Mary Tudor (52 page)

In October 1555, Charles resigned the lordship of the Netherlands to Philip and in January 1556 the crowns of Aragon and Castile. He sent a message with one of his gentlemen to Mary “with congratulations on her being able for the future to style herself the Queen of many and great crowns, and on her being no less their mistress than of her own crown of England.”
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Philip now desired power in England in his own right, not simply as a regent for the heir. He began to put pressure on Mary that he be crowned and even suggested this might be
a condition of his return to England.
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On October 12, Badoer wrote that “the King of England had informed his wife that he was most anxious to gratify her wish for his return, but that he could not do so without being given an honourable share in the government of the realm.”
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Yet Mary hesitated to propose his coronation. Parliament was full of opposition, and, as she relayed to Badoer, “she knew it to be impossible to form either of these important resolutions without greatly endangering her crown, but that she hoped in the course of a short time to comfort the King with what he seems to desire.”
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At the end of December, Mary wrote to Philip, “apologising for her non-adoption of any of the resolutions desired by him in the matter of the coronation, or with regard to waging war on the Most Christian King [of France].”
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Rumors were circulating of Philip’s lascivious antics abroad, and Mary began to lose hope of her husband’s imminent return.
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As Noailles recounted in a letter of December 30, Mary “told her ladies, that she had done all possible to induce her husband to return, and as she found he would not, she meant to withdraw utterly from men, and live quietly, as she had done the chief part of her life before she married.”
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O
N THE MORNING OF MARCH 21, 1556, THOMAS CRANMER, THE
sixty-six-year-old former archbishop of Canterbury, was burned alive in the town ditch in Oxford. Thrusting his hand into the flames, he spoke the words “For as much be as my hand offended, writing contrary to my heart, my hand shall first be punished therefor.”
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Cranmer was the highest profile of the Marian martyrs and one Mary had always been determined to condemn as a heretic. It was he who had encouraged her father’s break with Rome; he who had, as archbishop of Canterbury, declared Katherine of Aragon’s marriage invalid; and he who had performed the wedding of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. Upon Mary’s accession he had been condemned with Lady Jane Grey and three of Northumberland’s sons for high treason for his support of Jane’s accession, but his sentence had not been carried out.

Mary bore Cranmer a deep and personal grudge, and even though Church law said that as a repentant heretic he should be pardoned, she was determined that he burn. She wanted his death to be for heresy, not for secular offenses. Given his status as archbishop of Canterbury, she had had to wait for the restoration of papal jurisdiction. For two and a half years he had languished in prison, awaiting his inevitable fate.

IN MARCH
1554, Cranmer, together with Hugh Latimer, the former bishop of Worcester, and Nicholas Ridley, the former bishop of London, were moved from the Tower of London to Oxford and placed
in the Bocardo, the town prison. Several weeks later, a disputation on the Eucharist was held at St. Mary’s Church during which each of the Protestant leaders made their case to an audience of nearly a thousand Catholics. It was never intended to be a fair hearing; the prisoners were to be delivered to the commissioners “so that their erroneous opinions being by the word of God justly and truly convinced, the residue of our subjects, may be thereby the better established in the true Catholic faith.”
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After four days of debate, the Protestants were told they had been defeated. They were declared heretics, excommunicated, and returned to their prison cells. For the next seventeen months, Cranmer remained almost completely isolated in the Bocardo.

On September 12, 1555, Cranmer’s trial for heresy began at St. Mary’s Church. He faced fifteen charges: six dealing with his matrimonial affairs, six others with his repudiation of papal authority, and three with heretical doctrines. He refused to recant and to acknowledge papal supremacy and the Real Presence. The trial ended, the case had to be referred to Rome, and Cranmer was sent back to the Bocardo. Three weeks later, Ridley and Latimer faced their trial. Both refused to recant; both were condemned to death. On October 16, they were taken to a stake sunk into a ditch outside the northern wall of the city near Balliol College. Cranmer was brought out of his cell to watch. For three hours Dr. Richard Smith, an Oxford theologian, preached as Ridley and Latimer waited for their deaths. Finally they were fastened to the stake and the faggots were lit. “Be of good comfort mister Ridley, and play the man,” Latimer called out, “we shall this day light such a candle by God’s grace in England, as (I trust) shall never be put out.”
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Latimer was quickly engulfed by the flames.

Ridley’s death was much slower. The faggots had been stacked so thickly that the fire could not burn through them. His legs burned, but the flames did not rise above his body to the gunpowder around his neck. “Let the fire come unto me, I cannot burn!” he cried.
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Faggot after faggot was thrown around Ridley’s head and further fuel added to the fire. Finally the gunpowder was ignited and he died.
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ON DECEMBER
4, Cranmer’s fate was decided in Rome. He was deprived of his archbishopric “and of all ecclesiastical dignities,” and
permission was given for his execution. On January 27, the Venetian ambassador, Giovanni Michieli, reported that “the sentence against the late Archbishop of Canterbury will soon be executed, he remaining more obstinate than ever in his heresies.”
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A few days later, under pressure of interrogation, Cranmer admitted to every fact brought before him and signed his first submission. He stated that he would accept the supremacy of the pope because the king and queen had ordered him to do so and he would always obey his sovereigns.
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Within days he signed a second recantation conceding more:

Mary must have been informed of his recantation but chose to ignore it; she was determined to be rid of the man who had caused her and her mother so much suffering.

On February 14, Cranmer was publicly degraded from holy orders in the church of Christ Church College. It was a ritual humiliation conducted by his old enemy Edmund Bonner, the bishop of London. After his crimes had been read out, Cranmer was forced to put on the vestments of an archbishop and then of a priest, after which each was stripped from him. His head was shaved to remove his tonsure, and his fingers were scraped to remove the holy oil that had ordained him. Then, dressed in a townsman’s cloak and cap, Cranmer was handed over to the secular authorities, who returned him to the Bocardo. He made two more recantations, but to little effect. On the twenty-fourth a writ was issued to the mayor of Oxford ordering that “in a public and open place” Cranmer be “for the aforesaid cause committed to the flames in the presence of people; and have that Thomas Cranmer actually consumed by that same fire, for a manifest example to other Christians of the detestation in which such crimes are held.”
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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.”
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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:

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!”
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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.