And again, “On the first day, and also the first Sunday in Lent, the Bishop of London, preaching before the King, took for his subject the preparation for our Lord’s Passion, and said that it was not only needful to mortify the spirit, but also the flesh, teaching which is opposed to the doctrine of the greater number of Protestants.”

Thus, the Puritans had some ground for murmuring, and it was not altogether unnatural, that they and the Catholics also should imagine that the Church of England had set its face Romewards.  The above were not doctrines such as Cranmer, Ridley, Latimer, and Hooper would have owned, nor would they recognise the churches in which such language was held.

Greater still would have been the wrath of such men as Prynne, Bastwick, and Burton, had they known that the Bishop of Gloucester had applied to Panzani for permission to have a Catholic priest in his house secretly, to say Mass daily for him; and that he was strongly in favour of re-union.

William Prynne, barrister-at-law by profession, by reputation a vituperative pamphleteer, was always ready to denounce, cavil, and rail.  The list of his philippics fills nearly a whole folio volume of the British Museum Library Catalogue.  He had what Wharton, more graphically than politely, describes as “the eternal itch of scribbling.”  The subject of Sabbath-breaking to which he attributed the fresh outbreak of the plague in 1636, was to him as a red rag to a bull.  Encouraged by his example a whole mass of literature appeared on the observance of the Sabbath—­not the modern Sunday which was decried as an invention of Rome, but of the old Jewish Sabbath, considered by the Puritans to have a far better claim to be observed.

Prynne had no perception of the relative value of things.  Sabbath-breaking, predestination, and the supreme wickedness of curls, or love-locks as they were then called, were of equal importance in his mind.  Laud’s innovations put him into a state of frenzy, and he declared that the Church of England was now “as full of ceremonies” as a dog was “full of fleas.”

Giles Widdowes, entering the lists for the archbishop, argued that “men should take off their hats on entering a church, because it was the place of God’s presence, the chiefest place of his honour amongst us, where His ambassadors deliver His embassage, where His priests sacrifice their own and the militant Church’s prayers, and the Lord’s Supper, to reconcile us to God, offended with our daily sins.”  “Ergo,” answered Prynne, “the priests of the Church of England are sacrificing priests, and the Lord’s Supper a propitiatory sacrifice, sacrificed by those priests for men’s daily sins!”

Widdowes also wrote in defence of the practice of bowing at the name of Jesus; and considering doubtless that men should be fought with their own weapons, took a leaf out of Prynne’s book and belaboured soundly “the lawless, kneeless, schismatical Puritan.”