Justified True Belief

(●) The archbishop who gave English-speaking Christians the words they still pray in, and who had to decide at the end whether he believed them. + Stand at almost any English-speaking wedding and listen. "To have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish." Stand at a graveside and listen again: "earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust." Those are not phrases that drifted in from nowhere. A man wrote them, at a desk, in the middle of the sixteenth century, and his name was Thomas Cranmer. He was Archbishop of Canterbury for twenty-three years, which is a long time to hold the most dangerous job in England. He served a king who changed his mind about religion roughly as often as he changed wives, he buried that king, he ran the church for a boy of nine, and then he was arrested by that boy’s half-sister and burned alive in a street in Oxford. Along the way he did the thing he is remembered for: he took the worship of the English church out of Latin and put it into English, in prose so good that people who have never heard of him have been quoting him ever since. Here is the fact about him that a reader will not forget. Under pressure in prison he signed his name to statements denying everything he had taught, six or seven times over, and then on the morning he was to die he stood up in a packed university church and took it all back, and when the fire was lit he held his right hand in the flame so that the hand that had signed would burn first. The story is not a legend polished by admirers. It was reported by men in that church who had come to hear him confirm his surrender.

(●) 1489 AD: Born in a Nottinghamshire village to a family with land and no particular fame. + Thomas Cranmer was born on 2 July 1489 at Aslockton, a small village in Nottinghamshire, the second son of a country gentleman also named Thomas. Second sons in such families inherited very little, and the usual provision for them was the church. There was nothing in his background to suggest a man who would one day rewrite how a nation prayed. He was sent to Jesus College, Cambridge, at about fourteen, two years after his father died. Cambridge in those years was a slow place to be clever in: he took his bachelor’s degree in 1511 and his master’s in 1515, and by the standards of ambitious men he was in no hurry at all. What he acquired there, and never lost, was the habit of settling a question by reading everything written on it. Years later that habit would fill notebooks with thousands of extracts from the church fathers, and it is the reason his opponents found him so hard to argue with in public.

(●) 1515 AD: Marriage cost him his college fellowship, and his wife’s death in childbirth gave it back. + The rule was simple, and every man in Cambridge knew it before he took the money. A fellowship was a salaried place in a college, a room and a small income and a future, and a fellow was required to be unmarried. Cranmer married anyway, in 1515 or 1516, a woman named Joan, and lost the fellowship at once. His Catholic accusers called her "Black Joan of the Dolphin," a jibe that turns up in the articles read against him at his trial forty years later, and it made her out to be a servant at a Cambridge inn; one account has her a niece of the landlady there, which may be nearer the truth than the sneer. He supported them by taking a teaching post at Buckingham College nearby. Within a year or so Joan died in childbirth, and Jesus College did something colleges rarely do: it elected him to his fellowship again. He was ordained priest by 1520 and took the degree of Doctor of Divinity in 1526, after which he examined other men’s theology for the university. He was, by then, a respected and entirely obscure Cambridge don of thirty-seven, and there is no sign he expected to be anything else.

(●) 1529 AD: A remark made over supper at Waltham, about how to settle the king’s marriage, put him on the road to Canterbury. + Henry VIII wanted his marriage to Catherine of Aragon declared null, which is not the same as a divorce. An annulment is a ruling that a valid marriage never existed in the first place, and Henry’s case was that Catherine had been his brother’s widow and so had never lawfully been his wife at all. Rome had been sitting on the question for years. In the summer of 1529 plague drove the court out of London, and Cranmer, escaping with two pupils, lodged at Waltham in Essex, where two of the king’s men happened to be staying. Over supper the talk turned to the marriage, and Cranmer made a suggestion: stop fighting the case through the papal courts and put the question instead to the theology faculties of the universities of Europe. If the learned men of Christendom said the marriage was unlawful, the pope’s delay would look like obstruction rather than judgment. The suggestion was carried to the king. That man, Henry is said to have answered, "hath the sow by the right ear." It was a farmyard compliment, the old way of saying that a man had hold of the thing the right way round at last. The whole scene comes down through Cranmer’s secretary Ralph Morice, whose recollections John Foxe printed a generation later, so the words are a memory rather than a record; but they are the words everyone remembers. What followed were four years of errands. Cranmer wrote a treatise for the king’s case, argued it at Rome, and in 1532 went to Germany as resident ambassador to the Emperor Charles V. There he met the Lutheran reformer Andreas Osiander, and in July 1532 he married Margarete, a niece of Osiander’s wife. For a priest in the English church that was illegal, and it stayed illegal for the rest of Henry’s reign. He kept the marriage quiet for years, which tells you something about the kind of courage he had and the kind he did not.

