Chapter XIII. In the Hour of Death

WHILE the Pope was pronouncing him contumacious for taking no care to obey his citation¹ and was condemning him to be deprived and degraded as an obstinate heretic, and while he was being burnt in effigy at Rome,² Cranmer was engaged in drawing up an appeal to a General Council. The law of nature,³ he wrote to a legal friend whose assistance he sought, required every man to defend his own life so far as it might be done without offence to God; and lest he should seem rashly and unadvisedly to cast himself away he had resolved to follow Luther’s example in appealing from Leo X. He was bound by oath, he said, never to consent to the reception of the Pope’s authority in England; from this came all his trouble, so that the quarrel was personal between him and the Pope, and no man could be a lawful and indifferent judge in his own cause; therefore, he had good reason in appealing to a General Council.

Not that he thought his life would thereby be saved; he was well aware that in 1460 Pius II. by his “execrable” Bull¹ had forbidden all such appeals to a General Council, and had thus made absolute his own jurisdiction. “The chiefest cause in very deed (to tell you the truth),” wrote Cranmer, “of this mine appeal is that I might gain time (if it shall so please God) to live until I have finished mine answer against Marcus Antonius Constantine² which I now have in hand.”

The appeal was a stirring and striking document.³ Cranmer paid an eloquent tribute therein to Rome’s services in early times.

“The Church of Rome, as it were, lady of the world, both was and was also counted worthily the mother of other churches; forasmuch as she then first begat to Christ, nourished them with the food of pure doctrine, did help them with her riches, succoured the oppressed, and was a sanctuary for the miserable; she rejoiced with them that rejoiced and wept with them that wept. Then by the examples of the Bishops of Rome riches were despised, worldly glory and pomp was trodden under foot, pleasures and riot nothing regarded. Then this frail and uncertain life, being full of all miseries was laughed to scorn, whiles through the example of Romish martyrs men did everywhere press forward to the life to come. But afterward the ungraciousness of damnable ambition never satisfied, avarice, and the horrible enormity of vices, had corrupted and taken the see of Rome, there followed everywhere almost the deformities of all churches growing out of kind into the manners of the church, their mother, leaving their former innocency and purity, and slipping into foul and heinous usages. For the foresaid and many other griefs and abuses, since reformation of the above-mentioned abuses is not to be looked for of the Bishop of Rome; neither can I hope by reason of his wicked abuses and usurped authority, to have him an equal judge in his own cause, therefore I do challenge and appeal in these writings from the Pope.”

He protested against being condemned in his absence; he could not appear in person, for he was straitly kept in prison; “and though I would never so fain send any proctor, yet by reason of poverty I am not able (for all that ever I had, wherewith I should bear my proctor’s costs and charges, is quite taken from me).”

This appeal Cranmer had no means of lodging, and on 13 February, 1556, Bonner and Thirlby went down to Oxford to execute the papal commission for his degradation. The procedure on such occasions was a monument of exquisite cruelty;¹ nothing that ingenuity could devise was omitted to abase the victim and wound his spirit; and while Bonner gloated over his task, Thirlby must have suffered at least as much as Cranmer. He was a man of humanity and had received promotion, friendship, and other benefits from the Archbishop. “Whether it were a jewel,” writes Morice, “plate, instrument, maps, horse, or anything else, Thirlby had but to admire, and Cranmer would give it him.”¹ Calling the prisoner before them in the choir of Christ Church Cathedral, the two papal commissioners read their commission. When they came to the statement that his cause had been indifferently (i. e. impartially) heard at Rome and that he had lacked nothing necessary for his defence, Cranmer was moved to anger; “God must needs,” he exclaimed, “punish this open and shameless lying.” Next he was clothed in the vestments of all the seven orders and with the insignia of an archbishop; a staff was put in his hand and a mitre upon his head. Then Bonner mocked him:

“This is the man,” he said, “that hath ever despised the Pope’s Holiness, and now is to be judged by him; this is the man that hath pulled down so many churches and now is come to be judged in a church; this is the man that contemned the blessed sacrament of the altar, and now is come to be condemned before that blessed sacrament hanging over the altar; this is the man that like Lucifer sat in the place of Christ upon an altar¹ to judge others, and now is come before an altar to be judged himself.”

So pained was Thirlby at this exhibition that more than once he pulled Bonner’s sleeve to stop him. After this they began to strip Cranmer of his robes. As they took off his pall he asked, “Which of you hath a pall to take off my pall?” He was an archbishop, they only bishops; they acted, they replied, not as bishops but as papal delegates. They then wrested the crozier staff from his hands, while he drew from his sleeve his appeal to a General Council.² Thirlby said they could admit no appeal, and the degrading rite went on. Bonner scraped his fingers and nails to obliterate the effects of an unction administered twenty-three years before. Divested of episcopal rank, Cranmer was then successively degraded from the orders of priest, deacon, sub-deacon, acolyte, exorcist, lector, and doorkeeper. Finally a barber shaved his head to deprive him of whatever grace a long disused tonsure may have originally given him. “Now,” exclaimed Bonner in brutal triumph, “now are you no lord any more.” “All this,” said Cranmer, “needed not; I had myself done with this gear long ago.”

