Deliver me, I pray thee, from the hand of my brother, from the hand of Esau: for I fear him, lest he will come and smite me, [and] the mother with the children.
Ver. 11. And the mother with the children.] It seems to be a metaphor taken from birds, when fowlers take away the young and the dams together; which God forbade, Deuteronomy 22:6. See the like also of the ewe and the lamb, not to be slain in one day, Leviticus 22:28. But, Homo homini lupus, nay, daemon. The Indians would say that it had been better for them that their country had been given to the devils of hell, than to the Spaniards, such hath been their cruelty towards those poor creatures; and that, if Spaniards went to heaven, they would never come there. Three poor women were burnt at the Isle of Guernsey for religion; together with the infant child falling out of the mother's womb, and cruelly cast back into the flames. a Another sweet child of eight or nine years old, coming to Bonner's house, to see if he might speak with his father, a prisoner in the Lollard's Tower, was, for some bold answer that he gave the bishop's chaplain, so cruelly whipped, that he died within four days after. b At Merindol in France, besides other execrable outrages and butcheries there done by Minerius, one of the Pope's captains, the paps of many women were cut off, which gave suck to their children; which, looking for suck at their mother's breasts, being dead before, died also for hunger. c Was not this, to "kill the mother with the children?" And was not that a barbarous act of Pope Honorius III, in the year of grace 1224, to cause four hundred Scots to be hanged up, and their children castrated! and all for the death of Adam, bishop of Caithness, who was burned in his own kitchen, by his own citizens, for that he had excommunicated some of them for non-payment of tithes. d
a Act. and Mon., fol. 1392.
b Ibid., fol. 1864.
c Ibid., fol. 868.
d Jac. Revius, De Vitis Pontiff, p. 163.