SOURCE: Smyth, C. H. “Cranmer” and “Appendix: The Date of Cranmer's Liturgical Projects.” In Cranmer and the Reformation under Edward VI, pp. 28-77. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1926.

[In the following excerpt, Smyth considers charges that Cranmer was theologically inconsistent and attempts to determine the years during which the works collected in an edition entitled Cranmer's Liturgical Projects, edited by Dr. Wickham Legg, were written.]

CRANMER

Few Reformers have been so contemptuously regarded as the first Protestant Archbishop of the Church of England. ‘Mehr klug als charaktervoll’¹, ‘ingenio quod habebat magis blandum quam acutum’², ‘a weak man’ who ‘trusted to his suppleness for security in opposition’³, a man of ‘compliant temper’⁴—these charges have been so frequently repeated that they have almost ceased to be challenged. Other authorities have presumed even further upon this treacherous foundation. ‘Saintly in his professions, unscrupulous in his dealings, zealous for nothing, bold in speculation, a coward and a timeserver in action, a placable enemy and a lukewarm friend, he was in every way qualified to arrange the terms of the coalition between the religious and the worldly enemies of Popery’⁵: this tirade affords a better sample of Macaulay's instinct for invective than of his sense of justice. ‘This large, timorous, and unwieldy nature,’ wrote Canon Dixon⁶, ‘was needful to the men of violence and craft who now held in their hands the destinies of the country and the Church. He became their scribe, their tool, their voice. It is the misfortune of a nation when such a character is discovered and so used …’ Canon Dixon is not the only author to regret that Thomas Cranmer was not Thomas à Becket, or to exhibit a marked preference for Gardiner. But then follows a sentence that improves on the customary estimate of Cranmer's theological opinions: ‘In doctrine he ran from one position to another’—‘ran’ is good—‘with the whole rabble of innovators at his heels, until at last he seemed ready to surrender the Catholicity of the Church to the Sacramentarians.’ Yet not content with this, Dr Leighton Pullan in his Bampton Lectures (1922) tacitly passed a further amendment to the charge by his contemptuous reference to ‘the vacillations of Cranmer, blown about by every wind of doctrine from the Rhine’⁷: a remark of which the general purport is evident, though the precise application must remain, to anyone who has studied the history of the period, somewhat obscure.

But the main charge of inconsistency cannot be shirked, because it involves the validity of the entire Edwardine Reformation. If the charge be proven, only the last part of that Reformation, centring round the Prayer Book of 1552, can be accepted as doctrinally sound, unless we are prepared to preserve what Cranmer rejected, and to reject what Cranmer, in the maturity of his experience, came to maintain. The mass of Cranmer's Reformation work must be dismissed as worthless unless the whole body of it can be regarded as coherent.

In the first place Cranmer was, of course, an erastian, and erastianism has been in very bad odour since the Oxford Movement. But in his time the Church was not ripe for autonomy: it would have been paralysed by an Enabling Act. Royal Supremacy was, indeed, the only alternative to Roman obedience. A hundred years later Germany, after a period of anarchy followed by an armed truce and thirty years of devastating war, arrived at the same conclusion. Royal Supremacy had established the Church of England, and was a necessary condition of its survival: somewhat paradoxically, it was only by submitting to the authority of the Crown that the Church could maintain its independence. The English Reformation had not been initiated for the reform of doctrine, and its original leaders were not Lollards, but loyalists: the movement was part of an universal protest against alien domination: it was designed to abolish an imperium in imperio, and to achieve the independence less of the Church than of the State⁸. It was an essentially patriotic movement: and in that age politics and religion were less clearly distinguished than they are to-day, and the clergy were, for the most part, as good patriots as the laity. Now the first article in the nationalist creed in the age of the New Monarchy was, Le nouveau Messie est le Roi: and this was binding upon all citizens. National patriotism identified itself with personal loyalty, and was justified by expediency. From the point of view of the clergy, the Establishment was grounded in patriotism, and therefore in loyalty: the Reformation was a translatio imperii: the only legitimate defence of the abolition of the Pope's jurisdiction was that it usurped the King's, and therefore erastianism and anti-papalism were complementary and inseparable. From the point of view of the Crown, there was no use in abolishing one dominium in dominio in order merely to erect another: the Majestic Lord intended to have no further trifling. And so the clergy were, of double necessity, erastians all: and to blame Cranmer for being an erastian is as reasonable as to blame him for living in the first half of the sixteenth century⁹.

There is nothing either shameful or illogical in his own statements of his attitude, two of which merit quotation. The first is taken from a Memorial on General Councils (1537), signed by Cranmer and seven bishops, including Tunstall, Stokesley, Goodrich and Latimer, and by four other clerics.

… Other places of scripture declare the highness and excellency of christian princes' authority and power; the which of a truth is most high, for he hath power and charge generally over all, as well bishops, priests, as other. The bishops and priests have charge of souls within their own cures, power to minister sacraments, and to teach the word of God, to the which word of God christian princes [ac]knowledge themselves subject; and in case the bishops be negligent, it is the christian princes' office to see them do their duty.

The second occurs in Cranmer's Examination before Brokes, September 1555. It is remarkable for its restraint.

CRANMER.
I will never consent that the bishop of Rome shall have any jurisdiction within this realm.
STORY.
Take a note thereof.
CRANMER.
I will never consent to the bishop of Rome; for then should I give myself to the devil: for I have made an oath to the king, and I must obey the king by God's laws. By the scripture the king is chief, and no foreign person in his own realm over him. There is no subject but to a king. I am a subject, I owe my fidelity to the crown. The pope is contrary to the crown. I cannot obey both: for no man can serve two masters at once. … The king is head in his own realm: but the pope claimeth all bishops, priests, curates, &c. So the pope in every realm hath a realm.
Christ biddeth us to obey the king, etiam dyscolo [δυsκόλῳ]: the bishop of Rome biddeth us to obey him. Therefore, unless he be antichrist, I cannot tell what to make of him. Wherefore if I should obey him, I cannot obey Christ.
… I say therefore, the bishop of Rome treadeth under foot God's laws and the king's. …
MARTIN.
As you understand then, if they [the clergy] maintain the supremacy of Rome, they cannot maintain England too.

If it could be proved that Cranmer's erastianism ever deflected his policy as Primate of all England, or led him to profess doctrines which he did not believe, the censure would carry more weight. He accepted the Royal Supremacy, but only because he believed in it (he had been praying for the abolition of the Pope's authority in England since 1525): and in this his conduct compares favourably with that of his predecessor, ‘the saintly and venerable Warham,’ who assented to the Supremacy when he privately believed it to be evil, or that of his antagonist, Gardiner, who was equally conspicuous as an erastian under Henry, a malcontent under Edward, and a papalist under Mary; in fact, in the days when he was playing a leading part in the restoration of the Pope's supremacy, he was seriously embarrassed by Bale's republication, in an English translation, of his De Vera Obedientia, written in 1535. The proof of Cranmer's sincerity lies in his recantations, which he faced with far more hesitation than his martyrdom: he was logically committed to repudiate the Royal Supremacy by his unwavering belief in it. The argument by which he had confuted More's reasoning, though without breaking his resolution, had become fatally applicable to his own case.

… But then (said my Lord [of Canterbury]) you know for a certainty, and a thing without doubt, that you be bounden to obey your sovereign lord your King. And therefore are ye bounden to leave of the doubt of your unsure conscience in refusing the oath, and take the sure way in obeying of your prince, and swear it. … This argument seemed me suddenly so subtle, and namely with such authority coming out of so noble a prelate's mouth, that I could again answer nothing thereto but only that I thought myself I might not well do so. …¹⁰

If the Crown had the right to enforce the Act of Supremacy, had it not also the right to repeal it? It was not until Cranmer had determined that he had been commanded ‘to do against God,’ and was therefore released from his obedience, that he felt himself able to defy the royal architect of Counter-Reformation, and so died for the Royal Supremacy in defiance of the Crown.

Pocock declared his contempt for Cranmer for being ‘content to celebrate the office of the mass at the very time when he believed it to be idolatrous and blasphemous¹¹.’ Cranmer was not content: but he was Primate of the Church of England, and not an irresponsible individual. He could not abolish the Mass and substitute the Communion by a stroke of the pen upon the instant that he himself had ceased to believe in it. Precipitate action would merely provoke mutiny, if not anarchy, within the Church. But as soon as he came to disapprove of such superstitious ceremonies as creeping to the Cross, covering images in Lent, and ringing the church bells all night on All Hallows, he applied to the King to sanction their abolition—the permission was first given, but soon afterwards withdrawn—and himself omitted all marks of veneration of the Cross in the liturgy that he was then drafting: and in the same year (1546), upon his conversion to Suvermerianism, began to work for the abolition of the Mass, urging the King (who was diffident, being then preoccupied with the project of an alliance with the Emperor and the French king) to agree provisionally to the drafting of an English Order of the Communion, and eventually, in August 1547, obtaining the royal assent. To have acted without that assent would have been futile and dangerous.

Cranmer was no time-server: but he possessed the statesmanlike quality of patience, and gained his ends by persuasion, not by defiance, of his Prince. He was accommodating, but not subservient: he never yielded on fundamentals, nor allowed Henry to manipulate his conscience or juggle with his convictions. But he was accommodating, if that were indeed a fault: and of this we have a curious, and neglected, instance.

There is extant a MS. notebook, containing two separate drafts for a revised liturgy, which has been published by the Henry Bradshaw Society under the title, Cranmer's Liturgical Projects. Part I, which bears a strong resemblance to the Lutheran Kirchenordnungen, supplied the groundwork of the offices of Matins and Evensong in the Prayer Book of 1549: Part II, which was obviously composed under the influence of the Reformed Breviary of Cardinal Quignon, did not, apparently, lead to any practical result. But, contrary to the opinion generally received, Part I is the earlier in date. It may be stated with confidence that the date of this draft is 1538. Part II may be dated roughly between 1543 and 1546¹². These dates are significant. In 1538 the period of Lutheran influence upon the English Reformation was indeed drawing to a close: but for the time that influence was again paramount. Henry, yielding for the last time to Crumwell's foreign policy, had resumed negotiations, more or less seriously, for an alliance with the Lutheran Princes, who had sent to England three ambassadors—Burckhardt, the Chancellor of Saxony, supported by a lawyer and a theologian—to conclude a treaty and to advise the Church. Melanchthon sincerely desired, and confidently expected a religious concordat on the basis of the Augsburg Confession, which would bring England into line with Wittenberg. The King seemed to approve, and a commission of four prelates and four doctors was appointed to confer with the German orators. Cranmer, like his master, favoured the project, although his colleagues did not: he drew up Thirteen Articles, closely modelled on the Confession of Augsburg, to serve as a basis of negotiation: and was privately engaged with Crumwell's chaplain, Malet, in drafting a revised liturgy on the Lutheran pattern, as a gesture of goodwill. The preface is derived from Quignon, but the offices (Matins and Evensong) are clearly inspired by Bugenhagen's Pia et vere Catholica et consentiens veteri Ecclesiae ordinatio (1537), a copy of which had been presented to Henry by the author.

