Thomas Cranmer , born the July 2nd 1489 with Nottingham (England) and dead the March 21st 1556 with Oxford, archbishop of Canterbury and professor with the University of Cambridge under the reigns of Henri VIII and Edouard VI.

Biography

After the death of his wife, it is ordered priest. It progresses quickly in the ecclesiastical hierarchy and supports Henri VIII in the controversy around its divorce of with Catherine d' Aragon. Thomas Cranmer estimated that this question was to be submitted at the universities of Christendom, in order to prevent that it remained longer subjected to the decision of the pope. In the controversy with Rome, it supported that it was not to the pope, but to the king, that in England all people, laymen and ecclesiastics, were submitted, i.e. God wants that the Church is subjected to the civil capacity. In parallel, he marries secretly the niece of Andreas Osiander, a theologist Lutheran. In 1533, he becomes archbishop of Canterbury and begins the reforms which will lead to the establishment of the Communion Anglican. In 1538, it condemns the theses of John Lambert, opposed to the Transsubstantiation. Cranmer is also opposed to the Six Articles promulgated by Henri VIII, reaffirming inter alia the celibacy of the priests.

In 1547, with died of Henri, Cranmer becomes the adviser of Edouard, his son and successor. Under its reign, Cranmer implements the reform of the Church of England. With died of Edouard, in 1553, Cranmer is deposited by Marie Tudor. He is shown of treason and Hérésie to have rejected the transsubstantiation, to have condemned, and have locked up in a repugnant prison, in hillock with serious maltreatment during nearly three years. The spirit and the will weakened by its sufferings prolonged in prison, it was let persuade, on promise of forgiveness, to sign a light retractation which was fraudulently elaborate into six, by the pope. Because the history according to which it would have signed six retractations, each one of it more severe than the presumedly preceding one, rests on the only declaration of its persecutor " Bonner Sanguinaire". Left under the impression that after a public retractation, it would be freed, it went to the place or this one was to take place, in the church Sainte Marie in Oxford. Filled of a deep repentance because of its retractation, and knowing that what it was going to do would lead it infallibly to dead on roughing-hew it, it expressed a deep sorrow for its cowardice. It abjured its retractation solemnly, and known as that, when it would be burned, it would present initially its right hand to fire, since it had signed. Filled of fury, the papists, who had lied to him as for his release, and which, as of the beginning, had intended to send it to roughing-hew at once that it would have made its public retractation, violently pushed it towards roughing-hew it. There (see engraving Ci against), it firmly held its right hand towards the fire which consumed it the first before it reached the remainder of the body. Thomas Cramer died on the Bûcher on March 21st 1556.

Its torment, at the same time as that of his/her colleagues Nicholas Ridley, Hugh Latimer, Hooper and Ferrar, all bishops, fills England with a horror which rose with an extreme degree when the Protestant victims had been burned 286.