Engraved by W. Holl.
CRANMER.
From an original Picture in the Collection
at Lambeth Palace.
Under the Superintendance of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.
London, Published by Charles Knight, Ludgate Street, & Pall Mall East.
CRANMER.
Thomas Cranmer was born July 2, 1489, at Aslacton, in Nottinghamshire. He was descended from an ancient family, which had long been resident in that county. At the age of fourteen he was sent to Jesus College, Cambridge; where he obtained a fellowship, which he soon vacated by marriage with a young woman who is said to have been of humble condition. Within a year after his marriage he became a widower, and was immediately, by unusual favour, restored to his fellowship. In 1523, he was admitted to the degree of doctor of divinity, and appointed one of the public examiners in that faculty. Here he found an opportunity of showing the fruits of that liberal course of study which he had been for some time pursuing. As soon as his teachers left him at liberty, he had wandered from the works of the schoolmen to the ancient classics and the Bible; and, thus prepared for the office of examiner, he alarmed the candidates for degrees in theology by the novelty of requiring from them some knowledge of the Scriptures.
It was from this useful employment that he was called to take part in the memorable proceedings of Henry the Eighth, in the matter of his divorce from Catherine.
Henry had been counselled to lay his case before the universities, both at home and abroad. Cranmer, to whom the subject had been mentioned by Gardiner and Fox, went a step farther, and suggested that he should receive their decision as sufficient without reference to the Pope. This suggestion was communicated to the king, who, observing, with his usual elegance of expression, that the man had got the sow by the right ear, summoned Cranmer to his presence, and immediately received him into his favour and confidence.
In 1531, Cranmer accompanied the unsuccessful embassy to Rome, and in the following year was appointed ambassador to the Emperor. In August, 1532, the archbishopric of Canterbury became vacant by the death of Warham, and it was Henry’s pleasure to raise Cranmer to the primacy. The latter seems to have been truly unwilling to accept his promotion; and when he found that no reluctance on his part could shake the king’s resolution, he suggested a difficulty which there were no very obvious means of removing. The Archbishop must receive his investiture from the Pope, and at his consecration take an oath of fidelity to his Holiness, altogether inconsistent with another oath, taken at the same time, of allegiance to the king. All this had been done without scruple by other bishops; but Cranmer was already convinced that the Papal authority in England was a mere usurpation, and plainly told Henry that he would receive the archbishopric from him alone. Henry was not a man to be stopped by scruples of conscience of his own or others; so he consulted certain casuists, who settled the matter by suggesting that Cranmer should take the obnoxious oath, with a protest that he meant nothing by it. He yielded to the command of his sovereign and the judgment of the casuists. His protest was read by himself three times in the most public manner, and solemnly recorded. It is expedient to notice that the transaction was public, because some historians, to make a bad matter worse, still talk of a private protest.
In 1533, he pronounced sentence of divorce against the unhappy Catherine, and confirmed the marriage of the king with Anne Boleyn. He was now at leisure to contemplate all the difficulties of his situation. It is commonly said that Cranmer himself had, at this time, made but small progress in Protestantism. It is true that he yet adhered to many of the peculiar doctrines of the Roman Church; but he had reached, and firmly occupied, a position which placed him by many degrees nearer to the reformed faith than to that in which he had been educated. By recognising the Scriptures alone as the standard of the Christian faith, he had embraced the very principle out of which Protestantism flows. It had already led him to the Protestant doctrine respecting the pardon of sin, which necessarily swept away all respect for a large portion of the machinery of Romanism. As a religious reformer, Cranmer could look for no cordial and honest support from the king. Every one knows that Henry, when he left the Pope, had no mind to estrange himself more than was necessary from the Papal Church, and that the cause of religious reformation owes no more gratitude to him, than the cause of political liberty owes to those tyrants who, for their own security, and often by very foul means, have laboured to crush the power of equally tyrannical nobles. From Gardiner, who, with his party, had been most active and unscrupulous in helping the king to his divorce and destroying papal supremacy, Cranmer had nothing to expect but open or secret hostility, embittered by personal jealousy. Cromwell, indeed, was ready to go with him any lengths in reform consistent with his own safety; but a sincere reformer must have been occasionally hampered by an alliance with a worldly and unconscientious politician. The country at large was in a state of unusual excitement; but the rupture with Rome was regarded with at least as much alarm as satisfaction; and it was notorious that many, who were esteemed for their wisdom and piety, considered the position of the church to be monstrous and unnatural. The Lollards, who had been driven into concealment, but not extinguished, by centuries of persecution, and the Lutherans, wished well to Cranmer’s measures of reform: but he was not equally friendly to them. They had outstripped him in the search of truth; and he was unhappily induced to sanction at least a miserable persecution of those men with whom he was afterwards to be numbered and to suffer.
His first and most pressing care was by all means to reconcile the minds of men to the assertion of the king’s ecclesiastical supremacy, because all further changes must necessarily proceed from the royal authority. He then addressed himself to what seem to have been the three great objects of his official exertions,—the reformation of the clerical body, so as to make their ministerial services more useful; the removal of the worst part of the prevailing superstitious observances, which were a great bar to the introduction of a more spiritual worship; and above all, the free circulation of the Scriptures among the people in their own language. In this last object he was opportunely assisted by the printing of what is called Matthews’s Bible, by Grafton and Whitchurch. He procured, through the intervention of Cromwell, the king’s licence for the publication, and an injunction that a copy of it should be placed in every parish church. He hailed this event with unbounded joy; and to Cromwell, for the active part he took in the matter, he says, in a letter, “This deed you shall hear of at the great day, when all things shall be opened and made manifest.”
He had hardly witnessed the partial success of the cause of Reformation, when his influence over the king, and with it the cause which he had at heart, began to decline. He had no friendly feeling for those monastic institutions which the rapacity of Henry had marked for destruction; but he knew that their revenues might, as national property, be applied advantageously to the advancement of learning and religion, and he opposed their indiscriminate transfer to the greedy hands of the sycophants of the court. This opposition gave to the more unscrupulous of the Romanists an opportunity to recover their lost ground with the king, of which they were not slow to avail themselves. They were strong enough at least to obtain from Parliament, in 1539, (of course through the good will of their despotic master,) the act of the Six Articles, not improperly called the “Bloody Articles,” in spite of the determined opposition of Cranmer: an opposition which he refused to withdraw even at the express command of the king. Latimer and Shaxton immediately resigned their bishoprics. One of the clauses of this act, relating to the marriage of priests, inflicted a severe blow even on the domestic happiness of Cranmer. In his last visit to the continent, he had taken, for his second wife, a niece of the celebrated divine Osiander. By continuing to cohabit with her, he would now, by the law of the land, be guilty of felony; she was therefore sent back to her friends in Germany.