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Chapter 4          (  )           Breaking the Body Visible in Eikonoklastes Charles’s bid for martyrdom may have precipitated Milton’s break with the “Sidnean” aesthetic of Protestant imitatio, but the breadth and depth of that rupture are perhaps better appreciated by way of an earlier Puritan Passion narrative. On June 30, 1637, John Bastwick, William Prynne, and Henry Burton were pilloried in the palace yard at Westminster for libel and sedition. Linking these three rather disparate religio-political dissidents, in both the authorities’ and the public’s imagination, were two pamphlets: Newes from Ipswiche (1636), a seven-page argument attributing the persistence of the plague to recent revisions to the prayer book that privileged high ceremonial over preaching; and the self-explanatory A divine tragedie lately acted, or A collection of sundry memorable examples of Gods judgements upon Sabbath-breakers, and other like libertines, in their unlawfull sports, happening within the realme of England, in the compass only of two yeares last past, since the booke was published worthy to be knowne and considered of all men, especially such, who are guilty of the sinne or arch-patrons thereof (1636). For the crime of collaborating on these works while in prison for individual offenses (a charge all three denied until their deaths), Bastwick, Prynne, 157 and Burton were sentenced to be pilloried together.1 Their ears were to be cropped (Prynne’s for the second time), and Prynne’s cheeks were to be branded with the initials SL for “seditious libeler.” For Archbishop William Laud, it should have been a moment of triumph, a public demonstration of strong state support for his controversial program of tightened ecclesiastical oversight and heightened ceremonial observance. As it turned out, it was the beginning of the end of Laud’s ascendancy. By the appointed day of punishment, both the prisoners and a healthy percentage of the vast crowd that had gathered to witness their sufferings on the scaffold were in full-on Foxean martyrological mode. All three men comported themselves with the requisite heroic patience and bravado— Bastwick going so far as to produce his own scalpel—despite the unusual brutality (or carelessness, depending on the account) of the executioner, who sheared Burton’s ear so close as to nick his temporal artery, shaved off a chunk of Prynne’s cheek along with what was left of his ears, and branded him twice on one side of his face. Fittingly, it was Burton who most explicitly invoked the inevitable Christological comparisons. “Me thinkes,” he declared upon surveying the pillory from a window, “I see Mount Calvary, where the three Crosses (one for Christ, and the other two for the two theeves) were pitched: And if Christ were numbred among theeves, shall a Christian (for Christs cause) thinke much to be numbred among Rogues, such as wee are condemned to be? Surely, if I be a Rogue, I am Christs Rogue, and no mans.”2 Much to the authorities’ dismay, a good portion of the crowd seems to have been disposed to accept this interpretation. The path of the prisoners was strewn with flowers, their speeches were met with applause, and their sufferings were punctuated by audible expressions of sympathy. One observer wrote that “at the cutting of each eare there was such a roaringe as if every one of them had at the same instant lost an eare.”3 Rumors circulated among the faithful that God had miraculously regenerated Prynne’s previously shorn ears for the occasion, and souvenirs (not to say relics) were made of the bloody sponges and handkerchiefs that the hangman had used to do his duty.4 Perhaps even more distressingly from a bureaucratic standpoint, the decision to exile the prisoners post-pillorying turned out to be a public relations disaster. Prynne’s departure in particular (to lifetime imprisonment on the Channel Islands) became something of a prog158 Imitatio Christi ress, with well-wishers lined up all along the route.This scene was repeated to even greater effect in 1640, when Burton and Prynne triumphantly reentered London carrying sprigs of rosemary and followed by a crowd estimated by one contemporary account to be ten thousand strong.5 Of course, there were other ways of telling the story. Looking back on the long lead-up to Civil War from the vantage point of 1655, Stuart historian Thomas Fuller offers a fascinating contemporary perspective on the radical interpretability of the day’s events. Reporting Burton’s “manfull” deportment...

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