Chapter XXV: Part 25

"Surely, had Theophrastus dealt with women's matters, a woman, though mean, might in reason have contended with him. A king must be content to be laughed at if he come into Apelles's shop, and dispute about colours and portraiture. I am not ambitious nor envious to carp at matters of higher learning than matters of heraldry, which I profess: that is the slipper, wherein I know a slip when I find it. But see your cunning; you can, with the blur of your pen, dipped in copperas and gall, make me learned and unlearned; nay, you can almost change my sex, and make me a whore, like Leontion; and, taking your silver pen again, make yourself the divine Theophrastus."

At the close of Camden's answer, he introduced the allegorical picture of Calumny, that elegant invention of the Grecian fancy of Apelles, painted by him when suffering under the false accusations of a rival. The picture is described by Lucian; but it has received many happy touches from the classical hand of the master of Westminster School. As a literary satire, he applies it with great dignity. I give here a translation, but I preserve the original Latin in the note as Camden's reply to Brooke is not easily to be procured.

"But though I am not disposed to waste more words on these, and this sort of men, yet I cannot resist the temptation of adding a slight sketch, for I cannot give that vivacity of colouring of the picture of the great artist Apelles that our Antiphilus and the like, whose ears are ever open to calumny, may, in contemplating it, find a reflection of themselves.

"On the right hand sits a man, who, to show his credulity, is remarkable for his prodigious ears, similar to those of Midas. He extends his hand to greet Calumny, who is approaching him. The two diminutive females around him are Ignorance and Suspicion. Opposite to them, Calumny advances, betraying in her countenance and gesture the savage rage and anger working in her tempestuous breast: her left hand holds a flaming torch; while with her right she drags by the hair a youth, who, stretching his uplifted hands to Heaven, is calling on the immortal powers to bear testimony to his innocence. She is preceded by a man of a pallid and impure appearance, seemingly wasting away under some severe disease, except that his eye sparkles, and has not the dulness usual to such. That Envy is here meant, you readily conjecture. Some diminutive females, frauds and deceits, attend her as companions, whose office is to encourage and instruct, and studiously to adorn their mistress. In the background, Repentance, sadly arrayed in a mournful, worn-out, and ragged garment, who, with averted head, with tears and shame, acknowledges and prepares to receive Truth, approaching from a distance."[397]

This elegant picture, so happily introduced into a piece of literary controversy, appears to have only slightly affected the mind of Brooke, which was probably of too stout a grain to take the folds of Grecian drapery. Instead of sympathising with its elegance, he breaks out into a horse-laugh; and, what is quite unexpected among such grave inquiries into a ludicrous tale in verse, which, though it has not Grecian fancy, has broad English humour, where he maliciously insinuates that Camden had appropriated to his own use, or "new-coated his 'Britannia'" with Leland's MSS., and disguised what he had stolen.

Now, to show himself as good a painter as he is a herald, he propounded, at the end of his book, a table (_i.e._ a picture) of his own invention, being nothing comparable to "Apelles," as he himself confesseth, and we believe him; for, like the rude painter that was fain to write, 'This is a Horse,' upon his painted horse, he writes upon his picture the names of all that furious rabble therein expressed--which, for to requite him, I will return a tale of John Fletcher (some time of Oxford) and his horse. Neither can this fable be any disparagement to his table, being more ancient and authenticall, and far more conceipted than his envious picture. And thus it was:--

A TALE (NOT OF A ROASTED) BUT OF A PAINTED HORSE.

JOHN FLETCHER, famous, and a man well known,
But using not his sirname's trade alone,[398]
Did hackney out poor jades for common hire,
Not fit for any pastime but to tire.

His conscience, once, surveying his jade's stable,
Prick'd him, for keeping horses so unable.
"Oh why should I," saith John, "by scholars thrive,
For jades that will not carry, lead, nor drive?"

To mend the matter, out he starts, one night,
And having spied a palfrey somewhat white,
He takes him up, and up he mounts his back,
Rides to his house, and there he turns him black;

Marks him in forehead, feet, in rump, and crest,
As coursers mark those horses which are best.
So neatly John had coloured every spot,
That the right owner sees him, knows him not.

