And now, Archbishop Warham being sick unto death, the King intimates to Cranmer, who was engaged in his service on the Continent, his intention of promoting him to the primacy. There are some men who seek honours, and some who have honours thrust upon them: Cranmer belonged to the latter class; he was not prepared for so great and sudden an elevation. Under pretence that the King’s affairs still required his presence abroad, he tarried six months longer, in the hope that Henry might consign the crosier to some other hand.[230] There was no affectation in this--no _fuga ad salices_. Ambition is made of sterner stuff than the spirit of Cranmer. Even at an age when such a passion, if ever, must have been most active, and when he was as yet without a patron, he, like Parker, declined the offer of a fellowship in cardinal Wolsey’s college at Oxford, preferring the society of his old friends, or fellow-students, to the more splendid prospects which, a connection with the great favourite of the day presented; and even risking his displeasure rather than do violence to his own early associations, and bid adieu to the scenes of his boyhood and his youth. Neither was it of his own good will that he was in the first instance brought under the King’s notice, by the question of the divorce;--on the contrary, he quarrelled with his friends who had thus disturbed his repose, pleaded that it was a matter on which he had bestowed no pains or study, and begged in vain that he might be excused the honour of being closeted with a king.[231] Nor, indeed, were the times such as promised the head which wore the mitre an office of ease. Likely it was to prove but “a glistering grief,”--“a golden sorrow,” to the wearer; and it wanted no great sagacity to foresee (what the King told Cranmer when he afterwards changed his arms) that the pelican was fitter for his crest than the crane: seeing that “he would one day have to shed his blood for his young ones, if he stood to his tackling.”[232] But there was yet another and a stronger reason for Cranmer holding back;--the scruples he entertained touching the oath of fidelity to the Pope, which was exacted of an archbishop at his presentation. As yet the supremacy of the Pope was acknowledged; and though the subject had been mooted two years before, and even the title of supreme head of the church and clergy of England had been ascribed to Henry by the convocation under Archbishop Warham, in 1530, it was reluctantly, and was not immediately followed up. Here, therefore, Cranmer was embarrassed. The oath, however, he took under a previous public[233] protestation, “that he did not admit the Pope’s authority any further than it agreed with the express word of God; and that it might be lawful for him at all times to speak against him, and to impugn his errors when there should be occasion.”[234] The honesty of this proceeding has been often made the subject of debate; and it