Chapter VII: Part 7

No man, whatever his office, can be reproached for having failed to solve the eternal problems of poverty and unemployment. The enormous discrepancies in the distribution of wealth may appeal to the wealthy as evidence of divine justice; by the poor they are more apt to be attributed to human injustice. Yet it is not always apparent on the face of things that the rich man has become rich or the poor man poor through any misdoings. Natural forces operate without any regard to abstract equity. There are always, however, those who, passionately alive to the unfairness of the inequalities around them, are convinced that there is nothing to prevent the realisation of a Utopian rectification except the selfish greed of the propertied classes, and imagine that an adequate remedy can be found in the imposition of paper rules and regulations. Selfish greed is always one of the factors in the problem, of varying magnitude, and regulations which effectively protect the weak instead of strengthening the strong may have most beneficial results; but they must have a power behind them which is capable of enforcing them, and they must be in themselves capable of being enforced.

The social disorganisation at this period was exceptionally acute. For the agricultural depression, we have already noted as the most vital cause the conversion of arable land into pasture--the growing substitution of a highly remunerative industry demanding little labour for a less remunerative industry requiring more labour. Next to this was the disappearance of small holdings, owing to their accumulation into single large estates--the substitution in effect of large farms worked by farm servants for petty cultivation by peasant households. Third stands the enclosing and appropriation of common lands by large landholders. The demand for labour sinking from these causes out of all proportion to the supply, cheapened labour excessively. There was an army of men who could find no employment, and those who obtained employment were miserably paid. Of the three causes named, only the third can be attributed to the moral obliquities of the wealthy. The other two were natural economic developments which would in the course of time find their natural remedy in the growth of new industries which would absorb the displaced labour. That, however, did not make the existing distress less painful, since the new industries had not yet come into being. Moreover, whereas in the old days the monasteries had at least played some part in the immediate relief of distress, though they had not mitigated its causes, their destruction had abolished this source of relief. We have in our own day an analogous movement in the industrial world, public companies and trusts absorbing the business of the small traders, while the channels into which capital flows are decided by considerations not of philanthropy but of dividends.

The true remedy was to be found--and was found in the course of Elizabeth’s reign--in the development of new industries; and the condition of developing new industries was the restoration of public credit: to be achieved primarily by steady government, establishing general confidence, and by ending one grave cause of the existing lack of credit for which the recent government had been directly responsible, namely, the debasement of the coinage. It was also not impracticable, though exceedingly difficult, to deal with the thievery of common lands. Incidentally, it was necessary to find a substitute which should discharge the charitable functions of the monasteries, as well as to hold in check the vagabondage which, owing to the great number of the unemployed, was a daily increasing danger.

There were, then, certain practical steps to be taken which would not indeed cure the existing evils, but would serve directly to mitigate them and to restore the body politic to a condition in which the only effective remedy could be applied. But in the sixteenth century, even the most scientific thinkers believed that human nature could be “expelled with a fork” by statute: and it is small blame to Somerset that he sought to stay the economic tide and to forbid the inevitable. The attempt was very much more than anything else the cause of his ruin; and as usual it was dictated by the most excellent motives. But it is very much to be lamented that while he attempted the impracticable, he left what was practicable alone, or mismanaged it so far as he did try it. He could not provide the country with a steady government: he did not restore the currency: public credit sank. He pinned his faith on legislation which was either flatly rejected or became a dead letter the moment it was passed. He made an attempt to deal with vagabondage by converting vagabonds into slaves, which was merely grotesque. Dissatisfied--quite properly--with the courts which dealt with the land questions, he established a “Court of Requests” in his own house, and proposed on his own responsibility to overrule their decisions. As for the enclosure business, the Council was not merely unsympathetic; half its members were more or less flagrant enclosers themselves. For Somerset to make a direct frontal attack on the system on which they were battening was creditable to his courage, but it was not politics. When they found that the Protector was not merely playing at being a popular ruler, but was taking himself very seriously indeed, and that he evinced anything but the proper desire to pulverise the Commons when they rose in arms either in the western or the eastern counties, they were not long in deciding that the Protector himself must go. They were only following immemorial custom when they put forward the theory that he was seeking his own advancement by practising the arts of the demagogue, and that the rural unrest was the creation of his machinations.

VI

THE LORD ADMIRAL

The same characteristics of the Protector present themselves in other fields. His motives were quite other than those which actuated the government which succeeded his, and on an altogether higher plane. We have already noted in passing that his scheme for religion included the repeal of the Act of the Six Articles and the old penal statutes _de heretico comburendo_; that is, his policy abolished the methods of persecution, at least in any stringent form. In precisely the same spirit, he dealt with the Treason Laws invented under Henry VIII. and used by that monarch with such terrible effect. Those laws were a very potent weapon in the hands of an arbitrary ruler; an instrument by which virtually the king--or, if the king so chose, his minister--could absolutely secure the condemnation for high treason of any person who in any way proved obnoxious to his government. To that end it was practically sufficient to procure an information that the proposed victim had used expressions which might be construed as implying a possibility of treasonous intent, or of complicity in treasonous intent--treasonous intent being interpreted in the widest conceivable sense--and the victim’s doom was sealed, whether he were a Buckingham, a More, or a Surrey. This weapon lay ready to the Protector’s hand for the destruction of rivals and the establishment of his own authority. He not only declined to use it; he broke it to pieces himself. It is particularly noteworthy that it was in Somerset’s Act of 1547 that a provision was first introduced requiring that any charge of treason should be supported by two witnesses--a provision repeated in the later Treasons Act of Northumberland. The Protector deliberately and of set purpose deprived himself of those means to tyranny which Thomas Cromwell had so carefully fabricated.

