Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 6.djvu/582

548 of angle iron, and those of its convex or upper side by chain rivetting. The curvature of the jib allows of the raising of weights to its highest point. The chain-barrels and the spindles for the wheel-gearing are preferably inclosed within the jib.

1em  CRANMER, (1489-4556), archbishop of Canterbury, was born at Aslacton in Nottinghamshire on the 2d July 1489. The second son of Thomas Cranmer and of his wife Anne Hatfield, he belonged to a family that had been settled in Nottinghamshire from the time of the Norman Conquest. He received his early education, according to Morice his secretary, from &quot; a marvellous severe and cruel schoolmaster,&quot; whose discipline must have been severe indeed to deserve this special mention in an age when no schoolmaster bore the rod in vain. The same authority tells us that he was initiated by his father in those field sports, such as hunting and hawking, which formed one of his recreations in after life. To early training he also owed the skilful horsemanship for which he was conspicuous. At the age of fourteen he was sent by his mother, who had recently become a widow, to Cambridge, where he entered at Jesus College. Little is known with certainty of his university career beyond the facts that he became a fellow of his college in 1510 or 1511, that he had soon after to vacate his fellowship, owing to his marriage to &quot; Black Joan,&quot; a relative of the landlady of the Dolphin Inn, and that he was reinstated in it on the death of his wife, which occurred in childbirth before the lapse of the year of grace allowed by the statutes. During the brief period of his married life he held the appointment of lecturer at Buckingham Hall, now Magdalene College. The fact of his marrying would seem to show that he did not at the time intend to enter the church, and there are indications that the profession of his choice was the law. It has been conjectured with some plausibility that tho death of his wife caused him to change his intention and qualify himself for holy orders. He was ordained in 1523, and soon after he took his doctor s degree in divinity. According to Strype, he was invited about this time to become a fellow of the college founded by Cardinal Wolsey at Oxford; but Dean Hook shows that there is some reason to doubt this. If the offer was made it was declined, and Cranmer continued at Cambridge filling the offices of lecturer in divinity at his own college and of public examiner in divinity to the university. It is interesting, in view of his later efforts to spread the know ledge of the Bible among the people, to know that in tho capacity of examiner he insisted on a thorough acquaintance with the Holy Scriptures, and rejected several candidates who were deficient in this qualification. It was a somewhat curious concurrence of circumstances that transferred Cranmer, almost at one step, from the quiet seclusion of the university to the din and bustle of the court. In 1528 the plague known as the sweating sickness, which prevailed throughout the country, was specially severe at Cambridge, and all who had it in their power forsook tho town for the country. Cranmer went with two of his pupils named Cressy, related to him through their mother, to their father s house at Waltham in Essex. The king (Henry VIII.) happened at the time to be residing in the immediate neighbourhood, and two of his chief counsellors, Gardyner, secretary of starte, afterwards bishop of Winchester, and Fox. the lord high almoner, afterwards bishop of Herefor.l, were lodged at Cressy s house. Meet ing with Cranmer, they were naturally led to discuss what was the absorbing question of the day, the king s meditated divorce from Catherine of Aragon. The opinion of the future archbishop was given with the modesty that befitted an unknown man. He professed not to have studied the cause as the others had done ; but it seemed to him that if the canonists and the universities should decide that marriage with a deceased brother s widow was illegal, and if it were proved that Catherine had been married to Prince Arthur, her marriage to Henry could be declared null and void by the ordinary ecclesiastical courts. The necessity of an appeal to Rome was thus dispensed with, and this point was at once Been by the king, who, when Cranmer s opinion was reported to him, ordered him to be summoned in these terms : &quot; I will speak to him. Let him be sent for out of hand. This man, I trow, has got the right sow by the ear.&quot; At their first interview Cranmer was commanded by tho king to lay aside all other pursuits and to devote himself to the question of the divorce. He was to draw up a written treatise, stating the course he proposed, and defending it by arguments from scripture, the fathers, and the decrees of general councils. There is reason to believe that he entered upon the task somewhat reluctantly, but in the reign of Henry VIII. it was emphatically true that the king s will was law, and no refusal was possible. His material interests certainly did not suffer by compliance. He was commended to the hospitality of Anne Boleyn a father, the earl of Wiltshire, in whose house at Durham Place he resided for some time ; the king appointed him archdeacon of Taunton and one of his chaplains ; and he also held a parochial benefice, the name of which is unknown. When the treatise was finished Cranmer was called upon to defend its argument before the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, which he visited, accompanied by Fox and Gardyner. Immediately afterwards he was sent to plead the cause before a more powerful if not a higher tribunal. An embassy, with the earl of Wiltshire at its head, was despatched to Roma in 1530, that &quot;tho matter of the divorce should be disputed and ventilated,&quot; and Cranmer was an important member of it. He was received by the Pope with marked courtesy, and was appointed Grand Penitentiary of England / but hia argument, if he ever had the opportunity of stating it, did not lead to any practical decision of the question. Return ing home through France and Germany, he had interviews in the latter country with the elector of Saxony and other Protestant princes. It is usual to attribute to the influence of this Con tinental visit a further recoil in Cranmer s mind from Roman Catholicism and an advance to what is now known as Protestantism. Now there are, it is true, indications that he was dissatisfied with much that he saw at Rome, and it is a probable conjecture that his intercourse with tho German princes had some effect in modifying his doctrinal views. But it must be remembered that the modern idea of Protestantism and Roman Catholicism as two broadly marked, clearly divided, and antagonistic systems was only forming in Germany, and was all but unknown in England in Cranmer s day. It would be unnecessary to state so obvious a truth, were it not for the seemingly ineradicable tendency of hasty thinkers to throw back familiar distinc tions in religion and politics to a period when such distinc tions had not come into existence. The fact that Cranmer is persistently described as the &quot; first Protestant archbishop of Canterbury,&quot; which, if true at all, is true only in a very modified sense, shows the necessity for this caution. Cranmer had only been a few months in England when he received a second commission from the king appointing him &quot; Conciliarius Regius et ad Cicsarem Orator.&quot; In tho summer of 1531 he accordingly proceeded to Germany as sole ambassador to the emperor, with the design of furthering 