Thomas Cranmer (1489-1556)

A youth in Aslockton and the Cambridge years

Thomas Cranmer was born on 2 July 1489 at Aslockton in Nottinghamshire, the second son of a family of minor rural gentry^[3]. His father, also named Thomas, imposed on him a strict upbringing entrusted to "a schoolmaster of singular severity and cruelty", as Cranmer himself would recall^[4]. His mother, Agnes Hatfield, sent him at fourteen to study at Cambridge.

At Jesus College, Cranmer spent eight years studying scholastic philosophy and logic, before turning to the classical humanities and to Erasmus of Rotterdam, whose critical edition of the Greek New Testament (1516) profoundly marked his generation, just as it had marked Huldrych Zwingli in Basel. He obtained his Bachelor of Arts in 1511–1512 and his Master of Arts in 1515^[5].

First marriage, widowhood, ordination

Shortly after his master's degree, Cranmer married a young woman named Joan — a marriage which, under the college's rule, cost him his status as a fellow of Jesus College. Joan died in childbirth soon afterwards; Cranmer, now a widower, was immediately re-elected a fellow of his college, which suggests he had never truly left his embryonic clerical status^[6]. He was ordained priest soon after, continued his theological studies, was admitted Doctor of Divinity around 1526, became a lecturer in theology at Jesus College, and was then recruited for the college Cardinal Wolsey was founding at Oxford (the future Christ Church)^[7].

Nothing in this career of a studious and cautious academic foreshadowed the role Cranmer would soon play in the most sensational matrimonial crisis in English history.

The stratagem of the university consultations (1529)

Since 1527, Henry VIII had been seeking the annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, who had given him no male heir, so that he could marry Anne Boleyn. Rome was stalling. In the summer of 1529, while an outbreak of plague had dispersed the court to Waltham Abbey, Cranmer happened to discuss the deadlock in the Roman proceedings with two of the king's agents, Stephen Gardiner and Edward Foxe^[8].

Cranmer suggested a simple but clever idea: instead of relying solely on the papal decision, why not have the question — the biblical legitimacy of a marriage to a brother's widow — settled by the greatest universities of Europe? The king, delighted, summoned him and commissioned a treatise to that effect. Cranmer drafted the argument and managed to persuade "six or seven learned men" of Cambridge to support the royal position^[9]. This outflanking strategy, which shifted the debate from canonical to academic ground, marked Cranmer out to the king as a resourceful man.

Ambassador to Charles V and the secret marriage to Margarete

In January 1530, Cranmer accompanied the Earl of Wiltshire, Anne Boleyn's father, as ambassador to the Emperor Charles V, travelling to Bologna and Rome, where the pope appointed him penitentiary for England^[10]. In 1532, he was sent to relieve Sir Thomas Eliot at the imperial court of Regensburg, where he conducted discreet diplomacy with the German princes won over to the Reformation.

It was on this occasion that he spent six months in Nuremberg, where he became close to the Lutheran reformer Andreas Osiander. In July 1532, Osiander celebrated Cranmer's marriage to Margarete, the niece of his own wife^[11]. The act was in itself a confession: a Catholic priest, future primate of England, secretly marrying the kinswoman of a Lutheran reformer, thereby inwardly breaking with clerical celibacy even before the official break with Rome. His adversaries would later spread the legend that Cranmer, back in England, had to hide his wife in a chest pierced with holes for breathing in order to carry her from place to place — an anecdote reported by the Catholic polemicist Nicholas Harpsfield, but which modern historians judge unverifiable and probably forged to discredit him^[12].

Archbishop of Canterbury in spite of himself (1533)

The see of Canterbury had been vacant since the death of Archbishop Warham in August 1532. On 1 October 1532, Henry VIII let Cranmer, still on mission in Germany, know that he was designated to succeed him^[13]. Cranmer, who hoped to delay his return — no doubt knowing what this office would demand of him — nevertheless returned to England in early January 1533 and was consecrated bishop on 30 March 1533 by the Bishop of Lincoln, John Longland, assisted by the Bishops of Exeter and St Asaph^[14].