Again, we find during his rule that there was no coercing of Parliament, no interference with freedom of debate, no danger attending on the most outspoken opposition to the personal wishes of the Protector.

Yet here, again, he gave occasion to the enemy. If he had maintained the Cromwellian system of ruthlessness in the pursuit of each object he set before himself, his condemnation as a tyrant would have been tempered by praise of his masterfulness. The policy of blood and iron always has its advocates, and sometimes merits advocacy. But it was not Somerset’s policy, and therefore the one occasion on which he deserted his practice attracts criticism. On that one occasion there is very little doubt that he had an irresistible case. It is scarcely necessary to add that he did the thing the wrong way.

His brother William, created Lord Seymour of Sudely under the new administration, was also Lord High Admiral. But, as the king’s uncle, he was by no means satisfied with the honours which fell to his share, and was extremely jealous of his brother’s absorption of dignities and power. He plunged in a series of intrigues to get the young king under his own personal influence, and to bring the two younger girls, Elizabeth and Lady Jane Grey, who might come into the succession, under his own control. He began by secretly marrying Katharine Parr, the king’s widow, for whose hand he had been a suitor before Henry had chosen her for his sixth matrimonial venture: so that his wife had precedence over Somerset’s Duchess. Elizabeth, being under her charge, was thus brought into the Admiral’s household. He bribed Dorset, whose wife under Henry’s will stood next in succession to Henry’s own offspring, to place their daughter Jane under his tutelage also. He put forward a claim that, as the king’s uncle, he was entitled to be governor of the king’s person instead of his brother, who was Protector of the realm--a claim in which he was unsupported. He consistently set himself in opposition to his brother, doing everything in his power to thwart him, and refusing to command the fleet which accompanied the invasion of Scotland. Katharine Parr died within eighteen months of her marriage, and no sooner was she in her grave than he attempted to obtain the hand of Elizabeth, now a girl of barely fifteen years: to whom his behaviour had already been so objectionable that Katharine had found it necessary to remove her out of his reach. As Admiral, instead of repressing the pirates who infested the Channel, he made private league with them for their support--and for shares in their booty. He kept something like a small army of bravoes in his pay, and had a private cannon-foundry of his own; and he found the means for the heavy expenditure entailed through a pact with Sharrington, the master of the mint at Bristol, who was pocketing enormous and iniquitous profits out of the clipping and debasing of the coins he issued.

With Henry on the throne, or a Thomas Cromwell at the head of the State, the Lord Admiral would have been in the Tower in two months. Under the Protectorate, he was allowed to carry on his intrigues and malpractices for two years, with nothing more serious than remonstrances. The discovery, however, of Sharrington’s frauds and Seymour’s implication therein brought matters to a head. The evidence, not only of an abuse of his office which amounted to treason, but of an ulterior intention of subverting the Government, was ample enough, though the only prominent men who were in any sense attached to him were Dorset and Northampton (the latter being Katharine Parr’s brother). There is hardly a question that, in open trial, under the most favourable conditions, the Admiral would have been sentenced and executed. Unfortunately for his own credit, Somerset assented to the view of the Council that the process should be by attainder in Parliament instead. Seymour stood on his right to an open hearing, and refused to answer the interrogatories of committees of the Council or of the Peers; and therefore he was condemned, by the almost unanimous verdict of both houses, unheard. The natural result was that men said at the time, and have continued to say since, that the Protector, fearing that his brother might become a dangerous rival, fabricated charges against him, and in effect contrived one more of the political murders of the type so familiar in the annals of Henry VIII. The Admiral was executed in March. His death was undoubtedly a shock to popular sentiment, and weakened Somerset’s position, so that his fall followed the more easily after the rural risings which turned the majority of the Council decisively against him.

VII

THE EX-PROTECTOR

The Council’s _coup d’état_ cost very little trouble. The moment was seized, when the unsuspecting Somerset was at Hampton Court, Cranmer and Paget being absent; while Russell and Herbert were returning with victorious laurels and most of the available army from the suppression of the Western rising. Both of them had strong feelings as to Somerset’s Enclosures policy. After a futile appeal to the people, there was nothing to do but surrender. But the Duke was at any rate a popular favourite; a good many of those who were in the plot against him liked him well enough personally though his policy annoyed them; he was not of the stuff of which successful political plotters are made; there was no plausible excuse for treating anything that he had done as proving anything worse than incompetence; and the Council were satisfied by his being turned out of office, subjected to a brief imprisonment, and deprived of no great amount of his lands. Six months after his fall he was even readmitted to the Privy Council, as Southampton had been three years before. There was, in short, no display of animosity; but the Warwick faction meant to grasp the management of public affairs, and to conduct them with more profit to themselves than the Protector’s _régime_ permitted.

