Thomas Cranmer

Thomas Cranmer was a careful Cambridge scholar who never sought power and spent twenty-three years at the center of it, serving as Archbishop of Canterbury under Henry VIII and then under the boy king Edward VI. His lasting work was not politics but language: the Book of Common Prayer put the church's daily worship, its weddings, and its funerals into English so plain and rhythmic that people memorized it without trying, and much of it is still prayed today.

When Mary I came to the throne and Protestants were being burned, Cranmer was imprisoned, worn down, and signed a series of recantations — the only one of England's leading reformers to break. Told he would burn anyway, he stood in the university church, publicly took back everything he had signed, and named the pope as Christ's enemy. At the stake, witnesses said, he stretched his right hand into the flame first, because that was the hand that had signed.