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CHURCH AND STATE UNDER THE TUDORS

to stop the speaker, and he was able to add the final and important sentence: 'As for the Pope, I utterly refuse him, as Christ's enemy and Antichrist, with all his false doctrine; and as for the Sacrament, I believe as I have taught in my book against the Bishop of Winchester.' Then, indeed, there arose shouts of 'Pull him down!' 'Away with him!' 'Stop his mouth!' and so on. Further speech was not permitted. He was haled off to the stake, pursued to the last moment with the arguments and reproaches of the disappointed friars, and there took his death, without shrinking and without bravado, stood and held his right hand in the flame, and 'never stirred nor cried' till life was gone. Surely a death like this was some sort of atonement for the weakness and the fall which went before it. Whether it were so or not, at least it was a heavy blow to the Catholic party. They had striven hard to win a double triumph, and had violated justice, and been crueller than their own cruel laws to make their triumph and their vengeance complete. They had spared no effort to secure his recantation, had lured him to it by hopes of life, and, when they had succeeded, they would take his life as well. Then, at the last moment, he had turned upon them, flung back his recantation in their teeth, and, like Samson, to whom Mr. Froude has well compared him, 'the dead that he slew at his death were more than they that he slew in his life.' It is with no less truth than eloquence that Mr. Green has told us that 'it was with the unerring instinct of a popular movement that, among a crowd of far more heroic sufferers, the Protestants fixed, in spite of his recantations, upon the martyrdom of Cranmer as the deathblow to Catholicism in England. For one man who felt within him the joy of Rowland Taylor at the prospect