It was a somewhat curious concurrence of circumstances that transferred Cranmer, almost at one step, from the quiet seclusion of the university to the din and bustle of the court. In 1528 the plague known as the sweating sickness, which prevailed throughout the country, was specially severe at Cambridge, and all who had it in their power forsook the town for the country. Cranmer went with two of his pupils named Cressy, related to him through their mother, to their father’s house at Waltham in Essex. The king (Henry VIII.) happened at the time to be residing in the immediate neighbourhood, and two of his chief counsellors, Gardyuer, secretary of starte, afterwards bishop of Winchester, and Fox. the lord high almoner, afterwards bishop of Hereford, were lodged at Cressy’s house. Meeting with Cranmer, they were naturally led to discuss what was the absorbing question of the day, the king’s meditated divorce from Catherine of Aragon. The opinion of the future archbishop was given with the modesty that befitted an unknown man. He professed not to have studied the cause as the others had done; but it seemed to him that if the canonists and the universities should decide that marriage with a deceased brother’s widow was illegal, and if it were proved that Catherine had been married to Prince Arthur, her marriage to Henry could be declared null and void by the ordinary ecclesiastical courts. The necessity of an appeal to Rome was thus dispensed with, and this point was at once seen by the king, who, when Cranmer’s opinion was reported to him, ordered him to be summoned in these terms :—“I will speak to him. Let him be sent for out of hand. This man, I trow, has got the right sow by the ear.”

At their first interview Cranmer was commanded by the king to lay aside all other pursuits and to devote himself to the question of the divorce. He was to draw up a written treatise, stating the course he proposed, and defending it by arguments from scripture, the fathers, and the decrees of general councils. There is reason to believe that he entered upon the task somewhat reluctantly, but in the reign of Henry VIII. it was emphatically true that the king’s will was law, and no refusal was possible. His material interests certainly did not suffer by compliance. He was commended to the hospitality of Anne Boleyn’s father, the earl of Wiltshire, in whose house at Durham Place he resided for some time; the king appointed him archdeacon of Taunton and one of his chaplains; and he also held a parochial benefice, the name of which is unknown. When the treatise was finished Cranmer was called upon to defend its argument before the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, which he visited, accompanied by Fox and Gardyner. Immediately afterwards he was sent to plead the cause before a more powerful if not a higher tribunal. An embassy, with the earl of Wiltshire at its head, was despatched to Rome in 1530, that “the matter of the divorce should be disputed and ventilated,” and Cranmer was an important member of it. He was received by the Pope with marked courtesy, and was appointed “Grand Penitentiary of England;” but his argument, if he ever had the opportunity of stating it, did not lead to any practical decision of the question. Returning home through France and Germany, he had interviews in the latter country with the elector of Saxony and other Protestant princes.

It is usual to attribute to the influence of this Continental visit a further recoil in Cranmer’s mind from Roman Catholicism and an advance to what is now known as Protestantism. Now there are, it is true, indications that he was dissatisfied with much that he saw at Rome, and it is a probable conjecture that his intercourse with the German princes had some effect in modifying his doctrinal views. But it must be remembered that the modern idea of Protestantism and Roman Catholicism as two broadly marked, clearly divided, and antagonistic systems was only forming in Germany, and was all but unknown in England in Cranmer’s day. It would be unnecessary to state so obvious a truth, were it not for the seemingly ineradicable tendency of hasty thinkers to throw back familiar distinctions in religion and politics to a period when suc∙lι distinctions had not come into existence. The fact that Cranmer is persistently described as the “first Protestant archbishop of Canterbury,” which, if true at all, is true only in a very modified sense, shows the necessity for this caution.

Cranmer had only been a few months in England when he received a second commission from the king appointing him “Conciliarius Regius et ad Caesarem Orator.” In the summer of 1531 he accordingly proceeded to Germany as sole ambassador to the emperor, with the design of furthering the divorce. His mission was fruitless, but he did not at once return to England. At Nuremberg he had become acquainted with Osiander, whose somewhat isolated theological position he probably found to be in many points analogous to his own. Both were convinced that the old order must change; neither saw clearly what the new order should be to which it was to give place. They had frequent interviews, which had doubtless an important influence on Cranmer’s opinions. But Osiander’s house had another attraction of a different kind from theological sympathy. His niece Margaret won the heart of Cranmer, and early in 1532 they were married. In the case of a strong character like Luther, marriage implied an express practical rejection of the authority of Rome to impose celibacy upon priests; no such inference can safely be made in the case of Cranmer, whose character was weak and whose action was generally determined by the influences of the moment. Hook finds in the fact of the marriage corroboration of Cranmer’s statement that he never expected or desired the primacy; and it seems probable enough that, if he had foreseen how soon tha primacy was to be forced upon him, he would have avoided a disqualification which it was difficult to conceal and dangerous to disclose.

