But nothing displeased the sober part of the nation more, than the publication of the Book of Sports, which the bishops procured from the king, and which came out with a command, enjoining all ministers to read it to their parishioners, and to approve of it; and those who did not, were brought into the high commission, imprisoned, and suspended; this book being only a trap to catch some conscientious men, that they could not otherwise, with all their cunning, ensnare.

[[328]]“These, and such like machinations of the bishops,” says my author, “to maintain their temporal greatness, ease, and plenty, made the stones in the walls of their palaces, and the beam in the timber, afterwards cry out, moulder away, and come to nothing; and caused their light to go out offensive to the nostrils of the rubbish of the people.”[people.”]

Indeed many of the king’s bishops, such as Bancroft, Neal, and Laud, who was a reputed papist in Oxford, and a man of a dangerous turbulent spirit, were fit for any work; and as they do not appear to have had any principles of real piety themselves, they were the fittest tools that could be made use of to persecute those who had. Neal, when he was Bishop of Litchfield and Coventry, prosecuted one Edward Wightman, for broaching erroneous doctrine, and having canonically condemned him, got the king’s warrant for his execution; and he was accordingly burnt in Litchfield. One Legat also was prosecuted and condemned for heresy, by King Bishop of London, and expired in the flames of Smithfield. He denied the divinity of our Saviour, according to the Athanasian mode of explaining it; but as Fuller tells us, he was excellently skilled in scripture, and his conversation very unblameable. But as these sacrifices were unacceptable to the people, the king preferred, that heretics hereafter, though condemned, should silently and privately waste themselves away in prison, rather than to amuse others with the solemnity of a public execution.

In the reign of the Royal Martyr,[[329]] the church grew to the height of her glory and power; though such is the fate of all human things, that she soon sickened, languished, and died. Laud, carried all before him, and ruled both church and kingdom with a rod of iron. His beginning and rise is thus described by Archbishop Abbot, his pious and worthy predecessor.

[[330]]“His life in Oxford was to pick quarrels in the lectures of the public readers, and to advertise them to the then Bishop of Durham, that he might fill the ears of King James with discontents against the honest men that took pains in their places, and settled the truth, which he called puritanism, in their auditors.

“He made it his work to see what books were in the press, and to look over epistles dedicatory, and prefaces to the reader, to see what faults might be found.

“It was an observation what a sweet man this was like to be, that the first observable act he did, was the marrying the Earl of Devonshire to the Lady Rich, when it was notorious to the world that she had another husband, and the same a nobleman, who had divers children then living by her. King James did for many years take this so ill, that he would never hear of any great preferment of him: insomuch that the Bishop of Lincoln, Dr. Williams, who taketh upon him to be the first promoter of him, hath many times said, that when he made mention of Laud to the King, his Majesty was so averse from it, that he was constrained oftentimes to say, that he would never desire to serve that master, who could not remit one fault to his servant. Well, in the end he did conquer it, to get him to the Bishoprick of St. David’s; which he had not long enjoyed, but he began to undermine his benefactor, as at this day it appeareth. The Countess of Buckingham told Lincoln, that St. David’s was the man that undermined him with her son. And verily, such is his aspiring nature, that he will underwork any man in the world, so that he may gain by it.[it.]”

[[331]]He had a peculiar enmity to Archbishop Abbot, a man of an holy and unblameable life, because he had informed King James that Laud was a reputed papist in Oxford, and of a dangerous, turbulent spirit; and as James I. was wrought up into an incurable animosity against the puritans, “this was thought to be fomented by the papists, whose agent Bishop Laud was suspected to be: and though the king was pleased with asservations to protest his incentive spirit should be kept under, that the flame should not break out by any preferment from him; yet getting into Buckingham’s favour, he grew into such credit, that he was thought to be the bellows which blew those flames that were every where rising in the nation.

“For the papists used all the artifices they could to make a breach between the king and his people; and to accomplish this, amongst other methods, they sowed the seeds of division betwixt puritan and protestant; for all those were puritans, with this high grown Armenian popish party, that held in judgment the doctrine of the reformed churches, or in practice live according to the doctrine publicly taught in the church of England. And they attributed the name of protestant,

“1. To such papists, as either out of policy, or by popish indulgence, held outward communion with the church of England.