Of the two prevalent factions in the reign of Elizabeth, the
Catholics and the Puritans--Elizabeth's philosophical indifference
offends both--Maunsell's Catalogue omits the books of both
parties--of the Puritans, "the mild and moderate, with the fierce
and fiery," a great religious body covering a political
one--Thomas Cartwright, the chief of the Puritans, and his rival
Whitgift--attempts to make the Ecclesiastical paramount to the
Civil Power--his plan in dividing the country into comitial,
provincial, and national assemblies, to be concentrated under the
secret head at Warwick, where Cartwright was elected "perpetual
Moderator!"--after the most bitter controversies, Cartwright
became very compliant to his old rival Whitgift, when Archbishop
of Canterbury--of MARTIN MAR-PRELATE--his sons--specimens of their
popular ridicule and invective--Cartwright approves of this mode
of controversy--better counteracted by the wits than by the grave
admonishers--specimens of the ANTI-MARTIN MAR-PRELATES--of the
authors of these surreptitious publications.
The Reformation, or the new Religion, as it was then called, under
Elizabeth, was the most philosophical she could form, and therefore
the most hateful to the zealots of all parties. It was worthy of her
genius, and of a better age! Her sole object was, a deliverance from
the Papal usurpation. Her own supremacy maintained, she designed to be
the great sovereign of a great people; and the Catholic, for some
time, was called to her council-board, and entered with the Reformer
into the same church. But wisdom itself is too weak to regulate human
affairs, when the passions of men rise up in obstinate insurrection.
Elizabeth neither won over the Reformers nor the Catholics. An
excommunicating bull, precipitated by Papal Machiavelism, driving on
the brutalised obedience of its slaves, separated the friends. This
was a political error arising from a misconception of the weakness of
our government; and when discovered as such, a tolerating dispensation
was granted "till better times;" an unhealing expedient, to join again
a dismembered nation! It would surprise many, were they aware how
numerous were our ancient families and our eminent characters who
still remained Catholics.[402] The country was then divided, and
Englishmen who were heroic Romanists fell the terrible victims.
On the other side, the national evil took a new form. It is
probable that the Queen, regarding the mere ceremonies of religion,
now venerable with age, as matters of indifference, and her fine
taste perhaps still lingering amid the solemn gorgeousness of the
Roman service, and her senses and her emotions excited by the
religious scenery, did not share in that abhorrence of the paintings
and the images, the chant and the music, the censer and the altar,
and the pomp of the prelatical habits, which was prompting many
well-intentioned Reformers to reduce the ecclesiastical state into
apostolical nakedness and primitive rudeness. She was slow to meet
this austerity of feeling, which in this country at length extirpated
those arts which exalt our nature, and for this these pious Vandals
nicknamed the Queen "the untamed heifer;" and the fierce Knox
expressly wrote his "First Blast Against the Monstrous Government of
Women." Of these Reformers, many had imbibed the republican
notions of Calvin. In their hatred of Popery, they imagined that they
had not gone far enough in their wild notions of reform, for they
viewed it, still shadowed out in the new hierarchy of the bishops.
The fierce Calvin, in his little church at Geneva, presumed to rule a
great nation on the scale of a parish institution; copying the
apostolical equality at a time when the Church (say the Episcopalians)
had all the weakness of infancy, and could live together in a
community of all things, from a sense of their common poverty. Be
this as it may, the dignified ecclesiastical order was a vulnerable
institution, which could do no greater injury, and might effect as
much public good as any other order in the state.[403] My business
is not with this discussion. I mean to show how the republican system
of these Reformers ended in a political struggle which, crushed in
the reign of Elizabeth, and beaten down in that of James, so
furiously triumphed under Charles. Their history exhibits the
curious spectacle of a great religious body covering a political
one--such as was discovered among the Jesuits, and such as may again
distract the empire, in some new and unexpected shape.
Elizabeth was harassed by the two factions of the intriguing Catholic
and the disguised Republican. The age abounded with libels.[404] Many
a _Benedicite_ was handed to her from the Catholics; but a portentous
personage, masked, stepped forth from a club of PURITANS, and
terrified the nation by continued visitations, yet was never visible
till the instant of his adieus--"starting like a guilty thing upon a
fearful summons!"
