EVEN in the belief that it's impossible to libel a bloke who burned at the stake 455 years ago, it's hard to know what to make of Thomas Cranmer, the original Yes Minister. On most arguments he was Henry VIII's lapdog, an ecclesiastical poodle completely subservient to the king's command.

"The servility with which Cranmer lent himself to the accomplishment of Henry's lawless desires and the timidity which made him acquiesce to deeds of tyranny and violence....remain as a blot on his memory," observes one biographer, a Cranmer crammer on the Internet.

Yet Cranmer had the most wondrous way with words, his 1549 Prayer Book a literary and liturgical masterwork that sings sonorously down the centuries.

One is incorrigibly reminded of grass green days in Bishop Auckland juvenile court, when the little perisher's sins had abundantly been laid against him and the wretched parents were invited to offer expiation.

"Well, your worships," they would say as regular as reparation, "he's always a good boy at home."

Cranmer, doubtless a good boy at home, was born in Nottinghamshire in 1489, studied and lectured at Cambridge - without distinction in either - and is said to have come to old Henry's attention in 1529 by suggesting that he might get shot of Catharine of Aragon by collecting opinions in his favour from the universities.

Like Cambridge, perhaps.

In 1533, Henry made him Archbishop of Canterbury, the Archbishop then duly proclaiming that the King's marriage to Catharine was invalid. A few days later, he crowned Ann Boleyn queen, declared that marriage invalid in 1536, promoted both the marriage and subsequent divorce of Ann of Cleves and was one of Catherine Howard's accusers, too.

Not just an ecclesiastical poodle, but the best in the episcopal show.

Yet his Prayer Book, and his zeal for it, were extraordinary at a time when orders of worship had been entirely in Latin (and therefore, to the peasantry, all Greek.)

For that, if for nothing else, the 1549 service in all its great glory is celebrated once a year at Holy Trinity in Darlington.

"Our annual traditional treat," said Christopher Wardale, the Vicar, though it's entirely possible that a clandestine cell of the Justice for Thomas Cranmer Society meets there much more regularly in order to demand a posthumous pardon for the old primate, if not to free the Canterbury One.

"They come from far and wide," Mr Wardale had forecast, the column therefore assuming its customarily shrinking seat half way down the nave.

It was therefore reminiscent of the parable of the wedding feast to be bidden to go higher - to the choir stalls, to be exact - and something of a surprise to discover that the congregation numbered just ten, though two were from as far and wide as Piercebridge.

It was last Saturday morning. "I thought all the bollards in town were for this," someone said. "It must be the football match, instead."

Most of the service would be familiar to those who remember, or who still love, the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, its emphasis upon the awesomeness of God and the humility (indeed the humbleness) of the congregation.

The rubric lays down lengthy terms and conditions on whom might be admitted to communion - no naughty living, no more loathing thy neighbour, that sort of thing - the exhortation is more fearful yet.

"For as the benefit is great....so is the danger great, if we receive the same unworthily. For then we become guilty of the body and blood of Christ our saviour, we eat and drink our own damnation, not considering the Lord's body. We kindle God's wrath over us, we provoke him to plague us with diverse diseases and sundry kinds of death.

"Therefore if any here be a blasphemer, advouterer, or be in malice or envy...."

And so, alarmingly, it goes on. A proper column would insert an asterisk after the word "advouterer" and explain in a scholarly footnote that it is an archaic form of adulterer. The greater temptation was to run headlong from the choir stalls crying "Unworthy" and to flee down the road for a pie and a pint in the Britannia.

It's shimmering stuff, even so. "A genius for formal prose," said Mr Wardale. "I think history will remember him fondly, a learned man who always found himself in the midst of trouble.

"All our services, with all their twists and turns, come from this one great treasure."

Cranmer, freed to pursue doctrinal change by Henry's death in 1547, reluctantly supported the claims of Lady Jane Grey at Edward VI's passing six years later and, for once, he backed the wrong horse.

Upon Mary's accession he was tried for treason and sedition, convicted of heresy, stripped of his preferments and condemned to death.

A few days before his execution he recanted, but when ordered publicly to disavow his former beliefs at the stake he refused, villified his own cowardice and thrust the hand that had written the recantation into the flames.

Probably he felt forsaken. However else poor Thomas Cranmer may be remembered, however, words never failed him at all.