Book Review: Belloc on Cranmer

Please note that I received a copy of this book, Cranmer by Hilaire Belloc from Mysterium Press, the publisher, in exchange for my review and comments. The book is sold in the USA by Os Justi Press, but is as of this writing Out of Stock! More to come, I presume.

Something important to note about this book: Belloc wrote it based upon the work of Professor Alfred W. Pollard, Thomas Cranmer and The English Reformation. A brief notice dated on the Feast of the Assumption in 1931 at the beginning of the book tells us:

This is not a life of Cranmer: it is but a study of his character and motives, with exposition of, and emphasis upon, his literary genius and its legacy to the Church of England. . . .

Belloc explains that he has based most of the facts he narrates "on the scholarship of Professor Pollard, as must everyone since the publication of his monograph, which treats of Cranmer as a "Hero of the Reformation."

So the facts are Pollard's but the interpretation is Belloc's, I presume. I have not read Professor Pollard's book. Belloc reserved the right to provide some notes "to such few errors as appear in that work and call for correction."

Table of Contents:

1. The Beginning

2. Cambridge

3. The Accidental Entry

4. The Testing

5. The Call

6. The Divorce to Order

7. The First Peril

8. Back to Heel

9. The Bible

10. The Hoodwinking of Henry

11. The Second Peril

12. Cranmer Set Free

13. The Resistance of the English

14. The Third Peril

15. The Ordeal

16. The Fire

One thing about Belloc we can be certain of is that he has definite opinions of the characters in his historical studies! In his analysis of Thomas Cranmer's life and career in service to the Tudors and the Reformation, Belloc is convinced that aside from his great artistry in English prose, Cranmer had few qualities to recommend him. As the publisher's blurb attests: "A timid, furtive, scholar, unduly raised to aid the king’s divorce, Archbishop Thomas Cranmer lived a double life. Under the penalty of public ministry he burned within – forced to put his best years into the system which he yearned in secret to destroy, and to send back to the continent his own unlawful bride." 

He failed as a diplomat for Henry VIII's Great Matter on the Continent when ambassador to the Court of the Holy Roman Emperor, he was wavering in his loyalty to people and causes, and his main goal in life seems, in Belloc's mind, to be protecting himself and surviving. Until the end, perhaps.

Evidences of this survival instinct offered by Belloc: Cranmer did nothing to save John Frith, condemned to being burned alive at the stake for denying the Real Presence (and the doctrine of Purgatory) in 1533, while Cranmer did not believe in the Real Presence (it would not have been convenient to admit it at that time!); Cranmer, anachronistically speaking, threw Anne Boleyn under the bus once it was clear that she was going to be declared guilty and executed (his first peril). At first he protested that he couldn't really believe she would have been so unfaithful to Henry but soon acquiesced to reality. Belloc proposes that when Cranmer visited Anne Boleyn he used a technique--previously used against poor Elizabeth Barton, the Nun of Kent in 1533--of seeming sympathy to extract more information. Belloc says that Anne Boleyn was convinced she'd be released and sent into exile in Antwerp at the end of her interview with Cranmer! Cranmer evaded disaster again when Cromwell fell--writing a letter to Henry VIII again to demonstrate that his fealty was to Henry VIII alone (his second peril).

Belloc emphasizes that even after Cranmer had rejected Catholic doctrine about the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and the Real Presence of Jesus in Holy Communion, adopting a Zwinglian (not Lutheran) view, while Henry VIII was alive, he celebrated Holy Mass consistently (although if he did not intend what the Church intends, none of those Masses was valid). He also notes that when Cranmer became the Archbishop of Canterbury, he was subservient to Thomas Cromwell, the Vicegerent of the King in Spirituals who took over administration of the Church in England (Cromwell had "supplanted the bishops" Belloc notes on page 109). Cromwell and Cranmer connive to sneak in Tyndale's English translation of Holy Bible against Henry VIII's objections to it, but Belloc wonders about Cranmer's frustration during the last years of Henry's reign as the King would not permit his changes in Catholic Church doctrine and liturgy. 