Men echo the tone of their age, yet still the same unvarying human
nature is at work; and the Puritans,[405] who in the reign of
Elizabeth imagined it was impossible to go too far in the business of
reform, were the spirits called _Roundheads_ under Charles, and who
have got another nickname in our days. These wanted a Reformation of a
Reformation--they aimed at reform, but they designed Revolution; and
they would not accept of toleration, because they had determined on
predominance.[406]
Of this faction, the chief was THOMAS CARTWRIGHT, a person of great
learning, and doubtless of great ambition. Early in life a
disappointed man, the progress was easy to a disaffected subject. At a
Philosophy Act, in the University of Cambridge, in the royal presence,
the queen preferred and rewarded his opponent for the slighter and
more attractive elegances in which the learned Cartwright was
deficient. He felt the wound rankle in his ambitious spirit. He began,
as Sir George Paul, in his "Life of Archbishop Whitgift," expresses
it, "to kick against her Ecclesiastical Government." He expatriated
himself several years, and returned fierce with the republican spirit
he had caught among the Calvinists at Geneva, which aimed at the
extirpation of the bishops. It was once more his fate to be poised
against another rival, Whitgift, the Queen's Professor of Divinity.
Cartwright, in some lectures, advanced his new doctrines; and these
innovations soon raised a formidable party, "buzzing their conceits
into the green heads of the University."[408] Whitgift regularly
preached at Cartwright, but to little purpose; for when Cartwright
preached at St. Mary's they were forced to take down the windows. Once
our sly polemic, taking advantage of the absence of Whitgift, so
powerfully operated, in three sermons on one Sunday, that in the
evening his victory declared itself, by the students of Trinity
College rejecting their surplices, as Papistical badges. Cartwright
was now to be confuted by other means. The University refused him his
degree of D.D.; condemned the lecturer to silence; and at length
performed that last feeble act of power, expulsion. In a heart already
alienated from the established authorities, this could only envenom a
bitter spirit. Already he had felt a personal dislike to royalty, and
now he had received an insult from the University: these were motives
which, though concealed, could not fail to work in a courageous mind,
whose new forms of religion accorded with his political feelings. The
"Degrees" of the University, which he now declared to be "unlawful,"
were to be considered "as limbs of Antichrist." The whole hierarchy
was to be exterminated for a republic of Presbyters; till, through the
church, the republican, as we shall see, discovered a secret passage
to the Cabinet of his Sovereign, where he had many protectors.
Such is my conception of the character of Cartwright. The reader is
enabled to judge for himself by the note.[409]
But Cartwright, chilled by an imprisonment, and witnessing some of
his party condemned, and some executed, after having long sustained
the most elevated and rigid tone, suddenly let his alp of ice
dissolve away in the gentlest thaw that ever occurred in political
life. Ambitious he was, but not of martyrdom! His party appeared once
formidable,[410] and his protection at Court sure. I have read
several letters of the Earl of Leicester, in MS., that show he always
shielded Cartwright, whenever in danger. Many of the ministers of
Elizabeth were Puritans; but doubtless this was before their state
policy had detected the politicians in mask. When some of his
followers had dared to do what he had only thought, he appears to
have forsaken them. They reproached him for this left-handed
policy, some of the boldest of them declaring that they had neither
acted nor written anything but what was warranted by his principles.
I do not know many political ejaculations more affecting than that
of Henry Barrow, said to have been a dissipated youth, when
Cartwright refused, before Barrow's execution, to allow of a
conference. The deluded man, after a deep sigh, said: "Shall I be
thus forsaken by him? Was it not he that brought me first into
these briars? and will he now leave me in the same? Was it not from
him alone that I took my grounds? Or did I not, out of such
premises as he pleased to give me, infer those propositions, and
deduce those conclusions, for which I am now kept in these bonds?" He
was soon after executed, with others.
