Bad Taste.

So was it bad taste for me to write the other day with insouciance about the burning of Archbishop Cranmer? Very probably. I have never had much good taste. But I recall Dix's imagination of Cranmer's last musings ... 

" ... for this [the Royal Supremacy] he had shed blood, or consented to its shedding, in case after case where, rightly or wrongly, he believed the victims innocent  ... Zwinglian and papist, he had burned them both at different times, along with miscellaneous Arians and Eutychians and Anabaptists, for their creeds -- reluctantly (for he was by nature gentle) but persistently enough -- right down to Van Morey, not long before King Edward died. And now he was coming to join them himself. One wonders if the thought of them all passed through the old man's mind as he hurried of his own accord out of S Mary's along the Turl to where the stake stood in the Broad outside Balliol -- Lambert the Zwinglian and Friar Forrest -- and the gentle Fisher, and More the witty chancellor, and old abbot Whiting -- but they were in King Henry's time, and for a matter of treason, like the Carthusians -- whether the Boleyn girl were a lawful queen or a whore -- Both! -- That would have ruined him if he had not condemned her, though he had almost thought her innocent -- and Seymour the Admiral, and his brother and murderer Seymour the Protector -- he had abandoned them both in turn, though he had thought them innocent too -- but their cases were desperate, and his own mission could not be compromised in fighting lost battles -- and those hundreds of yokels strung up in 1549 -- and little Jane Grey and that ruffianly Northumberland -- the cur professed himself a papist on the the scaffold, that had been the ravingest protestant in England!-- A safer religion for a bad man to die in? -- ..."