and he knew, no man better, that Right is not of one party, nor Truth of a single creed. He must have mused, as he took the air in Oxford streets after Mistress Davenant had served his supper, on the three great Protestant Martyrs of whose suffering some of the elder folk with whom he chatted had been eyewitnesses. The commemorative cross that may now be seen in front of Balliol, near the church of St. Mary Magdalen whose tower was a familiar sight to Shakespeare's eyes, displays in richly fretted niches the statues of "Thomas Cranmer, Nicolas Ridley, Hugh Latimer, Prelates of the Church of England, who near this spot yielded their bodies to be burned." Most of all, his thought would have dwelt on Cranmer, that pathetic figure whose life was such a mingled yarn of good and evil. He had won the favour of Henry VIII by approving the divorce of Queen Catherine. He had beheld--and in some cases furthered--the downfalls of Sir Thomas More, of Anne Boleyn, of Wolsey, of Cromwell, of Catherine Howard, of Seymour, and of Somerset. He had stood godfather to Elizabeth and to Edward. He had watched over the death-bed of the tyrant; he had crowned that tyrant's frail young son as Edward VI. When by his adherence to the cause of Lady Jane Grey he had incurred sentence of treason, he was pardoned by Queen Mary. Yet this pardon only amounted to a transfer from the Tower of London to the Bocardo in Oxford, that prison-house over the North Gate from whose stone cells used to come down the hoarse cry of cold and hunger: "Pity the Bocardo birds." There were those still living in Oxford who could have told the dramatist, as he gazed up through the moonlight (for who does not?) to the pinnacled spire of St. Mary-the-Virgin, all the detail of those April days, only ten years before his birth, when Cranmer, with Ridley and Latimer, was brought into the church and bidden, before a hostile assemblage of divines, to justify the heresies of the new prayer-book. On the Tuesday Cranmer pleaded from eight till two; Ridley was heard on the Wednesday, and on the Thursday the aged Latimer, a quaint champion as he stood there "with a kerchief and two or three caps on his head, his spectacles hanging by a string at his breast, and a staff in his hand." On the Friday all three were condemned. After a year and a half of continued confinement, Archbishop Cranmer, whose irresolution was such that, from first to last, he wrote seven recantations, was made to look out from his prison window upon the tormented death of his friends. Then it was that the stanch old Latimer, bowed with the weight of fourscore years, but viewing the fagots undismayed, spake the never-forgotten words: "Be of good comfort, Master Ridley. We shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out." Cranmer's own end came six months later, on March 21, 1556. He was first brought to St. Mary's that he might publicly abjure his heresies. But at that