William Prynne

William Prynne

William Prynne (1600 – October 24, 1669) was a seventeenth-century author, polemicist, and political figure. He was a prominent Puritan opponent of the church policy of the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud.

Born at Swanswick, near Bath, Somerset, he was educated at Bath Grammar School and Oriel College, Oxford. In 1621 he entered Lincoln's Inn, one of the Inns of Court, to study law. Early in his life, Prynne began writing a series of attacks on the current Arminian high church policies of the government, and on the (by Puritan standards) lax morals prevalent at Court. Like many Puritans he was strongly opposed to stage plays and he included in his Histriomastix (1632) a denunciation of actresses which was widely felt to be an attack of Queen Henrietta Maria. He was tried in the Star Chamber in 1633 and sentenced to imprisonment, a £5000 fine, and the removal of part of his ears. He was, however, able to continue his activities from prison, and in 1637 he was sentenced (along with John Bastwick and Henry Burton) [1] to the removal of the rest of his ears and to be branded with letters S L (seditious libeller). He affected that these in fact stood for stigmata Laudis (the marks of Laud).

He was released by the Long Parliament in 1640, and supported the Parliamentary cause in the English Civil War. He was able to have the satisfaction of overseeing the trial of William Laud, which eventually ended in the latter's execution. In the rapidly shifting climate of opinion of the time, Prynne, having been at the forefront of radical opposition, soon found himself a conservative figure, defending Presbyterianism against the Independents favoured by Oliver Cromwell and the army. He was for a time a member of Parliament, but was expelled in Pride's Purge.

He became a thorn in Cromwell's side, and was imprisoned from 1650 to 1653 for his opposition to military government. Eventually, he supported the Restoration of the English monarchy, and was rewarded with public office: he became the Keeper of Records in the Tower of London.

Prynne died in London in May 1669. In his lifetime he wrote some 200 books and pamphlets, though Histriomastix is the one of his works that receives most attention from modern scholars, for its relevance to English Renaissance theatre.

References

• Kirby, Ethyn WIlliams. William Prynne: A Study in Puritanism. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1931.
• Lamont, William M. Puritanism and Historical Controversy. Montreal, McGill-Queen's Press, 1996.

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