On grounds of policy and morality alike the act was quite indefensible; but it is perhaps some palliation of his perjury that it was committed to satisfy the last urgent wish of a dying man, and that he alone remained true to the nine days’ queen when the others who had with him signed Edward’s device deserted her. On the accession of Mary he was summoned to the council—most of whom had signed the same device—reprimanded for his conduct, and ordered to confine himself to his palace at Lambeth until the queen’s pleasure was known. He refused to follow the advice of his friends and avoid the fate that was clearly impending over him by flight to the continent. Any chance of safety that lay in the friendliness of a strong party in the council was more than nullified by the bitter personal enmity of the queen, who could not forgive his share in her mother’s divorce and her own disgrace. On the 14th of September 1553 he was sent to the Tower, where Ridley and Latimer were also confined. The immediate occasion of his imprisonment was a strongly worded declaration he had written a few days previously against the mass, the celebration of which, he heard, had been re-established at Canterbury. He had not taken steps to publish this, but by some unknown channel a copy reached the council, and it could not be ignored. In November, with Lady Jane Grey, her husband, and two other Dudleys, Cranmer was condemned for treason. Renard thought he would be executed, but so true a Romanist as Mary could scarcely have an ecclesiastic put to death in consequence of a sentence by a secular court, and Cranmer was reserved for treatment as a heretic by the highest of clerical tribunals, which could not act until parliament had restored the papal jurisdiction. Accordingly in March 1554 he and his two illustrious fellow-prisoners, Ridley and Latimer, were removed to Oxford, where they were confined in the Bocardo or common prison. Ridley and Latimer were unflinching, and suffered bravely at the stake on the 16th of October 1555. Cranmer had been tried by a papal commission, over which Bishop Brooks of Gloucester presided, in September 1555. Brooks had no power to give sentence, but reported to Rome, where Cranmer was summoned, but not permitted, to attend. On the 25th of November he was pronounced contumacious by the pope and excommunicated, and a commission was sent to England to degrade him from his office of archbishop. This was done with the usual humiliating ceremonies in Christ Church, Oxford, on the 14th of February 1556, and he was then handed over to the secular power. About the same time Cranmer subscribed the first two of his “recantations.” His difficulty consisted in the fact that, like all Anglicans of the 16th century, he recognized no right of private judgment, but believed that the state, as represented by monarchy, parliament and Convocation, had an absolute right to determine the national faith and to impose it on every Englishman. All these authorities had now legally established Roman Catholicism as the national faith, and Cranmer had no logical ground on which to resist. His early “recantations” are merely recognitions of his lifelong conviction of this right of the state. But his dilemma on this point led him into further doubts, and he was eventually induced to revile his whole career and the Reformation. This is what the government wanted. Northumberland’s recantation had done much to discredit the Reformation, Cranmer’s, it was hoped, would complete the work. Hence the enormous effect of Cranmer’s recovery at the final scene. On the 21st of March he was taken to St Mary’s church, and asked to repeat his recantation in the hearing of the people as he had promised. To the surprise of all he declared with dignity and emphasis that what he had recently done troubled him more than anything he ever did or said in his whole life; that he renounced and refused all his recantations as things written with his hand, contrary to the truth which he thought in his heart; and that as his hand had offended, his hand should be first burned when he came to the fire. As he had said, his right hand was steadfastly exposed to the flames. The calm cheerfulness and resolution with which he met his fate show that he felt that he had cleared his conscience, and that his recantation of his recantations was a repentance that needed not to be repented of.
It was a noble end to what, in spite of its besetting sin of infirmity of moral purpose, was a not ignoble life. The key to his character is well given in what Hooper said of him in a letter to Bullinger, that he was “too fearful about what might happen to him.” This weakness was the worst blot on Cranmer’s character, but it was due in some measure to his painful capacity for seeing both sides of a question at the same time, a temperament fatal to martyrdom. As a theologian it is difficult to class him. As early as 1538 he had repudiated the doctrine of Transubstantiation; by 1550 he had rejected also the Real Presence (Pref. to his Answer to Dr Richard Smith). But here he used the term “real” somewhat unguardedly, for in his Defence he asserts a real presence, but defines it as exclusively a spiritual presence; and he repudiates the idea that the bread and wine were “bare tokens.” His views on church polity were dominated by his implicit belief in the divine right of kings (not of course the divine hereditary right of kings) which the Anglicans felt it necessary to set up against the divine right of popes. He set practically no limits to the ecclesiastical authority of kings; they were as fully the representatives of the church as the state, and Cranmer hardly distinguished between the two. Church and state to him were one.
Authorities.—Letters and Papers of Henry VIII. vols. iv.-xx.: Acts of the Privy Council, 1542–1556; Cal. of State Papers, Dom. and Foreign; Foxe’s Acts and Monuments; Strype’s Memorials of Cranmer (1694); Anecdotes and Character of Archbishop Cranmer, by Ralph Morice, and two contemporary biographies (Camden Society’s publications); Remains of Thomas Cranmer, by Jenkyns (1833); Lives of Cranmer, by Gilpin (1784), Todd (1831), Le Bas, in Hook’s Lives of the Archbishops of Canterbury, vols. vi. and vii. (1868), by Canon Mason (1897), A. D. Innes (1900) and A. F. Pollard (1904); Froude’s History; R. W. Dixon’s History; J. Gairdner’s History of the Church, 1485–1558; Bishop Cranmer’s Recantacyons, ed. Gairdner (1885). R. E. Chester Waters’s Chesters of Chicheley (1877) contains a vast amount of genealogical information about Cranmer which has only been used by one of his biographers. (A. F. P.)
CRANNOG (Celt. crann, a tree), the term applied in Scotland
and Ireland to the stockaded islands so numerous in ancient
times in the lochs of both countries. The existence of these lake-dwellings
in Scotland was first made known by John Mackinlay, a
fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, in a letter sent to
George Chalmers, the author of Caledonia, in 1813, describing two
crannogs, or fortified islands in Bute. The crannog of Lagore, the
first discovered in Ireland, was examined and described by Sir
William Wilde in 1840. But it was not until after the discovery
of the pile-villages of the Swiss lakes, in 1853, had drawn public
attention to the subject of lake-dwellings, that the crannogs of Scotland and Ireland were systematically investigated.
The results of these investigations show that they have little in common with the Swiss lake-dwellings, except that they are placed in lakes. Few examples are known in England, although over a hundred and fifty have been examined in Ireland, and more than half that number in Scotland. As a rule they have been constructed on islets or shallows in the lochs, which have been adapted for occupation, and fortified by single or double lines of stockaded defences drawn round the margin. To enlarge the area, or raise the surface-level where that was necessary, layers of logs, brushwood, heather and ferns were piled on the shallow, and consolidated with gravel and stones. Over all there was laid a layer of earth, a floor of logs or a pavement of flagstones. In rare instances the body of the work is entirely of stones, the stockaded defence and the huts within its enclosure being the only parts constructed of timber. Occasionally a bridge of logs, or a causeway of stones, formed a communication with the shore, but often the only means of getting to and from the island was by canoes hollowed out of a single tree. Remains of huts of logs, or of wattled work, are often found within the enclosure. Three crannogs in Dowalton Loch, Wigtownshire, examined by Lord Lovaine in 1863, were found to be constructed of layers of fern and birch and hazel branches, mixed with boulders and penetrated by oak piles, while above all there was a surface layer of stones and soil. The remains of the stockade round the margin were of vertical piles mortised into horizontal bars, and secured by pegs in the mortised holes. The crannog of