Then occurred one of those political spectacles at which the
simple-minded stare, and the politic smile; when, after the most cruel
civil war of words,[411] Cartwright wrote very compliant letters to
his old rival, Whitgift, now Archbishop of Canterbury; while the
Archbishop was pleading with the Queen in favour of the inveterate
Republican, declaring that had Cartwright not so far engaged himself
in the beginning, he thought he would have been, latterly, drawn into
conformity. To clear up this mysterious conduct, we must observe that
Cartwright seems to have graduated his political ambition to the
degree the government touched of weakness or of strength; and besides,
he was now growing prudent as he was growing rich. For it seems that
he who was for scrambling for the Church revenues, while telling the
people of the Apostles, _silver and gold they had none_, was himself
"feeding too fair and fat" for the meagre groaning state of a
pretended reformation. He had early in life studied that part of the
law by which he had learned the marketable price of landed property;
and as the cask still retains its old flavour, this despiser of
bishops was still making the best interest for his money by
land-jobbing.[412]
One of the memorable effects of this attempted innovation was that
continued stream of libels which ran throughout the nation, under the
portentous name of Martin Mar-Prelate.[413] This extraordinary
personage, in his collective form, for he is to be splitted into more
than one, long terrified Church and State. He walked about the kingdom
invisibly, dropping here a libel, and there a proclamation for
sedition; but wherever _Martinism_ was found, _Martin_ was not. He
prided himself in what he calls "Pistling the Bishops." Sometimes he
hints to his pursuers how they may catch him, for he prints, "within
two furlongs of a bouncing priest," or "in Europe;" while he acquaints
his friends, who were so often uneasy for his safety, that "he has
neither wife nor child," and prays "they may not be anxious for him,
for he wishes that his head might not go to the grave in peace."--"I
come, with the rope about my neck, to save you, howsoever it goeth
with me." His press is interrupted, he is silent, and Lambeth seems to
breathe in peace. But he has "a son; nay, five hundred sons!" and
_Martin Junior_ starts up! He inquires
"Where his father is; he who had studied the art of pistle-making? Why
has he been tongue-tied these four or five months? Good Nuncles (the
bishops), have you closely murthered the gentleman in some of your
prisons? Have you choaked him with a fat prebend or two? I trow my
father will swallow down no such pills, for he would thus soon purge
away all the conscience he hath. Do you mean to have the keeping of
him? What need that? he hath five hundred sons in the land. My father
would be sorry to put you to any such cost as you intend to be at with
him. A meaner house, and less strength than the Tower, the Fleet, or
Newgate, would serve him well enough. He is not of that ambitious vein
that many of his brethren the bishops are, in seeking for more costly
houses than even his father built for him."
This same "Martin Junior," who, though he is but young, as he says,
"has a pretty smattering gift in this pistle-making; and I fear, in a
while, I shall take a pride in it." He had picked up beside a bush,
where it had dropped from somebody, an imperfect paper of his
father's:--
"Theses Martinianae--set forth as an after-birth of the noble gentleman
himselfe, by a pretty stripling of his, Martin Junior, and dedicated
by him to his good nuncka, Maister John Cankerbury (i.e. Canterbury).
Printed without a sly privilege of the Cater Caps"--(i.e. the square
caps the bishops wore).
But another of these five hundred sons, who declares himself to be his
"reverend and elder brother, heir to the renowned _Martin Mar-Prelate_
the Great," publishes
"The just Censure and Reproof of Martin Junior; where, lest the
Springall should be utterly discouraged in his good meaning, you shall
finde that he is not bereaved of his due commendation."
_Martin Senior_, after finding fault with _Martin Junior_ for "his
rash and indiscreet headiness," notwithstanding agrees with everything
he had said. He confirms all, and cheers him; but charges him,
"Should he meet their father in the street, never to ask his blessing,
but walke smoothly and circumspectly; and if anie offer to talk with
thee of Martin, talke thou straite of the voyage into Portugal, or of
the happie death of the Duke of Guise, or some such accident; but
meddle not with thy father. Only, if thou have gathered anie thing in
visitation for thy father, intreate him to signify, in some secret
printed pistle, where a will have it lefte. I feare least some of us
should fall into John Canterburie's hand."
Such were the mysterious personages who, for a long time, haunted the
palaces of the bishops and the vicarages of the clergy, disappearing
at the moment they were suddenly perceived to be near. Their slanders
were not only coarse buffooneries, but the hottest effusions of
hatred, with an unparalleled invective of nicknames.[414] Levelled at
the bishops, even the natural defects, the personal infirmities, the
domestic privacies, much more the tyranny, of these now "petty popes,"
now "bouncing priests," now "terrible priests," were the inexhaustible
subjects of these popular invectives.[415] Those "pillars of the
State" were now called "its caterpillars;" and the inferior clergy,
who perhaps were not always friendly to their superiors, yet dreaded
this new race of innovators, were distinguished as "halting neutrals."