(●) 1533 AD: Consecrated archbishop in March, he annulled the king’s first marriage in May and crowned the second queen in June. + Archbishop William Warham died in August 1532, and Henry named Cranmer to Canterbury, the senior bishopric in England. The appointment reached him abroad and he did not want it. He was consecrated on 30 March 1533, in the service of prayer and laying on of hands that makes a man a bishop, still holding the papal documents that authorised him, and with a wife nobody was supposed to know about. He moved fast because the king needed him to. Anne Boleyn was already pregnant. On 23 May 1533, sitting at Dunstable, Cranmer pronounced the marriage to Catherine null; on 28 May he declared the marriage to Anne valid; on 1 June he crowned her queen. In September he stood godfather to her daughter Elizabeth, who would one day make his prayer book the law of England. From the outside this looked exactly as bad as Cranmer’s critics have said it looked ever since, and they are not making it up. The new archbishop’s first great act was to give his king the verdict his king had appointed him to give. In his defence, and it is a real defence, Cranmer had reached his view of the marriage by argument before he had anything to gain from it, and he never wavered from that view afterwards. He also never once told Henry no about a marriage. Three years later, in May 1536, he annulled the marriage to Anne Boleyn days before she was beheaded, and in 1540 he annulled the marriage to Anne of Cleves.

(●) 1539 AD: England had left Rome without turning Protestant, and serving a king who kept turning back nearly cost him his life twice over. + Henry had broken with Rome, but he had not become a Protestant, and the last years of his reign swung back and forth. In 1539 Parliament passed the Six Articles, which reimposed the old doctrine of the mass, the church’s service of communion as the medieval church understood it, with the bread and wine becoming the body and blood of Christ (T3), and made clerical marriage, a priest taking a wife, a felony. Cranmer argued against the bill in the House of Lords and lost. Then he sent his wife and their small daughter back to Germany for safety, and went on serving. He got his gains where he could. In 1540 he wrote the preface to the Great Bible, the first English Bible authorised to be set up in every parish church, a preface arguing that ordinary people should read Scripture for themselves. In 1544 he published the Exhortation and Litany, a long sung prayer of petitions for the church, the realm and the sick, and it was the first official service of the English church in the English language. Anyone who has heard "From all evil and mischief; from sin; from the crafts and assaults of the devil... Good Lord, deliver us" has heard the first English words a whole parish was ever ordered to pray together. Twice the conservative party at court tried to destroy him. In 1543 a group of cathedral clergy from Canterbury, the prebendaries who held salaried places at the cathedral, collected articles accusing him of heresy. What happened next is told by Ralph Morice, Cranmer’s secretary, and printed by Foxe from him, and some historians think Morice polished it in the retelling. Henry, on this account, handled the plot in the way that makes him so hard to like and so hard to dismiss. He told Cranmer the whole thing to his face, said he now knew who the greatest heretic in Kent was, appointed him to investigate the charges against himself, and gave him his own signet ring to produce if the council tried to send him to the Tower. When Henry lay dying in January 1547 it was Cranmer who was sent for, and the king, past speech, gripped his hand. Cranmer grew a beard after that day and kept it for the rest of his life. A beard was read then as mourning, and it was a declaration as well: the priests of the old church went clean-shaven, and the reformers abroad did not.

