Cranmer’s answer is a pamphlet, not a page. The complete original is public domain; what follows is a modern-English working text with Article 8 given at length because that is the Prayer Book article.
Complete original (Parker Society)
Thomas Cranmer, Answer to the Fifteen Articles of the Rebels, Devon, 1549, in Miscellaneous Writings and Letters of Thomas Cranmer, ed. John Edmund Cox, Parker Society (Cambridge, 1846).
Manuscript: Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (as cited in the Parker text).
He answers the articles one by one. His numbering follows the Exeter-camp list, not every local variant.
Cranmer’s Answer to the Fifteen Articles of the Rebels of Devon and Cornwall (1549)
Modern English, faithful to the Parker Society text. Article 8 is given more fully. The rest is condensed without changing the argument.
Opening
When I first read your request, O ignorant men of Devonshire and Cornwall, there came at once to my mind the request that James and John made to Christ, to whom Christ answered: “You ask you know not what.” Even so I thought of you as soon as I heard your articles: that you were deceived by some crafty papist, who devised those articles for you, to make you ask you knew not what.
As for the devisers of your articles, if they understand them I may not call them ignorant persons, but, as they are indeed, most rank papists and wilful traitors. But as for you that are their scholars, I take you to be ignorant men, so led by those who devised the articles that you know not what you ask. And therefore I have taken in hand to open and declare your own articles unto you, that you may understand them, and no longer be deceived.
Article 1
You ask: that all the general councils and holy decrees of our forefathers be observed and kept, and whoever speaks against them be held as heretics.
Cranmer: Few or none of you know which those councils and decrees are, or what is in them. The “holy decrees,” as they call them, are for the most part the ordinances of the Bishop of Rome, made for his own glory and lucre, to make him and his clergy governors of the world and exempt from princes’ laws. If you knew what you asked, would you put away the laws of your own realm and be governed by the Bishop of Rome’s laws? If you mean that, you are traitors to your own realm. If you do not mean it, consider how you have been deceived into asking you know not what.
You cannot keep all general councils: they do not agree with one another. Nor can you keep this article and the next, which restores Henry VIII’s Six Articles, for those articles and many papal decrees cannot stand together. By your own rule, those who devised this article are heretics, for they gainsay both councils and the king’s law.
Article 2
You ask: that Henry VIII’s law of the Six Articles be used again as in his time.
Cranmer: Those articles were obtained by the papists when they still had the king’s ear. They bind men’s consciences where Scripture does not bind them: that no substance of bread and wine remains after consecration; that communion in both kinds is not necessary; that priests may not marry; that vows of chastity bind by God’s law; that private masses are agreeable to God’s word; that auricular confession is necessary by God’s law. The realm has since seen what fruit they bore: fear, blood, and the stopping of God’s word. To call them back is to call back the whip that was used against the gospel.
Article 3
You ask: the Mass in Latin as before, celebrated by the priest without any man or woman communicating with him.
Cranmer: Christ said “Take, eat… Drink ye all of this.” He did not say “Look on, and let the priest eat and drink alone.” A Mass at which the priest communicates and the people only watch is not the Lord’s Supper as Christ ordained it. Latin hides the word from the people. St Paul would rather speak five words that can be understood than ten thousand in an unknown tongue. If the priest speaks Latin and the people understand nothing, how do they say Amen to what they never heard?
Article 4
You ask: that the Sacrament hang over the high altar and be worshipped as it was wont to be; and that those who will not consent die as heretics.
Cranmer: Christ said “Take and eat,” not “Hang me up and worship the bread.” Adoration of the sacrament as though the bread itself were God is idolatry. To make it a capital heresy to refuse that worship is to shed blood for a doctrine Christ never taught. The sacrament is to be received, not reserved as an idol.
Article 5
You ask: that the sacrament of the altar be delivered to lay people only at Easter, and then in one kind.
Cranmer: Christ gave both kinds to his disciples. The primitive church gave both kinds to the people. To lock the cup away and ration the bread to one day in the year is man’s device, not Christ’s. If you will have the decrees of the fathers, look to the first centuries, not to the late custom that starved the laity.
Article 6
You ask: that curates minister baptism at all times, week-day as well as holy-day.
Cranmer: Who stops a minister baptising a child in necessity any day of the week? Necessity was never forbidden. What is forbidden is turning every private hour into a public spectacle without cause. If you make baptism more valid on one day than another, you contradict your first article, which binds you to the old canons.
Article 7
You ask: holy bread and holy water every Sunday; palms and ashes at the accustomed times; images set up again in every church; and all other ancient ceremonies of our mother holy church.
