undertaken was not to be a long one. He was heard to say in a sermon, that of his personal knowledge certain things which had been offered in pilgrimage had been given to abandoned women. The priests, he affirmed, 'take away the offerings, and hang them about their women's necks; and after that they take them off the women, if they please them not, and hang them again upon the images.'[1] This was Bilney's heresy, or formed the ground of his arrest; he was orthodox on the mass, and also on the power of the keys; but the secrets of the sacred order were not to be betrayed with impunity. He was seized, and hurried before the Bishop of Norwich; and being found heterodox on the Papacy and the mediation of the saints, by the Bishop of Norwich he was sent to the stake.
Another instance of recovered courage, and of martyrdom consequent upon it, is that of James Bainham, a barrister of the Middle Temple. This story is noticeable from a very curious circumstance connected with it.
Bainham had challenged suspicion by marrying the widow of Simon Fish, the author of the famous Beggars' Petition, who had died in 1528; and, soon after his marriage, was challenged to give an account of his faith. He was charged with denying transubstantiation, with questioning the value of the confessional, and the power of the keys; and the absence of authoritative Protestant dogma had left his mind free to expand to a yet larger belief. He had ventured to assert, that 'if a Turk, a
- ↑ Foxe, vol. iv. p. 649.