Warwick and his friends--the Earl did not get himself created Duke of Northumberland till two years later--took over the control in October 1549. They retained it for a little less than four years. During that time their foreign and Scottish policy showed no improvement upon that of Somerset. In matters of religion, they progressed from the Prayer-book of 1548-49 to that of 1552: which would have been of a more pronounced Calvinistic flavour than it was but for the moderating influence of Ridley and Cranmer. Bonner and Gardiner were both deprived of their sees at the beginning of the _régime_, and later Tunstal, Day, and Heath were also imprisoned and deprived. The new appointments were all advanced Reformers. Before Somerset’s fall the Princess Mary had been attacked for persisting in the use of the Mass in private, after the Act of Uniformity, but the Protector granted her a licence to continue. The Warwick government was not similarly complaisant. And when a second Act of Uniformity was passed, of a much narrower type than the first, laymen as well as clergy were penalised for failure to conform. In dealing with the rural troubles Somerset’s policy was reversed, legislation being directed to the coercive repression of discontent and the relaxation of such safeguards as existed against the rapacity of landlords. To this must be added their new treason law, which not only extended the same protection to all Privy Councillors as to the king himself, but also made assemblies “for altering the laws” high treason, while renewing the requirement of two witnesses as well as of a time-limit which Somerset had introduced.

Yet there are historians who say that there is no need to differentiate between the policy of Somerset and his successor--associating them in the same condemnation.

Somerset, restored to liberty and formally reconciled to Warwick, consistently endeavoured to use his influence in mitigation of the rigours of the new Government, whose chief began to fear, not without reason, that the moderate men might draw together and reinstate his rival. Paget, whose abilities made him dangerous, was removed from the Council, and imprisoned on an inadequate pretext in the autumn of 1551, to simplify the carrying out of Warwick’s plot; evidence of an alleged conspiracy was carefully concocted, Somerset and several of his friends were arrested, and the torture--never employed by the Protector--was resorted to for the extraction of confessions from some of the prisoners. A mythical assassination plot was dropped out of the indictment. Finding that even the concocted evidence was quite inadequate for a conviction of treason, Northumberland magnanimously declined to press personal charges, and Somerset was found guilty of felony--apparently on the ground that he had incited the citizens of London to rebellion--by a carefully packed court.

Having been acquitted of treason, but--with equal satisfaction to Northumberland, since the penalty was the same--condemned for felony, the axe borne by Somerset’s gaolers was reversed when he was taken from the judgment-hall. The crowds which had gathered to await the verdict were thus misled into the belief that the trial had gone in his favour, and broke into a clamour of rejoicing. It was a fond illusion. Even when his doom was made known the populace refused to believe that it would be carried out. The Duke himself knew better. As he stood on the scaffold, having already pronounced his moving and dignified dying speech, a messenger was seen approaching, and a wild cry arose--a delighted shout that he was carrying a pardon. Somerset hushed the people, warning them it was no such thing, and bidding them pray with him for the King’s Majesty. Then, with the words “Lord Jesus, save me,” he laid his head on the block to receive the fatal stroke: and the spectators hastened to dip their kerchiefs in his blood, to be preserved as memorials of one who, with all his faults, had won the heart’s love of the common folk.

Somerset’s personal faults were shared by the majority of the prominent men of his time; it was only the greatness of his position which made them a shade more conspicuous in him. As a statesman, he was a melancholy failure; _capax imperii_ he was not in any possible sense; and his incapacity was only the more conclusively proved by the fact that he never suspected it himself. The shrewdest of men would have found it difficult enough to realise his aims, and of shrewdness he had not a particle. His failure was due not less to his complete lack of judgment than to the difficulties inherent in the problems which with easy confidence he set himself to solve. It was an ill thing for England that he was not a wiser man. But it had been well for England if wiser men than he had possessed more of those moral qualities of his to which he himself so woefully failed to give effect.

ARCHBISHOP CRANMER

I

INTRODUCTORY

The Protector Somerset accounted himself a statesman. Of his own choice, he grasped at power; and being unfitted for it, he broke down disastrously. Thomas Cranmer affords a striking contrast. He was dragged into the turmoil of public affairs, in the vortex of the Reformation; against his will, he was compelled to accept ecclesiastical responsibilities which were in themselves semi-political, and to play a part also in affairs which were political exclusively. In the second capacity, he never assumed the direction, but was merely called upon to assent to the actions of others; but as archbishop he was compelled willy nilly to be a protagonist in the religious revolution--a term covering not only changes in the authorised doctrines of the Church and the authorised practices of the clergy, but in the relations of the clerical organisation in England both to the clerical organisation of Christendom and the secular powers at home.

