MacCulloch, D. Thomas Cranmer. 1996

I got through Diarmaid MacCulloch's Thomas Cranmer (1996). (The blurbs cite Leslie Rowse referring to Cranmer as "a big-wig"). It's a good book for the details of what was going on. Poor Cranmer got caught by Henry's desire to get a son. He was not a great brain in the thinking line (which may account for the beauty of his prose). Nor had he much sense of the weakness of our moral nature. (Bouwsma's Calvin cites the Frenchman on Henry "the monster" - after Henry's death). For various reasons, Henry wanted Catherine as his wife. The pledge, the gage, was "til death do us part". Henry lost but couldn't accept the loss. Instead of accepting Mary as heir and getting on with his life, he set about turning the necessary reform of the monasteries and the too rich ecclesiastical holdings into a grab bag.
Cranmer did not see that the first divorce would lead to another and another. And the setting up of Henry as the deciding voice in the church in England would lead to the breakdown of monarchy and church alike. Incoherence at the center leads to chaos, held together only by hysteria. There is much to be said for a "holistic" view of things. MacCulloch occludes (there's a good word) the persecutions in Ireland and even in Scotland, with that English ("Anglo-Saxon") brutality which shocked all observers. He is irritated by the "papists" mockery of Cranmer's "fat German wife stuffed into a barrel" to hide her from Henry. No sense of humor in Diarmaid.
But all in all it's a valuable book as a description of the beginnings of the Church of England, with its pleasure in place and its ambitious clergy; its corruption of Scripture, its fear of women, its loathing of the dirt of poverty. All these reforming, protesting institutions end always by proclaiming that the reformers are a select of God. But fail to note that they may have been selected for particular duty, especially towards the poor - and not for particular pleasure. The flaw in the justification of the monarch as head of the head (the monarch rules by divine right in the simple sense that God made the heir) was demonstrated by the "glorious revolution". The English politicos would accept God's making of the heir, unless they didn't like the heir.
Now that the money is running out, they hysterically offer more and more excuses - a little divorce, a roll in the sack without consequence, a justification of the rich with their fear of poverty. The "Head" of the Church of England is a woman. Her successor is to be Charles. It is not without interest, as they say in the auction catalogues, that the protesting countries are the hot-beds of eu-genics and eu-thanasia, cheered on by their clergy, leading their sheep to the slaughter in the name of "humane-ity".
The triumph of secular religion saw the rise of "Enthusaism", "Pietism", the effort of worried souls, and especially the poor, to escape from the hell of predestination to which Anglicans and Lutherans and Calvinists had condemned them. Bad cyst to their greedy hearts. Had MacCulloch been able to control his irritation at the "papists", it would be a better book. He does demonstrate that Belloc was right and the Prot historians "disingenuous".