iven to the character of the Reformation
under Edward was due wholly to Cranmer. It was his voice that men heard
and still hear in the accents of the English Liturgy.

[Sidenote: His death.]

As an Archbishop, Cranmer's judgment rested with no meaner tribunal than
that of Rome, and his execution had been necessarily delayed till its
sentence could be given. It was not till the opening of 1556 that the
Papal see convicted him of heresy. As a heretic he was now condemned to
suffer at the stake. But the courage which Cranmer had shown since the
accession of Mary gave way the moment his final doom was announced. The
moral cowardice which had displayed itself in his miserable compliance
with the lust and despotism of Henry displayed itself again in six
successive recantations by which he hoped to purchase pardon. But
pardon was impossible; and Cranmer's strangely mingled nature found a
power in its very weakness when he was brought into the church of St.
Mary at Oxford on the twenty-first of March to repeat his recantation on
the way to the stake. "Now," ended his address to the hushed
congregation before him, "now I come to the great thing that troubleth
my conscience more than any other thing that ever I said or did in my
life, and that is the setting abroad of writings contrary to the truth;
which here I now renounce and refuse as things written by my hand
contrary to the truth which I thought in my heart, and written for fear
of death to save my life, if it might be. And, forasmuch as my hand
offended in writing contrary to my heart, my hand therefore shall be the
first punished; for if I come to the fire, it shall be the first
burned." "This was the hand that wrote it," he again exclaimed at the
stake, "therefore it shall suffer first punishment"; and holding it
steadily in the flame "he never stirred nor cried" till life was gone.

[Sidenote: War with France.]

It was with the unerring instinct of a popular movement that, among a
crowd of far more heroic sufferers, the Protestants fixed, in spite of
his recantations, on the martyrdom of Cranmer as the death-blow to
Catholicism in England. For one man who felt within him the joy of
Rowland Taylor at the prospect of the stake, there were thousands who
felt the shuddering dread of Cranmer. The triumphant cry of Latimer
could reach only hearts as bold as his own, while the sad pathos of the
Primate's humiliation and repentance struck chords of sympathy and pity
in the