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A pretty author, and a pretty cause he advocates, I thank God there are no schools and no printing presses in this colony, nor are like to be, and a courageous Surveyor-General to keep by him such pestilent stuff in the present year of grace. 'Abuses Stript and Whipt, 'Anglia Rediva, 'Diary of Nehemiah Wallington, 'Bastwick's Litany! Miles Carrington, Miles Carrington! I have my eye on thee!
In John Bastwick's Litany, instead of "from plague, pestilence, and famine," we have "from bishops, priests, and deacons, good Lord, deliver us." In 1637, Laud summoned the three men before the Star Chamber, to answer to a charge of libel. Bastwick's crime was for writing against the "Pope of Canterbury."
Burton's book, however, was considered worse than Prynne's or Bastwick's, for Heylin calls it "the great masterpiece of mischief." It consists of two sermons, republished with an appeal to the King, under the title of For God and King.
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.
Nothing is more graphic than Bastwick's account of the almost regal reverence claimed for the Archbishop of Canterbury, the traffic of the streets interrupted when he issued from Lambeth, the overturning of the stalls; the author's description of the excessive power of the bishops, of the extortions of the ecclesiastical courts, is corroborated by abundant correlative testimony; and he appeals for the truth of his charges of immorality against the clergy of that time to the actual cases that came before the High Commission.
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