At the ceremony (February 14) he had drawn from his sleeve an appeal from the Pope to a general council; and about this time he signed in close succession what are called four recantations. Two of them probably preceded the degradation; the other two Bonner extracted from him on February 15. None of them are recantations at all. They are submissions to the authority of the sovereign, to whom he had always taught that submission is due. He had obeyed his own conscience in contravention of his own theory hitherto; now, he returned to the theory, and owned that if the secular sovereign willed to establish Papal authority, obedience was still due. As to doctrine he recanted nothing. But this was not nearly enough for Mary and Pole, who were bent on extracting something which should altogether discredit the cause of the Reformation.
Within ten days the writ for his burning was issued. Then, before three more weeks had passed Cranmer broke down under the strain, writing first a full and complete recantation of every impugned doctrine, and then one more—dictated to him (March 18). No man ever repudiated his whole past in terms more ignominious. His enemies had what they wanted; if they had stopped there and pardoned him, the force of the blow would have been incalculable. But their thirst for his blood gave him the chance of salvation, changing their victory to hopeless rout. They did not pardon. They demanded from the victim the public confirmation from his own lips of the recantations he had written and signed. That one disastrous moment of weakness was to be gloriously redeemed.
Three days after his fall, on a morning of foul March weather, Cranmer was conveyed from his prison to listen himself to his own funeral discourse and then to play his own allotted part. No suspicion seems to have crossed the mind of his gaolers that there was anything for them to fear. The oration over—he had listened with frequent tears—he was bidden to make public avowal of his recantation. He arose; he confessed the grievousness of his sin, entreating pardon before the Throne of Omnipotence. And then he declared the nature of his sin. Before those about him could realise what was happening, he had recanted his recantation, declaring the truth of all he had before upheld, and proclaiming, “As my hand offended in writing contrary to my heart, therefore my hand shall first be punished. For if I may come to the fire, it shall first be burned.” Hastily he was silenced, and hurried to the stake; but of his own will he moved so swiftly that the confessors could scarce keep pace with him. And when, indeed, he “came to the fire” he fulfilled his words. Men saw him thrust the offending right hand into the flame, and hold it there till it was consumed.
* * * * *
So tragically, so triumphantly, closed the drama of Cranmer’s life—surely a close fitted for “purging the passions through pity and fear.” A vase of fine porcelain whirled into the eddies in company with pots of brass and stoneware; a scholar, dragged from academic cloisters to control a revolution; a man with a receptive mind, when receptivity was about as dangerous a quality, for himself, as he could possess. A man whom men have ventured to call craven, yet who alone of his contemporaries dared to remonstrate with Cromwell in his policy and with the eighth Henry in the day of his wrath, and that not once, nor twice. A man who endured till the eleventh hour, and then—fell.
But a man who, ere the twelfth hour had struck, rose up the Victor.