By holding his right hand in the fire, when he was burned at the stake, he testified his bitter repentance for its act in signing the recantations.

[Sidenote: March 21, 1556] The total number of martyrs in Mary's reign fell very little, if at all, short of 300.

The lists of them are precise and circumstantial.
The geographical distribution is interesting, furnishing, as it does, the only statistical information available in the sixteenth century for the spread of Protestantism.

It graphically illustrates the fact, so often noticed before, that the strongholds of the new opinions were the commercial towns of the south and east.

If a straight line be drawn from the Wash to Portsmouth, passing about twenty miles west of London, it will roughly divide the Protestant from the Catholic portions of England.