The conference proved abortive. What Henry wanted was not a religious, but a political alliance with the Lutherans: and he was outgrowing his desire even for that. Negotiations were broken off, and never resumed under as favourable circumstances, though the Germans returned to England in the following spring and lingered for some months in the hope of a successful issue. The arrival of Anne of Cleves furnished the last goad to Henry's impatience: in June, 1539, the Act of Six Articles had already initiated the Catholic Reaction, and in the following year Crumwell, too deeply committed to the Lutheran alliance to escape the consequences of its failure, went to the block. Cranmer's second draft of a liturgy is based exclusively on the Sarum Use and the Reformed Breviary of Cardinal Quignon.

Superficially, this change of policy seems entirely discreditable: Cranmer's accommodating disposition appears to have overstepped the bounds of decency. But the explanation is simple. Cranmer was always afraid of the isolation of his Church. In the Confession of Augsburg he saw the potential basis of an alliance with the Lutherans, whose moderation and conservatism he found extremely sympathetic, in sharp contrast to the radicalism of the Sacramentarians. The Article on the Eucharist, which he copied verbatim into his Thirteen Articles, had been deliberately left ambiguous: both Catholics and Lutherans could subscribe to it with a good conscience. It seemed possible to build upon this basis a Centre Party, composed of the Catholic Party of Reform and the Moderate Party of Reformation: a coalition strong enough to secure reform and to stem the tide of revolution. But the conference of 1538 revealed that this was merely a pious aspiration, for upon the fundamental question of the Eucharist the parties could come to no agreement. Cranmer, who throughout had conceded no point of doctrine to the Lutheran envoys, regretfully abandoned the project, and shelved his unfinished liturgy: in the resumed negotiations of 1539 he seems to have had no part: instead, he set himself to strengthen his position with the Catholic Party of Reform, who were now in power. The doctrine that he maintained in both cases was the same.

In 1546, when he was converted to the Suvermerian doctrine, the situation was profoundly modified. Upon this altered basis an alliance with the Lutherans seemed to come once more within the range of possibility. Alike in their theology, Cranmer and Martin Bucer were alike also in their belief in conferences. It was an echo of the Conciliar Movement. To convene a General Council of Protestantism that should establish ‘one sound, pure, evangelical doctrine, agreeable to the discipline of the primitive church,’ to discover a formula that could unite all the divergent forces of Reformation against the common foe while leaving ample room for differences of interpretation: this was the dominant aim of Cranmer's statesmanship, and one that frequently seemed upon the threshold of success. In 1538 the basis of agreement appeared to be provided by the Confession of Augsburg: in 1547 by the Consultation of Archbishop Hermann of Cologne: then by the English Prayer Book of 1549: and finally, in 1552, by the Consensus Tigurinus. Had Cranmer succeeded in destroying the isolation of the English Church, the reign of Mary might have run a different course: had he succeeded in uniting Continental Protestantism, the history of the Counter-Reformation would certainly not have been the same.

The Consultation of Hermann of Cologne, the charter of Reformation in that diocese, was the work of Bucer and Melanchthon in collaboration. Following on the Wittenberg Concordat of 1536, it consummated the alliance between the two great schools of Strassburg and Wittenberg. The articles on the three Natures, on creation, original sin, justification by faith and by works, the Church, and penance, are by Melanchthon: those on baptism and the Lord's Supper are by Bucer. It is not surprising that the vagueness and ambiguity of the latter made Luther indignant: ‘von der Substanz mummelt es, dass man nicht soll vernehmen, was er davon halte in aller Masse.’ But the popularity of this work was remarkable. It was first published, under the title Einfältiges Bedenken, in 1543: a Latin version (Simplex ac pia Deliberatio), which Cranmer used¹³, appeared in 1545, and two English editions in 1547 and 1548. From the Consultation, the Order of the Communion of 1548 derived its inspiration. Here was a more definite overture to the Lutherans than that of 1538, for in Cranmer's draft of a liturgy the question of the sacramental Presence had not been involved. And it was followed by an amazing offer. The need for a complete revision of the liturgy was now imperative: and so Cranmer invited the leading foreign Reformers to come to England, and, in effect, to compile the English Prayer Book.

The project was ambitious, but under the circumstances there was no reason why it should not have succeeded. The disaster of Mühlberg made the dominions of the Emperor unsafe for Protestants. The Interim had not yet been promulgated, it is true: but a far more stringent measure might have been anticipated. Melanchthon was meditating flight to Magdeburg. Strassburg was a doomed city: the return of the exiled Bishop was a question of days. East Friesland, where John à Lasco laboured, could no longer defy the Emperor with impunity. For most of the Reformers in Germany sentence of banishment at least seemed the inevitable penalty of defeat: while the generous hospitality of Lambeth offered sanctuary to them all. Some had already come to England; notably Peter Martyr, from Strassburg; Ochino, from Augsburg; Peter Alexander, late Chaplain to Mary of Burgundy, Regent of the Netherlands; Dryander, a Spanish Lutheran; Tremellio, a learned Italian Jew; Valérand Poullain, who had succeeded Calvin as pastor to the French Church at Strassburg; among others. Some of these were exiles; others merely travellers; not a few had come in the hope of obtaining more lucrative employment than they could find abroad. But here was already the nucleus of a ‘godly synod’: if Melanchthon, Bucer, and à Lasco could also be induced to come and to join with these other foreigners in a Conference with the leaders of the Church of England, they might draw up a formulary of faith that would command general obedience, and a liturgy that would be adopted by all the Protestant Churches of Europe. The Lutheran and Suvermerian Churches, and the Catholic Party of Reform, would be strongly represented: while à Lasco would hold a watching brief for more radical and Sacramentarian interests. The Conference was, in fact, to effect a coalition of the moderate parties, and to found a Centre Party upon the basis of uniformity of creed and ritual: the leading rôle was, inevitably, allotted to Melanchthon. The Swiss were not represented, partly because Cranmer had no sympathy for their theology, and partly because they had already wrecked too many conferences by their uncompromising temper: but it was vaguely hoped that they would accept the findings of this council, if unanimous.

The first essential was to persuade Melanchthon to come. He ought to have leapt at the opportunity, since the Conference was, after all, his own idea; he had urged upon King Henry, in his letter of March 26, 1539, the necessity of a consensus piae doctrinae, and had attached the greatest importance to the visit of the three Lutheran orators for that purpose. But now he showed an unaccountable reluctance. Cranmer wrote to him at least three times, urging him to come: he made Justus Jonas, the younger, who was then in England, write to him to the same purpose: he wrote to à Lasco and to Hardenberg, begging them to persuade him to come at all costs. Melanchthon sent two replies, conveying his warm approval of the proposed Conference, but made a childish pretence of not observing that he had been invited to it. In his first letter he ‘did not desire to do anything more than to express his grief’ [at the bitterness of the Sacramental Controversy]—‘which is so great that it could not be exhausted, though I were to shed a flood of tears as large as our Elbe or your Thames’: he had to be brief, as the messengers were waiting: but he begged Cranmer ‘to deliberate with the good and truly learned men both as to what should be determined, and as to what moderation may be expedient at first in teaching,’ and reminded him that he had always wished (as he had written in a former letter) ‘that a summary of necessary doctrine might be publicly set forth,’ without ambiguities, such as the Council of Trent employed. His second letter is written in the same strain:

The longer I think about your conference, than which nothing more weighty and necessary can be set on foot among mankind, the more I hope, and think you should be exhorted, that you will publish a true and perspicuous confession on the whole body of doctrine, having compared the judgments of learned men, whose names should be subscribed to it, in order that there may be extant among all nations an illustrious testimony concerning doctrine, delivered with grave authority, and that posterity may have a rule to follow. Nor, indeed, will that confession be very different from ours, but I could wish a few articles to be introduced more clearly explained to posterity, lest ambiguities should subsequently furnish new dissensions. … In the Church it is more proper to call a spade a spade, than to throw ambiguous expressions before posterity. … If you really press me for my opinion and vote also, I will gladly listen to the other learned men, and declare my own opinion in my turn and offer the reasons for my opinion, both persuading and being persuaded, as is fitting in a conference of pious men. …

This was very vague and indefinite, and it made no direct reference to coming to England: but it was rather more encouraging, and Cranmer promptly wrote his third invitation, and sent it with a covering letter to à Lasco, begging him to add his own suasions to this appeal. Three weeks later Cranmer wrote to Hardenberg, the pastor of Bremen, asking him to add his voice also to the chorus of invitation. All was useless. If Melanchthon replied to Cranmer's third letter, his reply has not survived. The truth was, he preferred the ignominy of submitting to the Interim to the inconvenience and possible danger of a journey to London: and nothing could persuade him to move. As to the others, Bucer with characteristic courage, and to the anxiety of his friends, refused to desert his flock until the last moment consistent with his safety: while à Lasco was delayed ‘by the sudden intervention of some other business,’ and did not arrive in England until September, and then, finding his presence not so urgently required, returned to his duty in East Friesland.