Expected or not, the primacy was forced upon him within a very few months of his marriage. In August 1532 Archbishop Warham died, and the king almost immediately afterwards intimated to Cranmer, who was still in Germany, his nomination to the vacant see. Cranmer’s conduct was certainly consistent with his profession that he did not desire, as he had not expected, the dangerous promotion. He sent his wife to England, but delayed his own return in the vain hope that another appointment might be made. How long he ventured to wait is uncertain, but when he arrived in England he found the arrangements matured for his consecration, his nolo episcopari” being unavailing against the king’s command. The papal bulls of confirmation were dated February and March 1533, and the consecration took place on the 30th March. One peculiarity of the ceremony has occasioned considerable discussion. It was the custom for the archbishop elect to take two oaths, the first of episcopal allegiance to tha Pope, and the second in recognition of the royal supremacy. The latter was so wide in its scope that it might fairly be held to supersede the former in so far as the two were inconsistent. Cranmer, however, was not satisfied with this. He had a special protest recorded, in which he formally declared that he swore allegiance to the Pope only in so far as that was consistent with his supreme duty to the king. The morality of this course has been much canvassed, though it seems really to involve nothing more than an express declaration of what the two oaths implied. It was the course that would readily suggest itself to a man of timid nature who wished to secure himself against such a fate as Wolsey’s. It showed weakness, but it added nothing to whatever immorality there might be in successively taking two incompatible caths.

In the last as in the first step of Cranmer’s promotion Henry had been actuated by one and the same motive. The business of the divorce had now become very urgent, and in tha new archbishop he had an agent who might be expected to forward it with the needful haste. The celerity and skill with which Cranmer did the work intrusted to him must have fully satisfied his master. During the first week of April Convocation sat almost from day to day to determine questions of fact and law in relation to Catherine’s marriage with Henry as affected by her previous marriage with his brother Arthur. Decisions favourable to the object of the king were given on these questions, though even the despotism of the most despotic of the Tudors failed to secure absolute unanimity. The next step was taken by Cranmer, who wrote a letter to the king, praying to be allowed to remove the anxiety of loyal subjects as to a possible case of disputed succession, by finally determining the validity of the marriage in his archiépiscopal court. There is evidence that the request was prompted by the king, and his consent was given as a matter of course. Queen Catherine was residing at Ampthill in Bedfordshire, and to suit her convenience the court was held at the priory of Dunstable in the immediate neighbourhood. Declining to appear she was declared contumacious, and on the 23d May the archbishop gave judgment declaring the marriage null and void from the first, and so leaving the king free to marry whom he pleased. In the whole proceeding, which had as much of the form as it had little of the spirit of justice, the archbishop’s subserviency was pitiful, and it is difficult to acquit him of the graver charge of knowingly pronouncing an unrighteous sentence.

The coronation of the new queen, Anne Boleyn, at which Cranmer officiated, took place on the lst June, little m*□re than a week after the sentence which deprived her predecessor of her rights. During that interval it is asserted by some authorities that the king and Anne were publicly married by the archbishop. This, however, seems unlikely. A private marriage had taken place in the previous November, or more probably in January. Hook conjectures that the later ceremony was not a repetition of the marriage, but merely an official and public recognition of it.

The splendid pageantry of the coronation made the marriage popular for a few days with the citizens of London, but a deeper current of feeling in the opposite direction soon set in. The deliberate judgment of the country was undoubtedly one of indignant disapproval, and it speedily found utterance through the pulpit—the chief organ of public opinion in the days when there was no press. So outspoken were the preachers in their denunciation of the king’s conduct that it was deemed necessary to silence them by an arbitrary exercise of authority. Cranmer’s very first act of episcopal jurisdiction was to prohibit all preaching within his own diocese, and to arrange for its restriction by the other bishops of his province. His conduct in this can, of course, only be fairly judged by the standard of his own time, but the forcible suppression of all preaching was a curiously inconsistent measure to be adopted, even from motives of political urgency, by the “first Protestant archbishop of Canterbury.”

Cranmer was little at court during the three years of Anne Boleyn’s ascendency there. The period was eventful, and he found abundant occupation in his ecclesiastical and parliamentary duties. He was an active promoter of the measures which led to the final breach with Rome. These included the appointment of bishops by the king alone without bulls or licences from the Pope, tho prohibition of the payment of Peter’s pence or other contributions to Rome, and the renunciation by the archbishop of the title of legate. The independence of the Church of England was finally asserted by the two Houses of Convocation in the declaration that “the bishop of Rome has no greater jurisdiction given him in this realm of England than any other foreign bishop,” and this statement may be held to embody the general result of Cranmer’s ecclesiastical policy as shown in the details just mentioned. It is to be noted to his credit that he pled for More and Fisher even after he had failed to persuade them to admit the royal supremacy.

