DRAGOONING. 
557 
in chimneys, smoking them with wisps of wet bay till they were suffo- 
cated. .They tied some under the arms with ropes, and plunged them 
agai)i and again into wells ; they bound others like criminals, put 
them to the torture, and with a funnel filled them with wine, till the 
fumes of it took away their reason, when they made them say they 
consented to be Catholics. They stripped them naked, and, after a 
thousand indignities, stuck them with pins and needles from head 
to foot. They cut and slashed them with knives ; and sometimes 
with red-hot pincers took hold of them by the nose and other parts 
of the body, and dragged them about the rooms till they made them 
promise to be Catholics, or till the cries of these miserable wretches, 
calling upon God for help, forced them to let them go. They 
beat them with staves, and thus bruised, and with broken bones, 
dragged them to the church, where their forced presence was taken 
for an abjuration. In some places they tied fathers and husbands to 
their bed-posts, and before their eyes ravished their wives and daugh- 
ters with impunity. They blew up men and women with bellows till 
they burst them. 
If any, to escape these barbarities, endeavoured to save themselves 
by flight, they pursued them into the fields and woods, where they shot 
at them like wild beasts, prohibiting them from departing the king- 
dom (a cruelty never practised by Nero or Dioclesian) upon pain of 
confiscation of effects, the galleys, the lash, and perpetual imprison^ 
ment ; insomuch that the prisons of the sea-port towns were cram- 
med with men, women, and children, who endeavoured to save them- 
selves by flight from their dreadful persecution. 
With these scenes of desolation and horror the popish clergy 
feasted their eyes, and made, them only a matter of laughter and 
sport. “ Though my heart aches,'' Says the writer of this tract, 
“ whilst I am relating these barbarities, yet, for a perpetual memorial 
of the infernal cruelty practised by these monsters, I beg the reader’s 
patience, to lay before him two other instances, which, if he has a 
heart like mine, he will not be able to read without watering these 
sheets with his tears. 
“ The first is of a young woman, who being brought before the coun- 
cil, upon refusing to abjure her religion, was ordered to prison. There 
they shaved her head, singed off the hair from other parts of her body'; 
and having stripped her stark naked, led her through the streets of 
the city, where many a blow was given her: then they set her up to 
the neck in a tub full of water, where after she had been for a while, 
they took her out, and put on her a shift dipped in wine, which, as it 
dried and stuck to her sore and bruised body, they snatched off again, 
and then had another, ready dipt in wine, to clap on her. This they 
repeated six times, thereby making her body exceeding raw and sore. 
When all these cruelties could not shake her constancy, th,ey fastened 
her by the feet in a kind of gibbet, and let her hang in that posture, 
with her head downward, till she expired. — The other is of a man, iii 
whose house were quartered some of these missionary dragoon s. 
One day, having drunk very plemtifully of his wine, and broken their 
glasses at every health, they filled the floor with the fragments, and 
often walking over them, reduced them to very small pieces. This 
