the lesser of two evils, his appointment was confirmed.

Thomas Cranmer was born in Nottingham, and educated in Cambridge. He
married early in life, but his wife having died within a few months,
he determined to take holy orders. His suggestion to submit the
validity of Henry's marriage to the judgment of the universities,
coming as it did at a time when Henry was at his wits' end, showed him
to be a man of resource whose services should be secured by the court.
He was appointed accordingly chaplain to Anne Boleyn's father, and was
one of those sent on the embassy to meet the Pope and Charles V. at
Bologna. During his wanderings in Germany he was brought into close
relationship with many of the leading Reformers, and following their
teaching and example he took to himself a wife in the person of the
well-known Lutheran divine, Osiander. Such a step, so highly
objectionable to the Church authorities and likely to be displeasing
to Henry, who in spite of his own weakness insisted on clerical
celibacy, was kept a secret, though it is not at all improbable that
the secret had reached the ears of the king. At the time when the
latter had made up his mind to set Rome at defiance, he knew how
important it was for him to sacrifice his own personal predilections,
for the sake of having a man of Cranmer's pliability as Archbishop of
Canterbury, and head of the clergy in England. On the 30th March,
1533, Cranmer was consecrated archbishop, and took the usual oath of
obedience and loyalty to the Pope; but immediately before the
ceremony, he registered a formal protest that he considered the oath a
mere form, and that he wished to hold himself free to provide for the
reformation of the Church in England.[25] Such a step indicates
clearly enough the character of the first archbishop of the
Reformation in England.