To the astonishment of friends and foes alike, Cranmer stood up before the congregation, and chanted the palinode of his forsworn opinions; he recanted his recantation. Face to face with that cruel [Illustration: The President's Lodge Trinity College] death, which in his weakness he had so desperately striven to avoid, he made the declaration of his true belief. "And now I come," he concluded, "to the great thing which so much troubleth my conscience, more than anything that ever I did or said in my whole life, and that is the setting abroad of a writing contrary to the truth; which now here I renounce and refuse as things written with my hand, contrary to the truth which I thought in my heart, and written for fear of death, and to save my life if it might be;... And forasmuch as my hand offended, writing contrary to my heart, my hand shall first be punished therefore; for, may I come to the fire, it shall be first burned. As for the Pope I utterly refuse him, as Christ's enemy and Anti-Christ, with all his false doctrine; and as for the Sacrament, I believe as I have taught in my book against the Bishop of Winchester." So far he was allowed to proceed before, amidst the infuriated cries of his enemies, he was pulled down from the stage and borne away to the stake. "Priests who did rue to see him go so wickedly to his death, ran after him exhorting him, while time was, to remember himself." But Cranmer had remembered himself at last. He had done with recantations at the bidding of Spanish priests and "bloody" Bonnor. He approached the stake with a cheerful countenance, we are told, undressed in haste and stood upright in his shirt. The Spanish friars finding they could do nothing with him, exclaimed the one to the other, "Let us go from him, for the devil is in him." "Make short," cried Lord Williams, and "Recant, recant," cried others. The wood was kindled. "This was the hand that wrote it," Cranmer said, extending his right arm, "therefore it shall suffer first punishment." He held his hand so steadfast and immovable in the flame that all men might see it burned before his body was touched. And so holding it he never stirred nor cried till the fire reached him and he was dead. A portrait of Cranmer hangs in the Bodleian. But the chief monument to the Protestant martyrs was raised in 1841. The Martyrs' Memorial in S. Giles', opposite the west front of Balliol College, was happily designed by Sir Gilbert Scott in imitation of the beautiful crosses which Edward I. raised in memory of Queen Eleanor. The statues of the martyrs are by Weekes. The north aisle of the neighbouring Church of S. Mary Magdalene was restored at the same time in memory of the same event.