John Tewkesbury, one of the most respected merchants in London, whom the bishops had put twice to the rack already, and whose limbs they had broken,[164] felt his courage revived by the martyrdom of his friend. CHRIST ALONE, he said habitually: these two words were all his theology. He was arrested, taken to the house of Sir Thomas More at Chelsea, shut up in the porter’s lodge, his hands, feet, and head being held in the stocks;[165] but they could not obtain from him the recantation they desired. The officers took him into the chancellor’s garden, and bound him so tightly to the _tree of truth_, as the renowned scholar called it, that the blood started out of his eyes; after which they scourged him.[166] Tewkesbury remained firm. On the 16th of December the Bishop of London went to Chelsea and formed a court. ‘Thou art a heretic,’ said Stokesley, ‘a backslider; thou hast incurred the great excommunication. We shall deliver thee up to the secular power.’ He was burnt alive at Smithfield on the 20th of December, 1531. ‘Now,’ said the fanatical chancellor, ‘now is he uttering cries in hell!’ [Sidenote: Utopias Of The Bishops.] Such were at this period the cruel _utopias_ of the bishops and of the witty Sir Thomas More. Other evangelical Christians were thrown into prison. In vain did one of them exclaim: ‘the more they persecute this sect, the more will it increase.’[167] That opinion did not check the persecution. ‘It is impossible,’ says Foxe (doubtless with some exaggeration), ‘to name all who were persecuted before the time of Queen Anne Boleyn. As well try to count the grains of sand on the seashore!’ Thus did the real Reformation show by the blood of its martyrs that it had nothing to do with the policy, the tyranny, the intrigues, and the divorce of Henry VIII. If these men of God had not been burnt by that prince, it might possibly have been imagined that he was the author of the transformation of England; but the blood of the reformers cried to heaven that he was its executioner. Footnote 139: ‘Ye would have raked in the coals.’—Latimer, _Works_, i. p. 46 (Parker Soc.); Tyndale, _Op._ iii. p. 231. Footnote 140: _History of the Reformation of the Sixteenth Century_, vol. v. bk. xviii. ch. ii. ix. xii.; bk. xix. ch. vii.; bk. xx. ch. xv. Footnote 141: ‘A man of a timorous conscience, and not fully resolved touching that matter of the Church.’—Foxe, _Acts_, p. 649. Footnote 142: ‘Soli sacerdotes, ordinati ritè per pontifices, habent claves.’—Ibid. Footnote 143: ‘The anachoress whom he had converted to Christ.’—Foxe, _Acts_, p. 642. Footnote 144: Herbert, p. 357. Footnote 145: ‘Like as if a man should take and strike off the head and set it under the foot, and to set the foot above.’—Foxe, _Acts_, iv. p. 649. Footnote 146: Latimer, _Remains_, p. xiii. Footnote 147: Ibid. Footnote 148: ‘Fit empoigner.’—Crespin, _Actes des Martyrs_, p. 101. Footnote 149: Strype, p. 313.