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On the 19th of July he was in the Hall, and was overheard by his enemies Colonel King and Dr. Bastwick taking part in a conversation in which dreadful things were said of the Speaker, his brother, and other public men.
No English Government has ever with impunity incurred the charge of cruelty; nor is anything clearer than that as these atrocious sentences justified the coming Revolution, so they were among its most immediate causes. The Letany, for which Bastwick was punished on this occasion, was not the first work of his that had brought him to trouble.
In the Gatehouse Bastwick penned his Apologeticus ad Præsules Anglicanos, and his Letany, the books for which he suffered, as above described, at the hands of the Star Chamber. The language of the Letany is in many passages extremely coarse, and it is only possible to quote such milder expressions as since the time of Tyndale had been traditional in the Puritan party.
Cousin John Hampden took a petition to King Charles, asking that mercy should be granted Doctor Bastwick, as he was an old man, a good physician, and his action was merely a kindly impulse, and not a deliberate insult to either the Archbishop or the King. The petition was ignored and John Hampden cautioned.
Lord Clarendon speaks of Bastwick as "a half-witted, crack-brained fellow," unknown to either University or the College of Physicians; perhaps it was because he was unknown to either University that he acquired that splendid Latin style to which even Lord Clarendon does justice.
In its name we take ten years of a thief's life minute by minute in the slow misery and degradation of modern reformed imprisonment with as little remorse as Laud and his Star Chamber clipped the ears of Bastwick and Burton. We dug up and mutilated the remains of the Mahdi the other day exactly as we dug up and mutilated the remains of Cromwell two centuries ago.
And hereby I do gather, that the celebration of the feast of Easter came up more of custom than by any law or canon.” Sect. 7. But Dr Bastwick allegeth more truly the fourth commandment against them: “Six days shalt thou labour.” This argument I have made good elsewhere; so that now I need not insist upon it.
Then Bastwick was a candidate. He was arrested, fined a thousand pounds, had his ears cut off without the use of cocaine, a month apart, both nostrils were slit, and he was imprisoned for life.
In the morning when thou goest home, burn thy library, burn Milton and Bastwick, and Withers, and the rest of the rogues, forswear such rascally company forever, and rat me! if I will not maintain that thou art the honestest, as well as the longest-headed, man in the colony. There's my hand on it, and to-night we'll have a rouse such as would make old Noll turn in his grave if he had one."
Having subscribed to the Articles, and enjoying the archdeaconry, he was writing against subscription and the whole hierarchy, with a spirit so irascible and caustic, that one would have suspected that, like Prynne and Bastwick, the archdeacon had already lost both his ears; while his antipathy to monarchy might have done honour to a Roundhead of the Rota Club.
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