Had he but feather'd his new-painted breast,
He would have seemed Pegasus at least.
Who but John Fletcher's horse, in all the town,
Amongst all hackneys, purchased this renown?

But see the luck; John Fletcher's horse, one night,
By rain was wash'd again almost to white.
His first right owner, seeing such a change,
Thought he should know him, but his hue was strange!

But eyeing him, and spying out his steed,
By flea-bit spots of his now washed weed,
Seizes the horse; so Fletcher was attainted,
And did confess the horse--he stole and painted.

To close with honour to Brooke; in his graver moments he warmly repels the accusation Camden raised against him, as an enemy to learning, and appeals to many learned scholars, who had tasted of his liberality at the Universities, towards their maintenance; but, in an elevated tone, he asserts his right to deliver his animadversions as York Herald.

"I know (says Brooke) the great advantage my adversary has over me, in the received opinion of the world. If some will blame me for that my writings carry some characters of spleen against him, men of pure affections, and not partial, will think reason that he should, by ill hearing, lose the pleasure he conceived by ill speaking. But since I presume not to understand above that which is meet for me to know, I must not be discouraged, nor fret myself, because of the malicious; for I find myself seated upon a rock, that is sure from tempest and waves, from whence I have a prospect into his errors and waverings. I do confess his great worth and merit, and that we Britons are in some sort beholding to him; and might have been much more, if God had lent him the grace to have played the faithful steward, in the talent committed to his trust and charge."

Such was the dignified and the intrepid reply of Ralph Brooke, a man whose name is never mentioned without an epithet of reproach; and who, in his own day, was hunted down, and not suffered, vindictive as he was no doubt, to relieve his bitter and angry spirit, by pouring it forth to the public eye.[399]

But the story is not yet closed. Camden, who wanted the magnanimity to endure with patient dignity the corrections of an inferior genius, had the wisdom, with the meanness, silently to adopt his useful corrections, but would never confess the hand which had brought them.[400]

Thus hath Ralph Brooke told his own tale undisturbed, and, after the lapse of more than a century, the press has been opened to him. Whenever a great author is suffered to gag the mouth of his adversary, Truth receives the insult. But there is another point more essential to inculcate in literary controversy. Ought we to look too scrupulously into the motives which may induce an inferior author to detect the errors of a greater? A man from no amiable motive may perform a proper action: Ritson was useful after Warton; nor have we a right to ascribe it to any concealed motives, which, after all, may be doubtful. In the present instance, our much-abused Ralph Brooke first appears to have composed his elaborate work from the most honourable motives: the offer he made of his Notes to Camden seems a sufficient evidence. The pride of a great man first led Camden into an error, and that error plunged him into all the barbarity of persecution; thus, by force, covering his folly. Brooke over-valued his studies: it is the nature of those peculiar minds adapted to excel in such contracted pursuits. He undertook an ungracious office, and he has suffered by being placed by the side of the illustrious genius with whom he has so skilfully combated in his own province; and thus he has endured contempt, without being contemptible. The public are not less the debtors to such unfortunate, yet intrepid authors.[401]

FOOTNOTES:

[396] This work was not given to the public till 1724, a small quarto,
with a fine portrait of Brooke. More than a century had
elapsed since its forcible suppression. Anstis printed it
from the fair MS. which Brooke had left behind him. The
author's paternal affection seemed fondly to imagine its
child might be worthy of posterity, though calumniated by
its contemporaries.

[397] "Verum enimvero de his et hoc genere hominum ne verbum amplius
addam, tabellam tamen summi illius artificis Apellis, cum
colorum vivacitate depingere non possim, verbis leviter
adumbrabo et proponam, ut Antiphilus noster, suique similes,
et qui calumniis credunt, hanc, et in hac seipsos semel
simulque intueantur.