These invectives were well farced for the gross taste of the
multitude; and even the jargon of the lowest of the populace affected,
and perhaps the coarse malignity of two _cobblers_ who were connected
with the party, often enlivened the satirical page. The _Martin
Mar-Prelate_ productions are not, however, effusions of genius; they
were addressed to the coarser passions of mankind, their hatred and
contempt. The authors were grave men, but who affected to gain over
the populace with a popular familiarity.[416] In vain the startled
bishops remonstrated: they were supposed to be criminals, and were
little attended to as their own advocates. Besides, they were solemn
admonishers, and the mob are composed of laughers and scorners.
The Court-party did not succeed more happily when they persecuted
Martin, broke up his presses, and imprisoned his assistants. Never
did sedition travel so fast, nor conceal itself so closely; for they
employed a moveable press; and, as soon as it was surmised that Martin
was in Surrey, it was found he was removed to Northamptonshire, while
the next account came that he was showing his head in Warwickshire.
And long they invisibly conveyed themselves, till in Lancashire the
snake was scotched by the Earl of Derby, with all its little
brood.[417]
These pamphlets were "speedily dispersed and greedily read," not only
by the people; they had readers and even patrons among persons of
condition. They were found in the corners of chambers at Court; and
when a prohibition issued that no person should carry about them any
of the Mar-Prelate pamphlets on pain of punishment, the Earl of Essex
observed to the Queen, "What then is to become of me?" drawing one of
these pamphlets out of his bosom, and presenting it to her.
The Martinists were better counteracted by the Wits, in some
extraordinary effusions, prodigal of humour and invective Wit and
raillery were happily exercised against these masked divines: for the
gaiety of the Wits was not foreign to their feelings. The Mar-Prelates
showed merry faces, but it was with a sardonic grin they had swallowed
the convulsing herb; they horridly laughed against their will--at
bottom all was gloom and despair. The extraordinary style of their
pamphlets, concocted in the basest language of the populace, might
have originated less from design than from the impotence of the
writers. Grave and learned persons have often found to their cost that
wit and humour must spring from the soil; no art of man can plant them
there. With such, this play and grace of the intellect can never be
the movements of their nature, but its convulsions.
Father Martin and his two sons received "A sound boxe of the eare," in
"a pistle" to "the father and the two sonnes, Huffe, Ruffe, and
Snuffe, the three tame ruffians of the Church, who take pepper in the
nose because they cannot marre prelates grating," when they once met
with an adversary who openly declared--
"I profess rayling, and think it is as good a cudgel for a Martin as a
stone for a dogge, or a whip for an ape, or poison for a rat. Who
would curry an ass with an ivory comb? Give this beast thistles for
provender. I doe but yet angle with a silken flie, to see whether
Martins will nibble; and if I see that, why then I have wormes for the
nonce, and will give them line enough, like a trowte, till they
swallow both hooke and line, and then, Martin, beware your gills, for
I'll make you daunce at the pole's end."
"Fill thy answer as full of lies as of lines, swell like a toade, hiss
like an adder, bite like a dog, and chatter like a monkey, my pen is
prepared, and my mind; and if you chaunce to find anie worse words
than you broughte, let them be put in your dad's dictionarie.
Farewell, and be hanged; and I pray God you fare no worse.--Yours at
an hour's warning."
This was the proper way to reply to such writers, by driving them out
of the field with their own implements of warfare. "Pasquill of
England"[418] admirably observed of the papers of this faction--"Doubt
not but that the same reckoning in the ende will be made of you which
your favourers commonly make of their old shooes--when they are past
wearing, they barter them awaie for newe broomes, or carrie them forth
to the dunghill and leave them there." The writers of these Martin
Mar-Prelate books have been tolerably ascertained,[419] considering the
secrecy with which they were printed--sometimes at night, sometimes hid
in cellars, and never long in one place: besides the artifices used in
their dispersion, by motley personages, held together by an invisible
chain of confederacy. Conspiracy, like other misery, "acquaints a
man with strange bedfellows;" and the present confederacy combined
persons of the most various descriptions, and perhaps of very opposite
views. I find men of learning, and of rigid lives, intimately
associated with dissipated, or with too ardently-tempered youths;
connected, too, with maniacs, whose lunacy had taken a revolutionary
turn; and men of rank combining with old women and cobblers.[420]
Such are the party-coloured apostles of insurrection! and thus their
honourable and dishonourable motives lie so blended together, that the
historian cannot separate them. At the moment the haughty spirit of
a conspirator is striking at the head of established authority, he
is himself crouching to the basest intimates; and to escape often
from an ideal degradation, he can bear with a real one.
