'It pleased the King's Highness,' Cranmer replied, 'many and sundry times to talk with me of the matter. I declared, that, if I accepted the office of archbishop, I must receive it at the Pope's hands, which I neither would nor could do, for his Highness was the only supreme governor of this Church in England. Perceiving that I could not be brought to acknowledge the authority of the Bishop of Rome, the King called Doctor Oliver, and other civil lawyers, and devised with them how he might bestow it on me, enforcing me nothing against my conscience, who informed him I might do it by way of protestation. I said, I did not acknowledge the Bishop of Rome's authority further than as it agreed with the word of God, and that it might be lawful for me at all times to speak against him; and my protestation did I cause to be enrolled, and there I think it remaineth.'
'Let your protestation, with the rest of your talk, give judgment against you,' answered Martin. 'Hinc prima mali labes: of that your execrable perjury, and
decessors, from the time of Edward I., must have been inducted with a tacit understanding of the same kind. If a bishop had been prosecuted under the Statutes of Provisors, his oath to the Papacy would have been no more admitted as an excuse by the Plantagenet sovereigns, than the oath of a college Fellow to obey the statutes of the founder would have saved him from penalties under the House of Hanover had he said mass in his college chapel. Because Cranmer, foreseeing an immediate collision between two powers, which each asserted claims upon him, expressed in words a qualification which was implied in the nature of the case—it was, and is (I regret to be obliged to speak in the present tense), but a shallow sarcasm to taunt him with premeditated perjury.
