Canon Arthur James Mason: Thomas Cranmer, Ch.5--Cranmer's Last Years

5. Cranmer’s Last Years, 165-203. Edward VI dies. Cranmer signs the instrument to have the Seymour girl installed as Queen along with all Councilors of the Privy Council, minus one. That arrangement last about 9 days and Mary rides into London as England’s Queen. The “device” supporting the Seymour girl has the support of judges. Cranmer will later write a letter to Mary with his usual craftiness and skills of debating, lying behind the mask. He signed it, period. The objection that he did not know the law is less than weak. If he could not attest to it, simple—don’t sign it. But, he did sign it. Own it, Tom. This points to the disaster of an Archbishop meddling in civil affairs, but his dedication to Erastianism was pure. He lived by such and would die by such. Meanwhile, in August and by mid-September 1553, a monk in Canterbury Canterbury reinstitutes the Latin Mass, in violation of the law. Some knave puts up posters around London that Cranmer was the instigator. Our pliable Archbishop is not amused and issues a written rejoinder that gets posted variously to parish doors in London. Cranmer is thrown in the clink by late Sept or early October and is attainted for treason. But, Mary never forgave Cranmer for his reformation-involvements and his annulment-machine. He, Latimer and Ridley are in the Tower in the same room, studying the NT and praying. Cranmer is shifted to Oxford by April 1554 for a disputation over which Weston is Prolocutor (if not academic inquisitor), (165-175). The first issue was the Eucharist Presence, that standard, growling bugbear of the Romanists and Lutherans, then, as now. In our time of indifferentism, no one cares, but those were the days when thinking triumphed over the fuzzies.