“Roger left her and the child in Lancashire,” said he; “where, if she will take mine avisement, she will remain.”
Mr Holland was examined before Bishop Bonner, Lord Strange being present, with others of his Lancashire kinsmen. Austin reported that “he confessed Christ right nobly, and kept up the Bishop in a corner by his wise and gentle learning—such as I had not thought had been in him:” and at last, after much discussion, the Bishop lost his patience (a commodity of which he never carried much to market), called Mr Holland a blasphemous heretic, and sentenced him to be burned.
Mr Holland replied, as the gaoler was about to remove him,—“My Lord, I beseech you, suffer me to speak two words.”
“Nay!” cried he, “I will not hear thee: have him away!”
Lord Strange interfered, and begged that his cousin might be heard.
“Speak?” growled Bonner, “what hast thou to say?”
Mr Holland answered, “Even now I told you that your authority was from God, and by His sufferance; and now I tell you, God hath heard the prayer of His servants, which hath been poured forth with tears for His afflicted saints, whom you daily persecute, as now you do us. But this I dare be bold in God to say (by whose Spirit I am moved), that God will shorten your hand of cruelty, that for a time you shall not molest His Church. And this you shall in a short time well perceive, my dear brethren, to be most true. For after this day, in this place, there shall not be any by him put to the trial of fire and faggot.”
The Bishop replied that “he should yet live to burn, yea, and he would burn, for all this prattling:” and so went his way, and Mr Holland was taken back to Newgate.
But the Bishop, like many another, laid his plans without reference to Him who sat above the water-floods. Roger Holland had an unction from the Holy One, and his prescience was true. The commandment was gone forth from the presence of the King—“Hitherto shalt thou come, and no further.” After that once, by Bonner, and in Smithfield, there was never another “trial of fire and faggot.”
Yet for that once, the Devil and Edmund Bonner had their way. Waiting for Roger Holland were the white robe and the martyr’s palm; and with his name the muster-roll of soldiers slain in the great battle of England was closed in Heaven.