Clad in “a poor yeoman-beadle’s gown, full bare and nearly worn,” Cranmer was now as a layman handed over to the secular authorities, whom Bonner, if he followed the usual form, besought not to expose their charge to any danger of death or mutilation ! He was taken back to Bocardo, where two days later he made the first of his dated recantations. It stands fourth among All the Submissions and Recantations of Thomas Cranmer, officially published after his death; and according to another recently discovered narrative,¹ he had for six weeks or more been listening to the persuasions of two Spanish Friars, Pedro de Soto and John de Villa Garcia, and of his gaoler, Nicholas Wodson. He is also said to have asked for an interview with his old friend Tunstall, who replied that Cranmer was more likely to shake him than be convinced by him, and with Cardinal Pole, who gathered up all his skirts when there was fear of contact with heretics. It is as a result of these persuasions that Cranmer is supposed to have signed the first three of his recantations; but they are not really recantations at all. In the official version the first two are merely styled “submissions”, and the third still more vaguely a “scriptum.” They are, in fact, only submissions to authority, such as Cranmer’s political principles almost compelled him to make.

It must always be borne in mind that the English Reformers of the sixteenth century as a rule recognised no such thing as the right to individual judgment, and its necessary corollary, religious toleration. Every form of government is based on a compromise between two principles, either of which, when pushed to extremes, is fatal to human society. The idea of private judgment ultimately leads to anarchy, and the doctrine of authority to slavery. In some cases the law must override individual conscience, while on the other hand, unless individual conscience had occasionally defied the law, there would have been no progress; and men who denounce most vigorously resistance to the law are often first to resist when the law touches their own individual conscience. Cranmer was now at the crux of the difficulty. The question for him, as for most others, had been between the authority of the Pope and that of the English State represented by the King. He had unreservedly decided for the authority of the State, and he was deeply imbued with the sixteenth-century notions of the wickedness of resistance to the King’s authority. He had in 1549 told the rebels of Devon with unnecessary emphasis that if the whole world prayed for them till doomsday it would not avail them unless they repented their disobedience.

This theory involved but slight inconvenience when Henry or Edward was King, and when their laws concurred with Cranmer’s conscience in renouncing the Pope and his doctrine. But when Mary was Queen the trouble began. If the English sovereign, Church, and Parliament had the right to abolish the papal jurisdiction, had they not also the right to restore it? And this authority restored, on what grounds could Cranmer resist? When arguing with Sir Thomas More about the oath of succession in 1534, he had suggested that More’s conscience was doubtful about his duty to swear, but there was no doubt about his duty to obey the King.¹ Even More confesses that he was unable at first to rebut the argument; yet he had surer ground than Cranmer in 1556 when the same reasoning was turned against him. For More could say that the voice of the Catholic Church justified him in refusing in this instance obedience to the King; but Cranmer could not plead the authority of the Church. For good or for ill, he had pinned his faith and allegiance to the State; and logically he was driven to obey the State even when it asserted the jurisdiction of Rome. Was there not also Scriptural warrant for yielding under compulsion? Had not Elisha promised pardon to Naaman whenever he bowed the knee in the House of Rimmon?

It was this distressing dilemma which produced Cranmer’s first submission; he recognised the papal authority, not because its claims had any intrinsic weight, but because the law of England, which he was bound to obey, had reimposed that authority. “Forasmuch,” he wrote,² “as the King’s and Queen’s Majesties, by consent of the Parliament, have received the Pope’s authority within this realm, I am content to submit myself to their laws herein.” Yet he was not content; his conscience warred with his logic. Whatever the laws might say, his conscience did not admit the papal claims. He had sworn to renounce the Pope, and that oath represented his real convictions. Scarcely had he signed the first submission before he cancelled it, throwing logic to the winds and taking refuge in conscience. But then, what about his oath of allegiance to Mary and her laws? Was not that also a conscientious oath? Undoubtedly it was: his conscience was now divided against itself, while logic counselled submission. Thus divided, his conscience could not stand, and a second submission followed, more complete than the first.

The date of these two submissions cannot be ascertained. Perhaps they preceded his degradation,¹ on 14 February. If so, they were annulled by the appeal he then presented to a General Council, in which he spoke of the heinous and usurped authority of the Bishop of Rome, and by his declaration during the ceremony that he would never again say mass. Either the indignities then suffered renewed his abhorrence of the papal system or the presentation of his appeal gave him fresh confidence; for when Bonner visited him in Bocardo on 15 and 16 February he could only extort from him submissions much more guarded than before. These are the third and fourth recantations; the third, while expressing readiness to submit to the laws of the King and Queen concerning the Pope’s supremacy, promised with regard to his books submission not to the Pope, but only to the judgment of the Catholic Church and of the next General Council. The fourth recantation, dated 15 February, was the first in which Cranmer made any direct reference to questions of doctrine, and he did so “in terms which might have been subscribed by any of the martyrs that had died.”¹ He simply declared his belief to be in accord with that of the Catholic Church; that, of course, had all along been his contention; Popery was a corruption of Catholicism.

