Part 60 (2/2)
And long they invisibly conveyed themselves, till in Lancas.h.i.+re 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 Ess.e.x 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 a.s.s 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 G.o.d 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 a.s.sociated 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 Wels.h.i.+sms could not save Ap Henry; and the judge, a.s.suming 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 circ.u.mstance 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 pa.s.sages 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 lords.h.i.+p 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 circ.u.mstances.” 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 t.i.tles of such libels, yet were they spread about, and even h.o.a.rded. 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 pa.s.sage; 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:--
”G.o.d 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 sanct.i.ty; 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.
<script>