the incident. He is certain that he was taken on a similar errand by Edward II, when setting out on the expedition to relieve Stirling, that resulted in the battle of Bannockburn. Scotch chroniclers gloat over the story of his capture by Robert Bruce, and tell how this king forced his prisoner to sing the defeat of his own countrymen as the price of his freedom. Baston's verses on this occasion are rhymed hexameters, with the rhymes disposed very irregularly. One couplet, describing Robert Bruce before the engagement, may serve as an example:—
Cernit, discernit acies pro Marte paratas;
Tales mortales gentes censet superatas.
Bower gives the verses in full as ‘worthy for their goodness to be set on a candlestick;’ but the Scotch writers of the next century are fully alive to their faults, which the English ascribed to the fact of their author's having penned them with an unwilling muse and against his conscience. Anthony à Wood tells us that it was owing to this Robert Baston that Edward II gave the Carmelites his mansion of Beaumont for their Oxford schools. As he narrates the story, Baston, when defeat was inevitable, assured the king of safety if he would only pray to the Virgin; and Edward thereupon promised to erect a house for the Carmelite brotherhood, if he reached home in safety—a vow which was fulfilled at the parliament of York in 1317, when the king gave the brethren his Oxford mansion outside the walls, just by the north gate of the city, with a provision for twenty-four friars (Wood, Annals, ed. Gutch, i. 248). Tanner quotes from a manuscript register that in 1318 friar Robert Baston, the Carmelite, was admitted to hear confessions in the Lincoln diocese. According to Bale and Pits, Baston was the author of various other poems besides the one just alluded to above, ‘De Striveliniensi obsidione.’ His other works consisted of poems on the second Scotch war, on the various states of the world—directed against popes, cardinals, and kings—works against the luxury of priests, a disputation concerning Dives and Lazarus, a book against ‘artists’ (contra artistas), poems and rhythms, tragedies and comedies, and a collection of ‘Orationes Synodales.’ Several of Baston's poetical works are to be found in the British Museum (Cotton MSS., Titus A. xx.). Pits has committed several egregious mistakes in his account of this writer, making him die in 1310, four years before the battle of Bannockburn, which he celebrates in verse; and Bale's vaguer language leaves the impression that he too was labouring under a similar error. On the whole, it seems hard to escape from the conclusion that Robert Baston's biographers have made him present in Scotland on two occasions instead of one, and have confounded the siege of Stirling under Edward I with the siege of the same castle that, under Edward II, resulted in the battle of Bannockburn. Leland seems to have originated the mistake, and the rest have blindly followed him.
[Leland, 338; Bale, 369; Pits, 399; Bower and Fordun's Scotichronicon, ed. Goodall, 250–1; Triveti Annales, ed. Hog, 403; Major, De Gestis Scotorum, lib. i. c. 4; Boethius's Hist. Scot. 302; Hearne's Fordun, i. preface ccxxv, and v. 1570; Wood's Historia Univers. Oxon. 101; Tanner; Chron. of Geoffrey le Baker (Camden Society), 55–8.]
BASTWICK, JOHN, M.D. (1593–1654), physician and ecclesiastical controversialist, was born at Writtle, in Essex, in 1593 (his portrait before his 'Flagellum Pontificis et Episcoporum' describing him as aged 47 in 1640). He was entered of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, on 19 May 1614, but remained there only a very short time. Leaving the university without a degree, he went 'on his travels,' and served for a time as a soldier, probably in the Dutch army. He afterwards studied medicine abroad, and took the degree of M.D. at Padua. Upon his return to England in 1623 he settled at Colchester, where he practised physic with success. But his strong puritan feeling soon led him into ecclesiastical controversy.
He was master of a fluent and classical Latin style, and in 1633-4 he published in Holland two Latin treatises the one called 'Elenchus Religionis Papisticae,' an answer to one Short, a Roman catholic, who maintained the pope's supremacy and the mass; the other called 'Flagellum Pontificis,' an argument in favour of presbyterianism. The latter came under the notice of Laud, and at his instance Bastwick was brought before the high court of commission; was convicted of a 'scandalous libel ;' was condemned to pay a fine of 1,000l. and costs, and to be imprisoned in the Gatehouse until he should 'recant his errors.' But Bastwick was not silenced. In 1636 appeared his 'Πράξεις τῶν επισκόπων, sive Apologeticus ad Praesules Anglicanos,' written in the Gatehouse against the high commission court. In 1637, abandoning Latin, he produced in vigorous English the four parts of his 'Letanie of Dr. John Bastwicke,' in which bishops were denounced as the enemies of God and the tail of the beast. For this publication he was summoned before the Star Chamber. At the same time similar proceedings were taken against Prynne for his 'Histrio-Mastix,' and
