Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 4.djvu/27

1543.] Filmer, and John Marbeck—while Sir Philip Hoby, Sir Thomas Garden, and other gentlemen belonging to the privy chamber, were accused of supporting and encouraging them.

Peerson's crime was that, two years before, he had said that 'like as Christ was hanged between two thieves, even so, when the priest is at mass and lifteth Him up over his head, then He hangeth between two thieves, except the priest preach the word of God truly.'

Filmer was charged with having called the sacrament of the altar a similitude. 'If it was God,' he had said, 'then in his lifetime he had eaten twenty Gods.'

Testwood had told a priest, when lifting up the Host, to take care he did not let Him fall.

Marbeck, the most obnoxious of the four, had made a Concordance of the Bible.

The accusations were probably true, although the evidence was obtained with the help of spies and traitors. It sufficed for its purpose; the prisoners were convicted, and were sentenced, in the ordinary form, to be burned. On the morning on which they were to suffer, a pardon, through private interference, was obtained for Marbeck who, in fact, had broken no law, just or unjust, and whose death would have been a murder, even technically. The other three satisfied the orthodoxy of the Bishop of Winchester by perishing on the meadow in front of Windsor Castle.

But if the minds of men had been slow to change, their hearts had changed in spite of themselves. The time was gone when either king or nation could look