Henry VIII's archbishop secretly married a Lutheran's niece while still a Catholic priest
Thomas Cranmer was a little-known Cambridge don when the Boleyn family helped make him Archbishop of Canterbury. Within months he annulled Henry VIII's first marriage and crowned Anne queen. He later gave England the Book of Common Prayer, then recanted his beliefs under Mary I, and withdrew that recantation on the day he died.
Born in 1489 at Aslockton in Nottinghamshire, a younger son of modest gentry, he was steered toward the Church while his eldest brother inherited the estate. He entered the new Jesus College, Cambridge, at 14, took eight years over his first degree, and became a fellow in 1515. Marrying a woman named Joan cost him that fellowship; when she died in childbirth the college took him back. Notes in his books show an early admiration for Erasmus and dislike of Luther.
From 1527 he worked on Henry's attempt to end his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. Sheltering from plague in 1529, he proposed polling university theologians across Europe instead of relying on the case in Rome, an idea that led to research backing the king's supreme authority in his realm. As ambassador to Charles V in 1532 he saw Lutheran Nuremberg, befriended the reformer Andreas Osiander, and married Margarete, his wife's niece, rather than keep a mistress as many priests did.
Appointed archbishop that autumn, he opened a court in May 1533, ruled the Catherine marriage contrary to God's law, validated Henry's union with Anne Boleyn, crowned her, and stood godparent to the newborn Elizabeth. Pope Clement VII provisionally excommunicated Henry and his advisers, Cranmer among them. Under Henry he moved cautiously, publishing the first authorised English service, the Exhortation and Litany; under the devout young Edward VI he went further, writing the first two versions of the prayer book and changing teaching on the Eucharist, clerical celibacy, images and saints.
When Catholic Mary I took the throne he was tried for treason and heresy. After more than two years in prison he signed several recantations, but Mary wanted him dead regardless. He was burned on 21 March 1556 after publicly renouncing those recantations. Foxe's Book of Martyrs made the scene famous, and the Thirty-nine Articles grew from his work.
Source: Thomas Cranmer
