Foundations of the Anglican Church LXXIV

Martyrs Memorial, 

marking the site in 

Oxford where Thomas

Cranmer had been put

to death

I had mentioned in the previous post that Mary was savoring her revenge on Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer.  Cranmer had not only supported Henry in his divorce from Mary’s mother, Katherine of Aragon, but he had, as Archbishop of Canterbury and Primate of England, annulled the marriage which brought disgrace on both Katherine and Mary.  Mary was no longer Princess of Wales, nor even princess, but no more than a bastard daughter of the King, the Lady Mary.  For twenty years she was without rightful title, honors, or prospects for a royal marriage.  For twenty years she was harassed because of her loyalty to her mother and to her Catholic faith.  And while Henry was responsible, it was at Cranmer’s doing.  She not only would have her revenge, she would make him pay, toying with him as a cat might toy with a rabbit before killing it.

Mary came to the throne on July 19, 1553—twenty years and two months after Cranmer had annulled her parents’ marriage and changed the course of her life.  On September 14, of that year Cranmer was ordered to appear in Star Chamber where he was accused of treason for having supported Lady Jane Grey as Queen against Mary’s claims. He was remanded to the Tower of London as a prisoner.  When Mary came to the throne, Cranmer had advised other Protestant leaders to flee England but he himself determined to stay and fight for his reformation.  Cranmer was tried at the London Guildhall for treason—along with Lady Jane Grey, her husband, Lord Guildford Dudley and two of Dudley’s brothers.  He—and they—were found guilty and sentenced to death.  But Mary had other plans for her one-time nemesis than a traitor’s beheading.   In March 1554 Cranmer, along with Protestant bishops Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley, both of whom refused to conform to the old religion, were confined in the Bocardo Prison in Oxford where they were to be tried for heresy.  The punishment for heresy was far more dreadful than treason: being burned alive rather than being beheaded.  Cranmer and the others were allowed to sit and ponder their destiny in the Bocardo for seventeen months before being brought to trial.  All this time, Cranmer was still Archbishop of Canterbury—Mary not having deprived him of his See, though having entrusted the primate’s normal duties (such as her coronation) to Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester and her Lord Chancellor.  The trials of the three accused heretics began in September 1555 and all three were found guilty.  Ridley and Latimer were executed almost immediately after their trials—on October 16^th 1555.  Cranmer was brought to the site of the judicial murders and forced to watch as his two faithful collaborators were burned alive at the stake for their Protestant faith.  It was only the following month, November 1555, that he was officially deprived of his See. But Mary did not act quickly.  Indeed she toyed with him—he was moved from the Bocardo to the home of the Dean of Christchurch, the Oxford Cathedral and College.  Here he was treated not as prisoner but as a guest.  A variety of Catholic academics visited him and debated with him over issues of papal authority, Eucharistic doctrines, and purgatory.  Cranmer submitted to the authority of the Queen and accepted Catholic doctrine.  He attended Mass and asked for sacramental absolution.  But then on February 14, 1556 he was defrocked from the clergy and sent back to prison.  Being defrocked left him vulnerable to capital punishment and ten days later a royal writ for his execution on March 7^th was sent to the Mayor of Oxford.  Cranmer issued a recantation of his Protestant faith, accepting papal supremacy, purgatory, transubstantiation, Eucharistic Sacrifice and the doctrine that outside the Catholic Church there is no salvation.  He fully repudiated any Lutheran or Zwinglian doctrine.  The writ for his execution was put in abeyance.  By Canon Law, having recanted his heresy, he was to be spared.  But that would not satisfy Mary’s jealousy to make him suffer.  He was to die and it was to be by burning.   He was told to prepare a final statement affirming his Catholic faith that he was to proclaim from the pyre before it was set alight.  He did so.  But on March 21^st when he was taken to the same site where Ridley and Latimer had been burned five months earlier, he departed from the prepared text, repented of his recantation of Protestantism, and cast his right hand into the fire first—his penance for having signed the recantation with that hand.  As the flames rose around him he called “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit…I see the heavens open and Jesus standing at the right hand of God.”  This second phrase is taken from the martyrdom of Stephen in Acts 7.

