to Rome in the detail of the judicial process against him. What may we think, then, of the calumny, which we have traced to Pole, (after whom it is insinuated by Sanders; then affirmed by the Romish historian, assuming the name of Dod; next by Phillips, the biographer of Pole, and since cordially adopted by Mr. Butler and Dr. Lingard,) as to the secret protest? What, but that it was intended unjustly to stain the very entrance of Cranmer upon his office, and so to strengthen any other reports which malice might dictate, and ingenuity would colour, against the man "that so bravely shook off the pope and his appendages.”

"6. However," Dr. Lingard proceeds, "with regard to the morality of the fact, it matters little whether it were done in private, or in public. In either case, it was a secret to him, to whom the oath was taken, and by whom it was imposed. He had empowered no one to receive it with any limitation. He had issued the bulls for the archbishop elect on the express condition that he should take the oath in the usual manner, previously to the episcopal consecration. Undoubtedly, as far as regarded the pontiff, the protest was a fraud,"

Let us see whether there was fraud or not.

x

Clement knew that the person, for whom his bulls were demanded, was an open enemy to his power, and had every where disputed against it. He could not, therefore, be sincere in this promotion. But he had no wish, by impeding it, to force the king into an absolute quarrel. He had felt the blow, too, at the papal dominion in the decision of parliament, that prelates might be consecrated in England without the sanction of the pope, if that sanction were delayed; though, in the present case of Cranmer, Dr. Lingard insinuates the nullity of

being consecrated without the papal approbation." The bulls for this promotion were accordingly not delayed; and to Cranmer's resistance in regard to the oath in the pontifical, as it would be prescribed, was opposed, at the king's command, the advice of certain eminent civilians; "who said, he might do it by way of protestation, and so one be sent to Rome to take the oath and do every thing in his name." Fearing, however, that this proxy might have taken the oath without limitation, the archbishop declares, in his personal protest, that whatever may be the oath, which my proctor has already taken to the pope in my name, it

66 a

was not my intention or will to give him any power, by virtue of which he might take any

b

oath in my name contrary to, or inconsistent with,

Cranmer, in the same spirit, rebuked his papal judge, the bishop of Gloucester: "You, my lord, are perjured: for now you sit judge for the pope, and yet you did receive your bishopric of the king. You have taken an oath to be adversary to the realm; for the pope's laws are contrary to the laws of the realm." To the pitiful reply of the bishop, that Cranmer caused "him to forsake the pope, and to swear that the king, and not he, ought to be his supreme head;" the answer of the archbishop is, "You report me ill, and say not the truth. The truth is, that my predecessor, bishop Warham, gave the supremacy to the king, and said that he ought to have it before the bishop of Rome; and that God's word would bear him, &c." Fox, Acts and Mon. Warham, therefore, did not consider this acknowledgment as any violation of the papal oath. He considered, no doubt, that the king had a right 'unquestionably from Scripture to the obedience of his subjects, as Dr. Ridley argues in the case of Cranmer; and therefore that the pope's assumed authority over the same subject, requiring an obedience inconsistent with his allegiance to an acknowledged superior, was void by the implied conditions of the oath itself. The authority of the pope was now daily sinking in estimation. The king, it may be thought, might have wholly dispensed with the present expiring form; but as Gilpin observes, to get rid of forms is often the last work of reformation. We conclude, accordingly, with Ridley, that Clement having ceased to be superior to the king in England at the very time of Cranmer's taking it, the oath was a ceremony pro formá, and as such the archbishop looked upon it; that therefore a Papist has no right to censure him, even if he had taken the oath (as Warham did) without a protest; but he thought it more honest, before he took the oath imposed,

the oath by me already taken, or hereafter to be taken, to our illustrious king of England: and in case he has taken any such contrary or inconsistent oath in my name, I protest, that the same, being taken, without my knowledge, and without my authority, shall be null and void." We cannot, therefore, think the determination of the protest to have been "a secret to the pontiff." Well acquainted with the persevering opposition of Cranmer, and afraid of provoking the king, Clement would be prepared for the renunciation in question. Evidently he acquiesced in it; and no thunder from the Vatican followed. Dr. Lingard, indeed, contends that the purport of Cranmer's protest was carefully concealed from the public, because, otherwise, the news would quickly have reached Rome, and the archbishop would have been suspended from the exercise of his office. Nothing could have been more public than this protest. How could it be concealed, therefore, from the pontiff? Doubtless, an account of the whole ceremony was carefully transmitted to him: for, I argue from Dr. Lingard's own words, if the protest was public, then the news or relation of it would quickly have reached Rome: but

с

to declare in what sense he took it, and what his exceptions were, without any mental reservation. Nor does it appear that those, before whom he took it, were dissatisfied

* See before, p. 21.

the protest was public; therefore the news of it did quickly reach Rome, I will adopt a syllogism, too, from Cardinal Pole's assertion, who reminds Cranmer of the oath taken at his consecration; than which, than which, he says, nothing could be "more solemn, being made in the hand of a bishop, with the testimony and assistance of other bishops, openly in the church, in the presence of as much people as the church could hold, at such time as you, arrayed with the sacred vesture of a bishop, came afore the altar to be consecrated archbishop." Now, if the protestation accompanied this oath at the precise moment mentioned, then the multitude present witnessed both: but the oath and the protestation, we have seen, were inseparable; therefore both were witnessed by all the people in the church. And yet Pole is so misled, or so malicious, as to charge the archbishop with a privy protest. Public as it certainly was, I may now therefore ask, where is the menaced suspension from office? In the imagination only of Dr. Lingard. Clement and his conclave adopted no measure to punish what to some of them would be no news. They made no com

Pole's Lett. to the Archbishop. Strype's Life of Cranm. Rec. No. 89.

• See before, p. 12.