Thomas Cranmer was born in 1489 in…
1529 CE
Thomas Cranmer was born in 1489 in Aslockton in Nottinghamshire, England.
His parents, Thomas and Agnes (née Hatfield) Cranmer, were of modest wealth and are not members of the aristocracy.
Their oldest son, John, had inherited the family estate, whereas Thomas and his younger brother Edmund had been placed on the path to a clerical career.
Today historians know nothing definite about Cranmer’s early schooling.
He probably attended a grammar school in his village.
At the age of fourteen, two years after the death of his father, he was sent to the newly created Jesus College, Cambridge.
It took him a surprisingly long eight years to reach his Bachelor of Arts degree following a curriculum of logic, classical literature and philosophy.
During this time, he began to collect medieval scholastic books, which he will preserve faithfully throughout his life.
For his master's degree he took a different course of study, concentrating on the humanists, Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples and Erasmus.
This time he progressed with no special delay, finishing the course in three years.
Shortly after receiving his Master of Arts degree in 1515, he had been elected to a Fellowship of Jesus College.
Sometime after Cranmer took his MA, he married a woman named Joan.
Although he was not yet a priest, he was forced to forfeit his fellowship, resulting in the loss of his residence at Jesus College.
To support himself and his wife, he took a job as a reader at Buckingham Hall (later reformed as Magdalene College).
When Joan died during her first childbirth, Jesus College showed its regard for Cranmer by reinstating his fellowship.
He began studying theology and by 1520 he had been ordained, the university already having named him as one of their preachers.
He received his Doctor of Divinity degree in 1526.
Not much is known about Cranmer’s thoughts and experiences during his three decades at Cambridge.
Traditionally, he has been portrayed as a humanist whose enthusiasm for biblical scholarship prepared him for the adoption of Lutheran ideas, which during the 1520s were spreading.
A study of his marginalia reveals an early antipathy to Martin Luther, however, and an admiration for Erasmus.
When Cardinal Wolsey, the king's Lord Chancellor, selected several Cambridge scholars, including Edward Lee, Stephen Gardiner and Richard Sampson, to be diplomats throughout Europe, Cranmer had been chosen to take a minor role in the English embassy in Spain.
Two recently discovered letters written by Cranmer describe an early encounter with the king, Henry VIII of England: upon Cranmer's return from Spain, in June 1527, the king had personally interviewed Cranmer for half an hour.
Cranmer described the king as "the kindest of princes".
Henry VIII's first marriage had its origins in 1502 when his elder brother, Arthur, died.
Their father, Henry VII, then betrothed Arthur's widow, Catherine of Aragon, to the future king.
The betrothal immediately raised questions related to the biblical prohibition (in Leviticus 18 and 20) against marriage to a brother’s wife.
The couple married in 1509 and after a series of miscarriages, a daughter, Mary, was born in 1516.
Henry by the 1520s still did not have a son to name as heir and he took this as a sure sign of God’s anger and made overtures to the Vatican about an annulment.
He had given Cardinal Wolsey the task of prosecuting his case; Wolsey began by consulting university experts.
Cranmer, in addition to his duties as a Cambridge don, has from 1527 assisted with the annulment proceedings.