These documents Bonner took back to London, where it now devolved upon the Government, that is to say, Queen Mary and Cardinal Pole,² to decide what was to be done with the degraded Archbishop. There is no reason to suppose that they ever intended to spare his life. They would have thought it presumption to neglect a papal sentence, and indeed those condemned by the Church were as a matter of course in Mary’s reign sent to the stake. From their point of view, Cranmer had done evil for which his death would be but a slight atonement; unable to comprehend the state of mind which led men to reject the doctrine of Rome, they and many others since their time attributed the whole Reformation in England to the divorce of Queen Catherine, in which Cranmer had played no small part. That to Mary was naturally a grievous offence, and others who shared the guilt with Cranmer were not sorry that he alone should bear the responsibility. Nor, although the contrary has often been asserted, was it illegal to burn a penitent heretic.¹

But Mary and Pole had wider objects in view than the satisfaction of a personal animus against Cranmer or the exemplary punishment of the greatest living heretical Englishman, They desired to serve the general cause of Roman Catholicism. It was not enough that Cranmer should die; he must also be made to ruin the Reformation. Northumberland had “turned many” by his speech on the scaffold; if Cranmer would only repeat the performance, the candle lighted by Ridley and Latimer might be snuffed out after all. Cranmer’s weakening on the point of the papal supremacy had already suggested that he might be used for this purpose, and after Bonner’s return to London means were considered for producing a deeper impression on Cranmer’s mind. Terror was first employed, and on 24 February the Queen signed a warrant for his committal to the flames. No date was fixed,¹ but Cranmer was given to understand that the writ had been signed.

When a sufficient interval had elapsed for this information to work on the prisoner’s mind, his treatment was suddenly changed. The prison doors were thrown open, and Cranmer exchanged his dungeon in Bocardo for the pleasant Deanery of Christ Church.² There he was used with every consideration. He walked in the gardens, played bowls on the green, enjoyed the converse of men of learning and wit, and lacked no delicate fare. Bishop Brooks at his trial told him¹ that, “whereas you were Archbishop of Canterbury and Metropolitan of England, it is ten to one (I say) that ye shall be as well still, yea, even better.” All these things might be given him if—

Then Cranmer fell. He signed his fifth or real recantation,² in which he anathematised the whole heresy of Luther and Zwingli, confessed his belief in one holy and visible Catholic Church, beyond the pale of which there was no salvation, and recognised the Pope as Christ’s vicar and supreme head of the Church on earth. The true body and blood of Christ were, he declared, really present under the forms of bread and wine in the sacrament; the bread was translated into the body and the wine into the blood of Christ. He acknowledged the six other sacraments and the existence of Purgatory. This was no mere submission to outward authority, but a professedly complete recantation of inward belief extorted from him by the poignant contrast between the pleasant prospect of life and the vivid horror of an agonising death. He surrendered every point for which he had fought; the “comfort he had in Christ “had not, as he hoped, enabled him “to cast away all fear.”

Unfortunately, human frailty has made Cranmer’s case a type rather than an exception among religious leaders. But they lived in times far removed from the comfortable immunity which now attends doctrinal vagaries; and it is more charitable and perhaps more fruitful to attempt to understand the psychological problem presented by cases like those of St. Peter, Hus, Jerome of Prague, Savonarola, Cranmer, and Galileo¹ than to make broad our phylacteries and point the finger of scorn at those who succumbed to a test which their critics have never stood. How comes it that an ordinary dervish will face death without flinching when great religious leaders have quailed? No doubt the horrible mode of a heretic’s death supplied an additional terror, and courage comes easier on the spur of the moment and in the heat of the battle than after prolonged reflection. But it is also true that the more sensitive the mind is, the greater is the fortitude required to confront danger. It is easy for the dull brain to face death; a dog, could it reason, could never be made to recant, because it would fail to imagine death. But an impressionable imagination like Cranmer’s paints the unknown horrors of the stake in the most vivid colours. It was the working of his imaginative and susceptible mind which drove Cranmer to yield when less impressionable men like Hooper, Ridley, and Latimer successfully bore the strain.

In another respect Cranmer was less fitted than his colleagues to withstand the attack. A man who sees only one side of truth at a time is proof against doubt; but the man of broader intellect, who knows that truth is relative and feels the force of hostile arguments, is inevitably less dogmatic and less absolutely sure of the impregnability of his position. In these days of comparative study it might almost be said that to be positive is to be ignorant; and few there are who would give their bodies to be burnt on the assumption that their opinion was the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Cranmer was much nearer this modern position than his contemporaries; he knew, none better, that on the impregnable rock of Holy Scripture could be based arguments against him as well as for him, and that the voice of the Church had varied in various ages. Even General Councils, he knew, could err; was he, then, unique and infallible? His distressing dilemma between a conscience which bade him renounce the Pope and a conscience which bade him obey his sovereign opened a breach through which doubts rushed in and submerged him.

