Lastly, a crosier was put into his hand, and Bonner standing before him, declared the cause of his degradation, Cranmer interrupting him at intervals with protests and retorts. When the ceremony of unvesting began, he refused to yield up the crosier, which was then wrested from him by force, and when the pallium was to be removed, he exclaimed, “Which of you, having a pallium is able to divest me of mine!” They replied, that they held their commission from the Pope. He then drew out of his sleeve a formal protest, appealing from the Pope to a General Council, and handed the document to Thirlby, who took it, saying, “Well, if it may be admitted it shall,” and bursting into tears, he promised to petition the Queen for a pardon. When Cranmer had been stripped of all the vestments, with appropriate words and ceremonies at each of them, he was degraded from his minor orders, after which his hair was closely cut, and Bonner proceeded to scrape his hands, at the places where he had been anointed priest. His gown was then taken off, and that of a yeoman substituted, in which he returned to prison. This was the regular form of degrading a bishop. Thirlby was as good as his word. Cranmer had drawn up two separate forms of submission before his degradation, and in consequence of these, a pardon such as had been granted to other recanters, was contemplated by the Council. But it was finally decided that the enormity of his offences required that he should suffer “for ensample sake”. During the six weeks which intervened before his execution, he made repeated recantations “without fear, and without hope of favour” as he himself said, “for the discharge of his conscience, and as a warning to others,” abjuring his former errors, and “beseeching the people, the Queen and the Pope, to pray for his wretched soul”. He signed in all seven recantations, and it was expected that he would read the last of them at his execution. But instead of doing so, at the supreme moment, he repudiated them all, expressing repentance for having written “contrary to the truth which I thought in my heart, and writ for fear of death”.[573] Being bound to the stake, he is said to have thrust his right hand into the flame exclaiming: “This hand hath offended”.[574] From first to last, he had proved himself so base a dissembler, that no confidence could possibly have been placed in the sincerity of his recantations. That he had lied therein also, he admitted by his final recantation of them all.