In the absence of Melanchthon, the idea of a Conference had to be abandoned. But the reformation of the liturgy had to proceed. It is, certainly, to Cranmer's credit that he did not lose all patience with the men who had failed him: though the foreign Reformers were not present, they were not forgotten: but the Catholic Party of Reform received more generous concessions than they might have had if the Conference had met. The First Prayer Book of King Edward VI is characterised by conservatism and moderation. It was designed to open the door to the New Learning without closing it to the Old. ‘I hear,’ wrote Bucer and Fagius to their old colleagues in Strassburg, ‘that certain concessions have been made both to a respect for the past and to the infirmity of the present.’ The Communion Office, though it was taken over, almost unaltered, from the Order of the Communion of 1548, which derived from the Consultation of Hermann of Cologne, was entitled The Supper of the Lorde and the Holy Communion commonly called the masse: while the liturgy as a whole was called The Booke of the Common Prayer and Administracion of the Sacramentes, and other Rites and Ceremonies of the Churche after the use of the Churche of England: guarded phrases to which a Catholic could hardly take exception. Much, too, was borrowed from Quignon: particularly the increased use of the Scriptures in divine service. And much was left optional: as ‘kneeling, crossing, holding up of handes, knocking upon the brest, and other gestures,’ and auricular confession, a paragraph being inserted at the end of the second Exhortation to the Communion

requiryng suche as shalbe satisfied with a generall confession, not to be offended with them that doe use, to their further satisfiyng, the auriculer and secret confession to the Priest: nor those also whiche thinke nedefull or conuenient, for the quietnes of their awne cōsciences, particuliarly to open their sinnes to the Priest: to bee offended with them that are satisfied, with their humble confession to GOD, and the generall confession to the churche. But in all thinges to folowe and kepe the rule of charitie, and euery man to be satisfied with his owne conscience, not iudging other mennes myndes or consciences; where as he hath no warrant of Goddes word to the same.

This passage perfectly expresses the spirit of the compilation. It was intended to be sufficiently comprehensive to include the Catholic Party of Reform, the Lutherans, and the Suvermerians. It was a liturgy for a Centre Party. Later Cranmer had reason to regret his generosity when Gardiner, with laboured ingenuity, contrived to read even transubstantiation into it.

On the other hand, there were no concessions to the papalists. The petition, ‘from the tyranny of the Bysshop of Rome and al hys detestable enormities. … Good lord, deliuer us,’ was retained from the Litany of 1544, and the name of St Thomas of Canterbury vanished from the Calendar. Moreover the old ritual was purged of ‘things standing against true religion and godliness,’ of various ceremonies and uses not warrantable by the practice of the Primitive Church but interpolated by mediæval popes, such as the elevation of the host, the reservation of the sacraments for adoration, the use of holy bread and holy water, the doctrine of Purgatory, the veneration of images, and of ‘vncertein stories¹⁴, Legendes, Respondes, Verses, vaine repeticions, Commemoracions and Synodalles.’

But, above all, free rein was given to Cranmer's democratic sympathies. He came of yeoman stock, and in an age of social snobbery, boasted of it: ‘I take it,’ he said upon a later occasion, ‘that none of us all here, being gentlemen born, but had our beginnings that way from a low and base parentage.’ Throughout, his sympathies lay with the people. He fought the New Landlordism, at considerable personal risk; he advocated democratic education, to the almost lyrical admiration of Professor Pollard. Now the Roman Church, as Cranmer saw it, was an essentially undemocratic organisation. It is true that it drew its priests from among the people, but it also withdrew them from among the people. They formed a caste apart, exalted above the laity and segregated from them by an entirely different rule of life. The Church of Rome, while it raised a small proportion of the people into the sacred ministry itself, held the vast majority of them apart from God, permitting only indirect communication through the mediation of the priests on earth and of the saints in heaven: the offices were celebrated in mumbled Latin: the Bible itself was for the laity a sealed book. It was against this undemocratic system that Cranmer revolted: for what it led to was not religion, but superstition.

In 1537 he had successfully importuned Crumwell and the King to sanction the publication of the Bible in English¹⁵. In 1544 he translated the Litany, with various alterations. In 1545 he induced the King to issue an authorised English Primer, and his hand is surely evident in the Preface:

… We have thought good to bestow our earnest labour in this part also, being a thing as fruitful as the best, that men may know both what they pray, and also with what words, lest things good and principal, being inwrapped in ignorance of the words, should not perfectly come to the mind and the intelligence of men. …

In consideration whereof we have set out and given to our subjects a determinate form of praying in their own mother tongue, to the intent that such as are ignorant of any strange or foreign speech may have what to pray in their own acquainted and familiar language with fruit and understanding; and to the end that they shall not offer unto God (being the searcher of the reins and hearts) neither things standing against true religion and godliness, nor yet words far out of their intelligence and understanding.

This declaration foreshadows the liturgy of 1549. But in that the use of the vernacular in all the offices was accompanied by other democratic reforms: the services, especially the Communion, were made more congregational: private Masses were discouraged, and the sacraments were administered in both kinds.

The Prayer Book of 1549 was a monument to Cranmer's tolerance and discrimination. But it was immediately followed by a serious rebellion in Cornwall and Devon and by risings, partly agrarian (as in Norfolk), partly religious (as in Oxfordshire), all over the country. Conditions in the south-west were, however, peculiar. The harm had been done some years earlier by the extortions of an Irish adventurer and of a son of Cardinal Wolsey—respectively holding the offices of Royal Commissioner and of Archdeacon of Cornwall—through whose work Reformation had become confused with rapacity in the minds of the people. The embers of discontent had been fanned by disaffected priests and also, perhaps, by agents of the French Ambassador¹⁶. Naturally prejudiced against change, the Cornish peasantry gained nothing from the new liturgy: for if they did not understand Latin, many of them did not understand English either, and the Latin offices had the advantage of familiarity. It is to Cranmer's credit that the Peasants' Revolt did not stampede him, as it stampeded Luther, into a subservient reliance upon authority. After the rising had been suppressed, he published a vindication of his Prayer Book in the form of an Answer to the Articles of the Rebels, but clearly addressed to a wider audience. This pamphlet is both learned and popular, written in ‘the accustomed speech of the homely people,’ but giving proof of Cranmer's remarkable knowledge of ecclesiastical history. The most valuable part of it is that in which he defends the innovations which made for more congregational worship. ‘Item,’ wrote the rebels, ‘we will have the sacrament of the Altar but at Estur delivered to the lai people, and then but in one kind.’ Cranmer replied:

Be you assured that there never was such law nor such request made among Christian people to this day. … In the apostles' time the people at Jerusalem received it every day, as it appears by the manifest word of the scripture. And after they received it in some places every day; … commonly everywhere at least once in the week. … But when the Spirit of God began to be more cold in men's hearts, and they waxed more worldly than godly, then … the more the people withdrew themselves from the holy communion. …

What enemies ye be to yourselves also, to refuse to drink of Christ's cup, which he commanded all men to drink, saying: ‘Take and divide this among you’; and, ‘Drink ye all of it’!

Item, we will have the Mass in Latin as was before. … Item, we will not receive the new service because it is but like a Christmas game, but we will have our old service of matins, mass, evensong, and procession [i.e. litany] in Latin, not in English, as it was before. And so we Cornishmen (whereof certain of us understand no English) utterly refuse this new English. … Item, we will have the Bible and all the other books of Scripture in English to be called in again; for we be informed that otherwise the clergy shall not of long time confound the heretics.

The priest prayeth to God for you [in the Mass], and you answer Amen, you wot not whereto. Is there any reason herein? … Had you rather be like [mag]pies or parrots, that be taught to speak, and yet understand not a word they say, than be true christian men, that pray unto God in heart and faith? The priest is your proctor and attorney, to plead your cause, and to speak for you all; and had you rather not know than know what he saith for you? … The heart is not moved with words that be not understand. … St Paul, in the first epistle to the Corinthians, saith, … ‘I had rather have five words spoken in the church to the instruction and edifying of the people, than ten thousand in a language unknown, that edifieth not.’ …

Can you name me any Christians in the world, but they have, and ever had, God's word in their own tongue? … And will you have God farther from us than from all other countries; that he shall speak to every man in his own language that he understandeth and was born in, and to us shall speak a strange language that we understand not? And will you that all other nations shall laud God in their own speech, and we shall say to him we know not what?

To bring God to the people—to reassure the English Catholics, without re-admitting the Pope—to keep open the road to union with the moderate Continental Protestants: these were the three main objects that directed the compilation of what proved, quite incidentally, to be the most beautiful of Christian liturgies. But as regards doctrinal controversy, the Prayer Book decided nothing. It offered a truce, and not a settlement. Dryander was right when, communicating to Bullinger the rumours about the character of the new liturgy, he observed that the activity of the English Reformers was apparently directed, not ‘to form a complete body of christian doctrine and to deliver a fixed and positive opinion without ambiguity upon particular articles; but … to the right institution of public worship.’

But Cranmer had other plans. Though thwarted at the first attempt, he never abandoned hope of establishing a consensus piae doctrinae with the collaboration of the German theologians. Now he had secured a second opportunity to achieve his object. In February, 1549, the Prayer Book was finished. He had reason to believe that it would commend itself to moderate men, and supply a basis for further deliberation. To induce the Continental Reformers to approve, perhaps even to adopt it, and to secure their assistance in drawing up the Articles by which it had to be supplemented and explained, was now his hope. Since the repeal of the Six Articles in 1547, there had existed no general criterion of orthodoxy: the Ten Articles of 1536 were obsolete, the Thirteen Articles of 1539 had never had any legal force: and now the somewhat neutral colour of the new liturgy, coupled with the danger that its generosity would be abused, pointed the necessity for definition. Torn between hope and doubt, Cranmer wrote a last desperate invitation to Melanchthon, and entrusted it to à Lasco to deliver personally into his hands. No answer was returned. ‘Cranmer and the Lord Protector sought to be aided with counsel; this counsel Wittenberg refused in the most decisive hour. We cannot then wonder that the doctrine of the Church of England has received an impress which does not originate in the school of Luther’¹⁷.

In each of its three objects, then, the Prayer Book of 1549 was an immediate failure. Designed to bring God to the people, it produced an epidemic of popular rebellion. Designed to conciliate the English Catholics, it was rendered useless by Gardiner's sophistry. Designed to keep open the road to union with the moderate Continental Protestants, it revealed that that road was blocked at the other end by the indolence, or cowardice, of Melanchthon. It seemed to have failed utterly. It is only after this length of time that we are able to appreciate the measure of its success.

The fact that the main doctrinal issues were left unsettled by the Prayer Book of 1549 does not imply that they were unsettled in Cranmer's mind. Hitherto we have proceeded on the assumption that Cranmer had been a Suvermerian in his sacramental theology since 1546. This runs counter to the generally received opinion, expressed for example by Pocock, who refers to Cranmer at the end of 1549 as ‘having passed through the phase of Lutheranism, and settled down into the Zwinglianism which is represented in the second Prayer Book of 1552.’ It is therefore necessary to justify it.

