Thomas Cranmer (2 July 1489 – )
You are the introvert to Cromwell’s extrovert. You act so much in concert that some less well-informed European politicians think you are one person: Dr Charmuel. When you and your other self are with Henry, you go smoothly into action, able to communicate everything to each other with a glance or a breath.
Mantel, Notes on characters
The story so far…
Week 7: Entirely Beloved Cromwell (Part 2)
The Cambridge scholar has been to Rome in the service of the king’s great matter. He used to work for Wolsey, but now he is close to the Boleyns. He says he is no heretic, but he did not take lightly the news of the dead scholars in the fish cellar at Cardinal College. Cramner knows many things, not least that Mary Boleyn once propositioned Thomas Cromwell.
Cromwell gets Cramner’s story out of him, one slow night over roast roe deer. The son of a gentleman from Aslockton, which is nowhere. His schoolmaster beat him, “sought out weakness”. He went to Cambridge to study, but was sent down for marrying Joan. She died in labour, and the university took him back. His colleagues considered it a miscalculation. “Like losing your way in the woods.”
Week 8: The Dead Complain of Their Burial / Arrange Your Face (Part 1)
When Cromwell gets to the king, that night at the end of 1530, Cranmer is already there. “The dead do not come back to complain of their burial. It is the living who are exercised about these matters.” He is telling the king, his brother Arthur has not returned to him. But his guilt, in the form of his brother. Cromwell silences him with a nod and tells Henry a different story. Untheologically sound, but a “vigorous invention.”
‘But I wonder,’ Cranmer says, almost to himself. ‘I wonder what you think the gospel is. Do you think it is a book of blank sheets on which Thomas Cromwell imprints his desires?’
Cranmer “speaks about your character.” God “has arranged your face on purpose to disconcert our enemies.”
Week 9: Arrange Your Face (Part 2)
Summer, 1531. Cranmer and Latimer, arm in arm in Cromwell’s garden at Austin Friars. The priests of Anne’s household discuss theology beneath Halley’s Comet. Cromwell thinks: “Give them a season’s respite from Thomas More, and they will fall to persecuting each other.”
Week 10: 'Alas, What Shall I Do For Love?' (Part 1)
In July 1532, Cranmer writes to Cromwell from Nuremberg. He is an unlikely diplomat on the king’s business. This letter is strange and includes a subscript in the margin: “Something has occurred. Not to be trusted to a letter. It may make a stir. Some would say I have been rash. I shall need your advice. Keep this secret.”
Week 12: Anna Regina (Part 1)
Cranmer has finally returned from the continent to take up his new office as Archbishop of Canterbury. “You were long enough coming. Why did you delay? Doesn’t every boy want to be an archbishop?”
Officially, Cranmer doesn’t know about the child and new marriage. He is to judge the matter of the king’s old marriage.
The king sounds astonished to learn that Cranmer is penniless. Cromwell borrows the money to pay Rome for Cranmer’s appointment. “It will be the last money Your Majesty sends to Rome, if it rests with me.”
Week 13: Anna Regina (Part 2)
At Anne’s coronation, Cranmer “looks mildly excited, as if someone had offered him a cup of warm milk.”
Later, he summons Cromwell to see her secret: his pregnant German wife, Margarete.
‘Do you know what the king will do to you when he finds you out? The master executioner of Paris has devised a machine, with a counterwieghted beam — shall I draw it for you? — which when a heretic is burned dips him into the fire and lifts him out again, so that the people can see the stages of agony. Now Henry will be wanting one. Or he will get some device to tease your head off your shoulders, over a period of forty days.’
Cranmer hopes for a daughter, as the king expects a son. He tells Cromwell he has spoken to Frith, but cannot “turn him from his path.” He did not expect that one of his first tasks as Archbishop would be to turn men away from the true religion. “Welcome to this world below,” Cromwell tells him.
Week 14: Devil’s Spit / A Painter’s Eye
Like the night of Henry’s bad dream, Cromwell and Cranmer are there to see him through the nightmare of a daughter. “Perhaps God intends some peculiar blessing by this princess,” Cranmer says. The king rises like Lazarus to continue his day.
Elizabeth Barton says he is no archbishop and will be dead within six months, along with all other heretics. She tells him she should have poured boiling water on Elizabeth at her christening. Still, at the end of the interrogation, he can see no case for heresy.
At Austin Friars, they gossip about Cranmer’s wife. He asked for a daughter, and he got one. The king was not so lucky.
Cranmer is enthroned in Canterbury, and Cromwell writes to him to take a new broom to the priory at Christ Church. “Put in people from home, your sad east Midland clerks, formed under sober skies.” Shake out the Oxford men and put in Cambridge men we know.
Week 16: The Map of Christendom (Part 1)
Cromwell falls ill in 1535. “Cranmer comes and looks at him dubiously. Perhaps he is afraid that he will ask, in his ever, how is your wife Grete these days?”