THE sufferings of the Protestants had failed to teach them the value of religious liberty. The use of the new liturgy was enforced by imprisonment, and the subscription to the Articles of Faith was demanded by royal authority from all the clergy and schoolmasters. The excesses of the Protestants led to a temporary but violent reaction.

The married priests were driven from their churches; the images were replaced, the new prayer book was set aside, the mass restored. Ridley and the others who had displaced the deposed bishops were expelled; Latimer and Cranmer were sent to the Tower. After the failure of Wyatt’s rebellion and the defeat of the Protestants, Mary set herself to enforce the submission of England to the Pope.

With the restoration of the system of Henry VIII. the country was satisfied. But Mary was not content to stop there.

The statutes against heretics were revived. The bigotry of Mary knew no restraint. She ferreted out Protestants all over the country, and for three and a half years England experienced a persecution which was insignificant if judged by continental standards, but which has left an indelible impression on the minds of men. Nearly three hundred Protestants were burnt at the stake, and among them Latimer, Ridley and Cranmer—all Cambridge men—at Oxford.

The accession of Mary had caused much dismay in the hearts of the Protestants in that city. The Queen’s proclamation as to religion on 18th August 1553, was followed two days after by letters to the Chancellors of Oxford and Cambridge enjoining the full observance of the ancient statutes. A special letter from the Queen was sent to Magdalen annulling the ordinances made contrary to the statutes since the death of Henry VIII. Prudent Protestants who had made themselves prominent in their colleges now wisely took leave of absence from Oxford. Peter Martyr left the country; and his place was soon afterwards taken by a Spanish friar from the court of Philip and Mary. Commissioners arrived, and were shocked to find that at Magdalen, for example, there was no priest to say mass, and no fellow who would hear it; there was no boy to respond, no altar and no vestments. Visitors were sent by Stephen Gardiner to New College, Magdalen and C.C.C. Many fellows were ejected, and mass was restored.

The work of death had now begun. Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, Nicholas Ridley, Bishop of London, and Hugh Latimer, Bishop of Worcester, were removed from the Tower in March and placed in the custody of the mayor and bailiffs of Oxford. For preparations had been made to examine them before a commission appointed from both the Universities. They were lodged at first in Bocardo, the town prison, now become, as Ridley observed, “a very College of Quondams.” Shortly afterwards Ridley was removed to the house of an alderman, and Latimer elsewhere, in order that they might not confer together. Presently

To support the platform where they sat the finials of the stalls are said to have been then levelled. “Soon after was brought in Cranmer (with a great number of rusty billmen), then Ridley, and last of all Latimer, to subscribe to certain articles then proposed. They all denied them.”

On Monday, the 16th April, the Vice-Chancellor and proctors met at Exeter College and thence went to the Divinity School, there to dispute with the bishops on the nature of the Eucharist. The Oxford and Cambridge doctors took their places, and the Moderator of the schools presided in his lofty chair. Cranmer was brought in and set opposite to the latter in the respondent’s place. By his side was the mayor of the city, in whose charge he was. Next day it was Ridley’s turn, and on the third Latimer’s. So the solemn farce of the disputations, punctuated by “opprobrious checks and reviling taunts,” was gone through; the bishops were pronounced no members of the Church, Cranmer was returned to Bocardo, Ridley taken to the sheriff’s house and Latimer to the bailiff’s. The judicial sentence followed the academical judgment.

In September 1555 a commission was sent down from London, and sat in the Divinity School. The two bishops had looked death steadily in the face for two years, expecting it every day or hour. It was now come. Ridley was urged to recant, but this he firmly refused to do or to acknowledge by word or gesture “the usurped supremacy of Rome.” His cap, which he refused to remove at the mention of the Cardinals and the Pope, was forcibly taken off by a beadle. Latimer when examined was equally firm. He appeared

Bread was bread, the aged bishop boldly declared when asked for his views on transubstantiation, and wine was wine; there was a change in the Sacrament it was true, but the change was not in the nature but the dignity.

The two Protestants were reprieved for the day and summoned to appear next morning at eight o’clock in S. Mary’s Church. There, after further examination, the sentence of condemnation was pronounced upon them as heretics obstinate and incurable. And on 16th October the sentence was fulfilled.

Ridley and Latimer were led out to be burnt, whilst Cranmer, whose execution had been delayed, since it required the sanction of Rome, remained in Bocardo, and ascending to the top of the prison house, or, as an old print represents it, to the top of S. Michael’s Tower, kneeled down and prayed to God to strengthen them.

