Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 5.djvu/619

1556.] The Archbishop shook hands with his friends; Ely only drew back, calling, 'Recant, recant,' and bidding others not approach him.

'This was the hand that wrote it,' Cranmer said, extending his right arm; 'this was the hand that wrote it, therefore it shall suffer first punishment.' Before his body was touched, he held the offending member steadily in the name, 'and never stirred nor cried.' The wood was dry and mercifully laid; the fire was rapid at its work, and he was soon dead. 'His friends,' said a Catholic bystander, 'sorrowed for love, his enemies for pity, strangers for a common kind of humanity, whereby we are bound to one another.'

So perished Cranmer. He was brought out, with the eyes of his soul blinded, to make sport for his enemies, and in his death he brought upon them a wider destruction than he had effected by his teaching while alive. Pole was appointed the next day to the See of Canterbury; but in other respects the Court had overreached themselves by their cruelty. Had they been contented to accept the recantation, they would have left the Archbishop to die broken-hearted, pointed at by the finger of pitying scorn; and the Reformation would have been disgraced in its champion. They were tempted, by an evil spirit of revenge, into an act unsanctioned even by their own bloody laws; and they gave him an opportunity of redeeming his fame, and of writing his name in the roll of martyrs. The worth of a man must be measured by his life, not by his failure under a single and peculiar trial. The Apostle, though