Bastwick and Burton were at the same time, for their books, condemned to a fine of £5,000 each, to be pilloried, to lose their ears, and to be imprisoned, one at Launceston Castle, in Cornwall, and the other in Lancaster Castle. It does not appear that the burning of their books was on this occasion included in the sentence; but as the order for seizing libellous books was sometimes a separate matter from the sentence itself (Laud's Hist., 252), or could be ordered by the Archbishop alone, one may feel fairly sure that it followed.
The execution of this sentence (June 30th, 1637) marks a turning-point in our history. The people strewed the way from the prison to the pillory with sweet herbs. From the pillory the prisoners severally addressed the sympathetic crowd, Bastwick, for instance, saying, "Had I as much blood as would swell the Thames, I would shed it every drop in this cause." Prynne, returning to prison by boat, actually made two Latin verses on the letters branded on his cheeks, with a pun upon Laud's name. As probably no one ever made verses on such an occasion before or since, they are deserving of quotation:—
"Stigmata maxillis referens insignia Laudis,
Exultans remeo, victima grata Deo."
Their journey to their several prisons was a triumphal procession all the way; the people, as Heylin reluctantly writes, "either foolishly or factiously resorting to them as they passed, and seeming to bemoan their sufferings as unjustly rigorous. And such a haunt there was to the several castles to which they were condemned . . . that the State found it necessary to remove them further," Prynne to Jersey, Burton to Guernsey, and Bastwick to Scilly. The alarm of the Government at the resentment they had aroused by their cruelties is as conspicuous as that resentment itself. No English Government has ever with impunity incurred the charge of cruelty; nor is anything clearer than that as these atrocious sentences justified the coming Revolution, so they were among its most immediate causes.
The Letany, for which Bastwick was punished on this occasion, was not the first work of his that had brought him to trouble. His first work, the Elenchus Papisticæ Religionis (1627), against the Jesuits, was brought before the High Commission at the same time with his Flagellum Pontificis (1635), a work which, ostensibly directed against the Pope's temporal power, aimed, in Laud's eyes, at English Episcopacy and the Church of England. The sting occurs near the end, where the author contends that the essentials of a bishop, namely, his election by his flock and the proper discharge of episcopal duties, are wanting in the bishops of his time. "Where is the ministering of doctrine and of the Word, and of the Sacraments? Where is the care of discipline and morals? Where is the consolation of the poor? where the rebuke of the wicked? Alas for the fall of Rome! Alas for the ruin of a flourishing Church! The bishops are neither chosen nor called; but by canvassing, and by money, and by wicked arts they are thrust upon their government." This was the beginning of trouble. The Court of High Commission condemned both his books to be burnt,[85:1] and their author to be fined £1,000, to be excommunicated, to be debarred from his profession, and to be imprisoned in the Gatehouse till he recanted; which, wrote Bastwick, would not be till Doomsday, in the afternoon.
In the Gatehouse Bastwick penned his Apologeticus ad Præsules Anglicanos, and his Letany, the books for which he suffered, as above described, at the hands of the Star Chamber. The first was an attack on the High Commission, the second on the bishops, the Real Presence, and the Church Prayer Book. The language of the Letany is in many passages extremely coarse, and it is only possible to quote such milder expressions as since the time of Tyndale had been traditional in the Puritan party. "As many prelates in England, so many vipers in the bowels of Church and State." They were "the very polecats, stoats, weasels, and minivers in the warren of Church and State." They were "Antichrist's little toes." To judge from these expressions merely one might be disposed to agree with Heylin, who says of the Letany that it was "so silly and contemptible that nothing but the sin and malice which appeared in every line of it could have possibly preserved it from being ridiculous." But the Letany is really a most important contribution to the history of the period. Nothing is more graphic than Bastwick's account of the almost regal reverence claimed for the Archbishop of Canterbury, the traffic of the streets interrupted when he issued from Lambeth, the overturning of the stalls; the author's description of the excessive power of the bishops, of the extortions of the ecclesiastical courts, is corroborated by abundant correlative testimony; and he appeals for the truth of his charges of immorality against the clergy of that time to the actual cases that came before the High Commission.
Lord Clarendon speaks of Bastwick as "a half-witted, crack-brained fellow," unknown to either University or the College of Physicians; perhaps it was because he was unknown to either University that he acquired that splendid Latin style to which even Lord Clarendon does justice. The Latin preface to the second edition of the Flagellum, in which Bastwick returns thanks to the Long Parliament for his release from prison, is unsurpassed by the Latin writing of the best English scholars, and bespeaks anything but a half-witted brain. Cicero himself could hardly have done it better.
Burton's book, however, was considered worse than Prynne's or Bastwick's, for Heylin calls it "the great masterpiece of mischief." It consists of two sermons, republished with an appeal to the King, under the title of For God and King. Like Bastwick, he writes in the interest of the King against the encroachments of the bishops; and complains bitterly of the ecclesiastical innovations then in vogue. His accusation is no less forcible, though less well known, than Laud's Defence in his Star Chamber speech; and if he did call the bishops "limbs of the Beast," "ravening wolves," and so forth, the language of Laud's party against the Puritans was not one whit more refined. So convinced was Burton of the justice of his cause, that he declared that all the time he stood in the pillory he thought himself "in heaven, and in a state of glory and triumph if any such state can possibly be on earth."
It is in connection with Bastwick's Letany and Prynne's News from Ipswich that Lilburne, of subsequent revolutionary fame, first appears on the stage of history, as responsible for their printing in Holland and dispersion in England. At all events he was punished for that offence, being whipped with great severity, by order of the Star Chamber, all the way from the Fleet Prison to Westminster, where he stood for some hours in the pillory. He was then only twenty. Laud had the second instalment of the books seized upon landing, and then burnt.
In this matter of book-burning the Archbishop seems at that time to have had sole authority, and doubtless many more books met with a fiery fate than are specifically mentioned. Laud himself refers in a letter to an order he issued for the seizure and public burning in Smithfield of as many copies as could be found of an English translation of St. Francis de Sales' Praxis Spiritualis; or, The Introduction to a Devout Life, which, after having been licensed by his chaplain, had been tampered with, in the Roman Catholic interest, in its passage through the press. Of this curious book some twelve hundred copies were burnt, but a few hundred copies had been dispersed before the seizure.
