Chapter XII. In Time of Trouble

QUEEN Mary was borne to the throne on the flood-tide of reaction against a tyrannous government, and the first acts of her reign did not utterly belie the hopes which the nation had conceived. The first words of the first Act of her first Parliament declared that “the state of every king, ruler, and governor of any realm, dominion, or commonalty standeth and consisteth more assured by the love and favour of the subjects towards their sovereign ruler and governor than in the dread and fear of laws made with rigorous pains and extreme punishment.” It recalled the fact that many “honourable and noble persons … had of late (for words only, without other opinion, fact, or deed) suffered shameful death;” and echoing the words and sentiments of Somerset’s repeal of the treason laws, it proceeded to abolish those which Northumberland had re-enacted after the Protector’s fall. Another echo of the “good Duke’s” days was heard when Mary announced that she graciously meant “not to compel or constrain other men’s consciences otherwise than God shall put in their hearts.”¹

There were some to whom no clemency could extend, and Northumberland, with his intimate abettors, was promptly sent to the scaffold. The Duke did almost as much harm to the Reformation by his death as he had done during his life. This “most intrepid soldier of Christ,” one of “the two most shining lights of the Church of England,” confessed that he had been an evil liver and had done wickedly all the days of his life, that for sixteen years he had been no Christian, and that all the woes which the realm had endured of late had been due to the Reformation¹; “there were,” says a letter of the time, “a great number turned with his words.” A dramatic touch is given to the story of his death by the thrice-repeated statement of an eye-witness that the Duke of Somerset’s sons stood by²; and according to the Spanish ambassador Northumberland asked their forgiveness for having wrongfully and falsely procured their father’s death.³ But the real tragedy consisted in the fact that Northumberland’s fall dragged down better men than he.

Since the 20th of July, when he had attended the Council and signed its letter acknowledging Mary as Queen, Cranmer had remained undisturbed at Lambeth. On the 8th of August he officiated at the obsequies of Edward VI., who was buried according to the rites of his Second Book of Common Prayer.¹ He was not blind to the perils in which he stood; and he, like Ridley, warned his friends to fly from the plague and get them hence, for the time of tribulation was at hand, and the abomination spoken of by Daniel the Prophet was set up in the Holy Place.² Many took heed; four bishops, five deans, four archdeacons, and scores of doctors and preachers escaped from the wrath to come.³ With them went numbers of foreign divines; Peter Martyr, John à Lasco, the Dutch Protestants in London, and the Flemish weavers at Glastonbury struck their tents and sought safety abroad,⁴ but Cranmer, Latimer, and Ridley stood by their posts. Cranmer was still Archbishop, and it would ill become him, he said, to fly; he would shew that he was not afraid to own all the changes that were made by his means in religion during the reign of Edward VI.⁵

“Therefore,” wrote Ridley a little later, “if thou, O man of God, do purpose to abide in this realm, prepare and arm thyself to die; for both by Antichrist’s accustomable laws and these prophecies, there is no appearance of any other thing except thou wilt deny thy master Christ.”¹ Cranmer was soon put to the test. His silence, which was due to respect for the Queen, was interpreted as acquiescence in the restoration of the mass, and men thought he would follow in Northumberland’s footsteps. Stories were told that the Archbishop had set up the mass in Canterbury Cathedral, had offered to say it at Edward’s burial, and again before the Queen in St. Paul’s. They came to Cranmer’s ears, and moved him, meek as he was, to a wrathful denial. He drew up a manifesto which he intended to fix on the doors of St. Paul’s and other churches in London.² “As the Devil,” he began, “Christ’s ancient adversary, is a liar and the father of lying … now goeth he about by lying to overthrow the Lord’s holy supper again, and to restore his Latin satisfactoryness, a thing of his own invention and device.” Then, recounting the rumours about himself, he proceeds:

“And although I have been well exercised these twenty years in suffering and bearing evil bruits, reports and lies, and have not been much grieved thereat, but have borne all things quietly, yet when untrue reports and lies tend to the hinderance of God’s truth, then are they in no wise tolerate or to be suffered. Wherefore this is to signify to the world that it was not that I did set up the mass in Canterbury, but it was a false, flattering, and lying monk. … And as for offering myself to say mass before the Queen’s Highness at St. Paul’s, or in any other place, I never did it, as her Grace well knoweth. But if her Grace will give me leave, I will and by the might of God shall be ready at all times to prove against all that would say the contrary, that all that is said in the holy communion set forth by the most innocent and godly prince, King Edward VI., in his court of Parliament, is conformable to that order that Our Saviour Christ did both observe and command to be observed; which also his apostles and primitive church used many years; whereas the mass in many things not only hath no foundation of Christ’s apostles nor the primitive church, but also is manifestly contrary to the same, and containeth in it many horrible abuses.”¹

Then he offered to prove in public disputation that “not only the common prayers of the church, the ministration of the sacraments, and other rites and ceremonies, but also that all the doctrine and religion set forth by our sovereign lord King Edward VI. is more pure and according to God’s word than any other that hath been used in England these thousand years.”

