‘About this time (says Fuller) a Spanish Arian being condemned to die, was, notwithstanding, suffered to linger on his life in Newgate, where he ended the same. Indeed, such burning of heretics much startled common people, pitying all in pain, and prone to asperse justice itself with cruelty, because of the novelty and hideousness of the punishment. Wherefore King James politicly preferred that heretics hereafter, though condemned, should silently and privately waste themselves away in the prison, rather than to grace them and amuse others with the solemnity of a public execution, which in popular judgments usurped the honour of a persecution.’1
We say nothing of the spirit of this passage, or of the motive ascribed in it to the pattern of politic wisdom who adopted this new mode of dealing with heretics;—it is however certain, that, from whatever cause, Legatt and Wightman were the last on whom the atrocious and horrible sentence of burning was actually carried into execution in England, though the writ ‘de haeretico comburendo’ continued to disgrace the English law till the year 1676.
Thus it appears that, throughout the whole of the first century after the Reformation, all that can now be collected of the history in this country of what we consider as the pure and simple doctrine of the gospel consists of a series of acts
