d enrolled ten thousand men. Everywhere there was mustering
and marching to succour the flower of the English army, which was
already in Somersetshire. And all for the purpose of crushing some five
or six thousand clodhoppers and fishermen, half-armed and penniless, who
were ready to throw their lives away for a man and for an idea.

But this idea, my dear children, was a noble one, and one which a man
might very well sacrifice all for, and yet feel that all was well spent.
For though these poor peasants, in their dumb, blundering fashion, would
have found it hard to give all their reasons in words, yet in the inmost
heart of them they knew and felt that it was England's cause which they
were fighting for, and that they were upholding their country's true
self against those who would alter the old systems under which she had
led the nations. Three more years made all this very plain, and showed
that our simple unlettered followers had seen and judged the signs of
the times more correctly than those who called themselves their betters.
There are, to my thinking, stages of human progress for which the Church
of Rome is admirably suited. Where the mind of a nation is young, it may
be best that it should not concern itself with spiritual affairs, but
should lean upon the old staff of custom and authority. But England had
cast off her swaddling-clothes, and was a nursery of strong, thinking
men, who would bow to no authority save that which their reason and
conscience approved. It was hopeless, useless, foolish, to try to drive
such men back into a creed which they had outgrown. Such an attempt was,
however, being made, backed by all the weight of a bigoted king with a
powerful and wealthy Church as his ally. In three years the nation would
understand it, and the King would be flying from his angry people; but
at present, sunk in a torpor after the long civil wars and the corrupt
reign of Charles, they failed to see what was at stake, and turned
against those who would warn them, as a hasty man turns on the messenger
who is the bearer of evil tidings. Is it not strange, my dears, how
quickly a mere shadowy thought comes to take living form, and grow into
a very tragic reality? At one end of the chain is a king brooding over a
point of doctrine; at the other are six thousand desperate men, chivied
and chased from shire to shire, standing to bay at last amid the bleak
Bridgewater marshes, with their hearts as bitter and as hopel