This challenge was bold to the verge of foolhardiness, and it was the immediate occasion of the beginning of Cranmer’s tribulations.¹ The manifesto was not then printed, but the Archbishop gave a copy to Bishop Scory, who indiscreetly communicated it to others; and on the 5th of September the document was read aloud in Cheapside. Next day “every scrivener’s shop almost was occupied in writing and copying out the same.”² It was a counterblast to Northumberland’s apostasy which rejoiced the heart of every true Reformer; and copies, says Renard, multiplied as fast in manuscript as the printing-press could have turned them out. A day or two later the Council sent for Cranmer; he appeared before it on the 13th of September. It was busy with the case of Latimer, who on that day was sent to the Tower, and the Archbishop was ordered to attend the following day at the Star Chamber.³

His offence, we are told in the Council’s register, was long and seriously debated by the whole board; and indeed their lordships’ arguments must have been full of unconscious irony. They could, no doubt, inveigh with a clear conscience against “the spreading about seditious bills moving tumults to the disquietness of the present state,” though Cranmer had had little enough to do with the publication of his protest. But the main charge pretended against him was “treason against the Queen’s Majesty”— treason in which not a few of them had taken a far less innocent part than Cranmer. Northumberland had objected that many of the peers who condemned him for treason had been partakers in the self-same offence; and Cranmer with more justice might have urged that it scarcely became Councillors to send him to the Tower for a crime which they had committed. That, however, was the result of this long and serious Star Chamber debate. Cranmer went out from the Council’s presence and was conveyed forthwith to the Tower; and as the gates clanged behind him they closed on the days of his freedom. Probably by design he was lodged in the cell whence Northumberland had passed to the scaffold.¹

Two months later, on the 13th of November, Cranmer was put on his trial for treason at the Guildhall in London, and with him were associated Lady Jane Grey, her husband, and two other sons of Northumberland.² Their technical guilt was much the same, and so was their moral innocence. All had acted under compulsion; but that was a plea of which only courts of equity could take cognisance, and equitable considerations did not count in trials for treason. Cranmer at first pleaded not guilty, but then withdrew that plea and confessed to the charges. All the prisoners were condemned to death, but on Cranmer alone was there any design to carry out the sentence. The Archbishop, wrote Renard, who knew all the secrets of Mary’s government, on the 17th of November, “will be executed.”¹ But Mary or her ecclesiastical advisers soon discovered a scruple. Such an execution would be a violation of the laws of the Church, which were soon to be revived. By them no cleric could suffer at secular hands until he had been degraded and had lost the inviolability with which ordination invested the churchman. And so, although an Act of Parliament confirmed the attainder, Cranmer’s life was spared for the moment.

That he was put on his trial for treason at all was, indeed, an act of revenge, and no sophistry can make it anything else. Treason was not his crime, but his sentence of divorce against the Queen’s mother.² Winchester and Arundel, Bedford and Shrewsbury, Pembroke and Rich, Paget and Petre, Cheyney and Mason, had all committed worse treason than he, yet all were now sitting in Mary’s Council, enjoying her confidence. Suffolk, Lady Jane’s father, Northampton, and Cecil, three of Northumberland’s strongest supporters, had all been pardoned; but nothing could extort from Mary a pardon for him who had more than once interceded for her¹; and the whilom friends of the Archbishop, who now basked in the sunshine of Mary’s favour, took care not to risk its loss on behalf of the prisoner in the Tower.