(●) 1549 AD: Under a boy king he finally put the worship of the English church into English. + Edward VI was nine years old at his accession and the government was run by a Protestant council, which meant that for the first time Cranmer could publish what he actually believed. He had been drafting for years, and it came out in a rush. - 1547, the Homilies. A set of sermons printed for every parish, so that a priest who could not preach could at least read something sound aloud. Cranmer wrote the central ones himself, including the sermon on salvation (T1). - 1548, the Order of the Communion. English devotions slotted into the Latin mass, including the Prayer of Humble Access. The same year a catechism went out under his name, a catechism being a book of short questions with the answers a child was meant to learn by heart, put into English from the Latin of the Lutheran Justus Jonas. - 1549, the Book of Common Prayer. The whole worship of the church in one English volume: morning and evening prayer, the communion service, baptism, marriage, visitation of the sick, burial. The Act of Uniformity made it the only lawful worship in England from Whitsunday, the old English name for Pentecost, which fell that year on 9 June. - 1550, the Ordinal. English services for making deacons, priests and bishops, bound into the prayer book itself two years later. - 1552, the second Book of Common Prayer. A thorough revision, plainer and more Protestant, and the ancestor of every prayer book since. - 1553, the Forty-Two Articles. A short doctrinal standard for the English church, which became the Thirty-Nine Articles under Elizabeth. Read straight through, those six years look like a clear run at the work. They were not. For one thing, the books were resisted, and not politely. When the 1549 book was enforced, the west country rose in rebellion and demanded the Latin mass back, calling the new service "but like a Christmas game"; Cranmer wrote an angry answer to their articles. For another, even a Protestant council could overrule him. In the autumn of 1552 the council moved to add to the new book a paragraph explaining that kneeling to receive communion implied no adoration of the bread and wine. A rubric is a direction in a service book, the line that tells the minister and the people what to do at that point rather than what to say, and it is called a rubric because such directions were printed in red. Cranmer wrote to the councillors on 7 October objecting. The paragraph went in later that month anyway, too late for the copies already run off, so it was pasted into those on a slip. Because the council had added it without Parliament, printers who later set the real rubrics in red left this one standing in black, and that is the name it has carried since: the Black Rubric.

(●) 1553 AD: Catholic Mary’s accession cost him everything, and fear made him sign away what he had taught. + Edward died in July 1553 at fifteen. Cranmer had put his name to the dying king’s device, the legal instrument Edward drew up settling the crown on Lady Jane Grey, in defiance of the statute that gave it to Mary, Henry’s daughter by Catherine of Aragon and a Catholic. He said afterwards that he had resisted until he was told the judges had ruled it lawful. Mary took the throne in days, and the men who had signed were traitors. He was arrested in September 1553, tried for treason in November and condemned, and then left alive. Mary wanted more than a traitor’s death for him. She wanted the architect of the English Reformation to be convicted as a heretic, which required a trial under papal authority, and that took over two years to arrange. In the meantime he was moved to Oxford and made to dispute in public against a stacked panel in April 1554. On 16 October 1555 he was taken up the tower of the Bocardo, the gate prison where he was held, and made to watch Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley burn in the ditch outside the town wall. On 14 February 1556 he was formally degraded from his orders, stripped of the vestments of a priest, the robes a priest wears at the altar, in a ceremony designed to unmake him. He had already begun to break before that. A recantation is a public taking back of what a man has taught, signed in his own hand so that it can be printed and read out to everyone who once listened to him. Between the end of January and the middle of February he signed four short submissions acknowledging the authority of the king and the queen and the pope over the English church, and after the degradation the documents went further, a fifth on 24 February and a last on 18 March, until he had denied in writing almost everything he had taught for twenty years. Whether he was worn down, or genuinely persuaded that a Christian owes obedience to the prince and the prince was now Catholic, or simply terrified of the fire, nobody can say with certainty, and he did not explain it afterwards except to call it fear. What is certain is that the recantations were exactly what the government wanted, and that they published them. What is also certain is that they burned him anyway.

