people, but he continued invincible. Finding that he adhered most rigidly and courageously to his principles, they condemned him to be degraded from his episcopal and ecclesiastical functions, and then delivered over to the secular power to be dealt with as a traitorous and disobedient subject of the realm. Under this sentence he was removed from the Fleet to Newgate, where he was placed more directly under the influence of Bonner and his chaplains. Every means was essayed which hope or fear could supply, or which threats and promises could enforce. Riches and honours were at his command if he would recant, but tortures and ignominy and death must be his lot if he persisted in his heresy. But still finding that every effort was powerless, and that his conscience was neither to be bribed nor scared, they resolved at least to avail themselves and their cause of the influence of his name and popularity. They pretended that he had recanted, and in order to destroy the cause of protestantism and counteract the influence of his name and example, gave the utmost publicity to this foul and infamous slander. But it was soon announced to Hooper, that such a report was industriously circulated, and he accordingly took the bold step of writing to his friends, to assure them and the public, that he was unaltered in his principles, and indeed more than ever attached to the protestant faith. The popish bishops, Gardiner and Bonner, were so stung by this spirited exposure of their falsehood and artifice, that they instantly determined upon visiting him with the ultimate degree of their cruelty and wrath. They found that Hooper was never to be won again to the abjured doctrines of Rome, and that so long as he survived, there would exist a formidable impediment to their schemes both of secular and ecclesiastical ambition. Bonner therefore, whose promptitude in all acts of cruelty and oppression has entitled him to an execrable pre-eminence among persecutors, hearing of the denial that Hooper had sent abroad, of any such recantation as the bishops had published, went immediately to Newgate, and there went through the solemn farce of degrading and depriving him of his orders as a priest, for already he had been discarded as a bishop. The very next day he was ordered to be sent under care of a troop of horse to Gloucester. Here he was to be brought to the stake under circumstances which, as they imagined, would most deeply afflict him, and afford the bitterest anguish to his numerous and attached flock in the city and its neighbourhood. On his arrival at Gloucester, the whole city assembled to show him respect and weep over his fate. Sir Anthony Kingston implored him to save himself, and consider the possible usefulness of future life-saying, "Life is sweet and death is bitter; therefore, seeing life may be had, desire to live, for life hereafter may do good." But the good bishop replied, "Indeed I am come here to end this life, and to suffer death, because I will not gainsay the former truth that I have taught in this diocese and elsewhere. I do not so much regard this death, nor esteem this life; but have settled myself, through the strength of God's holy Spirit, patiently to pass through the torments and extremities of the fire now prepared for me, rather than deny the truth of his word."

The next day, being the market day, he was brought to the stake, amidst a vast concourse of people. The execution of the horrid sentence was attended with the utmost barbarity, the wood being quite

green and long before it would burn. While he was engaged in prayer a stool was placed before him, on which a box was set, with the queen's pardon within it--if he would recant. When he beheld it he cried out "If you love my soul, away with it! If you love my soul, away with it!" After the fire was lighted he was kept in the utmost tortures for three quarters of an hour, his lower extremities being burnt away slowly before there was fire enough to affect the vitals. At length he expired, crying out, "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit!" His martyrdom took place on the 9th of February, 1555, in the sixtieth year of his age. He was the author of numerous controversial tracts, sermons, homilies, law lectures, confessions, letters, &c. Several of his smaller pieces are preserved in Fox's Acts, &c.'

Archbishop Cranmer.

BORN A. D. 1489.-died a. d. 1556.

