which came with expectations. Inevitably he was an instrument of their persecutions, and as a justice and magistrate he must frequently have given the first hearings to cases of religious delinquency. His reputation for severity towards common people as heretics seems borne out by a few stories in John Foxe's Acts and Monuments. Hooper and Mountain He was plunged directly into the full political force of Gardiner's intentions within hours of receiving his knighthood. On 28 and 29 January 1554/55 Heigham was in St Mary Overie where Stephen Gardiner with Edmund Bonner presided over a solemn company of the bishops, many lords, knights and others, to witness the public inquisition and excommunication of John Hooper, Bishop of Gloucester. Hooper was condemned, sentenced and handed over to the Sheriffs of London for burning. Many, including Sir Clement Heigham and Sir Richard Dobbs, were required to witness the notarial certificate of the proceedings. John Rogers (Prebendary of St Paul's), Dr. Rowland Taylor and Laurence Saunders (brother of Sir Edward) were condemned in the same session: Hooper was burned on 9 February 1554/55. On 5 March 1555, Queen Mary rewarded Heigham for his loyalty to her at Framlingham, and for his services as Speaker, by the grant in chief of the reversion of the manor and rectory of Nedging, Suffolk, with its lands in Semer, Bildeston, Whatfield and Chelsworth. Heigham was also on the Cambridge Castle Bench with Sir Robert Broke, Edward Griffith and others when Thomas Mountain, the troubled minister of Whittington College was brought into the August sessions of 1555, after a long imprisonment, and was found to have no accusers. The County Sheriff for November 1554 to 1555, Sir Oliver Leader, spoke up for Mountain, and then said he had forgotten to bring with him the writ against the man. Griffith, in the meantime, was telling Mountain that he was a traitor and a heretic, and likely to be hanged. However without a writ or an accuser Broke and his fellow-justices were obliged in all equity to release Mountain on bail, which was immediately put up by his acquaintances, and he was later able to make an escape. East Anglian martyrs In Ipswich in summer 1555 Robert Samuel, a minister of East Bergholt, was imprisoned, and burnt at the stake on 31 August. During his confinement two devout women of reformist views, Agnes Potten and Joan Trunchfield, visited Samuel and