Now the general opinion is based mainly on the evidence, not of Cranmer's own writings, but of the so-called Zurich Letters, addressed, for the most part, to Bullinger by the Zwinglians in England. Unfortunately this evidence is not trustworthy. The information of three of the writers—ab Ulmis, Burcher, and Micronius—is second-hand, and, like that of Hooper and Traheron, is coloured by the Zwinglian bias of the writers and, above all, by their desire to persuade Bullinger that Zwinglianism in England was carrying all before it. A man who could write, like Traheron (in August 1548), that he knew none of the nobility on the Reformation side who did not hold the Zwinglian doctrine; or, like Hooper (in December 1549), that ‘all the English who are free from popish tyranny and Roman guile hold correct [i.e. Zwinglian] opinions about the Supper’; cannot be regarded as an honest and impartial witness. Moreover, read in their chronological sequence, the references to Cranmer are not perfectly consistent with each other: and in many cases they are still less consistent with such facts and documents as we have to check them by. Certainly, the evidence of the Zurich Letters cannot be ignored: but it must not be read without suspicion.

These letters contain thirty-five leading references to Cranmer, which may be analysed as follows:

1548. Upon the publication (in July) of Cranmer's translation of Justus Jonas' Lutheran Catechism, the Zwinglians in England promptly assumed that he was a Lutheran. Then they believed him to be converted to Zwinglianism by à Lasco on his arrival in England in September: and Traheron affirmed that he maintained the Zwinglian doctrine of the Eucharist in the debate of December 14-18.

1549. The Zwinglians were apprehensive of Bucer's influence over Cranmer. The Archbishop began to be more friendly to Hooper—according to Hooper. But the coolness with which he still received Bullinger's advances could not be concealed.

1550. Hooper still maintained that Cranmer was friendly towards him, though somewhat more dubiously during the Vestiarian Controversy. He expressed some doubts as to the extent of Cranmer's conversion from Lutheranism.

From the summer of this year, references to Cranmer become progressively fewer, while references to the nobility, especially to Warwick and Dorset, become increasingly frequent, although the Zwinglians would never directly admit that they had been wrong in their appreciation of Cranmer's doctrine. This tendency is very significant.

1551. À Lasco was perturbed by Cranmer's resolution to invite the Lutheran Brentius to succeed Bucer at Cambridge. Hooper assured Bullinger three times in one letter that Cranmer ‘loved him dearly.’

1552. Cranmer wrote to Bullinger, as well as to Calvin and to Melanchthon (but rather more distantly), inviting him to a Conference. Not one of the Zwinglians mentioned Cranmer in his letters this year.

1553. No references to Cranmer until after the death of Edward VI, when Martyr expressed a certain anxiety on his behalf.

Now these letters point to three important conclusions: (1) Cranmer was at some time a Lutheran, (2) he was converted from Lutheranism by à Lasco, and (3) remained a Zwinglian till his death. To what extent are these conclusions true?

1. WAS CRANMER EVER A LUTHERAN?

Fox, Burnet, and Strype all held the view that Cranmer's first change in sacramental doctrine was from the tenets of Rome to those of Luther. Then, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Wordsworth and Todd challenged this theory: but were refuted by Jenkyns, who brought forward evidence that they had overlooked.

But it is a material point that the first occasion upon which this theory was advanced was that of the publication of Cranmer's translation of Justus Jonas' Catechism, in July 1548.

‘This Tωμα̑ς,’ wrote John ab Ulmis to Bullinger (London, Aug. 18), ‘is fallen into so heavy a slumber, that we entertained but a cold hope that he would be aroused even by your most learned letter: for a few days ago he published a catechism, in which he has not only approved that filthy and sacrilegious metamorphosis of the papists in the sacred supper of our Saviour; but also all the dreams of Luther seem to him to be sufficiently sound, perspicuous, and lucid. O how lamentable a thing it is, and worthy to be deplored in the discourse, letters and monuments of all peoples, that the sheep of Christ are to-day surrounded by certain persons with new error, nor do any of those who are most influential by learning and by authority, boldly oppose these ploughmen, das ist holzböcken, and drive them into exile!’

‘Canterbury, no doubt moved by the advice of Peter Martyr and other Lutherans,’ wrote Burcher to Bullinger (Strassburg, Oct. 29), ‘has ordered a catechism of some Lutheran opinion to be translated and published in our language. This little book has occasioned no little discord; so that the common people have often fought on account of the diversity of their opinions, even during sermons.’

Evidently neither of these correspondents had read the book in question. Ab Ulmis did not understand English, and Burcher lived in Strassburg: both merely passed on to Bullinger the common gossip. Now, although it is perfectly true that the original was Lutheran, the translation certainly was not: in fact, it actually led Gasquet and Bishop to conclude that Cranmer had abandoned the Real Presence, and now held the Real Absence¹⁸. For the original read:

God is almighty. Therefore He can do all things as He will. … When He calls and names a thing which was not before, then at once the very thing comes into being as He names it. Therefore when He takes bread and says: ‘this is my body,’ then immediately there is the body of our Lord. And when He takes the chalice and says: ‘this is my blood,’ then immediately His blood is present.

But Cranmer left out of his translation the words given in italics, and rendered the rest as follows:

… wherefore when Christ takes bread and saith: ‘Take, eat, this is my body,’ we ought not to doubt but we eat His very body; and when He takes the cup and saith: ‘Take, drink, this is my blood,’ we ought to think assuredly that we drink His very blood.

This striking alteration suggests not Lutheran, but rather Suvermerian doctrine. And this impression is confirmed by Cranmer's explanation of the passage in his Defence (1550) and in his Answer (1551):

And in that Catechism I teach not, as you do, that the body and blood of Christ is contained in the sacrament, being reserved, but that in the ministration thereof we receive the body and blood of Christ; whereunto if it may please you to add or understand this word ‘spiritually,’ then is the doctrine of my Catechism sound and good in all men's ears, which know the true doctrine of the sacraments.

Again, in his Answer to Smyth's Preface, he wrote, ‘I confess of myself, that not long before I wrote the said catechism, I was in that error of the real [i.e. corporeal] presence’: which proves that he was not in that error when he wrote it.

It may be objected that all these explanations were made some time after the publication of this Catechism, and that Cranmer was consciously or unconsciously reading into what he wrote in 1548 the views he held in 1550. Compare, then, the Exhortation in the Order of the Communion of the same year (1548):

… wherfore our dutie is, to come to these holy misteries with most harty thākes to be geuen to almightye God, for his infinite mercy and benefites, geuen & bestowed upon us, his unworthye seruauntes, for whome he hath not only geuen his body to death and shed his bloud, but also doth vouchesaufe in a Sacrament and misterye, to geue us his sayd body and bloud spiritually, to fede and drynke upon.

In view of this passage, was it entirely unreasonable in Cranmer to assume that the word ‘spiritually’ would be understood? Yet it was not only the Zwinglians who judged Cranmer to be a Lutheran upon the evidence of this Catechism, for the Romanist Dr Martin accused him in 1555 of having taught consubstantiation in it, on the same evidence as that on which Cardinal Gasquet calls him a sacramentarian. Here is another instance of the degree of misconstruction to which Suvermerian theology was liable. Even as late as June 1550, when Cranmer had already been triumphantly hailed as a Zwinglian by Traheron, ab Ulmis, and Hooper himself, we find Hooper wondering how much of his ‘Lutheranism’ he had really put away, and Gardiner putting upon the second book of the Defence a Lutheran construction, which Cranmer scornfully denied.

It is necessary, then, to conclude with Jenkyns that ‘so far as it [the charge of Lutheranism] rested on the translation of Justus Jonas' Catechism it must be admitted without foundation.’ But this does not exclude the possibility that Cranmer was a Lutheran before this date. He admitted himself, in his Answer to Smyth's Preface, that it was ‘by little and little’ that he put away his ‘former ignorance’: may not one of these preliminary stages have been Lutheranism? Those historians who wish to prove that it was, bring forward two important pieces of evidence in support of their contention. The first is the following passage from the Answer to Smyth's Preface (1551), appended to the Answer to a Crafty and Sophistical Cavillation devised by Stephen Gardiner:

I confess of myself, that not long before I wrote the said catechism, I was in that error of the real presence, as I was many years past in divers other errors: as of transubstantiation, of the sacrifice propitiatory of the priests in the mass, of pilgrimages, purgatory, pardons, and many other superstitions and errors that came from Rome; being brought up from youth in them, and nousled therein for lack of good instruction from my youth, the outrageous floods of papistical errors at that time overflowing the world. …

But after it had pleased God to shew unto me, by his holy word, a more perfect knowledge of his Son Jesus Christ, from time to time as I grew in knowledge of him, by little and little I put away my former ignorance. And as God of his mercy gave me light, so through his grace I opened mine eyes to receive it. …

Here it is necessary to insert a caveat, which will be explained later: wherever Cranmer alludes to the real (or corporeal) presence, either in the Defence or in the Answer, he invariably speaks of it as a Roman doctrine, implied by transubstantiation, though distinct from it: for, although it is impossible to believe in transubstantiation without believing in the presence of Christ's body in the consecrated elements, it is possible to believe in this real presence without believing in transubstantiation, or even in consubstantiation, for that matter. Therefore to read in place of the words ‘real presence’ the word ‘consubstantiation’ is a serious error. The passage should, in fact, be read as follows:

I confess … that not long before I wrote the said catechism [i.e. 1548], I was in that error of the real presence, as I was many years past in divers other errors … that [also] came from Rome. … But … by little and little I put away my former ignorance.

The truth is that Cranmer retained the Roman doctrine of the real presence for some time after he had discarded the Roman doctrine of transubstantiation: but this does not necessarily imply that he held the Lutheran doctrine of consubstantiation with it.

This point is brought out more clearly by the second piece of evidence: the Case of George Bucker, of Calais, alias Adam Damplip.

