Cranmer refused to acknowledge the jurisdiction of his judges, but answered the charges brought against him to his accusers because they represented his sovereigns. He denied that the Pope had any ecclesiastical power within England; but submitted to the kingly supremacy. As Brooks had no authority from the Pope to do more than hear the case, no judgment was pronounced; it was only intimated that the proceedings would be reported to Rome. Cranmer was conducted back to his prison. There he addressed first one, then a second letter to the Queen.[511] In dignified and perfectly respectful language he expressed the degradation of the kingdom exhibited in the act of the sovereigns appealing to an “outward judge, or to an authority coming from any person out of this realm” to judge between them and one of their own subjects. Cranmer early in his career had come to the unalterable opinion that the papal supremacy was responsible for the abuses and disorders in the mediæval Church, and that reformation was impossible so long as it was maintained. In common with every thoughtful man of his generation, he repudiated the whole structure of papal claims built up by the Roman Curia during the fifteenth century, and held that it was in every way incompatible with the loyalty which every subject owed to his sovereign and to the laws of his country. He took his stand on this conviction.
“Ignorance, I know,” he said, “may excuse other men; but he that knoweth how prejudicial and injurious the power and authority which 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 slate of this realm.”
In his second letter he struck a bolder note, and declared that the oath which Mary had sworn to maintain the laws, liberties, and customs of the realm was inconsistent with the other oath she had taken to obey the Pope, to defend his person, and to maintain his authority, honour, laws, and privileges. The accusation of perjury did not touch him at all. The sovereigns—Bishop Brooks, appointed to try him—every constituted authority in the realm—when confronted by it, had to choose between the oath of allegiance to country or to Papacy; he had chosen allegiance to his fatherland; others who acted differently betrayed it. That was his position. The words he addressed to Queen Mary—“I fear me that there be contradictions in your oath”—was his justification.
At Rome, Cranmer was found guilty of contumacy, and the command went forth that he was to be deposed, degraded, and punished as a heretic. In the meantime he was burnt in effigy at Rome. When he heard his sentence, he composed an Appeal to a General Council, following, he said, the example of Luther.[512] The degradation was committed to Bonner and Thirlby, and was executed by the former with his usual brutality. This done, he was handed over to the secular authorities for execution. Then began a carefully prepared course of refined mental torture, which resulted in the “Recantations of Thomas Cranmer.”[513] A series of recantations was presented to him, which he was ordered to sign by his sovereign; and, strange as it may seem now, it was the sovereign’s command that made it almost impossible for Cranmer to refuse to sign the papers which, one after another, were given him. He was a man who felt the necessity of an ultimate authority. He had deliberately put aside that of the Pope, and as deliberately placed that of the sovereign in its place; and now the ultimate authority, which his conscience approved, commanded him to sign. The first four were not real recantations; Cranmer could sign them with a good conscience; they consisted of generalities, the effect of which depended on the meaning of the terms used, and everyone knew the meanings which he had attached to the words all throughout his public life. But the fifth and the sixth soiled his conscience and occasioned his remorse. It was not enough for Mary, Pole, and Bonner that they were able to destroy by fire the bodies of English Reformers, they hoped by working partly on the conscience and partly on the weakness of the leader of the English Reformation, to show the worthlessness of the whole movement. In the end, the aged martyr redeemed his momentary weakness by a last act of heroism. He knew that his recantations had been published, and that any further declaration made would probably be suppressed by his unscrupulous antagonists. He resolved by a single action to defeat their calculations and stamp his sincerity on the memories of his countrymen. His dying speech was silenced, as he might well have expected; but he had made up his mind to something which could not be stifled.[514]
“At the moment he was taken to the stake he drew from his bosom the identical paper (the 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 doctrines 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 hath 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.”[515]
If the martyrdoms of Ridley and Latimer lighted the torch, Cranmer’s spread the conflagration which in the end burnt up the Romanist reaction and made England a Protestant nation. The very weakness of the aged Primate became a background to make the clearer his final heroism. The “common man” sympathised with him all the more. He had never been a very strong man in the usual sense of the words. The qualities which go to form the exquisite liturgist demand an amount of religious sensibility and sympathy which seldom belongs to the leader of a minority with the present against it and the future before it. His peculiar kind of courage, which enabled him to face Henry VIII. in his most truculent moods, was liker a woman’s than a man’s, and was especially called forth by sympathy with others in suffering. None of Henry’s Ministers pleaded harder or more persistently for the Princess Mary, the woman who burnt him, than did Cranmer; and he alone of all his fellows dared to beseech the monarch for Cromwell in his fall.[516]
The death of Cranmer was followed by a long succession of martyrdoms. Cardinal Pole became the Archbishop of Canterbury, and in Philip’s absence the principal adviser of the Queen. He did not manage, if he tried, to stop the burnings. Sometimes he rescued prisoners from the vindictive Bonner; at others he seems to have hounded on the persecutors. Mary’s conscience, never satisfied at the confiscation of property, compelled her to restore the lands still in possession of the Crown, and to give up the “first fruits” of English benefices—the only result being to awaken the fears of thousands of proprietors, and set them against the papal claims. She attempted to restore the monastic institutions, with but scanty results; to revive pilgrimages to shrines, which were very forced affairs, and had to be kept alive by fining the parents of children who did not join them. The elevation of Pope Paul IV. (Cardinal Caraffa) to the See of Rome increased her difficulties. The new Pontiff, a Neapolitan, hated her Spanish husband, and personally disliked Cardinal Pole, her chief adviser. Her last years were full of troubles.
Mary died in 1558 (Nov. 17th). “The unhappiest of queens, and wives, and women,” she had been born amidst the rejoicings of a nation, her mother a princess of the haughtiest house in Europe. In her girlhood she had been the bride-elect of the Emperor—a lovely, winning young creature, all men say. In her seventeenth year, at the age when girls are most sensitive, the crushing stroke which blasted her whole life fell upon her. Her father, the Parliament, and the Church of her country called her illegitimate; and thus branded, she was sent into solitude to brood over her disgrace. When almost all England hailed her Queen in her thirty-seventh year, she was already an old woman, with sallow face, harsh voice, her dark bright eyes alone telling how beautiful she had once been. But the nation seemed to love her who had been so long yearning for affection; she married the man of her choice; and she felt herself the instrument selected by Heaven to restore an excommunicated nation to the peace of God. Her husband, whom she idolised, tired of living with her after a few years. The child she passionately longed for and pathetically believed to be coming never came.[517] The Church and the Pope she had sacrificed so much for, disregarded her entreaties, and seemed careless of her troubles. The people who had welcomed her, and whom she really loved, called her “Bloody” Mary,—a name which was, after all, so well deserved that it will always remain. Each disappointment she took as a warning from Heaven that atonement had not yet been paid for England’s crimes, and the fires of persecution were kept burning to appease the God of sixteenth century Romanism.