Cranmer, Thomas

Cranmer, Thomas (1489–1556). Archbishop of Canterbury. Cranmer played a greater role than any other single churchman in shaping the Church of England. He was born to a gentry family in Nottinghamshire and studied at Jesus College, Cambridge. He rose to sudden prominence in 1529 on the strength of his suggestion that the universities of Europe be asked to provide opinions on the legitimacy of Henry VIII's first marriage. On an embassy to Germany in 1532 he met and married the niece of the Lutheran church leader of Nuremberg, Andreas Osiander, whom he later brought secretly back to England. When Archbishop William Warham died in that year Cranmer was proposed as his successor. Clement VII provided the papal documents for his consecration early in 1533. Cranmer then presided over the court which annulled Henry and Catherine's marriage. He was also used, later on, to decree the nullity of Henry's marriage to Anne Boleyn and to celebrate, and end, the marriage to Anne of Cleves.

During c.1535–8 it is hard to separate Cranmer's role from that of Thomas Cromwell in the shaping of religious policy. He was clearly opposed to the Act of Six Articles in 1539 (which forced him to send his wife away) but, unlike Latimer, did not resign his see in protest.

On the accession of Edward VI, Cranmer issued definitively protestant works, above all the first Book of Homilies, a set of official model sermons. In contrast, his first version of the Book of Common Prayer of 1549 was painfully conservative, to the glee of catholic opponents and the embarrassment of Cranmer's allies. In 1549 Cranmer welcomed a galaxy of German and Italian protestant stars into England. They helped guide Cranmer into formulating his most explicitly anti‐catholic liturgical document, the second version of the Book of Common Prayer (1552) and the Forty‐Two Articles of Religion (1553), the basis for the Prayer Book of 1559 and the Thirty‐Nine Articles of 1563 respectively.

Cranmer offered no resistance to Mary I's accession despite her known catholicism. He and other protestant bishops regarded her coming as a divine test. An attainder for treason was set aside in favour of a show‐disputation at Oxford in April 1554, in which Cranmer defended himself less vigorously than Nicholas Ridley. He was kept in prison and eventually persuaded to sign recantations in which he accepted key catholic doctrines. He later withdrew these and was burned for heresy on 21 March 1556.