THOMAS CRANMER was the son of a gentleman of Nottinghamshire, who traced his descent from one of the followers of the Conqueror. He was born at Aslacton, in that county, on the second day of July, 1489: and it is stated that so recently as the year 1790, traces might be seen of the walks and pleasure-grounds which belonged to the mansion of his fathers. Tradition also long pointed out a small rising ground or mount in the immediate neighbourhood of the house, from whose summit the future primate of England was accustomed to survey the beauty of the surrounding scenery, and to hearken to the music of the village bells. These memorials have disappeared and although such traditions are of little biographical value, they are interesting as indicating the sort of circumstances by which plain but not unpoetical minds imagine that the early footsteps of an illustrious man should be traced. Young Cranmer received his rudiments of instruction from "a rude parish clerk," under whom he learnt little; while the harsh disposition of his schoolmaster subjected him to much painful discipline. Although his father intended that he should have the advantages of a learned education, he was not willing that he should be ignorant of the exercises in which a gentleman was, in that age, expected to be proficient. He permitted him to shoot, to hunt, to hawk, and to ride unbroken horses; so that even when he became archbishop, he was able to mount without hesitation, and to ride becomingly the roughest horses that came into his stables. It is added by Strype, that notwithstanding very defective sight, he could "shoot in the long-bow, and many times kill the deer with his cross-bow." : Cranmer lost his father early but his excellent mother carried out the intentions which her husband had formed, in pursuance of which, when her son had reached the age of fourteen years, which was in 1503, she sent him to Jesus College, Cambridge. Of this society he was elected Fellow in 1510 or 1511. Much of the intervening period had been consumed upon the scholastic divinity which in that age formed the predominant study at Cambridge. After his election to the fellowship, his studies took a wider and more liberal range. The writings of Erasmus began by this time to be received with favour in England, especially by the younger scholars, and to open up the minds 'which had been more or less absorbed in the subtle vagaries of the schoolmen, whose influence had for some ages darkened all the realms of thought. After Cranmer had devoted four or five years to Erasmus, Faber, and other good authors, Luther began to write; and perceiving the great controversies which were there arising in the lesser as well as weightier matters of religion, he was led next to apply himself to the study of the Scriptures, which engaged his almost exclusive attention for three years, and thus laid a good foundation of Scriptural knowledge, which availed him much in later days. After this he allowed himself to expatiate freely among good authors, both new and old: but was still careful to digest well whatever he deemed worthy his perusal. Reading was a slow operation to him, as he always accompanied it with the use of the pen, wherewith he filled his adversaria with whatever struck him as worthy of especial note, by the actual transcription of shorter passages, and by references to and abstracts of such as were too long to be conveniently transcribed. Yet he was careful that this should not supersede the exercise of his memory and judgment; but the collections formed by this pains-taking mode of study were of great value to him in the controversies in which he was afterwards engaged. This course he followed till he took his degree of Doctor in Divinity in 1523, when he was in the thirtyfourth year of his age. About ten years before this, that is, when he was in the twenty-third year of his age, being then Master of Arts, he vacated his fellowship by marriage with a lady who is described by Strype as "a gentleman's daughter.' She was, however, related by affinity to the wife of the person who kept the Dolphin Inn, at Cambridge; and for this reason Cranmer, instead of procuring apartments for her elsewhere, allowed her to reside in that house with her kinswoman, and there openly resorted to her society. This arrangement, however convenient or unobjectionable it might have seemed to a studious man then little conversant with the world, ill suits the ideas of refinement and delicacy which society has now formed, and which it somewhat unreasonably exacts from men of a past and less cultivated age. Even in that age, however, Cranmer's proceedings did not escape animadversion, and it became the foundation of the idle story that he, for some time, acted as hostler of the Dolphin Inn. Although Cranmer's marriage lost him his fellowship, it did not disqualify him from the office of college reader or lecturer, and to that office he was actually appointed in Magdalen College, then called Buckingham College, and previously Monks' College, because monks resorted to it. Here he lectured with distinction and success, but in what faculty is not known, though there can be little doubt that it was in divinity. The loss of his wife a year after his marriage, enabled Cranmer's own college of Jesus to testify its appreciation of his great merits, by the rare and very remarkable course of re-electing the widower to the fellowship he had forfeited by his marriage. He was thus enabled to resume and carry on without interruption the studies which have already been described. In gratitude for this mark of esteem, he some years after declined to desert his college, when tempted to do so by the offer of a better preferment in Wolsey's new college of Christ Church at Oxford. The invitation is, however, a fair sign of the estimation in which his attainments and abilities were already held. Soon after taking his doctor's degree, Cranmer was appointed to the divinity lectureship in his own college; and in the university to that of public examiner in theology. In this capacity he did much good, at the cost of some immediate dissatisfaction, by turning back all those candidates for divinity degrees who appeared notoriously ignorant of the sacred Scriptures; for at this time it was not unusual for men deeply read in school theology, and aspiring to the degrees of bachelor and doctor in divinity, to be without any direct acquaintance with the Book upon which the whole system of Christian faith and doctrine is built. While he was thus employed, about the year 1529, an epidemical disorder, with many symptoms like the plague, broke out at Cambridge, and caused a dispersion of the members of the University. Cranmer retired into Essex, to the house of Mr. Cressy, a gentleman of fortune residing at Waltham, whose sons had been his pupils at Cambridge, and whose education he still continued to superintend. This visit was destined to produce circumstances which effected an entire change in his course of life, and in which lay the foundation of all his future fortune. King Henry the Eighth happened to be at that time in a progress through some of the southern counties of England; and Fox, provost of King's College, with Gardiner, then secretary of state, were invited as part of his suite to the house of Mr. Cressy, where they passed the evening with Cranmer. Aware of his high reputation as a divinity lecturer at Cambridge, they were |