but the commissioners forbade him
to speak more. The court was at last recalled to a quieter tone, but
contests of this sort still varied the proceedings as they dragged their
slow length along in chapel and hall.

At last Cranmer resolved to make an end. Had he been sitting simply as
Archbishop, he reminded Bonner sharply, he might have expected more
reverence and obedience from his suffragan. As it was, "at every time
that we have sitten in commission you have used such unseemly fashions,
without all reverence or obedience, giving taunts and checks as well
unto us, with divers of the servants and chaplains, as also unto certain
of the ancientest that be here, calling them fools and daws, with such
like, that you have given to the multitude an intolerable example of
disobedience." "You show yourself to be a meet judge!" was Bonner's
scornful reply. It was clear he had no purpose to yield. The real matter
at issue, he contended, was the doctrine of the Sacrament, and from the
very courtroom he sent his orders to the Lord Mayor to see that no
heretical opinions were preached before him. At the close of the trial
he once more addressed Cranmer in solemn protest against his breach of
the law. "I am sorry" he said "that I being a bishop am thus handled at
your Grace's hand, but more sorry that you suffer abominable heretics to
practise as they do in London and elsewhere--answer it as you can!" Then
bandying taunts with the throng, the indomitable bishop followed the
officers to the Marshalsea.

From the degradation of scenes like these Lambeth was raised to new
dignity and self-respect by the primacy of Parker. His consecration in
the same chapel which had witnessed Wyclif's confession was the triumph
of Wyclif's principles, the close of that storm of the Reformation, of
that Catholic reaction, which ceased alike with the accession of
Elizabeth. But it was far more than this. It was in itself a symbol of
the Church of England as it stands to-day, of that quiet illogical
compromise between past and present which Parker and the Queen were to
mould into so lasting a shape. Every circumstance of the service marked
the strange contrasts which were to be blended in the future of the
English Church. The zeal of Edward the Sixth's day had dashed the
stained glass from the casements of Lambeth; the zeal of Elizabeth's day
was soon to move, if it had not already moved, the holy table into the
midst of the chapel. But a reaction fro