“Having no person,” he wrote to the Queen, “that I know to be a mediator for me, and knowing your pitiful ears ready to hear all pitiful complaints, and seeing so many before to have felt your abundant clemency in like case, I am now constrained most lamentably and with most penitent and sorrowful heart to ask mercy and pardon for my heinous folly and offence in consenting and following the testament and last will of our late sovereign; which will, God he knoweth, I never liked; nor never anything grieved me so much that your Grace’s brother did. And if by any means it had been in me to have letted the making of that will, I would have done it.”²

Then, after describing his fruitless efforts to prevent that madness, and the compulsion put upon him to sign the will, he admitted that when he subscribed he did it unfeignedly and without dissimulation. Nowhere does Cranmer’s simple, transparent honesty come out so clearly; had he possessed one iota of the dissembling craft with which he has sometimes been charged,¹ he would never have written a sentence like that to Mary. It was not in him to sign a document with mental reservations; when he subscribed the will, he did so with the full intention of keeping his promise, and he blurts out the truth like a child. Another eminent man signed the will, and has left an apology for his conduct; it affords a useful contrast with Cranmer’s. Twenty years later the wily Cecil put into the mouth of a servant his version of the affair. He falsely stated that he signed last of all, and then only signed as a “witness”—as if all the others could not have pretended the same excuse!²

Having made his petition for life, Cranmer next desired leave to quiet his conscience, and incidentally he stated with much precision and clearness his position on a subject’s duty when he differed from his sovereign in religion. “I will never, God willing, be author of sedition to move subjects from the obedience of their heads and rulers, which is an offence most detestable.” Yet conscience required him, considering the place he had held as chief spiritual adviser to his sovereign, to “shew your Majesty my mind in things pertaining unto God.” When once he had done that, his conscience would be discharged. “For it lieth not in me, but in your Grace only to see the reformation of things that be amiss. To private subjects it appertaineth not to reform things, but quietly to suffer that they cannot amend.” Even this statement of his mind he would not make without the Queen’s permission; and, needless to say, he awaited that grace in vain.

Cranmer was now in a very anomalous position. He was a prisoner in the Tower and a condemned traitor; that condemnation deprived him, according to the laws as they stood, of his Archbishopric, and in obedience to those laws he now signed himself merely T. Cranmer.¹ But by the canon law his ecclesiastical character remained still intact; he could only be deprived by spiritual authority after condemnation by a spiritual court for a spiritual offence. Mary, as an orthodox Roman Catholic and devoted Papist, wished to have Cranmer deprived by the Pope’s authority and burnt as a heretic; but the laws de hœretico comburendo had not yet been revived nor those against the papal jurisdiction abolished.² Hence Cranmer’s reprieve; meanwhile he was only sequestered from his Archbishopric, and it was not till after his death that Cardinal Pole stepped into his place. He was even allowed to walk in the Tower gardens, and a greater appearance of clemency was shown if, as is said, he received a pardon for treason.¹ Had this been true, the boon would have resembled that accorded to Somerset, when he was acquitted of treason but condemned to death for felony²; and the mercy extended to Cranmer would have consisted in substituting for death on the scaffold the more long-drawn torture at the stake. As a matter of fact, no pardon was ever granted.

For a few months Queen Mary had enough to do to keep her throne without troubling about Cranmer’s or any one else’s heresy. The rebellion of Wyatt came nearer to success than any other revolt in Tudor times, but that very circumstance hardened her heart the more, and enabled her Government to maintain that heresy and treason were both the same thing. She had no more loyal subject than Cranmer, and he could not be even an innocent cause of dynastic plots as Lady Jane Grey was. Nevertheless, he was not to escape; on 8 March, 1554, the Lieutenant of the Tower was ordered to deliver Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer to Sir John Williams to be conveyed to Oxford.¹ The order was not at once carried out; and, the Tower being crowded with prisoners, the three Reformers were placed in one room, where they read and discussed the New Testament. Early in April they were removed to Oxford and lodged in Bocardo² prison, opposite St. Michael’s Church in the Corn Market. They were to partake in a scholastic disputation on the mass, and on the 14th of April the contest began in the University Church of St. Mary.

Commissioners from Cambridge joined forces with those from Oxford for the debate, and the same men who argued with Cranmer were also to judge whether his or their arguments had prevailed.¹ Nor were Ridley and Latimer permitted to hear his contentions, for each was to dispute alone. By this means they might be led to contradict one another, and the whole weight of all the Catholic disputants might be brought to bear on them singly.

Cranmer was first selected²; the Prolocutor began by censuring in detail his past life. He then showed Cranmer the Articles round which the debate was to centre. Cranmer, declaring them to be contrary to God’s Word, was required to commit his reasons to paper, and to be ready to maintain them in disputation on the following Monday, the 16th of April. At eight in the morning Weston opened the debate by declaring that their object was not to call Catholic doctrine into dispute, but to confound the heretics; what they wanted, in fact, was not justice but judgment. In that case, replied Cranmer, the disputation was useless. It was, indeed, only designed to register a foregone conclusion and to provide grounds for his condemnation. He was not permitted to read the exposition of his views on the Sacrament, which Canon Dixon terms “learned, moderate, and noble,”¹ nor was he allowed to cross-examine his numerous adversaries.