The whole story is somewhat confused, and Fox, in telling it, makes two mistakes, dating the case 1539, instead of 1538, and confusing the proceedings against Damplip with the trial of Lambert. The gist of the story is this: Damplip, lately chaplain to Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, had gone to Rome on pilgrimage and returned utterly disillusioned. On his way home he preached in Calais, and met with such success that he remained for three weeks, preaching daily and inveighing against transubstantiation and the doctrine of a propitiatory sacrifice in the Mass. He appears to have been ‘well lyked by the [Lord] Deputye & the Counsayle of Calice’: but he became involved in a dangerous controversy with the Prior of the Black Friars, and, since his position was irregular, prudently hastened to Lambeth, armed with a letter of commendation from John Butler, the Archbishop's commissary at Calais, and applied to Cranmer for a curacy at ‘our lady's church at Cales.’ He arrived at Lambeth on July 24, and was examined by Cranmer, who found him ‘of right good knowledge and judgment,’ and sent him on to Crumwell with a letter of introduction, requesting Crumwell to give him the curacy and to furnish him with letters commendatory to the Council of Calais. Damplip also seems to have informed against his enemy, the Prior, who was sent for by Cranmer, and on his arrival was kept in safe custody, according to Crumwell's instructions, and subsequently (it seems) deprived. But meanwhile two friars arrived from Calais, and laid information against Damplip as having denied the real presence. Damplip seems to have lost his nerve and fled, ‘suspecting the rigour of the law [rather] than the defence of his own cause.’ He was not pursued, and seems to have returned afterwards to Calais: where (according to Fox) after the passing of the Six Articles he was arrested and martyred on a trumped-up charge of treason.

All this is not very material. What is material is the following sentence in Cranmer's second letter to Crumwell on behalf of Damplip (Aug. 15, 1538):

As concerning Adam Damplip of Calice, he utterly denieth that ever he taught or said that the very body and blood of Christ was not presently in the sacrament of the altar, and confesseth the same to be there really; but he saith, that the controversy between him and the prior was, by cause he confuted the opinion of the transubstantiation, and therein I think he taught but the truth.

This statement corroborates the Answer to Smyth's Preface: together they present conclusive proof that Cranmer continued to believe in the real presence after he had ceased to believe in transubstantiation. But they give no indication that Cranmer had come to believe in consubstantiation. It is manifest from all his writings that he regarded the real presence as a Roman, and not a Lutheran doctrine: ‘for although these men [the Lutherans] … agree with the papists in part of this matter, yet they agree not in the whole.’ In the Answer he speaks] of Innocent III as ‘the chief author of your doctrine both of transubstantiation and of the real presence’: and again of ‘the whole papistical doctrine in the matter of the sacrament, as well touching transubstantiation, as also the carnal presence.’ Then in the Defence, in a passage which enumerates the ‘four principal errors of the papists,’ the first error is ‘transubstantiation, that is to say, the turning of one substance into another substance’; the second, regarded as similar but distinct, is the doctrine ‘that the very natural flesh and blood of Christ, which suffered for us upon the cross, and sitteth at the right hand of the Father in heaven, is also really, substantially, corporally, in or under the accidents of the sacramental bread and wine, which they call the forms of bread and wine.’ This, and not consubstantiation, is what Cranmer means when he alludes to the real presence: nor, for that matter, can consubstantiation very easily be fathered upon Pope Innocent III. Moreover he afterwards maintained that the real presence is easier to defend than transubstantiation: for when Gardiner in his reply to Cranmer's Defence changed the order of it, confuting Book III (Of the Presence of Christ) before Book II (Against Transubstantiation), Cranmer accused him of having done so for this very reason:

For he saw the matter of transubstantiation so flat and plain against him, that it was hard for him to devise an answer in that matter, that should have any appearance of truth, but all the world should evidently see him overthrown at the first onset. Wherefore he thought, that although the matter of the real presence hath no truth in it at all, yet forasmuch as it seemed to him to have some more appearance of truth than the matter of transubstantiation hath, he thought best to begin with the first, trusting so to juggle in the matter, and to dazzle the eyes of the simple and ignorant, and specially of such as were already persuaded in the matter, that they should not well see nor perceive his legerdemain.

Evidently what Cranmer held was the Scholastic doctrine of Impanation, which teaches that the very body and blood of Christ are in or under the accidents of bread and wine, but without either mutation or conjunction of substances, that is, without either transubstantiation or consubstantiation. To adapt Luther's definition, Christ's body is not cum pane, seu in pane, but in pane alone¹⁹.

This statement of Cranmer's doctrine at this period may seem a doubtful supposition: and it may be objected that his belief in the real presence would fit consubstantiation as well. But, happily, we hold final and conclusive proof that Cranmer was not a Lutheran in 1538. Indeed, the date of this letter about Adam Damplip could not have fallen less opportunely for those who wish to claim Cranmer as a Lutheran than on August 15, 1538. For on June 21 of the same year he refused the urgent request of Franz Burckhardt, Chancellor of Saxony and head of the Lutheran embassy then in England, that a recanted Lutheran named Atkinson might be permitted to do his penance more privately in his own parish church instead of in the publicity of St Paul's:

whereunto we made him this answer, that forasmuch as the error of the sacrament of the altar was so greatly spread abroad in this realm, and daily increasing more and more, we thought it needful, for the suppressing thereof, most specially to have him do his penance at Paul's, when the most people might be present, and thereby, in seeing him punished, to be ware of like offence.

And besides this, in the Examination before Brokes in 1555, when Martin asked, ‘What doctrine taught you when you condemned Lambert the sacramentary in the king's presence in Whitehall?’ Cranmer replied, ‘I maintained then the papists' doctrine.’ Now the date of Lambert's trial and condemnation was November 16, 1538. If Cranmer was relentless in his opposition to the doctrine of consubstantiation on June 21, and ‘maintained the papists' doctrine’ on November 16, it becomes extremely difficult to maintain that he was a Lutheran on the 15th of August.

Cranmer was never a Lutheran. Whenever he was taxed with it, he always, by implication at least, denied the charge. He was sympathetic to the temper of Lutheranism: but he never subscribed to its doctrines. Nor did Latimer, whose mind was profoundly under Cranmer's influence²⁰. ‘You, master Cranmer,’ said Martin, at the same Examination, ‘taught in this high sacrament of the altar three contrary doctrines, and yet you pretended in every one verbum Domini’: meaning Catholicism, Lutheranism, and Zwinglianism. ‘Nay,’ said Cranmer, ‘I taught but two contrary doctrines in the same.’ We have established that his second doctrine was not Lutheranism: but what it was, and who converted him to it, it is now our business to discover.

2. WAS CRANMER CONVERTED BY à LASCO?

The only direct evidence in support of this theory is ab Ulmis' letter to Bullinger of November 27, 1548:

England is flourishing in all the glory of the gospel. … Right and excellent decisions concerning the sacred supper of Jesus Christ have been declared by the primates [i.e. the bishops?]: that base and crass opinion of a feigned sαρκοϕαγια [flesh-eating] has long since been banished, and sent to Jericho [εἰς κόρακας delegata]. Even that Tωμα̑ς (about whom I wrote to you when I was at London), by the goodness of God and the instrumentality of Dr John à Lasco, a man of most upright character and sound judgment, has been much delivered from his dangerous disease of lethargy.

This, however, is supported by the general testimony of the Zwinglians (especially Traheron) that Cranmer came over to their opinion during the period of à Lasco's first visit to England (Sept. 21, 1548-Feb. 1549): a conversion that was evident to them from Cranmer's speeches in the great debate on eucharistic doctrine in the House of Lords, December 14-18.

Upon this evidence Dr Hermann Dalton, à Lasco's biographer, ascribed the credit of Cranmer's conversion to à Lasco: he admitted that the English historians prefer the claims of Ridley, but attributed this to modern nationalist prejudice (p. 330). But a few pages farther on—farther, unfortunately, than the English translation runs—he more or less retracted this in a footnote, admitting that it was probably Ridley who first shook Cranmer's faith in Roman doctrine, shortly before the arrival of à Lasco (Note, p. 364).

Cranmer himself stated quite unequivocally in his Examination before Brokes that it was Ridley who had converted him:

I grant that then [1538] I believed otherwise than I do now; and so I did, until my lord of London, doctor Ridley, did confer with me, and by sundry persuasions and authorities of doctors drew me quite from my opinion.

This statement leaves only the date in doubt: and that is supplied by Cheke (who had been so intimate with Cranmer that his statement can be taken as entirely trustworthy), in his preface to the Emden (Latin) edition of Cranmer's Defence, published in 1557:

… this man [Cranmer], after much searching of the scriptures, by the instruction of one blessed martyr, Ridley, bishop of London, at long last (in the year '46, to be precise) was led into that opinion, which he here defends.

Inevitably this raises the question, to what did Ridley convert him? what doctrine did Ridley himself maintain?

By his own admission, Ridley had been converted (apparently in 1545, when he was vicar of Herne) by reading the ninth-century treatise De Corpore et Sanguine Domini, written at the request of Charles the Bald by the Benedictine Ratramnus (commonly called ‘Bertram’ in Ridley's day), and recently printed at Cologne (1532) and at Geneva (1541).

This Bertram was the first that pulled me by the ear, and that first brought me from the common error of the Romish church, and caused me to search more diligently and exactly both the Scriptures and the writings of the old ecclesiastical fathers in this matter²¹.

References to Ratramnus' book, and quotations from it, are frequent in Ridley's writings and disputations: and the English translation of it, published in 1548, was probably due to his interest. Now to Ratramnus' doctrine that of Bucer approximates very closely. Ratramnus' doctrine is based on the distinction between Verity (actuality, rei manifestae demonstratio) and Mystery (mysterium). In every sacrament exist both its verity and its mystery. In the sacrament of the Lord's Supper, the verity is bread and wine: the mystery is the Body and Blood of Christ. The one is outwardly taken, refreshing the body: further, it signifies, or is a figure of (1) Christ's body crucified for our redemption, and (2) Christ's mystical body, the Church, by way of pledge and image. The other, feeding invisibly the soul, is taken by faith, not by the senses: it is the very substance of life eternal. The consecrated element is one thing in nature (species, verity), another in significance: in nature bread, in sacrament the body of the Lord. In its outward verity it is the perishable food of the perishable body: in its inward mystery—its inward reality—it is the immortal food of the immortal soul. The body of the recipient receives and feeds on the symbolic bread and wine: his soul by faith receives and feeds on the very body and blood of Christ. There is little difference between this and the Suvermerian doctrine. And this, be it remembered, was the doctrine that Ridley maintained consistently to the end: it is to be found in his answers to the Queries put concerning some abuses of the mass addressed to the bishops at the end of 1547, in his speeches in the great debate in the House of Lords, December 14-18, 1548, or in his defence at the Oxford Disputation of April 1554—there perhaps best of all, for his repudiation of Zwinglianism was as clear and as candid as his repudiation of Roman or of Lutheran doctrine.