On the evening of the 15th there had been a supper at the house of Irish, the mayor, whose wife was a bigoted and fanatical Catholic. Ridley, as we have seen, was in their charge, and the members of his family were permitted to be present. He talked cheerfully of his approaching “marriage”; his brother-in-law promised to be in attendance and, if possible, to bring with him his wife, Ridley’s sister. Even the hard eyes of Mrs Irish softened to tears as she listened and thought of what was coming. The brother-in-law offered to sit up through the night, but Ridley said there was no occasion; he “minded to go to bed and sleep as quietly as ever he did in his life.” In the morning he wrote a letter to the Queen. As Bishop of London he had granted renewals of certain leases on which he had received fines. Bonnor had refused to recognise them; and he entreated the Queen, for Christ’s sake, either that the leases should be allowed, or that some portion of his own confiscated property might be applied to the repayment of the tenants. The letter was long; by the time it was finished the sheriff’s officers were probably in readiness.

Bocardo, the prison over the North Gate, spanned the road from the ancient tower of S. Michael’s, and commanded the approach to Broad Street. Thither, to a place over against Balliol College, “those special and singular captains and principal pillars of Christ’s church” were now led. The frontage of Balliol was then much further back than it is now; beyond it lay open country, before it, under the town wall, ran the water of the tower-ditch. Some years ago a stake with ashes round it was found on the site which is marked by a metal cross in the roadway, at the foot of the first electric lamp, as the site of the martyrs’ death.[34] To this spot then came the two bishops.

Lord Williams of Thame was on the spot by the Queen’s order; and the city guard was under arms to prevent disturbance. Ridley appeared first. He wore

He walked between the mayor and aldermen, and Master Latimer followed him in the same shabby attire as that which he had worn on the occasion of his examination. As they passed towards Bocardo they looked up in the hope of seeing Cranmer at the little glass window. It was from this window[35] that the Bocardo

South View of Bocardo Herbert Railton
South View of Bocardo Herbert Railton

prisoners used to let down an old hat and cry, “Pity the Bocardo Birds.” For prisoners in those days depended for their daily sustenance on the charity of strangers, even as the prisoners in Portugal or Morocco do to-day, and “Bread and meat for the prisoners” was a well-known cry in the London streets. The Parisian version was, “Aux prisonniers du Palais.” Cranmer’s attention at this moment was engrossed by a Spanish friar, who was busy improving the occasion, and the martyr could not see him. But Ridley spied Latimer hobbling after him. “Oh, be ye there?” he exclaimed. “Yea,” answered the old man. “Have after as fast as I can follow!” When he reached the stake Ridley ran to Latimer, “and with a wondrous cheerful look embraced and kissed him” and comforted him, saying, “Be of good heart, brother, for God will either assuage the fury of the flame, or else strengthen us to abide it.” With that he went to the stake, kneeled down by it, kissed it and effectually prayed, and behind him Master Latimer kneeled, as earnestly calling upon God as he.

The martyrs had now to listen to a sermon from Dr Smith, who denounced them as heretics, and exhorted them to recant. The Lord Williams of Thame, the Vice-Chancellor and other commissioners sat upon a form close at hand. The martyrs asked leave of them to reply, but the bailiffs and the Vice-Chancellor ran up to Ridley and stopped his mouth with their hands. The martyrs now commended their souls and their cause to God, and stripped themselves for the stake, Ridley giving away to the eager crowd his garments, dials, napkins and nutmegs, whilst some plucked the points off his hose; “happy was he that might get any rag of him.” They were chained to the stakes, and gunpowder was hung about their necks, thanks to the humane care of Ridley’s brother-in-law. Then men brought a faggot kindled with fire, and laid the same down at Dr Ridley’s feet, to whom Master Latimer spake in this manner:

Then Latimer crying aloud, “O Father of Heaven, receive my soul,” bathed his hands in the flame that blazed up about him, and stroked his face. The powder exploded, and he “soon died with very little pain or none.” Ridley was less fortunate, for the fire being lit beneath and the faggots heaped above, the flames burnt his legs slowly away, and did not ignite the gunpowder round his neck. Amid cries to heaven of “Lord, Lord, receive my soul,” and “Lord have mercy upon me,” he screamed in his agony to the bystanders to let the fire come unto him. His brother-in-law with awkward kindness threw on more wood, which only kept down the flame. It was not till the lower part of his body had been burned away that he fell over, “and when the flame touched the gunpowder he was seen to stir no more.”