“I never,” he complained² to the Council, “knew nor heard of a more confused disputation in all my life. For albeit there was one appointed to dispute against me, yet every man spake his mind, and brought forth what him liked without order. And such haste was made that no answer could be suffered to be given fully to any argument before another brought anew argument. … But why they would not answer us, what other cause can there be but that either they feared the matter, that they were not able to answer us, or else (as by their haste might well appear) they came, not to speak the truth, but to condemn us in post haste, before the truth might be thoroughly tried and heard?”

Chedsey³ was Cranmer’s chief antagonist, but the Prolocutor,⁴ the Vice-Chancellor, and half a dozen other divines frequently interposed. In spite of this unmannerly treatment Cranmer bore himself throughout the ordeal with unruffled temper and courtesy. His demeanour towards the court was, if anything, too submissive; but his points were none the less effective, and when, after six hours’ controversy, the Prolocutor summed up against him and bade the audience cry “Vicit Veritas” even his opponents do not appear to have been quite satisfied with the verdict. At any rate, he was asked to argue again on the following Thursday, when John Harpsfield,¹ Bonner’s archdeacon, was to dispute for his degree of D.D.; and on this occasion Weston was moved to commend, not his arguments, but his conduct. “Your wonderful gentle behaviour and modesty,” he said, “is worthy much commendation; and that I may not deprive you of your right and just deserving, I give you most hearty thanks in mine own name, and in the name of all my brethren.” At which saying “all the doctors gently put off their caps.” This tribute was not to affect the sentence pronounced on all the three Reformers on the following day. They were said to have been overcome in the disputations, which Cranmer denied; to be no members of the Church; and were asked whether they would turn or no. With one accord they refused, and were condemned as heretics. “From this your judgement and sentence,” said Cranmer, “I appeal to the just judgement of God Almighty.”

These proceedings were purely academic; for, as Hooper said, there was yet no law by which they could be condemned; and Gardiner’s efforts² to carry through Parliament the renewal of the heresy laws was even then meeting with successful resistance. Some of the hotter heads were for burning them out of hand, despite the laws and in virtue merely of the commission by which they had been tried. And these unconstitutional views appear to have been expressed even in the Privy Council. It was sorely perplexed what to do; to dispose of the heretics somehow or other was obviously its desire, and on the 3rd of May

“it was resolved by their Lordships that the judges and the Queen’s Highness’ learned counsel should be called together and their opinions demanded what they think in law her Highness may do touching the cases of the said Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer, being already by both the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge judged to be obstinate heretics; which matter is the rather to be consulted upon for that the said Cranmer is already attainted.” ¹

The animus behind these words is clear; but the judges and other lawyers no doubt brushed aside the idea that the judgment of a few academics was a warrant for putting any one to death, even though a royal commission had invested their views with a fictitious importance. So Cranmer was sent back to Bocardo, Ridley to the charge of the sheriff, and Latimer to that of the bailiff of Oxford. For a year and a half they languished in prison until the law could be altered so as to secure their execution.

The Romanist flood of reaction meanwhile surged higher and was lashed into greater violence; in Mary’s first Parliament it submerged most of the work of Edward VI.; in her third it now covered the remnant and that of Henry VIII. The Queen herself was its stormy petrel; before the law had sanctioned the death of a single Reformer, she was arranging how they were to be burnt with decency and order.¹ But a suitable Parliament alone could give full effect to her wishes, and of the moderate House of Commons which rejected the heresy bills of May, 1554, not a sixth found seats in that which met in November.² Convocation petitioned for the renewal of the statutes de hœretico comburendo³; in the Commons there was little resistance, and the only fight for mercy was made in the House of Lords. In January, 1555, the great act of persecution became the law of the land. The realm was reconciled with the Pope, and the Church recovered its power of dealing with heretics. The Dudleys who had been condemned with Cranmer for treason could now be released, for Cranmer was safe in the fiercer grip of the heresy laws.

