William Prynne (1600 – 24 October 1669), an English lawyer, voluble author, polemicist and political figure, was a prominent Puritan opponent of church policy under William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury (1633–1645). His views were Presbyterian, but he became known in the 1640s as an Erastian, arguing for overall state control of religious matters.
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.
Early life Born at Swainswick, near Bath, Somerset, William Prynne was educated at Bath Grammar School and Oriel College, Oxford. He graduated as a BA on 22 January 1621, entered as a student of Lincoln's Inn in the same year, and was called to the bar in 1628.
According to Anthony Wood, he was confirmed in his militant Puritanism by the influence of John Preston, then a lecturer at Lincoln's Inn. In 1627 he published his first of over 200 works, a theological treatise titled The Perpetuity of a Regenerate Man's Estate. This was followed in the next three years by three others attacking Arminianism and its teachers. 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.A Brief Survey of Mr. Cozens his cozening Devotions.
Prynne was a strong disciplinarian. 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.
1630s Like many Puritans abhorring decadence, Prynne strongly opposed religious feast days, including Christmas, and revelry such as stage plays. He included in his Histriomastix (1632) a denunciation of actresses which was widely felt to be an attack on Queen Henrietta Maria. This book led to the most prominent incidents in his life, but the timing was accidental.
About 1624 Prynne had begun a book against stage-plays; on 31 May 1630 he gained a licence to print it and about November 1632 it was published. 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. By chance, the Queen and her ladies, in January 1633, took part in the performance of Walter Montagu's The Shepherd's Paradise: this was an innovation at court. A passage reflecting on the character of female actors in general was construed as an aspersion on the Queen; passages attacking the spectators of plays and magistrates who failed to suppress them, pointed by references to Nero and other tyrants, were taken as seen on King Charles I.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord Cottington, ordered Histriomastix to "be burnt, in the most public manner that can be." As David Cressy has pointed out, this was an innovative act of public censorship. It imported continental public book-burning by the hangman for the first time. "Though not used in England", Lord Cottington noted, this manner of book burning suited Prynne's work because of its "strangeness and heinousness". William Noy, as attorney-general, took proceedings against Prynne in the Star-chamber. After a year's imprisonment in the Tower of London, he was sentenced on 17 February 1634 to life imprisonment, a fine of £5,000, expulsion from Lincoln's Inn, deprival of his Oxford University degree, and cropping of both his ears in the pillory, where he was held on 7–10 May. His book was burnt before him, and with over a thousand pages it suffocated Prynne in its smoke.
On 11 June Prynne addressed a letter to Archbishop Laud, whom he saw as his chief persecutor, charging him with illegality and injustice. Laud handed the letter to the Attorney-General as material for a new prosecution, but when Prynne was required to own his handwriting, he contrived to get hold of the letter and tore it to pieces. Prynne wrote in the Tower and published anonymous tracts against episcopacy and the Book of Sports. 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). An anonymous attack on Matthew Wren, Bishop of NorwichNews from Ipswich (1636). brought him again before the Star Chamber. On 14 June 1637 Prynne was sentenced once more to a fine of £5,000, to imprisonment for life, and to lose the rest of his ears. At the proposal of Chief Justice John Finch, he was also to be branded on the cheeks with the letters S. L., standing for "seditious libeller". Prynne was pilloried on 30 June in company with Henry Burton and John Bastwick; Prynne was handled barbarously by the executioner. He made, as he returned to his prison, a couple of Latin verses explaining the 'S. L.' with which he was branded to mean 'stigmata laudis' ("sign of praise", or "sign of Laud").
His imprisonment was then much closer: no pens or ink, nor any books allowed but the Bible, the prayer book, and some orthodox theology. To isolate him from his friends, he was sent first to Carnarvon Castle in July 1637, and then to Mont Orgueil in Jersey between 1638 and 1640. The Bailiff of Jersey, Philippe de Carteret II, treated Prynne well during this imprisonment, and Prynne was able to repay this kindness by defending Carteret's character in 1645, when he was accused as a malignant and a tyrant due to his support for the royalist cause during the English Civil Wars.
1640s He was released by the Long Parliament in 1640. 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). He supported the Parliamentary cause in the English Civil War, particularly in the press, and in many pamphlets, while still pursuing the bishops.
In 1643 Prynne became involved in the controversy which followed the surrender of Bristol by Nathaniel Fiennes. 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.True and Full Relation of the Trial of Nathaniel Fiennes, 1644. Prynne was also one of the counsel for the parliament at the trial of Lord Maguire in February 1645.The Subjection of all Traitors, &c. 1658).
He was able to have the satisfaction of overseeing the trial of William Laud, which was to end in Laud's execution. 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. At the time some thought he was clearly tampering with the witnesses. Prynne had the duty of searching Laud's room in the Tower for papers. He published a redacted edition of Laud's diaryA Breviate of the Life of William Laud and a volume intended to serve as an introduction to his trial.Hidden Works of Darkness brought to Public Light. After Laud's execution, Prynne was charged by the House of Commons (4 March 1645) to produce an account of the trial;Canterburies Doom, or the first part of a complete History of the Commitment, Trial, &c., of William Laud (1646). other controversies prevented him from finishing the book.
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. From 1644 he wrote pamphlets against Independents.Independency Examined, Unmasked, and Refuted, 1644. He attacked John GoodwinBrief Animadversions on Mr John Goodwin's Theomachia, 1644. and crossed his old companion in suffering, Henry Burton.Truth triumphing over Falsehood, 1645. He controverted and denounced John Lilburne, and called on Parliament to crush the sectaries.Just Defence of John Bastwick, 1645; The Liar Confounded, 1645; Fresh Discovery of some prodigious new wandering blazing Stars, 1645. Prynne was equally hostile to the demands of the presbyterian clergy for the establishment of their system: Prynne maintained the supremacy of the state over the church. 'Mr. Prynne and the Erastian lawyers are now our remora,' complains Robert Baillie in September 1645. 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.Four Serious Questions, 1644; A Vindication of Four Questions, 1645; Suspension Suspended, 1646; The Sword of Christian Magistracy Supported, 1647. He was answered by Samuel Rutherford.The Divine Right of Church Government and Excommunication, 1646. William M. Lamont writes:
Prynne also came into collision with John Milton, whose doctrine on divorce he had denounced, and was replied to by the poet in a passage in his Colasterion. Milton also inserted in the original draft of his sonnet On the Forcers of Conscience a reference to "marginal Prynne's ears".
During 1647 the breach between the army and the Parliament turned Prynne's attention from theology to politics. He wrote a number of pamphlets against the army, and championed the cause of the eleven presbyterian leaders whom the army impeached.Brief Justification of the Eleven Accused Members, 1647; Full Vindication and Answer of the Eleven Accused Members, 1647; Hypocrites Unmasking, 1647. He also undertook official work. From February 1644 he had been a member of the committee of accounts, and on 1 May 1647 he was appointed one of the commissioners for the Visitation of the University of Oxford. In April 1648 Prynne accompanied Philip Herbert, 5th Earl of Pembroke when he came as chancellor of Oxford to expel recalcitrant heads of houses.
In November 1648 Prynne was elected Member of Parliament for Newport in Cornwall for the Long Parliament. As soon as he took his seat, he showed his opposition to the army. 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.The Substance of a Speech made in the House of Commons by William Prynne, 4 December 1648. Two days later Pride's Purge took place. 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.
Pride's Purge to the Restoration