Honest Doubter
CRANMER is one of history's whipping-boys. Beaten by his schoolmasters as a child, bullied by Henry VIII and Northumberland as arch- bishop and finally burnt as a heretic by Mary, he has hardly been treated more kindly by posterity. Ever since his death historians have been squabbling over his soul, distorting his motives and misrepresenting his actions in the interests of religious or political propaganda. Hated by Roman Catholics as a renegade, at- tacked by nineteenth-century Whig historians as an instrument of Tudor despotism, he has been denounced alternately as an unscrupulous careerist and as a cowardly time-server who sold his soul to Henry V111.
Nor have his defenders been any less extreme in their claims. Protestant writers have tended to exaggerate his virtues, extolling him as a saint whose merits cannot be called in question without threatening the basis of the Reforma- tion. If modern historians have been less bigoted in their approach; they have been condescending. It is fashionable nowadays to see Cranmer as a slightly pitiable figure, well-intentioned but weak, pushed by fate into an uncongenial job for which he was temperamentally unfitted. Yet in spite of the volumes written about him, Cranmer's personality remains something of an enigma. His character is full of contradictions which cannot be resolved by any simple formula.
This is the first large-scale biography to appear since Pollard's over half a century ago. Mr. Ridley has not, it must be admitted, been able to unearth much fresh material—the details of Cranmer's life have been subjected to such intensive scrutiny in the past that there can be little left to discover. Nevertheless, by bringing together all the available evidence, he has suc- ceeded in reopening the question of Cranmer's personality. The great merit of his study is to bring out clearly the basic paradox of Cranmer's character—the curious mixture of subservience and integrity, pliancy and moral courage, which runs through all his behaviour. Again and again Cranmer gave way against his personal judgment to pressure from the king. He annulled three marriages for Henry in seven years, he adjusted himself without too much difficulty to the various shifts in religious policy throughout two reigns; he took part in the punishment of reformers under Henry and the removal of Catholics under Edward. he let himself be coerced by Edward and Northumberland into endorsing a change in the succession to the throne of which he disapproved.
Yet his personal bravery is also undeniable. He was capable of standing up to the king when the policy of expediency would have been to keep silent. He put in a dignified word for both Anne Boleyn and Thomas Cromwell at the time of their fall, he opposed Henry's use of monastic property for secular purposes and lie tried to resist the king's attempts to plunder the bishops. That he was not a man to flinch from unpleasant duties is clear from the fact that it was he who was detailed by the Council to break the news of Catherine Howard's infidelities to Henry VIII, while at the beginning of Mary's reign he declined the opportunity to escape abroad, although he knew that by staying he was risking almost certain death.
Mr. Ridley does full justice to this side of Cranmer's character. He refuses to accept the facile view that Cranmer was a coward and he
insists rightly on the courage of many of his actions. To explain the paradox, Mr. Ridley falls back on Cranmer's political ideology. He con- siders that the key to Cranmer's political be- haviour is to be found in his exalted concep- tion of royal authority, which led him to regard the commands of his sovereign as sacred. Cran- mer's reverence for the crown undermined his integrity by encouraging him to suppress his personal convictions in the interests of a mis- taken notion of obedience. In consequence, al- though he sympathises with Cranmer's dilemma, Mr. Ridley is forced ultimately to condemn him for being untrue to his principles, allowing him- self to collaborate with Henry against the promptings of his conscience, and becoming in the process 'the servile servant of a despot.'
Mr. Ridley is undoubtedly right to emphasise the importance of Cranmer's ideas of kingship and the extent to which they influenced his be- haviour. Nevertheless, his final judgment is almost certainly too harsh. It is anachronistic to blame Cranmer for acting on a principle which was accepted by the majority of his con- temporaries as an article of faith, and which re- mained the official doctrine of the Church of England for another century and a half. It is true that even in the sixteenth century it was recognised that princes should not be obeyed when their commands were manifestly wicked. But Cranmer's trouble was that often he could not decide whether Henry's policies were wrong in fact or only seemed so. And according to the generally accepted theory of the time, it was one's duty, whenever there was any possibility of doubt, to obey the king and leave the final judgment to God.
Mr. Ridley's interpretation does not make sufficient allowance for Cranmer's temperamen- tal infirmities—his intellectual doubts and hesi- tations. Cranmer's real weakness was not fear, although he readily confessed to lack of courage, or even excessive respect for the crown, but indecisiveness. Throughout his life he was tor- tured by doubt and uncertainty. He lacked con- fidence in his own judgment and suffered agonies of indecision before he could make up his mind. On the whole he was a man of scrupulous per- sonal integrity; he was anxious to do the right thing when he knew what it was, but too often he was incapable of deciding. To make matters Worse, he seems to have been at his weakest in argument. Whenever his mind was unsettled, he had difficulty in formulating his scruples. As a result he could easily be out-argued by a deter- mined opponent, especially when that opponent was also his king.
It is doubtful whether even at the very end of his life his beliefs were really fixed. Mr. Ridley puts forward convincingly the suggestion that his recantations before his death were inspired not so much by fear, as Cranmer himself alleged, as by a sudden resurgence of doubt. Under the demoralising impact of his trial, where he was out-argued again and again by his opponents, and his subsequent imprisonment, his faith in Protestantism would seem to have been shaken and until the moment came for him to die he could not make up his mind whether his judges might not after all have been right. If this interpretation is correct, Cranmer's courage is all the more admirable, for it represents the triumph of integrity over indecision. It is far easier to go to the stake, like Ridley and Latimer, for truths of which one is firmly con- vinced, than it is to be prepared t' die for one's doubts.
JAMES CARGILL THOMPSON
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