this present world, and so careful of it, that for the world to come they seem to care very little or nothing. The very repetition of what three years before he had written to Cecil, "I am not so doted to set my mind upon things here, which neither I can carry away with me, nor tarry long with them." It is remarkable that in Bonner's tract the conclusion of the archbishop's exhortation, where he alludes to his long imprisonment, is suppressed.

But Garcina is said to have proffered, and the archbishop to have copied, what is called a declaration of the queen's right to the crown. In regard to such a declaration the attentive and impartial spectator offers not a syllable. Dr. Lingard says, that the archbishop entirely omitted it "in a second copy of the articles which he appears to have made, after the friar had left him." Has the historian, then, seen the friar's own or any other copy of the articles, which at once verifies the charge of omission in Cranmer's? Not so. For even Bonner's tract here pretends no distinct article, but gives only this direction, "Here to declare the queen's just title to the crown," which is the preliminary to the renunciation, or the words that were prepared for him to speak, which, as it was "2 notoriously known to hundreds of persons present" at the martyrdom, he did not speak, and which Bonner dared not print as either signed by

1 See before, p. 284.

2 Strype.

Cranmer himself, or as attested by the Spanish friar, or by any other person. It was the fifth recantation, I cannot then but conclude, that had been hastily printed and immediately ordered to be burnt, which Garcina on the fatal morning brought newly written, requiring and obtaining from Cranmer, who could not deny what it contained, his signature to it; and suggesting an abbreviated admission of it before the people. The public would be anxious to possess what had been suspiciously withdrawn from them. The Privy Council, who had been "concerned” at the first appearance of this recantation, could not but be desirous to supply the information. Nor would the friar, we may suppose, conceal from Cranmer that his four preceding recantations, with this and the sixth, were intended for publication. This indeed, the only complete one, was then the general theme, while the sixth had been sent to the court only three days before, and by few even there perhaps as yet had been seen. It is to this fifth paper, that the man of Brasen-Nose College must have referred, when, insulting Cranmer on his way to the stake, he, " with 2 the two

1 On the 13th of March, "when they heard that Cranmer's paper of recantation was published." Burnet. On the 16th the printers entered into a recognizance that the recantations should be burnt. Lansdowne MSS. No. 980. p. 189.

2 Foxe calls them friar Richard, and friar John. The latter was Garcina; the former is not known. There were several Spanish ecclesiastics who had accompanied Philip to England.

Spanish friars, laboured to convert him to his former recantation." It could be this paper only that one of the friars, (Garcina we may suppose,)

raging and foaming, almost out of his wits," forced upon the notice of the victim, with the words, "Nonne fecisti? Didst thou it not?”

Foxe, in his further account of the dying hour, adds to the Roman Catholic's narrative a personal description of the sufferer that may not here be overpassed. "His head," says the martyrologist, "when both his caps were off, was so bare that one hair could not be seen upon it: his beard was long and thick: such a countenance of gravity moved the hearts both of his friends and of his enemies." After noticing yet one more vain attempt of the Spanish friars to shake the archbishop's resolution, and the uncharitable refusal of the academic to accept his hand, Foxe exhibits him bound with an iron chain to the stake, and the flames kindled; next, as the fire began to burn near him, not only thrusting his right hand into the flame, but holding it so that all men might see it consumed before his body was touched; and then, when enveloped in flames, enduring the torment with such heroism as apparently to move no more than the stake to which he was bound, while his eyes were lifted up to heaven, and his

1 It had been suffered, probably, thus to grow, while he was in prison.

tongue was repeatedly exclaiming, so long as it would suffer him, That unworthy hand, and Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.

"His sufferings were 'short," Dr. Lingard says; as if holding the hand in the flame " a good space before the fire came to any other part of his body," nor flinching while it was reduced to ashes, were a brief torment; as if such fortitude, which even from Voltaire has elicited the commendation of being more intrepid than the similar act of Mutius Scævola, deserved no encomium in a history of our country. But the learned historian, if he has not lauded, at least has not dispraised, the deed. Alan Cope, however, not only contemptuously and almost immediately forbade the comparison of it with that of Scævola, but also pointed to another example, as still more valuable than the patriot's, in the history of a martyr of the Church of Rome, whose hand the fire could not injure! For the flames that consumed the archbishop these were the charges:

For a hundred of wood fagots,

2

For a hundred and a half of furze fagots, 0 3 4

2 Dialogi Sex, etc. contra Pseudomartyres, &c. Antverpiæ,

1573, p. 547.

3 Strype.

66

We have now seen "the end of this learned archbishop," (to use the judicious words of Foxe,) whom, lest by evil subscribing he should have perished, by well recanting God preserved; and, lest he should have lived longer with shame and reproof, it pleased God rather to take him away, to the glory of His Name and the profit of His Church."

He suffered in the sixty-seventh year of his age, and had presided over the Church of England above twenty years.