It is unfair to try to sum up a life as complex as Thomas Cranmer but there are certain themes that emerge.  He was an ambitious man and while one aspect that that ambition was to advance the faith in which he believed, religious zealotry does not explain it all.   There was a certain duplicity in him.  He concealed both his having a wife and his Protestant leanings from King Henry knowing that his ideas would lead him, under Henry, at least to removal from office and possibly to the stake for his understanding of the Eucharist, of Masses for the Dead, of purgatory, and of the intercession of the saints.  Indeed, despite his personal beliefs, he had supported the Six Articles in 1539—articles that articulated a very Catholic understanding of the Sacrifice of the Mass as well as confession, clerical celibacy, and other Catholic perspectives.  Moreover, in addition to the duplicity there was certain instability to Cranmer’s faith.  He was no original thinker or even a critical thinker; he began with Luther’s theological position but over the years moved towards a more radical Swiss Protestantism without ever really understanding either position in depth.  Faith to Cranmer was more a matter of intellectual stimulation, or even titillation, than inner experience.   When Edward came to the throne, he could express his Protestant views and indeed create a magnificent liturgy that celebrated that theology, but he also was disloyal to Henry’s wishes regarding the regency and broke his oath to the old King regarding as to how the Kingdom was to be administered and how the succession to the Throne was to be arranged during the minority of the new King.    When Mary came to the throne he did not flee even though he advised others to do so, but his recantation of all he had worked for and done for twenty-three years in a desperate hope to save his life, shows a certain lack of spine.  Only when he realized that he was damned either way did he stand up for his Protestant principles.  I don’t think he was insincere, but I think for Cranmer faith was more a matter of intellectual assent than personal commitment.  He has been made a hero, the closest thing they can manage for a saint, by the evangelical wing of the Church of England but in fact I think there was less to Cranmer than meets the eye.  He was too vacillating to be a hero; a martyr yes, but a most reluctant one.  It cannot be denied however that he was a master of the English language, second only to Shakespeare in the ability to create elegant and pithy phrases that draw from the depths of the human heart and can make the soul soar.  All in all, while he was most talented he was no better a man than many—most—of the bishops of his day, Protestant or Catholic, a climber, a theoretician, a man of ideas more than deeds, a disappointment.  He was not a bad man but he lacked a certain compass that a man of faith would have.  When you think about it, a self-indulgent narcissist wearing the crown and a sycophantic dilatant wearing the miter was no way to begin a Church.  But then they didn’t begin the Church of England—it was an ancient Church going back into mists of early Romano-Britain—and its rich heritage would sustain it even through the troubled times of Henry and Edward and Mary.  And to be fair, Thomas Cranmer contributed to that rich heritage by the magnificent Prayer Book that he created to replace the beautiful but archaic rites that had preceded it.  All in all then I think we have a man whose moral compass kept pointing towards power rather than towards true north and who was more articulate than intellectual, a man of his time rather than a man for the ages, but no worse than many of his contemporaries and better than most.  

Foundations of the Church of England, LXXIII

The "cathedra" of Saint
Augustine, the seat of
the Archbishop of
Canterbury in his
cathedral. 

Reginald Pole was the grandnephew of Edward IV and Richard III, the great-great-great-great grandson of Edward III and one of the few Plantagenets to survive the War of the Roses.  His mother, Margaret Pole—through whom he had the royal blood—was the 8^th Countess of Salisbury and one of only two women in 16^th century England who were peers in their own right (as opposed to sharing their husband’s titles.)   He was born at Stourton Castle on March 12, 1500.  He was educated by the Carthusians at Sheen and matriculated at Magdalene College, Oxford where he received his BA in 1518.  Although not yet ordained a priest (he would not be ordained for many years to come) he was given a number of prelacies by Henry VIII, including the Deanery of Exeter Cathedral and a canonry at York.  He studied Law at Padua where he fell in with a group of ecclesiastical reformers including Peter Martyr Vermilgi who would be one of the chief advisors to Cranmer in the English Reformation.  Henry VIII financed his studies and in return Pole represented the King’s cause for divorce from Queen Katherine to the faculty of the Sorbonne. 

