The Court of Star Chamber.
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THE COURT OF STAR CHAMBER. By John D. Lindsay. VIII. RICHARD CHAMBERS, a London mer chant who had a dispute with some of the subordinate officers at the Custom House, was summoned before the Privy Council at Hampton Court. He said there "that the merchants are in no part of the world so screwed and wrung as in Eng land; that in Turkey they have more en couragement." For this he was fined £2,000 and required to make a written submission or apology, and, refusing to do so, was imprisoned for six years. The proceedings which made the court utterly intolerable and brought about its abolition, were the sentences upon libellers, and the proceedings connected with them. In 1632, William Prynn, who was a bar rister of Lincoln's Inn, was informed against for his book called "Histrio Mastix, or a Scourge for Stage Players, etc." * -Prynn in his answer disclaimed any intention of wrong doing, declared that the book had been licensed, and urged the court to take into consideration that he had been confined for a year in the Tower pending the trial. The book was certainly a scandalous publication, and at the present time its author would doubtless receive a term of imprisonment for it. Prynn's own counsel apologized for his style. " For the manner of his writing he is heartily sorry, that his style is so bitter, and his imputations so unlimited and general." While his trial was, like most of the Star Chamber proceedings, dignified and quiet, the sentence, and the immediate language 1 R. Vashon Rogers makes mention of this case and comments upon Prynn's sentence as "a good specimen of the sentences of this famous infamous tribunal" in the Green Bag for June, 1894, " Some Things about Theatres." I., (G. B„ Vol. VI., No. 6, p. 259.)
of the judges in pronouncing it, were mon strous. The judgment was that Prynn should be disbarred and deprived of his university degrees, should stand twice in the pillory, and have one ear cut off each time, be fined £5,000, and be perpetually imprisoned, without books, pen, ink or paper. " Yet let him have some pretty prayer book," said Chief-Justice Richardson, "to pray to God to forgive him his sins, but to write, in good faith, I would never have him." Lord Dor set was as brutal in his judgment as Prynn in his book. " Mr. Prynn, I do declare you to be a schism maker in the church, a sedition sower in the commonwealth, a wolf in sheep's clothing, in a word, omnium malorttm nequissimus. ... I will not set him at liberty no more than a plagued man or a mad dog, who, tho' he cannot bite, he will foam. . . He is fit to live in dens with such beasts of prey as wolves and tigers like him self. . . I should be loth he should escape with his ears, for he may get a periwig which he now so much inveighs against, and so hide them, or force his conscience to make use of his unlovely love-locks on both sides; therefore I would have him branded in the forehead, slit in the nose, and his ears cropt too." The book was burned by -the common hangman. Five years later, while Prynn was under going imprisonment in the Tower, he was again prosecuted at the instigation of Arch bishop Laud, together with Dr. John Bastwick and Harry Burton, a dissenting divine, "for writing and publishing seditious, schismatical and libellous books against the Heirarchy." The information was very lengthy, and annexed to it were the five books com plained of, namely : Dr. Bastwick's " Latin Apology," and his " Litany," and Mr. Bur
