ABSTRACT
Within the walls of Westminster Abbey, that great shrine to the national collective memory of centuries of English worship and worthies, the fierce religious divisions of Tudor times are today quietly sealed up in their respective royal tombs. Edward, Mary, Elizabeth, and even their cousin Mary, queen of Scots, all lie within the same house of God, achieving in death the Christian unity they lacked in life. The centuries have worn away the sharp divisions of their day so that in our era their common interment in the Abbey serves to underline the message of Christian ecumenism. How ironic, then, that even as time has helped to heal the wounds of that turbulent period, the years of the Abbey’s continued use have also effaced its memorial to an eminent Tudor theologian who attempted a middle way between the religious extremes of his day and won the respect of all concerned. Nothing of his burial inscription in the North Transept remains today to remind Abbey visi tors of this man’s life and witness. Yet, his reformed catholicism rather than the committed protestantism of Thomas Cranmer would seem more in keeping with those who would wish to see Anglicanism as a theological equipoise. He is Cranmer’s younger Cambridge contempo rary, John Redman, DD, an original canon of the refounded Abbey.1