While Pole was willing to argue in favor of the required annulment of the King’s marriage to Katherine, he saw early on where the royal policy was headed.  When Wolsey fell, Henry offered Pole the choice between the Archbishopric of York (the number 2 Churchman in England) or the Bishopric of Winchester (the richest bishopric), but Pole declined and went abroad for more studies.  He did return briefly but in 1536, realizing that he was going to be required to foreswear his loyalty to the Pope, he left England into voluntary exile.  Pole saw the problem—and saw it correctly—as the King’s fracturing the Unity of the Church and while he might support the royal divorce and other policies of Henry, he could not go against the unity of the Body of Christ.  Henry took revenge on Pole whom he regarded as ungrateful for all the King had done for him.  His older brother Henry, Baron Montagu, and his mother, Margaret, Countess of Salisbury, were both executed for treason, their only “treason” being Reginald’s refusal to accede to the King’s claim to be Head of the Church.  The Spanish Ambassador, Eustace Chapuys, tried to arrange for a marriage between Henry’s daughter, Mary (the grand-daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella and niece of Chapuys’ master, Charles V) and Pole which—given Pole’s royal descent and Plantagenet blood—would have had great dynastic legitimacy: more than any other child of Henry’s could claim.  Pole was not interested however as he saw his future in the Church.  Moreover, it was all theory as Henry would not allow Pole to return to England and he would not permit Mary to go abroad.

Paul III made Pole a Cardinal in 1537, though he was only in deacon’s orders.  He was commissioned to try to organize support for the “Pilgrimage of Grace,” a popular uprising against Henry’s suppression of the monasteries and break with Rome.  The “Pilgrimage” was a desperate failure and this was probably the cause for Henry’s vengeance on Henry Pole and the Lady Margaret.  Henry tried, unsuccessfully, to have Pole assassinated.

Reginald Pole, meanwhile, was appointed one of the three papal legates for the Council of Trent.  His support for the doctrine of justification by faith led to accusations of heresy, but nothing came of the charges.  Indeed in the conclave of November 1549-February 1550, Pole was almost elected Pope, being only two votes short of the required 2/3 majority.  As it turned out, the opposition of the French King and his cardinals, moved the election in another direction, but Pole maintained his influence and reputation—especially given the scandalous behavior of Cardinal Giovanni del Monte who had been elected as Julius III. 

Pole had been appointed Papal Legate to England as early as 1537 but was unable to take up the post as Henry had broken communion with the See of Rome and was not interested in having a legate.  Moreover, Pole’s role in supporting the Pilgrimage of Grace had left him attainted for treason as well as costing his mother and brother their lives as we have seen.  However with the death of Edward in 1553 and Mary’s accession to the Throne, Pole was now welcome in his native land to reconcile it to the Church.

Well, actually, welcome but not quite yet.  Mary and the Emperor Charles V both feared that Pole would oppose—and try to block—the marriage of Mary to Charles’ son, Philip, which, as we saw in an earlier post, was part of Mary’s strategy to provide a Catholic heir in place of her Protestant half-sister, Elizabeth.   Mary and Charles were correct in their estimation and Pole was opposed to the marriage, but the Queen was successful—with Charles’ help—in delaying Pole’s ability to reach England until November 20, 1554: sixteen months after Mary’s accession and four months after the marriage. 

As Legate Pole had extraordinary authority.  He was no mere nuncio but had quasi-papal powers, a sort of vice-Pope for England.  The major roadblock to reconciling the Church of England to the Roman Communion involved the extensive properties Henry had confiscated from the Church, especially in the suppression of the monasteries.  These lands had been handed out to the King’s political allies and the powerful magnates who now held these lands did not want to loose them.   They would never support a return to Rome if the price came at the loss of their estates.  Pole knew he had to cut his losses and accept the fact that the great wealth of the Church had been severely reduced.  He also believed that in time the Church would regain land and wealth as new bequests were made.  Had Catholicism taken root in England again that may have been the case, but the Marian restoration was all too short. 

On November 30, 1554, ten days after his arrival back in England, the papal legate lifted the excommunications and restored the Church of England to the Roman Communion.  It would last less than five years. 

