some under the arms with ropes, and plunged them again and again into wells; they bound others like criminals, put them to the tortures, and, with a funnel, filled them with wine, till the fumes of it took away their reason, when they made them say they consented to be Catholics. They stripped them naked, and, after a thousand indignities, stuck them with pins and needles from head to foot. They cut and slashed them with knives; and sometimes with red-hot pincers took hold of them by the nose and other parts of the body, and dragged them about the rooms till they promised to be Catholics. They beat them with staves, and thus bruised, and with broken bones, dragged them to the church, where their forced presence was taken for abjuration. In some places they tied fathers and husbands to their bed-posts, and, before their eyes, ravished their wives and daughters with impunity. With these scenes of desolation and horror the popish clergy feasted their eyes, and made them only a matter of laughter and sport. Though my heart aches, I beg the reader’s patience to lay before him two other instances, which, if he hath a heart like mine, he will not be able to read without watering these sheets with tears. The _first_ is of a young woman, who being brought before the council, upon refusing to abjure her religion, was ordered to prison. There they shaved her head, singed off the hair from other parts of her body; and having stripped her stark naked, led her through the streets of the city, where many a blow was given her, and stones flung at her; then they set her up to the neck in a tub of water for awhile; they took her out, and put on her a shift dipped in wine, which, as it dried and stuck to her sore and bruised body, they snatched off again, and then had another ready dipped in wine to clap on her. This they repeated six times, thereby making her body exceeding raw and sore. When all these cruelties could not shake her constancy, they fastened her by the feet in a kind of gibbet, and let her hang in that posture, with her head downward, till she expired!