tried first for being married, though a priest, and for not
believing in the mass. He admitted both of these accusations, and
said that the mass was a wicked imposition. Then they tried
Rogers, who said the same. Next morning the two were brought up to
be sentenced; and then Rogers said that his poor wife, being a
German woman and a stranger in the land, he hoped might be allowed
to come to speak to him before he died. To this the inhuman
Gardiner replied, that she was not his wife. ‘Yea, but she is, my
lord,’ said Rogers, ‘and she hath been my wife these eighteen
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years.’ His request was still refused, and they were both sent to
Newgate; all those who stood in the streets to sell things, being
ordered to put out their lights that the people might not see them.
But, the people stood at their doors with candles in their hands,
and prayed for them as they went by. Soon afterwards, Rogers was
taken out of jail to be burnt in Smithfield; and, in the crowd as
he went along, he saw his poor wife and his ten children, of whom
the youngest was a little baby. And so he was burnt to death.
The next day, Hooper, who was to be burnt at Gloucester, was
brought out to take his last journey, and was made to wear a hood
over his face that he might not be known by the people. But, they
did know him for all that, down in his own part of the country;
and, when he came near Gloucester, they lined the road, making
prayers and lamentations. His guards took him to a lodging, where
he slept soundly all night. At nine o’clock next morning, he was
brought forth leaning on a staff; for he had taken cold in prison,
and was infirm. The iron stake, and the iron chain which was to
bind him to it, were fixed up near a great elm-tree in a pleasant
open place before the cathedral, where, on peaceful Sundays, he had
been accustomed to preach and to pray, when he was bishop of
Gloucester. This tree, which had no leaves then, it being
February, was filled with people; and the priests of Gloucester
College were looking complacently on from a window, and there was a
great concourse of spectators in every spot from which a glimpse of
the dreadful sight could be beheld. When the old man kneeled down
on the small platform at the foot of the stake, and prayed aloud,
the nearest people were observed to be so attentive to his prayers
that they were ordered to stand farther back; for it did not suit
the Romish Church to have those Protestant words heard. His
prayers concluded, he went up to the stake and was stripped to his
shirt, and chained ready for the fire. One of his guards had such
compassion on him that, to shorten his agonies, he tied some
packets of gunpowder about him. Then they heaped up wood and straw
and reeds, and set them all alight. But, unhappily, the wood was
green and damp, and there was a wind blowing that blew what flame
there was, away. Thus, through three-quarters of an hour, the good
old man was scorched and roasted and smoked, as the fire rose and
sank; and all that time they saw him, as he burned, moving his lips
in prayer, and beating his breast with one hand, even after the
other was burnt away and had fallen off.
Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer, were taken to Oxford to dispute with
a commission of priests and doctors about the mass. They were
shamefully treated; and it is recorded that the Oxford scholars
hissed and howled and groaned, and misconducted themselves in an
anything but a scholarly way. The prisoners were taken back to
jail, and afterwards tried in St. Mary’s Church. They were all
found guilty. On the sixteenth of the month of October, Ridley and
Latimer were brought out, to make another of the dreadful bonfires.
The scene of the suffering of these two good Protestant men was in
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