Thomas Cranmer

Thomas Cranmer (1489–1556) served as the first Protestant Archbishop of Canterbury and was the principal architect of Anglican theology and liturgy during the English Reformation. He composed the Book of Common Prayer (1549, revised 1552), which gave the emerging Church of England its distinctive vernacular worship, and oversaw the formulation of the Forty-Two Articles (1553), the doctrinal basis later revised into the Thirty-Nine Articles. Cranmer navigated the shifting religious policies of Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Mary I with varying degrees of compromise, and under Mary he signed recantations of his Protestant beliefs under duress before publicly withdrawing them at the stake. He was burned for heresy at Oxford in 1556, famously thrusting his right hand — with which he had signed the recantations — into the flames first. His liturgical prose shaped the English language and the devotional life of Anglicanism for centuries.