Who Was Thomas Cranmer?
Thomas Cranmer was born in 1489 in Aslockton, Nottinghamshire, and educated at Jesus College, Cambridge, where he immersed himself in the new humanist scholarship associated with Erasmus and in the biblical languages. He came to royal attention in 1529 through his suggestion that Henry VIII's case for an annulment from Catherine of Aragon be put to the universities of Europe rather than argued solely before the pope – an idea that suited Henry's purposes and launched Cranmer's rapid rise. In 1533 he was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury, a position from which he presided over the annulment, and then spent the following decades as the principal architect of the English Reformation under Henry VIII and Edward VI.
Cranmer's most enduring achievement is the Book of Common Prayer, first issued in 1549 and substantially revised in 1552, which replaced the Latin liturgy with English-language services built on Cranmer's own translations and compositions, many of which remain in use across the Anglican world. When the Catholic Mary I came to the throne in 1553, Cranmer was arrested, tried for treason and heresy, and, under sustained pressure during his imprisonment, signed a series of recantations renouncing his Protestant beliefs – the final ones going so far as to affirm papal supremacy and the doctrine of the Mass he had spent his career opposing.
On the day appointed for his execution, March 21, 1556, Cranmer was brought to make his recantation public before a large crowd. Instead, he renounced the recantations themselves, declared his Protestant convictions one final time, and was burned at the stake. According to the account given by John Foxe, as the fire was lit Cranmer thrust the hand that had signed the recantations into the flames, saying, “This hand hath offended.” Cranmer is significant for TLA because his life enacts, in a single biography, the structure of fall and restoration that his own liturgy places at the center of every act of Christian worship: a genuine failure, openly confessed, followed not by erasure of the failure but by a return that the failure does not get the final word over.
In Their Own Words
“This hand hath offended.”
– at the stake, March 21, 1556, per John Foxe“We have erred, and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep.”
– Book of Common Prayer, General Confession“Almighty God, unto whom all hearts be open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid.”
– Book of Common Prayer, Collect for PuritySelected Bibliography
- The Book of Common Prayer – 1549, revised 1552
- The Homilies – authorized sermons for parish use
- The Forty-Two Articles – 1553, basis of the later Thirty-Nine Articles