How the King Named Cranmer As Archbishop of Canterbury, of His Sinful Life, and of How He Deceived the Pope1
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book 1, chapter 18 How the King Named Cranmer as Archbishop of Canterbury, of His Sinful Life, and of How He Deceived the Pope1 As the king’s crimes and misdeeds had become so hateful, our Lord elected to punish him by allowing him free rein to carry on, without hesitation or fear of anything. God took to himself that excellent man, William Warham, the arch- bishop of Canterbury, who had aided the queen’s cause with such fervor.2 At the request of Thomas Boleyn and his beloved Anne, the king gave the arch- bishopric to Thomas Cranmer, who had been Thomas’s chaplain, and later the king’s agent in Rome.3 This was the reason he was given the post, and because the king judged that his lifestyle and habits were such as could be useful in his ambitions, if the pope gave sentence in favor of the queen. Thomas Cranmer was a heretic, as will be seen later, for which he was burned in the time of Queen Mary; he was also an immoral man, of such lustfulness that while in Germany, he had seduced a maiden from the house where he was staying and carried her off to England.4 When he was archbishop, she was publicly carried through the streets in a litter wherever he went, and he kept her as his mistress until Henry’s death and the reign of his son, King Edward, when he married her in the sight of the entire world.5 This was the man the king chose as his minis- ter and named as archbishop and primate of his kingdom, to further his own 1 Sander, De origine ac progressu, 82–84. 2 On 22 August, just before standing trial for praemunire, Warham died of natural causes in Hackington, Kent. Scarisbrick, “Warham, William,” in odnb, 57:414. 3 Cranmer had joined Thomas Boleyn’s household by the autumn of 1529, subsequently be- coming one of Henry’s leading diplomats. He was appointed archbishop of Canterbury in 1533 with the Boleyns’ backing. See MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer, Chapters 3 and 4. 4 While on a diplomatic mission to Nuremberg in the summer of 1532, Cranmer stayed in the house of the reformed theologian Andreas Osiander (1498–1552). There he met Margarete (d. 1570s), the niece of Osiander’s wife; the two married soon after, but the nuptials were kept secret until the accession of Edward vi. Ibid., 71–72, 250. 5 This picaresque story originates in the polemical screed Bishop Cranmer’s Recantacyons (c.1556), probably the work of Harpsfield: “Like a peddler, he carried his goods in secret, so that at each junction, there was a box near at hand with the baggage.” Nicholas Harpsfield, Bishop Cranmer’s Recantacyons, ed. Richard Monckton Milnes and James Gairdner, Philo- biblon Society Miscellanies 15 (London, 1877–84), 8. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���7 | doi �0.��63/97890043�3964_0�4 <UN> How the King Named Cranmer as Archbishop of Canterbury 195 will—to which Cranmer so entirely conformed, in all that could please him, that years later the king was heard to say, “There is but one in my kingdom— Cranmer, archbishop of Canterbury—who has never strayed from my will.” But even though Cranmer was a man of this sort, to be more sure of him the king gave him the archbishopric on the condition that, if the Roman pontiff ruled in favor of the marriage with the queen, he, as archbishop and primate, would give a contrary sentence and declare against the pope that the king was obligated to divorce her. And because the king had not yet lost all shame before the Apostolic See, nor broken from it, Cranmer had to request papal confirma- tion of his position,6 and in the proper manner take the solemn oath used for the consecration of bishops: to adhere to the communion of the Apostolic See and to obey its commands. Lest he offend the king by this oath, or by it fail to attain what he sought, Cranmer searched for some means of serving two mas- ters, though they commanded contradictory things.7 And because he loved the king from his very heart (as a man like himself), but merely feared the pope, he chose to win the king’s favor by a willfully, deliberately false oath—so as to of- fend the pope all the more. Accordingly, he summons a notary public and tells him that he will swear the customary and canonical obedience to the Roman pontiff, but before doing so he wishes the notary to produce a separate docu- ment, in which he protests that he takes the oath against his will and that he will neither keep faith with the pope nor obey him in anything contrary to the king’s pleasure. When this codicil and protest had been written and authenti- cated before witnesses (so as to remove any suspicion of the king’s), he swore the solemn oath and took possession of his archbishopric.8 This was Cranmer’s Ribadeneyra may have (deliberately?) misunderstood his Latin source here: he translates Sander’s “cista” as “litera,” which generally refers to a litter, rather than a box. Sander’s impli- cation is one of secrecy, Ribadeneyra’s one of brazenness. Sander, De origine ac progressu, 84. Cf. Harpsfield, Treatise, 275. 6 Cranmer received papal confirmation of his appointment as archbishop on February 21, 1533. Scarisbrick, Henry viii, 310. 7 Matt. 6:24; Luke 16:13. 8 Cranmer was consecrated as archbishop of Canterbury at Westminster on March 30, 1533. Before the consecration oath, Cranmer insisted on making a prior protestation in Latin, which he did in the presence of a notary and three witnesses. This included the stipulation that “I Thomas, bishop-elect of the archbishopric of Canterbury, allege, say and protest, openly, publicly, and expressly with these writings, that […] it is not nor will it be my will or intention by such oath or oaths, no matter how the words placed in these oaths seem to sound, to bind myself on account of the same to say, do or attempt anything afterwards which will be or seem to be contrary to the law of God or against our most illustrious king of England, the commonwealth of his kingdom of England, or the laws and prerogatives of the <UN>.