John Foxe: "Acts and Monuments" (1556), Vol. 8, p. 42ff.

1556. (We are not convinced on the date of 12 March 1556, 9 days before the burning, but will check.) Dr. Brooks, Bishop of Gloucester, Papal legate, issues the opening oration to Dr. Cranmer in St. Mary's Church at Oxford. Foxe, the leather shoe journalist, describes the scene: a 10-foot-high scaffold in the east end of St. Mary’s with Dr. Brooks, again the Pope’s man, and two of the King and Queen’s Proctors, Dr. Story and Martin, present and elevated. Dr. Cranmer’s garb is described. He doffs his hat to the Royal proctors and genuflects to them, but not to Dr. Brook, the Pope’s man. It must be noted that this had Papal sanction. Anything to get England back. Dr. Brooks starts his verbose oration by disclaiming “we’re not here to judge you” and then proceeding to judge him without due process. A small taste of Dr. Brooks’s weird combination of prejudice, injustice, and malice in charmless words, to wit: “But after ye began to fall by schism, and would not acknowledge the pope's holiness as supreme head, but would stoutly uphold the unlawful requests of king Henry the eighth, and would bear with what should not be borne withal, then began you to fancy unlawful liberty; and when you had exiled a good conscience, then ensued great shipwreck in the sea, which was out of the true and catholic church cast into the sea of desperation; for as he saith, ‘Without the church there is no salvation.’ When ye had forsaken God, God forsook you, and gave you over to your own will, and suffered you to fall from schism to apostasy, from apostasy to heresy, and from heresy to perjury, from perjury to treason, and so in conclusion, into the full indignation of your sovereign prince; which you may think a just punishment of God, for your other abominable opinions. “After that, ye fell lower and lower, and now to the lowest degree of all, to the end of honour and life. For if the light of your candle be, as it hath been hitherto, dusky, your candlestick is like to be removed, and have a great fall, so low, and so far out of knowledge, that it be quite out of God's favour, and past all hope of recovery: ‘For in hell there is no redemption.’ The danger whereof being so great, very pity causeth me to say, ‘Remember from whence thou hast fallen.’ I add also, and whither you fall!” (Vol. 8: 46) And so it goes with this list of arch-heretics of history by Dr. Brooks. This won’t end well.