The date of his fifth recantation is uncertain, but it was in print before 13 March, when the Privy Council summoned the printers before them and ordered all copies to be burnt.¹ An English translation of this document, writes the Venetian ambassador on 24 March,²

“was published in London, and as it was signed by Father Soto and his associate, both Spaniards, … the Londoners not only had suspicion of the document, but openly pronounced it a forgery; so the Lords of the Council were obliged to suppress it and to issue another witnessed by Englishmen.”

It may have been partly to demolish for ever these suspicions of forgery that Cranmer, who was now—if not before—sent back to Bocardo, was required to make a sixth and still more debasing confession¹; but the main object seems to have been to cover the whole history of the Reformation with shame and indelible infamy. Hitherto Cranmer had only professed a complete change of mind, without directly accusing his past career. Now he was to depict his misdeeds in the blackest hues, and to attribute to his own sinister influence the whole series of woes which had lately afflicted the realm. “I have sinned” (such were the words put into his mouth)¹ “most grievously, before Heaven and against the realm of England, yea, against the whole Church of Christ; I have persecuted more furiously than Paul; I have blasphemed, persecuted, and maltreated.” He was then made to compare himself with the thief on the cross, and to imply that, like the thief, he only repented when his means to do harm had failed. He was most deserving, proceeded the confession, not only of all human and temporal, but of divine and eternal punishment,

“because I did exceeding great wrong to Henry VIII., and especially to his wife, Queen Catherine, when I became the cause and author of their divorce; which crime, indeed, was the seed-plot of all evils and calamities to this realm. Hence came the death of so many good men, hence the schism of the whole realm, hence heresies, hence the confounding of so many minds and bodies. … I opened wide the windows to heresies of every sort, of which I myself was the chief doctor and ductor. … In this indeed I was not only worse than Saul and the thief, but most accursed of all whom the earth has ever borne. …” ¹

This last shameful confession,—more shameful to those who dictated it than to the heart-broken captive who signed it,— was dated 18th March. It would reach London on the following day. Queen Mary and Pole had now got what they wanted and all they could hope to obtain. Here was a version of recent history even more pleasing to them than that of Northumberland. When the chief prophet of Reform had cursed it in terms like these, who should be found to bless or defend? A signal and final service had Cranmer performed; he could be of no further use except to repeat in public his private confession; he might now be dismissed to the stake. Orders were given at once, which would reach Oxford on the 20th, that Cranmer should be burned on the following day. Dr. Cole, Provost of Eton, was warned to prepare a sermon, and Lord Williams of Thame and other local magnates were directed to summon their forces to maintain order at the coming execution. Cole arrived in Oxford on the 20th, and the lords and their retainers in the early hours next morning.

It was probably on the day before his death that Cranmer composed what is called his seventh recantation.¹ It consisted of the address he should make to the people at his execution, and when he wrote it out he must have already known that he was to die on the morrow.⁸ His sixth recantation had bent the bow to the uttermost; could a religious system which involved such cruelty be just or true? He was still in the valley of doubts and fears, but the light had begun to glimmer, and the harrowed mind to hope. Although this seventh document asserts the real and substantial presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and repudiates the books he had written against that doctrine since the death of Henry VIII., it contains no such shameful language as its predecessor, and not a word of submission to the Pope: apart from the Sacrament it merely professes the creed of the English Reformers. “I believe,” he says, “every article of the Catholic faith, every clause, word, and sentence taught by our Saviour Jesus Christ, His Apostles, and Prophets in the New and Old Testament and all articles explicate and set forth in the General Councils.”¹ Could it be that Cranmer was going over again in brief the history of his mental development? His previous recantations had carried him back to the state of belief in his youth, but they had not represented any deep change of conviction, and now it seemed that the revulsion had already begun. Gradually he began to recover lost ground, and in this seventh recantation there is nothing inconsistent with his position under Henry VIII. after the breach with Rome.²

But the process did not stop here in a half-way house; and a further mental struggle ensued during the night between this recantation and the dawn of his dying day.¹ Of that night of agony we have no record, but it needs none to depict the depth of Cranmer’s conflicting emotions, his shame and humiliation, his dread of approaching torture and of the yet more dark hereafter, his intense desire to salve his conscience, and his aching to be at peace. The papist tractarian tells us that he sought comfort in the Penitential Psalms, but we may be sure that petitions from his own great Litany sprang no less readily to his lips:

“that it may please Thee to succour, help, and comfort all that be in danger, necessity, and tribulation … and to show Thy pity upon all prisoners and captives; … that it may please Thee to bring into the way of truth all such as have erred and are deceived … that it may please Thee to strengthen such as do stand, and to comfort and help the weak-hearted, and to raise up them that fall, and finally to beat down Satan under our feet.”

