two gentlewomen expiated their offence of being Catholics by a horrible and ignominious public death; while, according to the records still extant, the total number of the “good Queen Bess’” ecclesiastical victims amounted to the handsome number of one hundred and twenty‐three, including one hundred and thirteen seculars, eight Jesuits, one friar, and one monk, besides innumerable laymen in whose veins flowed the best blood of the land. The rack and the thumb‐screw almost invariably preceded the half‐hanging and disembowelling, so that many looked upon the gallows as a welcome relief from worse sufferings. Priests were tortured to compel them to disclose the names of their penitents, and laymen to force them into the betrayal of their pastors. Father Campion was four times racked, and then secretly brought before the queen to discuss theology with that model Supreme Head of the Church; while others like Nichols found it more convenient to swear to all their tormentors required, for, as that recreant shepherd naïvely says in his _Apology_, “it is not, I assure you, a pleasant thing to be stretched on the rack till the body becomes almost two feet longer than nature made it.” Father Gerard, who speaks from personal experience, has left us in his Memoirs the following account of this most effectual method of extorting confessions in the glorious reign of that queen to which so many of our modern writers refer with pride and congratulation: “Then they led me to a great upright beam, or pillar of wood, which was one of the supports of this vast crypt. At the summit of this column were fixed certain iron staples for supporting weights. Here they placed on my wrists manacles of iron, and ordered me to mount upon two or three wicker steps; then raising my arms they inserted an iron bar through the rings of the manacles, and then through the staples in the pillar, putting a pin through the bar so that it could not slip. My arms being thus fixed above my head, they withdrew those wicker steps I spoke of, one by one, from my feet, so that I hung by my hands and arms. The tips of my toes, however, still touched the ground; so they dug away the ground beneath, as they could not raise me higher, for they had suspended me from the topmost staples in the pillar. Thus hanging by my wrists I began to pray, while those gentlemen standing around me asked again if I was willing to confess. I replied, ‘I neither can nor will.’ But so terrible a pain began to oppress me that I was scarcely able to speak the words. The worst pain was in my breast and belly, my arms and hands. It seemed to me that all the blood in my body rushed up my arms into my hands, and I was under the impression at the time that the blood actually burst forth from my fingers and the back of my hands. This was, however, a mistake, the sensation was caused by the swelling of