“And because that detestable offence, now newly practised and committed, requireth condign punishment for the same, it is ordained and enacted by authority of this present parliament that the said Richard Rouse shall be therefore boiled to death, without having any advantage of his clergy; and that from henceforth every wilful murder of any person or persons hereafter to be committed or done by means or way of poisoning, shall be reputed, deemed, and judged in the law to be high treason; and that all and every person or persons which shall hereafter be indicted and condemned by order of the law of such treason, shall not be admitted to the benefit of his or their clergy, but shall be immediately after such attainder or condemnation, committed to execution of death by boiling for the same.”

The sentence was carried into effect[301] in Smithfield, “on the tenebra Wednesday following, to the terrible example of all others.”  The spectacle of a living human being boiled to death, was really witnessed three hundred years ago by the London citizens, within the walls of that old cattle-market; an example terrible indeed, the significance of which is not easily to be exhausted.  For the poisoners of the soul there was the stake,[302] for the poisoners of the body, the boiling cauldron,—­the two most fearful punishments for the most fearful of crimes.  The stake at which the heretic suffered was an inherited institution descending through the usage of centuries; the poisoner’s cauldron was the fresh expression of the judgment of the English nation on a novel enormity; and I have called attention to it because the temper which this act exhibits is the key to all which has seemed most dark and cruel in the rough years which followed; a temper which would keep no terms with evil, or with anything which, rightly or wrongly, was believed to be evil, but dreadfully and inexorably hurried out the penalties of it.

Following the statute against poisoning, there stands “an act for the banishment out of the country of divers outlandish and vagabond people called Egyptians;"[303] and attached to it another of analogous import, “for the repression of beggars and vagabonds,” the number of whom, it was alleged, was increasing greatly throughout the country, and much crime and other inconveniences were said to have been occasioned by them.  We may regard these two measures, if we please, as a result of the energetic and reforming spirit in the parliament, which was dragging into prominence all forms of existing disorders, and devising remedies for those disorders.  But they indicate something more than this:  they point to the growth of a disturbed and restless disposition, the interruption of industry, and other symptoms of approaching social confusion; and at the same time they show us the government conscious of the momentous nature of the struggle into which it was launched; and with timely energy bracing up the sinews of the nation for its approaching trial.