Mary, for her part, was savoring her revenge on Archbishop Cranmer who was imprisoned but whom had not been deprived of his See of Canterbury.  In November Mary had him deprived of his bishopric and named Pole as his successor.  Pole, though a Cardinal, was not yet a priest.  He was ordained on March 20, 1556 and on the 22^nd was consecrated as Archbishop of Canterbury.

Mary was ramping up her persecution of Protestants by this time and Pole cautioned her to moderation, but without much success.  Pole himself tended to be very lenient with those accused of heresy, pardoning those whose appeals reached him but Pole’s health was failing and his tenure as Archbishop was not marked by an aggressive approach to Catholic restoration.   

Foundations of the Anglican Church LXXXI

Martyrdom of Bishop Hooper 

Back to the reign of Mary and the fate of the Reformers in that reign.  Mary was not the fanatical Catholic that John Foxe in his famous Actes and Monuments (aka “Foxe’s Book of Martyrs”)  and his literary heirs, the 19^th century Evangelical Anglican authors, would make her out to be.  But she was a tormented soul, and her torment caused pain—real pain—for countless of religious dissenters.

Remember that for the first seventeen years of her life she had been not only a royal princess, but the heir-apparent to the Throne of England.  On an even more important foundation, for the first ten years or so of her life she enjoyed the security of her parents having a reasonably loving marriage.  When she was bout thirteen that marriage was souring fast, and Mary found herself torn between the conflicting interests of her two parents.  At this period of life she began to experience severe menstrual issues that may have been—it is too late for an autopsy—due to the stress of seeing her parents’ marriage fall apart and her own future cast in doubt.  Her father, whom she adored, “didn’t want” her as Queen to succeed him.  He loved a yet-to-conceived son over a daughter whom he had fashioned into an elegant and learned woman.  When Archbishop Cranmer—and this key people, pay attention—annulled her parents’ marriage, Mary lost the Title “Royal Highness,”  and her status as a Princess.  She was now simply The Lady Mary, the King’s bastard.  This is a difficult comedown, and if so for an English Princess, even more for an Infanta of Spain, granddaughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, the founders of the Spanish Empire and the most powerful (as well as the most blue-blooded) royalty of Europe.   All of a sudden her prospects for a marriage of rank and a life of privilege disappeared.   Her father appointed her a Lady-in-Waiting the little Boleyn baby that had taken her place in history.  That was humiliating, but what was far more painful is that he separated her from her mother in an attempt to force both Mary and Katherine to acknowledge the annulment, the Boleyn marriage, and the succession of the new Princess, Elizabeth. 

When Mary came to the throne she freely promised not to disturb the consciences of any of her subjects.  Moreover, as we have seen, bishops and clergy—even those who had supported Cranmer’s Reform—were allowed to remain in their Sees and Benefices (and many promoted) providing they were willing to give up their wives, and return to Catholic doctrine and practice.  One has to admit that the clergy of the Church of England were, for the most part, more committed to their having a job than having a wife.  But even today how many marriages falter on career vs. commitment? 

Remember:  Mary had a score that she was determined to settle and that was with Archbishop Cranmer, the man whose toadieness to her father, had broken her mother’s heart and taken away her own happiness for over twenty years.   Mary was going to make the Archbishop pay.  We will get to that in a future posting as Cranmer’s role in the reign of Queen Mary deserves an entry—at least one—of its own.

In 1554, as part of the negotiations to readmit the Church of England to the Roman Communion, the old Heresy Acts were revived.  Mary had already arrested the handful of Protestant bishops who would not back down on Cranmer’s Reforms.  She now prosecuted them and had them executed.  As the reign went on—and we will look at this—Mary seems to have become more and more impassioned against the religious changed that had taken place in England.  There are a number of reasons for this, but one of the leading reasons undoubtedly was her increasing anxiety that she would not be able to provide a heir to the throne and the Crown would go to her Protestant sister Elizabeth who would restore the Protestant faith.  Mary was determined to keep England Catholic, even after she died.

