Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 2.djvu/551

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royal clemency would be extended to him on the scaffold itself, there acknowledged the justice of his sentence and made a complete renunciation of Protestantism, even going so far as to attribute the intestine strife and the miseries, which for so many years had troubled alike England and Germany, to the defection of those realms from the true faith. The Roman ritual was not as yet formally restored as obligatory on all loyal subjects, but in her private chapel Mary heard mass. The Protestant Bishops were deposed; and an injunction was issued that none of the clergy should preach without the royal licence, while any member of that body was to be liable to suspension if his conduct proved unsatisfactory. Gardiner, Bonner, Heath, and Day were reinstated in their respective sees of Winchester, London, Worcester, and Chichester. The see of Durham, which Northumberland had suppressed, appropriating its ample revenues to his own use, was restored, and Cuthbert Tunstall installed as Bishop. On August 29 Gardiner received instructions himself to select and appoint capable preachers who were to be sent to discharge their functions throughout the country.

Not a few of the more eminent preachers among the Reformers, foreseeing the storm, had already fled to the Continent; but a certain number still remained, such as Latimer and John Bradford, openly to call in question the prerogatives which the Queen still arrogated to herself as Head of the Church. Foremost, however, among those who refused to flee was Archbishop Cranmer, who at his palace in Lambeth confronted the reactionary tendencies around him with an intrepidity which marked him out for general observation. Already obnoxious, owing to his complicity in the diversion of the Succession to the Crown, he was by his open denunciation of the restoration of the Mass, which he declared to involve " many horrible blasphemies, 1' exposed to the charge of open resistance to the royal authority. On September 8 he was summoned before the Council to answer for the publication of the Declaration in which he had given expression to his views. His defence, if such it could be termed, was rightly regarded as evasive. He pleaded that Scory, the deprived Bishop of Chichester, had published the Declaration without his formal authorisation, though he admitted that it had been his intention to give it. He was accordingly committed to the Tower, where Ridley, who had publicly proclaimed the illegitimacy of both Mary and Elizabeth, had already been a prisoner for two months. Latimer's committal appears to have taken place about the same time; and, early in October, Cranmer was followed by his brother Primate, Archbishop Holgate. The latter was now more than seventy years of age, and chiefly obnoxious on account of the persistent energy with which he assailed all that reflected the Roman ritual and ornamentation in the churches.

On October 1 Mary was crowned in Westminster Abbey-the procession from the Tower and the entire ceremonial being marked by