The genius of the archbishop as a courtier may be measured by the fate which overtook his contemporaries. He was the fourth of Henry’s great ministers, of whom Cromwell, Norfolk, and Wolsey were the other three. Wolsey was disgraced, plundered, and hounded to death; Cromwell was beheaded, and Norfolk was on his way to the scaffold, when saved by the death of the man who condemned him. The priest alone, as Lutheran, or as worshipper of the miracle which he afterward denied, always kept the sunshine of favour. Burnet has described how readily he violated his oath by participating in the attempt to change the succession under Edward, “He stood firm, and said, that he could not subscribe it without perjury; having sworn to the observance of King Henry’s will.... The king himself required him to set his hand to the will.... It grieved him much; but such was the love that he bore to the king, that in conclusion he yielded, and signed it.”[307] Like the chameleon, he changed his colour to match the force which upheld him. Under Edward, he became radical as easily as he had sung the mass under the “Six Articles,” or as, under Mary, he pleaded to be allowed to return to Rome. Nor did he act thus from cowardice, for when he went to the fire, not a martyr of the Reformation showed more constancy than he. With hardly an exception, Cranmer’s contemporaries suffered because they could not entirely divest themselves of their scruples. Even Gardiner had convictions strong enough to lodge him in the Tower, and Bonner ended his days in the Marshalsea, rather than abjure again under Elizabeth, but no such weakness hampered Cranmer. At Oxford, before his execution, he recanted, in various forms, very many times, and would doubtless have gone on recanting could he have saved himself by so doing. Unlike Gardiner, his convictions were evangelical, and he probably imbibed reformed principles quite early, for he married Ossiander’s niece when in Germany, before he became archbishop. Characteristically enough, he voted for the “Six Articles” in deference to Henry,[308] although the third section of the act provided death and forfeiture of goods for any priest who might marry. Afterward, he had to conceal his wife and carry “her from place to place hidden from sight in a chest.”[309] Cranmer alleged at his trial that he had stayed orthodox regarding the sacrament until Ridley had converted him, after Henry’s death. But, leaving out of consideration the improbability of a man of Cranmer’s remarkable acuteness being influenced by Ridley, the judgment of such a man as Foxe should have weight. Certainly, Foxe thought him a “gospeller” at the time of Lambert’s trial, and nothing can give so vivid an idea of the lengths to which men of the Anglican type were ready to go, as the account given by Foxe of the martyrdom of this sectary:-- “Lambert: ‘I answer, with Saint Augustine, that it is the body of Christ, after a certain manner.’