_From a Painting by_ G. FLICCIUS _in the National Portrait Gallery_]

In the eyes of an earnest school of ecclesiastical critics, he proved himself a traitor to the sacred trust which was imposed on him; a time-serving tool of lay usurpers; who, if he had convictions, lacked the courage of them, disowning all that he had most strongly avowed to save himself from the stake; and only at the last in some measure redeeming himself by a belated and almost incomprehensible courage in the hour of his doom. Ardent Protestants endorse half the charges, and condemn him as at best a Laodicean, though one who found grace at the eleventh hour. And historians who display no marked bias on the ecclesiastical questions are apt almost to pass him by, with contemptuous reference to his weakness and subserviency. Still there are not a few who have studied his career with care and sympathy; and their verdict is by no means the one conventionally accepted. It would, indeed, be strange and sad if such a verdict gave a true account of the man who did more than any other individual, on the one hand, to preserve the continuity of the Church, while, on the other hand, he strove to make her comprehensive and national. To no one, indeed, can he assume the proportions of a master-spirit; but the more closely we study him, the more readily we recognise in him a pre-eminently gentle and charitable soul, simple and sincere, striving to do his duty through good and evil report, in a task which he would fain have left to men who were not--as he was--born to be students, not fighters; and actually accomplishing what men of far greater practical ability would have deemed it vain to attempt. If it was better for England that the Church should be what it became than that it should have taken the shape into which either a Gardiner or a Knox would have moulded it, it was well for England that for twenty years Cranmer was her foremost ecclesiastic.

II

CRANMER AT CAMBRIDGE

Thomas Cranmer was born not two years before Henry VIII., in 1489; the son of a country gentleman of no great estate. An elder son was to carry on the family; Thomas and his younger brother were destined to the Church. The younger sons of a country gentleman of straitened means had no very encouraging prospects, and the career chosen for the boy was, no doubt, dictated merely by convenience, though it was well enough suited to his talents and temperament. Somewhat lacking, perhaps, in that cheerful heedlessness of danger and physical pain which is the happy heritage of the normal English boy--the outcome often of rude health and imperturbable nerves rather than of any properly moral endowment--a certain timidity and want of self-confidence in him were evidently fostered by the unsympathetic severity of a pedagogue whose theory of education was, a stick with a master at one end and a boy at the other. In due course he went up to the recent foundation of Jesus College, Cambridge, and was elected to a fellowship on taking his degree. Till his fortieth year he continued in these academic shades, and would have remained there peacefully enough to his life’s end if an accident had not brought him under the notice of Henry VIII.

Colet and others, some years earlier, had introduced the new criticism into Oxford; while Cranmer was an undergraduate, Cambridge was still lagging behind. In 1511, however, the placid, not to say stagnant, waters were moved by the appointment of Erasmus to the Greek Chair. There is no record of any personal intercourse between Cranmer and the great scholar; but it was precisely at this time that the former withdrew his attention from the scholastic philosophy and theology which had hitherto absorbed him, and devoted himself to studying the Scriptures. In the University he seems to have been regarded as an undoubtedly learned scholar; for Wolsey, who as an educationist chose his men with judgment, offered him a canonry at his new “Cardinal College” at Oxford; but he was not looked upon as one who would seek preferment or be selected for it unsought, or as in any sense an intellectual leader. The only incident worth noting is that at the outset, being still a layman, he lost his fellowship by marrying a respectable young “gentlewoman,” a connexion of the landlord of a Cambridge hostelry. On her death, however, a year later, he was re-elected to his fellowship--apparently a unique instance in those times of such recognition--proceeding afterwards to take Holy Orders.

Now, in those early days, the intelligence and ability, not only of laymen, but of the greatest ecclesiastics were all on the side of the intellectual emancipation of which Erasmus was the apostle. Archbishop Warham was the scholar’s patron, Fox of Winchester was his warm admirer, Fisher of Rochester had given him his Cambridge appointment. From his disciples Wolsey chose the men for the great college which was his favourite scheme outside of pure politics. Colet, Dean of St. Paul’s, and Thomas More, were among his closest friends. No one of any account thought of receiving with anything but the warmest welcome his edition of the Greek Testament and the _Utopia_ of More, which appeared about the same time. Then a somewhat startling event occurred. The Pope wanted money; he sent out commissioners to obtain it by the sale of indulgences; and a monk at Wittenberg rose up and publicly denounced the whole scheme. At first, the meaning of the portent was not fully appreciated; but before long the denunciation of indulgences developed into a challenge of the entire Papal system, of the pretensions of the Popes, and of sundry accepted dogmas. Reformation by the influence of sweetness and light was by no means the same thing as this volcanic revolution. The men who had done so much to make the new movement possible became eager to repress it. The English king plunged into theological controversy, triumphantly vindicating the Papacy and pulverising the monk of Wittenberg.

Before many years had passed, however, Henry found reason to modify his views, as More had warned him he might do. Papal pretensions stood in the way of royal designs, and that fact brought it home to him that those pretensions were not based upon a rock. The Bishop of Rome was also a European potentate subject to political pressure from other potentates--a political factor with a spiritual sanction. If the spiritual sanction were challenged, the political situation would be simplified. The king’s authority in his own dominions would no longer be trammeled by the claims of a foreign authority to over-ride it. When a collision between the royal and the Papal authority became imminent, it was time to be rid of the Papacy for good and all. That, of course, was quite a different thing from admitting heretical dogmas or denials of dogma.

The occasion was the divorce[C] of Katharine of Aragon. If the Pope had been amenable in that matter, Henry would in all likelihood have left the Papal authority where he found it. But Clement, terrorised by the Emperor, was not amenable--despite the efforts of Wolsey. The collapse of the legatine trial ruined Wolsey and decided the king on a campaign with the object of establishing the Crown as the sole head of the Spirituality; involving the withdrawal or repudiation of the Papal claims and the formal subjection of the clergy in England.

