he official record:--"Thursday after the
feast of St. Barnabas, John Fisher was brought to the bar by Sir William
Kingston, Constable of the Tower. Pleads not guilty. Venire awarded.
Verdict--guilty. Judgment as usual in cases of treason."[454]

It was a swift sentence, and swiftly to be executed. Five days were
allowed him to prepare himself; and the more austere features of the
penalty were remitted with some show of pity. He was to die by the axe.

[Sidenote: June 22. He is beheaded on Tower Hill.]

Mercy was not to be hoped for. It does not seem to have been sought. He
was past eighty. The earth on the edge of the grave was already
crumbling under his feet; and death had little to make it fearful. When
the last morning dawned, he dressed himself carefully--as he said, for
his marriage-day. The distance to Tower Hill was short. He was able to
walk; and he tottered out of the prison-gates, holding in his hand a
closed volume of the New Testament. The crowd flocked about him, and he
was heard to pray that, as this book had been his best comfort and
companion, so in that hour it might give him some special strength, and
speak to him as from his Lord. Then opening it at a venture, he read:
"This is life eternal, to know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus
Christ, whom Thou hast sent." It was the answer to his prayer; and he
continued to repeat the words as he was led forward. On the scaffold he
chanted the _Te Deum_, and then, after a few prayers, knelt down, and
meekly laid his head upon a pillow where neither care nor fear nor
sickness would ever vex it more. Many a spectacle of sorrow had been
witnessed on that tragic spot, but never one more sad than this; never
one more painful to think or speak of. When a nation is in the throes of
revolution, wild spirits are abroad in the storm; and poor human nature
presses blindly forward with the burden which is laid upon it, tossing
aside the obstacles in its path with a recklessness which, in calmer
hours, it would fear to contemplate.

Sir Thomas More followed, his fortunes linked in death as in life to
those of his friend. He was left to the last--in the hope, perhaps, that
the example might produce an effect which persuasion could not. But the
example, if that was the object, worked to far other purpose. From
More's high-tempered nature, such terrors fell harmless, as from
enchanted armour. Death to him was but a passing from one country to
another; and he had all along