Thomas Cranmer and the English Reformation 1489-1556

A. F. Pollard

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367150181
• eBook ISBN: 9780429620232
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Published in 1965: It has been maintained by an eminent scholar recently dead that the chief content of modern history is the emancipation of conscience from the control of authority. From that point of view the student of Tudor times will not be exclusive in his choice of heroes. He will find room in his calendar of saints for More as well as for Cranmer. Both had grave imperfections, and both took their share in enforcing the claims of authority over those of conscience. Nor perhaps is it true to say that they died in order that we might be free; but they died for conscience' sake, and unless they and others had died conscience would still be in chains. That was Cranmer's service in the cause of humanity his Church owes him no less, for in the Book of Common Prayer he gave it the most effective of all its possessions.

THOMAS CRANMER

___________

CHAPTER I
PARENTAGE, BIRTH, AND EARLY YEARS

MIDWAY between the north-midland towns of Grantham and Nottingham, and just beyond the railway which joins them, lies the modest hamlet of Aslacton.¹ It is not of itself a parish; of old it belonged to Whatton on the south-east, and now it forms part of Scarrington on the north-west. Until recent years its spiritual needs were satisfied with a Primitive Methodist chapel and an Anglican mission room named, like some walks and mounds in the neighbourhood, after its one distinguished native. Its inhabitants do not number five hundred souls, and it covers less than thirteen hundred acres of land. The cross-roads, on which its cottages cluster, lead nowhere in particular, and the great Fosse Way passes it by in contempt four miles to the north-west. Beyond that lies Sherwood Forest, already in the days of Cranmer’s youth celebrated as the scene of the legendary exploits of Robin Hood. To the south-east a stream, dignified by the name of the River Smite, meanders down to its junction with the Devon and then loses itself in the great river, the Trent, at Newark. Beyond this stream the ground rises to the heights whence, in Armada days,

“Belvoir’s lordly terraces the sign to Lincoln sent,

And Lincoln sped the message on o’er the wide vale of Trent.”¹

Few inhabited spots have suffered less from modern civilisation; the nearest money office is three miles distant, and if a rustic of Aslacton requires the telegraph he has still farther to seek. Some six times a day, trains pass in either direction, but Aslacton owes its railway station less to its own than to the borrowed importance of neighbouring Whatton; and the proximity of a railroad at all is solely due to the fact that the pioneers who constructed the line from Grantham and Nottingham must needs pass near Aslacton.

Here on 2 July, 1489, was born “the first Protestant archbishop of this kingdom, and the greatest instrument, under God, of the happy Reformation of this Church of England: in whose piety, learning, wisdom, conduct, and blood the foundation of it was laid.”² But Aslacton, although it was the place of Cranmer’s birth, was not the original cradle of the race. The family took its name from Cranmer, a manor in the parish of Sutterton in Lincolnshire; and its arms, a chevron between three cranes, are an heraldic pun on the name, which signifies a lake abounding in cranes. It occurs as a place-name in the counties of Norfolk and Suffolk, and under the variant “Cranmore” is found in the west of England.¹ Imaginative county historians,² and fertile makers of pedigrees, have traced the genealogy of the Cranmers of Sutterton back to the reign of Edward I., when one Hugh de Cranmer is said to have wedded the daughter of William de Sutterton. But few genealogists of the sixteenth century were content with a line which began at so recent a date. It was an age of parvenus, and therefore of pedigree-makers, and the legislature has never weighted the imagination of genealogists with the penalties attaching to the forgery of other kinds of documents. The great Lord Burghley himself was a zealous hunter of pedigrees, and even Cranmer liked to believe that his forbears came over with William the Conqueror. When he discovered in the train of the French Ambassador a gentleman with a similar coat-of-arms to his own, he gave him a good dinner at Lambeth on the strength of the supposed relationship.

The truth is that the Cranmers’ antecedents were obscure and their position humble enough. “I take it,” said Cranmer, many years later, “ that none of us all here, being gentlemen born, but had our beginnings that way from a low and base parentage.”¹ No member of his family had been knighted or pricked as sheriff, none had been elected to serve in Parliament or summoned to fight his country’s battles in the wars of the fourteenth century. It is, however, an exaggeration to say that there is no evidence for the existence of the various members of the family, whom the historian of Nottinghamshire has introduced into the fourteenth-century part of the pedigree; for we have it on the authority of the tax-collector that in 1338 one Hugh de Cranmer owned three acres and something more in the county of Lincoln.² It is no straining of probabilities to assume that this Hugh de Cranmer is he whose name was painted on the stained-glass windows of Sutterton Church,³ and that both are identical with the Hugh who figures in the pedigrees as the grandfather of Edmund Cranmer, the first to connect the Cranmers with Aslacton.

This Edmund did not a little to promote the modest fortunes of the family. Early. in the fifteenth century he married Isabella, daughter and heiress of William de Aslacton,⁴ and her family was certainly of higher social standing than that of her husband. It may have been descended from Walkelin, presumably a Norman, who held Aslacton in the time of Domesday Book⁵; one of its members had been sheriff of Nottingham and Derby shires in the reign of Henry III., and another had sat as knight for his native county in the parliament of Edward III.¹ Edmund Cranmer apparently sold his Lincolnshire inheritance, and with the proceeds purchased in 1425 lands adjoining his wife’s in Aslacton. Their son John married Alice Marshall of South Carleton in North Muskham, Nottinghamshire, and by her had issue two sons, Thomas, the father of the future Archbishop, and John. The elder, of course, succeeded to the Aslacton lands, and the younger, in orthodox fashion, devoted himself to the Church.

