Mary Tudor - Anna Whitelock [136]
In his fifth and sixth recantations, Cranmer condemned himself in the most abject terms; he was “a blasphemer, persecutor and insulter … who surpassed Saul in wickedness and crime”; he was “unworthy of all kindness and goodness but rather deserving of … divine and eternal punishment.” He continued that he had been “the cause and originator” of Henry’s divorce, “which fault was in truth the seedbed of all the woes and disasters of this realm,” and was therefore guilty “of the murder of so many upright men … the schism which split the whole kingdom … the slaughter of so many minds and bodies such that my reason can hardly grasp.” He was, he maintained, “the most wicked all the earth has ever born.”10
THE MORNING OF Saturday, March 21, 1556, was wet and dull. Given the weather, the sermon, normally delivered before the burning at the stake, was preached in St. Mary’s Church.
Cranmer was expected to deliver his seventh recantation, retracting his rejection of the Real Presence in the Eucharist. Dr. Henry Cole, provost of Eton, first preached the sermon explaining the reasons for Cranmer’s execution. Then, standing on a raised platform in a packed church, Cranmer began:
And now I come to the great thing, that so much troubleth my conscience more than any thing 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 for as much be as my hand offended, writing contrary to my heart, my hand shall first be punished therefor: for may I come to the fire, it shall be first burnt…. As for the Pope, I refuse him as Christ’s enemy and Antichrist, with all his false doctrine.11
The church descended into noise and protest. Cranmer was pulled from the stage and dragged through the streets to the place of execution, where Ridley and Latimer had suffered, and fastened to the stake with an iron chain. He held his hand in the flames, crying out, “Unworthy right hand!”12 that which had signed the recantations. The sixty-six-year-old was soon dead. What had been intended to be a great coup—the public recantation of the architect of the English reformation—had been ruined.
The government immediately set about limiting the damage. The following day, Passion Sunday, Dr. Cole preached a denunciation of Cranmer in the church where he had spoken the day before. Within days John Cawood printed All the Submissions and Recantations of Thomas Cranmer, which ended with Cranmer’s final expected recantation, rather than the one he had actually delivered. As the Venetian ambassador observed:
On Saturday last, 21 March, Cranmer, late Archbishop of Canterbury was burnt, having fully verified the opinion formed of him by the Queen, that he had feigned recantations thinking to save his life, and not that he had received any good inspiration, so she considered him unworthy of pardon.13
CHAPTER 58
A GREAT AND RARE EXAMPLE OF GOODNESS
AT THREE ON THE AFTERNOON OF MAUNDY THURSDAY, APRIL 3, 1556, Mary, accompanied by Cardinal Pole, her Council, and her chaplains, entered the Great Hall at Greenwich Palace. Gathered at the entrance were Mary’s chief ladies and gentlewomen in long linen aprons and towels around their necks. Each carried a silver ewer full of water and bunches of flowers. Mary wore a gown of purple velvet, its sleeves touching the ground. On either side of the hall were forty-one poor women, one