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"Blessed Lord, who hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning; grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest them … "

Thomas Cranmer, seated in an Oxford cell before a plain wooden desk, weary from months of trial, interrogation, and imprisonment, tried to make sense of his life. Before him lay the speech he was to give the next morning, a speech that repudiated his writings that had denied Catholic teaching.

Also before him was another speech, in which he declared the pope "Christ's enemy and antichrist."

Cranmer has often been accused of waffling, if not hypocrisy, but the decision he made the next morning—as much as his most famous and lasting work, Book of Common Prayer—settled the matter of where he really stood on the Reformation.

Cranmer was born 66 years earlier in Aslacton, Nottinghamshire. He attended Cambridge, became a fellow of Jesus College in 1510, and was ordained a priest. He threw himself into his studies, becoming an outstanding theologian, a man of immense, though not original, learning. In about 1520, he began joining other scholars who met regularly to discuss Luther's theological revolt on the Continent.

Cranmer's reform leanings remained merely academic until he was drawn into the politics of the day. In August 1529, King Henry VIII happened to be in a neighborhood Cranmer was visiting, and he ended up conversing with the king. Henry had been trying to figure out how to divorce his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, in order to marry his new love, Anne Boleyn. The king, impressed with Cranmer's reasoning, commanded Cranmer to write a treatise backing the king's right to divorce and then made Cranmer one of his European ambassadors.

In this capacity, Cranmer made a trip to Germany, where he met Lutheran reformer Andreas Osiander—and Osiander's niece, Margaret. Osiander's Reformed theology and his niece so appealed to Cranmer that, despite his priest's orders, he married her in 1532. Because of the complex political situation in England, however, he kept his marriage a secret for years.

In August 1532, the aged archbishop of Canterbury died, and by March of the next year, Cranmer was consecrated as the new archbishop. Cranmer immediately declared the king's marriage to Catherine of Aragon void from the beginning; he then declared valid the marriage to Anne Boleyn (which had secretly taken place in January).

Cranmer believed in royal absolutism, that his primary duty was to obey the king, God's chosen, to lead his nation and church. Time and again in Henry's rocky reign, Cranmer was ordered to support religious policies of which he personally disapproved, and he always obeyed the king.

In 1536, he became convinced by rather dubious evidence that Anne had committed adultery, and he invalidated the marriage. In 1540, he ruled that Henry's proposed marriage to Anne of Cleves was lawful—and when Henry sought a divorce six months later, Cranmer approved it on the grounds that the original marriage was unlawful!

But Cranmer wasn't a lackey. Time and again, Cranmer alone of all Henry's advisers pleaded for the lives of people who fell out of royal favor, like Sir Thomas More, Anne Boleyn, and Thomas Cromwell. He even publicly argued against Henry's Six Articles, designed to move the country back in a Catholic direction. But when the Six Articles were approved by Parliament, he went along with the king's policies.

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