At last Cranmer resolved to make an end. Had he been sitting simply as Archbishop, he reminded Bonner sharply, he might have expected more reverence and obedience from his suffragan. As it was, "at every time that we have sitten in commission you have used such unseemly fashions, without all reverence or obedience, giving taunts and checks as well unto us, with divers of the servants and chaplains, as also unto certain of the ancientest that be here, calling them fools and daws, with such like, that you have given to the multitude an intolerable example of disobedience." "You show yourself to be a meet judge!" was Bonner's scornful reply. It was clear he had no purpose to yield. The real matter at issue, he contended, was the doctrine of the Sacrament, and from the very courtroom he sent his orders to the Lord Mayor to see that no heretical opinions were preached before him. At the close of the trial he once more addressed Cranmer in solemn protest against his breach of the law. "I am sorry" he said "that I being a bishop am thus handled at your Grace's hand, but more sorry that you suffer abominable heretics to practise as they do in London and elsewhere--answer it as you can!" Then bandying taunts with the throng, the indomitable bishop followed the officers to the Marshalsea.
From the degradation of scenes like these Lambeth was raised to new dignity and self-respect by the primacy of Parker. His consecration in the same chapel which had witnessed Wyclif's confession was the triumph of Wyclif's principles, the close of that storm of the Reformation, of that Catholic reaction, which ceased alike with the accession of Elizabeth. But it was far more than this. It was in itself a symbol of the Church of England as it stands to-day, of that quiet illogical compromise between past and present which Parker and the Queen were to mould into so lasting a shape. Every circumstance of the service marked the strange contrasts which were to be blended in the future of the English Church. The zeal of Edward the Sixth's day had dashed the stained glass from the casements of Lambeth; the zeal of Elizabeth's day was soon to move, if it had not already moved, the holy table into the midst of the chapel. But a reaction from the mere iconoclasm and bareness of Calvinistic Protestantism showed itself in the tapestries hung for the day along the eastern wall and in the rich carpet which was spread over the floor. The old legal forms, the old Ordination Service reappeared, but in their midst came the new spirit of the Reformation, the oath of submission to the royal supremacy, the solemn gift no longer of the pastoral staff but of the Bible. The very dress of the four consecrating bishops showed the same confusion. Barlow, with the Archbishop's chaplains who assisted him in the office of the Communion, wore the silken copes of the older service; Scory and Hodgskins the fair linen surplice of the new. Yet more noteworthy was the aged figure of Coverdale, "Father Coverdale," as men used affectionately to call him, the well-known translator of the Bible, whose life had been so hardly wrung by royal intercession from Mary. Rejecting the very surplice as Popery, in his long Genevan cloak he marks the opening of the Puritan controversy over vestments which was to rage so fiercely from Parker on to Laud.