“I can’t recollect the year; but I remember the circumstance well.  It was about sixty-five years ago.  I was there alone with the crowd.  I sat on my father’s shoulder, and saw them bring her and the marine to the field.  They fixed her neck by a rope to the stake, and then set fire to the faggots, and burnt her.”

She was probably strangled by this rope.

One Query which I would ask is, Was this execution at Winchester, in 1783 (or thereabouts), the last instance in England? and another is, Are you aware of any other instance in the latter part of the last century?

E.S.S.W.

* * * * *

CORNELIS DREBBEL.

In a very curious little book, entitled Kronycke van Alemaer, and published in that town anno 1645, I read the following particulars about Cornelis Drebbel, a native of the same city.

Being justly renowned as a natural philosopher, and having made great progress in mechanics,{7} our Drebbel was named tutor of the young Prince of Austria, by the emperor Ferdinandus II.; an office which he fulfilled so well, that he was afterwards chosen councillor to his Majesty, and honoured with a rich pension for past services.  But, alas! in the year 1620, Prague, the place he dwelt in, was taken by Frederick, then king of Bohemia, several members of the imperial council were imprisoned, and some of them even put to death.

Bereft of every thing he possessed, a prisoner as well as the others, poor Drebbel would perhaps have undergone the same lot if the High Mighty States of the United Provinces had not sent a message to the King of England, asking him to interfere in their countryman’s favour.  They succeeded in their benevolent request for his English Majesty obtained at last from his son-in-law, the Dutch philosopher’s liberation, who (I don’t exaggerate) was made a present of to the British king; maybe as a sort of lion, which the king of Morocco had never yet thought of bestowing upon the monarch as a regal offering.

Drebbel, however, did not forget how much he owed to the intercession of King James, and, to show his gratitude, presented him with an object of very peculiar make.  I will try to give you an exact version of its not very clear description in the Dutch book.

“A glass or crystal globe, wherein he blew or made a perpetual motion by the power of the four elements.  For every thing which (by the force of the elements) passes, in a year, on the surface of the earth (sic!) could be seen to pass in this cylindrical wonder in the shorter lapse of twenty-four hours.  Thus were marked by it, all years, months, days, hours; the course of the sun, moon, planets, and stars, &c.  It made you understand what cold is, what the cause of the primum mobile, what the first principle of the sun, how it moves the firmament, all stars, the moon, the sea, the surface of the earth, what occasions the ebb, flood, thunder, lightning, rain, wind, and how all things wax and multiply, &c.,—­as every one can be informed of by Drebbel’s own works; we refer the curious to his book, entitled Eeuwige Beweginghe (Perpetual Motion).”

Can this instrument have been a kind of Orrery?