The lot of Cranmer was still more pathetic, and made a yet deeper impression upon the popular mind. He, like the others, had been examined in S. Mary’s (7th September 1555). He had appeared, clad in a fair black gown with his hood on his shoulders, such as Doctors of Divinity used to wear, and in his hand was a white staff. The aged Archbishop confronted there the Pope’s Legate, who sat on a raised dais ten feet high, with cloth of state, very richly and sumptuously adorned, at the east end of the church. Summoned to answer to a charge of blasphemy, incontinency and heresy, he refused as firmly as the others to recognise the authority of the Bishop of Rome within this kingdom.

Before further proceedings were taken against the Archbishop, it was necessary to obtain sanction of the Pope. It was not till the middle of the following February that the Papal breve arrived and a new commission came down to Oxford. Sitting before the high altar in the choir of Christ Church, Thirlby and Bonnor announced that Cranmer had been tried at Rome, where, according to the preamble of the Papal sentence, he had been allowed every opportunity to answer for himself. “O Lord!” commented Cranmer, “what lies be these!” They were directed, the commissioners continued, to degrade him, excommunicate him and deliver him up to the secular power. The form of degradation was begun when Cranmer appealed to the next Free General Council. The appeal was refused; the degradation was continued. Cranmer was stripped of his vestments, his hair was shorn, the sacred unction scraped from his finger-tips, and he was then dressed in a poor yeoman-beadle’s gown, full bare and nearly worn, and handed over to the secular power.

“Now are you lord no longer!” cried Bonnor when the ceremony was finished. “All this needed not,” the Archbishop replied; “I myself had done with this gear long ago.”

Cranmer had been three years in prison; he was an old man, and his nerve may well have been upset by the prolonged delay and fear of death and the recent degradation which he had undergone. There is no authentic account of what happened to him during the next few hours. But Protestant tradition relates that he was taken from the Cathedral to the Deanery of Christ Church, where he was entertained at his ease and exposed to the arguments and exhortations of Soto, the Spanish friar. He was warned at the same time that the Queen’s mind was so set, that she would either have Cranmer a Catholic or else no Cranmer at all. He was taken back to his cell that night, and there his constancy at last gave way. He signed a series of recantations. But the Queen refused to relent; she had humiliated her enemy, and now he must die. She fixed the 25th of March for the day of his execution. But first he was called upon to make a public confession of his recantation. It was a foul and rainy day when he was brought out of Bocardo to S. Mary’s Church. Peers, knights, doctors, students, priests, men-at-arms and citizens thronged the narrow aisles, and through their midst passed the mayor and next the aldermen in their place and degree; after them came Cranmer between two Spanish friars, who, on entering the church, chanted the Nunc Dimittis. A stage was set over against the pulpit—the ledge cut for it may still be seen in the pillar to the left of the Vice-Chancellor’s chair—and here Cranmer was made to stand in his bare and ragged gown, and old square cap, whilst Dr Cole, the Warden of New College, preached his funeral sermon, and justified the sentence that had been passed, by which, even though he had recanted, he was condemned to die.

Cole gave this reason and that, and added that there were others which had moved the Queen and Council “which were not meet and convenient for every one to understand.” He congratulated the Archbishop on his conversion, and promised him that a dirge should be sung for him in every church in Oxford. Finally, he called upon the whole congregation to kneel where they were and to pray for him. When the prayer was finished the preacher called upon the Archbishop to make the public confession of his faith. “Brethren,” cried he, “lest any man should doubt of this man’s earnest conversion and repentance, you shall hear him speak before you.” But the spirit of revenge had overreached itself. Cranmer’s enemies had hoped to humiliate him to the uttermost; instead, they gave him the opportunity of redeeming his fame and adding his name to the roll of martyrs.

To the astonishment of friends and foes alike, Cranmer stood up before the congregation, and chanted the palinode of his forsworn opinions; he recanted his recantation. Face to face with that cruel

The President’s Lodge Trinity College
The President’s Lodge Trinity College

death, which in his weakness he had so desperately striven to avoid, he made the declaration of his true belief. “And now I come,” he concluded,

So far he was allowed to proceed before, amidst the infuriated cries of his enemies, he was pulled down from the stage and borne away to the stake. “Priests who did rue to see him go so wickedly to his death, ran after him exhorting him, while time was, to remember himself.” But Cranmer had remembered himself at last. He had done with recantations at the bidding of Spanish priests and “bloody” Bonnor. He approached the stake with a cheerful countenance, we are told, undressed in haste and stood upright in his shirt. The Spanish friars finding they could do nothing with him, exclaimed the one to the other, “Let us go from him, for the devil is in him.” “Make short,” cried Lord Williams, and “Recant, recant,” cried others. The wood was kindled. “This was the hand that wrote it,” Cranmer said, extending his right arm, “therefore it shall suffer first punishment.” He held his hand so steadfast and immovable in the flame that all men might see it burned before his body was touched. And so holding it he never stirred nor cried till the fire reached him and he was dead.

