The appeal was intended perhaps to provoke the Queen to let him die with his friends, in whose example and companionship he felt his strength supported. But it could not be; he was the spectator of their fate, while his own was still held at a distance before him. He witnessed the agonies of Ridley; and the long imprisonment, the perpetual chafing of Soto the Spanish friar, and the dreary sense that he was alone, forsaken of man, and perhaps of God, began to wear into the firmness of a many-sided susceptible nature. Some vague indication that he might yield had been communicated to Pole by Soto before Christmas,[1] and the struggle which had evidently commenced was permitted to protract itself. If the Archbishop of Canterbury, the father of the Reformed Church of England, could be brought to a recantation, that one victory might win back the hearts which the general constancy of the martyrs was drawing off in tens of thousands. Time,
- ↑ Pole to Philip: Epistolæ Reg. Pol., vol. v. p. 47.
Dominus sedem David patris ejus: et regnabit in domo Jacob in æternum.The letter contains another illustration of Pole's habit of mind. 'There was never spiritual man,' he says, 'put to execution according to the order of the laws of the realm but he was first by the canon laws condemned and degraded; whereof there be as many examples afore the time of breaking the old order of the realm these last years, us hath been delinquents. Let the records be seen. And specially this is notable of the Bishop of , which, being imprisoned for high treason, the King would not proceed to his condemnation and punishment afore he had the Pope's bull given him.…'The historical argument proceeded smoothly up to the name, which, however, was not and is not to be found. Pole was probably thinking of Archbishop Scrope, who, however, unfortunately for the argument, was put to death without the Pope's sanction.—Draft of a Letter from Cardinal Pole to Cranmer: Harleian MSS. 417.
