The Queen having declared to the Council,in writing,that she would wish none of her subjects to be burnt without some of the Council being present,and that she would particularly wish there to be good sermons at all burnings,the Council knew pretty well what was to be done next.So,after the Cardinal had blessed all the bishops as a preface to the burnings,the Chancellor Gardiner opened a High Court at Saint Mary Overy,on the Southwark side of London Bridge,for the trial of heretics.Here,two of the late Protestant clergymen,HOOPER,Bishop of Gloucester,and ROGERS,a Prebendary of St.Paul's,were brought to be tried.Hooper was 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 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 the City ditch,near Baliol College.On coming to the dreadful spot,they kissed the stakes,and then embraced each other.And then a learned doctor got up into a pulpit which was placed there,and preached a sermon from the text,'Though I give my body to be burned,and have not charity,it profiteth me nothing.'When you think of the charity of burning men alive,you may imagine that this learned doctor had a rather brazen face.Ridley would have answered his sermon when it came to an end,but was not allowed.
