the
death of another man, and made but a poor show (as might be expected)
when he himself lay low. He entreated Gardiner to let him live, if it
were only in a mouse's hole; and, when he ascended the scaffold to be
beheaded on Tower Hill, addressed the people in a miserable way, saying
that he had been incited by others, and exhorting them to return to the
unreformed religion, which he told them was his faith. There seems
reason to suppose that he expected a pardon even then, in return for this
confession; but it matters little whether he did or not. His head was
struck off.

Mary was now crowned Queen. She was thirty-seven years of age, short and
thin, wrinkled in the face, and very unhealthy. But she had a great
liking for show and for bright colours, and all the ladies of her Court
were magnificently dressed. She had a great liking too for old customs,
without much sense in them; and she was oiled in the oldest way, and
blessed in the oldest way, and done all manner of things to in the oldest
way, at her coronation. I hope they did her good.

She soon began to show her desire to put down the Reformed religion, and
put up the unreformed one: though it was dangerous work as yet, the
people being something wiser than they used to be. They even cast a
shower of stones--and among them a dagger--at one of the royal chaplains
who attacked the Reformed religion in a public sermon. But the Queen and
her priests went steadily on. Ridley, the powerful bishop of the last
reign, was seized and sent to the Tower. LATIMER, also celebrated among
the Clergy of the last reign, was likewise sent to the Tower, and Cranmer
speedily followed. Latimer was an aged man; and, as his guards took him
through Smithfield, he looked round it, and said, 'This is a place that
hath long groaned for me.' For he knew well, what kind of bonfires would
soon be burning. Nor was the knowledge confined to him. The prisons
were fast filled with the chief Protestants, who were there left rotting
in darkness, hunger, dirt, and separation from their friends; many, who
had time left them for escape, fled from the kingdom; and the dullest of
the people began, now, to see what was coming.

It came on fast. A Parliament was got together; not without strong
suspicion of unfairness; and they annulled the divorce, formerly
pronounced by Cranmer between the Queen's mother and King Henry the
Eighth, and unmade all the laws on the subject of religion th