21
March 1556. Thomas
Cranmer’s Ambiguous Legacy by Diarmaid MacCulloch
MacCulloch, Diarmaid.
“Cranmer’s Ambiguous Legacy.” History Today Volume:
46 Issue: 6 1996. http://www.historytoday.com/diarmaid-macculloch/cranmers-ambiguous-legacy
. Accessed March 22, 2014.
Diarmaid MacCulloch reflects on the 'after-life' of
Henry VIII's archbishop, burnt at the stake as a Protestant martyr under
Mary.
Portrait of Cranmer after Henry VIII's death by an unknown artist
Archbishop Thomas Cranmer died at the stake in 1556, a martyr for the English Reformation; but did he die a martyr for the Church of England or for Anglicanism? If we examine Cranmer's career after he parted company in the early 1530s with the Catholicism of his first forty years, we find a man of international perspective, who sought to move England into the path of the wider European Reformation: in particular towards the Reformations to be found in the churches of south Germany and Switzerland. After Cranmer's death, most of these churches would be labelled 'Calvinist' or 'Reformed'. He would not have recognised these descriptions, but if he had lived, it is very likely that he would have done his best to take the English church in the same direction.
What would the Church of England have looked like if
instead of Queen Mary's triumph in 1553, Queen Jane's quite reasonable
hereditary claim to the throne had succeeded in establishing her regime? The
Lady Mary would have to have been effectively neutralised, and one fears that
neutralising her for good would have involved the block, in a return to
Henrician savagery. The Lady Elizabeth could have been married off to Lord
Robert Dudley, a good catch for a royal bastard, and a good chance for them
both of a happy love-match.
Archbishop Cranmer, living to his allotted three-score
years and ten or beyond, could produce a third version of his two earlier
Prayer Books of 1549 and 1552, in the light of friendly criticism from
continental reformers whom he respected, like Peter Martyr, Johann Heinrich
Bullinger and Calvin. He would be succeeded as archbishop by Nicholas Ridley or
Robert Holgate, with energetic younger. reformers like Edmund Grindal ready to
make their mark and pick up good ideas from the best reformed churches of
Europe. The Scots immigrant John Knox, mellowed by an increasingly successful
career in the Church of England, would be appointed Bishop of Newcastle,
benevolently taking no notice of the advanced congregations in his diocese who
received communion sitting; this was a practice in any case increasingly common
throughout Jane's Church, despite Cranmer's grumbles. Cranmer's cherished
reform of the old popish canon law would be achieved; the primer and catechism
published at the very end of Edward's reign in 1553 would become the standards;
the Forty-two Articles would have been unmodified by Elizabethan hesitations about
relegating the significance of the sacrament of Holy Communion to that merely
of a symbolic repetition.
Out in the parishes, metrical psalms in the style of
Geneva would quickly have spread: these were the best secret weapon of the
English Reformation, making its public worship and private devotional practice
genuinely popular throughout increasing areas of the kingdom. This
congregational music would also take over in the cathedrals, now devoid of
choirs or polyphony, and with their organs (where they survived) used mainly
for entertainment in the Dutch fashion. The conservative nobility would
continue the sullen public compliance with religious change which they had
shown under Edward VI, their private celebration of ceremonial worship
tolerated as eccentricity, like the Lady Elizabeth's patronage of choral music
in her own chapel.
The traditionalist higher clergy would gradually die off
in senior church offices and the universities, with no possibility of
like-minded replacement: since the universities produced no major haemorrhage
of exiles in the 1560s, the Jesuits and other religious orders would find it
difficult to recruit potential clergy to train for their attempt to treat
Jane's England as a mission field. England would have become the most powerful
political player in the Reformed camp, with Cranmer a cordial if geographically
distant partner with John Calvin. It is powerfully symbolic that it was
Cranmer's son-in-law Thomas Norton who translated Calvin's Institutes into
English, and Cranmer's veteran printer Reyner Wolfe who published it. With a
Cranmer-Calvin axis, the profile of Reformed religion across the whole
Continent would have been changed, and with the help and encouragement of
Bishop Knox, the Reformation in Scotland might have followed a close path to
the Reformed Church of England.
That is the history that never happened. Instead, in 1558
Queen Elizabeth had to cope with the consequences of Mary's steadily more
successful effort to integrate a traditionalist comeback with the Counter-
Reformation's new dynamism. At home, Elizabeth wanted to conciliate
conservatives; abroad, she wanted to conciliate suspicious Catholic Spain and
France, and also to win friends among the Lutheran princes of Germany and
Scandinavia, who were increasingly hostile to the Calvinist and other Reformed
Churches to their south. At the same time, however, she was identified with the
Protestant cause by her birth, she had a team of advisers who were senior
administrators from Northumberland's regime, and she faced a triumphalist
Protestant grouping already creating a mythology of glorious resistance to evil
in the deaths of so many martyrs. Of these martyrs, Cranmer's name headed the
list. Elizabeth herself shows signs of having preferred his discredited first Prayer
Book of 1549 to his second of 1552, but virtually no-one at the time agreed
with her: to reintroduce 1549 was not practical politics.
For the rest, see: http://www.historytoday.com/diarmaid-macculloch/cranmers-ambiguous-legacy .
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