"Ad dextram sedet quidam, quia credulus, auribus praelongis
insignis, quales fere illae Midae feruntur. Manum porrigit
procul accedenti Calumniae. Circumstant eum mulierculae duae,
Ignorantia ac Suspicio. Adit aliunde propius Calumnia eximie
compta, vultu ipso et gestu corporis efferens rabiem, et iram
aestuanti conceptam pectore prae se ferens: sinistra facem
tenens flammantem, dextra secum adolescentem capillis
arreptum, manus ad superos tendentem, obtestantemque
immortalium deorum fidem, trahit. Anteit vir pallidus, in
specium impurus, acie oculorum minime hebeti, caeterum plane
iis similis, qui gravi aliquo morbo contabuerunt. Hic livor
est, ut facile conjicias. Quin, et mulierculae aliquot Insidiae
et Fallaciae ut comites Calumniam comitantur. Harum est munus,
dominam hortari, instruere, comere, et subornare. A tergo,
habitu lugubri, pullato, laceroque Poenitentia subsequitur,
quae capite in tergum deflexo, cum lachrymis, ac pudore procul
venientem Veritatem agnoscit, et excipit."

[398] A _Fletcher_ is a maker of bows and arrows.--ASH.

[399] Brooke died at the old mansion opposite the Roman town of
Reculver in Kent. The house is still known as Brooke-farm; and
the original gateway of decorative brickwork still exists. He
was buried in Reculver Church, now destroyed, where a mural
monument was erected to his memory, having a rhyming
inscription, which told the reader:--

"Fifteenth October he was last alive,
One thousand six hundred and twenty-five,
Seaventy-three years bore he fortune's harms,
And forty-five an officer of armes."

Brooke was originally a painter-stainer. His enmity to Camden
appears to have originated in the appointment of the latter to
the office of Clarencieux on the death of Richard Lee; he
believing himself to be qualified for the place by greater
knowledge, and by his long connexion with the College of Arms.
His mode of righting himself lacked judgment, and he was twice
suspended from his office, and was even attempted to be
expelled therefrom.--ED.

[400] In Anstis's edition of "A Second Discoverie of Errors in the
Much-commended 'Britannia,' &c.," 1724, the reader will find
all the passages in the "Britannia" of the edition of 1594 to
which Brooke made exceptions, placed column-wise with the
following edition of it in 1600. It is, as Anstis observes, a
debt to truth, without making any reflections.

[401] There is a sensible observation in the old "Biographia
Britannica" on Brooke. "From the splenetic attack originally
made by Rafe Brooke upon the 'Britannia' arose very _great
advantages to the public_, by the shifting and bringing to
light as good, perhaps a better and more authentic account of
our nobility, than had been given at that time of those in any
other country of Europe."--p. 1135.

MARTIN MAR-PRELATE.

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.

FOOTNOTES:

[402] The Church History by Dodd, a Catholic, fills three vols. folio:
it is very rare and curious. Much of our own domestic history
is interwoven in that of the fugitive papists, and the
materials of this work are frequently drawn from their own
archives, preserved in their seminaries at Douay, Valladolid,
&c., which have not been accessible to Protestant writers.
Here I discovered a copious nomenclature of eminent persons,
and many literary men, with many unknown facts, both of a
private and public nature. It is useful, at times, to know
whether an English author was a Catholic.

[403] I refer the reader to Selden's "Table Talk" for many admirable
ideas on "Bishops." That enlightened genius, who was no friend
to the ecclesiastical temporal power, acknowledges the
absolute necessity of this order in a great government. The
preservers of our literature and our morals they ought to be,
and many have been. When the political reformers ejected the
bishops out of the house, what did they gain? a more vulgar
prating race, but even more lordly! Selden says--"The bishops
being put out of the house, whom will they lay the fault upon
now? When the dog is beat out of the room, where will they lay
the stink?"