The morning broke in a storm of rain, and the crowds which thronged St. Mary’s came out to see a reed shaken with the wind. The reed was bent and sorely bruised, but it was not broken yet; even now it might be fashioned into a rod. To St. Mary’s Cranmer was led in procession between two friars, and as they approached the doors a significant Nunc Dimittis was raised. Inside, Cranmer was placed on a stage opposite the pulpit,¹ from which Dr. Cole was to preach a sermon. Cranmer had given no sign to Cole or the friars who visited him in the morning; but he had told a poor woman, on whom he bestowed some money, that he would sooner have the prayers of a good layman than those of a bad priest. That boded ill for his final profession, and both Romanists and Reformers passed from hope to fear and from fear to hope as they witnessed Cranmer’s demeanour. He was made the touchstone of truth, and his foes themselves had determined that his conduct should test the strength of the two forms of faith.

He stood there, “an image of sorrow,” while Cole delivered his not unmerciful sermon.² With more kindliness than consistency he recalled for Cranmer’s comfort the fate of the three faithful children of Israel, who refused to bow before the false god which the King had set up, and passed through the fire unscathed. When he had ended he asked them all to pray for the contrite sinner. Cranmer knelt with the congregation. Then he rose and gave thanks for their prayers, and began to read from a paper he held in his hand.¹ It was his seventh recantation—amended. First came a prayer—” the last and sublimest of his prayers²”; then followed four exhortations. He besought his hearers to care less for this world and more for God and the world to come; to obey the King and Queen, not for fear of them only, but much more for the fear of God, for whosoever resisted them resisted God’s ordinance; to love one another like brothers and sisters and do good to all men; and finally he reminded the rich how hard it was for them to enter the kingdom of heaven, and moved them to charity; for what was given to the poor was given to God.³

“And now,” he went on, “forasmuch as I have come to the last end of my life, whereupon hangeth all my life past and all my life to come, either to live with my Saviour Christ for ever in joy, or else to be in pains ever with the wicked devils in hell; and I see before mine eyes presently either heaven ready to receive me, or else hell ready to swallow me up: I shall therefore declare unto you my faith without colour or dissimulation; for now is no time to dissemble whatsoever I have written in time past.” ¹

Then Cranmer began the real work of that day. Having recited the Lord’s Prayer in English he began the profession of faith contained in the seventh recantation; but now he declared no unlimited belief in General Councils. He had completely re-covered the ground lost in his recantations and re-gained the position of 1552.² If his audience perceived the drift of these changes, the tension must have grown almost unbearable. The climax was reached; his trial was over, his triumph began.

“And now I come to the great thing that so troubleth my conscience, more than any other thing that I said or did in my life: and that is my setting abroad of writings contrary to the truth, which here now I renounce and refuse as things written with my hand contrary to the truth which I thought in my heart, and written for fear of death, and to save my life, if it might be; and that is all such bills which I have written or signed with mine own hand since my degradation; wherein I have written many things untrue. And forasmuch as my hand offended in writing contrary to my heart, it shall be first burned. And as for the Pope, I refuse him as Christ’s enemy and Antichrist, with all his false doctrine. And as for the Sacrament—”

He got no farther; his foes had been dumb with amazement, but now their pent-up feelings broke loose. “Stop the heretic’s mouth!” cried Cole, “take him away!” “Play the Christian man,” said Lord Williams; “remember your recantations and do not dissemble.” “Alas, my lord,” replied Cranmer, “I have been a man that all my life loved plainness, and never dissembled till now against the truth; which I am most sorry for”; and he seized the occasion to add that as for the Sacrament he believed as he had taught in his book against the Bishop of Winchester. The tumult redoubled. Cranmer was dragged from the stage and led out towards the stake.

There was no need of a spur for his lagging steps. His desire was now to be gone. He had done with the quicksands of logic, legal formulas, and constitutional maxims, and had gained a foothold in conscience. The fight had been long and bitter, but he had reached a conclusion at length; he had “professed a good profession before many witnesses.” The Reformation would not be shamed in him, and the gates of hell should not prevail against it. Over it, as over his own ashes, he would write the legend Resurgam. Eagerly he pressed forward to the scene of his final victory, and the friars could scarcely keep pace. Through Brasenose Lane and out of the gate by St. Michael’s they sped to a spot in the present Broad Street in front of Balliol College; there Ridley and Latimer had suffered six months before, and now it is marked by a plain stone cross¹ in the ground.

The friars ceased not to ply him with exhortations; “Die not in desperation,” cried one; “Thou wilt drag innumerable souls to hell,” said another. But Cranmer was out of their reach; it was not to perdition that he thought those souls would go. Cheerfully he put off his upper garments and stood in his shirt, which reached to the ground. There was no hair on his head, but a long white beard flowed over his breast. He was then bound to the stake with a steel band,² and light was set to the hundred and fifty faggots of furze and the hundred faggots of wood which made up his funeral pyre. As the flames leapt up, he¹ stretched out his right hand, saying with a loud voice, “This hand hath offended,” and held it steadfastly in the fire until it was burnt to ashes. Thus openly did he proclaim his faith by the gesture in which the mind of posterity paints him. No one could falsify that recantation; it was a sign which none could misread. His body might perish, but his cause was won. He saw the travail of his soul and was satisfied.

“His patience in the torment,” writes a hostile eye-witness, “his courage in dying, if it had been taken either for the glory of God, the wealth of his country, or the testimony of truth, as it was for a pernicious error, and subversion of true religion, I could worthily have commended the example, and matched it with the fame of any Father of ancient time.”

