The fourth of August … was arraigned at Guild hal of London Iohn Felton, for hanging a bull at the gate of the bishop of Londons palace, and also two young men, for coyning and clipping of coine, who all were found guilty of high treason, and had iudgment to be drawne, hanged and quartered.
The eight of August, Iohn Felton was drawne from Newgate into Paules Churchyeard, and there hanged on a gallowes new set vp that morning before the Bishoppes palace gate, and being cut downe aliue, he was bowelled and quartered. After this time the same morning the sherifs returned to Newgate, and so to Tiborne with two young men which were executed for coyning and clipping as is aforesaid (Stow, pp. 666-7).
Here we have the quarrel between the Pope and Elizabeth come to a head, with dreadful results to English Catholics—results extending in an aggravated form over centuries.
In “Pilgrim’s Progress” Bunyan describes the Pope in his cave, alive, indeed, but “by reason of age, and also of the many shrewd brushes that he met with in his younger days, grown so crazy and stiff in his joints, that he can now do little more than sit in his cave’s mouth, grinning at pilgrims as they go by, and biting his nails because he cannot come at them.”
A sense of humour, or even a sense of proportion, might have counselled to laugh at this impotent railing. But there was the temptation, always present to governments, to appeal to the ignorance and fanaticism of the mass. And behind and above all there was the question of the abbey lands:—
“The thief doth fear each bush an officer.”
So for the next hundred years it became the most pressing duty of governments to tear out the bowels of men who acknowledged the Pope as spiritual father; and when governments became slack in the work, Parliament immediately set up a howl for blood.
1571. The execution of Dr. John Story is one of the horrors of Tyburn: it is further memorable from the fact that, as we have seen (p. 64), the triangular gallows, destined to become famous as the Triple Tree, first came into use on this occasion.
Dr. Story was a bitter persecutor under Mary.
There is no more difficult question than that of determining how far we must condemn, how far we may absolve those, on either side, who used their power to inflict punishments on men who differed from them in religion. In his “Prince” Machiavelli divides men of the ruling class into three categories. There is, in the first place, the man who understands of himself; next comes he who understands when a thing is shown to him; last comes he who can neither generate a new idea, nor comprehend it when put before him. The first, he says, is most excellent; the second excellent; the third useless. But incapacity to generate new ideas, inability to assimilate them, are things not criminal. The mass of men will always be found in the third category. Dr. Story was not one of those rare spirits who rise above the ideas current in their time.