God's Fury, England's Fire_ A New History of the English Civil Wars - Michael J. Braddick [50]
Central to this agonizing problem was the common Reformation view that reform should produce a purified church, not a sect or heresy. Arguments between those who stayed and those who left were to become quite heated once the tide of Laudianism had been turned back in England. For those who felt these difficulties, however, the way forward was not clear and for those who stayed it was not clear how far resistance should go. The Covenanters” publicists recognized the dangers of setting religious obligations against political duties and had thought carefully about the limits of legitimate resistance: for many reformers a world reformed in line with scripture was a hierarchical one, in which everyone knew their place and their calling. Active encouragement of civil and political unrest was clearly ungodly and religious diversity in England did not automatically create rebels.113
Those who stayed, and protested loudly, might fall foul of Laudian authoritarianism. Most famously Henry Burton, John Bastwick and William Prynne stood trial before Star Chamber in 1637 as a result of publishing offensive tracts. Their sentence was the pillory and to have their ears cropped. Prynne’s ears had already been cropped, but the remaining stumps came off nonetheless, and his cheeks were branded ‘SL’ for ‘seditious libeller’. Burton’s left ear was cut so close to the head, and so clumsily, that he lost a lot of blood. Throughout it all they bore their sufferings with Christian patience, turning their punishment into an example of the futility of physical punishment in the face of godliness. All three had been in trouble before without exciting nationwide sympathy, and their publications were acknowledged even by many of the godly to have gone far beyond the bounds of acceptable public criticism. They were given ample opportunity to speak at their trials, and to seek some relatively mild punishment, but there is a suspicion that they sought martyrdom. Certainly, in the pillory, they were transformed into suffering saints. Both during and after their brutal public mutilations they were given a warm welcome. Prynne was feasted in St Alban’s and Chester, for example, and the Privy Council came to think that it had lost a propaganda battle. The spectacle prompted Sir Thomas Wentworth to remark to Laud that ‘A Prince that loses the force and example of his punishments loses withal the greatest part of his dominion’.114 Of course, hardly any anti-Laudians ran the risk of similar treatment, but through their transformation into Puritan martyrs these three came to represent the more general suffering of the godly under Laud’s episcopal authoritarianism. Their views were not universally liked, their preferred mode of expression even less so, but these were men of status – a doctor, a lawyer and a divine. That status should have protected them from this fury; their sufferings became a symbol of something much bigger.
William Laud and Sir Thomas Wentworth (soon to become the Earl of Strafford): the two royal advisers held most responsible for the misgovernment of Charles’s kingdoms
Grumbling, foot-dragging and some sharp intakes of breath at the mutilation of the Puritan martyrs were a fair exchange for the problems of a decade earlier, perhaps. There was an informed, principled and critical public in England, but it was not ungovernable. It is true that there were many grievances in the 1630s, but they did not all irritate the same people to the same extent, and there were few Englishmen who would have argued that royal government was not in itself a good thing. Things had been much easier in the absence of war, and of parliaments. Clearly, however, some secular policies were producing tensions between the crown and some of its natural governors