Each martyrdom, therefore, was equivalent to a hundred sermons against Popery; and men either avoided such horrid spectacles, or returned from them full of a violent, though secret, indignation against the persecutors.

Repeated orders were sent from the council to quicken the diligence of the magistrates in searching out heretics; and in some places the gentry were constrained to countenance by their presence those barbarous executions.

These acts of violence tended only to render the Spanish government daily more odious; and Philip, sensible of the hatred which he incurred, endeavored to remove the reproach from himself by a very gross artifice: he ordered his confessor to deliver, in his presence, a sermon in favor of toleration; a doctrine somewhat extraordinary in the mouth of a Spanish friar.[***] But the court, finding that Bonner, however shameless and savage, would not bear alone the whole infamy, soon threw off the mask; and the unrelenting temper of the queen, as well as of the king, appeared without control.

A bold step was even taken towards introducing the inquisition into England.

As the bishops' courts, though extremely arbitrary, and not confined by any ordinary forms of law, appeared not to be invested with sufficient power, a commission was appointed, by authority of the queen's prerogative, more effectually to extirpate heresy.
* Fox, vol.iii.p.