=1571.= The execution of Dr. John Story is one of the horrors of Tyburn: it is further memorable from the fact that, as we have seen (p. 64), the triangular gallows, destined to become famous as the Triple Tree, first came into use on this occasion. Dr. Story was a bitter persecutor under Mary. There is no more difficult question than that of determining how far we must condemn, how far we may absolve those, on either side, who used their power to inflict punishments on men who differed from them in religion. In his “Prince” Machiavelli divides men of the ruling class into three categories. There is, in the first place, the man who understands of himself; next comes he who understands when a thing is shown to him; last comes he who can neither generate a new idea, nor comprehend it when put before him. The first, he says, is most excellent; the second excellent; the third useless. But incapacity to generate new ideas, inability to assimilate them, are things not criminal. The mass of men will always be found in the third category. Dr. Story was not one of those rare spirits who rise above the ideas current in their time. In this matter of persecution it is impossible for us of to-day to place ourselves in the position of men in the sixteenth century. Nothing could be more false than to represent the reformers as advocates of religious liberty. They made no such claim for themselves: they would have regarded themselves as traitors to their trust if, when their opportunity came, they did not in their turn send to the stake the obstinate heretics who refused to yield to their arguments and rejected “the truth.” Latimer could jest in the sermon he preached on the occasion of the burning of Friar Forest.[174] Forest, it is true, was a Catholic. The reformers persecuted others than Catholics, and here it is even more difficult to acquit them. Claiming liberty to discard old beliefs, they persecuted those who went further than they in the same direction. In 1549 was appointed a Commission, and in 1551 another, with extended scope. Among the Commissioners we find Cranmer, Ridley, Latimer, Coverdale—more than thirty names of the brightest lights of the Reformation. They were appointed to try heretics—Anabaptists and those who rejected the Book of Common Prayer—to try, to condemn, and to hand over to the civil power.[175] Latimer was earnest to persuade the hearers of one of his great sermons that to go boldly to death did not prove that death was suffered in a righteous cause. He jeered at the constancy of the Anabaptists: “The Anabaptistes that were brente here in dyuers townes in England, as I heard of credible menne (I saw them not my selfe) went to their death euen _Intrepide_. As ye wyll saye, with out any feare in the world chearfully. Well, let them go.”[176]