Cranmer, THOMAS, Archbishop of Canterbury, was born of a good old family at Aslacton, Nottinghamshire, 2d July 1489. He learned his grammar of 'a rude parish clerk,' a 'marvellous severe and cruel schoolmaster,' who seems to have permanently cowed his spirit; still, his father trained him in all manly exercises, so that even as primate he feared not to ride the roughest horse, and was ever a keen hunter. By his widowed mother he was sent in 1503 to Jesus College, Cambridge, where in 1510 he obtained a fellowship. He forfeited it by his marriage with 'black Joan' of the Dolphin tavern, but regained it on her death in childhood before the year's grace was up; and taking orders in 1523, proceeded D.D., and became a divinity tutor. During the quarter of a century that he resided at Cambridge he did not greatly distinguish himself; Erasmus never so much as mentions him; he was just a clever, hard-reading college don.
But in the summer of 1529 the plague was raging in Cambridge, and Cranmer removed with two pupils to Waltham. Here he met Fox and Gardiner, the king's almoner and secretary; and their talk turning on the divorce, Cranmer suggested that Henry might satisfy his conscience of the nullity of his first marriage by an appeal to the universities of Christendom. The suggestion pleased Henry; he exclaimed, 'Who is this Dr Cranmer? I will speak to him. Marry! I trow he has got the right sow by the ear.' So Cranmer became a counsel in the suit. He was appointed a royal chaplain and archdeacon of Taunton; was attached to the household of Anne Boleyn's father (Anne at the time being Henry's paramour); penned a treatise to promulgate his view; and was sent on two embassies, to Italy in 1530, and to Germany in the middle of 1532. At Rome the pope made him grand penitentiary of England; at Nuremberg he had married a niece of the Reformer Osiander—a marriage uncanonical but not then illegal—when a royal summons reached him to return as Warham's successor in the see of Canterbury. He sent his wife secretly over, and himself following slowly, was consecrated on 30th March 1533, four days after the arrival of the eleven customary bulls from Rome. He took the oath of allegiance to the pope, with a protest that he took it 'for form sake,' and with, as was usual, a contradictory oath of allegiance to the king.
That Henry looked for a pliable judge in Cranmer no man could doubt, least of all Cranmer himself, who in May pronounced Catharine's marriage null and void ab initio, and Anne's, four months earlier, valid; and who in September stood godfather to Anne's daughter Elizabeth. It was the same throughout the entire reign. Cranmer annulled Henry's marriage with Anne Boleyn (1536), divorced him from Anne of Cleves (1540), informed him of Catharine Howard's prenuptial frailty, and strove to coax her into confessing it (1541). Sometimes he raised a voice of timid entreaty, on Anne Boleyn's behalf, on Cromwell's; still, if Henry said they were guilty, guilty they needs must be. He did what he dared to oppose the Six Articles (1539), naturally, since by one of them the marriage of priests was rendered felony, punishable with death; but he failed to stick to his opposition, and sent away his own wife to Germany, whence he did not recall her till 1548.
A kindly, humane soul, yet he was not ahead of his compeers—More, for instance, or Calvin—in the matter of religious toleration. We cannot acquit him of complicity in the burning of Frith and Lambert for denying the doctrine of Transubstantiation (1533-38), of Friar Forest for upholding the papal supremacy (1538), of two Anabaptists, a man and a woman (1538), of Joan Bocher for denying Christ's humanity (1550), and of a Dutch Arian (1551). In the death, however, of Anne Askew (q.v.) he seems to have borne no part; nor is there one word of truth in Foxe's legend that he coerced Edward VI. into signing the warrant for Joan Bocher's execution. With the dissolution of the monasteries he had little to do; but he bestirred himself in promoting the translation of the Bible (q.v.) and a service-book, in curtailing the number of holy days, in the suppression of the cult of St Thomas of Canterbury, and in negotiating an eirenic with foreign Reformers. On the path, indeed, towards Protestantism, he was ever in advance of Henry VIII., though to Henry he surrendered his right of private judgment as completely as ever Ultramontane to Pope. Thus, writing in 1540 on the sacraments, he could wind up a thesis with 'This is mine opinion and sentence at this present, which nevertheless I do not temerarily define, but remit the judgment thereof wholly unto your majesty.' Henry repaid him with implicit confidence, and twice saved him from the plots of his enemies (1543-45).
