Before we reached it our driver checked his horse of his own accord, got down from his perch at the back, and presented his weather-beaten face at my side.
“I’ve thocht”—respectfully, and with unction learned in the “kirk”—“that it might eenterest the leddies to know that this is the square where mony hundreds of men, wimmen, and, one may say, _eenfants_, were burrned alive for the sake of the FAITH.”
And in saying it, he lifted his hat quite from his head in reverence, we were touched to note, was not meant for us, but as a tribute to those of whom the world was not worthy.
“Smithfield!” we cried in a breath. “Oh! let us get out!”
It is a hollow square, a small, railed-in garden and fountain in the middle; around these extends on three sides an immense market, the pride of modern London, a structure of much pretension, with four towers and a roof, like that of a conservatory, of glass and iron, supported by iron pillars. A very Babel of buying and selling, of hawkers’ and carters’ yells, at that early hour of the day. The stake was near the fine old church of St. Bartholomew, which faces the open space. Excepting the ancient temple, founded in 1102, there is no vestige of the Smithfield (_Smooth_-field) where Wallace was hanged, drawn and quartered in 1305; where the “Gentle Mortimer” of a royal paramour was beheaded in 1330, and, in the reign of Mary I., the “Good Catholic,” three hundred of her subjects, John Rogers and Bradford among them, were burned with as little scruple as the white-aproned butcher in the market-stall near by slices off a prime steak for a customer. The church has been several times restored, but the Norman tower bears the date 1628. It, too, felt the Great Fire, and the heat and smoke of crueller flames, in the midst of which One like unto the Son of Man walked with His children. Against the walls was built the stage for the accommodation of the Lord Mayor of London, the Duke of Norfolk and the Earl of Bedford, that they might, at their ease, behold Anne Askew burn. They were in too prudent dread of the explosion of the powder-bag tied about her waist to sit near enough to hear her say to the sheriff’s offer of pardon if she would recant—“I came not hither to deny my Lord!”