His words read like the account of an attack upon a body of unarmed men. It is noticeable that the punishment which followed was punishment for heresy, not for treason; and it is expressly stated that priests as well as laymen suffered. The rest of the story may be briefly told. Oldcastle remained at large for nearly four years. Walsingham reports him to have attempted a rising on the occasion of Henry’s departure on his French expedition, and mentions rumour of a plot which he had formed against the King’s person in the beginning of 1417, and of negotiations with the Scots later on in the same year. The monk clearly saw the hand of the arch-Lollard and his followers whenever there was any mischief going on. The end came not many weeks after. He was captured in Wales after what would seem to have been a fierce resistance, for several of his captors as well as the prisoner himself were wounded. Taken to London, he was brought before Parliament, the session being specially prolonged in order that his case might be heard. The proceedings that followed cannot be described as a trial. He was asked what he had to say on his behalf why he should not be condemned. His answer seemed to be irrelevant to his judges, and the Duke of Bedford, who was acting as Regent, bade him keep to the point. His doom was sealed, if indeed it had not been fixed before, when he denied the jurisdiction of his judges, and declared that he would answer only to his liege-lord Richard, then alive in Scotland. He suffered death by burning, being hung on a chain fastened to a gallows, while a fire was lighted beneath. Of the special barbarity of this punishment Henry may be acquitted. He was absent in France; nor is it likely that the execution was delayed till he could be consulted. We may even believe that it would not have been allowed had he been in England. Indifferent as he was to suffering, and relentless where any military necessity was concerned, he was not cruel, and would hardly have ordered the torture of a brave soldier for whom he had once had some personal regard. But there is no reason to suppose that he would have spared Oldcastle’s life. There was a growing severity in the treatment of heresy, and he was quite in accord with it. Shocking as such severity seems to us now, it was one of the ways in which the religious earnestness of the age expressed itself. The Council of Constance, while active to cleanse the Church of abuses, saw, we cannot doubt, a cognate duty in sternly repressing what it considered the vagaries of heresy. The safe-conduct of Sigismund had not protected John Hus from this orthodox zeal; nor is there any reason to suppose that this postponement of good faith to a pious duty called forth anything more than a transient feeling of self-reproach. The “blush of Sigismund” has become historical; but this Prince seems to have soon recovered his self-satisfaction; nor did the perjury committed in the