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It is Henry on his throne who gives the sacred volume to Cranmer, ere Cranmer and Cromwell can distribute it to the throng of priests and laymen below. Hitherto men had looked on religious truth as a gift from the Church. They were now to look on it as a gift from the king. The very gratitude of Englishmen for fresh spiritual enlightenment was to tell to the profit of the royal power.
Clerk, Bishop of Bath and Wells was one of an exceedingly small minority, who were inclined to believe that the denial might be true, and this bishop was one of the four who were associated with Cranmer when he sate at Dunstable for the trial of the cause.
He was not the only Erastian, nor was he an Erastian pure and simple. He has left it on record that Macaulay's unfairness to Cranmer in the celebrated review of Hallam's Constitutional History first suggested to him the project of his own book. His besetting sin was not so much Erastianism, or secularism, as a love of paradox.
With this object in view Cranmer and his associates subjected the services of the hours to a process of combination and condensation. These two formularies, the Order for Matins and the Order for Evensong, make the core and substance of our present daily offices. But the tradition of daily prayer is only one of the two great devotional heritages of the Church.
Indeed, they tried to persuade the English to be like themselves with very few services, no ornaments in the churches, and no bishops; and things seemed to be tending more and more to what they desired, for the king was too young not to do what his tutors and governors wished, and his uncle and Cranmer were all on their side.
However the Act-of-Parliament religion was set up again; the prayer book of Cranmer was set up again, after sundry alterations: it was altered too, in Edward's reign, yet when first made, it was duly declared to come from the 'Holy Ghost; so it was after its second polishing under Elizabeth.
"They wish to give Henry a popish queen; and so Cranmer must be overthrown, that, when they have deprived the queen of this powerful prop, they may destroy her also and tread her in the dust. But as God liveth, they shall not succeed in this! God is just, and He will at last punish these evil-doers. And supposing there is no God, then will we try a little with the devil himself.
It is in fact doubtful whether Henry could have procured a judgment from Warham; but Warham was dead, and the successor appointed was Thomas Cranmer, who already before he had been dragged into public life had committed himself to the sufficiency of the judgment of the English courts.
Cranmer had a premonition of the troubled years of James VI. and of the Covenant, when this question of kneeling was the first cause of the Bishops' wars. But Knox did not accept, as far as we know, the mediaeval ordeal by fire. Other questions about practices enjoined in the Articles arose.
Cranmer was a man of peace, driven to do battle in the front rank; an academic, forced to take a leading part in exceedingly practical affairs; a student, compelled so far as he might to control a revolution.
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