The Anglican clergy under the Tudors and the Stuarts were not so much priests, in the sense of the twelfth century, as hired political retainers. Macaulay’s celebrated description is too well known to need full quotation: “for one who made the figure of a gentleman, ten were mere menial servants.... The coarse and ignorant squire” could hire a “young Levite” for his board, a small garret, and ten pounds a year. This clergyman “might not only be the most patient of butts and of listeners, might not only be always ready in fine weather for bowls, and in rainy weather for shovelboard, but might also save the expense of a gardener, or of a groom. Sometimes the reverend man nailed up the apricots; and sometimes he curried the coach horses.”[302]
Yet, as Macaulay has also pointed out, the hierarchy was divided into two sections, the ordinary labourers and the managers. The latter were indispensable to the aristocracy, since without them their machine could hardly have been kept in motion, and these were men of talent who demanded and received good wages. Probably for this reason a large revenue was reserved for the higher secular clergy, and from the outset the policy proved successful. Many of the ablest organizers and astutest politicians of England, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, sat on the episcopal bench, and two of the most typical, as well as the ablest Anglicans who ever lived, were the two eminent bishops who led the opposing wings of the Church when it was reformed by Henry VIII.: Stephen Gardiner and Thomas Cranmer.
Gardiner was the son of a clothworker of Bury Saint Edmunds, and was born about 1483. At Cambridge he made himself the best civil lawyer of the kingdom, and on meeting Wolsey, so strongly impressed him with his talent that the cardinal advanced him rapidly, and in January 1529 sent him to negotiate for the divorce at Rome. Nobody doubts that to the end of his life Gardiner remained a sincere Catholic, but above all else he was a great Anglican. Becoming secretary to the king in June, 1529, as Wolsey was tottering to his fall, he laboured to bring the University of Cambridge to the royal side, and he also devoted himself to Anne until he obtained the See of Winchester, when his efforts for the divorce slackened. He even went so far as to assure Clement that he had repented, and meant to quit the court, but notwithstanding he “bore up the laps” of Anne’s robe at her coronation.
In 1535 the ways parted, a decision could not be deferred, he renounced Rome and preached his sermon “de vera Obedientia,” in which he recognized in Henry the supremacy of a Byzantine emperor. The pang this act cost him lasted till he died, and he told the papal nuncio “he made this book under compulsion, not having the strength to suffer death patiently, which was ready for him.”[303] Indeed, when dying, his apostacy seems to have been his last thought, for in his closing hours, as the story of the passion was read to him he exclaimed, “Negavi cum Petro, exivi cum Petro, sed nondum flevi cum Petro.” All his life long his enemies accused him of dissimulation and hypocrisy for acts like these, but it was precisely this quality which raised him to eminence. Had he not been purchasable, he could hardly have survived as an Anglican bishop; an enthusiast like Fisher would have ended on Tower Hill.
