His first and most pressing care was by all means to reconcile the minds of men to the assertion of the king’s ecclesiastical supremacy, because all further changes must necessarily proceed from the royal authority. He then addressed himself to what seem to have been the three great objects of his official exertions,—the reformation of the clerical body, so as to make their ministerial services more useful; the removal of the worst part of the prevailing superstitious observances, which were a great bar to the introduction of a more spiritual worship; and above all, the free circulation of the Scriptures among the people in their own language. In this last object he was opportunely assisted by the printing of what is called Matthews’s Bible, by Grafton and Whitchurch. He procured, through the intervention of Cromwell, the king’s licence for the publication, and an injunction that a copy of it should be placed in every parish church. He hailed this event with unbounded joy; and to Cromwell, for the active part he took in the matter, he says, in a letter, “This deed you shall hear of at the great day, when all things shall be opened and made manifest.”
He had hardly witnessed the partial success of the cause of Reformation, when his influence over the king, and with it the cause which he had at heart, began to decline. He had no friendly feeling for those monastic institutions which the rapacity of Henry had marked for destruction; but he knew that their revenues might, as national property, be applied advantageously to the advancement of learning and religion, and he opposed their indiscriminate transfer to the greedy hands of the sycophants of the court. This opposition gave to the more unscrupulous of the Romanists an opportunity to recover their lost ground with the king, of which they were not slow to avail themselves. They were strong enough at least to obtain from Parliament, in 1539, (of course through the good will of their despotic master,) the act of the Six Articles, not improperly called the “Bloody Articles,” in spite of the determined opposition of Cranmer: an opposition which he refused to withdraw even at the express command of the king. Latimer and Shaxton immediately resigned their bishoprics. One of the clauses of this act, relating to the marriage of priests, inflicted a severe blow even on the domestic happiness of Cranmer. In his last visit to the continent, he had taken, for his second wife, a niece of the celebrated divine Osiander. By continuing to cohabit with her, he would now, by the law of the land, be guilty of felony; she was therefore sent back to her friends in Germany.