Having been found guilty of a rape (says Mr. Roby), in all probability this story of his martyrdom, and of the miraculous attestation to the truth of the cause for which he suffered, were contrived for the purpose of preventing the scandal that would have come upon the church through the delinquency of an unworthy member. A subordinate tradition accompanies that already related. It is said that one of the family of the Kenyons attended as under-sheriff at the execution, and that he refused the culprit some trifling favour at the gallows; whereupon Arrowsmith denounced a curse upon him,--to wit, that whilst the family could boast of an heir, so long they should never want a cripple; which prediction was supposed by the credulous to have been literally fulfilled.[108] Mr. Roby, professing to give the _fact_ upon which he founded one of his tales, accuses the unfortunate priest of rape, and states that he was executed for that crime in the reign of William III. All this Mr. Roby gives as from himself, and mentions a curse pronounced by Father Arrowsmith upon the under-sheriff who executed him, in the reign of William III. Now Arrowsmith was hung, under sanction of an atrocious law, for no other reason but because he had taken orders as a Catholic priest, and had endeavoured to prevail upon others to be of his own faith. For this offence, and for this offence alone, in 1628,--in the reign not of William III., but of Charles I.,--he was tried at Lancashire Assizes, and hanged, drawn, and quartered, in the same year that Edmund Ashton, Esq., was sheriff. Mr. Roby must have seen what was the real state of the case in the same history of Lancashire[109] as that which he repeatedly quotes.[110]