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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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