And he said, When ye do the office of a midwife to the Hebrew women, and see [them] upon the stools; if it [be] a son, then ye shall kill him: but if it [be] a daughter, then she shall live.
Ver. 16. Then ye shall kill him.] No greater argument of an ill cause than a bloody persecution. George Tankerfield, the martyr, was in King Edward's days a very Papist, till the time Queen Mary came in; and then, perceiving the great cruelty used on the Pope's side, was brought into a misdoubt of their doing, and began, as he said, in his heart to abhor them. a So did Julius Palmer, a martyr in Queen Mary's days, who had been a stiff Papist all King Edward VI's days, and was therefore expelled out of Magdalen College, whereof he had been Fellow; till beholding the martyrdom of the three bishops burnt in Oxford, he said to his friends, "Oh, raging cruelty! Oh, tyranny tragical, and more than barbarous!" and so became a zealous Protestant.
a Act. and Mon., fol. 1535.