[C] This customary term for the proceedings has been used
throughout. But it may be necessary to note that a
“decree of nullity”--the thing sought--is not properly
speaking a “divorce” at all. Nullity means that no
marriage had in fact been contracted; divorce, that a
marriage which had been contracted is dissolved.

The trial had just collapsed. Henry in dudgeon retired to Waltham. Two of his suite, his almoner Fox and his secretary Stephen Gardiner, took up their quarters with a Mr. Cressy, in whose house Dr. Cranmer happened to be residing, as the son’s tutor. Gardiner and Fox, being also respectively Provost and Master of King’s and Trinity Hall, were acquainted with Cranmer; and together they naturally discussed what was known as “the king’s affair.” In the course of conversation Cranmer expressed himself to the effect that Henry could do without the Papal decision. He could obtain from the universities of Europe the opinion of the qualified divines on the question whether a Papal dispensation for a marriage with a deceased brother’s widow was _ultra vires_; and take corresponding action on his own responsibility when he learnt the result. The English courts, in short, were competent to pronounce the marriage null or valid, but the position would be made impregnable if they had the expert opinion of Europe to go upon. The conversation was reported to Henry, who caught at the scheme and summoned its deviser to talk to him. Their interview terminated Cranmer’s hitherto undisturbed prospect of passing his days in peaceful and learned seclusion; such an instrument as this was not to be wasted. Unscrupulous loyalty Henry knew by experience he could command; servants of the type which provided it could be used till the last ounce of service had been extracted from them, and then cast aside. But Henry wanted a man of undeniable learning, unblemished character, a tender conscience, a convenient theory of Church and State, and a certain impressibility. The combination was not easily found--but he had found it.

III

RISE TO THE ARCHBISHOPRIC

The common animosity towards Cranmer of those who hold “high” doctrines on the function of the priesthood is entirely intelligible. For them, the divine revelation is entrusted to the Church, and the voice of the Church is the voice of her priesthood. Its authority is absolute, and secular powers seeking to control it are laying profane hands on the Ark of the Covenant. That laymen should not humbly recognise that august claim is deplorable; still, for laymen some excuse may be found. But that a priest should not merely disavow it in words, but emphasise the disavowal by his acts, aiding and abetting the desecration as well as justifying it, is intolerable. When, moreover, that priest is himself, as it were, the shepherd of the whole flock, whose position demands that he above all others should be the guardian and champion of the Church’s rights, he becomes a double-dyed traitor. Palpably guilty of so heinous a crime, the presumption in favour of the truth of any minor charges against him is so strong that it is hardly necessary to examine them: they may almost be taken for granted.

If, indeed, it be unpardonable to believe that the State is supreme, there can be no pardon for Cranmer. But if once it be admitted that a man is not of necessity a moral reprobate for holding that view, and that it is possible, even for a priest, to maintain it with entire honesty and sincerity, the whole fabric of Cranmer’s condemnation collapses. To Cranmer, the State meant the king, and in the king he found an authority more divine--more definitely, that is, of divine sanction--than in any other of the powers that be. When in Queen Mary’s reign he found the royal authority in flat opposition to what he held to be truth, no doubt a very painful and puzzling dilemma presented itself; but the same dilemma is presented to every individual who, having recognised some external authority as final, suddenly discovers that the dictates of that authority and those of his own conscience are in flat contradiction.

Cranmer, in short, was as complete and convinced an Erastian as any layman could possibly have been. It was the clear perception of that fact which primarily made Henry select him as Archbishop Warham’s successor. A frankly Erastian archbishop was an anomaly, but it is not necessary _ipso facto_ to condemn him as a criminal and a hypocrite, or even as a time-server.

Cranmer, like a good many other people, was thoroughly convinced that, though the marriage with Katharine had been effected in perfect good faith, it was invalid in the nature of things, and could not be made valid by any sort of ecclesiastical sanction, Papal or other. The king set him to work to formulate a plea for nullity, and placed him under the immediate influence of the Boleyn household, where the simple man very readily learnt to form the highest opinion of the lady whom the king had determined to make a queen. Then he was sent with Anne’s father on a futile embassy to Bologna; and not long after his return he was again despatched as an enemy to Germany, where he made many friends but did not succeed in gaining many converts to his view on the divorce question. There also he took the extremely uncanonical step of marrying; but it must be remembered that while such marriages among the secular clergy were not recognised by the law, they were not regarded as offences against morality, and were by no means infrequent; while in Germany itself they had become, or were becoming, the rule rather than the exception. Cranmer was still in Germany when he received the unexpected and most unwelcome summons to return to England and take upon himself the ungrateful honour of the archbishopric.

In the meantime Henry’s “Reformation” parliament had been at work; the campaign against the Pope and the clerical organisation was in full swing: and Convocation, under the aged Warham, had been compelled to affirm the royal supremacy. The “submission of the clergy” had become an accomplished fact in Cranmer’s absence, and before he held any position of high authority. The most stubborn of the bishops were unable to resist the pressure of the Crown. They bowed to the logic of facts, under protest and against their convictions, without being condemned as subservient. Cranmer is called subservient mainly because his convictions were on the king’s side.

