Ten Tudor Statesmen

by Arthur D. Innes

Northumberland’s methods did not make him popular; but they made him powerful, and it was his primary object to place on the throne in succession to Edward some one who should be his own puppet. To this end he devoted himself in the last months of the young king’s life. By Henry VIII.’s will, the succession was fixed first on Mary, then on Elizabeth, then on the Greys—not Suffolk himself, but his wife Frances Brandon and their children. The accession of Mary could only mean destruction for Northumberland. He could not be sure of Elizabeth, who was now in her twentieth year. But he thought he could make quite sure of Lady Jane Grey, who was hardly more than a child and had been brought up under pronounced Protestant tutelage. His plan was to marry her to one of his own sons, induce Edward to assume the authority formally granted to his father and name her his heir—ostensibly, of course, on the ground that both his sisters had been declared illegitimate and those judgments had not been revoked—and trust to intrigue and force to secure her on the throne. Having won the king over, he succeeded in entangling several of the Council in the conspiracy; the rest were then worked upon individually to give their adherence. One after another did so, reluctantly, till all were drawn in save Hales—Cranmer being the last, and assenting only on the positive assurance that the Crown lawyers had guaranteed the constitutional validity of the instrument he was called upon to sign, and under direct personal pressure from the king. Northumberland, however, had completely miscalculated the forces at work. He knew that the very signatories of the document could not be relied on when out of his reach; but having them under his grip, he thought himself safe. But the country rallied to Mary; the troops deserted to her standard; the plot failed, ignominiously and utterly. Mary was hailed Queen; the arch-traitor was sent to the block; for the rest, only a few of those most conspicuously compromised were sent to the Tower.

It was, of course, obvious at the outset that Mary’s rule must mean the return to power of the party which had been in opposition under Somerset and more actively repressed under his successor. The daughter of Katharine of Aragon was a convinced adherent of the entire Roman position. That she would go so far as to restore the Roman obedience might have been a matter of doubt; but, short of that, she was not likely to allow limits to reaction. Gardiner and Bonner, Tunstal and Day and Heath, had all been imprisoned and deprived of their sees during the last four years; it was not likely that the advanced bishops would be allowed to retain their functions. And, beyond theological differences, some of them had been driven by the religious motive into open and vigorous support of Lady Jane Grey’s succession. Of Cranmer himself the most that could be said was that he was an assenting party; but Ridley, Bishop of London, had committed himself to the cause in somewhat inflammatory language.

Nevertheless, Mary was in no haste to strike. Every one who feared for his own skin was given time and opportunity to retire from the country—whereof not a few made haste to take advantage. Ridley was arrested; but Cranmer, Latimer, and others who stood their ground manfully, might have gone if they would. After all, no Catholics during the last reign had suffered anything worse than imprisonment, and Mary’s leniency towards the participators in the rebellion may well have given an impression that retaliation would not go beyond the infliction of corresponding penalties.

Cranmer, then, remained at large for a time. But a report was circulated that he was about to make submission, and had himself set up the Mass again. Had it not been for this, he might have hoped to be allowed to retire into obscurity; but the rumour stirred him to an indignant and uncompromising denial, which was promptly followed by his arrest for complicity in Northumberland’s plot. The Archbishop was by nature a sanguine man, but he can hardly have imagined that this protest of his would be allowed to pass; for it was practically a challenge to all and sundry who desired the Mass to be restored. No government of the time would have dreamed of ignoring the action of its author.

Even when he was safely in the Tower along with Ridley, the hopefulness of Cranmer’s temperament displayed itself. He had an incurable conviction that any one who listened to him was bound to recognise the entire reasonableness of his views; and from prison he petitioned Mary for leave to “open his mind” to her. That accomplished, he felt that he would have discharged his conscience and could retire from further controversy without reproach, even though he might fail to persuade his sovereign. The duty of conformity, in conduct at least, to the sovereign’s decrees, was, as already remarked, a cardinal belief with him.

The petition was not granted. Moreover, the reign of clemency was destined to very brief duration. Wyatt’s rebellion hardened the Queen, whose determination to marry Philip of Spain strengthened pari passu with her determination to be reconciled with Rome and to discharge her duty as a daughter of the Church by bringing her subjects back to the fold. Throughout 1554 signs accumulated, ominous of the coming storm. Whatever Mary’s original intent may have been, mercy to Cranmer must have ceased to be a part of it at an early stage; though, if she had definitely resolved on his destruction, it is difficult to find an adequate explanation of the extreme prolongation of his imprisonment.

In April 1554, the three who were most obnoxious to Mary and the reactionaries, Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer, were removed to Oxford, to play their part in a great disputation. All three held their ground stoutly. It was pronounced, of course, that all three had been completely refuted, and were manifest heretics; but being thereupon invited to recant, they all refused. Cranmer had been treated with considerable rudeness in the course of the debates; but the mildness and dignity of his bearing throughout were such that one of his chief antagonists, the Prolocutor, Dean Weston, thanked him openly for his admirable behaviour.

This condemnation, however, was of no practical account, since, in 1554, the penal laws against heresy were not yet re-enacted. On the other hand, to punish Cranmer for treason would be a palpable piece of pure vindictiveness. His treason, such as it was, had been shared by several of the men who were now on the Council. But the arrival of Pole and the formal reconciliation with Rome at the close of the year were accompanied by the revival of the statute de heretico comburendo, and the great persecution opened in February with the burning of Rogers. A twelvemonth more passed before the end came for Cranmer himself. It is perhaps, after all, a sufficient explanation of the delay that the Primate of England could only be condemned for heresy by the Pope. Other cases fell within the jurisdiction of the legatine or national ecclesiastical courts; his did not.

In September 1555, a Papal Commission sat in Oxford to examine the case of the Archbishop and report to Rome for the Pope to pass judgment. Cranmer refused to recognise the jurisdiction, but made a declaration in answer to the questions put to him as coming from the Queen’s Proctors, who were on the Commission. He maintained his views on the Sacrament, and on the Royal Supremacy, and on the usurpations of Rome; and justified his actions on all points in respect of which it had been impugned. The trial over, he followed up his defence by a vigorous address to the Queen, asserting the utter incompatibility of any sovereign authority with the Papal claims. On November 25 the Pope pronounced his excommunication. In the meantime Ridley and Latimer had been condemned by a court under the authority of the Legate, Cardinal Pole, on October 1, and on the 16th they suffered martyrdom—Cranmer, it is said, witnessing the scene from the roof of his prison.

Cranmer remained in prison, cut off from every sympathiser. It is easy to forget, but it should not be difficult to realise, the tremendous strain on a nature like his—sensitive, diffident, imaginative. All his life he had been surrounded and supported by the personal affection of friends. Now, every conceivable incentive to doubt whether he had been in the right after all was set to work on him simultaneously. Yet month followed month, and he remained steadfast—unless his expression of a desire to confer with Tunstal or Pole was a sign of weakening. Before he could be handed over to the secular arm, his ecclesiastical degradation was necessary. The sentence was carried out with every circumstance of public ignominy—Bonner, the principal performer, excelling himself in his coarse brutality. For a man with highstrung nerves, the thing must have been simply shattering.