Thomas Cranmer. Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1533 to 1555, was the architect of the English Reformation. <a href="//commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Thomas-Cranmer-ez.jpg" title="File:Thomas-Cranmer-ez.jpg">A portrait by Gerlach Flicke</a> shows him without a beard in 1546, so the present painting depicts him late in life. The first images of Cranmer with a long beard appeared in Boissard's collection of portraits from 1560 (<a href="//commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Thomas-Cranmer.jpg" title="File:Thomas-Cranmer.jpg">Image:Thomas-Cranmer.jpg</a>), and in John Foxe's <i>Actes and Monuments</i> in 1563 (<a href="//commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Foxe%27s_Book_of_Martyrs_-_Cranmer_%26_Cole.jpg" title="File:Foxe's Book of Martyrs - Cranmer &amp; Cole.jpg">Image:Foxe's Book of Martyrs - Cranmer &amp; Cole.jpg</a>), seven years after Cranmer's burning. Foxe describes him as "of stature mean, of complexion pure and somewhat sanguine" and as having "a long beard, white and thick". (See Roy Strong, <i>Tudor and Jacobean Portraits</i>, London: HMSO, 1969, pp. 53–56; Diarmaid MacCulloch, <i>The Boy King: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation</i>, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002, p. 78.)
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Unknown artist<span style="display: none;">Unknown artist</span></div>
Almost certainly posthumous; according to Strong, this version, at Lambeth Palace, is likely a seventeenth-century (or later) copy. The inscription refers to Cranmer's martyrdom (1556).
<p>Chris Skidmore, <i>Edward VI: The Lost King of England</i>, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2007, <a href="//commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:BookSources/9780297846499" title="Special:BookSources/9780297846499">ISBN 9780297846499</a>.
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