Thomas Cranmer was Archbishop of Canterbury during the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI and, for a short time, Mary I. He published the first officially authorised vernacular service, the Exhortation and Litany. After the accession of the Catholic Mary I, he was put on trial for treason and heresy. Mary wanted him executed, and, on the day of his execution, he withdrew his recantations, to die a heretic to Catholics and a martyr. His death was immortalised in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and his legacy still lives on in the Anglican Statement of faith.
About Thomas Cranmer in brief
Thomas Cranmer was a leader of the English Reformation. He was Archbishop of Canterbury during the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI and, for a short time, Mary I. He helped build the case for the annulment of Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon. He published the first officially authorised vernacular service, the Exhortation and Litany. Cranmer promulgated the new doctrines through the Prayer Book, the Homilies and other publications. After the accession of the Catholic Mary I, he was put on trial for treason and heresy. Mary wanted him executed, and, on the day of his execution, he withdrew his recantations, to die a heretic to Catholics and a martyr. His legacy lives on within the Church of England through the Book of Common Prayer and the Thirty-Nine Articles, an Anglican statement of faith derived from his work. Not much is known about Cranmer’s thoughts and experiences during his three decades at Cambridge. Traditionally, he has been portrayed as a humanist whose enthusiasm for biblical scholarship prepared him for the adoption of Lutheran ideas which were spreading during the 1520s. He received his Doctor of Divinity degree in 1526 and died in 1527. He is buried in St Paul’s Cathedral, London. He died in 1489 at Aslockton in Nottinghamshire, England. His son, John Cranmer, inherited the family estate, whereas Thomas and his younger brother Edmund were placed on the path to a clerical career.
Their oldest son John died at the age of 25 in 1487. Their youngest son, Edmund, died in 1605 at age 30. He had a son, Thomas, who went on to become a priest and later a bishop. His wife, Joan, died during her first childbirth, and he was forced to forfeit his fellowship, resulting in his loss of his residence at Jesus College. To his wife, he married a woman named Joan. He began studying theology and by 1520 he had been ordained as one of the university’s preachers. In 1515 he was elected to a Fellowship of Jesus College and began studying the humanists, Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples and Erasmus. He finished his Master of Arts degree in three years. He married Joan in 1520 and was a priest until his death in 1528. He wrote and compiled the first two editions of the Book Of Common Prayer, a complete liturgy for the English Church. He also gave refuge to several Continental reformers to whom he gave refuge, he changed doctrine or discipline in areas such as the Eucharist, clerical celibacy, the role of images in places of worship, and the veneration of saints. His death was immortalised in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and his legacy still lives on in the Anglican Statement of faith. His family came from a well-established armigerous gentry family which took its name from the manor of Cranmer in Lincolnshire.
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