Cranmer has fallen upon evil tongues, both in his life and in his memory. A report was spread that he had declared for the mass; and, indeed, that it had been actually restored, under his sanction, in his own cathedral at Canterbury; a charge which he repelled in terms the most indignant, saying, that it was not he that set it up there, but “a false, flattering, lying, and dissembling monk,” one Dr. Thornden; whilst at the same time he challenged the adversaries of the Reformation to a public discussion of its principles, the soundness of which he undertook to maintain. Yet Neal, who was not ignorant of these facts, ungenerously keeps them back till he has indulged in the repetition of the slander;[421] thus doling out reluctant and compulsive justice to a man whose character Protestants ought surely to protect with jealousy, be their denomination what it may. The challenge, however, though it was not accepted was not overlooked, and Cranmer was cited before the Queen’s commissioners, whether upon the charge of heresy or treason or both, and was ordered to keep his house at Lambeth. In the interval which elapsed before he was finally committed to the Tower, he had probably ample opportunity to escape, and was urged by his friends to profit by it, but a sense of what was due to himself, and to those who looked up to him as the leader of the Reformation in England, constrained him; and whilst he advised the less conspicuous persons of his party to flee for their lives, as not being so deeply pledged, as not in the same degree prejudicing their cause by the abandonment of their country, and as having Scripture for their warrant if they fled, he determined for himself to abide the issue come what might, and if it was so required, to be faithful even unto death. Perhaps, too, for himself, he might reckon upon some grateful recollection in Mary, that her life had been spared by her father at his intercession, and some reluctance on her part to shed the blood of a man who had saved her as a daughter, though he had done her some wrong as a queen. But Mary’s gratitude was too brief, or her bigotry too vehement, to admit of this, and even Sir James Hales, who had contended for her right succession at the critical moment single-handed, was nevertheless committed to the Marshalsea, when, like an honest judge as he was, he acted at the quarter sessions upon the statutes of Henry and Edward touching the supremacy, which were still unrepealed, and refused to bend the laws of the land to the pleasure of the sovereign; and though he was not actually put to death at the instance of the government, yet life was made intolerable to him; so that having unsuccessfully attempted to end it with a knife whilst in prison, on his release he drowned himself in a river near his own house. The conduct of Mary was marked by the same ungrateful oblivion of services rendered to her in times past, in the case of the men of Suffolk.