The most revealing detail of this consecration has remained famous: before taking the oath of obedience to the pope required by the traditional form of the rite, Cranmer took care to protest secretly before witnesses that this oath should in no way bind him against the authority of the king^[15]. Here was a man who, from his very entry into office, inwardly reserved the right to betray the commitment he was about to make publicly — an act of calculated duplicity which casts its light in advance over his entire career as an archbishop in the service of temporal power.

The annulment of the marriage to Catherine of Aragon

As early as 11 April 1533, a few days after his consecration, Cranmer petitioned the king for jurisdiction over "His Majesty's great matrimonial cause"^[16]. He opened his court at Dunstable on 10 May: Catherine of Aragon, who refused to recognise this jurisdiction, was declared contumacious. After three further hearings, Cranmer delivered his sentence on 23 May 1533: the marriage to Catherine was declared null and void in the eyes of divine law^[17].

Validating the marriage to Anne Boleyn and Elizabeth's baptism

Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn had in fact married in secret as early as 25 January 1533 — Cranmer himself only learned of it a fortnight later. On 28 May 1533, following an inquiry held at Lambeth, Cranmer declared the king lawfully married to Anne Boleyn^[18]. Anne was crowned queen on 1 June. On 7 September 1533, she gave birth to a daughter, the future Queen Elizabeth I, whom Cranmer baptised and whose godfather he became.

The fall of Anne Boleyn (1536)

Three years later came a complete reversal: after the miscarriage of a son in January 1536, Anne Boleyn fell from favour. Arrested on 2 May 1536, she was imprisoned in the Tower of London, where Cranmer heard her confession on 16 May. The next day, 17 May 1536, he pronounced the nullity of the very marriage he had validated three years earlier, establishing that "it had been null and void from the first day"^[19]. Anne was executed two days later. Cranmer, who had pleaded her cause to the king in the days before her arrest, was one of the few at court to show his grief openly — without, however, refusing to pronounce the sentence that completed the legalisation of her downfall.

The Ten Articles and the Bishops' Book

Once the break with Rome was sealed by the Act of Supremacy (1534), which made the king the supreme head of the Church of England, Cranmer set out to give this nascent Church a formal doctrine. In July 1536, Convocation adopted the Ten Articles, the first doctrinal formulary of the Church of England, drafted by the king and touched up by Cranmer — a cautious text, still close to Catholic teaching on several points, but silent on four of the seven sacraments^[20]. The following year, Cranmer revised the Bishops' Book (The Institution of a Christian Man, 1537), which developed this intermediate doctrine.

Under his supervision the first complete English Bible available in every parish was also authorised: Cranmer licensed Matthew's Bible in 1537, judging it "better than any revision to come will be, until the day after the Last Judgment"^[21] — a quip illustrating his conviction that the people's direct access to Scripture in the vernacular was the priority of any genuine reform.

The destruction of the relics and the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket

It was during Cranmer's episcopate that one of the most symbolically weighty acts of the English rupture was perpetrated, in September 1538: the destruction, on the orders of the king and his vicegerent Thomas Cromwell, of the sumptuous shrine of Saint Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral itself — the tomb of the archbishop martyred in 1170 for resisting a king who claimed to subject the Church to his power. A royal proclamation of 16 November 1538 completed the posthumous humiliation: it decreed that Becket should "no longer be called a saint", that he was "in nothing, in his life, worthy to be called a saint, but rather to be counted a rebel and a traitor", ordered that his images be torn down from all churches and that his name be "erased and struck out of all books"^[22]. The shrine was dismantled, the gold and jewels sent to be melted down at the Tower of London, the saint's bones dispersed or burned^[23].

