nt a message to the Lieutenant of the Tower
to look better after him, or he should give him the slip yet.[107]

[Footnote 106: _Privy Council Register, MS. Mary._]

[Footnote 107: Foxe.]

And there was another besides Latimer who would not fly when the
chance was left open to him. Archbishop Cranmer had continued at
Lambeth unmolested, yet unpardoned; his conduct with respect to the
letters patent had been more upright than the conduct of any other
member of the council by {p.049} whom they had been signed; and on
this ground, therefore, an exception could not easily be made in his
disfavour. But his friends had interceded vainly to obtain the queen's
definite forgiveness for him; treason might be forgotten; the divorce
of Catherine of Arragon could never be forgotten. So he waited on,
watching the reaction gathering strength, and knowing well the point
to which it tended. In the country the English service was set aside
and the mass restored with but little disturbance. No force had been
used or needed; the Catholic majorities among the parishioners had
made the change for themselves. The archbishop's friends came to him
for advice; he recommended them to go abroad; he was urged to go
himself while there was time; he said, "it would be in no ways fitting
for him to go away, considering the post in which he was; and to show
that he was not afraid to own all the changes that were by his means
made in religion in the last reign."[108]

[Footnote 108: Strype's _Cranmer_.]

Neither was it fitting for him to sit by in silence. The world,
misconstruing his inaction, believed him false like Northumberland;
the world reported that he had restored mass at Canterbury; the world
professed to have ascertained that he had offered to sing a requiem at
Edward's funeral. In the second week of September, therefore, he made
a public offer, in the form of a letter to a friend, to defend the
communion service, and all the alterations for which he was
responsible, against any one who desired to impugn them; he answered
the stories against himself with a calm denial; and, though the letter
was not printed, copies in manuscript were circulated through London
so numerously that the press, said Renard, would not have sent out
more.[109]

[Footnote 109: Renard to Charles V.: _Rolls House
MSS._ In these late times, when men whose temper