THOMAS CRANMER, the first protestant archbishop of Canterbury, and one of the fathers of the English Reformation, was born of an ancient and respectable family of Nottinghamshire, at Aslacton in that county, on the 2d of July, 1489. He received the rudiments of education at the grammar school of his native village, under a rude and harsh master, "of whom he learned little and endured much." At the age of fourteen he was entered of Jesus college, Cambridge, where he continued sixteen years. The first half of this period he mispent upon the scholastic logic of Duns and other celebrated questionists; the next four years he turned to more profitable account in the study of Faber, Erasmus, and other good Latin authors; and latterly he gave his undivided attention to the study of the scriptures. It does not appear, however, that he was originally intended for the church, for he is said to have excelled in the more profane accomplishments of a gentleman of that age, such as hunting and hawking, and he married before he took orders. His wife died in child-birth within a year after her marriage, a circumstance which enabled him to resume the fellowship which he had forfeited by entering into wedlock. From this period he appears to have directed his views towards the church. In 1523, he took the degree of doctor in divinity, and soon after became reader of the divinity lectures in his own college, and one of the examiners of candidates for holy orders. In the latter capacity he made an accurate knowledge of the scriptures indispensable to all candidates. The enforcement of this measure was not without difficulty. School divinity had hitherto been the sole study of those intended for the clerical profession, and the monastic orders in particular were zealously opposed to any innovations upon the established practice in this respect; but the firmness and affability of the new examiner prevailed, and he soon won the universal esteem of all whom his new office brought him in contact with.

In 1529, the sweating sickness' having broken out in Cambridge, Cranmer retired to the abode of a friend at Waltham abbey in Essex.

■ Middleton.-Neal.- Burnett's Reformation.-Wood's Athen. Oxon.

It happened that Henry VIII. at this time spent a night at Waltham, and the royal suite being billetted in the different houses in the neighbourhood, his secretary Gardiner, and his almoner Fox, were allotted to the house in which Cranmer was then a resident. The conversation at supper soon turned upon the all-absorbing object of public interest, the king's divorce, and Cranmer being pressed for his opinion, expressed himself in favour of committing it as a question of conscience and religion, in which the truth is one, to the discussion and decision of competent divines. This opinion was soon after reported to the king, who was so much pleased with it that he exclaimed, "The man has got the sow by the right ear!" and immediately sent for him to court. In his conference with the king, he gave so much satisfaction that he was immediately appointed one of the royal chaplains, and placed in the family of the earl of Wiltshire, the father of Anne Boleyn. The king also commanded him to write a treatise upon the subject of the divorce. From this moment Cranmer was considered as a rising churchman,' and some discerning spirits already perceived in him the probable successor of Wolsey, now in the first stage of his fall.

Having finished his treatise on the divorce, in which he mainly argued against the pope's power of granting a dispensation for the marriage of Henry with his brother's widow, Cranmer received the royal commands to take the opinion of the learned upon the question agreeably to the plan which he had himself suggested. He began with his own university, where he at first met with but indifferent success, although he succeeded in changing the minds of a few leading men, and both universities afterwards determined against the dispensing power of the pope. He met with better success, however, in his consultations with the divines of France, Italy, and Germany, a majority of whom decided in favour of the king's wishes. He was then deputed with the earl of Wiltshire, to the papal court, to submit to his holiness the opinions of the learned, and to obtain the papal sanction for the intended divorce. On his arrival in Rome, he presented his treatise to the pope, and offered to defend in public its two principal points, namely, that no man, jure divino, could or ought to marry his brother's wife, and that the bishop of Rome had no power to dispense to the contrary. The pontiff declined to sanction a public disputation on either of these points, but promised to take the whole matter into consideration, and willing to please Henry, appointed Cranmer pope's pœnitentiary through out England, Wales, and Ireland. From Rome, Cranmer proceeded to Germany, where he spent nearly two years in endeavouring to convince the Lutheran divines of the nullity of the king's marriage. He succeeded in gaining over the famous Osiander to his sentiments with several members also of the emperor's court and council. Cranmer's intercourse at this time with the German protestant divines, particularly Osiander and Bucer, tended to confirm those views of religion which we have seen he had begun to cherish while at Cambridge, and, though yet holding the status of a catholic clergyman, he was privately married to a niece of his friend Osiander.

He was yet in Germany when he received notice of his appointment to the metropolitan see of England, then vacant by the death of archbishop Warham. He at first seriously hesitated to accept of this high promotion. The marriage had placed him in an awkward dilemma, for