The engine which Parliament had at last let loose did not long remain idle. Six days after the session ended, the heretics in the Tower were arraigned before Gardiner; and a fortnight later John Rogers “valiantly broke the ice” at Smithfield. Then began the bloodiest persecution that England has ever known; and before six months had passed, some fifty Protestant martyrs had suffered at the stake. Among these early victims were Bishops Hooper and Ferrar, and eminent divines such as Rowland Taylor, Cardmaker, and Bradford. Yet this is the period during which Philip II. is said to have exercised a restraining influence over his wife ! There is, however, something to be said for the wretched Queen. The idea that she was, in slaying her fellow-creatures, making a burnt-offering acceptable to God ¹ may have been due to physical as well as to mental derangement. When she was cherishing for six months the delusion that she was about to become a mother and went so far as to appoint special envoys to announce the happy event to foreign courts with commissions all written out and nothing to fill in except the date of the birth and the sex of the child, it was natural enough that other illusions should darken her mind. And it must also be remembered in extenuation that if she had burnt every one of the thousands of heretics in her kingdom, she would only have been logically giving effect to the tenets of the faith she professed. But the result was that she did more than Henry VIII., more than Edward VI., and even more than Elizabeth to make the victory of the Reformation in England certain.

The delay in dealing with Cranmer was not due to the mercifulness of Philip II., but to a desire to comply with all the punctilios of Roman canon law. One who had been an archbishop, consecrated with all the rites and ceremonies, clothed in the pallium sent from Rome, and proclaimed in the papal consistory, could, it was thought, only be decently dealt with by papal authority. To the Pope Cranmer was still Thomas, Archbishop of Canterbury, and as such he was cited before the papal commissioners. The academic resolution of April, 1554, was, of course, no condemnation by English law, and it was worth even less at Rome; for the English Church was still barren and dead in a schism until the following year, when the reconciliation with Rome restored it to life and made fruit possible. So Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer were all to be tried again; and the two latter were judged by three bishops acting on a commission granted by Pole as papal legate. They were sentenced to death on the first of October, 1555, and on the 16th, from the roof of his Bocardo prison, Cranmer watched the flames devour his friends below in the ditch outside Balliol College; he may have heard stout-hearted Latimer bid Ridley be of good cheer, for by God’s grace they would light in England that day a candle that never should be put out.

For Cranmer himself a longer trial was in preparation. In their abasement at the feet of papal majesty, the sovereigns of England appeared as parties in a suit against a subject of their own before a foreign tribunal. They “denounced” him to the Holy Father, and the Holy Father deputed the Prefect¹ of his Holy Inquisition to act in the matter. The Prefect further delegated the conduct of the trial to Bishop Brooks² of Gloucester, to the Dean of St. Paul’s, and to the Archdeacon of Canterbury. Early in September Brooks arrived in Oxford, and cited Cranmer to appear at Rome in person or by proxy within the space of eighty days to answer such charges as should be laid against him by Philip and Mary. This was merely a formal pretence, for there was no intention of allowing Cranmer to plead in Rome, and on the 12th the subdelegate’s court was opened in the Church of St. Mary.³ Cranmer bowed to Drs. Martin and Story,⁴ the proctors of Philip and Mary, but refused to recognise Brooks as the representative of a jurisdiction which he, like his opponents, had once forsworn. Brooks, after remarking that he came neither to judge nor to dispute, but to examine him in certain matters and to make relation thereof to him that had power to judge, exhorted him to repent of his errors and return to the bosom of the Catholic Church. Cranmer, protesting that he made answer not to the Papal subdelegate, but to Martin and Story as King’s arid Queen’s proctors, then delivered a strong defence of the Royal Supremacy, of his writings on the Sacrament, and an attack upon the Papacy. “The Bishop of Rome,” he declared, “treadeth under foot God’s laws and the King’s”; “yet I speak not this for hatred I bear to him that now supplieth the room, for I know him not. I pray God give him grace not to follow his ancestors.” The warmest dispute arose over the perjury with which Cranmer was charged in breaking his oath to the Pope. He retorted that Brooks had abjured the oath he swore to King Henry. Both accusations were true, and although Cranmer had saved his real consistency by his preliminary protestation that his oath to the Pope was void, that very act laid him open to a further technical charge of perjury. Brooks pronounced no sentence, for that was beyond his commission; he merely sent a certified report of the proceedings to Rome, where it awaited the Pope’s decision.

Immediately after this trial Cranmer sent a remarkably bold appeal to Mary,¹ vindicating his own and the nation’s conduct in repudiating the papal jurisdiction, in adopting their mother tongue for their own devotions, in renouncing Transubstantiation, and in demanding the administration of the Sacrament under both elements. “Alas !” he wrote,

“It cannot but grieve the heart of any natural subject to be accused of the King and Queen of his own realm and specially before an outward judge, or by an authority coming from any person out of this realm; where a King and Queen, as if they were subjects within their own realm, shall complain and require justice at a stranger’s hand against their own subject being already condemned to death by their own laws. As though the King and Queen could not do or have justice within their own realms against their own subjects, but they must seek it at a stranger’s hands in a strange land, the like whereof, I think, was never seen. I would have wished to have had some meaner adversaries; and I think that death shall not grieve me much more than to have my most dread and most gracious sovereign lord and lady (to whom under God I owe all obedience) to be mine accusers in judgement within their own realm before any stranger and outward power.”

