Father Garnet's last prayers were in Latin, the language of the "One" Church into which he had been born and in whose service he had spent his life. The priest crossed his arms over his breast---it had not been thought necessary to bind his arms---and "so was cast off the ladder". His arms remained cross, for he made no struggle against death.He hung motionless at the end of his rope. At that moment a strange change in mood gripped the crowd. Many of the spectators had deliberately made their way to St. Paul's in order to see a gruesome spectacle which culminated with the bloody axing and quartering of a still living human body.
A great number of those present---they cannot all have been Catholics---surged forward. With a loud cry of "hold, hold", they stopped the hangman cutting down the body while Garnet was still alive. Others pulled on the priest's legs, something which was traditionally done by relatives in order to ensure a speedy death. As a result Father Garnet was "perfectly dead" when he was finally cut down and taken to the block. In their compassion they refused to see him butchered alive; and when he was cut up, his bowels cast into the fire, and his heart held up aloft with the cry, "Behold the heart of a traitor!" it met with no applause, not even the usual response, "God save the king." "He died like a saint," "he looked not like a contriver of treason," were comment heard among the crowd. Even ministers were heard to say that without doubt his soul was in Heaven.
Hat tip to the Laudem Gloriae
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