No cry escaped his lips, no movement betrayed his pain, save that once with his unburnt hand he wiped his forehead. The flames might scorch and consume his flesh, but his spirit had found repose; for conscience had ceased to torment, and a peace which passed understanding pervaded his soul.

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¹ “Comparere non curaret,” says the Pope.

² Recantaeyons, p. 69.

³ Works, ii., 455–456.

¹ The bull “Execrabilis” is dated I Jan., 1460: see Cambridge Mod. Hist., i., 632–633.

² I.e., Gardiner, who under this pseudonym published a rejoinder in 1552 to Cranmer’s books on the Sacrament. Three books of this reply are said to have been completed by Cranmer when his work was cut short; but all trace of them has disappeared. Nor does any copy of Gardiner’s book appear to be known. See Cranmer, Works, vol. ii., Pref., p. x.; and other references s. v. Gardiner in Gough’s Index to Parker Soc. Publications. Neither of these works is mentioned by the biographers of Cranmer and Gardiner in the Dict. Nat. Biogr.

³ Foxe, viii., 73–76; Jenkyns, iv., 121–129; Works, ii., 224–228.

¹ The form is given in Foxe, viii., 77–79; cf. Pontificale Romanum by J. Catalan (Rome, 1740), iii., 146–164.

¹ Harleian MS., 416, fol. 183; in Dixon, iv., 500, the number of the MS. is misprinted as 116.

¹ This was a scandal which Cranmer warmly repudiated. The truth of the incident was that, Cranmer having to sit in commission at St. Paul’s, a scaffold was as usual prepared for him by the Bishop (Bonner) and his officials; and it is possible that the scaffold concealed an altar.

³ In Foxe and in other accounts the crozier is said to have been taken away first, but the regular and natural order was to begin with the highest insignia, the pall.

¹ This other narrative is entitled Bishop Cranmer’s Reeantacyons; it was privately printed in 1885 by the late Lord Houghton under the editorship of Dr. J. Gairdner. The original MS. is in the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris; it was found among Nicholas Harpsfield’s papers and is thought to have been written either by him or by Alan Cope. Canon Mason thinks the tract was written by Harpsfield; but Harpsfield affected to disbelieve the whole incident of Cranmer’s burning his right hand (see Dixon, 545), an incident mentioned in the Recantacyons. Dr. Gairdner, Canon Dixon, and Canon Mason have based their accounts of Cranmer’s last days largely upon it, but its authority is very questionable. It was, as the author admits, “written to order,” to counteract the effect of Cranmer’s final triumph, to check the Protestant boasting over his courage (see Reeantaeyons, p. 113), and to prove that he was no martyr—a contention which Harpsfield maintained in his Dialogi Sex, 1566, p. 743 (it may also be noted that in the Reeantaeyons and in Harpsfield’s Divorce we have the only contemporary authority for the story of Cranmer’s wife). Moreover, it is full of strange stories of attempted rescues, the appearance of comets, etc. We are told that Cranmer’s héart remained unburnt, being hardened by the poison of heresy, as Suetonius relates that Germanicus’s heart was made proof against cremation by material poison (Recantacyons, p. 109). It states that on his way to execution Cranmer declared that he would have maintained his recantation if only the Pope had let him live, and repeated the statement at the stake palam aperteque (publicly and openly), which is quite incredible, seeing that a few moments before Cranmer had irrevocably renounced the Pope “and all his false doctrine.” There is no word of this in the detailed account of the scene written by a Catholic bystander in a letter to a friend immediately afterwards, nor in the account written by the Venetian ambassador in London three days later; and it is inconsistent with Queen Mary’s explanation of her action in putting Cranmer to death, viz., that his “iniquity and obstinacy against God and the Queen were so great that her clemency and mercy could have no place with him.” (Foreign Cal., 1553–58, p. 224; Venetian Cal., 1553–58, Pt. i., p. 386). Such a declaration made palam aperteque would have stultified the whole of Cranmer’s action on his last day, and would not have remained unknown until 1885. Finally, the author of this tract gives a wrong date for Cranmer’s execution. Under these circumstances it cannot be accepted as an historical authority of much value. The Government had no reason to spare Cranmer’s reputation; they even published under official sanction as his words the very opposite of what he spoke. If, therefore, they had known of anything worse than the details embodied in their official version, All the Submissions, they would certainly have published it.

¹ L. and P. of Henry VIII., vii., 227.

² Jenkyns, iv., 393, who reprints Cawood’s official publication, All the Submissions,

¹ On the other hand, in his final recantation, Cranmer repudiated all bills signed “since my degradation.” He certainly meant to repudiate all his acknowledgments of papal authority; and, unless he made a mistake, his words must imply that no submissions were signed before his degradation.

¹ Dixon, iv., 505.

² Gardiner, the Lord Chancellor, had died on 12 November, 1555; on his death-bed he is reported to have said, “Negavi cum Petro, exivi cum Petro, sed nondum flevi cum Petro.” (Dict. Nat. Biogr., xx., 424.) The “negavi” refers to his repudiation of Rome under Henry VIII., the “exivi” to his deprivation under Edward VI.

