[2] In October 1532, Thomas Cranmer was recalled to London in order to succeed William Warham as Archbishop of Canterbury; he was consecrated on 30 March 1533.
Later recusant accounts suggest that Cranmer joined her husband clandestinely, having to hide in a ventilated chest during his travels through his province..[3] Others suggest that, until June 1539 and the prorogation of the Six Articles (1539) with its strict re-enforcement of clerical celibacy, Cranmer lived 'more or less openly as his wife until the reign of Queen Mary, except whilst the Act of the Six Articles was in force, when she retired with her children into Germany'.
[5] Two months after the accession of Mary Tudor in 1553, Thomas Cranmer was charged with treason and sent first to the Tower and then to Oxford's Bocardo Prison.
Cranmer most likely once more sought exile in her native Germany, though it is possible that she and her two children remained in hiding in England until her husband’s execution in March 1556.
During his time in the Whitchurch household, Norton translated Calvin’s Institutes: ‘I performed my worke in the house of my sayd friende Edward VVhitchurch, a man well known of vpright hart and dealing, an auncient zelous Gospeller, as plaine and true a friend as euer I knew living, and as desirous to do any thinge to common good, specially by the advancement of true religion’.
[9] She was not without means, and derived regular income from her interest in Kirkstall Abbey, Yorkshire, a personal grant of land made to her first husband Thomas Cranmer under the terms of the dissolution of monastic houses and conveyed to her.