“Smite him upon the mouth; and take him away!” roared Cole.
We would presently see where he was chained to the stake and helped tear off his upper garments, as fearing he might again grow cowardly before the burning began. From a different motive,—namely, the dread that his bald head and silvery beard might move the people to rescue, the Lord Overseer of the butchery ordered the firemen to make haste. “The unworthy hand” was burned first. His heart was left whole in the ashes.
“That was the Oxford spirit, three hundred and twenty years ago!” mused Caput, aloud. “Within fifty years, John Henry Newman,—now a Cardinal—was incumbent of St Mary’s.”
“Yes, sir,” responded the pew-opener (with a bonnet on,) who showed the church. “He was one of the first Puseyites.”
“I know!” turning again toward the site of the old pulpit.
A small square of marble, no bigger than a tile, let into the chancel floor, records that in a vault beneath lies “Amy Robsart, first wife of Lord Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester.” Her remains were brought hither from Cumnor Hall, which was but three miles from Oxford, and decently interred in a brick grave under the church. Other monument than this insignificant morsel of stone she has none.
The Martyrs’ Memorial is a handsome Gothic structure of magnesian limestone, hexagonal and three-storied, rising into a pinnacle surmounted by a cross. It is in a conspicuous quarter of the city, in the centre of an open square. In arched niches, facing different ways, are Cranmer, in his prelatical robes, Ridley, and Latimer.
“This place hath long groaned for me!” said Latimer, passing through Smithfield, on his way to the tower after his arrest.
But they brought him to Oxford to die.
We checked the carriage and alighted opposite Balliol College. The street is closely built up on both sides, and in the middle, upon one of the paving-stones, is cut a deep cross. This is the true Martyrs’ Memorial. There, Ridley and Latimer “lighted such a candle by the grace of God as shall never be put out.” The much-abused phrase, “baptism of fire,” grows sublime when we read that Latimer was “seen to make motions with his hands as if washing them in the flames, and to stroke his aged face with them.”