1556 He had been Henry VIII’s Archbishop of Canterbury, a conscientious Protestant who worked out the arguments and tactics to support the annulment of the king’s marriage with Catherine of Aragon, and then the doctrinal and liturgical consequences of the split with Rome that followed. Under the evangelical regency of Henry’s son, the boy king Edward VI, Cranmer strengthened Protestant reforms in the English church, consolidating its identity as well as his own position.
Then the young king died of tuberculosis at the age of only fifteen. With the succession of Mary Tudor, it was pay-back time for the Catholics. Mary recognised the supremacy of the Pope, married Charles V of Spain in order to cut her Protestant half-sister Elizabeth out of the succession, repealed Edward’s religious laws, and had 284 Protestant reformers burned at the stake – among them Thomas Cranmer.
In his Actes and Monuments (1563), better known as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, that great chronicler of the Marian persecutions, John Foxe, tells the moving story of Cranmer’s last days. ‘Both English and Spanish divines had many conferences with him’, after which he ‘signed a recantation of all his former opinions’. This abject humiliation cut little ice with the queen, who (in Foxe’s brilliant formulation) ‘was resolved to sacrifice him to her resentments’.
Cranmer was expected to broadcast his backsliding. Instead he recanted his recantation, ‘refusing’ the Pope as ‘Christ’s enemy and Antichrist’ and reaffirming his doctrinal and liturgical beliefs. He was brought to the stake at the bottom of St Giles street, bound with a chain, and, as ‘the fire began to burn near him, he stretched forth into the flames his right hand which had signed his recantation, and there held it so steadfastly, that the people might see it burned to a coal before his body was touched’.
Yet his imprint on the Anglican Church has lasted to this day, not least his elegant solution to the furious debate over transubstantiation – the Catholic belief that Christ was really and corporally present in the Eucharist, and the extreme Protestant view that the bread and wine were symbolic only. Cranmer’s solution was that Christ’s body was indeed present in the consecrated elements, but spiritually rather than bodily.
Because of its clean, compact expression of complex ideas, Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer (BCP) of 1549 has infiltrated English literature almost as much as has the Bible. Its prose has proved impossible to modernise without lapsing into absurdity. For example, the petition to Christ in the BCP ‘Gloria’ goes:
O Lord God, Lamb of God, son of the father, that takest away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us: thou that takest away the sins of the world, receive our prayer. Thou that sittest at the right hand of God the father, have mercy upon us.
Which the latest modernisation of the BCP, Common Worship (2000), renders as:
Lord Jesus Christ, only Son of the Father, Lord God, Lamb of God, you take away the sin of the world: have mercy on us; you are seated at the right hand of the Father: receive our prayer.
You can see that the modernisers are trying to make the petition more ‘relevant’ to the 21st century – and especially to the ‘youth’ of our era. So out go the old-fashioned ‘thees’ and ‘thous’ and their appropriate verb endings. Fair enough. But also effaced are the relative clauses – presumably on the grounds that subordination makes the prayer too hard to grasp. As a result, Jesus Christ, who already knows that He takes away the sins of the world and is seated on the right hand of God, is told these things, as though in a newsflash. This is the clinching proof of Cranmer’s verbal power: to unpick it is to turn it into baby talk.