VI., but has made the poor armourer confess his treasons in his dying moments; for in the time in which this custom prevailed, it never was even suspected but that guilt must have been the portion of the vanquished.  When people of rank fought with sword and lance, plebeian combatants were only allowed a pole, armed with a heavy sand-bag, with which they were to decide their guilt or innocence.  In Smithfield were also held our autos-de-fee; but to the credit of our English monarchs, none were ever known to attend the ceremony.  Even Philip II. of Spain never honoured any, of the many which were celebrated by permission of his gentle queen, with his presence, notwithstanding he could behold the roasting of his own subjects with infinite self-applause and sang-froid.  The stone marks the spot, in this area, on which those cruel exhibitions were executed.  Here our martyr Latimer preached patience to friar Forest, agonizing under the torture of a slow fire, for denying the king’s supremacy; and to this place our martyr Cranmer compelled the amiable Edward, by forcing his reluctant hand to the warrant, to send Joan Bocher, a silly woman, to the stake.  Yet Latimer never thought of his own conduct in his last moments; nor did Cranmer thrust his hand into the fire for a real crime, but for one which was venial, through the frailty of human nature.  Our gracious Elizabeth could likewise burn people for religion.  Two Dutchmen, Anabaptists, suffered in this place in 1675, and died, as Holinshed sagely remarks, with “roring and crieing.”  But let me say, (says Pennant,) that this was the only instance we have of her exerting the blessed prerogative of the writ De Haeretico comburendo.  Her highness preferred the halter; her sullen sister faggot and fire.  Not that we will deny but Elizabeth made a very free use of the terrible act of her 27th year.  One hundred and sixty-eight suffered in her reign, at London, York, in Lancashire, and several other parts of the kingdom, convicted of being priests, of harbouring priests, or of becoming converts.  But still there is a balance of 109 against us in the article persecution, and that by the agonizing death of fire; for the smallest number estimated to have suffered under the savage Mary, amounts, in her short reign, to 277.  The last person who suffered at the stake in England was Bartholomew Logatt, who was burnt here in 1611, as a blasphemous heretic, according to the sentence pronounced by John King, bishop of London.  The bishop consigned him to the secular of our monarch James, who took care to give the sentence full effect.  This place, as well as Tybourn, was called The Elms, and used for the execution of malefactors even before the year 1219.  In the year 1530, there was a most severe and singular punishment inflicted here on one John Roose, a cook, who had poisoned 17 persons of the Bishop of Rochester’s family, two of whom died, and