The contrast could not have been more explicit for a Catholic reader: two Archbishops of Canterbury, three and a half centuries apart, faced with the same dilemma — the authority of the Church against the will of a King of England. Becket chose martyrdom to defend the rights of the Church; Cranmer, on the same see, presided over the methodical erasure of his memory.

The Act of Six Articles (1539) and the hidden wife

In the following years, Cranmer had to reckon with a conservative reaction. In 1539, Parliament passed the Act of Six Articles, the "Law for the Abolition of Diversity of Opinions", which reaffirmed transubstantiation, clerical celibacy, vows of chastity, communion under one kind, private masses and auricular confession, on pain of death for anyone who denied them^[24]. Cranmer "bent all his efforts on the side of liberty", particularly on the marriage of clerics, but failed to move the king^[25]. He then had to discreetly send his wife Margarete back to Germany until the storm passed.

The Great Bible and the Necessary Doctrine (King's Book)

In 1539 appeared the Great Bible, prefaced by Cranmer, intended to be placed in every parish church. But the theological climate hardened further: in 1543, under the growing influence of the conservative bishop Stephen Gardiner, the king promulgated the Necessary Doctrine and Erudition for Any Christian Man — the "King's Book" — which rolled back several points of the Bishops' Book. Cranmer, whose influence was waning before Gardiner, nevertheless survived several attempts by his conservative adversaries to bring about his disgrace, protected to the end by Henry VIII's personal favour. On 28 May 1544, he published the Exhortation and Litany, the first liturgical text officially authorised in the English language — a direct stepping stone towards the work that would soon occupy his entire career.

Henry VIII died on 28 January 1547. His son, Edward VI, was only nine years old; real power passed to the regency council dominated by the protector Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, committed to a far more radical Reformation than Henry VIII had tolerated^[26]. Cranmer, freed from the old king's tutelage, would now show his full stature as a reformer.

The theological turning point: from the Real Presence to the spiritual memorial

The decisive turning point came in the House of Lords debates of December 1548, when Cranmer publicly revealed that he had abandoned all belief in a bodily presence of Christ in the Eucharist. This shift owed much to his correspondence with the Strasbourg reformer Martin Bucer, who arrived in England in 1549 after eighteen years of epistolary exchanges with Cranmer, and with the Italian theologian Peter Martyr Vermigli, both invited as professors to Cambridge and Oxford on his initiative. On this precise point — the nature of the Eucharistic presence — Cranmer joined the camp of the most advanced continental reformers, the one of which Huldrych Zwingli had given the most radical version twenty years earlier.

The first Book of Common Prayer (1549) and the Devon and Cornwall revolt

In 1549, under the authority of the first Act of Uniformity, Cranmer published the first Book of Common Prayer, a complete liturgy in English intended to replace the medieval Latin rites in every parish of the realm. The work owes "almost entirely its composition" to Cranmer, as even the Catholic Encyclopedia acknowledges, praising "his admirable mastery of the English language" and "his genius for devotional composition"^[27]. The imposition of this new missal provoked, in Devon and Cornwall, a popular revolt — the Prayer Book Rebellion — harshly repressed; Cranmer himself drafted the official answer to the rebels and preached twice at St Paul's against the uprising.

For the structure of this liturgy, its successive editions, the doctrinal controversy it crystallised and its development down to the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, the complete study can be found in the article devoted to Anglicanism.

The 1550 Edwardian Ordinal and the future question of Anglican orders

In 1550 appeared the Edwardian Ordinal, the ritual for the ordination of bishops, priests and deacons composed under Cranmer's direction to replace the Roman pontifical. The text profoundly altered the formulas of priestly ordination, in particular by removing any explicit mention of the power to consecrate and offer the Eucharistic sacrifice^[28]. This seemingly technical modification would have considerable doctrinal consequences: three and a half centuries later, in 1896, Pope Leo XIII would rely precisely on this Ordinal to declare Anglican ordinations "absolutely null and utterly void"^[29] — a question explored further in the article on Anglicanism.

