In 1533, he pronounced sentence of divorce against the unhappy Catherine, and confirmed the marriage of the king with Anne Boleyn. He was now at leisure to contemplate all the difficulties of his situation. It is commonly said that Cranmer himself had, at this time, made but small progress in Protestantism. It is true that he yet adhered to many of the peculiar doctrines of the Roman Church; but he had reached, and firmly occupied, a position which placed him by many degrees nearer to the reformed faith than to that in which he had been educated. By recognising the Scriptures alone as the standard of the Christian faith, he had embraced the very principle out of which Protestantism flows. It had already led him to the Protestant doctrine respecting the pardon of sin, which necessarily swept away all respect for a large portion of the machinery of Romanism. As a religious reformer, Cranmer could look for no cordial and honest support from the king. Every one knows that Henry, when he left the Pope, had no mind to estrange himself more than was necessary from the Papal Church, and that the cause of religious reformation owes no more gratitude to him, than the cause of political liberty owes to those tyrants who, for their own security, and often by very foul means, have laboured to crush the power of equally tyrannical nobles. From Gardiner, who, with his party, had been most active and unscrupulous in helping the king to his divorce and destroying papal supremacy, Cranmer had nothing to expect but open or secret hostility, embittered by personal jealousy. Cromwell, indeed, was ready to go with him any lengths in reform consistent with his own safety; but a sincere reformer must have been occasionally hampered by an alliance with a worldly and unconscientious politician. The country at large was in a state of unusual excitement; but the rupture with Rome was regarded with at least as much alarm as satisfaction; and it was notorious that many, who were esteemed for their wisdom and piety, considered the position of the church to be monstrous and unnatural. The Lollards, who had been driven into concealment, but not extinguished, by centuries of persecution, and the Lutherans, wished well to Cranmer’s measures of reform: but he was not equally friendly to them. They had outstripped him in the search of truth; and he was unhappily induced to sanction at least a miserable persecution of those men with whom he was afterwards to be numbered and to suffer.