Henry Burton (theologian)
Along with John Bastwick and William Prynne, Burton's ears were cut off in 1637 for writing pamphlets attacking the views of Archbishop Laud.
Thomas Fuller says that he was to have attended Prince Charles to Spain (17 February 1623) for the Spanish Match, and that for some unknown reason the appointment was countermanded.
Burton does not mention this, but says that he could not get a license for a book which he wrote in 1623 against the Converted Jew by John Percy alias Fisher the Jesuit, to refute Arminianism and prove the Pope to be Antichrist.
On the accession of Charles, Burton took it as a matter of course that he would become clerk of the royal closet, but Neile was continued in that office.
He was almost immediately presented to the rectory of St. Matthew's, Friday Street, and used his city pulpit to campaign aggressively against episcopal practices.
For a publication[2] which bore a frontispiece representing Charles in the act of assailing the pope's triple crown, he was summoned, in 1627, before the privy council, but again got off, in spite of Laud.
His Babel no Bethel (1629) in reply to the Maschil of Robert Butterfield, earned him a temporary suspension from his benefice, and a spell in the Fleet Prison.
Next month he was summoned before Arthur Duck, a commissioner for causes ecclesiastical, to answer on oath to articles charging him with sedition.
Fifteen days afterwards he was cited before a special high commission at Doctors' Commons, did not appear, and was in his absence suspended and ordered to be apprehended.
In prison Burton was soon joined by William Prynne and John Bastwick, a parishioner who had also written books against the Church hierarchy, and the three were proceeded against in the Star-chamber (11 March) and included in a common indictment.
An attempt was made on 6 June to get the judges to treat the publications of Bastwick and Burton (who had added to his offence by publishing, from his prison, An Apology for an Appeale, 1636 consisting of epistles to the king, the judges, and the nobility) as presenting a primâ facie case of treason, but this fell through.
They made short work of it, striking out sixty-four sheets, and leaving no more than six lines at the beginning and twenty-four at the end.
Thus mutilated, Burton would not own it; he was not allowed to frame a new answer, and on 2 June it was ordered that he, like the rest, should be proceeded against pro confesso.
He was condemned to be deprived of his benefice, to be degraded from the ministry and from his academical degrees, to be fined £5,000, to be set in the pillory at Westminster and his ears to be cut off, and to be perpetually imprisoned in Lancaster Castle, without access of his wife or any friends, or use of pen, ink, and paper.
He was for some time allowed to hold a catechetical lecture every Tuesday fortnight at St. Mary's, Aldermanbury, but on his introducing his independent views the churchwardens locked him out in September 1645.
He published a Vindication of Churches commonly called Independent, 1644 (in answer to Prynne), and exercised a strict ecclesiastical discipline within his congregation.
