“Ay, poor Agnes! It is death by fire.”
“And in the meantime?—”
“They lie in Newgate. He shall be taken to Colchester to suffer, being he was there born, the 28th of this March.”
“Then he dieth on the 29th?”
“E’en so.”
He was to die on the very day they had fixed for their marriage. To what had Agnes been looking forward so joyfully during those past weary months?
When the prisoners had reappeared before Bonner in the afternoon, they were asked, for the last time, if they would recant their heresy.
“We are not heretics,” they replied; “the contrary is heresy.”
Then, on these six contumacious men, was passed in due form the sentence of death.
Each was to suffer at the place of his birth: Thomas Tomkins in Smithfield, on the 16th of March; William Hunter, the poor apprentice-boy, at Brentford, on the twenty-sixth; William Pygot at Braintree, and Stephen Knight at Maldon, on the twenty-eighth.