counsellor in his childhood, and his own guardian and adviser in his youth; and now Edward lay a-dying, and this was his last request to him, and was made in the interest of that very form of religion which Cranmer himself had done more than any living man to establish. It was a case in which even a strong man might have yielded, and Cranmer was not a strong man: in which a hard man might have been softened, and Cranmer was not a hard man. He did wrong, no doubt, but surely not without excuse or from base motives.
It is argued by some that Cranmer's reluctance was a mere pretence—that as he, of all men, had most to lose by the accession of Mary, so he went heartily with the Duke of Northumberland, and with the extreme section of the Protestants, who were his only real adherents. But it must be remembered that he was on the worst of terms with Northumberland himself, who, as he said in his letter to Mary afterwards, had sought his destruction; that if he meant to join him from the beginning, he had no reason to spoil the act by hesitation and pretended unwillingness; that he had been a lawyer and a statesman before he became a reformer, and therefore, like many other statesmen of the time, had probably no great confidence in the hasty and ill-contrived scheme of Northumberland; and must at least have known that, unless it succeeded, to join it was to throw away his last chance of safety, whereas to take active measures against it would have been the most obvious means of averting Mary's anger from himself. It was simply another, and this time a fatal instance of that inherent weakness of character, which had made Cranmer so often unable to withstand his sovereign, even when the choice lay between his sovereign and his own conscience, his better judgment, and his peace of mind.
