silenced, as he might well have expected; but he had made up his mind to something which could not be stifled.[514] "At the moment he was taken to the stake he drew from his bosom the identical paper (the recantation), throwing it, in the presence of the multitude, with his own hands into the flames, asking pardon of God and of the people for having consented to such an act, which he excused by saying that he did it for the public benefit, as, had his life, which he sought to save, been spared him, he might at some time have still been of use to them, praying them all to persist in the doctrines believed by him, and absolutely denying the Sacrament and the supremacy of the Church. And, finally, stretching forth his arm and right hand, he said: 'This which hath sinned, having signed the writing, must be the first to suffer punishment'; and thus did he place it in the fire and burned it himself."[515] If the martyrdoms of Ridley and Latimer lighted the torch, Cranmer's spread the conflagration which in the end burnt up the Romanist reaction and made England a Protestant nation. The very weakness of the aged Primate became a background to make the clearer his final heroism. The "common man" sympathised with him all the more. He had never been a very strong man in the usual sense of the words. The qualities which go to form the exquisite liturgist demand an amount of religious sensibility and sympathy which seldom belongs to the leader of a minority with the present against it and the future before it. His peculiar kind of courage, which enabled him to face Henry VIII. in his most truculent moods, was liker a woman's than a man's, and was especially called forth by sympathy with others in suffering. None of Henry's Ministers pleaded harder or more persistently for the Princess Mary, the woman who burnt him, than did Cranmer; and he alone of all his fellows dared to beseech the monarch for Cromwell in his fall.[516]