Reformation had already begun, and religious questions were being much discussed, he devoted himself for three years to the independent study of the Bible, subsequently to sound authors, ancient and modern. He formed the habit, which in his subsequent momentous controversies he found of inestimable value, of writing out excerpts of all the important passages of his author. He never read without pen in hand.

Losing his fellowship by marriage, he placed his wife in the Dolphin Inn, the landlady of which was her kinswoman, and became Reader at Buckingham College, now known as Magdalene. She died in childbirth, and he was re-elected to a fellowship at Jesus. About 1523, the thirtyfourth year of his age, he became D.D. Wolsey was now making his great foundation at Oxford, and sent to inquire for some Cambridge scholars for the new institution. Cranmer was invited, but refused. His college made him Divinity Lecturer, and the University one of the public examiners in theology.

Driven from Cambridge in 1529 by a pestilence, he went with two of his pupils to the house of their father, Mr. Cressy, at Waltham Abbey, to whose wife he was himself related. The King came at this time to Waltham, and the

two chief agents in his divorce from Catherine, Gardiner, his secretary, and Fox, his almoner, were lodged at Mr. Cressy's. Cranmer, Gardiner, and Fox were old college friends, and talked together about the difficulty in which the King had been placed by Catherine's appeal to the Pope. It was here that Cranmer made his famous suggestion that it would be better to consult the opinion of leading divines at the Universities on the legality of marriage with a brother's widow and the validity of the papal dispensation. Henry summoned him to Greenwich, commanded him to write out his opinion, and lodged him with the Earl of Wiltshire, Anne Boleyn's father, in Durham Place. At Cambridge, in one day, Cranmer persuaded six or seven theologians to pronounce against the legality and the dispensing power.

Next year was extremely interesting, for he went with an embassy, of which Lord Wiltshire was head, to meet the Pope and the Emperor Charles V. at Bologna. He was directed to proceed by himself to Rome, where he offered to maintain his thesis; but in the Court of the Pope his challenge against the dispensing power was not likely to be accepted. The Pope, however, in compliment to his master, made him

Grand Penitentiary of England. Returning to Lord Wiltshire's household, he was again sent to the Emperor in 1532, and received secret instructions to encourage John Frederick, Elector of Saxony, and other German Princes in their opposition to Charles V. To his intense astonishment, while at the Court of the Emperor at Mantua, he was summoned home to be made Archbishop of Canterbury in succession to Warham. He had married in Germany the niece of the reformer Osiander; and although the marriage of the clergy was already a point accepted by the pioneers of the Reformation, the step would hardly have been taken at that date by an Archbishop of Canterbury. On other grounds Cranmer's reluctance was genuine; and he was only in his forty-fourth year. Seven weeks he delayed in hopes that Henry might change his purpose; but on arriving in England he found the King determined. The exact date of his return is not quite certain: Strype believes that he was present at the private marriage of Henry and Anne in November 1532; Gairdner thinks he came back in January 1533. Henry even lent him money to procure his bulls from Rome. On March 30th, 1533, Cranmer was consecrated at Westminster by the Bishops of

Lincoln, Exeter, and St. Asaph. Before taking the usual oath of fidelity to the Pope, he protested that he intended not to bind himself to do anything contrary to the laws of God, the King's prerogative, or the commonwealth and statutes of the kingdom; nor to tie himself from speaking his mind freely in matters relating to the reformation of religion, the government of the Church of England, and the prerogative of the Crown. He made a similar protest before obtaining the temporalities of his see.

Cranmer was fully convinced of the illegality of marriage with a brother's widow and of the invalidity of the papal dispensation. On April 11th he wrote to ask the King's leave to take cognisance of the nullity suit. Catherine was summoned to appear before the Archbishop at Dunstable. The Court was opened on May 10th, and the Queen pronounced contumacious for non-appearance; on the 23rd the marriage was formally pronounced invalid. On the 28th, after a secret investigation at Lambeth, he pronounced that the King had therefore been lawfully married to Anne Boleyn in the previous November; and on September 10th he stood godfather to the Princess Elizabeth. It was a sorry business; but whatever Henry's

motives were, and however great the natural sympathy for Catherine, our generation, which has taken so decided a stand on the question of marriage with a deceased wife's sister, can hardly blame Cranmer for his decision against marriage with a deceased brother's wife.

Cranmer was not, of course, able to control by himself the course of the Reformation in England. Henry VIII. was not inclined to go far with him in the restoration of the scriptural and primitive model. And Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, at the head of a vigorous papal and anti-reformation party, was exceedingly powerful throughout the reign, and often baffled the attempts of the Archbishop. Many of the clergy of his own cathedral and diocese openly thwarted his teaching and plans. But with mild and gentle patience he persevered, and the formularies of the English Church, many of them penned by his own hand, are in harmony with his final position and views. The first important thing he did was to join the King in an appeal from the Pope to a General Council. In 1534 under his inspiration Convocation petitioned the King for a translation of the Bible, which was published by royal authority in 1537, to Cranmer's unbounded joy. The visitation of