The Australian Church Record, number 1889, April 2006, has been released.
Four hundred and fifty years ago this year, Thomas Cranmer, the 67-year-old Archbishop of Canterbury, was taken through the north gate of the city of Oxford, tied to a pile of wood and burnt to death. It was one of those moments of horror for which that violent period is well known.
For the two hours prior to this, he had been forced to endure a mock trial in the church of St Mary the Virgin. The sentence had already been determined, after all the wood had been gathered and the time of execution had been announced throughout the city. The crowds were already building in anticipation.The trial itself was merely meant to be a piece of theatre. It would be used to show the congregation that even the old Archbishop recognised that his ideas had been heretical and in his last moments he was willing to renounce them all.
Yet the stage-managed trial had not quite gone as planned. It was true that in a moment of weakness Cranmer had signed a document recanting everything he had taught and written and had agreed to read the speech that had been given to him. But at the critical moment, when he was to tell the world that he and his friends had departed from the truth, the old Archbishop changed the words:
And now I come to the great thing that troubleth my conscience more than any other thing that ever I said or did in my life, and that is the setting abroad of writings contrary to the truth: which here now I renounce and refuse as things written with my hand contrary to the truth which I thought in my heart, and written for fear of death and to save my life if it might be; and that is, all such bills which I have written or signed with mine own hand since my degradation: wherein I have written many things untrue. And forasmuch as my hand offended in writing contrary to my heart, therefore my hand shall first be punished; for if I may come to the fire, it shall be first burned. And as for the Pope, I refuse