The party then moved away about a mile, and the prisoners were allowed to sit down.

Several of them were elderly men, and Philip picked these out, by the light of two torches they had brought from the last house, and ordered the ropes to be removed from their necks.
"I should regret, gentlemen," he said, "the indignity that I have been forced to place upon you, had you been other than you are.

It is well, however, that you should have felt, though in a very slight degree, something of the treatment that you have all been instrumental in inflicting upon blameless men and women, whose only fault was that they chose to worship God in their own way.

You may thank your good fortune at having fallen into the hands of one who has had no dear friends murdered in the prisons of Toulouse.

There are scores of men who would have strung you up without mercy, thinking it a righteous retribution for the pitiless cruelties of which the parliament of Toulouse has been guilty.
"Happily for you, though I regard you with loathing as pitiless persecutors, I have no personal wrongs to avenge.