It was always more agreeable to Henry to employ on any job he had in hand men to whom that particular job was not distasteful. Thus, knowing Sir Thomas More’s sentiments as to the divorce, he had given the new Chancellor no business in connexion with it. It is not likely that any of the bishops at this time, with the exception of Fisher, would have felt strongly as to a breach with Rome--Gardiner and Stokesly were both advocates of the divorce. But it was more convenient to have an archbishop as to whose sentiments there was no manner of doubt. It is not impossible that Gardiner, not Cranmer, would have been chosen, if his attitude in regard to the “Supplication against the Ordinaries” and the “Submission” of Convocation had not made Henry scent in him a possible Becket. The Bishop of Winchester’s services had been of considerable value; and if Cranmer’s appointment stirred his jealousy, he can hardly be blamed. But it is scarcely to be doubted that a personal antagonism to the rival, for whose first preferment to Henry’s notice he had himself been in part responsible and by whom he now found himself superseded, exercised a marked influence on Gardiner’s attitude from this time.

Cranmer, summoned home, delayed on the way as much as he dared--in the hope, it is said, that the king might be persuaded to change his mind and make another selection. However, he arrived in January; Henry--for his own ends--put pressure on the Pope to hasten the necessary bulls, and the new Archbishop was consecrated on March 30 (1533). An oath of obedience to the Pope was a necessary part of the ceremony. Such oaths are commonly regarded as mere formalities, binding precisely so long as it is convenient to recognise them. Cranmer, however, being very well aware that whosoever became archbishop would very soon find it necessary to ignore the oath or else to defy the king, was at pains to announce beforehand that he only intended to respect the oath so far as it consorted with obedience to the king--a declaration which has been rather oddly condemned as hypocritical. Oaths and promises[D] made purely _pro forma_ are a not very excusable institution, but the open profession that they are made _pro forma_ only makes such hypocrisy as is involved less, not greater.

[D] How many godparents or brides, for instance, regard
the formal promises they make in the face of the
congregation as imposing a real and literal obligation?

IV

HENRY’S PRIMATE

The first business before Cranmer was to finish off the affair of the divorce. Henry had already--whether in the previous November or January--been privately married to Anne Boleyn. On the theory that the marriage with Katharine was void _ab initio_, there was never any bar to another marriage, though it was hardly possible to announce one until the nullity had been formally declared: so that any further delay was certain to cause a public scandal--since it was now April, and Elizabeth was born in the following September. Convocation had already pronounced in favour of Henry’s view; and if Cranmer was somewhat anxious to evade possible obstructions, it was only because the decision of the court was by this time a foregone conclusion.

For the destruction of More and Fisher (1534-1535) Cranmer was in no sort of way responsible. He was on the Commission which had to administer the Oath of Supremacy, which the two recalcitrants declined, but it was not he who prescribed the form of the oath, nor had he anything to say to the penalties. All he did do was to urge the king to accept as sufficient a form of the oath to which Fisher and More were both prepared to subscribe.

Something more is usually made of the Archbishop’s conduct at the time of Anne Boleyn’s fall, as an instance of the subserviency which is imputed to him. It is argued that officially at Henry’s bidding he condemned the unhappy lady, while personally convinced of her innocence. The whole story is enveloped in an obscurity which makes that impression a natural one; nevertheless, the most probable explanation of the circumstances is one which fairly exonerates the Archbishop.

Henry had sought to have the nullity of the marriage with Katharine established ostensibly for two main reasons. The first was the fruit of conscience, that the union, though sanctioned by the Pope, was against the moral law. The second was a reason of State, that a male heir to the throne with an indisputable title was a necessity, and therefore the king must be provided with another wife than Katharine. The other wife he had chosen was Anne Boleyn, but she had failed to do what was expected of her. Like her predecessor, she had borne a daughter, and had two miscarriages Henry was tired of her, and was attracted to another lady whose virtue was impregnable; therefore he wanted to be rid of her in turn. Charges of treason on the ground of post-nuptial immorality were brought against her, and on these she was condemned by a court of peers composed in great part of those who would have been readiest to welcome her acquittal. Here, we have nothing to do with the truth or falsehood of the allegations; Cranmer was not one of the judges, and had nothing whatever to do with the trial. But Anne had from the first shown him the best side of her character, and he had a perfect conviction that she was a good woman. He could not influence the court; he had nothing which could be called evidence in her favour to bring forward. The king’s wishes were obvious. Yet Cranmer took the somewhat bold step of addressing the king, pleading earnestly and even passionately on her behalf--though vainly.

