Page:History of England (Froude) Vol 5.djvu/507

1555.] income. In the hall of his palace at Gloucester a profuse hospitality was offered daily to those who were most in need of it. The poor of the city were invited by relays to solid meat dinners, and the Bishop with the courtesy of a gentleman dined with them, and treated them with the same respect as if they had been the highest in the land. He was one of the first persons arrested after Mary's accession, and the cross of persecution at once happily made his peace with Ridley. In an affectionate interchange of letters, the two confessors exhorted each other to constancy in the end which both foresaw, determining 'if they could not overthrow, at least to shake, those high altitudes' of spiritual tyranny. The Fleet prison had now been Hooper's house for eighteen, months. At first, on payment of heavy fees to the warden, he had lived in some degree of comfort; but as soon as his deprivation was declared, Gardiner ordered that he should be confined in one of the common prisoners' wards; where 'with a wicked man and a wicked woman' for his companions, with a bed of straw and a rotten counterpane, the prison sink on one side of his cell and Fleet ditch on the other, he waited till it would please Parliament to permit the dignitaries of the Church to murder him.

These were the two persons with whom the Marian persecution opened. On their appearance in the court,