Cranmer renouncing his recantation

Cranmer renouncing his recantation" from the 1631 ed. of Foxe's Acts and Monuments;
 woodcut - Bodleian Library, Oxford

Good people, give not your minds to this glozing world,

Nor murmur against the glory of the Queen;

Love each other, altogether love each other;

Each to each be full of straight goodwill,

Wherethrough let the rich give naturally to the poor

Always, and especially in this present time

When the poor are so many and food so dear.

What else? Yet for myself I will something say:

I am quite come to believe in Omnipotent God

And in every article of the Catholic Faith.

But since the Queen will have me cut for obedience,

Outcast from her, I must have an outcast's mind,

A mind that is my own and not the Queen's,

Poorly my own, not richly her society's.

Therefore I draw to the thing that troubles me

More than all else I ever did - the writings

I let abroad against my heart's belief

To keep my life... if that might be... that I signed

With this hand, after I was degraded: this hand,

Which wrote the contrary of God's will in me,

Since it offended most, shall suffer first;

It shall burn ere I burn, now I go to the fire,

And the writings, all writings wherein I denied God’s will,

Or made God's will be the method of my life,

I altogether reject them.

Charles Williams - 'Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury'

(First produced in the Chapter House, Canterbury,

as part of the Festival of the Friends of Canterbury Cathedral,

20 June 1936)