the names of other barristers with whom he was suspected to have held intercourse.  He refused; and in consequence his wife was imprisoned, and he himself was racked in the Tower by order of Sir Thomas More.  Enfeebled by suffering, he was then brought before Stokesley, and terrified by the cold merciless eyes of his judge, he gave way, not about his friends, but about himself:  he abjured, and was dismissed heartbroken.  This was on the seventeenth of February.  He was only able to endure his wretchedness for a month.  At the end of it, he appeared at a secret meeting of the Christian Brothers, in “a warehouse in Bow Lane,” where he asked forgiveness of God and all the world for what he had done; and then went out to take again upon his shoulders the heavy burden of the cross.

The following Sunday, at the church of St. Augustine, he rose in his seat with the fatal English Testament in his hand, and “declared openly, before all the people, with weeping tears, that he had denied God,” praying them all to forgive him, and beware of his weakness; “for if I should not return to the truth,” he said, “this Word of God would damn me, body and soul, at the day of judgment.”  And then he prayed “everybody rather to die than to do as he did, for he would not feel such a hell again as he did feel for all the world’s good."[551]

Of course but one event was to be looked for; he knew it, and himself wrote to the bishop, telling him what he had done.  No mercy was possible:  he looked for none, and he found none.

Yet perhaps he found what the wise authorities thought to be some act of mercy.  They could not grant him pardon in this world upon any terms; but they would not kill him till they had made an effort for his soul.  He was taken to the Bishop of London’s coal cellar at Fulham, the favourite episcopal penance chamber, where he was ironed and put in the stocks; and there was left for many days, in the chill March weather, to bethink himself.  This failing to work conviction, he was carried to Sir Thomas More’s house at Chelsea, where for two nights he was chained to a post and whipped; thence, again, he was taken back to Fulham for another week of torture; and finally to the Tower, for a further fortnight, again with ineffectual whippings.

The demands of charity were thus satisfied.  The pious bishop and the learned chancellor had exhausted their means of conversion; they had discharged their consciences; and the law was allowed to take its course.  The prisoner was brought to trial on the 20th of April, as a relapsed heretic.  Sentence followed; and on the last of the month the drama closed in the usual manner at Smithfield.  Before the fire was lighted Bainham made a farewell address to the people, laying his death expressly to More, whom he called his accuser and his judge.[552]