Page:The Life of Sir Thomas More (William Roper, ed by Samuel Singer).djvu/34

 who think that even by killing their fellow creatures they do God service. This was another thing that was laid to Sir Thomas's charge. He tells us himselfe that it was said of him that whilst he was Chancellour he used to examine the protestants with torments, causing them to be bounden to a tree in his garden and there petiously beaten. But Sir Thomas solemnly declared, of very great trouthe that 'albeit for a great robbery, or an heighnous murder or sacrilege in a churche wyth carieng awaye the pixe with the blessed sacramente, or villinously casting it out, he caused sometyme suche thinges to be done by some officers of the Marshalsye, or of some other prisons.—He never did els cause any suche thinge to be done to any of all the blessed brethren in all his life, except only the child before mentioned, and another who was mad and disturbed good people in the divine service.—That of all that ever came in his hand for heresye, as helpe him God, saving the sure keeping of them, els had never any of them any strype or stroake given them so muche as a fylyppe on the forehead.'

His friend Erasmus said of him, that he hated the seditious tenets with which the world was then miserably disturbed: that this he no way dissembled, nor desired should be a secret. Yet this was a sufficient argument of a certain excellent clemency, that whilst he was Chancellor no one was put to death for his disapproved opinions. In a letter of his to Erasmus Sir Thomas very freely owns, that he so far hated that sort of men called hereticks, that unless they repented he would be as troublesome to them as