WESTON.
Ye say, Christ gave not his body, but a figure of his body.
RIDLEY.
I say not so: I say, he gave his own body verily; but he gave it by a real, effectual, and spiritual communication. … I understand … the very flesh of Christ to be eaten, but spiritually: and further I say, that the sacrament also pertaineth unto the spiritual manducation: for without the spirit to eat the sacrament is to eat it unprofitably; for whoso eateth not spiritually, he eateth his own condemnation.

Cranmer had arrived at this position, abandoning the corporeal for the spiritual presence, long before the visit of à Lasco. This is indicated by the Exhortation in the Order of the Communion of 1548, previously quoted²², or by his alteration of Justus Jonas' Catechism: it is clearly apparent from his answers to the Queries concerning abuses of the mass. Moreover—though this may be a small point—it was on September 28, 1548, that Traheron wrote to Bullinger, ‘But that you may add more to the praises of God, know that Latimer has, respecting the truth of the eucharist, come over to our opinion together with Canterbury and the rest of the bishops, who previously seemed Lutherans.’ Now, it is true that à Lasco was at Lambeth on September 21: but Cranmer was not, for à Lasco, writing on that date, mentioned that the Archbishop was not expected for a week. Even allowing that Cranmer arrived a day or two earlier, Traheron's letter would imply that that conversion was phenomenally rapid, if à Lasco were indeed its author.

We have, then, sufficient evidence to deny that it was à Lasco who converted Cranmer from his belief in the real presence (in the strict sense of the term). But did à Lasco either permanently or temporarily modify Cranmer's conception of the spiritual presence? This leads on to the third question—

3. DID CRANMER BECOME A ZWINGLIAN?

The answer to this question, as to the other two, is in the negative. Those who would seek to prove an affirmative from the Zurich Letters may well be oppressed by the ominous silence in which Cranmer's policy is shrouded after the summer of 1550. From December 1548 to June 1550—that is, before the Vestiarian Controversy—the letters of the Zwinglians to Bullinger contain many such references as this: ‘The bishop of Canterbury understands correctly the business about Christ's supper.’ But why do the references to Cranmer become less frequent and less friendly (for Hooper's letter of August 1, 1551, protesting repeatedly to Bullinger that ‘my lord of Canterbury loves you indeed dearly. … You have no one, I know, of all your dearest friends, who loves [you] in Christ with greater solicitude or more lovingly than he. I know and am certain that he loves you from his heart,’ is an isolated instance, and transparently incredible) after the Vestiarian Controversy: and why do they cease altogether after August 1551, during the very period when the characteristically Zwinglian Prayer Book of 1552 was being compiled—that Prayer Book which is commonly held to embody Cranmer's altered doctrinal views? Why was Cranmer's attitude to Bullinger so consistently unfriendly (for example, he never answered Bullinger's letters, and only wrote to him once, and then somewhat stiffly, when he had need of him for a conference) that even the Zwinglians, excepting only Hooper, made no attempt to conceal it? And why were Cranmer and Ridley constantly found allied against à Lasco and the Zwinglian leaders in such disputed matters as the independence of the Strangers' Church in London, the use of vestments, or the custom of kneeling at Communion?

It may be worth while to test the veracity of one or two of the statements made by Bullinger's correspondents during the phase of their enthusiasm for the Archbishop, as a sample of the rest. Allusion has previously been made to the motive underlying most of their correspondence: the desire to give Bullinger the most favourable impression possible of the progress of Zwinglianism in England. Thus, for example, on August 28, 1550, Micronius writes to Bullinger, ‘The bishop of Canterbury … has just published an enormous volume about the Lord's supper, in which he stoutly attacks every [opinion of the] presence of the body of Christ.’ It may be stated with assurance that, but for the date, it would be impossible to recognise this for a description of Cranmer's Defence of the true and Catholic Doctrine of the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of our Saviour Christ. Or again, take these two statements from Hooper's letters to Bullinger:

The bishop of Canterbury … has some articles of religion, to which all preachers and lecturers in divinity are compelled to subscribe, (or else a license for teaching is not allowed them,) in which he holds the pure and religious and Swiss opinion concerning the eucharist.

(Dec. 27, 1549.)

Canterbury, who is head of the king's councils (sic), is making a supply of suitable lectures and sermons for lecturers and preachers: first, however, they all subscribe to certain articles, which I will send you some time (if I can), among which one is about the eucharist, and it is manifestly true and Swiss.

(Feb. 5, 1550)

Historians have found some difficulty in identifying these ‘articles.’ But surely they can be none other than the Articles to be followed and observed according to the king's majesty's injunctions and proceedings, which, as Cardwell notes²³, are evidently later than the Act of Uniformity of January 21, 1549, though of the same year. And the ‘one about the eucharist,’ so ‘manifestly true and Swiss,’ is merely—

§ 2. Item, For an uniformity, that no minister do counterfeit the popish mass, as to kiss the Lord's table; washing his fingers at every time in the communion; blessing his eyes with the paten, or sudary; or crossing his head with the paten; shifting of the book from one place to another; laying down and licking the chalice of the communion; holding up his fingers, hands, or thumbs, joined towards his temples; breathing upon the bread or the chalice; shewing the sacrament openly before the distribution of the communion; ringing of sacrying bells; or setting any light upon the Lord's board at any time; and finally to use no other ceremonies than are appointed in the king's book of common prayers, or kneeling, otherwise than is in the said book.

It does not appear that Hooper ever found himself able to send Bullinger a copy.

So much for the veracity of these reports that Cranmer had become a Zwinglian. Nevertheless, other and more reliable evidence makes it impossible to deny that Cranmer's opinions were modified, and even deflected, by his intimacy with à Lasco in the winter of 1548-9.

The doctrine that Cranmer maintained consistently (with this slight modification, due to à Lasco's influence) from his conversion in 1546 to his martyrdom ten years later, may be identified with that of Bucer, but also distinguished from it. Cranmer had been led to Suvermerianism by reading Ratramnus, Bucer by a very different process. Yet their doctrines were built upon the same conception. The doctrine that Cranmer maintained in the Disputation of April 1555, to the incomprehension of his opponents, can only be described as Suvermerian:

The soul is fed with the body of Christ, the body with the sacrament. … So one thing is done outwardly, another inwardly: like as in baptism the external element, whereby the body is washed, is one; so the internal element, whereby the soul is cleansed, is another. … The sacrament is one thing; the matter of the sacrament is another. Outwardly we eat the sacrament; inwardly we eat the body of Christ. …

Tertullian also saith: Nutritur corpus pane symbolico, anima corpore Christi: that is, ‘Our flesh is nourished with symbolical or sacramental bread, but our soul is nourished with the body of Christ.’ …

But in one point he varied from Bucer. Bucer held that Christ's body is present spiritually in the sacraments, and is spiritually received with the soul by all who receive him worthily. Cranmer after 1548 maintained that Christ's body is present, not in the sacraments, but in the administration of the sacraments, and is spiritually received by all who receive him worthily, that is, by those in whom Christ is already spiritually present. The difference is not very considerable, and seems to reflect the influence of à Lasco's doctrine as expressed in the Epistola ad amicum quendam²⁴.

Certainly, for a short period, à Lasco's exposition of his Sacramentarian doctrine seems to have shaken Cranmer's confidence. By its simplicity and directness it avoided all those obstacles that a less radical theology had laboriously to circumvent. The Archbishop was evidently puzzled. As a theologian or as a debater, he never appeared to worse advantage than in the famous Debate on the Sacrament in the House of Lords, December 14-18, 1548. Traheron was not far from the truth when he said that Cranmer maintained the Zwinglian doctrine: but that was not the only doctrine which he maintained. His interventions during the first three days of the debate show him to have been confused and unhappy. Holbeach of Lincoln put his finger on the root of Cranmer's difficulties when he asked, ‘Whether the body is in the Sacrament or in the receiver?’ It seems that à Lasco had provided Cranmer with arguments and quotations which did not fit in very well with his own doctrine. But it is not surprising that Traheron jumped to the conclusion that the Archbishop had become a Zwinglian when he heard that he had made use of such arguments as these:

There be two things, to eat the Sacrament and to eat the body of Christ.
The eating of the body is to dwell in Christ, and this may be though a man never taste the Sacrament. All men eat not the body in the Sacrament. Hoc est corpus meum. He that maketh a will bequeaths certain legacies, and this our legacy, remission of sins, which those only receive that are members of his body.
And the Sacrament is the remembrance of this death which made the will good. …
Our faith is not to believe him to be in bread and wine, but that he is in heaven; this is proved by Scripture and Doctors, till the Bishop of Rome's usurped power came in. …
I believe that Christ is eaten with the heart. …
Eating with his mouth giveth nothing to no man, nor the body being in the bread. …
The good man hath the word within him. …
AUGUSTINE.
Quid paras ventrem et dentes? Crede et manducasti. …
TERTULLIAN.
Appellavit panem suum Corpus. …
Hoc est Corpus meum, id est figura Corporis. Thus sayeth the old fathers. …
For Christ when he bids us eat his body it is figurativè; for we cannot eat his body indeed. …

It is significant that on the second day Cranmer intervened but once, leaving his cause to Ridley, in whose hands it was safer. But on the last day of the debate he recovered his balance. Probably it was Ridley's argument that saved him:

No man sayeth instead of Hoc put in Panis, but we say that Hoc meaneth Panis. …

How the body is present.

And in what manner.

Quia divinitas infundit se elemento.

Then Cranmer clutched at St Paul's words: ‘i corin. 10. Saint Paul saith: Panis quem frangimus est communicatio Corporis. Even so Christ when he said: This is my body he meant communionem corporis.’ And so dragged himself into safety: his last argument in the debate was this:

It was natural bread, but now no common bread, for it is separated to another use. Because of the use it may be called the bread of life.
That which you see is bread and wine. But that which you believe is the body of Christ.
AUGUSTINE.
We must believe that there is bread and the body.

The triumph of the Zwinglians—of Traheron, who wrote to Bullinger, ‘Canterbury beyond all men's expectation most openly, most resolutely, and most learnedly defended your opinion about this business. … The truth never obtained a more brilliant victory among us. I see plainly that it is all over with Lutheranism, since those who were formerly regarded as its principal and almost only supporters have become entirely ours,’ or of ab Ulmis, who added his postscript, ‘There has been a marvellous recantation of the foolish bishops at London’—was premature. Traheron, although a Member of the Lower House, does not appear to have been present at this debate: and evidently the course of the last day of it had not been reported to him.

