What aggravated the cruelty of these scenes, and is demonstrative of the sanguinary spirit of papacy, is, that the news of these excesses was received at Rome with boundless satisfaction. When the letters of the pope’s legate were read in the assembly of the cardinals, by which he assured the pope that all was transacted by the express will and command of the king, it was immediately decreed that the pope should march with his cardinals to the church of St. Mark, and in the most solemn manner give thanks to God for so great a blessing conferred on the see of Rome and the Christian world; and that on the Monday after, solemn mass should be celebrated in the church of Minerva, at which the pope, Gregory the Thirteenth, and cardinals were present; and that a jubilee should be published throughout 229the whole Christian world, to return thanks to God for the extirpation of the enemies of the truth, and of the Church in France. In the evening the cannon of the castle of St. Angelo were fired, to testify the public joy; the whole city was illuminated with bonfires; and no one sign of joy was omitted that was usually made for the greatest victories obtained in favour of the Romish Church. But these persecutions, though black as Erebus, were far exceeded in cruelty by those which took place in the time of Louis the Fourteenth. The troopers and dragoons, hired for the purpose, went into the houses of Protestants, where they destroyed the furniture, broke the looking-glasses, wasted their corn and wine, and sold what they could not destroy; so that in four or five days the Protestants had been plundered of property worth a million of money. But this was only the beginning of sorrows. They turned the dining-rooms of gentlemen into stables for horses, and treated the owners of the houses where they quartered with the greatest insolence and cruelty, lashing them about, and depriving them of food. In several places the soldiers applied red-hot irons to the hands and feet of men, and to the breasts of women. Mothers that gave suck they bound to posts, and let their perishing infants lie languishing in their sight, crying, and gasping for life. Some they bound before a great fire, and, when half dead, let them go. Amidst a thousand other till then unheard-of cruelties, they hung up men and women by the hair, and some by their feet, on hooks in chimneys, and smoked them with wisps of wet hay till they were suffocated. Others they plunged repeatedly into wells; and many they bound, and then with a funnel forced them to drink wine till the fumes destroyed their reason, when they made them say they were Catholics. If any, to escape these barbarities, endeavoured to save themselves by flight, they were pursued into the fields and woods, where they were shot like wild 230beasts. On these scenes the popish clergy feasted their eyes, and derived astonishing amusement from them. LATIMER.