[404] The freedom of the press hardly subsisted in Elizabeth's
reign; and yet libels abounded! A clear demonstration that
nothing is really gained by those violent suppressions and
expurgatory indexes which power in its usurpation may
enforce. At a time when they did not dare even to publish
the titles of such libels, yet were they spread about, and
even hoarded. The most ancient catalogue of our vernacular
literature is that by Andrew Maunsell, published in 1595.
It consists of Divinity, Mathematics, Medicine, &c.; but
the third part which he promised, and which to us would
have been the most interesting, of "Rhetoric, History,
Poetry, and Policy," never appeared. In the Preface, such was
the temper of the times, and of Elizabeth, we discover that
he has deprived us of a catalogue of the works alluded to in
our text, for he thus distinctly points at them:--"The books
written by the _fugitive papistes_, as also those that are
_written against the present government_ (meaning those of
the Puritans), I doe not think meete for me to meddle
withall." In one part of his catalogue, however, he contrived
to insert the following passage; the burden of the song seems
to have been chorused by the ear of our cautious Maunsell.
He is noticing a Pierce Plowman in prose. "I did not see the
beginning of this booke, but it ended thus:--

"God save the king, and speed the plough
And send the _prelats_ care inough,
Inough, inough, inough."--p. 80.

Few of our native productions are so rare as the _Martin
Mar-Prelate_ publications. I have not found them in the public
repositories of our national literature. There they have been
probably rejected with indignity, though their answerers have
been preserved; yet even these are almost of equal rarity
and price. They were rejected in times less enlightened than
the present. In a national library every book deserves
preservation. By the rejection of these satires, however
absurd or infamous, we have lost a link in the great chain
of our National Literature and History. [Since the above was
written, many have been added to our library; and the Rev.
William Maskell, M.A., has published his "History of the
Martin Mar-Prelate Controversy." It is a most careful
summary of the writings and proceedings of all connected with
this important event, and is worthy the attentive perusal of
such as desire accurate information in this chapter of our
Church history.]

[405] We know them by the name of Puritans, a nickname obtained by
their affecting superior sanctity; but I find them often
distinguished by the more humble appellative of Precisians. As
men do not leap up, but climb on rocks, it is probable they
were only _precise_ before they were _pure_. A satirist of
their day, in "Rythmes against Martin Marre-Prelate," melts
their attributes into one verse:--

"The sacred sect, and perfect _pure precise_."

A more laughing satirist, "Pasquill of England to Martin
Junior," persists in calling them Puritans, _a pruritu!_ for
their perpetual itching, or a desire to do something.
Elizabeth herself only considered them as "a troublesome sort
of people:" even that great politician could not detect the
political monster in a mere chrysalis of reform. I find,
however, in a poet of the Elizabethan age, an evident change
in the public feeling respecting the _Puritans_, who being
always most active when the government was most in trouble,
their political views were discovered. Warner, in his
"Albion's England," describes them:--

"If ever England will in aught prevent her own mishap,
Against these Skommes (no terme too gross) let England shut
the gap;
With giddie heads--
Their countrie's foes they helpt, and most their country
harm'd.
If _Hypocrites_ why _Puritaines_ we term, be asked, in
breefe,
'Tis but an _ironised terme_: good-fellow so spells
theefe!"

The gentle-humoured FULLER, in his "Church History," felt a
tenderness for the name of _Puritan_, which, after the mad
follies they had played during the Commonwealth, was then held
in abhorrence. He could not venture to laud the good men of
that party, without employing a new term to conceal the odium.
In noticing, under the date of 1563, that the bishops urged
the clergy of their dioceses to press uniformity, &c., he
adds--"Such as refused were branded with the name of
Puritans--a name which in this nation began in this year,
subject to several senses, and various in the acceptions.
_Puritan_ was taken for the opposers of hierarchy and church
service, as resenting of superstition. But the nickname was
quickly improved by profane mouths to abuse pious persons. We
will decline the word to prevent exceptions, which, if
casually slipping from our pen, the reader knoweth that only
_nonconformists_ are intended," lib. ix. p. 76. Fuller,
however, divided them into classes--"the mild and moderate,
and the fierce and fiery." HEYLIN, in his "History of the
Presbyterians," blackens them as so many political devils; and
NEALE, in his "History of the Puritans," blanches them into a
sweet and almond whiteness.

