William Prynne, 1600-1669
“Bleak indeed, but blazing,” Prynne was one of the martyrs of the seventeenth-century Puritan movement. Yet, as William M. Lamont notes, even in his own party, his fiercely uncompromising character often aroused hatred and contempt.
A Catalogue of the Works of William Prynne, the Puritan lawyer, was published after the Restoration. Appended to it was a Biblical text: “Of making many Books there is no end, and much study (or reading) is a werisomnesse to the flesh.” Across his own copy, Anthony Wood mischievously added: “And ears.”
The joke was mean and unworthy. Twice, in 1634 and in 1637, Prynne had been punished for his pamphlets against Archbishop Laud by the mutilation of his ears. On the second occasion, his ear had been cut so close that a part of his cheek had been sliced too, and he had very nearly lost his life. The sentence that he had hurled back then at his persecutors splendidly captured the resilient strength of Puritanism: “The more I am beat down, the more am I lift up.”
Prynne deserves to be honoured as one of the great seventeenth century martyrs, but Wood’s reaction is far more typical. Both his own and later generations have found it difficult to take him seriously: quite simply, the more Prynne was beat down, the more Prynne was beat down.
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