We linger in the martyr's prison cell while he is writing his final protestation, conscious that it is "the last writing which is likely to proceed from" him, and "looking not to live this week to an end." After an allusion to the attractions which life had for him, to the "poor, friendless widow" and the "four poor, fatherless infants" whom he was leaving, and to the comparative lowliness and poverty of the condition in which he had lived, he says: "Sufficiency I have had, with great outward troubles; but most contented was I with my lot; and content I am, and shall be, with my undeserved and untimely death, beseeching the Lord that it be not laid to the charge of any creature in this land. For I do, from my heart, forgive all those that seek my life, as I desire to be forgiven in that day of strict account-praying for them as for my own soul, that, although upon earth we can not accord, we may yet meet in heaven unto our eternal comfort and unity. . . . And if my death can procure any quietness to the church of God, or the state, I shall rejoice. I know not to what better use it [my life] could be employed if it were reserved; and therefore in this cause I desire not to spare the same. Thus have I lived toward the Lord and my prince; and thus I mean to die, by his grace. Many such subjects I wish unto my prince, though no such reward to any of them."

Having added his request, "as earnest as possibly. I can utter the same, unto all those, both honorable and worshipful, unto whom this my last testimony may come, that her majesty may be acquainted herewith before my death-if it may be," he subscribes his name," with that heart and that hand which never devised or wrote any thing to the discredit or defamation of my sovereign, Queen Elizabeth—I take it on my death, as I hope to have a life after this. By me, John Penry."

There is no reason to think that Elizabeth ever saw that protestation, or heard of it. It was submitted to the judges, as the queen's advisers; and their comment remains in the

State Paper Office. "Penry," they said, "is not, as he pretendeth, a loyal subject, but a seditious disturber of her majesty's peaceable government. [It] appeareth many ways." Among those "many ways," they alleged "his schismatical separation from the society of the Church of England, and joining with the hypocritical and schismatical conventicles of Barrowe and Greenwood," and also "his justifying of Barrowe and Greenwood, who, suffering worthily for their seditious writings and preachings, are nevertheless represented by him as holy martyrs."

Such was English liberty under the sceptre of Elizabeth. The voluntary association of Christian men for united worship and for mutual helpfulness in the Christian life-the quiet meeting, in fields and woods, or in private apartments, for the worship of God in any form or way not prescribed by the authority of that petticoated pope who called herself "Supreme Governor of the Church of England"-in one word, Congregationalism-was "sedition," to be punished by death. Green be the memory, forever, of the men who, in that cruel age, with the gallows before them, and with the hangman's noose about their necks, asserted and obeyed a higher law. To them, under God, do we owe it that in less than thirty years from that date there began to be a New England; and that Old England itself, to-day, is free England.

Four days after trial and conviction, the prisoner was brought up and sentence of death was pronounced against him. In the ordinary course of proceeding, execution would have followed on the second or third day after the sentence. For some reason there was a day's delay, and a respite began to be hoped for. But on the fourth day (May 29-June 7), Whitgift and other lords of the queen's council affixed their names to the death-warrant, the archbishop's name being the first. At five o'clock, afternoon, the martyr was carried on a cart from his prison in Southwark to the usual place of execution for that county, at the second mile-stone on the Kent

road, near a brook which, in memory of Thomas à Becket, was called St. Thomas-a-Watering. An unexpected day and hour had been chosen for the execution, that his friends might have no opportunity of cheering him with their presence. A few persons, who had seen the gallows so suddenly prepared, were standing around. To them the martyr would have spoken; but not one word was he permitted to utter in their hearing. It was almost sunset, and the sheriff and hangman were in haste. They finished their work; and John Penry, in the thirty-fourth year of his age, having shared the ignominy of our Lord, who was hanged on a tree for sedition, went to be with Christ.1

1 Dr. Waddington's "John Penry, the Pilgrim Martyr," gives all that is known concerning Penry, and clears his memory from the charge that would make him the author of the Marprelate tracts.

CHAPTER X.

PERSECUTION AND EXILE: THE CHURCH AT SCROOBY.

1

Ar the time when Barrowe and Greenwood ended their testimony, a certain "Act to retain the queen's subjects in obedience" was passing through Parliament. On the day after their death, the bill, having been modified by Puritan influence in the Commons with the view of making it effectual against Separatists, "without peril of entrapping honest and loyal subjects," was passed into an act. By that statute, banishment from the realm and forfeiture of goods became the punishment of every Separatist who, after suffering a three-months' imprisonment, should refuse to conform. The policy of Queen Elizabeth, in her attempted supremacy over the religion of her subjects (for it was distinctively her policy), had converted the men who at first were only anti-ritualists, scrupulous about certain ecclesiastical vestments and ceremonies, into resolute Puritans, demanding a presbyterian instead of a prelatical church government over the nation. It had converted Puritans into Separatists, and now it was compelling Separatists to become Pilgrims, and preparing them to become the founders of a new nationality.

Of course the new statute was first employed against the martyr church in London-or, more properly, in Southwark, for its place of assembling was on that side of the Thames. The pastor, Francis Johnson, had already been about four months a prisoner; and the teacher, John Greenwood, had just been released from his long imprisonment by being put to death. Many of the members among them, some who had

The story of how that bill was carried through Parliament is well told by Mr. Punchard, "History of Congregationalism," iii., 193–200.

been clergymen in the Church of England, were suffering in filthy jails for their testimony in behalf of Christian liberty. Barrowe, their bold lay champion, had died on the same gallows with his friend Greenwood. The mockery of Penry's, trial, followed by the cruelty of his death, was four weeks after the passage of the act, and seems to have been arranged for the purpose of striking terror into the Separatists, by showing them that the new law under which they were to be banished had not superseded the old law under which they might be hanged at the discretion of their enemies.

A letter from Johnson, the imprisoned pastor, to Lord Burleigh (Jan. 8, 1594), has come down to us. It shows that at the date of his writing he had been about fourteen months a close prisoner in one jail, and his brother George eleven months in another. He complained that his papers and books had been seized, and that all the papers, and some of the books (though published by authority), were still detained from him. A significant statement is made concerning one of the members of that persecuted church (William Smyth, formerly a clergyman in the Church of England), who had been examined by High Commissioners at Westminster a month before. He had been, at that time, eleven months a prisoner; and, at the date of Johnson's letter, he was still in prison. That unrelenting offender against the hierarchy was so bold as to tell the High Commissioners-by way of illustrating the absurdity of “dealing with men by imprisonment and other rigorous means, in matters of religion and conscience, rather than by more Christian and fit proceedings ”—that “if he should, to please them, or to avoid trouble, submit to go to church, and to join with the public ministry of those assemblies as it now standeth, he being persuaded in conscience that it was utterly unlawful," his so doing would be mere dissimulation and hypocrisy; to which the reply was, "Come to the church, and obey the queen's laws, and be a dissembler, be a hypocrite or a devil, if thou wilt."