(●) 21 March 1556 AD: On the last morning he took it all back, and put his right hand into the fire first. + The plan for the day was a set piece. Cranmer would be brought to the University Church of St Mary the Virgin in Oxford, in the rain, before a packed congregation, and would read a prepared speech confirming his submission. Then he would be burned, and the Reformation in England would be buried with its own author’s signature on the coffin. He read the prepared text as far as the prayer and the exhortation, and then he departed from it. John Foxe, who collected the accounts of men who were in the church, gives the words: "And now I come to the great thing, which so much troubleth my conscience, more than any thing that ever I did or said in my whole life, and that is the setting abroad of a writing contrary to the truth; which now here I renounce and refuse, as things written with my hand, contrary to the truth which I thought in my heart, and written for fear of death, and to save my life if it might be." He named his punishment himself: "And forasmuch as my hand offended, writing contrary to my heart, my hand shall first be punished therefor; for, may I come to the fire, it shall be first burned." He added that he refused the pope as Christ’s enemy and antichrist, which was the fighting language of that century on both sides, and that he stood by what he had written on the sacrament against Bishop Gardiner. The church erupted. They pulled him down from the platform and hurried him out to the stake in Broad Street, where Latimer and Ridley had died five months before. Foxe’s account of what followed is the reason the scene is remembered at all: when the wood was kindled, Cranmer stretched out his arm and put his right hand into the flame and held it there, so steadily that everyone present could see the hand burn before the fire reached his body, repeating that it was his unworthy right hand. He died using the words of the first Christian martyr, "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit" (Acts 7:59). There is a temptation to tidy this story in either direction: to forget the recantations because of the fire, or to remember the recantations and sneer at the fire. Neither is honest. A frightened old man signed what he did not believe, and then found, with an hour to live and nothing left to gain, that he believed it after all.

What He Taught

(T1) God accepts sinners for Christ’s sake alone, and faith is the empty hand that takes what is given. + Think of a man who owes far more than he can ever repay, and whose creditor tears up the note. He is now out of debt. He did not get out of debt by paying, in part or in whole, and no amount of careful budgeting afterwards is what cleared him. That is roughly the picture behind the word justification, which in the New Testament means being declared right with God, acquitted, put in the clear. The question that split sixteenth-century Europe was what does it. Cranmer’s answer, set out in the sermon on salvation he wrote for the 1547 Homilies, is that God does it, and that we contribute nothing to it. Every human being has broken God’s law, so no one’s own record can acquit him; the acquittal comes as a gift, on the ground of Christ’s death, and faith is simply the receiving of it. He is careful about what that does not mean. Faith, he says, does not shut out repentance, hope, love, or the fear of God; a justified man will have all of them. It shuts them out only from the work of justifying, the way a beggar’s gratitude is real without being what bought the bread. This is the doctrine Martin Luther had recovered thirty years earlier from Paul (Romans 3:28; Ephesians 2:8–9), and Cranmer’s contribution was not originality. It was that he got it into the plumbing. The Homilies were read aloud in every parish church in England by priests who could not preach, and the prayers he wrote were built on it, so that congregations who could not have defined justification were saying it out loud every week.

(Q) "Justification is not the office of man, but of God; for man cannot make himself righteous by his own works, neither in part, nor in the whole." + Source: Cranmer, A Sermon of the Salvation of Mankind, by Only Christ Our Saviour, from Sin and Death Everlasting, the second part (Certain Sermons or Homilies, 1547). "Office" here means job, the thing a person is responsible for doing. The first part of the same sermon had already set the other half of the balance in place: "that faith doth not shut out repentance, hope, love, dread, and the fear of God, to be joined with faith in every man that is justified; but it shutteth them out from the office of justifying" (T1).

