solemnized the monarch's adulterous marriage with Lady Katherine Howard—we must pronounce him guilty of sacrilege: and finally, when we find that, notwithstanding the undoubted rights of the Princesses Mary and Elizabeth, he yet, on the death of their royal brother, strove to exclude them both from the throne, and to place Lady Jane Grey upon it, we must admit the justice of the verdict, and pronounce him guilty both of ingratitude and high treason. Still the sentence, which, after he had been pardoned for high treason, condemned him to the flames for heresy, was execrable. His firmness under the torture to which it consigned him has seldom been surpassed.'-Butler's Mem. vol. i. p. 261.

Let us dispassionately, and with due regard to the circumstances in which Cranmer was placed, inquire, 1st, whether the list of his offences may not be materially diminished; 2d, that of his great and virtuous actions as materially increased.

I. The progress of Cranmer's mind in the adoption of the Lutheran principles was slow, circumspect, and conscientious; he renounced no doctrine till after a rigid examination; accepted none without long consideration. How far his opinions advanced in Germany we have no evidence, except that he married, and that he denied the supremacy of the Pope. Other superstitious practices of the Church of Rome he endeavoured to abolish; the right of the people to read the scriptures in their native tongue he acknowledged himself, furthered the translation, and procured an enactment that the Bible should be placed in every parish church. But at what period he renounced the other doctrines of popery it is impossible to aver with certainty, except that of transubstantiation, from the belief in which he was converted by the arguments of the admirable Bishop Ridley, at a late and well-ascertained period.

II. Henry's commands having overcome the unwillingness which he felt, on account of the oath, to become Archbishop of Canterbury, he took it, by the advice of the best civil lawyers, with a protestation, reserving his allegiance to his God, his King, and his country, and his design for a reformation of the abuses in the church. He did not retire into a private room. They assembled in the chapter-house of the King's College of St. Stephen. Present, as witnesses, Watkins, the King's prothonotary; Dr. John Tregonwel; Thomas Bedyl, clerk of the King's council; Richard Guent, doctor of decrees, &c.; and John Cocks, the Archbishop's auditor, &c. . . . . Cranmer, in the said chapter-house, before the said witnesses, made a protestation.'-Strype's Cranmer, vol. i. And at every separate part of the ceremony he publicly renewed the same protestation.

But we would ask all Roman Catholics who hold the doctrines

of

of Mr. Butler and the Gallican Church, and especially we would ask the Roman Catholic bishops in Ireland, whether they would take the same oath under any other interpretation, either virtually made or explicitly avowed, as far at least as reserving their duty to their King and country: whether, as to the point of reformation, all who assert the superiority of a general council to the Pope, and the right of the church thus represented to reform even the Papacy itself, must not either have made a similar reservation, or have been guilty of violating their oath. We think that, in this point of view, neither the oath nor the protestation have been fairly considered.

III. After having resisted the Six Article act with such energy, that the King desired him to quit the parliament if he would not assent; after having refused so to do, and continued to oppose it to the last, and thereby probably having procured some desirable modifications of it; when the enactment had become the law of the land, he acquiesced, and doubtless in his courts its observance was enforced. Mr. Todd, in his able preface to the republication of Cranmer's work on the Sacrament, has hunted Dr. Lingard through his many mistatements with severe and unrelenting vigilance, and on this article asserts, correctly, that subscription was not required. But the obedience which he was thus unwillingly obliged to exact, Cranmer displayed himself; for when the King demanded whether his chamber would stand the scrutiny of the act, he stated, and stated truly, that he had sent his wife to her friends in Germany.

IV. Anne Boleyn was condemned to be, at the King's pleasure, either burnt or beheaded: the ill-fated woman, to avoid the more horrible punishment, confessed a precontract. Cranmer accepted this confession, though contradicted by Lord Piercy, in hopes probably that it might not only mitigate, but avert her doom. It is false that Burnet represents Cranmer as extorting this confession; but that writer justly observes, the two sentences that were past upon the Queen; the one of attainder, for adultery; the other of divorce, because of a precontract, did so contradict one another, that it was apparent one, if not both, of them must be unjust.' Cranmer therefore might rationally hope (for Henry's wife-killing propensities had not yet been made manifest) that he might be satisfied with annulling the marriage, which made the crime of adultery impossible, and might thus be led to spare the unhappy object of his former attachment the pains of an ignominious death, and his own soul the crime of a judicial murder. V. We proceed to the more important topic of persecution. Cranmer disputed against Lambert, and conscientiously, for he then believed in transubstantiation. Cromwell read the sentence

