the blood of his friends, and to yield himself a prisoner. After a moment's pause, he threw away his sword, and surrendered to Sir Maurice Berkeley, who carried him first to the Court, and thence to the Tower.

XII.

THE PROTESTANT MARTYRS.

GREEN.

[Wyat's revolt brought on the persecution it was intended. to avert. Mary looked on all Protestants as traitors, and resolved to destroy Protestantism. A law was passed against heretics, and at once put in force.]

WHETHER from without or from within, warning was wasted on the fierce bigotry of the Queen. It was, as Gardiner asserted, not at the counsel of her ministers, but by her own personal will that the laws against heresy had been laid before Parliament; and now that they were enacted Mary pressed for their execution. Her resolve was probably quickened by the action of the Protestant zealots. The failure of Wyat's revolt was far from taming the enthusiasm of the wilder reformers. The restoration of the old worship was followed by outbreaks of bold defiance. A tailor of St. Giles-in-the-Fields shaved a dog with the priestly tonsure. A cat was found hanging in the Cheap1 "with her head shorn, and the likeness of a vestment cast over her, with her forefeet tied together, and a round piece of paper like a singing cake between them." Yet more galling were the ballads which were circulated in mockery of the mass, the pamphlets which came from the exiles 2 1 Cheapside. 2 Many of the Protestants had fled for safety to Switzerland and Germany.

over sea, the seditious broadsides dropped in the streets, the interludes 3 in which the most sacred acts of the old religion were flouted with ribald mockery. All this defiance only served to quicken afresh the purpose of the Queen. But it was not till the opening of 1555, when she had already been a year and a half on the throne, that the opposition of her councillors was at last mastered, and the persecution began. In February the deprived Bishop of Gloucester, Hooper, was burned in his cathedral city, a London vicar, Lawrence Saunders, at Coventry, and Rogers, a prebendary of St. Paul's, at London. Ferrar, the deprived Bishop of St. David's, who was burned at Caermarthen, was one of eight victims who suffered in March. Four followed in April and May, six in June, eleven in July, eighteen in August, eleven in September. In October Ridley, the deprived Bishop of London, was drawn with Latimer from their prison at Oxford. "Play the man, Master Ridley!" cried the old preacher of the Reformation, as the flames shot up around him; we shall this day light up such a candle by God's grace in England as I trust shall never be put out."

66

If the Protestants had not known how to govern indeed, they knew how to die; and the cause which prosperity had ruined revived in the dark hour of persecution. The memory of their violence and greed faded away as they passed unwavering to their doom. Such a story as that of Rowland Taylor, the vicar of Hadleigh, tells us more of the work which was now begun, and of the effect it was likely to produce, than pages of historic dissertation. Taylor, who as a man of mark had been one of the first victims chosen for execution, was arrested in London, and con demned to suffer in his own parish. His wife, "suspecting that her husband should that night be carried away," had

3 Rhyming plays.

waited through the darkness with her children in the porch of St. Botolph's-beside-Aldgate.

"Now when the sheriff and his company came against St. Botolph's Church, Elizabeth cried, saying, 'O my dear father! Mother! mother! here is my father led away!' Then cried his wife, 'Rowland, Rowland, where art thou?' for it was a very dark morning, that the one could not see the other. Dr. Taylor answered, 'I am here, dear wife,' and stayed. The sheriff's men would have led him forth, but the sheriff said, 'Stay a little, masters, I pray you, and let him speak to his wife.' Then came she to him, and he took his daughter Mary in his arms, and he and his wife and Elizabeth knelt down and said the Lord's Prayer. At which sight the sheriff wept apace, and so did divers others of the company. After they had prayed, he rose up and kissed his wife and shook her by the hand, and said, 'Farewell, my dear wife, be of good comfort, for I am quiet in my conscience! God shall still be a father to my children.' Then said his wife, 'God be with thee, dear Rowland! I will, with God's grace, meet thee at Hadleigh.' "All the way Dr. Taylor was merry and cheerful as one that accounted himself going to a most pleasant banquet or bridal. . . . Coming within two miles of Hadleigh he desired to light off his horse, which done, he leaped and set a frisk or twain as men commonly do for dancing. 'Why, Master Doctor,' quoth the sheriff, 'how do you now?' He answered, 'Well, God be praised, Master Sheriff, never better, for now I know that I am almost at home. I lack not past two stiles to go over, and I am even at my Father's house!' The streets of Hadleigh were beset on both sides with men and women of the town and country who waited to see him whom when they beheld so led to death, with weeping eyes and lamentable voices, they cried, 'Ah, good Lord! there goeth our good shepherd

