Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 5.djvu/266

246 had followed war, famine, rebellion, misery, tokens all of them of God's displeasure. Therefore, as they loved their country, as they valued their souls, he implored his hearers to turn, all of them, and turn at once, to the Church which they had left; in which Church he, from the bottom of his heart, avowed his own steadfast belief. For himself he called them all to witness that he died in the one true Catholic faith; to which, if he had been brought sooner, he would not have been in his present calamity.

He then knelt; 'I beseech you all,' he said again, 'to believe that I die in the Catholic faith.' He repeated the Miserere psalm, the psalm De Profundis, and the Paternoster. The executioner, as usual, begged his pardon. 'I have deserved a thousand deaths,' he muttered. He made the sign of the cross upon the sawdust, and kissed it, then laid down his head, and perished.

The shame of the apostasy shook down the frail edifice of the Protestant constitution, to be raised again in suffering, as the first foundations of it had been laid, by purer hands and nobler spirits. In his better years