and Elizabeth Gaunt. They were brought to trial. The villain whose
life they had preserved had the heart and the forehead to appear as
the principal witness against them. They were convicted. Fernley was
sentenced to the gallows, Elizabeth Gaunt to the stake. Even after
all the horrors of that year, many thought it impossible that these
judgments should be carried into execution. But the King was without
pity. Fernley was hanged. Elizabeth Gaunt was burned alive at Tyburn on
the same day on which Cornish suffered death in Cheapside. She left a
paper written, indeed, in no graceful style, yet such as was read by
many thousands with compassion and horror. "My fault," she said, "was
one which a prince might well have forgiven. I did but relieve a poor
family; and lo! I must die for it." She complained of the insolence of
the judges, of the ferocity of the gaoler, and of the tyranny of him,
the great one of all, to whose pleasure she and so many other victims
had been sacrificed. In so far as they had injured herself, she forgave
them: but, in that they were implacable enemies of that good cause which
would yet revive and flourish, she left them to the judgment of the King
of Kings. To the last she preserved a tranquil courage, which reminded
the spectators of the most heroic deaths of which they had read in Fox.
William Penn, for whom exhibitions which humane men generally avoid seem
to have had a strong attraction, hastened from Cheapside, where he had
seen Cornish hanged, to Tyburn, in order to see Elizabeth Gaunt burned.
He afterwards related that, when she calmly disposed the straw about her
in such a manner as to shorten her sufferings, all the bystanders burst
into tears. It was much noticed that, while the foulest judicial murder
which had disgraced even those times was perpetrating, a tempest burst
forth, such as had not been known since that great hurricane which had
raged round the deathbed of Oliver. The oppressed Puritans reckoned up,
not without a gloomy satisfaction the houses which had been blown down,
and the ships which had been cast away, and derived some consolation
from thinking that heaven was bearing awful testimony against the
iniquity which afflicted the earth. Since that terrible day no woman has
suffered death in England for any political offence. [470]

It was not thought that Goodenough had yet earned his pardon. The
government was bent on destroying a victim of no high rank, a surgeon in
the C