Thomas Cranmer (Bello) by Ridley Jasper

Author:Ridley, Jasper [Ridley, Jasper]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Bello
Published: 2013-06-05T23:00:00+00:00

17. Edward VI: The Book of Homilies

At Henry’s death, power passed into the hands of Hertford. Hertford immediately rode to Hertford Castle to fetch the young King, and brought him on 31st January to the Tower, where Cranmer and Wriothesley were waiting at the head of the Lords of the Council to welcome him on the drawbridge. The Council then held a meeting in the Tower, at which it was decided to entrust the supreme authority and the office of Protector to Hertford, who was soon afterwards created Duke of Somerset, although Henry in his will had appointed all the Executors of the will to act as regents during Edward’s infancy. Cranmer’s name stood first in the list of the sixteen Executors; but as usual he had fared badly as compared with other courtiers as regards financial gain. Under the will, he received 500 marks—£333 6s 8d—which was a large legacy, but less than the £500 which Wriothesley, Somerset, Paulet, John Dudley Earl of Warwick and Russell each received.1

Thus England passed from the dangerous tempests of King Henry’s time to the mild and halcyon days of King Edward VI. But though sixteen years later John Foxe described the transition in these terms, it was not seen in this light by Cranmer in 1547. One of Cranmer’s modern biographers has suggested that he welcomed the death of Henry as a great opportunity, and that as he hastened from Croydon to Whitehall on the night of 27th January, he rejoiced that the chance for which he had been waiting had come at last.2 But this is certainly wrong. The situation undoubtedly provided a great opportunity for a Protestant Archbishop who was determined to press forward with the Reformation, for Henry had lived long enough to set the course for a reforming policy, and the new Protector had for some time supported the Reformation; but Cranmer was not the man to seize this opportunity. Any man who would have been capable of doing so would have been burned or would have fled abroad in 1540 or 1543. The man who was Archbishop of Canterbury when Henry died was a man who had always been sympathetic to reform and was almost a Lutheran by conviction; but he was a man who had spent sixteen years as a servile servant of a despot, and had lost whatever capacity for leadership he may once have possessed.

The death of Henry caused Cranmer great distress. He would of course in any case have been obliged to show the appropriate grief in public, for even if he had believed that the Reformation could now free itself from the shackles which Henry had imposed, he could not have taken this attitude openly, or expressed any criticism of Henry’s policy. We can be sure that he agreed with Bale that it was sinful to criticize a King even when, like King John, he had been dead for more than three hundred years. But Cranmer expressed his grief at Henry’s death even when speaking in the strictest privacy to his secret friends.

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