A portrait of Cranmer hangs in the Bodleian. But the chief monument to the Protestant martyrs was raised in 1841. The Martyrs’ Memorial in S. Giles’, opposite the west front of Balliol College, was happily designed by Sir Gilbert Scott in imitation of the beautiful crosses which Edward I. raised in memory of Queen Eleanor. The statues of the martyrs are by Weekes. The north aisle of the neighbouring Church of S. Mary Magdalene was restored at the same time in memory of the same event.

Cranmer had atoned for his inconstancy, and crowned the martyrdoms of the English Reformation. From that moment the cause of Catholic reaction was hopeless. Cranmer’s career had not been that of a saint or a martyr. He was a weak man with a legal rather than a religious cast of mind. Nothing in his life became him like the leaving of it. Others more constant to their belief, and more noble in character, had died at the stake. But the very weakness of the man and the pathos of the humiliation of one so highly placed, appealed to the crowd who could not rise to heights of unshaken constancy. More easily understood by the people than the triumphant cry of heroic sufferers like Latimer, the dramatic end of the Archbishop filled every independent mind with sympathetic dread. In vain did Mary heap rewards on the University. In vain did Cardinal Pole institute a fresh visitation, hunt all heretics from the University, burn in the common market-place all English Bibles and Protestant books that could be found. In vain did he revise the University and college statutes. His work was undone as soon as finished. The lesson of Cranmer’s death had gone home to a thousand hearts. England refused to be a province of Spain and of Rome. The news of Mary’s death was received in Oxford with the ringing of bells and other signs of discreet delight.

The Catholic Reaction is marked in Oxford history by the institution of two colleges, Trinity and S. John’s, both founded on the sites of old monastic houses by wealthy citizens of London who were lovers of the old order and adherents of the old religion. In 1555 Sir Thomas Pope, a faithful servant of the Tudors, who had acquired large tracts of abbey lands in Oxfordshire, bought the site and vacant buildings of Durham College, which were then “mere dog-kennels,” and the half of the grove which had not been included in the grant of S. Bernard’s College to Christ Church. Here he founded the College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity, consisting of a president, twelve fellows and eight scholars. And in drawing up his statutes he availed himself of the advice both of Elizabeth and Cardinal Pole. The hall was completed in 1620. In 1665 the decay of the old Durham buildings made reconstruction imperative. Wren was the architect. He wished to build a long range in the upper part of the grove, but the quadrangular form was preferred; and he designed the garden quadrangle, a block in the Renaissance style which was spoilt by additions and alterations in 1802. The chapel (1691), which boasts some magnificent carving by Grinling Gibbons, is, in style, closely akin to the advanced palladian of Dean Aldrich’s Church of All Saints. He certainly made some suggestions for it, and so did Wren. The President’s house and New Buildings, by T. G. Jackson (1883), form, with the iron railings and old halls, including the old Perilous or Kettle Hall (1615), that face “the Broad,” a new and handsome quadrangle.

It was in 1555, also, that Sir Thomas White, a rich merchant tailor who had twice been Lord Mayor of London, chose the site of the suppressed College of S. Bernard for his foundation, being guided thereto, as tradition asserts, by a dream which warned him to build near a place where there was a triple elm having three trunks issuing from one root. Between his college and the Merchant Taylors’ School in London White established a connection similar to that between Winchester and New College. The treasure of ecclesiastical vestments preserved in the library, and the fact that Edmund Campion, the Jesuit poet and conspirator, after whom the new Jesuit Hall in Oxford is called, was the fellow chosen to preach the founder’s funeral sermon, indicate the Roman Catholic sympathies of the institution. Yet it was an alumnus of this college, William Laud, whose body was laid in the chapel (1530), and whose ghost, it is said, still haunts the library he built and the quadrangle which owes its completion (1635) to his munificence, who fixed the University in its sympathy with the High Church party of the Anglican Church. The classical colonnades and the charming garden front, wherein Inigo Jones combined the Oxford Gothic with the style which he had recently learned to love in Italy, form a fitting background to the most perfect of Oxford gardens (1750).