Of the Archbishop’s father we know more than of any earlier member of the family. He was probably born between 1450 and 1455, and some thirty years later he married Agnes, daughter of Lawrence Hatfield of Willoughby, in the Nottinghamshire hundred of Thurgarton. The suggestion² that these Hatfields were descended from the lords of Hatfield in Holderness is a conjecture unsupported by evidence; but they were a county family of some standing, and Agnes Hatfield’s uncle married the daughter of Sir Thomas Molyneux of Hawton; his son, Henry Hatfield, was in later years surveyor of the Archbishop’s lands.³ By this marriage Thomas Cranmer had a large family; there were three boys and at least four girls. Of the daughters, Dorothy married Harold Rosell, of Ratcliffe-on-Trent,⁴ and Agnes wedded Edmund Cartwright¹ of Ossington, a family which produced more than one well-known name in English history. Two daughters, Margaret and Emmet, were unmarried at their father’s death; one of them afterwards became the wife of that unknown brother-in-law of the Archbishop who perished in the fire at Lambeth Palace in December, 1543.² The other was scarcely more fortunate in her matrimonial relations; her first husband was “a milner,” but during his lifetime she is said to have married a second, one Henry Bingham, and her daughter by one of these husbands (presumably the first) was wife of Dr. Christopher Nevinson, the Archbishop’s commissary, facts which furnished material for an attack on Cranmer by his Prebendaries in 1543.³

With so large a family, the Cranmers’ household can hardly have been luxurious. Despite the slow but steady improvement in the fortunes of the clan, the Archbishop’s father possessed but moderate means, and the extent of his influence and estates can easily be exaggerated. Aslacton was a “lordship” as well as a hamlet, but it is not clear that Cranmer was lord of any of the various manors of which thé “lordship” was composed. The “lord-ship” itself belonged to the Crown, apparently as part and parcel of the duchy of Lancaster. Edward IV. gave it to the Marquis Montagu, brother of Warwick the King-Maker, but on the fall of the Nevilles it reverted to royal hands. Among the various persons appointed from time to time as “receivers” or other royal representatives in the “lordship” the name of Cranmer does not occur¹; and from this fact, and from the smallness of the bequests in the elder Cranmer’s will, it may be safely assumed that his rents hardly sufficed to keep him and his household in the moderate comfort to which the smaller English gentry of the time were accustomed.

These comparatively narrow circumstances determined the careers of Cranmer’s sons. The eldest, John who was born in the spring of 1487, was expected to do as his father had done, keep his inheritance intact, extend it, or enhance his social position by marrying well, and beget sons to carry on the family line and traditions. To him education was a matter of little or no importance, and there is no evidence to show that his intelligence was one whit superior to that of his class. The inference is in the opposite direction, for had he possessed brains or ambition, the influence of the Archbishop could easily have secured for his brother an opportunity of distinguishing himself in some wider sphere of usefulness than the local affairs of Aslacton. But in spite of his lands and his brother, John Cranmer never even rose to the dignity of a justice of the peace. He was perhaps successful in all to which his lowly ambition aspired. He won a wife who boasted among her remote ancestors a baron by writ, and his daughter actually married the youngest son of a living peer.¹

It was beyond the means of the Cranmer estates to support two of the family in such a position, and both of John’s younger brothers were quartered on the Church. There is no reason to suppose that either felt any special call to the spiritual state; the decision was made for them by their parents and their circumstances; younger sons, for whom the family property could not provide, as a matter of course took holy orders. And so Thomas Cranmer was, by no design of his own, launched on his fateful career. His younger brother, Edmund, born about 1491, was intimately associated with him throughout his life; he followed Thomas to Cambridge, assimilated his elder brother’s views and like him, married a wife, received the Archdeaconry of Canterbury, escaped to the Continent on Mary’s accession, and died abroad in 1571.²

The first step in a clerical career was a clerical education, and the Archbishop once told his secretary tary that his father “did set him to school with a marvellous severe and cruel schoolmaster.”¹ Another account,² written soon after Cranmer’s death, states that he “learned his grammar of a rude parish clerk in that barbarous time.” But as Morice goes on to speak of Cranmer s leaving his “grammar school” to go to Cambridge, it is probable that his instructor was not the local parish priest, but the master of some neighbouring school. Of these there were ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Preface
• Table of Contents
• Illustrations
• Chapter I. Parentage, Birth, and Early Years
• Chapter II. Cranmer and the Divorce of Catherine of Aragon
• Chapter III. Cranmer and the Royal Supremacy
• Chapter IV. Cranmer and Reform
• Chapter V. Cranmer and the Catholic Reaction
• Chapter VI. Cranmer’s Projects During Henry’s Last Years
• Chapter VII. Cranmer and the First Book of Common Prayer
• Chapter VIII. Theological Views and Controversies
• Chapter IX. Cranmer and the Second Book of Common Prayer
• Chapter X. The Downfall of English Protestantism
• Chapter XI. Cranmer’s Character and Private Life
• Chapter XII. In Time of Trouble
• Chapter XIII. In the Hour of Death
• Index