Thomas Cranmer

Thomas Cranmer was Archbishop of Canterbury for twenty-three years, wrote the Book of Common Prayer, and was burned at Oxford after recanting his recantations. He was a Cambridge don of no particular prominence until 1529, when he suggested that Henry VIII should canvass the universities of Europe on the legality of his marriage rather than wait on Rome - a procedural idea that made his career. He was made archbishop in 1533 and immediately annulled the marriage to Catherine of Aragon and validated the one to Anne Boleyn, whose family had promoted him. He then annulled that marriage too, and the marriage to Anne of Cleves, and it was Cranmer who had to take the evidence about Catherine Howard to the king, in writing, because he could not bring himself to say it aloud. His lasting work is liturgical. The prayer books of 1549 and 1552 put the whole of public worship into English in prose of a rhythm that shaped the language for four centuries; the marriage and burial services are still recognisable in modern use, and phrases from them are ordinary English. He also drafted the Forty-Two Articles, the basis of Anglican doctrine. Under Edward VI he moved the church decisively towards Protestantism; under Mary I he was tried for heresy, and after two years in prison signed several recantations of increasing abjectness. Mary had him burned anyway. At the stake in March 1556 he repudiated the recantations, said that the hand which had signed them should burn first, and held it in the flame. The scene is in Foxe's Book of Martyrs and did the Catholic restoration more damage than his life had.

• Lived: 1489 CE – 1556 CE
• Nationality: English
• Roles: religious_leader