1641 HENRY BURTON. Puritan Ears Cut Off for Advocating the Separation of Church and State.

Very scarce tractate by radical Puritan, Henry Burton [1578-1648]. Just four years earlier, in 1637, Burton, and other radical Puritans William Prynne and John Bastwick, had his ears lopped off for publicly reproving Archbishop Laud. They were said to have been cut so close to the face that the temporal artery was struck so that he nearly bled to death.  Released from prison in 1640, he returned immediately to the battle for religious liberty, declaring that the mixture of heavenly and earthly Kingdoms was sinful and prone to repression and urged against a coercive National Covenant. He argued strongly for the kind of religious liberty that would ultimately have to find its root in America first.  The immediate occasion of the pamphlet was in response to the House of Commons Protestation issued in 1640, which intended to publicly reaffirm the Church of England as Protestant, the King as Rightful Ruler, and essentially give approval to the conflation of Church and State [and the ongoing