Relation of My Imprisonment Read Free Page B

prison and at the same time was not to receive the indulgences prompted by the solstice that all other prisoners were to be granted. The place where this interview took place was called the Lion’s Chamber, where there were then situated the two judges and also many gentry and officers of the several towns in the parish. My wife, coming into them with a bashed face and a trembling heart and voice, began her errand to them in this manner:
    Woman: My Lord (directing herself to Judge Hale), I make bold to come once again to your Lordship to know what may be done with my husband.
    Hale: Woman, I have told you that I can do you and your husband no good, because they have taken that for a conviction which your husband has already spoken at the indictment. And unless there be something done to un-do that, I can do you no good.
    Woman: My Lord, he was clapped into prison . . .
    One of the gentry in the room, interrupting her: My Lord, the man was lawfully convicted! Why waste your precious time?
    Woman: False! False!
    Whereupon Judge Bester answered very angrily, saying that my wife must think that judges could do whatever they wished, whereas it seemed instead that her husband, meaning me, was the one who at this very moment was standing at prison for attempting to do whatever he wished. Did she desire that they too, meaning the judges and various gentry in the room, should end standing in prison alongside her husband? He laughed loudly at this.
    Woman: But my Lord, he was not lawfully convicted.
    Bester: He was.
    Woman: No, he was not.
    Bester: Indeed he was!
    Hale: He was.
    One of the gentry: Get this woman from out the room! She is a disrupter!
    Bester: He was convicted! It is recorded! It is recorded! he continued crying, as if it must be of necessity true because it was so recorded. With which words, he and the others in the chamber, for they had taken up the cry, attempted to stop up her mouth, having no other argument to convince her but, It is recorded! It is recorded!
    Here Judge Hale, trying to restore order, but not so greatly interested in restoring justice, interrupted and declared that none should talk about this matter any further, for he (meaning me) cannot do whatever he wishes, and he (meaning me again) has proved himself a breaker of the peace if not a heretic.
    Woman: He only desired to live peaceably and that he follow his calling, both that his life and his family’s be properly maintained, and moreover, my Lord, I have five small children that cannot help themselves, of which one is born blind, and they and I now have nothing to live upon but the charity of good people.
    Hale: You have five children? You are but a young woman to have five children. And a slender woman to have five children. (He seemed to wish her proven a liar of some sort.)
    Woman: I am, my Lord, but stepmother to them, having not been married to him yet two full years when he was first arrested. Indeed, I was with child when my husband was first apprehended, but being young and unaccustomed to such things then, I was smayed at the news and fell into labor and so continued for eight days, then was delivered, but my child died.
    Whereat Judge Hale, looking very soberly on the matter, said, Alas, poor woman!
    But Judge Bester declared that she made poverty and pain her cloak and its lining.
    Here the woman fell to weeping, albeit in silence, for while she had up to now endured great woe and tribulation, this attack upon her very integrity, coming as it did from such a height and, as it seemed to her then and to me now, with no other cause than that of idle malice, came with a heaviness all out of proportion to its mass, as if it were a chain cast from lead and placed around her narrow shoulders solely to bear her down.
    When she had left this place called the Lion’s Chamber and had brought herself directly to my cell and had recounted to me the details of her several interviews with these mighty persons, I saw that it would be this