Cranmer did the work intrusted to him must have fully satisfied
his master. During the first week of April Convocation sat almost
from day to day to determine questions of fact and law in relation
to Catherine’s marriage with Henry as affected by her previous
marriage with his brother Arthur. Decisions favourable to the
object of the king were given on these questions, though even
the despotism of the most despotic of the Tudors failed to secure
absolute unanimity. The next step was taken by Cranmer, who
wrote a letter to the king, praying to be allowed to remove the
anxiety of loyal subjects as to a possible case of disputed succession,
by finally determining the validity of the marriage in his
archiepiscopal court. There is evidence that the request was
prompted by the king, and his consent was given as a matter of
course. Queen Catherine was residing at Ampthill in Bedfordshire,
and to suit her convenience the court was held at the priory
of Dunstable in the immediate neighbourhood. Declining to
appear, she was declared contumacious, and on the 23rd of May
the archbishop gave judgment declaring the marriage null and
void from the first, and so leaving the king free to marry whom he
pleased. The Act of Appeals had already prohibited any appeal
from the archbishop’s court. Five days later he pronounced
the marriage between Henry and Anne—which had been secretly
celebrated about the 25th of January 1533—to be valid. On the
1st of June he crowned Anne as queen, and on the 10th of September
stood godfather to her child, the future Queen Elizabeth.
The breach with Rome and the subjection of the church in England to the royal supremacy had been practically achieved before Cranmer’s appointment as archbishop: and he had little to do with the other constitutional changes of Henry’s reign. But his position as chief minister of Henry’s ecclesiastical jurisdiction forced him into unpleasant prominence in connexion with the king’s matrimonial experiences. In 1536 he was required to revise his own sentence in favour of the validity of Henry’s marriage with Anne Boleyn; and on the 17th of May the marriage was declared invalid. The ground on which this sentence is pronounced is fairly clear. Anne’s sister, Mary Boleyn, had been Henry VIII.’s mistress; this by canon law was a bar to his marriage with Anne—a bar which had been removed by papal dispensation in 1527, but now the papal power to dispense in such cases had been repudiated, and the original objection revived. The sentence was grotesquely legal and unjust. With Anne’s condemnation by the House of Lords Cranmer had nothing to do. He interceded for her in vain with the king, as he had done in the cases of Fisher, More and the monks of Christchurch. His share in the divorce of Anne of Cleves was less prominent than that of Gardiner, though he did preside over the Convocation in which nearly all the dignitaries of the church signified their approval of that measure. To his next and last interposition in the matrimonial affairs of the king no discredit attaches itself. When he was made cognizant of the charges against Catherine Howard, his duty to communicate them to the king was obvious, though painful.
Meanwhile Cranmer was actively carrying out the policy which has associated his name more closely, perhaps, than that of any other ecclesiastic with the Reformation in England. Its most important feature on the theological as distinct from the political side was the endeavour to promote the circulation of the Bible in the vernacular, by encouraging translation and procuring an order in 1538 that a copy of the Bible in English should be set up in every church in a convenient place for reading. Only second in importance to this was the re-adjustment of the creed and liturgy of the church, which formed Cranmer’s principal work during the latter half of his life. The progress of the archbishop’s opinion towards that middle Protestantism, if it may be so called, which he did so much to impress on the formularies of the Church of England, was gradual, as a brief enumeration of the successive steps in that progress will show. In 1538 an embassy of German divines visited England with the design, among other things, of forming a common confession for the two countries. This proved impracticable, but the frequent conferences Cranmer had with the theologians composing the embassy had doubtless a great influence in modifying his views. Both in parliament and in Convocation he opposed the Six Articles of 1539, but he stood almost alone. During the period between 1540 and 1543 the archbishop was engaged at the head of a commission in the revision of the “Bishop’s Book” (1537) or Institutions of a Christian Man, and the preparation of the Necessary Erudition (1543) known as the “King’s Book,” which was a modification of the former work in the direction of Roman Catholic doctrine. In June 1545 was issued his Litany, which was substantially the same as that now in use, and shows his mastery of a rhythmical English style.
The course taken by Cranmer in promoting the Reformation exposed him to the bitter hostility of the reactionary party or “men of the old learning,” of whom Gardiner and Bonner were leaders, and on various occasions—notably in 1543 and 1545—conspiracies were formed in the council or elsewhere to effect his overthrow. The king, however, remained true to him, and all the conspiracies signally failed. It illustrates a favourable trait in the archbishop’s character that he forgave all the conspirators. He was, as his secretary Morice testifies, “a man that delighted not in revenging.”
Cranmer was present with Henry VIII. when he died (1547). By the will of the king he was nominated one of a council of regency composed of sixteen persons, but he acquiesced in the arrangement by which Somerset became lord protector. He officiated at the coronation of the boy king Edward VI., and is supposed to have instituted a sinister change in the order of the ceremony, by which the right of the monarch to reign was made to appear to depend upon inheritance alone, without the concurrent consent of the people. But Edward’s title had been expressly sanctioned by act of parliament, so that there was no more room for election in his case than in that of George I., and the real motive of the changes was to shorten the weary ceremony for the frail child.
During this reign the work of the Reformation made rapid progress, the sympathies both of the Protector and of the young king being decidedly Protestant. Cranmer was therefore enabled without let or hindrance to complete the preparation of the church formularies, on which he had been for some time engaged. In 1547 appeared the Homilies prepared under his direction. Four of them are attributed to the archbishop himself—those on Salvation, Faith, Good Works and the Reading of Scripture. His translation of the German Catechism of Justus Jonas, known as Cranmer’s Catechism, appeared in the following year. Important, as showing his views on a cardinal doctrine, was the Defence of the True and Catholic Doctrine of the Sacrament, which he published in 1550. It was immediately answered from the side of the “old learning” by Gardiner. The first prayer-book of Edward VI. was finished in November 1548, and received legal sanction in March 1549; the second was completed and sanctioned in April 1552. The archbishop did much of the work of compilation personally. The forty-two articles of Edward VI. published in 1553 owe their form and style almost entirely to the hand of Cranmer. The last great undertaking in which he was employed was the revision of his codification of the canon law, which had been all but completed before the death of Henry. The task was one eminently well suited to his powers, and the execution of it was marked by great skill in definition and arrangement. It never received any authoritative sanction, Edward VI. dying before the proclamation establishing it could be made, and it remained unpublished until 1571, when a Latin translation by Dr Walter Haddon and Sir John Cheke appeared under the title Reformatio legum ecclesiasticarum. It laid down the lawfulness and necessity of persecution to the death for heresy in the most absolute terms; and Cranmer himself condemned Joan Bocher to the flames. But he naturally loathed persecution, and was as tolerant as any in that age.
Cranmer stood by the dying bed of Edward as he had stood by that of his father, and he there suffered himself to be persuaded to take a step against his own convictions. He had pledged himself to respect the testamentary disposition of Henry VIII. by which the succession devolved upon Mary, and now he violated his oath by signing Edward’s “device” of the crown to Lady Jane Grey.
