Forty-two Articles

Written by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer and published by King Edward VI's privy council along with a requirement for clergy to subscribe to it, it represented the height of official church reformation prior to the reign of Queen Elizabeth I.

This was not implemented, and Henry VIII instead imposed the Six Articles of 1539, mandating clerical subscription to them and requiring married clergymen to separate from their wives.

[3] After Henry VIII's death and King Edward VI's 1547 accession, the English Reformation again picked up steam.

This delay occurred because, while there was sufficient support for repealing the Six Articles, it was not clear that a majority of bishops or the House of Lords would be willing to make a more definitively Reformation-aligned statement.

[3] Furthermore, Cranmer may have held out hopes of a general ecumenical council bringing new unity among Christians under Reformation lines, or at the very least a common confession between continental Protestants and the Church of England.

The articles which, that year, Bishop John Hooper required clergy under him to subscribe to may have drawn from Cranmer's draft.

[5] But the Forty-two Articles were more ambitious in that they were intended as a definitive statement of doctrine for the Church of England, akin to the Lutheran Augsburg Confession.

[7] At each point, its progress towards ratification was slowed by those less convinced of Reformation doctrines, but its text appears to have remained largely as Cranmer wrote it with the help of two laymen revisers, William Cecil and John Cheke.