Then, quoting from the Roman canon law, he showed how fatal the papal claims, if admitted, were to national independence; how the Queen herself, her judges, and all other executors of her laws stood condemned as heretics, because not a few of her laws were even then repugnant to the canon law of Rome, and Popes had pronounced all such laws invalid and their authors, executors, and observers cursed. These things, he supposed, had not been explained to Parliament, or the Roman jurisdiction would never have been readmitted. The clergy who knew the truth had their own reasons for silence; they maintained the Pope

“to the intent they might have as it were a kingdom and laws within themselves, distinct from the laws of the crown, and wherewith the crown may not meddle; and so being exempt from the laws of the realm, might live in this realm like lords and kings without damage or fear of any man, so that they please their high and supreme head at Rome. … Ignorance, I know, may excuse other men; but he that knoweth how prejudicial and injurious the power and authority, which he [the Pope] challengeth everywhere, is to the crown, laws, and customs of this realm, and yet will allow the same, I cannot see in anywise how he can keep his due allegiance, fidelity, and truth to the crown and state of this realm.”

This was the centre of Cranmer’s position and, indeed, the heart of the Reformation in England; and in the repudiation of the claims of the Pope and the Church to a jurisdiction not merely independent of national systems but superior to them, the Reformation was ultimately triumphant in Catholic as well as in Protestant countries. The State all over the world has deposed the Church from the position it held in the Middle Ages, and the existence of churches, whether Catholic or Protestant, in the various political systems is due not to their own intrinsic authority, but to the toleration or encouragement extended to them by the State. No ecclesiastic has any appeal to that “outward judge,” whom Cranmer denounced, from the national laws of the land in which he lives. The pretensions of Popes to dispense with oaths of allegiance, to root out and destroy, to plant and build again principalities and powers, have disappeared so utterly from the face of the earth that it is hard to believe they ever existed. Yet to Cranmer they were a real and terrible menace; and, as if his previous letter had not been bold enough, he wrote again¹ to Mary, lamenting the oath she had taken to the Pope, “to be obedient to him, to defend his person, to maintain his authority, honour, laws, and privileges.” Such an undertaking was, he averred, inconsistent with the other oath she had sworn, to maintain the laws, liberties, and customs of this realm.

In conclusion, he complained that he was kept from the company of learned men, from books, from counsel, from pen and ink, save for the purpose of writing to her. He was, however, willing to answer his summons to Rome.¹ “And I trust that God shall put in my mouth to defend His truth there as well as here.” That request, of course, was not granted; and on 20 November, 1555,² the Cardinal-delegate brought his case before the Papal Consistory. Five days later Cranmer was pronounced contumacious for not appearing and was solemnly excommunicated by the Pope in person. The occasion, no doubt, was great, and the scene was perhaps impressive—the pastor of all the world cutting off from his flock the once great Primate of England. But in sixteenth-century Rome there was barely a step from the sublime to the infamous; and in the same hour that the Vicar of Christ passed sentence upon the arch-enemy of the Catholic faith, the worldly Prince of the Papal States invoked the same terrific anathemas in a squalid dispute with a petty Italian lord !¹

Pole was then appointed to the vacant Archbishopric, and a papal commission was issued for Cranmer’s degradation and delivery to the secular arm. His hour at last was come. Hitherto he had endured more than two years’ incarceration and had withstood the assaults of his enemies without flinching. He was now to be put to the supreme and final test whether he could sustain in deed the words of his letter to Mary.

“I have not spoken for fear of punishment and to avoid the same, … but I have spoken for my most bounden duty to the crown, liberties, laws, and customs of this realm of England; but most specially to discharge my conscience in uttering the truth to God’s glory, casting away all fear by the comfort which I have in Christ, who saith, ‘Fear not them that kill the body, and cannot kill the soul; but fear him that can cast both body and soul into hell-fire.’ He that for fear to lose this life will forsake the truth, shall lose the everlasting life; and he that for the truth’s sake will spend his life, shall find everlasting life.”

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¹ Acts of the Privy Council, 1552–54, p. 317.

¹ The fullest report of Northumberland’s confession is in Brit. Mus., Harleian MS., 284, f. 127 (printed in Tytier, ii., 230–232); two others are printed from Harleian MS. 353, in the Chron. of Queen Jane, p. 21; a fourth and fifth are in Cotton MS., Titus, B. ii., and Royal MS., 12 A., xxvi.

