March 21st, 1556. Saturday morning, rain fell on the cobblestones and on the timber frames of the old

university town and inside the university church of St. Mary the Virgin, a crowd packed the nave

shoulder to shoulder. The mayor and his

alderman were there, Lord Williams and his gentlemen of the shire. Students and clerics and common folk,

all of them craning for a view of the raised platform that had been erected opposite the pulpit,

high enough that every soul in the church could see the man standing on it.

The man was 66 years old, gaunt from two years in Bacardo prison, dressed in a tattered black

gown and a scholar's hood that hung from both shoulders. His name was Thomas Cranmer, and until

recently he had been the Archbishop of Canterbury, the highest churchman in England.

He had held that office for 23 years. He had crowned kings and annulled marriages and written the

book of common prayer, the liturgy that gave the English their first church services in their own language.

He had shaped the theology of a nation. Now he was about to burn alive. The story of how

Thomas Cranmer arrived at that platform begins, as so many Tudor stories do, with a king who wanted

a divorce. In 1529, Henry VIII was desperate to rid himself of his first wife, Catherine of

Aragon, who had failed to produce

a male heir. The Pope would not grant an annulment. Cranmer, then an obscure Cambridge theologian,

offered a solution that pleased the king enormously. Why not let English authorities decide the matter

without bothering Rome at all? Henry liked this reasoning. He liked Cranmer. Within four

years the theologian was Archbishop of Canterbury, and one of his first official acts was to declare

the king's marriage to Catherine Null and Void. He then married Henry to the already pregnant Anne Boleyn.

It was a bold stroke, and it had consequences that rippled across

decades. By severing England from papal authority, Cranmer helped set in motion the English Reformation.

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