But, for reasons best known to himself, Henry was not satisfied with a condemnation for treason: he also required a divorce--or, to express it more correctly, a declaration that the marriage, like that with Katharine, had been void from the beginning. How could Cranmer, who had officially declared it valid, now make any such pronouncement? The answer is, that the technical ground on which it was voided had not previously been taken into account. The story of a pre-contract with Northumberland need not count for much, though for the avoidance of scandal it was put in the forefront. The charges on which Anne was condemned to death, while effective for proper divorce proceedings, were irrelevant to the question of nullity. The real ground was that at an earlier stage Henry had illicit relations with Anne’s elder sister, Mary, thereby technically creating affinity with Anne, and rendering the marriage with her void by canon law. How far Cranmer knew or suspected this unofficially, when he declared the marriage valid, is a matter of doubt--which is not set at rest by his pamphlet in favour of the divorce. But, being now officially informed of it, he could not maintain the technical validity of the marriage any longer. His view of the importance of merely canonical prohibitions is illustrated by his own uncanonical marriage. Even if he knew of the “affinity” he would probably have accounted it no moral bar to a union. But, knowing it, he could not deny that it made the marriage technically invalid. It is, perhaps, worth noting that his plea for Anne’s life contains a reference to Henry’s own morals, which may very well have been a reminder that it was the king’s sin, not Anne’s, which had placed her in a false position. As for her actual guilt or innocence under the other accusations, the Primate could not protest against the king or the judges being persuaded by the evidence, but he could, and did, declare that, not having the evidence before him, he could not bring himself to believe that the charges were true: but that did not touch the question of nullity. Whoever deserved blame over the affair, Cranmer did not.

Some years later Thomas Cromwell was struck down by his master. His government had been in many respects a reign of terror. The populace had no affection for him; the nobles hated him: the new men, even those he had made, feared him; the king’s wrath was kindled against him. The downfall of Wolsey had not been more universally acceptable. But there was one man who lifted up his voice to plead for the fallen minister--Thomas Cranmer, the time-server. As in the case of Anne Boleyn, it was impossible for him to take up the cudgels in defence of the man who had been less dangerous, perhaps, to him than to most others--dangerous he was to every one, for he spared neither friend nor foe--but who else would have dared, or ever did dare, to appeal to Henry in the day of his wrath?

It was not Cranmer who directed the course of the Reformation under Henry. The breach with Rome in all its completeness was devised and carried out without aid from him, unless the suggestion of taking the opinion of the Universities on the divorce is to be counted as aid. Before the king had ever heard of Cranmer, Gardiner had told Clement in plain terms that if he refused to entertain the English king’s wishes England would repudiate his jurisdiction altogether. The great majority of the bishops were no friends to the Papal claims, though some of them would have taken a different line if they had not been too late in discovering that the king meant to impose his own yoke instead of the Pope’s: and the same thing might be said of Convocation generally. Gardiner and Stokesley, the most persistent of Cranmer’s antagonists, had been foremost in supporting the king against the Pope. The clergy had writhed and resisted when the attack was turned against themselves by the “Supplication against the Ordinaries,” but they had been forced to surrender and make their “Submission” while Warham was still Archbishop and Cranmer was engaged in other matters. Even after he became Primate Cranmer had no actual hand or voice in the great despoiling measures which accompanied the dissolution of the monasteries; while the downfall of the monastic system in itself was probably not unwelcome to the bulk of the secular clergy, between whom and the regulars there was constant friction and jealousy.

In this connexion, however, while Cranmer, like Gardiner and the rest, neither aided nor hindered Cromwell’s work, it ought to stand to his eternal credit that he was almost alone in protesting, not against the spoliation itself--practically no one seems to have ventured to do that--but against the misuse of the wealth which thus changed hands. He wrote to Cromwell emphatically expressing his grief and disappointment that those funds were not appropriated to education--still accounted one of the primary functions of the Church. Had the course which he urged been followed there would have been little possibility of saying that the Church was robbed. But Cromwell and his master had other uses for the spoils. It is remarkable, too, that when educational establishments were endowed Cranmer made a vigorous stand on behalf of humble scholars against those who would have confined their benefits to the sons of the well-to-do.

So far, however, as concerned matters of doctrine and practice the Archbishop exercised some influence. His sojourn in Germany had not made him a Lutheran, but it had inclined him to give favourable consideration to the opinions of sober reformers on the Continent. Viewing the Papacy as the enemy, he was always sanguine of the possibility that a common standard of doctrine might be formulated in consultation with the Protestant leaders; and such an agreement was a pet project of his, the theological counterpart of Cromwell’s political league with the Lutherans. Henry, however, looked askance on both schemes, and the Archbishop’s efforts were doomed to disappointment.

Anxious as Cranmer was for a union of the opponents of Papacy, there were many disputable points on which his own judgment had not crystallised. In the matter, however, on which he really laid most stress he got his way. An English Bible which all men might read was the desire of his heart, and that was the one innovation of first-rate importance to which Henry acceded. The first Convocation over which he presided petitioned for a commission to prepare such a volume, and the petition was granted. The Commission itself was ineffective enough; some of the members, like Stokesley, desired only to obstruct the work as far as in them lay. But the principle was conceded, and the Commission was made superfluous by the appearance of Coverdale’s and “Matthew’s” versions. There is no doubt at all that the main credit is due to Cranmer, though his efforts would have been vain enough without the powerful support of Cromwell. A kindred concession to Cranmer’s enthusiasm for the English language was the authorisation, in Henry’s later years, of an English Litany.

