people are gathered together?' It was
answered, 'It is Oldham Common, the place where you must suffer, and the
people are come to look upon you.' Then said he, 'Thanked be God, I am
even at home!'... But when the people saw his reverend and ancient
face, with a long white beard, they burst out with weeping tears and
cried, saying, 'God save thee, good Dr. Taylor; God strengthen thee and
help thee; the Holy Ghost comfort thee!' He wished, but was not
suffered, to speak. When he had prayed, he went to the stake and kissed
it, and set himself into a pitch-barrel which they had set for him to
stand on, and so stood with his back upright against the stake, with his
hands folded together and his eyes towards heaven, and so let himself be
burned." One of the executioners "cruelly cast a fagot at him, which hit
upon his head and brake his face that the blood ran down his visage.
Then said Dr. Taylor, 'O friend, I have harm enough--what needed that?'"
One more act of brutality brought his sufferings to an end. "So stood he
still without either crying or moving, with his hands folded together,
till Soyce with a halberd struck him on the head that the brains fell
out, and the dead corpse fell down into the fire."

[Sidenote: The area of the Martyrdoms.]

The terror of death was powerless against men like these. Bonner, the
Bishop of London, to whom, as bishop of the diocese in which the Council
sate, its victims were generally delivered for execution, but who, in
spite of the nickname and hatred which his official prominence in the
work of death earned him, seems to have been naturally a good-humoured
and merciful man, asked a youth who was brought before him whether he
thought he could bear the fire. The boy at once held his hand without
flinching in the flame of a candle that stood by. Rogers, a
fellow-worker with Tyndale in the translation of the Bible, and one of
the foremost among the Protestant preachers, died bathing his hands in
the flame "as if it had been in cold water." Even the commonest lives
gleamed for a moment into poetry at the stake. "Pray for me," a boy,
William Brown, who had been brought home to Brentwood to suffer, asked
of the bystanders. "I will pray no more for thee," one of them replied,
"than I will pray for a dog." "'Then,' said William, 'Son of God, shine
upon me'; and immediately the sun in the elements shone out of a dark
cloud so full in his face that he was constrained to look another way;
whereat