A TRIMMER
From a contemporary print in the British Museum.
Meantime those who would be intolerant in their turn, but as yet could not, found the situation gloomy. They looked across the Atlantic and began to emigrate by thousands; not, as is too often asserted, to find across the ocean that freedom which they could not find here, but to find the power of living under the creed that they accepted, and of imposing it upon all who would live among them.
“The Land,” says Clarendon, “was full of pride and mutiny.” It seemed, at one time, as if the best blood of the country was going across the ocean. Hundreds of the clergy gave up their houses and went into poverty because they would not turn a table into an altar, and because they refused to take the least step which pointed in the direction of Rome.
And persecution and public punishment of men like Leighton and Prynne only had the effect of bringing the discontent of the people to the point of exasperation.
EXECUTION OF WILLIAM LAUD, ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY (1645)