Of the heads of this party, I shall notice Penry and Udall, two
self-devoted victims to Nonconformity. The most active was John Penry,
or _Ap Henry_. He exulted that "he was born and bred in the mountains
of Wales:" he had, however, studied at both our Universities. He had
all the heat of his soil and of his party. He "wished that his head
might not go down to the grave in peace," and was just the man to
obtain his purpose. When he and his papers were at length seized,
Penry pleaded that he could not be tried for sedition, professing
unbounded loyalty to the Queen: such is the usual plea of even violent
Reformers. Yet how could Elizabeth be the sovereign, unless she
adopted the mode of government planned by these Reformers? In defence
of his papers, he declared that they were only the private memorandums
of a scholar, in which, during his wanderings about the kingdom, he
had collected all the objections he had heard against the government.
Yet these, though written down, might not be his own. He observed that
they were not even English, nor intelligible to his accusers; but a
few Welshisms could not save Ap Henry; and the judge, assuming the
hardy position, that _scribere est agere_, the author found more
honour conferred on his MSS. than his genius cared to receive. It was
this very principle which proved so fatal, at a later period, to a
more elevated politician than Penry; yet Algernon Sidney, perhaps,
possessed not a spirit more Roman.[421] State necessity claimed
another victim; and this ardent young man, whose execution had been at
first unexpectedly postponed, was suddenly hurried from his dinner to
a temporary gallows; a circumstance marked by its cruelty, but
designed to prevent an expected tumult.[422]
Contrasted with this fiery Mar-Prelate was another, the learned
subtile John Udall. His was the spirit which dared to do all that
Penry had dared, yet conducting himself in the heat of action with the
tempered wariness of age: "If they silence me as a minister," said he,
"it will allow me leisure to write; and then I will give the bishops
such a blow as shall make their hearts ache." It was agreed among the
party neither to deny, or to confess, writing any of their books, lest
among the suspected the real author might thus be discovered, or
forced solemnly to deny his own work; and when the Bishop of
Rochester, to catch Udall by surprise, suddenly said, "Let me ask you
a question concerning your book," the wary Udall replied, "It is not
yet proved to be mine!" He adroitly explained away the offending
passages the lawyers picked out of his book, and in a contest between
him and the judge, not only repelled him with his own arms, but when
his lordship would have wrestled on points of divinity, Udall expertly
perplexed the lawyer by showing he had committed an anachronism of
four hundred years! He was equally acute with the witnesses; for when
one deposed that he had seen a catalogue of Udall's library, in which
was inserted "The Demonstration of Discipline," the anonymous book for
which Udall was prosecuted; with great ingenuity he observed that this
was rather an argument that he was not the author, for "scholars use
not to put their own books in the catalogue of those they have in
their study." We observe with astonishment the tyrannical decrees of
our courts of justice, which lasted till the happy Revolution. The
bench was as depraved in their notions of the rights of the subject in
the reign of Elizabeth as in those of Charles II. and James II. The
Court refused to hear Udall's witnesses, on this strange principle,
that "witnesses in favour of the prisoner were against the queen!" To
which Udall replied, "It is for the queen to hear all things when the
life of any of her subjects is in question." The criminal felt what
was just more than his judges; and yet the judge, though to be
reprobated for his mode, calling so learned a man "Sirrah!" was right
in the thing, when he declared that "you would bring the queen and the
crown under your girdles." It is remarkable that Udall repeatedly
employed that expression which Algernon Sidney left as his last legacy
to the people, when he told them he was about to die for "that _Old
Cause_ in which I was from my youth engaged." Udall perpetually
insisted on "_The Cause_." This was a term which served at least for a
watchword: it rallied the scattered members of the republican party.
The precision of the expression might have been difficult to
ascertain; and, perhaps, like every popular expedient, varied with
"existing circumstances." I did not, however, know it had so remote an
origin as in the reign of Elizabeth; and suspect it may still be
freshened up, and varnished over, for any present occasion.
The last stroke for Udall's character is the history of his
condemnation. He suffered the cruel mockery of a pardon granted
conditionally, by the intercession of the Scottish monarch but never
signed by the Queen--and Udall mouldered away the remnant of his days
in a rigid imprisonment.[423] Cartwright and Travers, the chief movers
of this faction, retreated with haste and caution from the victims
they had conducted to the place of execution, while they themselves
sunk into a quiet forgetfulness and selfish repose.