² Chron. Queen Jane, pp. 19, 20, 21.

³ Renard, quoted in Froude, v., 36; Northumberland’s tool, Sir Thomas Palmer, also confessed, that he had sworn to evidence against Somerset which Northumberland had fabricated,

¹ Grey friars* Chron., pp. 82–83.

² See Ridley’s Piteous Lamentation (Parker Soc), pp. 62–63, and Cranmer’s Works, ii., 441–442, 444–445.

³ See list in Strype’s Cranmer, i., 449–450.

⁴ Peter Martyr and others of these foreigners obtained passports, but it seems rather far-fetched to adduce this as a proof that Mary “had no desire to persecute” (Gairdner, p. 321). Peter Martyr had only come by official invitation, and it would have been a flagrant violation of public decency to persecute him; moreover, most of these men were not Mary’s subjects, and proceedings against them might have involved awkward disputes with other powers,

⁵ Strype, Cranmer, i., 449.

¹ Works, p. 62.

² See Strype’s Cranmer, i., 436; Original Letters, i., 371. This declaration is printed in Cranmer’s Works, i., 428–429, from the MS. at Emanuel College, Cambridge; another MS. is at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

¹ It is often argued that neither the Second Book of Common Prayer nor the First was intended to be final; and Bullinger stated in 1555 that “Cranmer had drawn up a book of prayers an hundred times more perfect than that which was then in being, but the same could not take place, for that he was matched with such a wicked clergy and convocation.” (Strype, Cranmer, p. 382.) This story agrees ill with Cranmer’s statement in the text; and is on other grounds improbable. The Second Book of Common Prayer represented the furthest limit of Cranmer’s advance towards continental Protestantism. Bullinger’s assertion probably embodies a hazy recollection of the perfectly accurate account which his correspondents had given him of the First Prayer Book, where Cranmer’s draft was toned down by the hostility of the bishops and others,

¹ Froude (v., 255) not unjustly remarks, “Considering the position of the writer, and the circumstances under which it was issued, I regard the publication of this letter as one of the bravest actions ever deliberately ventured by man.”

² Foxe, viii., 38.

³ Acts P. C., 1552–54, pp. 346–347; Chron. Queen Jane, p. 27: Greyfriars’ Chron., p. 84; Wriothesle’s Chron., ii., 103.

¹ “Over the gate against the water-gate, where the Duke of Northumberland lay before his death.”—Chron. Queen Jane.

² See documents relating to the trial in the Baga de Secretis, calendared in Appendix II. to the Fourth Report of the Deputy Keeper of Records.

¹ Fremde, v., 295. Archbishop Heath is reported as saying that the Queen’s determination was that Cranmer should only be deprived of his bishopric and given a sufficient living on condition that he kept his house and did not meddle with religion. (Foxe, viii., 38.) These may have been Heath’s own merciful sentiments, but they were soon overruled.

² Mary’s anger was natural enough, but she might have been satisfied with the triumph which established the validity of that marriage and seated her on the throne. She forgave Gardiner, who had been eagerly pushing on the divorce long before Cranmer had expressed an opinion on it,

¹ See above, p. 161.

² Cranmer, Works, ii., 443–444.

¹ “From first to last,” says one zealous writer, “he had proved himself so base a dissembler that no confidence could possibly have been placed in the sincerity of his recantations. That he had lied therein also, he admitted by his final recantation of them all.”—J. M. Stone, History of Queen Mary, 1901, p. 389.

² Tytler, ii., 171, 202; Strype, Annals, iv., 349. It need scarcely be said that there is no difference between Cecil’s signature and those of the other Councillors. Cecil, in fact, was peculiarly responsible, as he had been Northumberland’s most trusted secretary of state. No doubt he disliked and distrusted the scheme; but if all who felt the same had acted with courage it would never have passed its initial stages. Cranmer’s opposition was useless because the whole weight of Government was already cast in the other balance.

¹ E. g., in his letter to Mrs. Wilkinson, Works, ii., 445.

