Cranmer had now been a prisoner for more than two years, during the whole of which his conduct appears to have been worthy of the high office which he had held, and the situation in which he was placed. Whilst he expressed contrition for his political offence, and was earnest to vindicate his loyalty, he maintained with temper and firmness those religious opinions which had placed him in such fearful peril. Of the change which has thrown a cloud over his memory, we know hardly any thing with certainty but the fact of his recantation. Little reliance can be placed on the detailed accounts of the circumstances which accompanied it. He was taken from his miserable cell in the prison to comfortable lodgings in Christchurch, where he is said to have been assailed with promises of pardon, and allured, by a treacherous show of kindness, into repeated acts of apostacy. In the mean while the government had decreed his death. On the 21st of March, 1556, he was taken from his prison to St. Mary’s Church, and exhibited to a crowded audience, on an elevated platform, in front of the pulpit. After a sermon from Dr. Cole, the Provost of Eton, he uttered a short and affecting prayer on his knees; then rising, addressed an exhortation to those around him; and, finally, made a full and distinct avowal of his penitence and remorse for his apostacy, declaring, that the unworthy hand which had signed his recantation should be the first member that perished. Amidst the reproaches of his disappointed persecutors he was hurried from the church to the stake, where he fulfilled his promise by holding forth his hand to the flames. We have undoubted testimony that he bore his sufferings with inflexible constancy. A spectator of the Romanist party says, “If it had been either for the glory of God, the wealth of his country, or the testimony of the truth, as it was for a pernicious error, and subversion of true religion, I could worthily have commended the example, and matched it with the fame of any Father of ancient time.” He perished in his sixty-seventh year.
All that has been left of his writings will be found in an edition of “The Remains of Archbishop Cranmer,” lately published at Oxford, in four volumes 8vo. They give proof that he was deeply imbued with the spirit of Protestantism, and that his opinions were the result of reflection and study; though the effect of early impressions occasionally appears, as in the manner of his appeals to the Apocryphal books, and a submission to the judgment of the early fathers, in a degree barely consistent with his avowed principles. See his First Letter to Queen Mary.