Bastwick and Burton, are read still with hor griefs. About a week since I went over to Lambeth, to move that great bishop (too great indeed) to take this danger off from this minister, and to recall the pursuivant. And withal I did undertake for Mr. Wilson (for so your petitioner is called), that he should answer his accusers in any of the king's courts at Westminster. The bishop made me answer (as well as I can remember), in hæc verba, I am sure that he will not be absent from his cure a twelvemonth together, and then (I doubt not) but once in a year he shall have him.' This was all I could obtain; but I hope (by the help of this house), before this year of threats run round, his grace will either have more grace, or no grace at all. For our manifold griefs doe fill a mighty. and vast circumference, yet so that from every part our lines of sorrow doe lead unto him, and point at him, the center from whence our miseries in this church, and many of them in the commonwealthe, doe flow *." It is very remarkable, that Milton was hindered from engaging in the ministerial office, by the consideration of the church-tyranny which was at this time erected. He was destined, he tells us, from a child, to the service of the church, by the intentions of his parents and friends, and his own resolutions: ""Till," says he, coming to some maturity of years, and perceiving what tyranny had invaded the church, that he who would take orders must subscribe slave, and take an oath withal, which unless he took with a conscience that would retch, he must either strait perjure, or split his faith; I thought it better to prefer a blameless. silence before the sacred office of speaking, bought and begun with servitude and forswearing ? Let us now proceed to the punishments inflicted on a Dering's Speeches, p. 9. b Prose Works, vol. I. p. 65. ror by those who have any compassion; and the opposers of these kind of sovereign tyrannical ecclesiastics. In 1630, Alexander Leighton was prosecuted in the Star-chamber, for writing a book intitled, "An Appeal to the Parliament, or Sion's Plea against Prelacy;" and by reason hereof it was decreed, "That Leighton should be committed to the Fleet, during life, unless his majesty should be graciously pleased to enlarge him; to pay a fine of 10,000l. to the king; to be degraded of his ministry; be brought into the pillory at Westminster (the court sitting), and there whipt; and after his whipping, be set upon the pillory for some convenient space, and have one of his ears cropt off, and his nose slit, and be branded in the face with a double SS, for a sower of sedition: be then carried to the prison of the Fleet, and at some other time be carried into the pillory at Cheapside, upon a market-day, and be there likewise whipt, and then be set upon the pillory, and have his other ear cut off; and from thence be carried back to the prison of the Fleet, there to remain during life, unless his majesty shall be graciously pleased to enlarge him." This sentence, as far as the corporal punishment was concerned, was executed in its full rigour. The long parliament, happily for him, released him from his fine and imprisonment. "The severe punishment of this unfortunate gentleman," says Rushworth, "many people pitied, he being a person well known both for learning and other abilities; only his untempered zeal (as his countrymen then gave out) prompted him to that mistake, for which the necessity of affairs at that time required this severity from the hand of the magistrate, more than perhaps the crime would do in a following juncture"." No such crimes as Leighton's, I hope, will ever, in any b Id. vol. I. p. 58. a Rushworth, vol. II. p. 56. stand as eternal monuments of the cruelty following juncture, be thus punished in any part of the British dominions. I have this appeal to the parliament now before me, by the favour of a very learned gentleman of the long robe, and have read by far the greatest part of it; and cannot, for my life, see any thing in it deserving of so heavy a censure. The book is written with spirit, and more sense and learning than the writers of that stamp usually shewed in their productions. He treats the bishops without ceremony; speaks of them, even in his title-page, as intruders upon the privileges of Christ, of the king, and of the commonweal, and declares the land shall never prosper by correspondencies with them. Speaking of the bishops, he says, "their lording over the land hath robbed the nobilitie of honor, blessing to their state, of their families, yea and of their soules; and that not only by giving evil example, but also by keeping out the power of the means, by which they should have been moulded, and the true discipline of Christ, by which they should have been kept in compasse: give them therefore an alarm; make them see their miserie, and the bishops to be the cause of it.—Proclaim to all sorts of people, from the Word, the impietie and iniquitie of the prelates places and practices; discover to the prelates their dangerous condition, will them to come out of Babel, and to cast off their antichristian pomp. Shew them and the people the fearful sin of pestering God's worship, and overlaying people's consciences, with the inventions of men, yea with the trumperie of Antichrist"." I will transcribe no more from this book, that I may not be * Nicholas Munckley, of Lincoln's Inn, Esq. b Syon's Plea against Prelacy, p. 274. 4to. printed the year and month wherein Rochelle was lost. of the government, and the influence of the tiresome to the reader; who, though he may condemn the sharpness of the expressions (as well as his styling the queen a Canaanite and idolatress, which Mr. Whitlock attributes to him), will, I doubt not, think that the men who were capable of getting such a punishment inflicted on the writer, were far enough from deserving gentle usage from the world. But to go on. In the year 1632, William Prynne, well known to the world by his very voluminous, and some very useful writings, especially in the law, published his Histrio-Mastix, for which "he was fined five thousand pound to the king, expelled the university of Oxford and Lincoln's-Inn; degraded and disabled from his profession in the law; to stand in the pillory, first in the Palace-yard in Westminster, and three days after in Cheapside, in each place to lose an ear, to have his book publickly burnt before his face by the hand of the hangman, and remain prisoner during life." Heylin says, that part of the punishment, which affected his ears, was much moderated in the execution: but Mr. Garrard, in a letter to the lord deputy Wentworth, dated London, June 3, 1634, tells him, "no mercy shewed to Prynne: he stood in the pillory, and lost his first ear in a pillory in the palace at Westminster in full term; his other in Cheapside, where, while he stood, his volumes were burnt under his nose, which had almost suffocated him." The same gentleman, in another letter, informs his lordship," that Mr. Prynne had got his ears sowed on, and that they grew again as before to his head." I have turned to some places in this book of Mr. Prynne's, which is a thick quarto, containing 1006 pages; and cannot but admire See Oldys's British Librarian, p. 11. Svo. Lond. 1738. b Heylin's priests. It is fit all should be acquainted at the weakness, as well as wickedness, of those who treated him in so vile a manner on account of it. Had they let the man alone, few people would have read his book, which is a very tedious dull performance, though it abounds with learning, and has some curious citations; but to use him in so barbarous a manner for high and keen invectives against vice, or what he took to be such, was a barbarity unheard of.—Might not a man, without offence, speak against a sin, though the prince is known to be guilty of it? If not, what must our preachers do, when the sovereign happens to be at some distance from a saint? Prynne deemed acting of popular or private interludes, for gain or pleasure, infamous and unlawful, and that as well in princes and nobles as common actors: he declared players to have been infamous amongst Christians and pagans, rogues by statute, and subject to the whipping-post; that women-actors among the Greeks and Romans (for so he expressly speaks, and no otherwise) were all notorious, impudent, prostituted strumpets. This was the passage gave the handle for Prynne's punishment, as appears from the following account of Mr. Whitlock's. "About this time," says he, " Mr. Prynne published his book called Histrio-Mastix, by licence of archbishop Abbot's chaplain, which being against plays, and a reference in the table of the book to this effect, Women-actors notorious whores,' relating to some women-actors mentioned in his book, as he affirmeth: it happened that, about six weeks after this, the queen acted a part in a pastoral at Somerset-house; and then the archbishop Laud, and other prelates, whom Prynne had angered by some books of his against Arminianism, and against the jurisdiction of the bishops, and by some that Histrio-Mas..x, p. 214. Lond. 1633. |