index, seemed to range
all female actors in the class. The Queen, unfortunately, six weeks
after the publication of Prynne's book, had performed a part in a mask
at court. This passage was accordingly dragged to light by the malice of
Peter Heylin, a chaplain of Laud, on whom the Archbishop devolved the
burden of reading this heavy volume in order to detect its offences.

Heylin, a bigoted enemy of everything Puritanical, and not scrupulous as
to veracity, may be suspected of having aggravated, if not
misrepresented, the tendency of a book much more tiresome than
seditious. Prynne, however, was already obnoxious, and the Star-chamber
adjudged him to stand twice in the pillory, to be branded in the
forehead, to lose both his ears, to pay a fine of five thousand pounds,
and to suffer perpetual imprisonment. The dogged Puritan employed the
leisure of a jail in writing a fresh libel against the hierarchy. For
this, with two other delinquents of the same class, Burton a divine, and
Bastwick a physician, he stood again at the bar of that terrible
tribunal. Their demeanor was what the court deemed intolerably
contumacious, arising, in fact, from the despair of men who knew that no
humiliation would procure them mercy. Prynne lost the remainder of his
ears in the pillory; and the punishment was inflicted on them all with
extreme and designed cruelty, which they endured, as martyrs always
endure suffering, so heroically as to excite a deep impression of
sympathy and resentment in the assembled multitude. They were sentenced
to perpetual confinement in distant prisons. But their departure from
London and their reception on the road were marked by signal expressions
of popular regard; and their friends resorting to them even in
Launceston, Chester, and Carnarvon castles, whither they were sent, an
order of council was made to transport them to the isles of the Channel.

It was the very first act of the Long Parliament to restore these
victims of tyranny to their families. Punishments by mutilation, though
not quite unknown to the English law, had been of rare occurrence; and
thus inflicted on men whose station appeared to render the ignominy of
whipping and branding more intolerable, they produced much the same
effect as the still greater cruelties of Mary's reign, in exciting a
detestation of that ecclesiastical dominion which protected itself by
means so atrocious.

THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY

Now commenced a new era. Many