A questioning note
Little is known about the first forty years of Thomas Cranmer’s life – he was born in 1489 and was being head-hunted out of Cambridge by Cardinal Wolsey in the late 1520s. So as his most recent and finest biographer, Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch, has observed, “it is not surprising that his biographers have done their best to fill the gap.” (1). The university, college and church records that might have cast some light on those years are either fragmentary, lost to sight or have never existed (the University had no formal matriculation requirement until 1544 so neither it nor the colleges kept matriculation registers) while the earliest surviving biographical accounts were written, probably, in the late 1560s, more than sixty years after he first arrived in Cambridge and forty years after he had left it for good. By then Church, College and University were all ordered in ways that differed radically from those prevailing in the first three decades of the sixteenth century, about which these biographers were probably rather hazy.
The story given in these early lives has passed into common currency and, for want of anything better, has been repeated continually and with little variation ever since. It runs as follows: on the death of his father in 1503, when Thomas was only 14, his mother sent him to Cambridge where he became an undergraduate at Jesus, though he took, for whatever reason, an inordinately long time to obtain his B.A. which eventually he did in 1511, proceeding to the M.A. without further hiccups in 1515. Meanwhile, sometime between 1511 and 1515, he became a Fellow of Jesus, but thereafter fell in love with, and married, a daughter or cousin (called Joan) of the inn-keeper of the Dolphin in Bridge Street, with the consequence, as inevitable in the 1510s as in the 1560s and ’70s, that he lost his fellowship. To make ends meet he accepted appointment as Reader (i.e., lecturer) at Buckingham College, the hostel for Benedictine monks from the East Anglian abbeys who were studying in Cambridge – a hostel whose buildings were later to form the core of Magdalene College. The marriage was, however, short-lived for wife and child died in child-bed. Soon afterwards the Master and Fellows of Jesus welcomed the new widower back to the College where he was re-elected a Fellow and remained, taking his due share in the work of the University and its Divinity School, becoming a D.D. in 1526, before being lured away.
This traditional account is, however, not without its difficulties which, while not making it wholly impossible, do make it rather improbable. That Cranmer was, in some sense, a Jesuan is not in doubt. He is listed as one of three Bachelors of Divinity resident in Jesus in a Cambridge tax assessment of December 1522 (2); and, perhaps more significantly, for the first Christmas after his appointment as archbishop of Canterbury he sent the Fellows a buck from the archiepiscopal deer park with a cheery message and the promise to pay for the accompaniments.(3)
This is Cranmer’s only recorded gift to the College which, on the traditional account, had nurtured him and been, with a small interruption, his home for almost a quarter of a century. Professor MacCulloch’s memorable verdict that “Cranmer was not a good College man once he left his Fellowship for higher things” (4) may, however, be a shade harsh, for it not only assumes that the traditional account is accurate, but also overlooks the possibility that he may just have left matters too late. For after backing the wrong horse – the Lady Jane Grey rather than the Princess Mary – when Edward VI died in 1553, he had been convicted of treason and all his worldly goods, including his splendid library, had been forfeited to the Crown. Thereafter he had nothing he could give his College – which brings us back to the question of in what way he was “a College man”.
The difficulties with the traditional account are these. First, that there was no provision for undergraduates at Jesus (or at most other colleges) in the early 1500s. Most undergraduates lived, as noted above, in the thirty or so hostels for them that there then were. Cranmer could have been one of the four ‘youths’ with specific duties in the Chapel who were provided for in the earliest (draft) statutes for the College that survive (5), or he may simply have lived in the place with and under the aegis of one of the Fellows. We do not know. But there is a story – one which troubled some of his later (and class-conscious) admirers – that offers an alternative account of how and where he spent the eight years between his father’s death and his becoming a B.A. Shortly after Cranmer’s appointment to Canterbury, papalist-minded disparagers of this scholarly, but uncharismatic, priest who, because the King believed that he had the theological answer to the first of the monarch’s matrimonial problems, had been catapulted over the heads of the entire bench of bishops into the highest office in the English church, were reported to be calling him an “[h]ostler” and hanging bundles of hay on the gates of Lambeth Palace, alluding, it was supposed, to his marriage, to his parents-in-law’s trade, and to his having given them a helping hand in the stable yard of their inn (6). Later, however, an alternative explanation was proffered. Cranmer’s critics were not being quite so offensive: they were simply referring to his not having secured a (prestigious) undergraduate place in one of the few colleges that had them, never having done better than live and pay his own way, without patron or benefactor, in a hostel. (7) It is not, of course, necessary to choose between the two interpretations: some who, whether in Cambridge or London, knew something of Cranmer’s background may have repeated the slur for one reason, some for the other, and some for both. For if, as MacCulloch is inclined to think (8), the Dolphin was kept by relatives not of his wife, but of his mother, it is quite feasible that the fatherless lad was first sent by her to live with them, that he worked for them to earn money so that he could study in the University, and that when he had saved enough he joined one of the hostels and became a student. This hypothesis would also explain why it took him so long to become a B.A.