However, Cranmer was not yet free from à Lasco's influence. The Defence, written in the following year, shows traces of his uncertainty: for in Book I (except in the last chapter) there are several characteristically Zwinglian expressions, although in the four other books there are practically none. The natural inference is that the former was written under the influence of à Lasco, who had only just left England; the latter under the influence of Bucer, who had just arrived. Henceforward Cranmer's writings exhibit a retreat from Zurich, rather than an advance towards it: until at last, in the Oxford Disputation, the mode of expression was so characteristically Suvermerian, that hardly a suspicion of Zwinglianism remained.

It would be tedious and unprofitable to multiply quotations, but a few are essential: and the following may be regarded as representative of the works from which they are taken.

But there be all these things together in the holy communion: Christ himself spiritually eaten and drunken, and nourishing the right believers; the bread and wine as a sacrament declaring the same; and the priest as a minister thereof.

(Defence, II. xii.)

And where of this word ‘there’ you would conclude repugnance of my doctrine, that where in other places I have written that Christ is spiritually in them that receive the sacrament, and not in the sacraments of bread and wine, and now it should seem that I teach contrary, that Christ is spiritually present in the very bread and wine; if you be pleased to understand my words rightly, there is no repugnance in my words at all. For by this word ‘there’ I mean not in the sacraments of bread and wine, but in the ministration of the sacrament, as the old authors for the most part, when they speak of the presence of Christ in the sacrament, they mean in the ministration of the sacrament. … I say that Christ is but spiritually in the ministration of the sacrament, … [not that he is] but after a spiritual manner in the sacrament.

(Answer, I. Cran. 74, 91.)

(This marks his divergence from Bucer. The following extracts are a vigorous repudiation of Zwinglianism.)

And where you speak of the participation of Christ's flesh and blood, if you mean of the sacramental participation only that thereby we be ascertained of the regeneration of our bodies, that they shall live, and have the fruition of God with our souls for ever, you be in a most horrible error. … For Christ's flesh and blood be in the sacrament truly present, but spiritually and sacramentally, not carnally and corporally. And as he is truly present, so is he truly eaten and drunken, and assisteth us.

(Answer, I. Cran. 89.)

The flesh liveth by the bread, but the soul is inwardly fed of Christ. … We ought not to consider the bare bread; but whosoever cometh to the sacrament, eateth the true body of Christ.

(Disputation, April 1555, I. Cran. 408, 421. And cf. p. 66.)

It seemeth to me a … sound and comfortable doctrine, that Christ hath but one body, and that hath form and fashion of a man's true body; which body spiritually entereth into the whole man, body and soul: and though the sacrament be consumed, yet whole Christ remaineth, and feedeth the receiver unto eternal life (if he continue in godliness), and never departeth until the receiver forsake him. And as for the wicked, they have not Christ with them at all, who cannot be where Belial is. And this is my faith, and (as meseemeth) a sound doctrine, according to God's word, and sufficient for a Christian to believe in that matter.

(Letter to Queen Mary, September 1555, II. Cran. 453-4.)

It is not easy to make a satisfactory collection of extracts to illustrate Cranmer's sacramental doctrine: but I have tried to make at least a fair and an honest one. The difficulty is that the manner of expression varies so very greatly. By judiciously selected passages, a partisan could make Cranmer appear inconsistent with himself, or a consistent Lutheran, Zwinglian, Suvermerian, or even (by suppressing a few contexts) an orthodox Roman Catholic. But there is no real inconsistency. Gardiner's Explication is full of contradictory statements, as Cranmer and Ridley showed. But in the Defence, the Answer, or the Disputation, though the mode of expression varies considerably, the doctrine expressed is invariably the same. It is impossible to judge any one of these fairly without reading the whole of it: but if that be done, the details, however superficially discordant, sink naturally into place in the pattern of the complete design. Cranmer himself always claimed to have been consistent. At his Examination before Brokes (Sept. 1555) it was to the Defence that he appealed for his vindication: ‘My book was made seven years ago, and no man hath brought any authors against it. I believe, that whoso eateth and drinketh that sacrament, Christ is within them, whole Christ, his nativity, passion, resurrection and ascension, but not corporally that sitteth in heaven.’ ‘I taught but two contrary doctrines,’ he declared, on the same occasion: the first was, of course, transubstantiation: the second, this Suvermerian doctrine of the spiritual eating, learned from Ratramnus through Ridley's agency, modified by à Lasco, fortified by Bucer. Nor was this claim to consistency unjustified. Except for that brief period of doubt and confusion in the winter of 1548-9, Cranmer's doctrine was always clear: and it was not Zwinglianism. The rest of this essay will be devoted to showing the strength of the Zwinglian influences that were brought to bear upon him: and there can be no more solid tribute to the strength of his character than his consistent, resolute, indomitable resistance. Nor is that the least of the debts of modern Anglicans to the first Protestant Archbishop of the English Church.

The charge of cowardice, so often levelled against Cranmer, still remains to be answered: but it is based principally upon the charge of inconsistency, and if that be demolished, it involves the other in its ruin. However, this admirable passage from Professor Pollard's biography²⁵ demands quotation:

He alone, so far as we know, tried to save the monks of Sion from the block; he alone interceded for Fisher and More, for Anne Boleyn and for the Princess Mary, for Thomas Cromwell and Bishop Tunstall. He told Henry VIII that he had offended God, and Cromwell that the Court was setting an evil example. He maintained almost unaided a stubborn fight against the Act of Six Articles, and resisted longer than anyone else the Duke of Northumberland's plot. …

The last is perhaps the most splendid instance of his courage, if by Northumberland's plot be understood not merely the plot for the succession, but rather the plot for the spoliation of the English Church. For Cranmer in his old age was suddenly called upon to face the most determined and the most ruffianly antagonist that he had yet encountered. John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, had successfully disposed of his rivals: he had disgraced the Catholic nobility, and imprisoned the Catholic bishops: and the young King, never an entirely negligible factor in the history of this reign, was confirmed in his own doctrinal opinions by finding them so firmly held by his minister. So, with the approval of the King already secured, and with the Papists silenced, Northumberland entered secretly into an unholy alliance with John Hooper: the terms of this alliance were, that the Puritans were to rule the Church, and the nobility were to despoil it. Hooper was perfectly sincere: he was determined that Zwinglianism should be forced upon the Church of England by any means and at any price. Northumberland was sincere in nothing but his insatiable ambition. And so, from very different motives, the Puritans and the New Nobility joined in this nefarious alliance, and the attack on the ecclesiastical revenues began. But one man stood between them and the realisation of their plans—Cranmer, who was determined that if it cost him his life he would never allow the Church which had been entrusted to his care to be delivered from the bondage of Rome only to be thrust into the more constricting bondage of Zurich, nor its revenues to be squandered by a pack of upstart peers. Cranmer was an erastian: he believed in the Divine Right of Kings: but he did not believe that it embraced their ministers. Had Edward VI lived a few years longer, Northumberland might have succeeded in getting rid of Cranmer and making Hooper Primate. But the time was short, and the resistance of Cranmer endured long enough to frustrate for ever the plans of that unholy combination. It is impossible to exaggerate the gravity of the issue. Had the plot succeeded, Northumberland would have reduced the Church to abject poverty and abject dependence on the State: Hooper would have reduced its doctrine to a slavish imitation of the theology of Zurich. The strength of the popular opposition that would have been provoked is quite incalculable: but it may be said with certainty that the reign of Queen Jane would have made it as impossible for England to remain Protestant as the reign of Queen Mary made it impossible for England to remain Papist. Had the Church of England ever come to be identified with the objects of Northumberland and Hooper, it would have lost all its hold upon the people. It was the resistance of Cranmer that prevented this identification: and if by his death he saved the Church of England from the supremacy of Rome, so by his life he saved her from the supremacy of Zurich.

APPENDIX. THE DATE OF CRANMER'S LITURGICAL PROJECTS

The MS., published (with a facsimile) by the Henry Bradshaw Society under the title, Cranmer's Liturgical Projects (edited by Dr Wickham Legg), and previously printed by Gasquet and Bishop in Edward VI and the Book of Common Prayer, is in two parts. Part I, which resembles certain Lutheran Kirchenordnungen, supplied the groundwork of the offices of Matins and Evensong in the Prayer Book of 1549: Part II, which was composed under the influence of the Reformed Breviary of Cardinal Quignon, did not lead to any practical result that we know. Consequently it has generally been assumed that Part I is the later in date: Gasquet and Bishop assign it to ‘an early period in the reign of Edward VI,’ and Part II to ‘some date between 1543 and Henry's death in 1547.’

Certainly Part II was written during the Catholic Reaction (1539-47). ‘It may be described as Sarum material worked up under Quignon influence. … The body of the book shows the ancient Sarum arrangement, whilst the table of lessons drawn up by his [Cranmer's] own hand adopts the changes initiated by cardinal Quignon. … In places he enriches the modern baldness of Quignon from the ancient Catholic storehouse of Sarum.’ Now the Sarum Breviary (early thirteenth century) was the most important of the three great diocesan Uses (Sarum, York, and Hereford) that had evolved in Britain during the Middle Ages: though Lincoln, Bangor, Aberdeen, and various monastic orders and collegiate churches had their own Uses also. In 1542 the Convocation of Canterbury had passed an act prescribing, for the sake of uniformity, the Sarum Use for the entire Province. This suggests that Part II was at least subsequent to that date. Further, in 1543 Cranmer proposed to Convocation a new examination and reformation of the liturgy: a very material point. On the other hand, the office for the Feast of Corpus Christi expresses so unmistakeably if not transubstantiation at least the Roman doctrine of the real presence, that it was probably written before Cranmer's conversion in 1546. It is true that it was in 1546 that Cranmer tried to persuade Henry VIII by his royal authority to suppress all marks of veneration of the Cross in the service books—a request that Henry first granted, and then refused—and that the stanzas of veneration in the Vexilla Regis and the Invention of the Cross in the Calendar do not appear in this draft: but it is probable that Cranmer merely hoped to persuade the King to sanction, as if on his own initiative, a step that had already been taken. These considerations point to the conclusion that Part II was written between 1543 and 1546.

