s "who did rue[548] to
see him go so wickedly to his death, ran after him, exhorting him,
while time was, to remember himself." But Cranmer, having flung down
the burden of his shame, had recovered his strength, and such words
had no longer power to trouble him. He approached the stake with "a
cheerful countenance," undressed in haste, and stood upright in his
shirt. Soto and another Spanish friar continued expostulating; but
finding they could effect nothing, one said in Latin to the other,
"Let us go from him, for the devil is within him." An Oxford {p.259}
theologian--his name was Ely--being more clamorous, drew from him only
the answer that, as touching his recantation, "he repented him right
sore, because he knew that it was against the truth."

[Footnote 548: _Harleian MS._, 422. Strype has
misread the word into "run," losing the point of
the expression.]

"Make short, make short!" Lord Williams cried, hastily.

The archbishop shook hands with his friends; Ely only drew back,
calling, "Recant, recant," and bidding others not approach him.

"This was the hand that wrote it," Cranmer said, extending his right
arm; "this was the hand that wrote it, therefore it shall suffer first
punishment." Before his body was touched, he held the offending member
steadily in the flame, "and never stirred nor cried." The wood was dry
and mercifully laid; the fire was rapid at its work, and he was soon
dead. "His friends," said a Catholic bystander, "sorrowed for love,
his enemies for pity, strangers for a common kind of humanity, whereby
we are bound to one another."

So perished Cranmer. He was brought out, with the eyes of his soul
blinded, to make sport for his enemies, and in his death he brought
upon them a wider destruction than he had effected by his teaching
while alive. Pole was appointed the next day to the See of Canterbury;
but in other respects the court had overreached themselves by their
cruelty. Had they been contented to accept the recantation, they would
have left the archbishop to die broken-hearted, pointed at by the
finger of pitying scorn; and the Reformation would have been disgraced
in its champion. They were tempted, by an evil spirit of revenge, into
an act unsanctioned even by their own bloody laws; and they gave him
an opportunity of redeeming his fame, and of writing his name in the
roll of martyrs. The worth of a man must be measured by his