en he was bishop of
Gloucester. This tree, which had no leaves then, it being February, was
filled with people; and the priests of Gloucester College were looking
complacently on from a window, and there was a great concourse of
spectators in every spot from which a glimpse of the dreadful sight could
be beheld. When the old man kneeled down on the small platform at the
foot of the stake, and prayed aloud, the nearest people were observed to
be so attentive to his prayers that they were ordered to stand farther
back; for it did not suit the Romish Church to have those Protestant
words heard. His prayers concluded, he went up to the stake and was
stripped to his shirt, and chained ready for the fire. One of his guards
had such compassion on him that, to shorten his agonies, he tied some
packets of gunpowder about him. Then they heaped up wood and straw and
reeds, and set them all alight. But, unhappily, the wood was green and
damp, and there was a wind blowing that blew what flame there was, away.
Thus, through three-quarters of an hour, the good old man was scorched
and roasted and smoked, as the fire rose and sank; and all that time they
saw him, as he burned, moving his lips in prayer, and beating his breast
with one hand, even after the other was burnt away and had fallen off.

Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer, were taken to Oxford to dispute with a
commission of priests and doctors about the mass. They were shamefully
treated; and it is recorded that the Oxford scholars hissed and howled
and groaned, and misconducted themselves in an anything but a scholarly
way. The prisoners were taken back to jail, and afterwards tried in St.
Mary's Church. They were all found guilty. On the sixteenth of the
month of October, Ridley and Latimer were brought out, to make another of
the dreadful bonfires.

The scene of the suffering of these two good Protestant men was in the
City ditch, near Baliol College. On coming to the dreadful spot, they
kissed the stakes, and then embraced each other. And then a learned
doctor got up into a pulpit which was placed there, and preached a sermon
from the text, 'Though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity,
it profiteth me nothing.' When you think of the charity of burning men
alive, you may imagine that this learned doctor had a rather brazen face.
Ridley would have answered his sermon when it came to an end, but was not
allowed. When Latimer was stripped, it appeared tha