Smithfield, he looked round it, and said, "This
is a place that hath long groaned for me." For
he knew well, what kind of bonfires would soon
be burning. Nor was the knowlege confined
to him. The prisons were fast filled with
the chief Protestants, who were there left
rotting in darkness, hunger, dirt, and separation
from their friends; many, who had time
left them for escape, fled from the kingdom;
and the dullest of the people began, now, to
see what was coming.

It came on fast. A Parliament was got
together, not without strong suspicion of
unfairness, and they annulled the divorce,
formerly pronounced by Cranmer between
the Queen's mother and King Henry the
Eighth, and unmade all the laws on the
subject of religion that had been made in the
last King Edward's reign. They began their
proceedings in violation of the law, by having
the old mass said before them in Latin, and
by turning out a bishop who would not kneel
down. They also declared guilty of treason
Lady Jane Grey, for aspiring to the Crown,
her husband, for being her husband, and
Cranmer for not believing in the mass
aforesaid. They then prayed the Queen
graciously to choose a husband for herself, as
soon as might be.

Now, the question who should be the
Queen's husband had given rise to a great
deal of discussion, and to several contending
parties. Some said Cardinal Pole was the
man—but the Queen was of opinion that he
was not the man, being too old and too much
of a student. Others said that the gallant
young COURTENAY, whom the Queen had
made Earl of Devonshire, was the man—and
the Queen thought so too, for a while, but
she changed her mind. At last it appeared
that PHILIP, PRINCE OF SPAIN, was
certainly the man—though certainly not the
people's man, for they detested the idea of
such a marriage from the beginning to the
end, and murmured that the Spaniard would
establish in England, by the aid of foreign
soldiers, the worst abuses of the Popish
religion, and even the terrible Inquisition
itself.

These discontents gave rise to a conspiracy
for marrying young Courtenay to the Princess
Elizabeth, and setting them up, with popular
tumults all over the kingdom, against the
Queen. This was discovered in time by
Gardiner; but in Kent, the old bold county,
the people rose in their old bold way. SIR
THOMAS WYAT, a man of great daring, was
their leader. He raised his standard at
Maidstone, marched on to Rochester,
established himself in the old castle there, and
prepared to hold out against the Duke of
Norfolk, who came against him with a part
of the Queen's guards and a body of five
hundred London men. The London men,
however, were all for Elizabeth, and not at
all for Mary. They declared, under the
castle walls, for Wyat; the Duke retreated;
and Wyat came on to Deptford, at the head
of fifteen thousand men.

But these, in their turn, fell away. When
he came to Southwark, there were only two
thousand left. Not dismayed by finding the
London citizens in arms, and the guns at the
Tower ready to oppose his crossing the river
there, Wyat led them off to Kingston-upon-
Thames, intending to cross the bridge that
he knew to be in that place, and so to work
his way round to Ludgate, one of the old gates
of the City. He found the bridge broken down,
but mended it, and came across, and bravely
fought his way up Fleet Street to Ludgate
Hill. Finding the gate closed against him,
he fought his way back again, sword in hand,
to Temple Bar. Here, being overpowered,
he surrendered himself, and three or four
hundred of his men were taken, besides a
hundred killed. Wyat, in a moment of weakness
(and perhaps of torture) was afterwards
made to accuse the Princess Elizabeth as his
accomplice to some very small extent. But his
manhood soon returned to him, and he refused
to save his life by making any more false
confessions. He was quartered and distributed
in the usual brutal way, and from fifty to a
hundred of his followers were hanged. The
rest were led out, with halters round their
necks, to be pardoned, and to make a parade
of crying out, "God save Queen Mary!"

In the danger of this rebellion, the Queen
showed herself to be a woman of courage
and spirit. She disdained to retreat to any
place of safety, and went down to the Guildhall,
sceptre in hand, and made a gallant
speech to the Lord Mayor and citizens,
But on the day after Wyat's defeat, she did
the most cruel act, even of her cruel reign, in
signing the warrant for the execution of Lady
Jane Grey.

They tried to persuade Lady Jane to accept
the unreformed religion, but she steadily
refused. On the morning when she was to die, she
saw from her window the bleeding and headless
body of her husband, brought back in a cart
from the scaffold on Tower Hill where he had
laid down his life. But, as she had declined
to see him before his execution, lest she
should be overpowered and not make a good
end, so, she even now showed a constancy and
calmness that will never be forgotten. She
came up to the scaffold with a firm step and
a quiet face, and addressed the bystanders in
a steady voice. They were not numerous, for
she was too young, too innocent and fair, to
be murdered before the people on Tower Hill,
as her husband had just been: so, the place of
her execution was within the Tower itself.
She said that she had done an unlawful act
in taking what was Queen Mary's right, but
that she had done so with no bad intent,
and that she died a humble Christian. She
begged the executioner to despatch her
quickly, and she asked him "Will you take
my head off before I lay me down?" He
answered, "No, Madam," and then she was