Note (Back to Main Text) — Chapter V · CALAIS.

The general suffering was aggravated by a likelihood of famine. The harvest of 1555 had failed, and bread, with all other articles of food, was daily rising. The conspiracy exasperated the persecution, which was degenerating into wholesale atrocity. On the 23rd of April, six men were burnt at Smithfield; on the 28th, six more were burnt at Colchester; on the 15th of May, an old lame man and a blind man were burnt at Stratford-le-Bow. In the same month three women suffered at Smithfield, and a blind boy was burnt at Gloucester. In Guernsey, a mother and her two daughters were brought to the stake. One of the latter, a married woman with child, was delivered in the midst of her torments, and the infant just rescued was tossed back into the flames.[571] Reason, humanity, even common prudence, were cast to the winds. On the 27th of June, thirteen unfortunates, eleven men and two women, were destroyed together at Stratford-le-Bow, in the presence of twenty thousand people.[572] A schoolmaster, in Norfolk, in July read an inflammatory proclamation in a church. He and three others were instantly hanged. Ferocity in the government and lawlessness in the people went hand in hand. Along the river bank stood rows of gibbets, with bodies of pirates swinging from them in the wind. In the autumn, sixty men were sentenced to be hanged together, for what crime is unknown, at Oxford;[573] and as a symbol at head-quarters of the system of the administration, four corpses of thieves hung as a spectacle of terror before the very gates of St. James's Palace.[574]