Cranmer was dependent upon the good-will of the king, especially during and after he was accused of heresy by the prebendaries and justices of Kent.133 Rather than arguing his case in convocations it was homilies and vernacular liturgy that would be his means of conveying evangelical doctrine and teaching on repentance to the English people in the final years of Henry VIII’s reign. In 1542 the bishops in convocation had agreed to the publication of homilies “to make for stai of such errors as were then by ygnorant preachers sparkeled among the people.”134 These do not survive as such but some of them may have been incorporated into the 1547 Homilies. In any case
Cranmer spoke of them positively in his correspondence with Stephen Gardiner and it may be deduced from this that they expressed reformist doctrines.
It was “various authors of contemporary English primers [who] brought Cranmer inspiration” for his liturgical work.135 MacCulloch shows that some phrases and even whole collects, used by Cranmer in his liturgical writings, can be traced back to George Joye’s Hortulus anime, which had probably been translated by Richard
Taverner and were also incorporated into the 1545 King’s Primer.136 Robert Redman’s 1535 primer included the translation of a prayer from an eighth-century Gelasian sacramentary, which with various emendations became the Collect for Peace in the 1549 Prayer Book, and in all subsequent editions. While retaining the traditional pattern of the primer, English primers subtly utilised material in keeping with
133 Ralph Morice, “Anecdote and Character of Thomas Cranmer”, Narratives of the Days of the Reformation,
ed. J G Nichols (Camden Society LXXVII, London 1859), pp. 250-58.
134 The Letters of Stephen Gardiner, p. 296. 135
MacCulloch, Cranmer, p. 418.
83 evangelical doctrine. Prefaces and explanations enable authors to use traditional
material and at the same time convey evangelical doctrine. Bishop Hilsey explains in his 1539 Primer137 that despite false promises in earlier primers of delivering fifteen souls from purgatory by saying these prayers “yet are the prayers selfe right good and virtuous ... and for as much as these prayers are a goodly and godly meditacion of Christes passion, we have not thought it nether to us grevous, nether to thys primer superfluous to set them in thys place.”138
Primers usually had a penitential tone, a tendency which “was re-enforced by the highly penitential mood of sixteenth-century religion in general.”139 William Marshall had introduced Savonarola’s meditation on the 51st Psalm into the 1538 edition of his primer.140 Whereas the royal proclamation (6th May 1545) preceding the publication of the King’s Primer focused on the need for uniformity and an aid to religious
education, the preface to the diglot edition stressed the need for a spiritual understanding of prayer. This “seems to bear the imprint of Cranmer’s
composition.”141 In keeping with tradition the King’s Primer included the seven penitential psalms, but followed them with psalms of the passion, and then the passion narrative from St John’s gospel.142 This directed attention to Christ’s death as the means of redemption. These were followed by “Praiers of the Passion”, which Butterworth suggests were written by Cranmer. They focused on the sinfulness of humanity and the mercy of God in redemption through Christ’s passion. Duffy
discerns that “a consistently reforming emphasis is evident.”143After a large collection of prayers the primer concludes with a general confession, followed by two prayers of Vives against the devil and “for the desire of the lyfe to come.”144 This ending
suggests that there is an alternative to auricular confession for the penitent devotee.145 Katherine Parr’s Lamentacion of a Sinner, moreover,shows that penitence was becoming a deeply personal and significant matter in the lives of some even in the
137
Three Primers put forth in the reign of Henry VIII, (Oxford 1848), pp. 321-436.
138 Helen C White, The Tudor Books of Private Devotion (Wisconsin 1951), p. 217. 139 Ibid., p. 227.
140 Three Primers, p. 130. 141
Charles C Butterworth, The English Primers 1529-49 (Philadelphia 1953), p. 258.
142 Ibid., pp. 259-71.
143 Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, p. 446. 144 Butterworth, The English Primers, p. 271. 145
White The Tudor Books of Private Devotion, pp. 85-6: suggests that this primer is “anti-monastic, anti-papal, and possibly anti-confessional.”
84 royal household who were closest to the king; the sort of people most likely to make
use of the primers. Lamentacion of a Sinner is a book of personal penitential devotion which reveals Katherine’s evangelical faith, and though it was written while she was queen it was not published until after Henry’s death. In the preface William Cecil sees her repentance as a heavenly regeneration.146 David Starkey goes so far as to suggest that Katherine’s Privy Chamber was “a conventicle of the ‘new’ religion.”147 For those who used primers penitence could be intensely personal focusing on the death of Christ as the basis on which sins were forgiven. “The handling of scriptural narrative was for the sixteenth century devotional writer not only a means of satisfying
perennial spiritual needs, but also of reinforcing what he held to be the right doctrinal positions and attitudes”,148 for example the use of verses of scripture in the King’s Primer149 in place of references to the Virgin Mary, and the use of the Johannine passion narrative. Although the pattern of the 1545 primer followed the tradition and included the Dirige, it so expressed the aims of evangelical reformers that Duffy sees it as “a notable blow at one of the strongholds [i.e. primers] of traditional religion.”150
“Cranmer’s steady liturgical work bore its first substantial fruit ... in the new English litany, published with royal approval in 1544.”151 The service had ancient penitential overtones. St Basil the Great (d.379) used the word litany to signify penitential services.152 It was widely used for church processions. Cranmer drew from the Sarum and York rites and also from the litany by Melanchthon and Bucer in Hermann von Wied’s ‘Consultatio’. The new English service was much shorter. Where there had been sixty two invocations to saints and angels, Cranmer reduced these to three. The service opens with penitential invocations and Cranmer intensified the penitential feeling by eight times making penitents describe themselves as “miserable sinners”. An abbreviated form of Cranmer’s litany was included in The King’s Primer “for edifying and stirring of devotion of all true faithful Christian hearts.” The readers are advised that the litany is not only for public worship but also that they may read it
146 The Early Modern Englishwoman:A Facsimile Library of Essential Works. Vol. 3 Katherine Parr, selected
and introduced by Janel Mueller (Aldershot 1996), no pagination.
147
David Starkey, The Reign of Henry VIII: Personalities and Politics (London 1985), p. 141.
148 White, Tudor Books of Private Devotion, p. 227. 149 Three Primers, pp. 437-end.
150 Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (London 1992), p. 444. 151
Ryrie, The Gospel and Henry VIII, p. 51.
85 “quietly and softly to themselves.”153 The lay devotee did not need the mediation of a
priest.
But how much did evangelicals achieve by pressing forward their ideas on repentance in these ways? After a careful examination of the King’s Primer Eamon Duffy
suggests that “under the exuberance of traditionalist rejoicing over victory [through the ‘King’s Book’] the foundations were slowly but decisively shifting.”154 Those who used primers were praying into their minds and hearts evangelical doctrine, not least about repentance. They were to confess their sins to God and even use a general confession and find comfort in God’s word. Primers did not reach the illiterate but had a considerable power to influence the thinking of those at court and among the
nobility.