David Loades: "Thomas Cranmer and John Dudley: An Uneasy Alliance, 1549-...

Taken from Paul Ayris and David Selwyn, Ed., "Thomas Cranmer: Churchman and Scholar." MORE OF DR. CRANMER'S REFORMED MEDICINE AND BREW IS ORDERED UP. 6. Thomas Cranmer and John Dudley: an uneasy alliance, 1549-1553—D. Loades, 157-174. Seymour, Duke of Somerset, is about to get ousted as the Protector, being headstrong in the Privy Council and beyond council and prudence. The Protestant and Reformed Prayer Book had been introduced, the chantries dissolved, and “prayers for the dead discontinue” (157). The back-malice did not serve him well. Things were heating up. Somerset or Warwick. How would it be? A Civil War? By September 1549, things were looking bad for Somerset. Cranmer’s hand was present especially since the King liked and trusted him. The twelve-year old, albeit youthful, had an “evangelical commitment” and it was “genuine” (160). The constituency of the Council, however, still had the balance of power with 11 favoring English Romanism plus 3 other liklies: or, 14 of 24. Yet, Edward and Cranmer brought in some heavier voices for reformist theology: Thomas Goodrich, Bishop of Ely, being one of them. Dryander wrote Bullinger on 3 December of the “religious situation in England” (161). “It was the persuasion of many persons here that Bernardine and Bucer had been apprehended with the Lord Protector, and that with him the entire form of religion which they had established a short time before, had fallen to the ground…the purposes of the leaders are well known to me…I say too, that religion is now in a better condition than it was before the imprison of the Protector…” By 5 November, Dryander had been at Lambeth with Cranmer, Bucer and Ochino, and a public edict announces further reforms “according to the tenor of the Gospel” (162). By the end of November, Warwick and friends were ascendant and trimmers (“sensitive weathercocks”) were in decline, awaiting a “further dose of Cranmer’s religious medicine, a brew which most of them found distasteful” (162).