AFTER reading this excellent book, it crossed my mind to see how Shakespeare dealt with the same drama. Henry VIII is a disappointing play its evasive, patriotic tone suggests John Major addressing Euro sceptics the closing eulogy of Elizabeth, which aims at Virgilian sonority, is closer to a Daily Telegraph leader on the queen's Jubilee.
In tact, only in most recent years since books such as Eamon Duffy's The Stripping of the Altars (also published by Yale) which showed how deeply England resisted her Reformation has this era been open to revision. It is not surprising the Reformation is England's 1916 Rising, a sacred base of her national myth. In 1530, she was a Catholic European country, Calais her only possession overseas in one generation, by 1560, she was a Protestant nation state, irksome outside authority shaken off, such sea pirates as Drake making their first trips abroad. Now, as England without even Calais returns to Europe, it is natural that she look honestly at the movement which carried her away. Although the names Duffy and MacCulloch suggest that, so far, this looking comes from the Celtic fringe.
Most of us have attended an Anglican service, probably for a wedding or funeral, and admired the language of the collect or tuned in to choral even song (BBC 3, Wednesday. 3 p.m.) and listened longer than we imagined we would. That was my only interest in this book to learn something about the man who composed such a serene liturgy. But Cranmer the writer cannot be divorced from Cranmer the archbishop who killed men for their beliefs and in turn was killed for his. He was probably not a very likeable man flexible to the point of bloodlessness but bloody decisive when Henry told him to do his duty the first archbishop of Canterbury to be married yet his wife was so rarely seen that rumour said he kept her in a box punched with airholes. Cautious as a tortoise, and as persistent, he saw the Reformation through.
Why did the Reformation happen? No one of any importance wanted it, King Henry least of all. The people fought it at every step. They ridiculed such puritan Protestant innovations as segregating the sexes at church, nick naming it "the Christmas game". As in Scripture when the Angel calms the visionary with the words "Fear not", Cranmer assured the people that nothing was really changing.
The chief pleasure of this book is its detail. Through it we see the revolution in slow motion 1542 Worcester Cathedral ordered to destroy the tombs of its local saints Oswald and Wolfstan 1548 blessed ashes, candles, palms banned 1550 stone altars replaced by tables. None of this was wanted by the people. Yet when the alternative came, when Bloody Mary made to marry Philip of Spain, the English horror of sudden change and outside interference proved to be still greater, and Cranmer's Anglican via media held.
Cranmer appears as one of nature's conservatives. That phrase, for example, which seems the essence of Anglicanism "In the midst of life we are in death" is traced to source it comes from Myles Coverdale's English version of Martin Luther's German version of an ancient Latin text. All was compromise, fusion, grafting, scissors and paste. Cranmer's monument, The Book of Common Prayer, derived from the Sarum rite of medieval England, the Mozarabic rite of Spain, and the Eastern Orthodox liturgy. All great art is compromise. Cranmer's made something simple, beautiful and strong enough to have survived four hundred years. Compromise involves loss, too. Cranmer changed the old marriage service, removed the wife's promise to be "buxom in bed and at board" and replaced it with the now familiar "to love and to cherish". That sort of change perhaps symbolises the English Reformation. {CORRECTION} 96072900053