(T2) A church should pray in words its people understand, and a whole country should pray them together. + Imagine sitting through the most important hour of your week in a language you do not speak, every week, for your whole life. You would learn when to stand and when to kneel. You would recognise the tune. You would not know what was being said about you or on your behalf, and after fifty years of it you would still not know. That was the ordinary English parishioner’s experience of the Latin mass, and Cranmer said so bluntly in the preface to the 1549 prayer book: the people "have heard with their ears only," and their hearts and minds were not fed by it. He was not inventing the complaint. Paul had made it in Corinth about unintelligible speech in church: "So with yourselves, if with your tongue you utter speech that is not intelligible, how will anyone know what is said? For you will be speaking into the air" (1 Corinthians 14:9). His second idea was stranger and more far-reaching, and it is in the book’s title. Liturgy, the fixed order of words a church uses in worship, had varied from diocese to diocese: Salisbury did it one way, York another, Hereford another. Cranmer ended that. One book, one form of words, said by the ploughman in Devon and the merchant in York and the queen in her chapel on the same morning. That is what "common prayer" means, and it is why a prayer book, of all things, could hold a scattered communion of churches together for four centuries. He also knew what he was risking: he opens the preface by admitting that nothing devised by human wit has ever stayed uncorrupted, which is a remarkable thing for a man to write at the front of the book he is asking a nation to adopt.

(Q) "The Service in the Church of England (these many years) hath been read in Latin to the people, which they understood not; so that they have heard with their ears only; and their hearts, spirit, and mind, have not been edified thereby." + Source: Cranmer, the preface to the Book of Common Prayer, 1549, the piece later headed "Concerning the Service of the Church"; spelling modernised. "Edified" is a builder’s word, and it is the one Paul uses in the same argument about worship in Corinth: to be edified is to be built up. The same preface ends the old regional variations with a sentence of flat administrative finality: "now from henceforth, all the whole realm shall have but one use" (T2).

(T3) Christ is truly fed upon in the Lord’s Supper, but by faith, and his body is in heaven. + A woman kneels at the front of her parish church, holds out her hands, and is given a piece of bread. What is she holding? That question is the one Cranmer wrote most about, changed his mind about, and was finally burned over, and four answers to it were on the table in his century, close enough together to be easy to confuse. The terms come first, then the argument. The meal itself goes by several names, all of them for the same thing: the Lord’s Supper, holy communion, the mass, and the Eucharist, which is only the Greek word for thanksgiving. - Transubstantiation is the medieval doctrine, defined in the West in 1215, that at the priest’s words of consecration the whole substance of the bread becomes the substance of Christ’s body, while the appearance of bread remains. What is on the altar is no longer bread. - Consubstantiation is the name usually given to Luther’s alternative: the bread stays bread, and Christ’s body is genuinely present in, with and under it. - Memorialism is the view often associated with Zwingli of Zurich: the supper is a remembrance of a death, and nothing is received but bread and wine. Cranmer landed in none of those three. His settled position, argued at length in the Defence of 1550 and defended against Bishop Stephen Gardiner in 1551, is that Christ’s body is in heaven and nowhere else, as the sun is in the sky and nowhere else, and yet the sun’s light and warmth reach the whole earth. So a believer at the communion table really does receive Christ, really is fed on his body and blood, and really is joined to him; but the receiving happens by faith, in the heart, not by the teeth. The bread stays bread. The giving is no less real for that, and the wicked who eat without faith receive no Christ at all, however reverently they hold out their hands. Two consequences follow, and both are built into the 1552 service. If Christ’s body is in heaven, the right movement at communion is upward: the congregation is told to lift up its heart, not to look down at the altar. And if the bread is not Christ’s body, then the mass cannot be a sacrifice offered again by a priest; Calvary happened once. Cranmer took his warrant for the whole position from Christ’s own words in John 6, that the Spirit gives life and the flesh is no help at all (John 6:63). Rome answered, then and now, that those words are about a fleshly way of eating rather than about a bodily presence, and the disagreement is genuine and has never been closed.