¹ Froude describes Cranmer’s burning as “an act unsanctioned even by their own bloody laws,” and Canon Dixon says that if Cranmer was not a martyr he was a murdered man. But in 1498, for instance, at Canterbury a heretic priest was burnt at the stake, even though Henry VII. himself persuaded him to recant and “got great honour” thereby. (Cotton MS., Vitellins A., xvi., f. 172; Excepta Historica, p. 117.) It was, no doubt, considered the proper thing to pardon penitent heretics, but it does not appear to have been a legal obligation.

¹ This warrant is printed in Burnet, v., 452, 453, where it is erroneously styled a writ; a warrant was directed by the Queen to the Lord Chancellor, who would thereupon issue out of Chancery a writ for the execution. Burnet’s error has led Canon Dixon into confusion on the subject; he disputes Lingard’s assertion that the day of Cranmer’s execution was fixed (Dixon, iv., 207), and says the day was not fixed in the writ. But he is thinking of the warrant, which did not fix a date; and although it prescribed the form of the writ, the writ itself does not appear to be extant. Dr. Gairdner, on the authority of the Recantacyons, p. 75, says that Cranmer. was told he was to suffer on 7 March, which is possibly true.

² The Recantacyons and Dr. Gairdner place Cranmer’s removal to Christ Church before and not after his degradation; but not very consistently the Recantacyons represents Cranmer as being influenced by the keeper of Bocardo prison at the time that he is supposed to be faring delicately in Christ Church. Foxe definitely says that it was after the degradation; Canon Dixon takes the same view, and some confirmation of it may be found in the fact that the English witness to the fifth recantation was Henry Siddall, Canon of Christ Church.

¹ Foxe, viii., 48. No definite promises are known to have been made, unless Foxe’s authority be accepted, but Cranmer’s treatment was suggestive.

² Jenkyns, iv., 395.

¹ For Hus and Jerome, see Creighton, History of the Papacy, Bk. II., chap, v; for Savonarola, see Villari’s Life, and for Galileo see Fahie’s Life. The scientist is perhaps the least to be excused, for he had means of verifying his conclusions which were not available for the theologians; his certainty was objective, theirs only subjective,

¹ Acts P. C., 1554–6, p. 247.

² Venetian Cal., 1553–58, Pt. i., p. 386. This is the nearest contemporary account of the incident; cf. Original Letters, i., 173, where Sampson writes from Strassburg on 6 April: “A certain absurd recantation, forged by the papists, began to be spread abroad during his life-time, as if he made that recantation; but the authors of it themselves recalled it while he was yet living.” Foxe also plainly believes it was forged, and in more recent times Whiston, Todd, and Soames have doubted whether Cranmer recanted at all. There is little ground for this view, which would destroy the significance of Cranmer’s action in burning his right hand. With regard to the suppression of the first edition of the fifth recantation various theories have been suggested. Dixon thinks it was suppressed because it was issued by an “obscure” firm merely at the instance of the Oxford theologians, Lingard because it infringed the patent of Cawood, the Queen’s printer, and others because it really was forged. Dixon’s idea of Copland’s being an obscure firm will not stand against the two pages about him in the Dict. Nat. Biogr., and there may be something in Lingard’s view, as Cawood undoubtedly had the right to publish official documents. Yet there was probably some truth in the Venetian ambassador’s story. Dixon says it is inaccurate because Siddall (not Soto) and Garcia are the witnesses; so they are in the later edition of Cawood; but what the ambassador says is that Soto and Garcia witnessed Copland’s first suppressed edition, of which no copy is known. Probably Siddall, as an Englishman, was substituted for Soto; he was one of the most active turncoats in that canting and recanting age. See Dict. Nat. Biogr., lii., 193.

¹ Printed in Jenkyns, iv., 396–397.

¹ The real author of this document was probably Cardinal Pole; its style bears a striking resemblance to that affected by Pole; and the view of the origin of the Reformation is that expressed by Pole in a letter to Mary in 1553 (Cambridge Modern History, ii., 519).

¹ Notwithstanding the outcry about the witnesses to the fifth recantation, this sixth document has no witness at all, and in this respect it resembles all the recantations except the fifth. It was scarcely surprising that the fifth recantation was the only one known to Foxe; if all the documents were unwitnessed they might all be considered equally authentic; but the fact that in the official version one is witnessed and the others are not seems to imply a distinction either in importance or authenticity.

¹ Jenkyns, iv., 398–400: it is neither signed, witnessed, nor dated; but most of it, at any rate, was Cranmer’s composition.

