Saints, Sacrilege and Sedition: Religion and Conflict in the Tudor Reformations by Duffy Eamon

Author:Duffy, Eamon [Duffy, Eamon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2012-06-20T16:00:00+00:00

8

Archbishop Cranmer and Cardinal Pole: the See of Canterbury and the Reformation

Two Archbishops of Canterbury led the English Church during the most tumultuous twenty-five years of the sixteenth century. Both were reformers, dedicated to the renewal of the Church, both were long-term survivors in a murderous age of religious hatreds, both were taciturn men who hid their opinions from all but their closest intimates. But there the resemblance ends: they came from radically different social classes and they adopted diametrically opposed stands on the great dividing issues of the Reformation. Thomas Cranmer, the older of the two, probably needs little introduction. The key figure in the shaping of the English Reformation, his successive versions of the Book of Common Prayer gave the reformed Church of England its distinctive liturgical and devotional ethos and, just as importantly, some of its long-term doctrinal ambiguities. 1 And his death by fire at Oxford in March 1556, at the time an event surrounded in moral and political ambiguities would, in John Foxe’s retelling of it, become an iconic moment in the English Reformation and the retrospective discrediting of the Church and regime which had condemned him.

Reginald Pole, by contrast, is probably not much more than a name to most people. Yet, in their overlapping lifetimes, he was the more famous of the two, a European figure who was a prince both of church and state, being Henry VIII’s cousin and grandson of George, Duke of Clarence. As a young man he was groomed by Henry VIII for high office in the English Church, and received a magnificent humanist education at Henry’s expense, first at Oxford and then at Padua and Venice. 2 Exiled from England for his opposition to the English Reformation, Pole became the lynch-pin of the incipient Italian Reformation, the centre of a circle which included some of the finest spirits of the time – his circle included Michaelangelo. Many of this group, including Pole himself, accepted the doctrine of Justification by Faith, and two of his protégés, Peter Martyr and Bernardino Ochino, became prominent Protestants and enjoyed Cranmer’s patronage. 3 Pole presided over the opening sessions of the Council of Trent, but he was devastated by the Council’s rejection of Justification by Faith alone. Nevertheless he reconciled himself to the Council’s teaching, and he was offered the papacy by acclamation during the conclave of 1549–50. In 1554, the year after Queen Mary’s accession, Pole returned to England as Papal Legate to restore the country to Catholic communion, and it was under his jurisdiction that Cranmer was tried and burned.

Though their lives crossed and recrossed, there is no evidence that the two men ever met, and Cranmer is very unlikely even to have registered on Pole’s radar at all during the 1520s. But the pattern of both their lives was decisively set by the great cause which was troubling all England at the end of the 1520s: Henry’s urgent desire for a divorce from Catherine of Aragon. Theological opinion about the divorce

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