notorious Prynne in the prosecution of the Irish rebels, Lords Macguire and Macmahon, before the Commissioners of Oyer and Terminer, which resulted in the rebel lords being condemned and executed. It is not unlikely that Bradshaw had made the acquaintance of Prynne before he left Congleton, for the year of his mayoralty there was one in which that “pestilent breeder of sedition,” as he was called, after standing in the pillory with Bastwick and Burton, and having his ears clipped, passed through Cheshire on his way to the prison at Carnarvon, making what reads very like a triumphal progress, and creating no small stir among the disaffected Puritans in the county, who regarded the victim of a harsh and unwise persecution as a sufferer for the cause of the true Gospel. His conductors treated him with much leniency—indeed, on the whole, they seem to have had rather a pleasant outing, stopping for two or three days at a time at the principal halting-places, and enjoying themselves when and where they could. At Tarporley, Tarvin, and Chester the offender was admitted to the houses of his friends, and received visits from some of the more notable of the anti-Royalist faction in the city and county, a procedure which drew down upon him the episcopal wrath—Bridgeman, the Bishop, being greatly scandalised at the idea of the “twice-censured lawyer and stigmatised monster,” as he called him, being entertained in his own cathedral city “by a set of sour factious citizens.” The complaint, it must be admitted, was not without cause, for it seems the mayor and corporation began to waver in their orthodoxy, and became slack in going to hear sermons at the cathedral, so that the energetic prelate “could not have his eye upon their behaviour” as he desired. Whether this was due to the pleasant and moving discourses of Prynne, or that the sermons at the cathedral were too dry and lifeless to suit the tastes of the Cestrians, is not clear, but to remedy the evil Bridgeman had a brand new pulpit erected in the choir, capacious enough for all the canons to preach in at one time, had they been so minded; and, further, ordered all other preachers in the city to end their discourses before those at the cathedral began, in order that the civic authorities might have no excuse for negligence in their attendance on sound doctrine, as delivered within its walls.