of Court, who had been roused by his wholesale condem- nation of the drama to spend thousands of pounds on a gorgeous mask, which they presented to the king, and some who afterwards took the foremost part in resistance to the court, joined now in approval of its measures. The prison with which Laud rewarded Prynne's enor- mous folio, however, in nowise tamed this most obstinate and narrow-minded of men. Three years afterwards, while in the Tower under the above sentence, he issued from its walls a new tract, attacking the bishops as de- vouring wolves and lords of Lucifer. It was entitled News from Ipswich, and sorely reflected upon Laud and the hierarchy generally. For this publication he was again prosecuted in the Star-chamber, and sentenced to pay a tine of £5000, to be set in the pillory, to be branded on both cheeks with the letters S and L (Seditious Li- beller), to lose the remainder of his ears, and to be closely imprisoned for life in Caernarvon Castle. The usual consequence of undue severity appeared in the popular sympathy and party spirit which these outrageous sen- tences excited. The Puritan friends of Prynne flock- ed to Caernarvon Castle in such numbers that it was thought necessary to change the scene of his confine- ment ; and after lie had been at Caernarvon about ten weeks, he was illegally removed, by a warrant from the lords of the council, to the castle of the Mont Orgueil, in the island of Jersey. Here he remained until the beginning of the Long Parliament, in 1641, when, upon his petition to the House of Commons, he was released by a warrant from the Speaker, and resolutions were passed declaring, very truly, both the sentences against him in the Star-chamber to be contrary to law. Clar- endon and Anthony Wood describe the extraordinary demonstrations of popular feeling in his favor on his landing at Southampton and on his journey to Lon- don (History of the Rebellion, i, 199 ; A thence Oxotm nsi s, iii, 848). Soon afterwards he was returned as a mem- ber of Parliament for Newport, in Cornwall, and about the same time was made a bencher at Lincoln's Inn. Besides, Parliament voted him, and the famous preach- er Burton, and the physician Bastwick, two Puritans who were included with Prynne, money in compensa- tion; but this they never got, in consequence of the dis- turbed state of the times. One of the principal fruits of this high-handed proceeding of the law was the rous- ing of the nation to indignant protests against those in authority, and preparing the way for the changes of gov- ernment that ensued; yet to the credit of Prynne be it said that, notwithstanding all the injustice with which he was treated, and the cruelty that was inflicted upon him, he took no part in the violent proceedings of the later years of the Long Parliament. Quite to the con- trary, immediately before the king's trial Prynne was ordered into the custody of the sergeant -at -arms for "denying the supremacy of Parliament" in a pamphlet entitled The Memento ( Hushworth, Collections, ii, 1389). On Dec. 6 he was arrested by the army, and, together with many of his party, ejected from the House of Commons. From this time he became a bitter enemy of Cromwell and the army party, and, in consequence of his writings against them, was again imprisoned for several years at Dunster Castle, in Somersetshire, and Pendennis Castle, in Cornwall. He was expressly disabled by Parliament "to officiate or be in any office concerning the adminis- tration of justice within the commonwealth." In the early part of the year 1(300. having returned to his seat in the House of Commons as an excluded member, he is said, in a letter to General Monk (Winwood, Memo- rials, vol. iii), to have "exceedingly asserted the king's right," but with so much of his characteristic bitterness and imprudence that Monk sent for him and admon- ished him to be quiet. Upon the dissolution of the Parliament, in March, 1G00, he was elected to serve in the new Parliament for the city of Bath. Soon after the Restoration he was appointed keeper of the rec- ords in the Tower, an office for which his habits of study peculiarly fitted him, and which furnished him
with the opportunity of compiling his laborious and useful collections respecting constitutional and parlia- mentary history. He died in that office in 1669. Wood calculates that he wrote a sheet of MS. for every day of his lifetime after reaching man's estate. " His custom was, when he studied, to put on a long quilted cap, which came an inch over his eyes, serving as an um- brella, to defend them from too much light: and, sel- dom eating a dinner, would every three hours or more be munching a roll of bread, and would now and then refresh his exhausted spirits with ale. To this (says the editor of Neale) Butler seems to allude in his ad- dress to his muse:
'Thou that with ale or viler liquors Didst inspire Withers, Prynne, or Vicars, And teach them, though it were in spite Of nature and their stars, to write.'" His works amount to forty volumes, folio and quarto. The most valuable, and a very useful performance, is his Collection of Records, in four large volumes. Prynne proposed to illustrate and prove in these the supremacy of the kings of England in all ecclesiastical affairs with- in the realm by records taken from the earliest periods of English history to the reign of Elizabeth. He only completed the design to the reign of Henry III. See English Cyclop, s. v. ; Appleton, Biog. Diet. s. v. ; Greene, Short Hist, of the Engl. People, p. 515 sq.; Gardiner, Hist, of the Puritan Revol. ch. v; Stoughton, Eccles. Hist, of Engl, i, 24, 43, 89, 121, 153, 455; Perry, Hist. Engl. Ch. vols, i and ii; Collier, Eccles. Hist.; Clarendon, Hist: of the Rebellion, bk. iii; DTsraeli, Miscell. p. Ill sq. ; Knight, Popular Hist, of England, vol. iii, ch. xix; Hume, Hist, of England, ch. Iii et al. ; and the copious article in Allibone, Diet, of Brit, and Amer. Authors, s. v. (J. H. W.)