death, which in his weakness he had so desperately striven to avoid, he made the declaration of his true belief. “And now I come,” he concluded,
“to the great thing which so much troubleth my conscience, more than anything that ever I did or said in my whole life, and that is the setting abroad of a writing contrary to the truth; which now here 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 forasmuch as my hand offended, writing contrary to my heart, my hand shall first be punished therefore; for, may I come to the fire, it shall be first burned. As for the Pope I utterly refuse him, as Christ’s enemy and Anti-Christ, with all his false doctrine; and as for the Sacrament, I believe as I have taught in my book against the Bishop of Winchester.”
So far he was allowed to proceed before, amidst the infuriated cries of his enemies, he was pulled down from the stage and borne away to the stake. “Priests who did rue to see him go so wickedly to his death, ran after him exhorting him, while time was, to remember himself.” But Cranmer had remembered himself at last. He had done with recantations at the bidding of Spanish priests and “bloody” Bonnor. He approached the stake with a cheerful countenance, we are told, undressed in haste and stood upright in his shirt. The Spanish friars finding they could do nothing with him, exclaimed the one to the other, “Let us go from him, for the devil is in him.” “Make short,” cried Lord Williams, and “Recant, recant,” cried others. The wood was kindled. “This was the hand that wrote it,” Cranmer said, extending his right arm, “therefore it shall suffer first punishment.” He held his hand so steadfast and immovable in the flame that all men might see it burned before his body was touched. And so holding it he never stirred nor cried till the fire reached him and he was dead.
A portrait of Cranmer hangs in the Bodleian. But the chief monument to the Protestant martyrs was raised in 1841. The Martyrs’ Memorial in S. Giles’, opposite the west front of Balliol College, was happily designed by Sir Gilbert Scott in imitation of the beautiful crosses which Edward I. raised in memory of Queen Eleanor. The statues of the martyrs are by Weekes. The north aisle of the neighbouring Church of S. Mary Magdalene was restored at the same time in memory of the same event.
Cranmer had atoned for his inconstancy, and crowned the martyrdoms of the English Reformation. From that moment the cause of Catholic reaction was hopeless. Cranmer’s career had not been that of a saint or a martyr. He was a weak man with a legal rather than a religious cast of mind. Nothing in his life became him like the leaving of it. Others more constant to their belief, and more noble in character, had died at the stake. But the very weakness of the man and the pathos of the humiliation of one so highly placed, appealed to the crowd who could not rise to heights of unshaken constancy. More easily understood by the people than the triumphant cry of heroic sufferers like Latimer, the dramatic end of the Archbishop filled every independent mind with sympathetic dread. In vain did Mary heap rewards on the University. In vain did Cardinal Pole institute a fresh visitation, hunt all heretics from the University, burn in the common market-place all English Bibles and Protestant books that could be found. In vain did he revise the University and college statutes. His work was undone as soon as finished. The lesson of Cranmer’s death had gone home to a thousand hearts. England refused to be a province of Spain and of Rome. The news of Mary’s death was received in Oxford with the ringing of bells and other signs of discreet delight.
The Catholic Reaction is marked in Oxford history by the institution of two colleges, Trinity and S. John’s, both founded on the sites of old monastic houses by wealthy citizens of London who were lovers of the old order and adherents of the old religion. In 1555 Sir Thomas Pope, a faithful servant of the Tudors, who had acquired large tracts of abbey lands in Oxfordshire, bought the site and vacant buildings of Durham College, which were then “mere dog-kennels,” and the half of the grove which had not been included in the grant of S. Bernard’s College to Christ Church. Here he founded the College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity, consisting of a president, twelve fellows and eight scholars. And in drawing up his statutes he availed himself of the advice both of Elizabeth and Cardinal Pole. The hall was completed in 1620. In 1665 the decay of the old Durham buildings made reconstruction imperative. Wren was the architect. He wished to build a long range in the upper part of the grove, but the quadrangular form was preferred; and he designed the garden quadrangle, a block in the Renaissance style which was spoilt by additions and alterations in 1802. The chapel (1691), which boasts some magnificent carving by Grinling Gibbons, is, in style, closely akin to the advanced palladian of Dean Aldrich’s Church of All Saints. He certainly made some suggestions for it, and so did Wren. The President’s house and New Buildings, by T. G. Jackson (1883), form, with the iron railings and old halls, including the old Perilous or Kettle Hall (1615), that face “the Broad,” a new and handsome quadrangle.
It was in 1555, also, that Sir Thomas White, a rich merchant tailor who had twice been Lord Mayor of London, chose the site of the suppressed College of S. Bernard for his foundation, being guided thereto, as tradition asserts, by a dream which warned him to build near a place where there was a triple elm having three trunks issuing from one root. Between his college and the Merchant Taylors’ School in London White established a connection similar to that between Winchester and New College. The treasure of ecclesiastical vestments preserved in the library, and the fact that Edmund Campion, the Jesuit poet and conspirator, after whom the new Jesuit Hall in Oxford is called, was the fellow chosen to preach the founder’s funeral sermon, indicate the Roman Catholic sympathies of the institution. Yet it was an alumnus of this college, William Laud, whose body was laid in the chapel (1530), and whose ghost, it is said, still haunts the library he built and the quadrangle which owes its completion (1635) to his munificence, who fixed the University in its sympathy with the High Church party of the Anglican Church. The classical colonnades and the charming garden front, wherein Inigo Jones combined the Oxford Gothic with the style which he had recently learned to love in Italy, form a fitting background to the most perfect of Oxford gardens (1750).