1533.]
MARRIAGE WITH ANNE BOLEYN
479
Boleyn but a few days before had received her golden crown at the altar of Westminster Abbey. Twenty years later another fire was blazing under the walls of Oxford; and the hand which was now writing these light lines was blackening in the flames of it, paying there the penalty of the same 'imagination' for which Frith and the poor London tailor were with such cool indifference condemned. It is affecting to know that Frith's writings were the instruments of Cranmer's conversion; and the fathers of the Anglican Church have left a monument of their sorrow for the shedding of this innocent blood in the order of the Communion Service, which closes with the very words on which the primate, with his brother bishops, had sat in judgment.[1]
- ↑ 'The natural body and blood of our Saviour Christ are in Heaven, and not here, it being against the truth of Christ's natural body to be at one time in more places than one.' The argument and the words in which it is expressed were Frith's.—See Foxe, vol. v. p. 6.
