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Historical person
1489–1556
Thomas Cranmer rose from Cambridge scholar and royal servant to become archbishop of Canterbury in 1533. He helped secure Henry VIII’s annulment from Catherine of Aragon, supported the royal supremacy and later shaped the English Reformation through the first two editions of the Book of Common Prayer. Under Mary I he was convicted of heresy, briefly signed recantations and then dramatically withdrew them before being burned at Oxford in 1556.
Cranmer appears in many Tudor novels because his career connects the king’s marriages with the transformation of English religion. He is a significant figure in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy and in C. J. Sansom’s Shardlake novels, where the political and theological consequences of reform form a central part of the setting.
Series
The Shardlake Series follows Matthew Shardlake, a London barrister with scoliosis whose legal work repeatedly draws him into murder investigations and affairs of state between 1537 and 1549. He begins as an idealistic supporter of religious reform and an agent of Thomas Cromwell, but the violence of the…
All books in this series
Standalone books