by Henry's specific command, who was irritated by the inefficacy of his royal arguments to move the firm consistency of the martyr. Cranmer therefore must be acquitted of personally urging this condemnation; and Anne Askew's took place at the precise period when his influence was on the wane; and when, but for the personal attachment of the King, he would himself have been accused, probably convicted, of heresy, by the intrigues of Gardiner. In the minute and authentic account of Askew's trial, in Strype's Memorials, this last prelate appears to have taken the lead against her; nothing whatever appears to implicate Cranmer. The archbishop's persecution of Roman Catholics is indeed entirely without proof; but with shame and with sorrow we confess that it is not so with regard to the Anabaptists. We will not rely upon the unsatisfactory excuse, that persecution was the last article of the sanguinary creed in which he had been educated, which he put off. The man who could cause the Gospel of Christ to be translated into his native tongue, and read in every church, has no right to the plea of ignorance; he ought to have known the awful testimony borne against him by that volume. With no design of palliating this offence we still however bear in mind that the Anabaptists were not the harmless fanatics of later times, far less the prosperous and well-organized sect, which bears the same denomination at the present day. They were the ruin and the calumny of the Protestant cause by their licentiousness and seditious extravagance. Their doctrines were those of the French jacobins, their deeds as sanguinary and atrocious. We cannot forget that the ruins of Munster were still smoking, and that another John of Leyden might be apprehended among their frantic followers.* It appears from the trial of Barnes, that the nonsensical tenet of Joan Bocken was an article of the wilder Anabaptist creed; the rest who suffered, were certainly of the same class. Still, other legal means of restraint should have been adopted; their punishment was horrible, and, doubtless, if earthly thought troubled the soul of Cranmer, when he himself was perishing in the flames, it must have been the recollection of those poor victims, who, like himself, were suffocated, blinded, tortured, consumed. But if the Reformation is to bear the reproach of Cranmer's urging this sanguinary measure on the repugnant Edward; let it triumphantly claim for itself the long and noble resistance of the youth, who was, indeed, the representative of Protestant principles, nurtured by Protestants in the word of God, and therefore intuitively alive to that pure sense of the Holy Scriptures, which long usage with the world

* Barnet, vol. i. p. 297.

and

and early prejudice still obscured and weakened in minds like Cranmer's.

VI. To the solemn farce of the dissolution of the marriage with Anne of Cleves, Cranmer was unquestionably a party, but with the whole convocation-indeed here, as is usual in objectionable proceedings, the Bishop of Winchester was most active. Anne of Cleves certainly confessed something like a precontract; and it is ludicrous to see with what phlegmatic coolness she acquiesced in the divorce, without repugnance or complaint, and ' retired on a pension' in perfect good humour. We wish to justify neither the immorality of the proceeding, nor the servility of the convocation.

VII. Had Mary executed Craniner for treason we might have lamented his fate, but should scarcely have accused her of unprecedented cruelty. He had undoubtedly been guilty of that, which she was entitled so to punish; but when Mr. Butler speaks of his ingratitude, he surely forgets that he signed the patent for the new settlement of the crown with great reluctance and after long hesitation, at the urgent entreaties of the dying Edward, whom he not only tenderly loved, but who undoubtedly had the first claim to his gratitude. It is not a little remarkable, by the bye, that the Roman Catholics could adopt the principles by which Jane was raised to the throne when it suited their purposes; in the work of Doleman, (Robert Persons, the Jesuit,) on the succession after the death of Elizabeth, they are fully developed and vindicated- -a work from which Mr. Butler does not withhold his approbation.-See 2d vol, of Memoirs, p. 22. Principles indeed they are, which are capable of misapplication; but they are the same on which the glorious revolution of 1688, and the accession of the House of Brunswick, are to be justified.

So much for the darker side of the picture; let us now turn to the brighter. Cranmer's interference in favour of Mary is thus described by Fox.

'Unless ye account him blameworthy for this, that when King Henry, father to Mary, upon great displeasure conceived, was, for some secret causes, determined to strike off her head, this reverend archbishop did pacify the wrath of the father, and with mild continual intercession, pre- . served the life of the daughter; who, for life preserved, acquitted her patron with death.'

In the two greatest crimes of the age, the death of Fisher and of More, Cranmer is unanimously admitted to stand free from all participation, and to have laboured hard to prevent them. Fisher was an excellent and learned man, blindly, but conscientiously, attached to his religion: his death itself was cruel; his

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vious privations and sufferings barbarous. We should as fully enter into the most ardent admiration of More, could we entirely acquit him of apostatizing in practice from those doctrines of tolerance which his better-judging youth had promulgated in his Utopia. Instead of wondering that Cranmer advanced the reformation so little during the reign of Henry, it is most extraordinary, that he could effect so much. His influence over the capricious monarch is thus described, to his honour, by Cromwell. You, my lord, were born in a happy hour I suppose, for do or say what you will, the King will always take it well at your hands.' This is the forbearance which is extorted even from a tyrant like Henry, by uniform temper and virtue. But in all his schemes Cranmer was thwarted by the influence of the Howards, and the acutest politician of the age, Gardiner. He did not, therefore, urge any measure for which the minds of men were not fully ripe; he silently undermined the superstitions of the country, by suppressing the more offensive practices, removing the idols, discouraging pilgrimages, detecting the flagrant impostures of relics and miracles, inviting and patronizing all men of learning, whom he supported with the utmost liberality; and, above all, 'casting the seed of the word of God upon the waters,' which he found again after many days. He left the Bible to work its own way, and thus prepared the nation with equal wisdom, temper, and moderation, for the great, bloodless, and almost unresisted change which was effected in the subsequent reign.

In reality the positive advancement of the Reformation, during the reign of Henry, was very imperfect and precarious. Two points only were decidedly carried, the supremacy of the king and the dissolution of the monasteries. With regard to the first, it is remarkable with what unanimity it passed; few refused to subscribe; it is even questionable whether Pole himself was not in the number of conformists as Dean of Exeter: but our readers may not be aware that the most vigorous defender of that doctrine was Gardiner, whose work was accompanied with a preface by Bonner, in which the Pope is assailed with the coarsest acrimony, and called a ravening wolf.' In the dissolution of the monasteries, much abuse undoubtedly prevailed, many tyrannical and unjustifiable acts were committed, and the rapacity with which the plunder was seized by Henry and his courtiers, covers their memory with shame. But of these abuses the real religious protestants were guiltless. The general corruption of the monasteries is asserted on the evidence of whatever records Burnet could obtain; and on the still stronger testimony afforded by the anxiety with which all documents on the subject were directed to be de

stroyed