(Q) "As we see with our eyes and eat with our mouths very bread, and see also and drink very wine, so we lift up our hearts unto heaven, and with our faith we see Christ crucified with our spiritual eyes, and eat his flesh thrust through with a spear, and drink his blood springing out of his side with our spiritual mouths of our faith." + Source: Cranmer, An Answer unto a Crafty and Sophistical Cavillation Devised by Stephen Gardiner, the second book (Writings and Disputations of Thomas Cranmer relative to the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, Parker Society, 1844, page 317). "Very" here means real or actual, not merely very much: real bread, real wine. Cranmer is answering Gardiner, the Bishop of Winchester, over a passage in John Chrysostom, and the sentence is his own summary of what he takes Chrysostom to mean rather than a translation of Chrysostom: nothing has to stop being what it is for Christ to be genuinely received (T3). This is the book he said, on the morning of his death, would stand at the last day.

(T4) The Scriptures were written to be heard, read and taken in by everyone, not guarded from them. + Every parish church in England had been ordered to buy a copy of the Great Bible and chain it to a desk where anyone could read it, and from 1540 there stood at the front of it a preface by Cranmer arguing that this was not a dangerous innovation but a return to normal. He wrote it for people who were being told that Scripture in English would breed error in untrained heads, and his answer was that the church fathers had assumed the opposite: that ordinary Christians, farmers and tradesmen and women at home, were meant to have the text and live on it. The same conviction turns up where it does the most work, in the prayers. A collect is a short prayer that gathers a congregation’s petitions into a few lines; Cranmer wrote or rewrote dozens of them, and the one he composed for the second Sunday in Advent is about the Bible. It asks for five verbs in a row, and the sequence is the argument: hear, read, mark, learn, inwardly digest. Hearing is passive and it comes first because most people in 1549 could not read. Marking is paying attention to what you have heard. Learning is holding on to it. Digesting is what your body does with food over hours and days without your supervision, and it is the last word because it is the point. The collect takes its language straight from Paul, who wrote that "whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, that through endurance and through the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope" (Romans 15:4). He also made the prayer book itself a machine for getting through the Bible. Morning and evening prayer were laid out so that a congregation working through the calendar would hear nearly the whole Old Testament once a year, the New Testament three times, and the Psalms every month. When John Wesley cut the prayer book down for the Methodists in America in 1784, trimming services and dropping saints’ days and psalms, he kept this collect where it stood.

(Q) "Blessed Lord, who hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning: Grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them, that by patience and comfort of thy holy Word, we may embrace and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which thou hast given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ." + Source: Book of Common Prayer, the collect for the second Sunday in Advent, composed by Cranmer for the book of 1549 and given here in the spelling of the 1662 book. "Learning" in Tudor English means teaching or instruction rather than memorising, and "patience" means endurance under strain. Read with those two words restored, the prayer asks for exactly what Paul asks for in Romans 15:4 (T4).

(Q) "We do not presume to come to this thy Table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies. We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy Table. But thou art the same Lord, whose property is always to have mercy." + Source: Book of Common Prayer, the Prayer of Humble Access, first printed in the Order of the Communion of 1548 and revised in 1552; the wording here is the 1552 form as it stands in the 1662 book. The crumbs are borrowed from the Canaanite woman who told Jesus that even the dogs eat what falls from the table, and was commended for it (Matthew 15:27). This is what the doctrine of T1 sounds like when it stops being a proposition and becomes something a whole parish says out loud on its knees, and it is the best short answer to anyone who thinks Cranmer’s theology was an academic import. A congregation that prays this has already conceded the argument about merit before the sermon starts.

What the Church Made of Him

(†) His prayer book became the common speech of English religion, and it travelled wherever English did. + Mary burned the books along with their author, and three years later Elizabeth brought them back. The 1559 book was the 1552 book with small changes; the 1662 book, made after the civil wars, is still recognisably Cranmer’s, and it remains the official prayer book of the Church of England. From there it went out with the English language: to Scotland and Ireland, to North America, to India, to Africa, to Australia, and Anglican churches around the world still pray from books that descend from it. Its reach is wider than its own communion, which is the odd part. Methodists inherited it from John Wesley, who abridged it for America rather than replacing it. Its phrases are quoted by people with no church at all, because so much of it has come loose and floated into ordinary English: "speak now or forever hold your peace," "till death us do part," "ashes to ashes, dust to dust," "peace in our time," "the world, the flesh and the devil," "read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest." Few writers in the language have had that kind of afterlife, and none of the others were trying to write liturgy. Even Christians who reject his theology outright have taken his habit of writing. The idea that a church should have a settled, printed, comprehensible order of worship that a congregation can hold in its hands, rather than whatever the minister produces that morning, is one he did more than anyone to fix in English, and it is at work in places that would be startled to hear whose it was.

