Alphonsus, emperor of Germany, reprinted in facsimile from the ...

xxviiiAlphonsuswhich reminds one of the words used by Susan inA Woman Killed with Kindness,"Will CharlesHave me cut off my hands and send them Acton?"In Traill's Social England (vol. iii, p. 364) it is recordedthat in the reign of Elizabeth the exportation of rawmaterials was sharply discouraged. The exportation ofa live sheep might, in the case of a first offence, cost aman his hand.The courage with which the victims bore theirpunishment—fine examples of the physical hardihoodof that age of iron as well as of gold—blots out insome measure, or at any rate directs attention from,the appalling cruelty of the following incident. APuritan lawyer, John Stubbs by name, wrote a pamphlet,wherein he commented rather too frankly and distastefullyregarding the match at one time proposedbetween Elizabeth and Alengon (Creighton, QueenElizabeth, p. 172). Both Stubbs and his book-seller,Page, were sentenced to lose their right hand. Theywere conducted from the Tower to a scaffold erectedin front of the palace at Westminster, and "theirright hands were struck off with a cleaver driventhrough the wrist with a beetle, " While the dismemberedstump was being cauterised with a hot iron.Page said proudly, "I have left there a true Englishman'shand." Stubbs, exhausted from the flow ofblood, nevertheless waved his hat with all the energyhe could muster and cried, "God save Queen Elizabeth, ''before dropping in a faint (Froude, History of E?iglandfrom the Fall of Wolsey to the Destruction of the SpanishArmada, vol. xi, p. 181).Characterised by loyalty, though tempered some-