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THOMAS CRANMER, "Primate of all England," and first protestant Archbishop of Canterbury, was born on the second of July, in the year 1489, at Aslacton in Nottinghamshire. He was of honourable Norman extraction, and the seat of the family had been Cranmer Hall, in Leicestershire.

His father, who gave him his own baptismal name, died when he was yet in early childhood; but he found a guardian and guide in his widowed mother, Agnes, of the race of the Hatfields, who sent him, at the age of fourteen, to Cambridge, where his time was wasted in the subtleties of the schools till he was twenty-two. His good sense and discrimination led him afterwards to the study of the purest latin authors, while he read at the same time with pleasure and profit the writings of Faber and Erasmus. He took the degree of Master of Arts, and was elected Fellow of Jesus College. The the ological controversies in Germany led him moreover to a diligent perusal of scripture; and when the English monarch thought fit to write against Luther, he was induced to examine some productions of that eminent reformer; which scrutiny was attended with a conviction of the justness of his reasoning, though, through that timidity and prudence which marked his character in after-life, he did not openly avow his sentiments. He was rather observant than comJAN. 1827.

municative. He was employed in laying up a stock of useful knowledge; extracting or making notes of the valuable thoughts of different authors in his common-place book, and marking the numbers of the divisions or pages in such works as had paragraphs too long for transcription, but whose substance he was desirous of committing to memory.*

In 1525 he married a gentleman's daughter. This measure, while it showed his protestant turn of mind, lost him his fellowship; but he was appointed divinityreader in Buckingham College; where he became very obnoxious to the idle and ignorant friars, who, because his wife boarded with the hostess of the Dolphin Inn, to whom she was related, and he went thither frequently to visit her, spread a malicious report that he was no better than an ostler. His wife dying in child-bed, the college did him the singular honour of once more choosing him Fellow, though it was contrary to the rules of the University. This favour he so gratefully acknowledged, that when he was nominated to a Fellowship in Cardinal Wolsey's new foundation at Oxford, though the salary was much more considerable, and the road to preferment more accessible by the favour of that dig

* Fox; Strype; Melchior Adam. Fuller's Hist. of Cambridge, p. 102.

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