The second Book of Common Prayer (1552) and the Black Rubric

Under pressure from the most Reformed theologians — including the Scottish preacher John Knox, who railed against kneeling during communion — Cranmer thoroughly revised his work: the second Book of Common Prayer of 1552, imposed by a new Act of Uniformity, removed the last formulas that could still suggest a Real Presence and introduced the famous Black Rubric, specifying that no adoration is due to the consecrated species, since Christ's natural body is "in Heaven, and not here".

The Forty-two Articles (1553)

At the end of 1552, Cranmer put the finishing touches to the Forty-two Articles, a complete doctrinal statement intended to become the official confession of the Church of England, published in 1553 without having formally received Convocation's sanction^[30]. After Edward VI's death, this text would be reworked under Elizabeth I to become the Thirty-nine Articles of 1563, still in force today in the Anglican Communion.

As with any reformer, Cranmer's thought must be honestly presented before it is judged. His theology is neither improvised nor crude: it is the fruit of a long personal evolution, documented by his own writings, which places him in an original position, distinct from both Luther and Zwingli.

"Neither bodily nor empty symbol": the spiritual presence according to the 1550 Defence

In his major treatise, A Defence of the True and Catholic Doctrine of the Sacrament (1550), written against the Catholic bishop Stephen Gardiner, Cranmer sets out his mature position:

"Although Christ, in his human nature, is substantially, really, corporally, naturally and sensibly present with his Father in Heaven, nevertheless, sacramentally and spiritually, he is here present." — Thomas Cranmer, A Defence of the True and Catholic Doctrine of the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Our Saviour Christ, London, 1550, p. 79^[31]

Cranmer insists: Christ dwells "spiritually in faithful Christian men who, according to Christ's institution, are baptised or receive holy communion"^[32]. For him, then, it is neither a pure empty symbol — as with Zwingli, for whom the bread merely "signifies" an absent body — nor the bodily presence defended by Rome and, in his own way, by Luther: it is a real but spiritual presence, effected by the believer's faith, not by a change in the substance of the bread.

Cranmer against Gardiner: the rejection of transubstantiation

On transubstantiation itself, Cranmer does not mince words:

"It is not Christ's doctrine, but the subtle invention of Antichrist, first decreed by Innocent III." — Thomas Cranmer, A Defence…, London, 1550, p. 77^[33]

He goes so far as to describe this doctrine as a contrivance designed "by subtlety and craft, to turn the Christian people from the true honour due to Christ, to the greatest idolatry that the world ever invented"^[34]. This last charge — that of idolatry — is the heaviest Cranmer lays against Catholic Eucharistic worship: in his eyes, adoring the consecrated species would amount to adoring bread.

The Catholic Church answers that this judgment misunderstands the very nature of the dogma: transubstantiation is not, as Cranmer claims, an invention of Pope Innocent III in the thirteenth century, but the technical formulation, fixed at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, of a far older faith, attested from the beginning of the second century. The council teaches that the bread is "transubstantiated by divine power into his body, and the wine into his blood"^[35] — not to innovate, but to name precisely what the Church already believed.

The witness of the Fathers against Cranmer's thesis

From the beginning of the second century, Saint Ignatius of Antioch, a disciple of the apostles, was already denouncing as heretics those who "abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer, because they confess not the Eucharist to be the flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ"^[36] — proof that faith in a Real, and not merely spiritual or symbolic, presence predates the English controversy by thirteen centuries. A century later, Saint Justin Martyr wrote in his First Apology:

"Not as common bread nor common drink do we receive these; but in like manner as Jesus Christ our Saviour, having been made flesh by the Word of God, had both flesh and blood for our salvation, so likewise have we been taught that the food which is blessed by the prayer of His word […] is the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh." — Saint Justin Martyr, First Apology, chapter 66, c. 155^[37]

The Council of Trent, in 1551, would answer directly the Eucharistic position defended by Cranmer and Zwingli by anathematising anyone who "denies that, in the sacrament of the most holy Eucharist, are contained truly, really, and substantially, the body and blood, together with the soul and divinity, of our Lord Jesus Christ", claiming instead "that He is present therein only as in a sign, or in figure, or in power"^[38].

