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Candles flickered in the darkness as Thomas Cranmer, seated before a plain wooden desk, tried to make sense of his life. It was the night of March 20, 1556. He sat alone and confused in an Oxford jail cell, weary from months of trial, interrogation, and imprisonment. Before him on the desk were strewn a number of official documents.

There were 14 copies of his fifth recantation, in which he had repudiated the heresies of Martin Luther. The Spanish friars had asked him to sign them before morning so they would have sufficient copies for the printers. Though Cranmer had refused to do so the previous night—he had signed one, wasn’t that enough?—now he debated whether to put his name to them.

Next to these 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 a different version of the same speech, which he had just finished composing. After declaring his faith according to the Nicene Creed, the speech swerved sharply: in it he called the pope “Christ’s enemy and Anti-christ.”

Cranmer agonized. Which speech should he read on the morrow? Which speech represented what he really believed?

His critics—and there were many—had accused him for years of hypocrisy; he was a cowardly archbishop who flip-flopped at crucial moments to curry favor with his king. That wasn’t the way Cranmer saw it, but he had to admit it would be hard to interpret the last few months in any other way.

At 5:00 a.m., the exhausted, solitary prisoner, weary of internal debate, brought himself to sign the 14 copies of his recantation. He noted it was four hours before he was to be escorted to the stake and burned alive.

Cranmer was born 66 years earlier in simpler times, on July 2, 1489. Aslacton, Nottinghamshire, far from the intrigue of court life, was his home, and his father, Thomas, belonged to the lowest rank of gentry. He had only enough property to endow his eldest son, so Thomas and his younger brother were destined for church work.

Later in life, Cranmer would blame his “marvelous severe and cruel schoolmaster” for his lack of ability in studies; still, Cranmer attended Cambridge in 1503 and in 1510 became a fellow of Jesus College.

When he fell in love and married a relative of the landlady of the local Dolphin Inn, he lost his fellowship (which was given only to celibates). But his wife, Joan, died in childbirth within a year of their wedding, and Jesus College restored Cranmer to his fellowship.

He now became ordained as a priest and threw himself into his studies, becoming an outstanding theologian, a man of immense, though not original, learning. In about 1520, he joined some scholars who met regularly to discuss Luther’s theological revolt on the Continent. In the group, dubbed “Little Germany,” were many who would play key roles in the coming decades of the English Reformation, including William Tyndale, Robert Barnes, and of course, Cranmer, who already by 1525 had included in his prayers one for the abolition of papal power in England.

Cranmer’s leanings toward reform would have remained merely academic had he not been drawn into the politics of the day. In August 1529, King Henry VIII happened to be in a neighborhood Cranmer was visiting, and Cranmer ended up conversing with two of the king’s councilors. For two years, Henry had been scheming: how could he be freed from his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, in order to marry Anne Boleyn? Cranmer told the councilors he believed that the king had the right to divorce Catherine and that the king should seek out English theologians who could firmly establish his case. Henry summoned Cranmer for an interview and commanded him to write a treatise backing the king’s right to divorce and defending it with arguments from Scripture, the church fathers, and church councils. Cranmer took up residence at Durham Palace, the home of Anne Boleyn’s father, and finished the treatise. But before he could defend it publicly, he was appointed to an embassy dispatched to Rome to lobby for the divorce (of which nothing came), and then to Germany to contact the Lutheran princes. There he met Lutheran reformer Andreas Osiander—and Osiander’s niece, Margaret. Osiander’s theology and his niece so appealed to Cranmer that, despite his priest’s orders, he married her in 1532. He had moved decidedly in the direction of the Reformation, but he was not yet ready to make his marriage, or his theology, public.

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