For the rest, their final words to Bonner in open consistory, when at last he took them there, were bold and resolute, while he seems to have laboured hard and patiently to bring them to recant.* In Colchester, that Taberah, that place of burning, ten martyrs divided the same day in the beginning of August. Several of them had been of the company of twenty-two who were taken to London and dismissed from Bonner in the year before: who, returning to their parishes, renewed their former conduct, absenting themselves from church, assembling themselves secretly in houses, it may have been for hearing the English service. It was difficult to touch them after their quittance, though Tye the curate did his best. "They assemble together upon the Sabbath day in time of divine service," wrote he to his ordinary, Bonner, "sometimes in one house, sometimes in another, and there keep their privy conventicles and schools of heresy. The jurates say the Lords' Commission is out and they are discharged of their oath. The questmen say, at the archdeacon's visitation, that as they have been once presented and sent home, they have no more to do with them. Your officers say that the Council sent them not home without great consideration. I pray God that some of your officers prove not favourers So reason, discerneth and willeth good and evil: but it willeth not that good which is acceptable to God except it be holpen with grace: but that which is ill it willeth of itself." Formularies of Henry VIII. p. 359. the Edwardian Article: "We have no power to do works pleasant and acceptable to God without the grace of God by Christ preventing us that we may have a good will," &c. Art. X. On this point, which caused so much trouble in Elizabeth's reign, these martyrs were sound. Thos. Loseby * Burned in Smithfield, April 12. Agnes Stanley Thos. Thirtell Marg. Hale Fox, 660: Machyn, 130: Strype, vi. 2. of heretics." * At length however fresh charges were laid, fresh indictments drawn against them: they were caught by Tyrrel, examined by laymen, examined again by Bonner's commissary Kingston and the famous Oxford champion Doctor Chedsey, who wept bitterly as their condemnation was read. Of the ten who suffered, six in the morning and four after noon, the most distinguished were two young women of twenty years; for Elizabeth. Folks said that the opinion of her judges in the Sacrament was a substantial lie and a real lie, Rose Allen said that the See of Rome was a see for crows, kites, owls, and ravens, such as her judges were, to swim in. To these are to be added two other women, condemned at the same time and place: whose execution by fire was delayed to September.† "The rebels are stout in the town of Colchester," added Tye, who was the priest of a neighbouring parish, in his letter to Bonner: and of this one reason was the remissness of the bailiff of Colchester and of the sheriff of Essex with whom the Council dealt severely for delaying the executions of persons condemned for heresy. Nor * Thomas Tye, priest, to Bonner, Colchester, Dec. 18, 1556. Fox, iii. 697. + Fox, 696 and 713. To Rose Allen belongs another horrible story of a burned hand. This time it is Tyrrel, not Bonner, who does it. Mr. Tyrrel must have been stronger than Samson, if, while they were both standing on their feet, he without assistance, having a candle in one hand, could with the other hold the hand of an active young woman in the flame long enough to crack the sinews. Burned alive at Colchester, Aug. 2. In the morning. Wm. Bongeor Thos. Benold W. Purcas of Bocking Agnes Silverside, als. Smith Helen Ewring Elizabeth Folks After noon. Wm. Mount of Muchbentley Rose Allen, her daughter On Sept. 17. less the sheriffs of Kent, Suffolk, and Staffordshire, and the mayor of Rochester, were remiss: and the remarkable Lord Rich acted with a caution which was little to the taste of the Council. He sent to them persons suspected for heresy, against whom he ought to have proceeded himself: thereby casting the dispraise of the severity upon them so they bade him in such cases to proceed according to law, and not to trouble them any more. In Bristol there was so much coldness, that it seemed as if the authority, the mayor and aldermen, were of them that gainsaid and resisted. They came not to sermons, processions, and other ceremonies in the cathedral church, unless they were fetched out of the city by the dean and chapter with their cross: and it was necessary for the Council to admonish them to conform themselves, and not expect that which was unseemly and out of order.* So difficult was it, where there was not a Sussex, a Darcy, an Oxford, a Tyrrel, or a Brown, to have the persecution properly carried out. It was necessary to interfere without scruple in the municipal elections.