The second difficulty with the traditional story relates to the first – pre-marital – fellowship at Jesus. He could not have married at all – or not, at any rate, without a papal dispensation – if he had already been in holy orders as either sub-deacon, deacon or priest, for the canon law of the western church imposed celibacy on all in major orders, and there has never been any suggestion that he needed, let alone sought, or had the financial wherewithal, or the time, to seek a dispensation to marry. Yet of the eight ‘fellowships’ at Jesus in the mid-1510s only one – that of ‘Stanley’s Scholar’ – was tenable by someone who was not already a priest. (9) Cranmer might have been (albeit briefly) Stanley’s Scholar, or he might have had some sort of promise of nomination for a fellowship – it was the Bishop who appointed – if and when he was ordained a priest, a promise which necessarily lapsed when he married. We do not know. But if it was a promise that he had received note would have to be taken of the technical legal point that until the College was issued with its first set of statutes by Bishop West in 1516/17 all the fellowships at Jesus were, strictly speaking, only embryonic – though, no doubt, everyone who had been working to establish the College out of the nunnery’s ruins expected them to be brought to birth.
The third difficulty in determining how and when to place Cranmer at Jesus and, in particular, about the story of his re-election to a fellowship after his first wife’s death, arises from the fact that we do not know when exactly he was ordained priest, and so became eligible to hold whichever one of the college’s fellowships/scholarships became vacant. The Ely ordination registers for the years 1520-1533 are missing. But since he was licensed in 1520 by the University (pursuant to a papal grant) to preach in all the dioceses of the British Isles it seems likely that he was ordained in 1520 or 1521 at about the time he became a Bachelor of Divinity (10). We do, however, know from Bishop West’s register who the Fellows (supported from the nunnery properties) were between 1516/17, when the College’s first statutes came into force, and 1528 when that bishop’s register stops – and Cranmer had left Cambridge. His name is not among them. He might, of course, have been appointed one of the Scholars, the priests of the family chantries in the Chapel – we do not know. Once he had become a D.D., as he did in 1526, he would have been altogether too grand to be a mere Scholar of Jesus – a job for someone at the beginning of his career. Fellows of colleges were not then the academic aristocracy of Cambridge that they were to become in the twentieth century.
This is not, however, quite the end of either the traditional, or even this more sceptical, account. The traditional one, as we have seen, has it that during his first, brief, marriage, Cranmer supported himself and his wife by taking the job of Reader (Lecturer) at Buckingham College. No records of Buckingham College survive, nor is anyone else, either before or since, known to have been a Reader there (11). It is, indeed, hard to see why the monks should have needed the services of a young married graduate to teach them when they had a good many older and more experienced graduates among their own monastic brethren. But there may have been some confusion in the memories of Cranmer’s earliest biographers about what he had said about his early life – confusion between where he lived during, or immediately after, his marriage, and the post he subsequently had as a university teacher of theology. The monks of Buckingham College are known at this period to have let out rooms along their frontage on what is now Magdalene Street, not far from the Dolphin(12). While at Jesus, Sir John Rysley, one of the College’s founders, had not only paid for the rebuilding of the nave of the Chapel and the extension and re-roofing of the cloisters, he had also endowed a Readership in Theology, with an annual stipend of 8 marks, tenable by someone who was at least a B.D. (13), a degree which Cranmer had (as we have seen) obtained by 1522. One of his early biographers, his secretary Ralph Morice, says that he held this post (14). Like the Readership (lectureship) that Chief Justice Rede was, along with his family chantry in the Chapel, shortly to establish, the holder’s duties were envisaged as lying in the University’s Schools – it was simply that it was both more practical and prudent to vest the endowment, and the appointment of the Reader, in a college rather than in the University: University and College could then keep an eye on each other (15). But a job with an annual stipend of 8 marks would have disqualified its holder from a Fellowship/Scholarship at Jesus which had to be vacated when the Fellow/Scholar obtained a parish or had an income of more than 5 marks (16). There would, however, have been no reason why Rysley’s Reader should not, and several reasons why he should, have lived for some years at Jesus with its Fellows and Scholars, as a ‘perindenant’, paying for his board and lodging, but nonetheless a Jesuan (17) – a stay that was reflected in that Christmas present of an archiepiscopal buck.
It was, it seems, just as well that the monument to Cranmer, which was placed in 1889 – the four hundredth anniversary of his birth – in the Chapel’s south transept, should say nothing about precisely what his connection with the College was.
Further reading:
1. Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer – A Life (New Haven 1996) p.23
2. Letters and Papers of the Reign of Henry VIII, Addendum, Pt. 1 (London 1929) pp. 108-109.
3. Arthur Gray and Frederick Brittain, A History of Jesus College (London 1960) p.41.
4. MacCulloch, p.99.
5. [Arthur Gray (ed.)] The Earliest Statutes of Jesus College, Cambridge (Privately printed, Cambridge 1935), Cap. III
6. MacCulloch, pp. 169-70.
7. William Harrison, The Description of England (1587), edited by Georges Edelen (Ithaca 1968) p.79.
8. MacCulloch, p.21, n.20.
9. Earliest Statutes¸ caps. II and V.
10. B.D.s hoping to become D.D.s were required to preach in both London (at Paul’s Cross) and Cambridge: Damien Leader, A History of the University of Cambridge vol. I (Cambridge 1988) pp. 174-175.
11. Peter Cunich et al, A History of Magdalene College, Cambridge 1428-1988 (Cambridge 1994) p.26.
12. Ibid.
13. Earliest Statutes, caps. XXII and XVIII.
14. MacCulloch, p.23; J.G. Nicholas (ed.) Narratives of the Reformation Camden Soc., 1st series, vol. 77 (London 1859) p.240.
15. Similarly, endowments for the Jesus Grammar School were managed by Pembroke College.
16. Earliest Statutes, cap. II.
17. Ibid., cap. I.