It was only in 1555, two years after her coming to the throne, that persecution of Protestants broke out in force.  In the remaining three and a half years of her reign, about 300 ordinary Englishmen died in defense of their Protestant faith, most very cruelly by being burned “at the stake.”  In the big picture Mary was no more “bloody” than had been her father or would be her sister in the days of their having worn the crown.  But the memory of the “Marian Martyrs” long provided grist for the mill of anti-papalism in England.   

Foundations of the Anglican Church LXXIX

Bonner's Cathedral of Saint Paul's

London--this cathedral was 

destroyed in the Great Fire of 

London in 1666 and replaced by 

Christopher Wren's masterpiece.

Another bishop on whom Mary depended in her program to restore England to the Catholic faith was Edmund Bonner.  Bonner had pretty humble beginnings.  His father was a woodsman or a lumberman in Worcestershire.  He studied law—not at the Inns of Court, which was common for a person who intended to follow a career in law, but at Oxford, earning degrees in both the Civil and Canon Law.  He was ordained quite young—perhaps as young as 22.  He was in the employ of Cardinal Wolsey and loyally stayed with him when he was arrested and accompanied the Cardinal on his trip to London to face the wrath of Henry (a wrath fanned into fury by Anne Boleyn who resented Wolsey’s attempts to break her ambitious relationship with the King.) It was a dangerous thing to do—to stay with the Cardinal in his time of disfavor.  Wolsey was fortunate enough not to make London but to die on the way—at Leicester Abbey, an Augustinian foundation just about halfway from Wolsey’s See at York to London where Henry—and the Tower—awaited him.  Bonner was with the Cardinal when he died. 

Cromwell scavenged the remnants of Wolsey’s service for what talent could go for the King’s work and Bonner found himself in the royal employ.   He was sent to Rome in 1532 to try to forestall action against Henry in the Roman Curia and in a 1533 meeting with Clement VII at Marseilles (where the Pope was conferring with Henry’s current foe, Francis I of France) Bonner threated the Pope with appealing over the Pope to a General Council for an annulment for Henry.  Clement was furious and Henry never got around to the appeal, choosing schism instead.  Bonner served Henry on embassies both to Charles V and to the French court and he made contact with the German Lutherans with whom he showed some doctrinal sympathy.  As an ambassador, Bonner could be quite abrasive and his tendency to get in altercations with his hosts did not help him achieve his diplomatic goals.  Yet this didn’t displease Henry who had a particular antipathy for the French.  Bonner also went out of his way to alienate Stephen Gardiner who had preceded him as ambassador in Paris and about whom he, Bonner, filed a highly critical report. 

Bonner oversaw the printing of “The King’s Great Bible” at Paris while ambassador to the French Court.  Myles Coverdale, later Bishop of Exeter and strong proponent of Protestant doctrine and worship in the reign of Edward VI, had provided this English translation under the sponsorship of Henry for use in the services of the Church of England.  (Henry had retained the Latin Mass throughout his reign, but much like the first introduction of the vernacular in the Catholic Church at the time of the Second Vatican Council, the custom of reading the Epistle and Gospel in English—after they had been read in Latin—was to pave the way for greater changes yet to come.)  Henry (and his Protestant-leaning minion, Thomas Cromwell) were quite impressed at Bonner’s performance with getting the Bible printed and rewarded him with the Bishopric of Hereford.  As he was still in France, however, he could neither be consecrated or take possession of his see and Henry moved him to London in 1540 where he was consecrated according to the old rites which would remain unaltered in the time of King Henry. 

Bonner had been trained in law, not theology, and he had never shown much interested in the finer points of doctrine. Indeed, if anything he seemed to lean towards a version of Lutheranism.  Yet once in his diocese he became an implacable religious conservative.  When the wind blew in a more traditionalist direction after the execution of Thomas Cromwell, and Parliament passed the Six Articles, Bonner began an earnest persecution of all those in his diocese who did not adhere strictly to Catholic Doctrine on Transubstantiation, on purgatory, and on the cult of the saints. 