† From the same fruitful region of Colchester, two martyrs of some note, Allerton and Roth, were combined with two Austows, man and wife, of London, and suffered death by fire in September at Islington. Allerton, a friend of a man who was hanged for sedition or treason, had been formerly in trouble for exhorting and reading in church: sent by Lord Darcy to Bonner: by Bonner examined in Whittle's Articles, well treated, brought to * Strype, vi. 43: Burnet, ii. 559; iii. 452 (Pocock). + The Council wrote, Jan. 1556, a letter to the corporation of Coventry that they should choose some catholic grave man for their mayor, and sent them a list of three persons, requiring them to give their voices for one of them. Burnet, iii. 434. From the Council Book. That was George Eagles, who was called Trudgeover: because he would, as it were, trudge over, and then trudge over. His affairs are in Fox but as he was hanged, not burned, I exclude him. There come no Trudgeovers here. [CH. XXIX. conform himself, dismissed. But who observed not his conditions, not once went to any church, but drew people from his parish church, and once withstood Tye, the zealous curate of Muchbentley, in the face of the parish. Through Tye his second and fatal apprehension was procured. He seems to have been not of the demeanour of those who merely absented themselves from church: and rather to have resembled those earlier professors of the Reformation in the time of Henry the Eighth, whose glory it was to walk into churches and withstand curates. With him stood before Bonner at Fulham his neighbour Roth, a quiet but determined man. Both of them were sent by the Bishop to his London prison at Paul's, which he merrily called Little Ease*: both of them wrote letters of exhortation to the confessors at Colchester, written in their own blood: both were very stern and downright with Bonner and their other examiners. They and their companions in suffering were Anglican martyrs, as they held the Book of Common Prayer set forth in the time of Edward to be "in all parts good and godly"; and daily in prison used some part of it among themselves. From Bonner's hands they were removed to the "Have the knave away: let him be carried to Little Ease in London till I come," cried Bonner of Allerton. Maitland in quoting this put in the word the, "to the Little Ease," apparently thinking that Bonner ordered his prisoner to be put in the instrument of torture called Little Ease in the Tower of London. Essays, 555. Bonner meant that part of his place in St. Paul's where the stocks were: and that would be perhaps the Lollard Tower, and not the other chamber called the coalhouse. It is to be feared that Bonner used the stocks with many of his prisoners. The stocks were not considered an instrument of torture but of punishment, and were a very common punishment: they inflicted however intolerable misery, cramp, ache, and distress. "And so I was carried to London unto Little Ease, and there remained all night," Allerton relates. Fox, 706. "I lie in my lord's Little Ease in the day, and in the night I lie in the coalhouse," wrote Roth to his friends at Colchester. 712. That Little Ease meant the stocks is confirmed by the curious incident that a fragment of paper was found on which was written "Look at the foot of the stocks for a knife," in the hand of one of these prisoners there. 710. Queen's prison of Newgate before they perished in the flames.* To Newgate were removed from Bonner's hands, before they perished in the flames in Smithfield, three notable martyrs, Hallingdale, Sparrow, and Gibson. There they were visited on the day appointed for their cremation by the gentle Abbot of Westminster, who so wrought on them, that though the stake was fixed, the wood brought, and the crowd gathered for the spectacle, one day more of grace was given and taken, and it was not until the following day, November 13, that Feckenham's intercession was rejected, and the pile was lit. The first of these martyrs, among other things, would not have his child baptized with the Latin rites but after the English office. The second had formerly yielded to Bonner, been confessed, and heard Mass: but had soon lamented his compliance, uttered his thoughts, and was caught selling ballads that were described as blasphemous and heretical. The third, Gibson, a gentleman by birth, was a humorist, who diverted himself with Bonner. Lying long in the Poultry Counter, about two years, for a matter of debt, he was observed to be consistently absent from chapel, Mass, and confession: and was brought under the notice of the Bishop. He purged himself by a somewhat ambiguous submission, which was accepted and entered in Bonner's register: but this made no difference in his conduct. Bonner ministered "The 17 day of September went out of Newgate unto Islington beyond the butts, towards the church in a valley to be burned, four, three men one woman, for heresy duly proved: two of them was man and wife, dwelling in St. Dunstan's in the East, of the east side of St. Dunstan's churchyard, with master Waters, sergeant of arms." Machyn, 152. Strype, iv. 18 and 62: Burnet, ii. 559 (Pocock). Burned at Islington, Sept. Ralph Allerton Jas. Austow Fox, 705. 17. Rich. Roth Margery Austow |