Perhaps more fully than any other prelate of his time, Gardiner represented the faction of Henry and Norfolk; he was as orthodox as he could be and yet prosper. He hated Cromwell and all “gospellers,” and he loved power and splendour and office. Fisher, with the temperament of Saint Anselm, shivering in his squalid house, clad in his shirt of hair, and sleeping on his pallet of straw, might indeed “humbly thank the king’s majesty” who rid him of “all this worldly business,” but men who rose to eminence in the reformed church were made of different stuff, and Gardiner’s ruling passion never burned more fiercely than as he neared his death. Though in excruciating torments from disease, he clung to office to the last. Noailles, the French ambassador, at a last interview, found him “livid with jaundice and bursting with dropsy: but for two hours he held discourse with me calmly and graciously, without a sign of discomposure; and at parting he must needs take my arm and walk through three saloons, on purpose to show himself to the people, because they said that he was dead.”[304]
Gardiner was a man born to be a great prelate under a monied oligarchy, but, gifted as he surely was, he must yield in glory to that wonderful archbishop who stamped the impress of his mind so deeply on the sect he loved, and whom most Anglicans would probably call, with Canon Dixon, the first clergyman of his age. Cranmer was so supremely fitted to meet the requirements of the economic revolution in which he lived, that he rose at a bound from insignificance to what was, for an Englishman, the summit of greatness. In 1529, when the breach came, Gardiner already held the place of chief secretary, while Cranmer remained a poor Fellow of Jesus. Within four years he had been consecrated primate, and he had bought his preferment by swearing allegiance to the pope, though he knew himself promoted for the express purpose of violating his oath, by decreeing the divorce which should sever England from Rome. His qualities were all recognized by his contemporaries; his adroitness, his trustworthiness, and his flexibility. “Such an archbishop so nominated, and ... so and in such wise consecrated, was a meet instrument for the king to work by ... a meet cover for such a cup; neither was there ever bear-ward that might more command his bears than the king might command him.”[305] This judgment has always been held by Churchmen to be no small claim to fame; Burnet, for example, himself a bishop and an admirer of his eminent predecessor, was clear that Cranmer’s strength lay in that mixture of intelligence and servility which made him useful to those who paid him:—
“Cranmer’s great interest with the king was chiefly grounded on some opinions he had of the ecclesiastical officers being as much subject to the king’s power as all other civil officers were.... But there was this difference: that Cranmer was once of that opinion ... but Bonner against his conscience (if he had any) complied with it.”[306]
The genius of the archbishop as a courtier may be measured by the fate which overtook his contemporaries. He was the fourth of Henry’s great ministers, of whom Cromwell, Norfolk, and Wolsey were the other three. Wolsey was disgraced, plundered, and hounded to death; Cromwell was beheaded, and Norfolk was on his way to the scaffold, when saved by the death of the man who condemned him. The priest alone, as Lutheran, or as worshipper of the miracle which he afterward denied, always kept the sunshine of favour. Burnet has described how readily he violated his oath by participating in the attempt to change the succession under Edward, “He stood firm, and said, that he could not subscribe it without perjury; having sworn to the observance of King Henry’s will.... The king himself required him to set his hand to the will.... It grieved him much; but such was the love that he bore to the king, that in conclusion he yielded, and signed it.”[307] Like the chameleon, he changed his colour to match the force which upheld him. Under Edward, he became radical as easily as he had sung the mass under the “Six Articles,” or as, under Mary, he pleaded to be allowed to return to Rome. Nor did he act thus from cowardice, for when he went to the fire, not a martyr of the Reformation showed more constancy than he. With hardly an exception, Cranmer’s contemporaries suffered because they could not entirely divest themselves of their scruples. Even Gardiner had convictions strong enough to lodge him in the Tower, and Bonner ended his days in the Marshalsea, rather than abjure again under Elizabeth, but no such weakness hampered Cranmer. At Oxford, before his execution, he recanted, in various forms, very many times, and would doubtless have gone on recanting could he have saved himself by so doing.
Unlike Gardiner, his convictions were evangelical, and he probably imbibed reformed principles quite early, for he married Ossiander’s niece when in Germany, before he became archbishop. Characteristically enough, he voted for the “Six Articles” in deference to Henry,[308] although the third section of the act provided death and forfeiture of goods for any priest who might marry. Afterward, he had to conceal his wife and carry “her from place to place hidden from sight in a chest.”[309] Cranmer alleged at his trial that he had stayed orthodox regarding the sacrament until Ridley had converted him, after Henry’s death. But, leaving out of consideration the improbability of a man of Cranmer’s remarkable acuteness being influenced by Ridley, the judgment of such a man as Foxe should have weight. Certainly, Foxe thought him a “gospeller” at the time of Lambert’s trial, and nothing can give so vivid an idea of the lengths to which men of the Anglican type were ready to go, as the account given by Foxe of the martyrdom of this sectary:—