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To judge from these expressions merely one might be disposed to agree with Heylin, who says of the Letany that it was "so silly and contemptible that nothing but the sin and malice which appeared in every line of it could have possibly preserved it from being ridiculous." But the Letany is really a most important contribution to the history of the period.
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.
Burton suffered the same punishment as Prynne; and Bastwick, a physician, incurred a like sentence on account of his Letany, and another work entitled Apologeticus ad Praesules Anglicanos, which were written while the author was a prisoner in the Gatehouse of Westminster, and contained a severe attack upon the Laudian party, the High Commission, and the Church of England.
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.
It is in connection with Bastwick's Letany and Prynne's News from Ipswich that Lilburne, of subsequent revolutionary fame, first appears on the stage of history, as responsible for their printing in Holland and dispersion in England.
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