Calamities And Quarrels Of Authors Part 60

[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 "From the splenetic attack originally made by Rafe Brooke upon the 'Britannia' arose very _great advantages to the public_, by the shifting and bringing to light as good, perhaps a better and more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 n.o.bility, 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 a.s.semblies, 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 surrept.i.tious 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 pa.s.sions 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 inst.i.tution; 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 inst.i.tution, 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 hara.s.sed 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 pa.s.sage 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 e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.ns 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 n.o.ble 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 circ.u.mspectly; 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 coa.r.s.e 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 mult.i.tude; and even the jargon of the lowest of the populace affected, and perhaps the coa.r.s.e 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 coa.r.s.er pa.s.sions 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 a.s.sistants. 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 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 Welshisms 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 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 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.