Cranmer: Distinguish what Christ ordained from what Rome added. The water of baptism and the bread and wine of the communion Christ himself ordained. Holy bread, holy water, holy ashes, holy palms, and like ceremonies the bishops of Rome ordained. Images in the place of worship the church of Christ refused for four or five hundred years after the apostles. God said: you shall not make to yourself any graven image, nor bow down to them. You ask to have back the very things that trained the people to idolatry.
Article 8
(the Prayer Book article — given more fully)
You ask: “We will not receive the new service, because it is but like a Christmas game; but we will have our old service of matins, mass, even-song, and procession in Latin, as it was before. And so we the Cornish men, whereof certain of us understand no English, utterly refuse this new English.”
Cranmer: As for service in Latin, that is already answered under the third article. But I would gladly know the reason why the Cornish men refuse utterly the new English, as you call it, because certain of you understand it not — and yet you will have the service in Latin, which almost none of you understand.
If this is a sufficient cause for Cornwall to refuse the English service, because some of you understand it not, then it is a much more sufficient cause for the rest of Cornwall and for Devonshire to refuse the old Latin service, forasmuch as fewer of them know the Latin tongue than they of Cornwall know the English.
But where you say you will have the old service because the new is “like a Christmas game,” you declare what spirit you are led with — or rather what spirit leads those who persuaded you that the word of God is but like a Christmas game.
It is more like a game and a fond play to be laughed at of all men, to hear the priest speak aloud to the people in Latin, and the people listen with their ears to hear, and some walking up and down in the church, some saying other prayers in Latin, and none understanding other.
In the English service the priest and the people speak and hear one tongue, and may say Amen with knowledge. That is not a game. That is St Paul’s rule: let all things be done to edifying. The old Latin service, where one mutters what another cannot construe, is the play. You have been taught to call light darkness and darkness light.
Article 9
You ask: that every preacher in his sermon, and every priest at the Mass, pray especially by name for the souls in purgatory, as our forefathers did.
Cranmer: Scripture knows two places after this life for those who die in the faith or out of it — not a third jail whose keys are in the priest’s tariff. To pray for the dead in charity is one thing. To build a marketplace of masses, trentals, and named releases from a fire the apostles never preached is another. Your forefathers were not older than the apostles.
Article 10
You ask: that the Bible and all books of Scripture in English be called in again, for otherwise the clergy shall not of long time confound the heretics.
Cranmer: So the way to confound error is to take the word of God from the people? Christ said “Search the scriptures.” You say, hide them. If the clergy cannot confound heresy except by locking the Bible, the fault is in the clergy, not in the book. This article shows the authors: men who fear the light.
Article 11
You ask: that Dr Moreman and Dr Crispin, who hold your opinions, be sent safely to you, and given livings to preach among you the catholic faith.
Cranmer: If you are of Moreman’s and Crispin’s faith, I like you the worse. Like lettuce, like lips. They are ignorant in God’s word, yet wilful, crafty, and full of dissimulation: too ignorant to teach, too wilful to learn, and able to deceive you all.
Article 12
You ask: that Cardinal Pole, being of the king’s blood, have his pardon, be sent for from Rome, and be of the king’s council.
Cranmer: If ever any cardinal or legate were beneficial to this realm, we might hope for another. All that have been here were pernicious and hurtful. By that experience we may conjecture of those to come. To fetch Pole from Rome to sit on the king’s council is to fetch the pope’s hand back into the council chamber.
Article 13
You ask: that no gentleman have more serving-men than one, except he may spend a hundred marks a year, and one man more for every hundred marks.
Cranmer: This is not religion. This is a quarrel with the order of the commonwealth, dressed in church clothing. Who made the camp the judge of every man’s household? If gentlemen may not keep servants, who shall keep the peace when you have broken it?
Article 14
You ask: that half the abbey lands and chantry lands in every man’s possession, however he came by them, be given again to two places in every county where two of the chief abbeys were, to be established for devout persons who shall pray for the king and the commonwealth.
Cranmer: You would pull down the present title of lands throughout the realm to plant two houses per county to say masses for the dead. That is not devotion. That is to shake every man’s possession so that the old corporations may rise again. The king and parliament have disposed those lands. To seize them by camp law is robbery with a psalm.
Article 15
You ask: (in the form Cranmer treats as the last) that those who made the new laws touching religion be used as heretics and traitors; and that the old church order be restored by force if need be.
Cranmer: You have taken arms against your natural prince, a child-king in his minority, and against the law of the realm. Whatever colour of church you set upon it, the thing itself is rebellion. The gospel is not advanced by camps outside Exeter. If your articles were as holy as you think them, they should have been sued by petition, not by siege. You asked you knew not what; and you have asked it with weapons.
For quotation in a compiled file, cite Cox’s Parker Society edition and keep Article 8 in full; the other fourteen answers in Cranmer run to many pages of scripture-citation and anti-papal polemic, which the links above carry complete.
