be still alive when the good time came, and to have his share in the completion of that on which he had spent so much labour, and for which he had gone through so many perils. Added to all this, he was an old man, and he went through misery enough in the last months of his life to have worn down the resolution of a stronger man than he; and had been worried by the perpetual arguments of Dr. Soto and his fellows—arguments always reinforced by the deluding hope of life and pardon—till his half-starved and weakened frame had, in all probability, reacted, for the time at least, both upon his intellect and his moral power. And so he fell—and no more pitiable fall than his is recorded in the long roll of history. But even that fall, grievous as it was, was not altogether unatoned for. At the last moment he found that his weakness and humiliation had been all in vain. His enemies had strained and twisted even their own pitiless laws in order to prevent his escape, to put him through the lowests depths of humiliation, and finally to bring him to the cruellest of deaths. They were just anticipating the final scene of triumph. They were to wreak their vengeance to the utmost on the man who had done more than any other man to perpetuate the schism from Rome, and to organise the English Protestant Church. They brought him out to die, and expected to hear him, in the face of a whole congregation, openly confess that Rome was the true Church of God, that the Pope was the legitimate Vicar of Christ, that Protestantism was utter heresy, that the system which he had established was utterly rotten, and himself a hypocrite, an apostate, and a too-late repentant heretic. But the scales had at last fallen from Cranmer's eyes—all his illusion had at last departed. He saw all at once