"What place

from us!'" The journey was at last over. is this,' he asked, 'and what meaneth it that so much people are gathered together?' It was answered, 'It is Oldham Common, the place where you must suffer, and the people are come to look upon you.' Then said he, 'Thanked be God, I am even at home!' But when the people saw his reverend and ancient face, with a long white beard, they burst out with weeping tears and cried, saying, 'God save thee, good Dr. Taylor; God strengthen thee, and help thee; the Holy Ghost comfort thee!' He wished, but was not suffered, to speak. When he had prayed, he went to the stake and kissed it, and set himself into a pitch-barrel which they had set for him to stand on, and so stood with his back upright against the stake, with his hands folded, together and his eyes towards heaven, and so let himself be burned." One of the executioners cruelly cast a faggot at him, which hit upon his head and brake his face that the blood ran down his visage. Then said Dr. Taylor, "Oh friend, I have harm enough, what needed that?" One more act of brutality brought his sufferings to an end. stood he still without either crying or moving, with his hands folded together, till Soyce with a halberd struck him on the head that the brains fell out, and the dead corpse fell down into the fire."

"So

The terror of death was powerless against men like these. Bonner, the Bishop of London, to whom, as bishop of the diocese in which the Council sate, its victims were generally delivered for execution, but who, in spite of the nickname and hatred which his official prominence in the work of death earned him, seems to have been naturally a good-humoured and merciful man, asked a youth who was brought before him whether he thought he could bear the fire. The boy at once held his hand without flinching in the flame of a candle that stood by. Rogers, a fellow

worker with Tyndale in the translation of the Bible, and one of the foremost among the Protestant preachers, died bathing his hands in the flame "as if it had been in cold water." Even the commonest lives gleamed for a moment. into poetry at the stake. "Pray for me," a boy, William Brown, who had been brought home to Brentwood to suffer, asked of the bystanders. "I will pray no more for thee," one of them replied, "than I will pray for a dog." "Then,' said William, 'Son of God, shine upon me;' and immediately the sun in the elements shone out of a dark cloud so full in his face that he was constrained to look another way; whereat the people mused because it was so dark a little time before." Brentwood lay within a district on which the hand of the Queen fell heavier than elsewhere. The persecution was mainly confined to the more active and populous parts of the country, to London, Kent, Sussex, and the Eastern Counties. Of the two hundred and eighty whom we know to have suffered during the last three years and a half of Mary's reign more than forty were burned in London, seventeen in the neighbouring village of Stratford-le-Bow, four in Islington, two in Southwark, and one each at Barnet, St. Albans, and Ware. Kent, at that time a home of mining and manufacturing industry, suffered as heavily as London. Of its sixty martyrs more than forty were furnished by Canterbury, which was then but a city of some few thousand inhabitants, and seven by Maidstone. The remaining eight suffered at Rochester, Ashford, and Dartford. Of the twenty-five who died in Sussex, the little town of Lewes sent seventeen to the fire. Seventy were contributed by the Eastern Counties, the seat of the woollen manufacture. Beyond these districts executions were rare. Westward of Sussex we find the record of but a dozen martyrdoms, six of which were at Bristol, and four at Salisbury. Chester and Wales contributed but four