The death of Henry and the accession of King Edward changed everything.  Within a few months of the new King’s accession a set of injunctions had been drawn up for reform in the Church and the bishops were entrusted with the task of seeing that they were carried out in their cathedrals as well as in the parishes of their diocese.  The injunctions required

1.    all images were to be taken down

2.    stained glass, statutes, and shrines were to be dismantled

3.    rood screens, their lofts, and the rood beam with its cross and figures of John the Apostle and the Virgin Mary were to be destroyed

4.    vestments were abolished and were to be burned or sold

5.    sacred vessels were to be melted down and replaced by pewter or silver cups and tankards

6.    processions were banned

7.    the use of ashes on Ash Wednesday, Palms on Palm Sunday, and candles on Candlemas was done away with

8.    chantries (mortuary chapels) with endowed masses for those buried there were abolished

9.    masses for the dead were abolished.   

The bishops were responsible to see that these directives were carried out in their respective dioceses, but the Council appointed visitators to go around the kingdom to make sure the changes had been carried out.  Bonner refused to implement the changes and resisted the idea of visitors coming to his diocese.  As London was the national capital, the Council could not afford dissent there. He was arrested and imprisoned in the notorious Fleet Prison.  There he changed his strategy and gave in to the visitation so as to be released and take his seat in Parliament where he could fight the new laws.  His resistance to the Prayer Book of 1549, however,  led to his being deprived of his see and imprisoned for the remained of King Edward’s reign.

Mary, on her accession, freed him and restored him to this See.  Bonner vigorously sought to restore Catholic doctrine and practice but had a rough time of it.  During his imprisonment, Edward’s Bishop of London, Nicholas Ridley, had pretty thoroughly destroyed what elements of Catholicism were left.  Not only had the stone altars been smashed in the London churches, the crosses and crucifixes torn down, the images of the saints ripped from their niches, but more important, Londoners had been well catechized in the Reformed Religion. 

Protestantism appealed to the merchant class and London was a merchant citu.  Protestantism was a religion that showed an appreciation for critical thinking and intellectual pursuits.  It was not a matter of blind authority and ancient traditions that no longer made sense.  Protestantism was rational, a thinking man’s religion.  There was no room for superstition.  Moreover it was economically rational. One didn’t put good money into silk vestments or silver crosses or gold chalices.  One gave to the poor.  One endowed schools.  And one re-invested one’s money for greater profit.  This was a religion for Londoners.  And when Bonner came back to his diocese after an absence of six years, the damage had been done.  Bonner did what he could do to repair the churches for Catholic worship again but he never won the confidence of the Londoners.  Even worse, he undertook a fierce persecution of Protestants, searching them out, trying them in ecclesiastical courts, and subjecting them to torture and being burned at the stake.  He was responsible for some of the worst excesses of “Bloody Mary’s” reign. 

Unlike Gardiner who predeceased Mary, Bonner lived well into Elizabeth’s reign.  He refused to swear to her supremacy over the Church.  Although he sat in her first Parliament where he spoke against her policy of reintroducing Protestantism, he was deprived of his See and imprisoned by the end of her first year on the throne.  Although many called for his death in retaliation for those martyred under his authority for their Protestant faith, he was never executed.  He remained imprisoned under somewhat genteel terms and every four months was given a new opportunity—which he always refused—to swear to the royal supremacy.  He died eleven years into Elizabeth reign. 

I notice that I have quite often used the term “Protestant” here and I need to clarify that term as I am not using it in the somewhat generic sense that we use to cover everything from a Swedish Lutheran to a Pennsylvania Dutch Mennonite.  The problem is that the other-than-Catholic movement in the Church of England was not stable through this period.  Phase I which might be thought to be 1520-1540 leaned towards Lutheran thought.  Phase II, which we shall mark as 1540 to the accession of Elizabeth in 1558 leaned more to the Swiss model but I wouldn’t say “Calvinist.”  It was sort of a generic Swiss/Strasbourg variety influenced heavily by Martin Bucer, the Strasbourg reformer who had taken refuge in England between 1549 and 1551, but also drawing on Bucer’s friends among the Swiss, especially Zwingli.  Phase III which will be the reign of Elizabeth will see a real struggle between the Puritan party who are definitely Calvinist and the more moderate party which would have favored the more middle of the road sort of theology typified in the reign of Edward VI.  The Puritan party was to win out, though Elizabeth herself was definitely a theological moderate.  But all that is still away off in our entries.