When John Frith affirmed the proposition that a correct belief on the subject of the Eucharist could not be essential to salvation, there were few, if any, of his contemporaries who did not regard him as an anarchist in religion. But the subject of the Eucharist was only one among many as to which men were in a state of great uncertainty concerning the belief which should be regarded as correct. A standard was wanted; it might be rigid, or it might be elastic. Given a standard fixed by authority, no one was prepared as yet to admit that the individual was at liberty to set up a different standard for himself: no one doubted that the lack of an authoritative standard was an evil. Hence arose the efforts in Henry’s reign to evolve acceptable formularies, which should define what must be acknowledged as true doctrines.

In the devising of these Cranmer, as well as many others, had his share. They did not express the views of any one man--unless it were the king--or any one party. They were three in number: first, the “Ten Articles” for “establishing Christian quietness”; then the “Institution of a Christian Man,” commonly called the _Bishop’s Book_; and some years later the “Necessary Doctrine and Erudition of a Christian Man,” known as the _King’s Book_. Between the first and the last there is no definite change of doctrinal attitude. None of the three breaks away from received opinion; they differ mainly in the precision with which certain points are insisted upon. Thus, in the first, the doctrine of the Real Presence is affirmed, but not explicitly in the form of Transubstantiation. The movement is rather towards rigidity. Cranmer and some of his colleagues made tentative suggestions in favour of admitting more advanced views, which were not approved, and in the case of the King’s Book, it is clear that the opposing party hoped to get something of a much more decisively reactionary character.

Cranmer was a long way from being an Anselm, a Becket, or a Langton. But on the whole, taking together the history of those three formularies, and adding that of the Six Articles Act, which intervened, the surprising thing about him is not his subserviency, but the persistency with which he defended his own views. The “Whip with Six Strings” was a tightening of the bonds which came upon the advanced party with a startling shock. Cranmer fought the Bill in Parliament, and he fought some of its positions in convocation after the king’s mind was very well known. By the king’s desire, he put his argument down in black-and-white for the royal perusal after the Act had become law--a manifestly dangerous step. When the “King’s Book” was in hand, he again fought, though unsuccessfully, for the admission of views which the Act condemned; and he told Henry with perfect candour that, although he obeyed the law as in duty bound, his opinion remained unaltered. Throughout all the discussions he criticised the royal suggestions and comments with an admirable frankness which none of his colleagues ventured to display.

The curious thing is that Cranmer was the one man who could say what he would to the king without arousing his anger, as Cromwell remarked to him with not unkindly envy: but he could not deflect the monarch from the path he chose by a single hair’s breadth. Twice after Cromwell’s fall the reactionaries fancied that they had the Archbishop fairly in the toils; both times they were brought up with a round turn by their master and his. The combination of ruthless force with great intellectual power in both Cromwell and Henry found by contrast a strange attraction in the Primate’s guilelessness. “Oh, Lord God,” exclaimed Henry on one occasion, “what fond simplicity have you, so to permit yourself to be imprisoned that every enemy of yours may take vantage against you.” They both chose to protect him against the enemies who certainly were not guileless; and bestowed on him an affection which was half-admiring and half-pitying; an affection returned by that which is often felt by a tender and pliant nature for a rugged and imperious one. When Cranmer felt impelled to remonstrate with their proceedings, he did so with trepidation; they ignored the remonstrances, but liked him none the worse. It might be said that he was the only man or woman of whom, being brought in frequent contact, Henry never fell foul. There was always warm respect in Henry’s fondness for him; and Henry was by no means the man to feel respect for a time-server.

V

CRANMER AND SOMERSET

The death of Henry was the beginning of a new era. Hitherto his personality had completely dominated the situation; effectively, he had become the most uncontrolled autocrat in Europe, in spite of a very careful preservation of traditional forms. But his successor on the throne was a nine-year-old boy, and there was no dominating personality to take the dead king’s place. If Henry’s scheme for the continuation of the government had been framed with a view to the maintenance of the _status quo_, it was a very complete failure.

Superficially, that would seem to have been the idea. The Council of Executors in whom power was vested by Henry’s will was a body in which the progressive and stationary or reactionary parties were both represented. The strength of the latter, however, suffered serious detriment in the closing weeks of Henry’s reign by the downfall of the Howards: while their ecclesiastical leader, Gardiner, was excluded from the Council, on which their principal representative among Churchmen was Tunstal of Durham, a man as mild as Cranmer himself. Within a week, the Earl of Hertford, now become Duke of Somerset, had secured the Protectorate in his own hands, and it became immediately and abundantly clear that the whole effective power was in the hands of the progressive party.

Now at this stage there were not many points of doctrine on which the leaders of the progressive party were committed to opinions fundamentally opposed to those received. Cranmer’s chief allies had not openly rejected even the doctrine of Transubstantiation, and certainly did not dispute the Real Presence: but they definitely favoured the administration of the cup to the laity; they held that it was lawful for priests to marry; and that auricular confession was not enjoined by Scripture. Cranmer had defended each of these views at the time of the Six Articles and of the King’s Book. They had been unsatisfied by the removal of “abused images” in the last reign, and desired an extension thereof. Cranmer’s own exposition of what he considered orthodox doctrine was contained in the Book of Homilies which he had prepared but had failed to persuade Henry to authorise: while the idea of a new uniform Book of Services had long been familiar and vaguely in favour. The men of the “Old Learning” did not fear the specific innovations as particularly dangerous _per se_; what they did fear was that the innovators would go a great deal further.