Much surprised, the governor pleaded hard for time to lay the whole case again before the Crown, and to implore mercy for the prisoners, whose execution he said “would shock all Devon.”
But Sir John was armed with full authority from the Crown, and hinting to the governor, that the King would not be best pleased to hear of his backwardness in the royal cause, and his love for traitors, so frightened that worthy functionary on his own account, that no further opposition was made, and orders were given to erect the scaffold.
Meanwhile every indulgence was given to the prisoners, whose fate many pitied—even in that stony-hearted gaol, the Castle of Rougemont. A priest was admitted to their cells, that very priest who had so nearly stumbled upon the secret of Cuthbert’s birth, and early in the morning he provided all that was necessary for the celebration of Mass, whereat Father Ambrose, for the last time as he supposed, with tears of devotion, officiated; and the three received the Holy Communion together.
Fortified by this heavenly food, they scarcely noticed the heavy boom of the cathedral bell, which told the city and the country around that two souls were about to be forcibly divorced from their bodies, and sent to appear before the judgment seat on High.
Boom! boom! The deep solemn sound penetrated each court and alley of the ancient city, and struck awe to the hearts even of the most hardened; boom! boom! the swelling tones startled the boatmen on the Exe, awoke the echoes of the hills around the fair city of the west, nay reached the rich purple moorland, and startled the children who played amongst the heather or gathered whortle-berries.
And beneath the two grand old towers in front of the great west door of the historical fane, was erected that disgrace to the civilization of our forefathers, the scaffold with its gibbet and quartering block, its hideous butchering apparatus, in the very cathedral yard.
What a multitude had now assembled! men, women, boys, girls; the noble and the simple, the burgher and the vagrant; there were many stalwart country men too from Dartmoor, each wearing a sprig of heather in his hat, that his companions might recognise him.
“Here they come!”
The bell booms out faster and faster, the multitude stretch their necks to gaze and catch the first glimpse of the sufferers. Oh, what a strange, morbid interest clings to those about to die; the very fact that that body framed by God as His noblest work, and sanctified by being limb for limb the same as the Incarnate Son took as His own, the very fact that that body is to be so ruthlessly desecrated, causes this awful excitement, this panting, breathless interest, in the poor victims.