The Story of Thomas Cranmer

Thomas Cranmer was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury by Henry VIII in 1532. He represented the middle ground between Catholicism and Puritanism, which would come to define Anglicanism. The irony that royal supremacy could be used to reassert Roman Catholicism just as much as to abolish it was for Cranmer a fatal one. While he was sentenced to execution nonetheless, he staged a dramatic recantation on the scaffold.