Cranmer’s last recantation had been issued on…
March 1556 CE
Cranmer’s last recantation had been issued on March 18.
It was a sign of a broken man, a sweeping confession of sin.
He had three more days to live.
The English government’s Catholic propagandists require Cranmer to make his recantation public before being burned to death, a fate insisted upon by Queen Mary and Cardinal Reginald Pole.
He has been told that he will be able to make a final recantation but this time in public during a service at the University Church.
He had written and submitted the speech in advance and it will be published after his death.
At the pulpit on the day of his execution, he opens with a prayer and an exhortation to obey the king and queen, but he ends his sermon totally unexpectedly, deviating from the prepared script.
Foiling the propagandists, he renounces the recantations that he had written or signed with his own hand since his degradation and as such he states his hand would be punished by being burnt first.
He then says, "And as for the pope, I refuse him, as Christ's enemy, and Antichrist with all his false doctrine."
He is pulled from the pulpit and taken to where Latimer and Ridley had been burnt six months before.
As the flames draw around him, he fulfills his promise by placing his right hand into the heart of the fire while saying "that unworthy hand"; his dying words are, "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit...I see the heavens open and Jesus standing at the right hand of God."
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Thomas Cranmer's execution by burning in 1556, from John Foxe's Book of Martyrs (1563)
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