Gardiner, now not only Bishop of Winchester but Lord Chancellor, had performed the rites of the coronation, in the absence of the Archbishops, both in confinement. The Tower had been once more opening its hospitable doors, and a fortnight earlier its resident diarist had noted Cranmer’s arrival. “Item, the Bishop of Canterbury was brought into the Tower as prisoner, and lodged in the Tower over the gate anenst the water-gate, where the Duke of Northumberland lay before his death.”
Nor was Cranmer the only churchman to find a lodging there. Doctor Ridley had preceded him to the universal prison-house, and on the same day that the Archbishop took up his residence in it “Master Latimer was brought to the Tower prisoner; who at his coming said to one Rutter, a warder there, ‘What, my old friend, how do you? I am now come to be your neighbour again,’ and was lodged in the garden in Sir Thomas Palmer’s lodging.”
Ominous quarters both! It was a day when the great fortress received, and discharged, many guests.
If Cranmer had drawn his imprisonment upon himself, the imprudence to which it was due did him honour. He had at first been treated by Mary with an indulgence the more singular when it is remembered that he had been the instrument of her mother’s divorce, and a strenuous supporter of Lady Jane. Prudence would have dictated the adoption on his part of a policy of silence; but, confined to his house at Lambeth, and regarding with the bitterness inevitable in a man of his convictions the steps in course of being taken for the restoration of the ancient worship, the news that Mass had been once again celebrated in Canterbury Cathedral, and that it was commonly reported that it had been done with his consent and connivance, was too much for him. Feeling the need of clearing himself from what he regarded as a damaging imputation, he wrote and spread abroad a declaration of his faith and opinions, adding to it a violent attack upon the rites of the Catholic Church. By Mary and her advisers the challenge could scarcely have been ignored; and it was this document, read to the people in the streets, which was the cause of the Archbishop being called before the Council and committed to the Tower on a charge of treason accompanied by the spreading abroad of seditious libels.[204]