Cranmer’s share in the divorce of Anne Boleyn in 1536 is perhaps less obscure than most things connected with that very mysterious transaction. When the king had made up his mind, the archbishop was summoned from Kent to Lambeth, where he was kept a virtual prisoner until he had indicated that he would be compliant. In a letter to Henry he pled generously for the queen, but the plea was robbed of whatever force it might have had by a closing sentence in which he stated his willingness to obey the king’s commands. The proceedings were gone through with the same hypocritical show of judicial formality as in the case of Queen Catherine, and on the 10th June 1536 the archbishop fulfilled his promise of obedience by declaring the marriage he had himself sanctioned to have been null and void from the first. It is urged in his favour that before doing so he had received from Anne a confession of some impediment existing before her marriage with the king which rendered the marriage invalid, but it does not appear in what the impediment consisted, and the plea can scarcely be accepted. Even if it could, few would be inclined to question the judgment of Hook that “of Cranmer’s conduct in the affair the less that his admirers say, the greater will be their discretion.” And this was not the last time in Henry’s reign that the archbishop stooped to act the same degrading part. In 1540 he presided over the Convocation that disannulled tho marriage with Anne of Cleves, which he had celebrated almost immediately before. To his next an 1 last interposition in the matrimonial affairs of the king no discredit attaches itself. When he was made cognizant of the charges against Catherine Howard, his duty to communicate them to the king was obvious, though painful; and his choice of the time and manner of his fulfilling it was both delicate to his royal master and considerate to the accused.

Meanwhile Cranmer was actively carrying out the policy which has associated his name more closely, perhaps, than that of any other ecclesiastic with the Reformation in England. Its most important feature on the theological as distinct from the political side was the endeavour to promote the circulation of the Bible in the vernacular, by encouraging translation and procuring an order in 1538 that a copy of the Bible in English should be set up in every church in a convenient place for reading, Only second in importance to this was the re-adjustment of the creed and liturgy of the church, which formed Cranmer’s principal work during the latter half of his life. The progress of the archbishop’s opinion towards that middle Protestantism, if it may be so called, which he did so much to impress on the formularies of the Church of England, was gradual, as a brief enumeration of the successive steps in that progress will show. In 1535 he corrected a second' edition of the book known as the King's Primer, the original composition of which has been attributed to him, and which was in several points Protestant in doctrine. In 1538 au embassy of German divines visited England with the design, among other things, of forming a common confession for the two countries. This proved impracticable, but the frequent conferences Cranmer had with the theologians composing the embassy had doubtless a great influence in modifying his views. He had not strength of conviction enough, however, to oppose out and out the reactionary statute of 1538, known as the Six Articles, or “whip with the six strings.” Foxe and others following him have indeed asserted that he did so, but Hook shows that the archbishop was present at the first and second readings of the bill, and also when it received the royal assent, while the only method of opposing it was to have absented himself. No doubt ho had and urged strong objections to it, but these must have been overcome in the end by the arguments or the authority of the king. During the period between 1540 and 1543 the archbishop was engaged at the head of a commission in the revision of the “Bishop’s Book,” or Institution of a Christian Man, and the preparation of the Necessary Erudition, known as the “King’s Book,” which was a modification of the former work in the direction of Roman Catholic doctrine. In 1543 was issued his translation of the Litany, which was substantially the same as that now in use, and shows his mastery of a rhythmical English style. In 1547 appeared the Homilies prepared under his direction. Four of them are attributed to the archbishop himself—those on Salvation, Faith, Good Works, and tho Reading of Scripture. His translation of the German Catechism of Justus Jonas, known as Cranmer’s Catechism, appeared in the following year. Important, as showing his views on a cardinal doctrine, was the Defence of the True and Catholic Doctrine of the Sacrament, which he published in 1550. It was immediately answered from the side of the “old learning” by Gardyner. From these and other works which need not be mentioned it is not difficult to fix Cranmer’s theological position. It may be best described in general terms as that of the historical High Church party in the Church of England, of which indeed Cranmer may be regarded as one of the chief founders. Transubstantiation was the discriminating doctrine between Romanists and Protestants in England, just as justification by faith was the discriminating doctrine in Germany; and it is to be noted that Cranmer did not renounce the dogma until after the death of Henry VIII. Ultimately, after much thought and controversy, he rested content with the acceptance of the fact of real presence apart from any theory, whether of transubstantiation or consubstantiation; and this course has...