Chapter VI: Later Elizabethan and Jacobean Prose (3)

"I know Martin will with a trice bestride my shoulders. Well, if
he ride me, let the fool sit fast, for my wit is very hickish:
which if he spur with his copper reply, when it bleeds, it will
all to besmear their consciences.

"If a martin can play at chess, as well as his nephew the ape, he
shall know what it is for a scaddle pawn to cross a Bishop in his
own walk. Such diedappers must be taken up, else they'll not
stick to check the king. Rip up my life, discipher my name, fill
thy answer as full of lies as of lines, swell like a toad, hiss
like an adder, bite like a dog, and chatter like a monkey, my pen
is prepared and my mind; and if ye chance to find any worse words
than you brought, let them be put in your dad's dictionary. And
so farewell, and be hanged, and I pray God ye fare no worse.

"Yours at an hour's warning,

"DOUBLE V."

[48] Well-known stage characters in Preston's _Cambyses_.

* * * * *

"By this time I think, good-man Puritan, that thou art persuaded,
that I know as well as thy own conscience thee, namely Martin
Makebate of England, to be a most scurvy and beggarly benefactor
to obedience, and _per consequens_, to fear neither men, nor that
God Who can cast both body and soul into unquenchable fire. In
which respect I neither account you of the Church, nor esteem of
your blood, otherwise than the blood of Infidels. Talk as long as
you will of the joys of heaven, or pains of hell, and turn from
yourselves the terror of that judgment how you will, which shall
bereave blushing iniquity of the fig-leaves of hypocrisy, yet
will the eye of immortality discern of your painted pollutions,
as the ever-living food of perdition. The humours of my eyes are
the habitations of fountains, and the circumference of my heart
the enclosure of fearful contrition, when I think how many souls
at that moment shall carry the name of Martin on their foreheads
to the vale of confusion, in whose innocent blood thou swimming
to hell, shalt have the torments of ten thousand thousand sinners
at once, inflicted upon thee. There will envy, malice, and
dissimulation be ever calling for vengeance against thee, and
incite whole legions of devils to thy deathless lamentation.
Mercy will say unto thee, I know thee not, and Repentance, what
have I to do with thee? All hopes shall shake the head at thee,
and say: there goes the poison of purity, the perfection of
impiety, the serpentine seducer of simplicity. Zeal herself will
cry out upon thee, and curse the time that ever she was mashed by
thy malice, who like a blind leader of the blind, sufferedst her
to stumble at every step in Religion, and madest her seek in the
dimness of her sight, to murder her mother the Church, from whose
paps thou like an envious dog but yesterday pluckedst her.
However, proud scorner, thy whorish impudency may happen
hereafter to insist in the derision of these fearful
denunciations, and sport thy jester's pen at the speech of my
soul, yet take heed least despair be predominant in the day of
thy death, and thou instead of calling for mercy to thy Jesus,
repeat more oftener to thyself, _Sic morior damnatus ut Judas_!
And thus much, Martin, in the way of compassion, have I spoke for
thy edification, moved thereto by a brotherly commiseration,
which if thou be not too desperate in thy devilish attempts, may
reform thy heart to remorse, and thy pamphlets to some more
profitable theme of repentance."

If Martin Marprelate is compared with the _Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum_ earlier, or the _Satire Menippee_ very little later, the want of polish and directness about contemporary English satire will be strikingly apparent. At the same time he does not compare badly with his own antagonists. The divines like Cooper are, as has been said, too serious. The men of letters like Lyly and Nash are not nearly serious enough, though some exception may be made for Nash, especially if _Pasquil's Apology_ be his. They out-Martin Martin himself in mere abusiveness, in deliberate quaintness of phrase, in fantastic vapourings and promises of the dreadful things that are going to be done to the enemy. They deal some shrewd hits at the glaring faults of their subject, his outrageous abuse of authorities, his profanity, his ribaldry, his irrelevance; but in point of the three last qualities there is not much to choose between him and them. One line of counter attack they did indeed hit upon, which was followed up for generations with no small success against the Nonconformists, and that is the charge of hypocritical abuse of the influence which the Nonconformist teachers early acquired over women. The germs of the unmatched passages to this effect in _The Tale of a Tub_ may be found in the rough horseplay of _Pap with a Hatchet_ and _An Almond for a Parrot_. But the spirit of the whole controversy is in fact a spirit of horseplay. Abuse takes the place of sarcasm, Rabelaisian luxuriance of words the place of the plain hard hitting, with no flourishes or capers, but with every blow given straight from the shoulder, which Dryden and Halifax, Swift and Bentley, were to introduce into English controversy a hundred years later. The peculiar exuberance of Elizabethan literature, evident in all its departments, is nowhere more evident than in this department of the prose pamphlet, and in no section of that department is it more evident than in the Tracts of the Martin Marprelate Controversy. Never perhaps were more wild and whirling words used about any exceedingly serious and highly technical matter of discussion; and probably most readers who have ventured into the midst of the tussle will sympathise with the adjuration of _Plain Percivall the Peacemaker of England_ (supposed to be Richard Harvey, brother of Gabriel, who was himself not entirely free from suspicion of concernment in the matter), "My masters, that strive for this supernatural art of wrangling, let all be husht and quiet a-God's name." It is needless to say that the disputants did not comply with Plain Percivall's request. Indeed they bestowed some of their choicest abuse on him in return for his advice. Not even by the casting of the most peacemaking of all dust, that of years and the grave, can it be said that these jars at last _compacta quiescunt_. For it is difficult to find any account of the transaction which does not break out sooner or later into strong language.