But there is no necessity to reject the natural supposition that Part I was written before Part II. There is no reason to assume that 1543 was the first year in which Cranmer contemplated a revision of the liturgy. There is on the other hand strong internal evidence for the assumption that Part I was written before, and not after, the Catholic Reaction. First, the stanzas of veneration in the Vexilla Regis are retained, and the Invention of the Cross (May 3) in the Calendar: which makes it almost certain that Part I was put together at least before 1546. Secondly, this Part contains two drafts for a Calendar, one of which is extremely empty, the other so full as to be entirely fantastic. ‘It may be described in one sentence as scripturalism without discretion. It commemorates Abel, Noe, the good Thief, Benjamin, Lydia and Deborah, Gideon and Sampson, Booz and the Centurion, king David and Nathan, Judith and Esther with others.’ It is incredible that this curious production should be an amplification of the reasonable Calendar of Part II, instead of that the latter should be a contraction of this. Thirdly, the Preface, which is an abridgment of the preface of Quignon's Second Recension, and which was retained in the Prayer Book of 1549, appears in Part I, but not in Part II: it may be inferred that it was understood to be carried over from Part I to Part II, to save the labour of copying: for how else should it be absent from Part II, which in all other respects follows Quignon closely?

Now for Part I, so clearly Lutheran in its ancestry, to have been composed during the Catholic Reaction would have been pointless: consequently it must have been written before 1539. The next question is, what is the earliest date at which it could have been written?

Its Preface is derived from Quignon's Second Recension. Now Cardinal Quignon's Brevium nuper reformatum, which had been commissioned by Pope Clement VII, and which represents that nascent Catholic demand for reform without Reformation which found effective voice at the Council of Trent, was first published in February 1535, and the Second Recension—a carefully revised edition—in 1536. This work was extremely popular, more than a hundred editions of the Second Recension being issued before it was finally superseded by the reform of Pius V in 1568.

Moreover the Lutheran Kirchenordnung with which, as Dr Wickham Legg has noted, this draft has the closest affinity, is Bugenhagen's Pia et vere Catholica et consentiens veteri Ecclesiae ordinatio, published in 1537. A copy was presented by Bugenhagen to Henry VIII, with an inscription on the fly-leaf, Inclyto Regi Anglię &c. Henrico octavo; doctor pomeranus: and it is not improbable that this was the copy that Cranmer used.

On this evidence, Part I may be said to have been composed between 1537 and 1539.

Happily it is possible to date it with even greater precision by means of a letter written by the Archbishop to Crumwell on April 11, 1538. Jenkyns, who did not know of Cranmer's Liturgical Projects, conjectured that the reference was to the revised Sarum Breviary published in 1541: but there is no indication that either Cranmer or Malet had any hand in that revision. On the other hand, everything seems to point to the conclusion that the reference is to Part I.

My very singular good lord; forasmuch as this bearer, your trusty chaplain, Mr Malet, at this his return towards London from Ford, where as I left him, according to your lordship's assignment, occupied in the affairs of our church service, and now at the writing up of so much as he had to do, came by me here at Croden [Croydon] to know my further pleasure and commandment in that behalf; I shall beseech you, my lord, that after his duty done in seeing your lordship, he may repair unto me again with speed, for further furtherance and final finishing of that we have begun. For I like his diligence and pains in this business, and his honest humanity declared in my house for this season of his being there so well, that I can be bold to so commend him to your lordship, that I shall with all my heart beseech the same to declare your goodness and favour to him by helping his poor and small living. I know he hath very little growing towards the supporting of his necessaries; which is much pity, his good qualities, right judgment in learning, and discreet wisdom considered. Thus fare your good lordship heartily well. From Croden, the 11th of April. [1538.]

Your own assured ever, T. Cantuarien.

Upon the hitherto neglected evidence of this letter it is possible, then, to assign Part I with confidence to the earlier months of 1538, for we know that Cranmer was at Ford from at least January 14 to March 14 of that year. On this hypothesis, the unknown Hand A (ff. 4-6 b) and probably Hand B also (ff. 7-47), which is very like it—the additions to both are in the handwriting of Cranmer himself—can be attributed to Malet. (A slight difficulty is created by the suggestion of Gasquet and Bishop that Hand D (ff. 157-195 b) can be identified with A: but Mr A. J. Herbert and the authors of the British Museum Catalogue of the Royal MSS. agree that this identification ‘seems very doubtful.’)

Our conclusion is, then, that Part I of Cranmer's Liturgical Projects was composed in the earlier months of 1538; Part II between 1543 and 1546.

Notes

1. Gustav Anrich's Martin Bucer (Strassburg, 1914), p. 112.

2. Bishop Cranmers Recantacyons, ed. Lord Houghton and James Gairdner (Philobiblon Society, 1884), p. 3.

3. Francis Aiden Gasquet and Edmund Bishop, Edward VI and the Book of Common Prayer (London, 1890), p. 277.

4. Nicholas Pocock's preface to Troubles connected with the Prayer Book of 1549 (Camden Soc., 1884), p. v.

5. Macaulay's History of England (3rd edtn, 1849), p. 52.

6. R. W. Dixon, History of the Church of England from the Abolition of the Roman Jurisdiction 2nd edtn, revised. 6 vols. 1893, I. 155-6.

7. Religion since the Reformation, by Leighton Pullan (Bampton Lectures, 1922), p. 36 (1924).

8. Even the leaders of the Pilgrimage of Grace (1536) had no wish to restore the Papal Supremacy, and actually suggested that such functions as it entailed should be delegated to the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, ‘so that the said Bishop of Rome have no further meddling.’ (A. F. Pollard's. Thomas Cranmer and the English Reformation (1489-1556). Heroes of the Reformation Series. 1904, p. 107.)

9. Cf. Tyndale's Practice of Prelates (Expositions and Notes on Sundry Portions of the Holy Scriptures. Together with the Practice of Prelates [P. S.: Parker Society edition, 1849], pp. 294, 296), or the disgusting passages in Thomas Becon's Pleasante newe Nosegay, ful of many godly & swete floures (Early Writings [P. S., 1843], pp. 216-17), or, in another connection, Strype's The Life and Acts of Matthew Parker (London, 1711), I. 85-6. Oddly enough, Edward VI in his Petit Traité a lencontre de la primauté du pape (1549) makes use of every argument except the erastian one: he is eager enough to show that the Pope and Mahomet are the two eyes of the little horn of the Beast in Daniel vii, and that the Pope is ‘the man of sin’ of II Thess. ii, but the idea of an imperium in imperio does not seem to have crossed his mind. (King Edward the Sixth on the Supremacy, ed. R. Potts, 1874.) But this was exceptional.

10. William Roper's Life of More.

11. Pocock, Troubles, p. v.

12. See the Appendix at the end of this chapter.

13. His own copy is still preserved in the library of Chichester Cathedral.

14. Of what sort these ‘vncertein stories’ were Cranmer set forth in very plain English in his Answer to the Fifteen Articles of the Rebels (1549).

    But forasmuch as you understood not the old Latin service, I shall rehearse some things in English that were wont to be read in Latin, that when you read them, you may judge them whether they seem to be true tales, or fables. … ‘The devil entered into a certain person, in whose mouth St Martin put his finger; and because the devil could not get out at his mouth, the man blew him … out behind. This is one of the tales that were wont to be read in the Latin service. … Yet more foolish, erroneous and superstitious things be read in the feasts of St Blaise, St Valentine, St Margaret, St Peter, of the Visitation of Our Lady, and the Conception, of the Transfiguration of Christ, and in the feast of Corpus Christi, and a great number mo. …’

15. Gardiner opposed it, submitting a list of ‘venerable words’ which, he alleged, lost all their virtue by translation: such words as Ecclesia, Penitentia, Baptizare, Martyr, Adorare, Sacramentum, Mysterium, Spiritus, Peccatum, Concupiscentia, Christus.

16. So Prof. Pollard conjectures (Thomas Cranmer, p. 248, n. 1), from the publication of a pamphlet entitled La Responce du Peuple Anglois à leur Roy Edouarde at Paris in 1550. But Pocock regarded this pamphlet as a translation from an English original, now lost: and Miss Rose Troup, the latest historian of this Rebellion, brings forward some weighty objections to Prof. Pollard's theory (The Western Rebellion of 1549, 1913).

17. Hermann Dalton John à Lasco: his earlier life and labours, tr. H. J. Evans (London, 1886), p. 364.

18. Gasquet and Bishop, pp. 130-1.

19. There is some indication, though by no means certain, that Cranmer also held that evil men do not receive the body and blood of Christ, but only the bread and wine. Even Gardiner admitted this theory in two passages of his Explication, though he denied it in two others (Nicholas Ridley, Works [P. S., 1841], p. 313). Such a belief was repugnant to Lutheranism.

20. At Latimer's trial in 1555, when Weston put to him the question, ‘You were once a Lutheran,’ he replied, ‘No. I was once a papist: for I never could perceive how Luther could defend his opinion without transubstantiation.’

21. Disputation at Oxford, April 17, 1555. (Ridley [P. S.], p. 206.) After his degradation, before his judges could leave the Divinity School, he urged Bishop Brokes to read Bertram's book ‘with an indifferent judgment.’ For an abridged rendering of this treatise, see Moule, App. II, pp. 223-48.

22. p. 53, supra.

23. Edward Cardwell, Documentary Annals of the Reformed Church of England (Oxford, 1839), p. 75n.

24. See p. 184.

25. Thomas Cranmer, p. 328.

Bibliography

Gustav Anrich. Martin Bucer. 1914.

Camden Society. Troubles connected with the Prayer Book of 1549. (Ed. N. Pocock.) 1884.

E. Cardwell. Documentary Annals of the Reformed Church of England, vol. I. 2 vols. 1844.

Hermann Dalton. Johannes à Lasco. Beitrag zur Reformationsgeschichte Polens, Deutschlands, und Englands. 1881. (Translation of the first half of this book by H. J. Evans: John à Lasco: his earlier life and labours. 1886.)

R. W. Dixon. History of the Church of England from the Abolition of the Roman Jurisdiction. 2nd edtn, revised. 6 vols. 1893.

Gasquet and Bishop. Edward VI and the Book of Common Prayer. 1890.

H. C. G. Moule (ed.). Bishop Ridley on the Lord's Supper. 1895.

Parker Society. Nicholas Ridley: Works. (Ed. H. Christmas.) 1841.

A. F. Pollard. Thomas Cranmer and the English Reformation (1489-1556). Heroes of the Reformation Series. 1904.