Thomas Cranmer was born not two years before Henry VIII., in 1489; the son of a country gentleman of no great estate. An elder son was to carry on the family; Thomas and his younger brother were destined to the Church. The younger sons of a country gentleman of straitened means had no very encouraging prospects, and the career chosen for the boy was, no doubt, dictated merely by convenience, though it was well enough suited to his talents and temperament. Somewhat lacking, perhaps, in that cheerful heedlessness of danger and physical pain which is the happy heritage of the normal English boy--the outcome often of rude health and imperturbable nerves rather than of any properly moral endowment--a certain timidity and want of self-confidence in him were evidently fostered by the unsympathetic severity of a pedagogue whose theory of education was, a stick with a master at one end and a boy at the other. In due course he went up to the recent foundation of Jesus College, Cambridge, and was elected to a fellowship on taking his degree. Till his fortieth year he continued in these academic shades, and would have remained there peacefully enough to his life’s end if an accident had not brought him under the notice of Henry VIII.
Colet and others, some years earlier, had introduced the new criticism into Oxford; while Cranmer was an undergraduate, Cambridge was still lagging behind. In 1511, however, the placid, not to say stagnant, waters were moved by the appointment of Erasmus to the Greek Chair. There is no record of any personal intercourse between Cranmer and the great scholar; but it was precisely at this time that the former withdrew his attention from the scholastic philosophy and theology which had hitherto absorbed him, and devoted himself to studying the Scriptures. In the University he seems to have been regarded as an undoubtedly learned scholar; for Wolsey, who as an educationist chose his men with judgment, offered him a canonry at his new “Cardinal College” at Oxford; but he was not looked upon as one who would seek preferment or be selected for it unsought, or as in any sense an intellectual leader. The only incident worth noting is that at the outset, being still a layman, he lost his fellowship by marrying a respectable young “gentlewoman,” a connexion of the landlord of a Cambridge hostelry. On her death, however, a year later, he was re-elected to his fellowship--apparently a unique instance in those times of such recognition--proceeding afterwards to take Holy Orders.