Henry Burton (Puritan) - Under Charles I

Under Charles I

On the accession of Charles, Burton took it as a matter of course that he would become clerk of the royal closet, but Neile was continued in that office. Burton lost the appointment through an indiscretion. On 23 April 1625, before James had been dead a month, Burton presented a letter to Charles, inveighing against the popish tendencies of Neile and William Laud (who in Neile's illness was acting as clerk of the closet). Charles read the letter partly through, and told Burton 'not to attend more in his office till he should send for him.' He was not sent for, and did not reappear at court. He deplored the death of James, for the influence he saw the late king had had in regarding the nascent high-church movement.

He was almost immediately presented to the rectory of St. Matthew's, Friday Street, and used his city pulpit to campaign aggressively against episcopal practices. He began to deviate from the set ceremonies, and was cited before the Court of high commission in 1626, but the proceedings were stopped. Bishop after bishop became the subject of his attack. For a publication which bore a frontispiece representing Charles in the act of assailing the pope's triple crown, he was summoned, in 1627, before the privy council, but again got off, in spite of Laud. His Babel no Bethel (1629) in reply to the Maschil of Robert Butterfield, earned him a temporary suspension from his benefice, and a spell in the Fleet Prison. More serious troubles were to come. On 5 November 1636 he preached two sermons in his own church on Proverbs xxiv. 21, 22, in which he charged the bishops with innovations amounting to a popish plot. His pulpit style was perhaps effective, but certainly not refined; he calls the bishops caterpillars instead of pillars, and 'antichristian mushrumps.' Next month he was summoned before Arthur Duck, a commissioner for causes ecclesiastical, to answer on oath to articles charging him with sedition. He refused the oath, and appealed to the king. Fifteen days afterwards he was cited before a special high commission at Doctors' Commons, did not appear, and was in his absence suspended and ordered to be apprehended.

He shut himself up in his house, and published his sermons, with the title, For God and the King (1636). On 1 February 1637 his doors were forced, his study ransacked, and he was taken into custody and sent next day to the Fleet. Peter Heylyn wrote a Briefe Answer to Burton's sermons.