Clerical Sufferers.

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on the scaffold none died more tranquilly than Hewer, for King Charles, or than Paul, at Tyburn, for King James. In the foreground of Churchmen who have suffered stand the bishops; and how they entertained fate with decency will be briefly shown in a few succeeding pages.

AXE AND CROSIER.

Four English prelates, five have been murdered

OF

by mobs; eight have been execution of a judicial sentence. lates who thus suffered, five were

put to death in Of the eight preburnt in the reign, and with the sanction of Queen Mary Tudor. The

first prelate who met death on the scaffold under legal process was Scrope, Archbishop of York,

A.D. 1405.

Previous thereto we had murdered two Archbishops of Canterbury, and a Bishop of Exeter-à Becket, in 1170; Stapleton, of Exeter, in 1326, and Archbishop Sudbury, in 1381. The next to suffer was Scrope, in 1405. Murder in the street succeeded to this beheading on the scaffold. Molines, of Chichester, and Ayscough, of Salisbury, were massacred in 1450. Episcopacy suffered no further violence till 1535, when Fisher of Rochester was judicially beheaded. To him followed the five, of whom Queen Mary has made martyrs, whose names will live for ever-Ferrar, of St. David's, Hooper, Cranmer, Latimer, and Ridley. Canterbury, which furnished the first sufferer in

Becket, furnished the last in Laud, who was beheaded in 1645.

In four and three quarter centuries, England had thus disposed of thirteen of her Fathers in God. It was from the Court that the people got the example of murdering their prelates; and for one slain by suggestion of the king, we have four slaughtered by the blind fury of the people. The causes of the violent deaths of three prelates were various. A Becket, when a layman, had held that cleric and laic were as one in the eye of the law, and that the king of England was supreme in his own realm. But à Becket, when a dignified ecclesiastic, maintained that the priest was not subject to the same law as the layman; that the papal power was higher than the royal prerogative; and that the Church was, in fact, independent of the State. He was the champion of a free Church, that is a Church free to execute in England any decree from Rome, in despite of all English law to the contrary.

dignified as the He was a huge

A Becket's death was not so romance of history has made it. feeder, a rather deep drinker, unclean in his habits, and a round swearer. "By God's eyes !" was one of his fierce expletives. He was fearless, and therefore bore himself courageously against his little mob of knightly assailants in Canterbury cathedral. But he roared as loudly, bawled as coarsely, as they; and when one of them, Grimes, looked at his body where

it lay, stripped of its gorgeous robes, and with nothing on but the hair shirt, from beneath which countless vermin were creeping, the confederate in murder could not help remarking, that by slaying the archbishop, à Becket had been saved from a condition of greater suffering, which in some degree accounted for his being irritated into blasphemy.

This St. Thomas's day (29th December) was a great day in England down to the Reformation. Subsequently, it was celebrated by English Romanists abroad. Evelyn was at Rome on that day, in 1645. He shows in his diary how singularly a day so solemn was observed: "We were invited by the English Jesuits to dinner, being their great feast of Thomas (à Becket) of Canterbury. We dined in their common refectory, and afterwards saw an Italian comedy acted by their alumni before the Cardinals!"

Walter Stapleton, Bishop of Exeter, was more heroic in his death (which occurred in 1326) than the archbishop, above a century and a half earlier. He perished at the hands of indignant cockneys, who had some hankering after his goods and chattels as well as a desire to sacrifice him to their wrath. He had been of the faction of Isabella and her son Edward, against the king, Edward II.; but he had changed sides, and as the London mob took side with the queen and her son, they formed themselves into a league, and murdered better men than themselves by way of promoting reform.

This scum of London began their

noble work by sacking the Bishop's inn. These early reformers carried off jewelry, gold and silver vases, all the valuables, in short, on which they could lay their felonious hands, and, not finding the bishop, they set fire to his inn. Stapleton was out riding, beyond Finsbury fields, and some good friends went forth to meet and warn him. The fine old fellow would not turn his horse's head; he rode at a walking pace, quietly into the city, and on and on through a howling crowd till he reached the north gate of St. Paul's. There the scum of the London league formed up and overwhelmed him. The rascally assassins-a thousand to one,―smote the prelate, tugged at his clothes, tore him from his steed, trampled him on the ground, and then carried him exultingly into Cheapside. There the valiant souls stripped him naked, and in a rough way cut off his head. Two faithful servants who had not deserted their master suffered with him. Cockney rage was not satiated with this. The head of the prelate was stuck on a pole for London rascalry to gloat upon, and his body was cast into a dishonoured grave. When the tragedy was over, the butchers would on no account allow that they sanctioned violence, or encouraged assassination. Justice, of course, with them, was a sacred duty; and had not the bishop, when he was Lord Treasurer, infringed the liberties of the city by allowing the itinerant justices to sit in London ? These justices had sharply suppressed a good many evil-doers, and