On March 21, 1556, in the third year of the reign of Queen Mary, Thomas Cranmer, late archbishop of Canterbury and Primate of All England, then sixty-seven years old, prepared to preach his last sermon. He had spent the early morning reciting the litany, tending to personal business, and signing some fourteen additional copies of his sixth recantation of his evangelical faith. Then, flanked by two Spanish Dominican friars, one of them the recently appointed Regius Professor of Divinity, he made his way to the University Church at Oxford. It was rainy; otherwise, much of the ceremony would have taken place outdoors, in front of Balliol College, where the day’s events were to conclude.

Inside the sanctuary, the assembled dignitaries first heard a sermon by Dr. Henry Cole, provost of Eton, explaining why it was entirely proper under canon law that a repentant sinner should be burned at the stake. Cranmer spoke next. He began conventionally: he requested prayers for his sins; he discussed three forms of love; he pled with the rich to avoid covetousness; he wept as he described how the poor were starving as food prices soared. Only then did he come to the heart of the matter, “the great thing which so much troubleth my conscience.”

And, departing from his prepared text, Cranmer explained, this “great thing” was “my sending abroad of writings contrary to truth which here now I renounce and refuse as things written with my hand contrary to the truth