English: Thomas Cranmer. Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1533 to 1555, was the architect of the English Reformation. A portrait by Gerlach Flicke 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 (Image:Thomas-Cranmer.jpg), and in John Foxe's Actes and Monuments in 1563 (Image:Foxe's Book of Martyrs - Cranmer & Cole.jpg), 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, Tudor and Jacobean Portraits, London: HMSO, 1969, pp. 53–56; Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Boy King: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002, p. 78.)