Indeed many of the king’s bishops, such as Bancroft, Neal, and Laud, who was a reputed papist in Oxford, and a man of a dangerous turbulent spirit, were fit for any work; and as they do not appear to have had any principles of real piety themselves, they were the fittest tools that could be made use of to persecute those who had. Neal, when he was Bishop of Litchfield and Coventry, prosecuted one Edward Wightman, for broaching erroneous doctrine, and having canonically condemned him, got the king’s warrant for his execution; and he was accordingly burnt in Litchfield. One Legat also was prosecuted and condemned for heresy, by King Bishop of London, and expired in the flames of Smithfield. He denied the divinity of our Saviour, according to the Athanasian mode of explaining it; but as Fuller tells us, he was excellently skilled in scripture, and his conversation very unblameable. But as these sacrifices were unacceptable to the people, the king preferred, that heretics hereafter, though condemned, should silently and privately waste themselves away in prison, rather than to amuse others with the solemnity of a public execution. In the reign of the Royal Martyr,[329] the church grew to the height of her glory and power; though such is the fate of all human things, that she soon sickened, languished, and died. Laud, carried all before him, and ruled both church and kingdom with a rod of iron. His beginning and rise is thus described by Archbishop Abbot, his pious and worthy predecessor. ----- Footnote 329: Charles I. ----- [330]“His life in Oxford was to pick quarrels in the lectures of the public readers, and to advertise them to the then Bishop of Durham, that he might fill the ears of King James with discontents against the honest men that took pains in their places, and settled the truth, which he called puritanism, in their auditors. ----- Footnote 330: Rapin, vol. II. p. 278. 2d edit. ----- “He made it his work to see what books were in the press, and to look over epistles dedicatory, and prefaces to the reader, to see what faults might be found.