ement. But the
illegal imprisonment cannot be explained away, and cannot be palliated;
and when a judge permits himself to commit an act of arbitrary tyranny,
we argue from the known to the unknown, and refuse reasonably to give
him credit for equity where he was so little careful of law.

[Sidenote: Contrast between Wolsey and More in the treatment of
heretics.]

[Sidenote: The Smithfield fires recommence.]

[Sidenote: Troubles of Bilney.]

Yet a few years of misery in a prison was but an insignificant
misfortune when compared with the fate under which so many other poor
men were at this time overwhelmed. Under Wolsey's chancellorship the
stake had been comparatively idle; he possessed a remarkable power of
making recantation easy; and there is, I believe, no instance in which
an accused heretic was brought under his immediate cognizance, where he
failed to arrange some terms by which submission was made possible. With
Wolsey heresy was an error--with More it was a crime. Soon after the
seals changed hands the Smithfield fires recommenced; and, the
chancellor acting in concert with them, the bishops resolved to
obliterate, in these edifying spectacles, the recollection of their
general infirmities. The crime of the offenders varied,--sometimes it
was a denial of the corporal presence, more often it was a reflection
too loud to be endured on the character and habits of the clergy; but
whatever it was, the alternative lay only between abjuration humiliating
as ingenuity could make it, or a dreadful death. The hearts of many
failed them in the trial, and of all the confessors those perhaps do not
deserve the least compassion whose weakness betrayed them, who sank and
died broken-hearted. Of these silent sufferers history knows nothing. A
few, unable to endure the misery of having, as they supposed, denied
their Saviour, returned to the danger from which they had fled, and
washed out their fall in martyrdom. Latimer has told us the story of his
friend Bilney--little Bilney, or Saint Bilney,[100] as he calls him, his
companion at Cambridge, to whom he owed his own conversion. Bilney,
after escaping through Wolsey's hands in 1527, was again cited in 1529
before the Bishop of London. Three times he refused to recant. He was
offered a fourth and last chance. The temptation was too strong, and he
fell. For two years he was hopelessly miserable; at length his braver
nature prevailed. There was no pardon for a relapsed hereti