21 March 1556. Thomas Cranmer’s Ambiguous Legacy by Diarmaid MacCulloch
21 March 1556. Thomas Cranmer’s Ambiguous Legacy by Diarmaid MacCulloch MacCulloch, Diarmaid. “Cranmer’s Ambiguous Legacy.” History Today Volume: 46 Issue: 6 1996 . http://www.historytoday.com/diarmaid-macculloch/cranmers-ambiguous-legacy . Accessed March 22, 2014. Diarmaid MacCulloch reflects on the 'after-life' of Henry VIII's archbishop, burnt at the stake as a Protestant martyr under Mary. Portrait of Cranmer after Henry VIII's death by an unknown artist Archbishop Thomas Cranmer died at the stake in 1556, a martyr for the English Reformation; but did he die a martyr for the Church of England or for Anglicanism? If we examine Cranmer's career after he parted company in the early 1530s with the Catholicism of his first forty years, we find a man of international perspective, who sought to move England into the path of the wider European Reformation: in particular towards the Reformations to be f...