We checked the carriage and alighted opposite Balliol College. The street is closely built up on both sides, and in the middle, upon one of the paving-stones, is cut a deep cross. This is the true Martyrs’ Memorial. There, Ridley and Latimer “lighted such a candle by the grace of GOD as shall never be put out.” The much-abused phrase, “baptism of fire,” grows sublime when we read that Latimer was “seen to make motions with his hands as if washing them in the flames, and to stroke his aged face with them.”
Said an American clergyman—and inferentially, a defender of the Faith—“I have no sympathy with those old martyrs. The most charitable of us must confess that they were frightfully and disgustingly _obstinate_!”
We may forgive them for failing to win the approbation of latter-day sentimentalists when we reflect that but for this, their unamiable idiosyncrasy, neither Protestant England nor Protestant America would to-day exist, even in name. Not very long since, excavations under the sidewalk nearest to the cross-mark in this street revealed the existence here—as a similar accident had in front of St. Bartholomew-the-Great, in London—of a thick stratum of ashes. “Human ashes mixed with wood,” says the report of the discovery printed by an Antiquarian Society—“establishing beyond question that this was where the public burnings were held.” The inhumanity of sweeping such ashes into a heap by the wayside, as one might pile the refuse of a smelting-furnace, is almost as revolting to most people as the disgusting obstinacy of the consumed heretics. We saw another official record, of an earlier date, relative to this locality,—the bills sent by the Sheriff of Oxford to the Queen, after two “public burnings.” One headed—“_To burn Latimer and Ridley_” has seven items, including “wood-fagots, furze-fagots, chains, and staples,” accumulating into a total of £1, 5s. 9d. “_To burn Cranmer_” was a cheaper operation. “Furze and wood-fagots,” the carriage of these, and “2 laborers,” cost but “12s. 8d.” Ridley and Latimer suffered for their obstinacy, October 16, 1555; Cranmer in March of the next year.
The walks and drives in and about Oxford are exceedingly beautiful. The “Broad Walk,” in Christ Church Meadows, deserves the eulogiums lavished upon it by tongue and pen. The interlacing tracery of the elms, arched above the smooth, wide avenue; the glimpses to right and left of “sweet fields in living green;” clumps of superb oaks and pretty “pleasances;” the dark-gray towers, domes and spires of the city, and the ivied walls of private and public gardens; the Isis winding beneath willows and between meadows, and dotted, although it was the long vacation, with gliding boats,—all this, viewed in the clear, tender light of the “Queen’s weather” that still followed us on our journeyings, made up a picture we shall carry with us while memory holds dear and pleasant things.