William Prynne
Recent scholarship has portrayed Prynne as an important Caroline era propagandist whose innovative political storytelling and publishing techniques played a major role in fomenting public distrust of Charles I and Archbishop Laud.
In the preface to one of them he appealed to Parliament to suppress anything written against Calvinist doctrine and to force the clergy to subscribe to the conclusion of the Synod of Dort.
After arguing that the custom of drinking healths was sinful, he asserted that for men to wear their hair long was "unseemly and unlawful unto Christians", while it was "mannish, unnatural, impudent, and unchristian" for women to cut it short.
[3][4] Like many Puritans abhorring decadence, Prynne strongly opposed religious feast days, including Christmas, and revelry such as stage plays.
Histriomastix has over a thousand pages, in which he presents plays as unlawful, incentives to immorality, and condemned by the Scriptures, Church Fathers, modern Christian writers, and pagan philosophers.
"Though not used in England", Lord Cottington noted, this manner of book burning suited Prynne's work because of its "strangeness and heinousness".
In A Divine Tragedy lately acted, or a Collection of sundry memorable Examples of God's Judgment upon Sabbath-breakers he introduced Noy's recent death as a warning.
In an appendix to John Bastwick's Flagellum Pontificis and in A Breviate of the Bishops' intolerable Usurpations he attacked prelates in general (1635).
The House of Commons declared the two sentences against him illegal, restored him to his degree and to his membership of Lincoln's Inn, and voted him pecuniary reparation (as late as October 1648 he was still trying to collect it).
Together with his ally Clement Walker, he presented articles of accusation against Fiennes to the House of Commons (15 November 1643), managed the case for the prosecution at the court-martial, which took place in the following December, and secured a condemnation of the offending officer.
He collected and arranged evidence to prove the charges against him, bore testimony himself in support of many of them, hunted up witnesses against the archbishop, and assisted the counsel for the prosecution in every way.
[10] After Laud's execution, Prynne was charged by the House of Commons (4 March 1645) to produce an account of the trial;[11] other controversies prevented him from finishing the book.
[4] In the rapidly shifting climate of opinion of the time, Prynne, having been at the forefront of radical opposition, soon found himself a conservative figure, defending Presbyterianism against the Independents favoured by Oliver Cromwell and the army.
He denied in his pamphlets the right of the clergy to excommunicate or to suspend from the reception of the sacrament except on conditions defined by the laws of the state.
His pamphlet, The Sword of Christian Magistracy, is one of the most blood-curdling pleas for total repressive action from the civil authority in the English language.
In April 1648 Prynne accompanied Philip Herbert, 5th Earl of Pembroke when he came as chancellor of Oxford to expel recalcitrant heads of houses.
He urged the Commons to declare them rebels, and argued that concessions made by Charles in the recent treaty were a satisfactory basis for a peace.
Prynne was arrested by Colonel Thomas Pride and Sir Hardress Waller, and kept prisoner first at an eating-house (called Hell), and then at the Swan and King's Head inns in the Strand.
He wrote three pamphlets against the engagement to be faithful to the Commonwealth, and proved that neither in conscience, law, nor prudence was he bound to pay the taxes which it imposed.
He was finally offered his liberty on giving security to the amount of £1,000 that he would henceforward do nothing against the government; but, refusing to make any promise, he was released unconditionally on 18 February 1653.
[25] The proposal to lift the thirteenth-century ban on the residence of Jews, being promoted then in England by Manasseh ben Israel, among others, inspired him with a pamphlet against the scheme, called in brief the Short Demurrer.
[29] Similarly, when the Protector, as Cromwell then was styled, set up a House of Lords, Prynne expanded the tract in defence of their rights which he had published in 1648 into an historical treatise of five hundred pages.
[31] On 27 December when the parliament was again restored after its interruption by John Lambert, Prynne and his friends made a fresh attempt to enter, but were once more excluded.
He also helped to forward the Restoration by accelerating the passing of the Militia Bill, which placed the control of the forces in the hands of the king's friends.
On constitutional subjects and points of procedure his opinion had weight, and in 1667 he was privately consulted by the king on the question whether a parliament which had been prorogued could be convened before the day fixed for its resumption.
[4] He became the Keeper of Records in the Tower of London; as a writer his most lasting works belong to that period, for the amount of historical material they contain.
