THE OXFORD MARTYRS
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
"a solemn Convocation was held in S. Mary's Chancel concerning the
business forthwith to be taken in hand; which being concluded all
the Doctors and Masters went in a solemn procession to Carfax and
thence to Christ Church, where they heard Divine service, and so
they went to dinner;[33] afterwards they with some others, in
number thirty-three, that were to dispute with the Bishops, met in
Our Lady's Chapel on the North side of S. Mary's Church, and thence
going into the Chancel, placed themselves in a semi-circle by the
High Altar."
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
"with a kerchief on his head and upon it a night cap or two and a
great cap such as townsmen use, with two broad flaps to button
under the chin, wearing an old threadbare Bristol frieze gown,
girded to his body with a penny leather girdle, at the which hanged
by a long string of leather his Testament and his spectacles
without a case, depending about his neck upon his breast."
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
"a fair black gown furred and faced with foins, such as he was wont
to wear being Bishop, and a tippet of velvet furs likewise about
his neck, a velvet nightcap upon his head and a corner cap upon the
same, going in a pair of slippers to the stake."
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
[Illustration: 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:
'Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man. We shall
this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I
trust shall never be put out.'
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.
"I protest," he said, "I am no traitor. I have made an oath to the
King and I must obey the King by God's law. By the Scripture the
King is chief and no foreign person in his own realm above him. The
Pope is contrary to the Crown. I cannot obey both, for no man can
serve two masters at once. You attribute the keys to the Pope and
the sword to the King. I say the King hath both."
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.
"The tongues of dying men
Enforce attention, like deep harmony....
More are men's ends marked than their lives before."
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
[Illustration: 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,
"to the great thing which so much troubleth my conscience, more
than anything that ever I did or said in my whole life, and that is
the setting abroad of a writing contrary to the truth; which now
here I renounce and refuse as things written with my hand, contrary
to the truth which I thought in my heart, and written for fear of
death, and to save my life if it might be;... And forasmuch as my
hand offended, writing contrary to my heart, my hand shall first be
punished therefore; for, may I come to the fire, it shall be first
burned. As for the Pope I utterly refuse him, as Christ's enemy and
Anti-Christ, with all his false doctrine; and as for the Sacrament,
I believe as I have taught in my book against the Bishop of
Winchester."
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).