Chapter V: Marriage of Henry and Anne Boleyn (4)

These victims went as they were sentenced, dismissed to their martyr's crowns at Smithfield, as Queen Anne Boleyn but a few days before had received her golden crown at the altar of Westminster Abbey. Twenty years later another fire was blazing under the walls of Oxford; and the hand which was now writing these light lines was blackening in the flames of it, paying there the penalty of the same "imagination" for which Frith and the poor London tailor were with such cool indifference condemned. It is affecting to know that Frith's writings were the instruments of Cranmer's conversion; and the fathers of the Anglican church have left a monument of their sorrow for the shedding of this innocent blood in the Order of the Communion service, which closes with the very words on which the primate, with his brother bishops, had sate in judgment.[448]