Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 4.djvu/322

302 The council permitted him to speak; but his plea of the law they set aside by the plea of their consciences; and they required him categorically to say whether he would or would not submit to the visitors. He said that he had three weeks in which to decide before they would come to him. At present he believed he could not submit, but he might change. The servant in the parable refused to do his master's will, and yet afterwards did it. It was hard to treat him as a criminal for an offence which, if offence it was, he had not yet committed, and might not commit.

But Cranmer chose to be obeyed. He summoned Gardiner privately before him at the deanery of St Paul's, and he told him that, if he would comply, he should be restored to the council, where his assistance would be welcomed. But Gardiner was unable to give the required promise, and was committed, like Bonner, to the Fleet. 'I have held my office sixteen years,' he wrote to Sir John Godsalve, who was one of the visitors; 'I have studied only how I may depart with it without offence to God's law; and I shall think the tragedy of my life well passed over, so I offend not God's law nor the King's; I will no more care to see my bishopric taken from me than myself taken from my bishopric; I am by nature already condemned to die, which sentence no man can pardon.'

Gardiner had endeavoured to destroy Cranmer. It was no more than retaliation that he suffered a small