March 21, 1556

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March 21st, 1556, Saturday morning.

Rain fell on the cobblestones and on the timber frames of the old university town and inside

the university church of St. Mary the Virgin, a crowd packed the nave, shoulder to shoulder.

The mayor and his aldermen were there, Lord Williams and his gentleman of the shire.

The man was sixty-six years old, gaunt from two years in Bacardo, prison, dressed in a tattered

black gown and a scholar's hood that hung from both shoulders.

His name was Thomas Cranmer and until recently he had been the Archbishop of Canterbury,

the highest churchman in England.

He had held that office in Bacardo, prison, dressed in a tattered black gown and a scholar's

hood that hung from both shoulders.

His name was Thomas Cranmer and until recently he had been the Archbishop of Canterbury, the

church for twenty-three years.

He had crowned kings and annulled marriages and written the book of common prayer, the

liturgy that gave the English their first church services in their own language.

He had shaped the theology of a nation.

Now he was about to burn alive.

The story of how Thomas Cranmer arrived at that platform begins as so many tutor stories

do with a king who wanted a divorce.

In 1529 Henry VIII was desperate to rid himself of his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, who

had failed to produce a male heir.

The Pope would not grant an annulment.

Cranmer, then an obscure Cambridge theologian, offered a solution that pleased the king enormously.

Why not let English authorities decide the matter without bothering Rome at all?

Henry liked this reasoning.

He liked Cranmer.

Within four years the theologian was Archbishop of Canterbury and one of his first official

acts was to declare the king's marriage to Catherine null and void.

He then married Henry to the already pregnant Ann Bolin.

It was a bold stroke, and it had consequences that rippled across decades.

By severing England from papal authority, Cranmer helped set in motion the English Reformation.

Under Henry he moved cautiously.

Under Henry's son the boy king Edward VI he moved fast, drafting the Protestant articles

of faith, rewriting the liturgy, reshaping English worship from the ground up.

The book of common prayer, first published in 1549, was Cranmer's masterwork, and its

language would echo through centuries of Anglican worship.

Then Edward died.

He was fifteen years old, and he left behind a succession crisis.

Catherine of Aragon's daughter Mary seized the throne.

She was a devout Catholic who had spent her entire life watching Protestants dismantle

her mother's marriage, her own legitimacy, and the faith she held sacred.

She had particular reasons to despise Cranmer.

He had annulled her parents' marriage.

He had declared her a bastard.

He had stood as Godfather to Ann Bolin's daughter Elizabeth.

Mary wanted the old religion restored, and she wanted the architects of the Reformation

to answer for what they had done.

Cranmer was arrested in September 1553 and convicted of treason that November.

In March 1554, he was transferred to Baccardo Prison in Oxford alongside two fellow Protestant

bishops Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley.

Baccardo was a medieval gatehouse prison, cold and damp, and Cranmer spent eighteen months

inside it.

On the 16th of October, 1555, his captors marched him to a spot on Broad Street, just outside

Baleal College, and forced him to watch as Latimer and Ridley were chained to a single

stake and set a light.

The two bishops died badly.

Ridley's fire burned low and uneven, and he screamed for a long time.

Latimer, older and frailer, went quicker.

Word was that Latimer told Ridley, as the flames caught to be of good comfort, for they

would that day light such a candle in England as would never be put out.

Limer watched all of it, and then they walked him back to his cell, what followed was a

slow campaign to break him.

In December, authorities moved Cranmer from Baccardo into the house of the Dean of Christ

Church, where he was treated as a guest, fed well, and engaged in scholarly debate by a Dominican

friar named Juan de Villa Garcia.

The friar was persuasive.

Cranmer was tired.

In January and mid-February of 1556, the old archbishop signed four recantations, each one

submitting more fully to papal authority and Catholic doctrine.

A fifth followed.

On February 26th, the most complete of all.

In it, Cranmer repudiated every Protestant belief he had ever held.

He accepted transubstantiation.

He acknowledged the Pope as the true head of the church.

He begged forgiveness.

Her canon law, a man who recanted his heresy, was to be absolved.

Cranmer had recanted five times.

By every precedent he should have been spared.

Mary said his execution date anyway, the 21st of March.

She wanted him dead, and no amount of groveling was going to change that.

The Queen's government, however, could not resist one final humiliation.

They ordered Cranmer to make his recantation public, to stand before the people of Oxford

and renounce the reformation from his own lips.

The propaganda value was irresistible.

England's most prominent Protestant, the architect of the break with Rome, confessing

his errors before God and the realm.

Cranmer wrote out the speech in advance and submitted it to the authorities.

They approved it.

Everything was arranged.

That rainy Saturday morning, Dr. Henry Cole, the Archdeacon of Ealy, preached first,

reminding the crowd of Cranmer's many sins.

Then it was the condemned man's turn.

He climbed to the platform.

He knelt.

He prayed.

The eyewitness, known only as J.A., reported that Cranmer wept so tenderly that many in the

crowd wept with him, believing they were about to hear a broken man confirm his return

to the true faith.

Cranmer stood.

He opened with the expected prayers.

He exhorted the people to obey the King and Queen.

He moved through the approved text, and then he stopped following the script.

The crowd shifted.

The officials stiffened.

Cranmer's voice rose.

He renounced every recantation he had signed.

He declared that those documents were contrary to the truth he held in his heart, written

for fear of death and to save his life.

He called the Pope the enemy of Christ and the Antichrist with all his false doctrine,

and he made a vow, since his right hand had offended by signing those false recantations,

his right hand would be punished first in the fire.

The church erupted.

Officials rushed the platform.

They dragged Cranmer from the pulpit and hauled him through the rain to Broad Street,

to the same spot where Latimer and Ridley had burned five months earlier.

They chained him to the stake.

Cranmer stripped off his gown with haste and stood upright in his shirt.

He shook hands with certain friends who had gathered near.

A young bachelor of divinity refused to take his hand and told the others they should be

ashamed to touch him and urged him one last time to agree to his former recantation.

Cranmer held up his right hand.

This is the hand that wrote it, he said, and therefore shall it suffer first punishment.

The fire was lit.

Cranmer stretched out his right hand and thrust it into the rising flames.

He held it there, steady and unshrinking, as the skin blackened and the flesh burned

to a cinder.

He did not pull away.

Witnesses heard him cry out, over and over, this unworthy right hand, and then, as the

fire climbed higher, Lord Jesus received my spirit.

He died without stirring.

He died without crying out again.

Queen Mary had wanted Cranmer's public recantation to be the death blow to English Protestantism.

Instead, his reversal at St. Mary's, that stunning, furious act of defiance from a broken

man who found, at the last possible moment, that he was not broken after all, became the

single most powerful piece of Protestant propaganda in Tutor England.

John Fox immortalized the scene in his book of martyrs and the story of the unworthy right

hand passed into legend.

Mary burned nearly 300 Protestants during her reign.

She earned the name Bloody Mary.

She died two years after Cranmer in November 1558, and her half-sister Elizabeth took

the throne and restored the Protestant faith for good.

The book of common prayer returned.

Cranmer's words filled English churches again.

Today, a cobblestone cross in Broad Street marks the spot where the fire burned.

A stone memorial stands nearby at the south end of St. Giles, inscribed to the glory of

God and in grateful commemoration of Thomas Cranmer, Nicholas Ridley, and Hugh Latimer,

who near that spot yielded their bodies to be burned.

The rain that fell on Oxford that Saturday morning in 1556 has long since dried.

The words Cranmer wrote have not.

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