lunatic, or a faddist, whose enthusiasm for some one idea or hobby becomes a monomania. “Crank” or “crank-sided” is a nautical term used of a ship which by reason of her build or from want of balance is liable to overturn. This strictly nautical sense is often confused with “crank” or “cranky,” that is, rickety or shaky, probably derived direct from the German krank, weak or ill.
CRANMER, THOMAS (1489–1556), archbishop of Canterbury,
born at Aslacton or Aslockton in Nottinghamshire on the 2nd of
July 1489, was the second son of Thomas Cranmer and of his
wife Anne Hatfield. He received his early education, according
to Morice his secretary, from “a marvellous severe and cruel
schoolmaster,” whose discipline must have been severe indeed to
deserve this special mention in an age when no schoolmaster
bore the rod in vain. The same authority tells us that he was
initiated by his father in those field sports, such as hunting and
hawking, which formed one of his recreations in after life. To
early training he also owed the skilful horsemanship for which
he was conspicuous. At the age of fourteen he was sent by his
mother, who had in 1501 become a widow, to Cambridge.
Little is known with certainty of his university career beyond the
facts that he became a fellow of Jesus College in 1510 or 1511,
that he had soon after to vacate his fellowship, owing to his
marriage to “Black Joan,” a relative of the landlady of the
Dolphin Inn, and that he was reinstated in it on the death of his
wife, which occurred in childbirth before the lapse of the year of
grace allowed by the statutes. During the brief period of his
married life he held the appointment of lecturer at Buckingham
Hall, now Magdalene College. The fact of his marrying would
seem to show that he did not at the time intend to enter the
church; possibly the death of his wife caused him to qualify
for holy orders. He was ordained in 1523, and soon after he took
his doctor’s degree in divinity. According to Strype, he was
invited about this time to become a fellow of the college founded
by Cardinal Wolsey at Oxford; but Dean Hook shows that
there is some reason to doubt this. If the offer was made, it was
declined, and Cranmer continued at Cambridge filling the
offices of lecturer in divinity at his own college and of public
examiner in divinity to the university. It is interesting, in view
of his later efforts to spread the knowledge of the Bible among
the people, to know that in the capacity of examiner he insisted
on a thorough acquaintance with the Holy Scriptures, and rejected
several candidates who were deficient in this qualification.
It was a somewhat curious concurrence of circumstances that transferred Cranmer, almost at one step, from the quiet seclusion of the university to the din and bustle of the court. In August 1529 the plague known as the sweating sickness, which prevailed throughout the country, was specially severe at Cambridge, and all who had it in their power forsook the town for the country. Cranmer went with two of his pupils named Cressy, related to him through their mother, to their father’s house at Waltham in Essex. The king (Henry VIII.) happened at the time to be visiting in the immediate neighbourhood, and two of his chief counsellors, Gardiner, secretary of state, afterwards bishop of Winchester, and Edward Fox, the lord high almoner, afterwards bishop of Hereford, were lodged at Cressy’s house. Meeting with Cranmer, they were naturally led to discuss the king’s meditated divorce from Catherine of Aragon. Cranmer suggested that if the canonists and the universities should decide that marriage with a deceased brother’s widow was illegal, and if it were proved that Catherine had been married to Prince Arthur, her marriage to Henry could be declared null and void by the ordinary ecclesiastical courts. The necessity of an appeal to Rome was thus dispensed with, and this point was at once seen by the king, who, when Cranmer’s opinion was reported to him, is said to have ordered him to be summoned in these terms: “I will speak to him. Let him be sent for out of hand. This man, I trow, has got the right sow by the ear.”
At their first interview Cranmer was commanded by the king to lay aside all other pursuits and to devote himself to the question of the divorce. He was to draw up a written treatise, stating the course he proposed, and defending it by arguments from scripture, the fathers and the decrees of general councils. His material interests certainly did not suffer by compliance. He was commended to the hospitality of Anne Boleyn’s father, the earl of Wiltshire, in whose house at Durham Place he resided for some time; the king appointed him archdeacon of Taunton and one of his chaplains; and he also held a parochial benefice, the name of which is unknown. When the treatise was finished Cranmer was called upon to defend its argument before the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, which he visited, accompanied by Fox and Gardiner. Immediately afterwards he was sent to plead the cause before a more powerful if not a higher tribunal. An embassy, with the earl of Wiltshire at its head, was despatched to Rome in 1530, that “the matter of the divorce should be disputed and ventilated,” and Cranmer was an important member of it. He was received by the Pope with marked courtesy, and was appointed “Grand Penitentiary of England,” but his argument, if he ever had the opportunity of stating it, did not lead to any practical decision of the question.
Cranmer returned in September 1530, but in January 1531 he received a second commission from the king appointing him “Conciliarius Regius et ad Caesarem Orator.” In the summer of 1531 he accordingly proceeded to Germany as sole ambassador to the emperor. He was also to sound the Lutheran princes with a view to an alliance, and to obtain the removal of some restrictions on English trade. At Nuremberg he became acquainted with Osiander, whose somewhat isolated theological position he probably found to be in many points analogous to his own. Both were convinced that the old order must change; neither saw clearly what the new order should be to which it was to give place. They had frequent interviews, which had doubtless an important influence on Cranmer’s opinions. But Osiander’s house had another attraction of a different kind from theological sympathy. His niece Margaret won the heart of Cranmer, and in 1532 they were married. Hook finds in the fact of the marriage corroboration of Cranmer’s statement that he never expected or desired the primacy; and it seems probable enough that, if he had foreseen how soon the primacy was to be forced upon him, he would have avoided a disqualification which it was difficult to conceal and dangerous to disclose.
Expected or not, the primacy was forced upon him within a very few months of his marriage. In August 1532 Archbishop Warham died, and the king almost immediately afterwards intimated to Cranmer, who had accompanied the emperor in his campaign against the Turks, his nomination to the vacant see. Cranmer’s conduct was certainly consistent with his profession that he did not desire, as he had not expected, the dangerous promotion. He sent his wife to England, but delayed his own return in the vain hope that another appointment might be made. The papal bulls of confirmation were dated February and March 1533, and the consecration took place on the 30th March. One peculiarity of the ceremony had occasioned considerable discussion. It was the custom for the archbishop elect to take two oaths, the first of episcopal allegiance to the pope, and the second in recognition of the royal supremacy. The latter was so wide in its scope that it might fairly be held to supersede the former in so far as the two were inconsistent. Cranmer, however, was not satisfied with this. He had a special protest recorded, in which he formally declared that he swore allegiance to the pope only in so far as that was consistent with his supreme duty to the king. The morality of this course has been much canvassed, though it seems really to involve nothing more than an express declaration of what the two oaths implied. It was the course that would readily suggest itself to a man of timid nature who wished to secure himself against such a fate as Wolsey’s. It showed weakness, but it added nothing to whatever immorality there might be in successively taking two incompatible oaths.
In the last as in the first step of Cranmer’s promotion Henry had been actuated by one and the same motive. The business of the divorce—or rather, of the legitimation of Anne Boleyn’s expected issue—had now become very urgent, and in the new archbishop he had an agent who might be expected to forward it with the needful haste. The celerity and skill with which
