A great number of conscientious and excellent ministers were thus excluded from their pulpits. To them these requirements of the law were rank papacy, and they would not conform. Some in consequence became physicians; some were received into private families, holding views similar to their own, as chaplains; many fled to Scotland or the continent, and many others with their families were reduced to beggary. “The churches,” says an historian, “were shut; the public mind was inflamed; 600 persons repaired to a church in London to receive the sacrament; the doors were closed, no minister would officiate. The cries of the people reached the throne; but the throne was inexorable, and the archbishop preferred that his flock should perish rather than dispense with the clerical robes of the Church of Rome.” The violence of persecution aroused the spirit of the persecuted tenfold; the press was resorted to as a means of defence, as well as for the propagation of opinion, but to little purpose. Any book or pamphlet reflecting on the present state of affairs was seized and burnt, and the author subjected to a fine and imprisonment. On this the suspended ministers and their party resolved on openly seceding from the church, believing that as they were not permitted to preach nor to officiate “without idolatrous geare, it was their duty to break off from the public church and to assemble in private houses and elsewhere.” They did so; they held their meetings in private houses and in fields and woods. One congregation was broken up in London, and as many as could be seized were hurried to prison. In 1575, ten men and one woman were condemned to the stake; the woman recanted; eight of the ten were banished, and two were burnt; and two others were put to death, after long and severe imprisonment, for circulating the tracts of the Brownists. The prisons were full of Nonconformists; “died,” says their historian, “in their dungeons, like rotten sheep,” from hunger, cold and the noisome state of the prisons; and three of their ministers, Barrow, Greenwood, and Penry, were executed at Tyburn with peculiar circumstances of cruelty. Nothing but the preserving power of God could have left a remnant alive. Still, though silenced by law and forbidden to preach or circulate their opinions, their views operated as leaven through the whole mass of society. Prohibitions, fines, imprisonments, ignominy, loss of property, nay, even of life, could not extinguish their zeal. Their works, produced at secret printing-presses, were diffused through the whole of the land as by invisible agency. The human mind had now risen up to do battle manfully for truth for conscience-sake, with the weapons of powerful argument and the keen arrows of sarcasm and wit, and no might of human oppression could overcome it.