Once Henry dies, however, like King Hamlet's Ghost ("Unhousel'd, disappointed, unanel'd,/No reckoning made, but sent to my account/With all my imperfections on my head:/O, horrible! O, horrible! most horrible!") and without a tomb prepared, "Cranmer [Is] Set Free"! Edward Seymour becomes Protector and guardian of the minor, King Edward VI, who is raised as thoroughly Protestant and anti-Catholic. As Belloc notes, Cranmer's main target was the Catholic Mass as a Sacrifice. It must be destroyed and replaced, gradually, given the Common's devotion to it, but irrevocably. He made other changes in prayer and belief, detailed in the 42 Articles of the Church of England in 1553, but these never took effect because of the brevity of Edward's reign.

On pages 184 and 185, while describing Edward VI's Coronation, Belloc explains how Cranmer elevated Edward VI so highly above the Church in authority and power that he was nearly Divine--the Divine Right of Kings. At the same address, Cranmer told the bishops they were no longer the Successors of the Apostles; the sees they'd received from Henry VIII--not from the Vicar of Christ in Rome--were forfeit until assigned to them by the new Vicar of Christ in England, Edward VI. What a prevenient blow to the project of the Tractarian Movement centuries later!

When it comes to the 1549/1552 Book of Common Prayer, however much Belloc regrets the liturgical and doctrinal changes Cranmer made, he admits there's "a quality of literary beauty, of excellence in English prose, unsurpassed in anything before or since his time." After listing all Cranmer's bad qualities (hypocrisy, timer-serving, cowardice, timidity) and good qualities (suavity, courtesy, kindness, etc), Belloc praises one special talent: "He was a master of the Word, he possessed the secret of magic. He had been granted power in that which is perhaps the highest medium we know of expression among men, English at its highest." (pp. 198-199) Belloc highlights the Litany, the Collects, the prefaces and other prayers as treasures of England.

Finally, the illness and decline of young king Edward VI, and the plan of Duke of Northumberland to thwart Henry VIII's will and plan for succession to bring Lady Jane Grey to the throne after the former's death, bring about Cranmer's third peril. If the Princess Mary, a devout Catholic comes to the throne, all his work to change the religion of England would be lost, so he goes along with the plot.

Northumberland, Paget, Grey, and others did not account for the loyalty of the people to the rightful heir--nor with Henry Fitzalan, 12th Earl of Arundel (Belloc presumes) warning Mary of her arrest. They should have had her in custody before Edward died. As Belloc notes, however, even after Mary in declared rightful queen and begins her reign, she did not take immediate revenge--not until the Wyatt Rebellion. Then the executions (for those already found guilty of treason) and trials for heresy began.

In the last two chapters, "The Ordeal" and "The Fire", Belloc narrates the story of those heresy trials and of Cranmer writing his recantations of his denials of Catholic doctrine and practice, that is, of the heresies he had refused to adjure at trial, all in the hopes of saving his life after Ridley and Latimer and he had been found guilty of heresy, and after the other two bishops had been burned at the stake in Oxford. 

He seems to have repented with his pen most heartily. But when no pardon was given, he turned against all that repentance and went eagerly to the stake, running down Brasenose Lane, standing at the stake, repenting for his recantation, and holding his right hand that wrote that recantation "steadfastly into the flame. . . . till flame and smoke hid all. This is the way in which Cranmer died." (p. 255)

Belloc ends the volume there without commentary or analysis, which I find interesting. He lets Cranmer's last words and dying gestures speak for themselves. Otherwise, throughout the volume Belloc has provided the reader with thorough analysis of the all the controversies, plots, and events of Cranmer's involvement in Henry VIII's Great Matter, the rise and fall of queens, consorts, courtiers, and bishops, plots and negotiations, politics and policy, all his own masterful style. 

I certainly hope that Mysterium Press will be able to publish more of Belloc's biographies of English monarchs, etc., and that Os Justi will offer them in the USA.

Image Credit (Public Domain): Cranmer burning at the stake from Foxe's Book of Martyrs.