Between Zwingli and Calvin: where does Cranmer stand?

Cranmer's mature position is therefore not identical to Zwingli's: where the Zurich reformer reduced the Supper to a purely commemorative memorial, Cranmer maintains a real presence of Christ — but purely spiritual, received by believers alone, not by the mouth. Historians generally bring this mature position close to the one John Calvin would develop at Geneva under the name of "virtual presence": Christ, bodily in Heaven, communicates his life-giving power to the soul of the believer who communes in faith. Cranmer himself specifies that "all men, good and evil, may with their mouth visibly and sensibly eat the sacrament", but that only believers spiritually consume the body and blood of Christ^[39] — a distinction which distances him as much from the "unworthy eating" condemned by Saint Paul (1 Cor 11:27-29) as from the barest memorialism.

The Devise for the Succession and Jane Grey

On his deathbed, in June 1553, the young Edward VI drew up a Devise for the Succession which set aside his half-sisters Mary and Elizabeth — both deemed illegitimate under laws he had himself voted — in favour of his Protestant cousin Jane Grey. Cranmer, called upon to countersign this document contrary to the succession law established by Henry VIII, hesitated strongly; he asked to speak alone with the dying king to try to change his mind, a request that was refused him. Edward VI himself pressed him to sign, saying that "he trusted he would not be more reluctant than the rest of the council"^[40]. Cranmer complied, later affirming that he had done so "sincerely and without dissimulation"^[41].

The accession of Mary Tudor and the arrest

Jane Grey's nine-day reign collapsed as soon as Mary Tudor, Catherine of Aragon's daughter, rallied the country to her legitimate cause. Cranmer, compromised by his signature, was summoned before the Star Chamber on 14 September 1553 and locked in the Tower of London, where he joined Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley, two reforming bishops who would share his fate.

The trial for treason and the sentence (November 1553)

On 13 November 1553, Cranmer was tried for high treason at Guildhall alongside Lord Guildford Dudley, Jane Grey's husband. After first pleading not guilty, he withdrew his defence and admitted the facts. Condemned to death, he nevertheless escaped immediate execution through an act of royal clemency — Mary I preferring to have him tried, later, for the theologically weightier crime of heresy^[42].

The Oxford disputation and the cry "Vicit veritas!" (April 1554)

On 8 March 1554, Cranmer was transferred to Oxford with Ridley and Latimer for a public theological disputation. On 14 April, before the assembly gathered at St Mary's Church under the presidency of Dr Weston, three conciliar articles on the Mass were submitted to him; Cranmer refused to subscribe to them. He argued from eight o'clock in the morning until nearly two in the afternoon against Dr Chedsey, his principal opponent^[43]. A cry then rose from the audience: "Vicit veritas!" — "Truth has conquered!"^[44]. Formal condemnation was nonetheless pronounced the following Friday. Cranmer wrote to the royal council on 23 April to complain of the injustice of the proceedings and to beg the queen's pardon^[45].

The trial for heresy under Roman jurisdiction (1555)

On 7 September 1555, Cranmer received a summons to appear in Rome within eighty days; the pope delegated the case to Cardinal Dupuy, who in turn transmitted it to the Bishop of Gloucester, James Brookes. On 12 September, Brookes opened the commission at St Mary's Church. Cranmer refused to recognise pontifical jurisdiction, declaring that he had "once and for all sworn never again to consent to the pope's jurisdiction"^[46]. Sixteen articles retracing his career were put to him; he admitted their facts but contested their interpretation, and challenged the eight witnesses produced against him as "perjurers", since they had themselves once abjured the pope they now defended^[47].