² These legislative changes were not ventured upon until 1554, when Wyatt’s rebellion had failed, the marriage with Philip had been completed, the Emperor’s support secured, and the sheriffs (not the constituencies) had been ordered to choose knights, citizens, and burgesses of “the wise, grave, and Catholic sort.” This curious situation has created confusion in the minds of historians. Burnet says Cranmer was still considered archbishop. Wharton (Specimen of Errors) disputed this statement, showing that commissioners were appointed to exercise the jurisdiction of the see during its vacancy, and that a special register was kept for the period. Yet Cranmer was still archbishop by Roman canon law. The deprivation of Tunstall by the civil power has been considered one of the most illegal acts of Edward’s reign, and if Cranmer’s deprivation had been complete there would have been no explanation of the sentence of deprivation subsequently pronounced at Rome nor of the delay in filling up the see. It was a question of conflict between the municipal laws of England and the universal law of the Church. By the one, Cranmer ceased to be archbishop on his attainder in November, 1553; by the other, he remained archbishop till judgment was pronounced against him at Rome two years later.

¹ Foxe, viii., 38; Strype, i., 460; but neither gives any date or authority. If he had been pardoned he should have been released, as he had not yet been condemned for heresy. All the evidence is against the story. On 3 May, 1554, the Council, considering what to do with Cranmer, remarked that he had been judged a heretic by both universities, and was besides “already attainted.” In September, 1555, Bishop Brooks told him he was a dead man in the eye of the English law, being attainted of treason, and in 1563 an Act of Parliament was required for the restitution of his children.

² England under Protector Somerset, p. 305.

¹ Acts P. C., 1552–54, p. 406.

² The prison is said to have been so named because it was as impossible to escape from it as from the logical figure known by that name; it really formed part of the northern gate of the city. The door of Cranmer’s prison is now in St. Mary Magdalene Church, which is close by the Martyrs’ Memorial, and must be distinguished from the University church (St. Mary the Virgin).

¹ Heylyn, ed. 1849, 155, “Commissionated to dispute, and authorized to sit as judges”; but several of the disputants were set apart as “censores.”

² See Foxe, vi., 439–468 for a full report of this disputation; Jenkyns, iv., 4–66; Cranmer, Works (Parker Soc), i., 389–423; and Strype’s Cranmer, chap, x.

¹ Dixon, iv., 189.

² Works, ii., 445–446.

³ William Chedsey (1510?–74?) had been chaplain to Bonner, and prebendary of St. Paul’s in the previous reign.

⁴ I.e., Hugh Weston (1505?–68), Dean of Westminster and Windsor; see the present writer in Dict. Nat. Biogr., lx., 361.

¹ John Harpsfield (1516–78) must not be confused with his better-known though younger brother, Nicholas (1519?–75); both are in the D.N .B.

² S. R. Maitland and others have defended Gardiner from the charge of persecution on the ground that his actions were only “official,” and that he was bound to carry out the law; but the fact is neglected that he did his best to pass laws which should make persecution a part of his ordinary duties.

¹ Acts P. c., 1554–56. p. 17.

¹ Collier, Eccl. Hist., ii., 371; Dixon, iv., 236.

² Compare the lists in the Official Return of Members of Parliament, 1878; this was the Parliament for which the Queen ordered the election of members “of a wise, grave, and Catholic sort” (see her letter in Burnet, vi., 313–314).

³ This fact rather goes against Canon Dixon’s theory that the clergy were ever backward in persecution.

¹ The origin of the idea that evil spirits possessed men, which could only be purged by burning, lies hidden in primitive mythology, and still survives, in a few savage tribes; it filtered into Christianity like other pagan superstitions during the dark ages.

¹ Cardinal de Puteo (of the Pit, as Cranmer translated it), or Du Puy.

² James Brooks, 1512–60, had been master of Balliol College, and succeeded Hooper as Bishop of Gloucester.

³ For Cranmer’s trial see Foxe, viii., 45–63; Jenkyns, iv., 79–117.

⁴ Dr. John Story had an adventurous career; see the present writer in Diet. Nat. Biogr., liv., 427. He lamented Queen Mary’s mildness, wished to put the Princess Elizabeth to death, instigated Alva to establish the Inquisition at Antwerp in 1565, was executed for treason in 1570 and canonised in 1886.

¹ Cranmer, Works, ii., 447–454.

¹ Works, ii., 454,

¹ Dr. Gairdner in his life of Cranmer in the Dict. Nat. Biogr. says that “Foxe tells us that he expressed his willingness to go and defend himself at Rome if the Queen would let him. But the statement is scarcely consistent with the position he had already taken up,” etc. The passage in Cranmer’s letter above cited apparently escaped Dr. Gairdner’s eye. With regard to the inconsistency, Cranmer was not prepared to accept the Pope’s jurisdiction; he merely contemplated a sort of missionary enterprise of a very bold and hopeless nature.

² Carne’s letter to Mary in Tytler, ii., 486–487,

¹ Foreign Calendar, 1553–58, p. 202.

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