(†) His Articles fixed what the English church officially believes, and his death gave English Protestantism its picture. + The Forty-Two Articles were issued in June 1553 and were law for barely three weeks before Edward died. Elizabeth’s bishops trimmed them to thirty-nine in 1563, Parliament required every clergyman to subscribe them, to sign his name under them as his own belief, in 1571, and in that form they have been the doctrinal standard of Anglicanism ever since, printed in the back of the prayer book and quarrelled over by every party in the church. Their articles on justification, on the sufficiency of Scripture, and on the Lord’s Supper are Cranmer’s positions (T1, T4, T3) in the compressed form of a legal document. The death did something the articles could not. John Foxe published his enormous book of Protestant martyrs in 1563, seven years after the fire, and in 1571 Convocation, the assembly in which the English clergy make their own church law, ordered it set up beside the Bible in every cathedral and in the houses of senior clergy; parish after parish bought a copy of its own and chained it to a desk. The hand held in the flame became one of the most reproduced images in English religious memory, printed in edition after edition and copied into cheap woodcuts, and generations of English children learned their country’s history partly from that picture. Foxe was a partisan and wrote as one, and modern historians read him with care, but on Cranmer’s last day he was drawing on the reports of hostile witnesses who had come expecting a surrender, and his account of the scene has stood up. It fixed two things, and they have held. One is that English Protestantism understood itself from then on as a faith that had been paid for. The other is subtler: because the martyr had first been a coward, the English tradition has never been able to tell its founding story as a tale of heroes, and has been the more honest for it.

(†) Where his own record will not bear defending: the king’s marriages, the fires he lit, and the signatures. + Cranmer is a saint in several church calendars and the ledger still has a second column, and the honest thing is to keep it open. These are not charges invented by his enemies; the first two are in the official records of his own archbishopric, and the third he confessed himself. - He never told the king no about a wife. He annulled Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon, then to Anne Boleyn, then to Anne of Cleves, and he gave the king the ruling the king wanted every time. He did write to Henry in 1536 defending Anne Boleyn, saying he had never had a better opinion of any woman, and then two days before she died he pronounced her marriage null anyway. A churchman whose judgments track his patron’s wishes that closely has stopped being a judge. - He sent people to the fire. This is the hardest one, and it is not softened by saying that everyone did it. A commission he headed condemned Joan Bocher, and she was burned at Smithfield on 2 May 1550. She was an Anabaptist, one of the radicals who rejected the baptism of babies and baptised believers as adults, and she denied that Christ took his flesh from Mary. The next year he sat in judgment on the Flemish surgeon George van Parris, who denied Christ’s divinity, condemned him on 7 April 1551, and van Parris was burned later that month. Cranmer believed, as almost all Christians of his century believed on both sides, that obstinate heresy was a capital crime. He was wrong, and six years later the same reasoning was used on him. When two of the disciples asked whether they should call fire down on a village that would not receive Jesus, he turned and rebuked them (Luke 9:54–55). - He signed what he did not believe. Six submissions between the end of January and 18 March 1556, each going further than the last, and the documents were real. He gave the reason himself at St Mary’s: fear of death, and the hope of saving his life. He did not plead illness, or confusion, or misunderstanding, and no admirer is entitled to plead them for him. The gospel has a category for this, and it is not excuse. Peter swore in a courtyard that he had never met Jesus, went out and wept bitterly (Luke 22:61–62), and was given his work back. What Cranmer’s life shows is not a hero and not a fraud, but the ordinary Christian case: a man who was braver at the end than in the middle, and who had to be forgiven for the middle.