by some members a rascally book, and that, as the author was unknown, the Serjeant at Arms was in search of the licenser.392 Bohun’s mind had never been strong; and he was entirely unnerved and bewildered by the fury and suddenness of the storm which had burst upon him.  He went to the House.  Most of the members whom he met in the passages and lobbies frowned on him.  When he was put to the bar, and, after three profound obeisances, ventured to lift his head and look round him, he could read his doom in the angry and contemptuous looks which were cast on him from every side.  He hesitated, blundered, contradicted himself, called the Speaker My Lord, and, by his confused way of speaking, raised a tempest of rude laughter which confused him still more.  As soon as he had withdrawn, it was unanimously resolved that the obnoxious treatise should be burned in Palace Yard by the common hangman.  It was also resolved, without a division, that the King should be requested to remove Bohun from the office of licenser.  The poor man, ready to faint with grief and fear, was conducted by the officers of the House to a place of confinement.393

But scarcely was he in his prison when a large body of members clamorously demanded a more important victim.  Burnet had, shortly after he became Bishop of Salisbury, addressed to the clergy of his diocese a Pastoral Letter, exhorting them to take the oaths.  In one paragraph of this letter he had held language bearing some resemblance to that of the pamphlet which had just been sentenced to the flames.  There were indeed distinctions which a judicious and impartial tribunal would not have failed to notice.  But the tribunal before which Burnet was arraigned was neither judicious nor impartial.  His faults had made him many enemies, and his virtues many more.  The discontented Whigs complained that he leaned towards the Court, the High Churchmen that he leaned towards the Dissenters; nor can it be supposed that a man of so much boldness and so little tact, a man so indiscreetly frank and so restlessly active, had passed through life without crossing the schemes and wounding the feelings of some whose opinions agreed with his.  He was regarded with peculiar malevolence by Howe.  Howe had never, even while he was in office, been in the habit of restraining his bitter and petulant tongue; and he had recently been turned out of office in a way which had made him ungovernably ferocious.  The history of his dismission is not accurately known, but it was certainly accompanied by some circumstances which had cruelly galled his temper.  If rumour could be trusted, he had fancied that Mary was in love with him, and had availed himself of an opportunity which offered itself while he was in attendance on her as Vice Chamberlain to make some advances which had justly moved her indignation.  Soon after he was discarded, he was prosecuted for having, in a fit of passion, beaten one of his servants savagely within the verge of the palace.  He had pleaded