On Tuesday, 21st March, a notable event took place in Oxford, under the auspices of the Prayer Book Society, to commemorate the burning at the stake 450 years ago to the day, of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer. After a morning service of Holy Communion at the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin, at which the preacher was the Archbishop of Canterbury, a packed congregation (of whom your correspondent was one) walked to the site of his martyrdom in Broad Street, thence to the nearby Martyrs Memorial where the Archbishop laid a wreath of flowers in Cranmer’s memory. It was a very Oxford occasion, with Oxford academic hoods and episcopal mitres jostling with ten-ton lorries and busy commercial city life! The day’s proceedings concluded with a lunch in the splendid dining hall of Balliol College, under the benign gaze of, among many other dignitaries, at least three twentieth-century British Prime Ministers.
Readers will no doubt have their own well-rehearsed views on the respective strengths of the 1662 Prayer Book, the King James Bible, the Alternative Service Book and its successor, Common Worship. It is a sensitive and difficult topic. Wisely, therefore, in view of his audience. Rowan Williams, in a memorable sermon, eschewed any reference to their comparative merits! Taking as his text the words from 2 Timothy 2, The word of God is not bound’, he discussed instead the peculiar style of the language of Cranmer’s Prayer Book, which sometimes appeared to be marked by wordy repetition, (e.g. full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction’) but which in fact reflects the necessary imprecision that is needed when discussing God. God is always in excess of what can be said, and words alone, as Cranmer ultimately found to his cost, were not sufficient to save him. So the tentative style of the Prayer Book, like a great bird hovering over its prey, approaching but never striking, is particularly well suited to the style of Cranmer’s own struggles. T.S. Eliot, in a later century, spoke of the intolerable wrestle with words and meanings’, and humbly concluded of his own efforts: That was a way of putting it’. Cranmer’s magnificent language mirrors the same struggle.
In addition, the Archbishop paid fulsome tribute to Cranmer the man, who, as one of the architects of the Reformation, was caught when the political wind changed and the Catholic Mary succeeded to the throne in 1553. He spoke of Cranmer’s penitent scrupulosity of language’ and added: He could not bring himself to lie in the face of judgement’. So when, from the pulpit of the same University Church in which we were sitting, the 67-year-old Cranmer shouted his defiance and refused to recant his heresies according to the prevailing religious orthodoxy, he was harried through the rain to the nearby city ditch and burned at the stake.
What has all this to do with our own lives in 2006? It is hardly likely that an Archbishop of Canterbury, or indeed anybody in England today, would be burned at the stake for their faith. But the twentieth century, and indeed our own new century, is littered with the corpses of men and women who suffered just a faith, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the victims of the Holocaust among them. Only in recent weeks, the new Taleban government in Afghanistan sentenced an Afghan to death for espousing Christianity, and offered him a chance to recant. Although we in the West have reached the year 2006, we must not forget that the Muslim calendar has recently entered the 15th century. What comparable atrocities were not committed in England around 1410?
In conclusion, it is easy to regard the members of the Prayer Book Society as a reactionary crowd of middle-aged, middle class readers of The Daily Telegraph who refuse to move with the times, but prefer to cling on the hymns with which they are most familiar, and prayers in the words they miss so much, in an age when the Church of England seeks to make itself more accessible’ by the use of revised liturgy. This is not wholly fair. The language of the 1662 Prayer Book, like the music of J.S.Bach and Palestrina, was written quite deliberately not of an age, but for all time, and fortunately even young priests have become infected’ by the beauty of the Prayer Book despite having been reared on a diet of Alternative Services. What, one wonders, would Cranmer himself have made of the sonorous cadences of Common Worship’? Cranmer’s Prayer Book will continue to be cherished by all those who love language, and Cranmer, the Oxford Martyr, will undoubtedly be celebrated on the 500th anniversary of his death, even if I myself am not around to see it!
Robert Triggs
An Oxford Martyr Remembered
Robert Triggs