anmer replied, "I do not acknowledge this session of
yours, nor yet yourself my mislawful judge; neither would I have
appeared this day before you, but that I was brought hither; and
therefore here I openly renounce you as my judge, protesting that my
meaning is not to make any answer as in a lawful judgment, for then I
would be silent; but only for that I am bound in conscience to answer
every man of that hope which I have in Jesus Christ."

He then knelt, and turning towards the west with his back to the court
and the altar, he said the Lord's Prayer. After which, he rose,
repeated the creed, and said--

{p.227} "This I do profess as touching my faith, and make my
protestation, which I desire you to note; I will never consent that
the Bishop of Rome shall have any jurisdiction in this realm."

"Mark, Master Cranmer," interrupted Martin, "you refuse and deny him
by whose laws you do remain in life, being otherwise attainted of high
treason, and but a dead man by the laws of the realm."

"I protest before God I was no traitor," said the archbishop. "I will
never consent to the Bishop of Rome, for then I should give myself to
the devil. I have made an oath to the king, and I must obey the king
by God's law. By the Scripture, the king is chief, and no foreign
person in his own realm above him. The pope is contrary to the crown.
I cannot obey both, for no man can serve two masters at once. You
attribute the keys to the pope and the sword to the king. I say the
king hath both."

Continuing the same argument, the archbishop entered at length into
the condition of the law and the history of the Statutes of Provisors
and Premunire: he showed that the constitution of the country was
emphatically independent, and he maintained that no English subject
could swear obedience to a foreign power without being involved in
perjury.

The objection was set aside, and the subject of oaths was an
opportunity for a taunt, which the queen's proctors did not overlook.
Cranmer had unwillingly accepted the archbishopric when the Act of
Appeals was pending, and when the future relations of England with the
See of Rome, and the degree of authority which (if any) the pope was
to retain, were uncertain. In taking the usual oaths, therefore, by
the advice of lawyers, he made an especial and avowed reservation of
his duty to the crown;[500] and this so-called perjury Martin now
flung in his teeth.

[Footnote 500: Although