On 16 October 1555, Cranmer watched, from a tower of his prison, the execution of his companions Ridley and Latimer, burned before his eyes. On 11 December, the pope rendered his judgment against him; Cardinal Reginald Pole was appointed, three days later, to succeed him in the see of Canterbury.

The degradation of 14 February 1556

On 14 February 1556, in Oxford Cathedral, the ceremony of degradation took place: Cranmer was successively vested in the garments of each order — from the subdiaconate up to the episcopate, all made of plain coarse cloth with derisory mitre and pallium — then stripped of each in turn, while Bonner, Bishop of London, stated the grounds of his deposition^[48]. Cranmer refused to let go of his episcopal crosier, which had to be torn from him by force^[49]. He then drafted a document appealing to the future general council, before his hair was cropped short and the skin of his fingers, at the places touched by the anointing, was symbolically scraped.

The six submissions of a broken man

Between the end of January and mid-March 1556, Cranmer signed, under pressure and in the hope of escaping the stake, a series of increasingly far-reaching documents of submission. The following table retraces this sequence, reconstructed from the trial minutes preserved by Foxe and the work of modern historiography:

These six successive documents, whose material authenticity historians do not contest, show a man spiritually at the end of his strength, perhaps sincerely seeking, under the fear of death, a genuine return to Catholic unity^[50]. That is what makes his final gesture all the more striking.

The last stratagem of Friar Juan de Villagarcía

On 20 March 1556, the eve of the execution, Dr Henry Cole, Provost of Eton, visited Cranmer to make sure of his fidelity to the Catholic faith. The next morning, the Spanish Dominican friar Juan de Villagarcía asked Cranmer to copy out in his own hand and sign a seventh profession of faith, to be read publicly at the moment of his execution^[51]. Everything then seemed in order for Cranmer to die publicly reconciled with the Catholic Church.

"This unworthy hand": the public renunciation

A sermon was preached in St Mary's Church, in driving rain. Cranmer was placed on a platform facing the pulpit; he knelt, prayed, wept, and moved the assembly to tears. Invited to address the people, he was expected to read the profession prepared the day before, confessing his faith in Catholic dogma and regretting the publication of writings contrary to the Real Presence. He did indeed begin by declaring that he believed "in every article of the Catholic faith", as expected — then broke abruptly from the agreed text:

"And now I come to the great thing which so much troubleth my conscience, more than any thing that ever I did or said in my whole life: and that is, the setting abroad of writings contrary to the truth, which here now I renounce and refuse, as things written with my hand contrary to that which I believed in my heart, and written for fear of death, and to save my life if it might be." — Thomas Cranmer, last speech at St Mary's Church, Oxford, 21 March 1556, as reported by John Foxe, Acts and Monuments^[52]

The astonished assembly tried in vain to call him back to his recantation. Cranmer went on, pointing to his own hand:

"And forasmuch as my hand offended in writing contrary to my heart, therefore my hand shall first be punished: for when I come to the fire, it shall be first burned." — Thomas Cranmer, ibid.^[53]

On the pope, he added, radical to the last: "I refuse him, as Christ's enemy, and Antichrist, with all his false doctrine"^[54]. According to Foxe's account, he "ran himself to the place of execution, so fast that few could follow him"^[55].

Death and Foxe's account

Bound to the stake, as the fire rose, Cranmer held his right hand out in the flames — the hand that had signed his recantations — repeating, "as long as his voice would allow him": "This unworthy hand!"^[56]. Foxe reports that his body "abode the fire with such constancy that it seemed to be no more than the stake to which he was bound", his eyes raised to Heaven, until he uttered, after the manner of the first Christian martyr, the words of Saint Stephen: "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit"^[57]. He died on 21 March 1556, at the age of sixty-six. Even witnesses hostile to his theological cause were, Foxe reports, "seized with admiration" at his "courage and patience"^[58].

An Ignispedia article cannot merely narrate: it must judge, in the light of the Church's faith. Cranmer's case, more than that of many reformers, calls for an assessment that is both firm on doctrine and attentive to human complexity.