Let us be thankful to these PURITANS for a political lesson.
They began their quarrels on the most indifferent matters.
They raised disturbances about the "Romish Rags," by which
they described the decent surplice as well as the splendid
scarlet chimere[407] thrown over the white linen rochet,
with the square cap worn by the bishops. The scarlet robe,
to please their sullen fancy, was changed into black satin;
but these men soon resolved to deprive the bishops of more
than a scarlet robe. The affected niceties of these
PRECISIANS, dismembering our images, and scratching at our
paintings, disturbed the uniformity of the religious
service. A clergyman in a surplice was turned out of the
church. Some wore square caps, some round, some abhorred all
caps. The communion-table placed in the East was considered
as an idolatrous altar, and was now dragged into the
middle of the church, where, to show their contempt, it
was always made the filthiest seat in the church. They used
to kneel at the sacrament; now they would sit, because that
was a proper attitude for a supper; then they would not
sit, but stand: at length they tossed the elements about,
because the bread was wafers, and not from a loaf. Among
their _preciseness_ was a qualm at baptism: the water was to
be taken from a basin, and not from a fount; then they
would not name their children, or if they did, they would
neither have Grecian, nor Roman, nor Saxon names, but Hebrew
ones, which they ludicrously translated into English, and
which, as Heylin observes, "many of them when they came of
age were ashamed to own"--such as "Accepted, Ashes,
Fight-the-good-Fight-of-Faith, Joy-again, Kill-sin, &c."

Who could have foreseen that some pious men quarrelling about
the square caps and the rochets of bishops should at length
attack bishops themselves; and, by an easy transition, passing
from bishops to kings, finally close in levellers!

[406] The origin of the controversy may be fixed about 1588. "A far
less easy task," says the Rev. Mr. Maskell, "is it to guess at
the authors. The tracts on the Mar-Prelate side have been
usually attributed to Penry, Throgmorton, Udal, and Fenner.
Very considerable information may be obtained about these
writers in Wood's 'Athenae,' art. _Penry_; in Collier, Strype,
and Herbert's edition of 'Arnes,' to whom I would refer. After
a careful examination of these and other authorities on the
subject, the question remains, in my judgment, as obscure as
before; and I think that it is very far from clear that either
one of the three last-named was actually concerned in the
authorship of any of the pamphlets."--ED.

[407] So Heylin writes the word; but in the "Rythmes against Martin,"
a contemporary production, the term is _Chiver_. It is not in
Cotgrave.

[408] In the "Just Censure and Reproof of Martin Junior" (circae 1589),
we are told: "There is Cartwright, too, at Warwick; he hath
got him such a company of disciples, both of the worshipfull
and other of the poorer sort, as wee have no cause to thank
him. Never tell me that he is too grave to trouble himself
with Martin's conceits. Cartwright seeks the peace of the
Church no otherwise than his platform may stand." He was
accused before the commissioners in 1590 of knowing who wrote
and printed these squibs, which he did not deny.--ED.