² Otherwise how could he have written “I am now come to the last end of my life,” etc.? The idea that Cranmer did not know he was to die on the 21st until that same morning originated with Foxe, who was not acquainted with the seventh recantation, a document carefully prepared on the assumption that he was to die. That he wrote this and not merely spoke it is clear from the fact that this recantation is printed in the official version by Cawood. Cranmer appears to have made more than one copy of this document, and from one of these the Government printed it. Strype, Todd, and Froude accuse Bonner of fraud in printing this account of what Cranmer meant to say, when it was the opposite of what he did say, and also suggest forgery. But Bonner would not have forged so lame and halting a submission, and if he had forged he would also have added a signature, if not witnesses and a date. Moreover, he only professed to print what Cranmer had written, not what he said. Of course, it was not, even so, a very honourable thing to do; but the object was to counteract the immense effect of Cranmer’s spoken words.

¹ These significant limitations in this last recantation have not hitherto been noticed, and it is mainly on them that I base the above view that Cranmer’s mind had begun to react earlier than is usually supposed. Canon Mason puts the change as late as the scene in St. Mary’s on the 21st, but the alterations of this seventh writing which Cranmer made in his oral address lead so naturally to his conclusion that they can scarcely have been improvised on the moment. I feel sure that they must have been thought out before he left his prison.

² It may be worth noting that there is no mention of the Ave Maria after the Lord’s Prayer in this document, and that the Lord’s Prayer was in English, not in Latin.

¹ There are several stories about Cranmer’s last night which are mutually destructive and cannot be corroborated. Foxe says he was visited by Garcia early in the morning and induced to sign copies of “articles”; this is almost certainly wrong, for the Government would assuredly have published these “articles” with the other submissions. Neither Foxe nor the author of the Recantacyons is to be trusted implicitly (cf. Dixon, iv., 525–526). According to the Reeantaeyons, Cranmer supped and talked with companions till a late hour, and then slept peacefully till five o’clock. If that is so, it is difficult to see where he found time to compose his last recantation and speech; and the further statement that he signed fourteen copies of it in the morning of the 21st is incredible, for if such was the case, how was it that the Government could not find a single signed copy to print, but printed one without any signature at all?

¹ “The pillar on the north side of the nave of St. Mary’s where Cranmer stood has a cut in it, a foot or two from the ground, where it was hewn to receive the wooden stand on which he was placed. Cole’s pulpit of stone was exactly opposite, a few inches eastward of the present wooden pulpit on the south side. The front of that pulpit has been preserved and is built into the wall above a door in the church.”—Dixon, iv., 527, note.

² It was charity itself compared with the terms of Cranmer’s sixth recantation; with regard to the Divorce, for instance, Cole admitted that Cranmer acted “not of malice, but by the persuasion and advice of certain learned men.”

¹ Lingard says he had two papers, one a copy of a recantation, the other a retractation of them all; the first was to be used if a pardon came, the second if he was to die. His real intention was to burn the recantation as he did his hand. The Venetian ambassador says he actually did this; the Recantacyons says it was taken from him before he was bound to the stake.

² Dixon, iv., 534.

³ The most authoritative account of these final scenes is the British Museum Harleian MS., 422, ff., 48–53; this consists really of two documents; (1) a letter of a Roman Catholic signed J. A., and written to a friend on 23 March, two days after the execution which it describes; (2) a paper headed “Cranmer’s Words before his Death,” written in the same hand and enclosed with the letter; this was apparently copied by J. A. from a still earlier MS., written possibly on the very day of execution. Strype has manipulated these two documents so as to form a continuous narrative (Dixon, iv., 532–533). Another narrative (Harleian MS., 417, ff., 90, et seq.) is printed in Nichols’s Narratives of the Reformation, pp. 218–233. The next in value is that of the Venetian ambassador, written on 24 March.

¹ The last phrase of Cranmer’s conveyed no sure indication to others, but it was a significant departure from the seventh recantation he had written in prison the day before; that ran, “whatsover I have said, preached, or written in time past,” and referred to his Reforming activity. By leaving out “said, preached, or” he now indicated his written recantations.

² The Forty-two Articles of that year admitted that General Councils might err.

¹ The Martyrs’ Memorial stands round the corner in St. Giles’s; it was erected in 1842 in spite of the opposition of the Tractarians (see Liddon, Life of Pusey, ii., 64–76). The spot was then an empty ditch, probably the remains of a moat which ran round the old city walls. Pusey thought it “not respectful that carts, etc., should drive over the place where [the martyrs] yielded up their souls” (ibid., ii., 66). The “carts, etc.” are now kept off by an electric-light standard which obstructs the road.

² The steel band is still preserved in private hands; see Gentleman’s Magazine, July, 1857, pp. 61, 75; the account of moneys paid for the faggots and furze used at the execution is printed by Strype,

¹ The Venetian ambassador says: “At the moment that he was taken to the stake he drew from his bosom the identical writing (probably the Fifth Recantation), throwing it in the presence of the multitude with his own hands into the flames, asking pardon of God and of the people for having consented to such an act, which he excused by saying that he did it for the public benefit, as, had his life, which he sought to save, been spared him, he might at some time have still been of use to them, praying them all to persist in the doctrine believed by him, and absolutely denying the Sacrament and the supremacy of the Church. And, finally, stretching forth his arm and right hand, he said: ‘This which has sinned, having signed the Writing, must be the first to suffer punishment,’ and thus did he place it in the fire and burned it himself,”

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