On 28th January 1547 Henry died, and Cranmer sang mass of requiem for his soul. He had been slowly drifting into Protestantism; but now the inrushing tide swept him onward through all those religious changes by which the mass was converted into a communion—changes stereotyped in the Second Prayer-book of 1552. See ENGLAND (CHURCH OF), PRAYER-BOOK, ARTICLES, HOMILIES, CATECHISM. During this as during the preceding reign he meddled little with affairs of state, though he was one of the council of regency. What he did do was not too creditable. In gross violation of the canon law he signed Seymour's death-warrant; he had a chief hand in the deposition and imprisonment of Bishops Bonner, Gardiner, and Day; and won over by the dying boy-king's pleading, he reluctantly subscribed the instrument diverting the succession from Mary to Lady Jane Grey (1553). Herein he was guilty of conscious perjury, yet, the twelve days' reign over, he made no attempt to flee. On the contrary, he was roused to an outburst of indignation, rare with him, by a report that he had offered to restore the mass, had indeed restored it at Canterbury. In the heat of the moment he dashed off a letter, denouncing that report as a lie of the devil, which letter, unrevised, being prematurely circulated, on 14th September Cranmer was sent to the Tower, on 13th November was arraigned for treason, and, pleading guilty, was condemned to die. If he had been executed on that sentence, little could have been urged against his executioners, but he was reserved to be tried as a heretic, and, perchance, to recant his heresy. In March 1554 he was removed with Ridley and Latimer, to Bocard, the common gaol at Oxford. He bore himself bravely and discreetly in a scholastic disputation, as also upon his trial before the papal commissioner, whose jurisdiction he refused to recognise. In October from the gaol he witnessed Latimer's and Ridley's martyrdom; in December judgment was pronounced against him; and on 14th February 1556 he was formally degraded, stripped of the mock vestments in which they had arrayed him. And now in rapid succession he signed form after form of recantation, seven in all, each more submissive than its predecessor. The last he transcribed on the morning of 21st March, and forthwith they brought him to St Mary's Church. If not before, he learned at least now from the sermon that he must burn; anyhow, when they looked for him to read his recantation, instead he retracted all that 'for fear of death' his hand had written 'contrary to the truth.' With a cheerful countenance he then hastened to the stake, and, fire being put to him, thrust his right hand into the flame, and kept it there, crying: 'This hath offended! Oh this unworthy hand!' Very soon he was dead.
Among Cranmer's forty-two writings, the chief of which have been edited by the Rev. H. Jenkins (4 vols. 1833) and the Rev. J. E. Cox (2 vols. Parker Society, 1844-46), may be noticed his prefaces to the Bible (1540) and the First Prayer-book (1549); the Reformatio Legum Ecclesiasticarum—his revision, happily abortive, of the Canon Law (q.v.)—first published in 1571; and A Defence of the True and Catholic Doctrine of the Sacrament (1550).
See Narratives of the Reformation, edited by J. G. Nichols (Camden Society, 1859), with a sketch of Cranmer by Ralph Morice, his secretary; Foxe's Acts and Monuments; Cooper's Athenæ Cantabrigienses (1858); Mr Gairdner's article in the Dictionary of National Biography (vol. xiii. 1888); Strype's Ecclesiastical Memorials (1721); Shakespeare's Henry VIII. and Tennyson's Queen Mary; and Lives of Cranmer by Strype (1694), Gilpin (1784), Todd (2 vols. 1831, with fine portrait), Le Bas (2 vols. 1833), Dean Hook, Lives of the Archbishops (vols. vi.-vii. 1868), Collette (1887), and Mason (1898).