Johnson was brought before the privy council and examined about his unpublished tract on ‘Julian's Arts.’ After three examinations he was committed to the Gatehouse on 3 Aug., but was liberated on bail. No copy of the tract was forthcoming; accordingly a prosecution founded on ‘Julian the Apostate’ was begun in the king's bench. Johnson was tried by Jeffreys and defended by Wallop. On 20 Nov. he was convicted of a seditious libel, fined five hundred marks, and sent to prison in default. His book was burned by the hangman. His necessities were relieved by a present of 30l. from Tillotson, and 10l. sent anonymously by Edward Fowler [q. v.], afterwards bishop of Gloucester. By the help of two friends he was at length enabled to give bonds which obtained for him the liberty of the rules.
He employed his liberty in printing tracts against popery, which were widely disseminated in 1685, and brought him into a paper war with Sir Roger L'Estrange [q. v.], in reply to whose ‘Observators’ he issued as a placard ‘A Parcel of wry Reasons and wrong Inferences, but right Observators.’ In 1686, when the forces were encamped on Hounslow Heath, he printed ‘An Humble and Hearty Address to all the English Protestants in the present Army.’ The impression made by this paper was very great. Calamy observes that Johnson ‘was by many thought to have done more towards paving the way for King William's revolution than any man in England besides.’ He had distributed about one thousand copies, when the rest of the impression was seized, and he was committed a second time for trial at the king's bench. The indictment charged him with great misdemeanors, but none were specified. Neither counsel nor a copy of the charge was allowed him. On 16 Nov. he was condemned to be degraded from the priesthood, to stand four times in the pillory, to pay a fine of five hundred marks, and to be whipped from Newgate to Tyburn. The degradation should, by the canon, have been executed by his diocesan, Henry Compton (1632–1713) [q. v.]; Compton, however, had been suspended on 6 Sept. The ceremony was performed in the chapter-house of St. Paul's on 20 Nov. by the administrators of Compton's see, the Bishops of Rochester (Sprat), Durham (Crewe), and Peterborough (White). Stillingfleet, then dean of St. Paul's, refused to attend. Johnson's demeanour was moving and dignified; he expressed his grief that ‘since all he had wrote was designed to keep their gowns on their backs, they should be made the unhappy instruments to pull off his.’ It appears that, though other formalities were duly observed, they forgot to strip him of his cassock, an omission which technically invalidated the degradation. He came (22 Nov.) in his cassock to the pillory; Rouse, the under-sheriff, tore it off and threw a frieze coat upon him. Efforts were made to have the whipping remitted. A Roman catholic clergyman is said to have offered to make interest with the king in this behalf, and a fee of 200l. was to be the reward of success. But James was obdurate. ‘Since Mr. Johnson,’ he said, ‘had the spirit of martyrdom, it was fit he should suffer.’ Accordingly on 1 Dec. Johnson received 317 stripes ‘with a whip of nine cords knotted;’ his spirit was absolutely unbroken, and the moral effect of the punishment was all in his favour. The king sent another clergyman to take possession of Corringham, but the administrators would not grant him institution without a bond of indemnity by reason of the flaw in the degradation, nor would the parishioners suffer him to enter the church. Before he was out of the surgeon's hands Johnson had reprinted three thousand copies of his tract, ‘A Comparison between Popery and Paganism,’ and used James's declaration (11 April 1687) for liberty of conscience as an opportunity for distributing these and for publishing an account of his trial. He maintained his pamphlet agitation until the revolution; one of his tracts was ‘A Way to Peace among all Protestants’ (1688), an historical argument for a comprehension of nonconformists.
On 11 June 1689 his case came before parliament, when it was resolved that the judgment against him in 1686 was illegal and cruel, and by subsequent resolution that his degradation was illegal and null. The House of Commons presented two addresses to the crown, recommending him for ecclesiastical preferment. The deanery of Durham was offered to him; he refused it, as beneath the value of his services. He expected a bishopric, but neither his spirit nor his politics commended him to the court. He scouted all the whig apologies for the revolution; rejecting the flimsy pretext which placed William's right to the crown upon conquest, he maintained that the monarch ‘has but one plain title, which is the gift of the people,’ and that of this gift the act of parliament is the ‘one plain proof.’ He is said to have scandalised William's courtiers by openly declaring at Whitehall that if kings were accountable only to God, the Rump parliament did right in sending Charles I to Him. Disappointment of his anticipations of high office roughened his temper. His attacks on Burnet were savage, and to Tillotson he was splenetic, though Tillotson not only avoided a