What the Church condemned in his doctrine

Cranmer's mature theology denies two points which the Catholic Church holds to belong to the deposit of faith: the Real and substantial presence of Christ under the consecrated species, and the sacrificial character of the Mass. On the first point, the Council of Trent answered directly, as seen above, by anathematising anyone who reduces this presence to "a sign, or in figure, or in power"^[59]. On the second, the same Tridentine session teaches that the Mass is a true sacrifice, propitiatory, in which the same Christ who offered himself once on the Cross continues to offer himself in an unbloody manner — the very doctrine which Cranmer's Ordinal, by deleting all mention of the priestly power to "offer sacrifice", intended precisely to set aside^[60].

For a Catholic, the objection is not only doctrinal but spiritual: what Cranmer cut away is not a ritual detail, but the very heart of Christian worship as the Fathers of the Church understood it without interruption since Ignatius of Antioch. Cranmer's claim to recover, by the mere reading of Scripture, an original purity lost for a thousand years runs up against an awkward patristic fact: what the Church believed in the second century about the Eucharist is not Cranmer's thesis, but Trent's.

The question of Anglican orders: a direct legacy of Cranmer

On the sacramental level, Cranmer's heaviest legacy concerns the very validity of the Anglican priesthood. By altering the Ordinal of ordination to cut out every reference to the Eucharistic sacrifice, Cranmer — without necessarily measuring its full theological scope — laid down the conditions which would lead, three and a half centuries later, Leo XIII to judge Anglican ordinations "absolutely null and utterly void" in the apostolic letter Apostolicae curae (1896)^[61]. The detailed analysis of this question, its sacramental foundations (matter, form, intention) and the later attempts at rapprochement (ARCIC, Anglicanorum coetibus) are set out in the article devoted to Anglicanism.

Two Archbishops of Canterbury, two destinies: Becket and Cranmer

The comparison between the two great Archbishops of Canterbury deserves to be pursued to the end. Thomas Becket died murdered in his own cathedral in 1170 for refusing to bend the liberties of the Church before Henry II. Thomas Cranmer, on the same see, first placed his theological learning at the service of another King Henry against the authority of the Church, before dying, himself too, a violent death — but this time as a martyr for the doctrine he had himself helped to spread. It is history's irony that it was the first man's shrine which the second helped to make disappear.

What an honest view can acknowledge

Honesty nevertheless obliges us not to reduce Cranmer to a mere figure of duplicity. His talent as a liturgical prose writer is recognised even in Catholic ranks: the Catholic Encyclopedia itself praises his "instinct for forms suited to the average English mind" and his "genius for devotional composition"^[62], a quality which durably marked the Anglophone liturgical language far beyond the Church of England. His death itself, far from being mere staging, bears the marks of a real inner struggle: six recantations signed under the pressure of fear, followed by a final surge of conscience which led him to choose death rather than live in the lie he had just signed. That this surge brought him back, not towards Rome, but still deeper into the theology he had defended under Edward VI, changes nothing of the painful sincerity of the gesture — and invites us to judge no human soul more harshly than the Church herself does, she who always distinguishes doctrinal error, objectively grave, from a man's state of conscience at the moment of his death, which God alone knows fully.

Thomas Cranmer can only be understood when placed within the constellation of the great sixteenth-century reformers and the doctrinal questions he helped to open.

• On the Church born of his liturgical and doctrinal work, and on the question of Anglican orders: Anglicanism.
• On the German reformer whose shadow hangs over the whole Eucharistic controversy of the century: Martin Luther.
• On the Zurich reformer whose doctrine of the "memorial" illuminates Cranmer's position by contrast: Huldrych Zwingli.
• On the Genevan reformer whose theology of the "virtual" presence comes closest to Cranmer's: John Calvin.
• On the English forerunner whose theses anticipated, a century and a half earlier, several intuitions of the English Reformation: John Wycliffe.