[409] I give a remarkable extract from the writings of Cartwright.
It will prove two points. First, that the _religion_ of
those men became a cover for a _political_ design; which was
_to raise the ecclesiastical above the civil power_. Just
the reverse of Hobbes's after scheme; but while theorists
thus differ and seem to refute one another, they in reality
work for an identical purpose. Secondly, it will show the not
uncommon absurdity of man; while these nonconformists were
affecting to annihilate the hierarchy of England as a
remains of the Romish supremacy, they themselves were
designing one according to their own fresher scheme. It
was to be a state or republic of Presbyters, in which _all
Sovereigns_ were to hold themselves, to use their style, as
"Nourisses, or servants under the Church; the Sovereigns
were to be as subjects; they were to vail their sceptres and
to offer their crowns as the prophet speaketh, _to lick the
dust of the feet of the Church_." These are Cartwright's
words, in his "Defence of the Admonition." But he is still
bolder, in a joint production with _Travers_. He insists
that "the _Monarchs of the World_ should give up their
_sceptres and crowns_ unto him (Jesus Christ) who is
_represented by the Officers of the Church_." See "A Full
and Plain Declaration of Ecclesiastical Discipline," p.
185. One would imagine he was a disguised Jesuit, and an
advocate for the Pope's supremacy. But observe how these
saintly Republicans would govern the State. Cartwright is
explicit, and very ingenious. "The world is now deceived
that thinketh that the _Church_ must be framed according to
the _Commonwealth_, and the _Church Government_ according to
the _Civil Government_, which is as much as to say, as if
a man should fashion his house according to his hangings;
whereas, indeed, it is clean contrary. That as the hangings
are made fit for the house, so the Commonwealth must be made
to agree with the Church, and the government thereof with her
government; for, as the house is before the hangings,
therefore the hangings, which come after, must be framed to
the house, which was before; so the Church being before there
was a commonwealth, and the commonwealth coming after, must be
fashioned and made suitable to the Church; otherwise, God is
made to give place to men, heaven to earth."--CARTWRIGHT'S
_Defence of the Admonition_, p. 181.

Warburton's "Alliance between Church and State," which was in
his time considered as a hardy paradox, is mawkish in its
pretensions, compared with this sacerdotal republic. It is not
wonderful that the wisest of our Sovereigns, that great
politician Elizabeth, should have punished with death
these democrats: but it is wonderful to discover that these
inveterate enemies to the Church of Rome were only trying to
transfer its absolute power into their own hands! They wanted
to turn the Church into a democracy. They fascinated the
people by telling them that there would be no beggars were
there no bishops; that every man would be a governor by
setting up a Presbytery. From the Church, I repeat, it is
scarcely a single step to the Cabinet. Yet the early
Puritans come down to us as persecuted saints. Doubtless,
there were a few honest saints among them; but they were as
mad politicians as their race afterwards proved to be, to
whom they left so many fatal legacies. Cartwright uses the
very language a certain cast of political reformers have
recently done. He declares "An establishment may be made
without the magistrate;" and told the people that "if every
hair of their head was a life, it ought to be offered for
such a cause." Another of this faction is for "registering
the names of the fittest and hottest brethren without
lingering for Parliament;" and another exults that "there are
a hundred thousand hands ready." Another, that "we may
overthrow the bishops and all the government in one day." Such
was the style, and such the confidence in the plans which the
lowest orders of revolutionists promulgated during their
transient exhibition in this country. More in this strain
may be found in "Maddox's Vindication Against Neale," the
advocate for the Puritans, p. 255; and in an admirable
letter of that great politician, Sir Francis Walsingham, who,
with many others of the ministers of Elizabeth, was a favourer
of the Puritans, till he detected their secret object to
subvert the government. This letter is preserved in
"Collier's Eccl. Hist." vol. ii. 607. They had begun to
divide the whole country into _classes_, provincial synods,
&c. They kept registers, which recorded all the heads of their
debates, to be finally transmitted to the secret head of the
_Classis_ of Warwick, where Cartwright governed as _the
perpetual moderator_! _Heylin's Hist. of Presbyt._ p. 277.
These violent advocates for the freedom of the press had,
however, an evident intention to monopolise it; for they
decreed that "no book should be put in print but by consent of
the _Classes_."--Sir G. PAUL'S _Life of Whitgift_, p. 65. The
very Star-Chamber they justly protested against, they were
for raising among themselves!

[410] Under the denomination of _Barrowists_ and _Brownists_. I find
Sir Walter Raleigh declaring, in the House of Commons, on a
motion for reducing disloyal subjects, that "they are worthy
to be rooted out of a Commonwealth." He is alarmed at the
danger, "for it is to be feared that men not guilty will be
included in the law about to be passed. I am sorry for it. I
am afraid there is near twenty thousand of them in England;
and when they be gone (that is, expelled) who shall maintain
their wives and children?"--SIR SIMONDS D'EWES' _Journal_, p.
517.