Here then were two men, both angry, both able, both accustomed to appeal directly to ignorant audiences with whom it was necessary to make things clear. Both, too, were bold men, and honest in the sense that they were ready to risk their lives for their cause. It would have been strange if they had not seized on the pamphlet, as their one remaining weapon against the bishops. |The Diotrephes.| Udall began by publishing, in April 1588, his dialogue commonly called Diotrephes.[86] The choice of the name was not the worst stroke of satire in the controversy. Diotrephes was that person mentioned in the ninth verse of the Third Epistle of St John “who loveth to have the pre-eminence” and who “receiveth us not.” It was a great belief among the Puritans that no minister should have authority over another, and that the bishops who had “pre-eminence” were “antichrists” and “petty popes.” The dialogue tells how a bishop, a papist, a money-lender, and an innkeeper were all rebuked by Paul, a preacher. The usurer alone shows signs of compunction, while the bishop goes off thirsting for the blood of the saints, with the hearty approval of the papist, and of the tavern-keeper, who explains that he lives by the vices of his neighbours, and is like to be ruined by the preaching of such men as Paul. This pamphlet was printed by John Waldegrave, a Puritan printer in London, who was deprived of his licence in consequence. His press was broken up, but he contrived to conceal a fount of type. A printing-press was smuggled in by Penry, and a campaign of unlicensed pamphlets was begun.

Course of the controversy.

The details are obscure. The names of the authors can only be guessed at. The controversy lasted from the end of 1588 to the end of 1590. At first the Puritans swept all before them. They had many friends at Court, where indeed their doctrine that the bishops’ lands should be taken and given to gentlemen who could serve the queen was not likely “to want for favourable or attentive hearers.” Some country gentlemen gave them help—notably Sir R. Knightley of Fawsley, in Northamptonshire (always a Puritan county), and Job Throckmorton, who appears to have been what we should now call a bitter anti-clerical. The press was concealed by them in different parts of the country till it was captured by the Earl of Derby. Penry was probably the leader of the fight on the Puritan side. It began by the publication of Martin Marprelate’s Epistle directed against Dr John Bridges, in November 1588. This drew a grave Admonition to the People of England from Dr Thomas Cooper, Bishop of Winchester, in or about January 1589. Martin followed up his attack on Dr Bridges by the Epitome, printed before the Epistle, but not issued till February of 1589. Then he turned on the Bishop of Winchester in Hay any Work for Cooper.[87]

The success of those pamphlets was great. A well-known story tells how when order was issued that they were not to be read, the Earl of Oxford pulled one of them out of his pocket, and presented it to the queen. Solemn “admonitions” were found to be too awkward in such a conflict, and counter-pamphleteers were called in on the bishops’ side. This part of the controversy is no less obscure than the other. It has been guessed that Lyly and Nash struck in for the bishops. Both have been credited with the authorship of a Pappe with a Hatchet and An Almond for a Parrot, which appeared respectively at the end of 1589 and the beginning of 1590. They are now generally attributed to Lyly. Then third parties struck in and denounced both houses, or endeavoured to hush the clamour, by such appeals as Plain Perceval the Peace-Maker of England.

Although they naturally fell into neglect so soon as the occasion had passed, the Martin Marprelate pamphlets are of great importance in the history of English literature. The euphuistic, pastoral, and other tales of the time served a mere fashion of the day, and are forgettable as well as forgotten. But when Martin Marprelate published his unlicensed Epistle he set an example which has been excellently well followed. His pamphlet stands at the head of the long list which includes the Areopagitica, the Anatomy of an Equivalent, the Public Spirit of the Whigs, the Shortest Way with the Dissenters, the Letters of Junius, the Regicide Peace, and it is not absurd to say the Reflections on the Revolution in France, which is a very long, great, and eloquent pamphlet, but a pamphlet still. The Epistle and its immediate successors were not unworthy to be the beginners of so vital a part of English literature.

“Si nous avions l’ambition d’être complet, et si c’était l’être que de tout dire,” it would be necessary to examine all the pamphlets in detail. But many are practically inaccessible, and there is so much repetition among them that they can be adequately judged by selected examples. The vital examples are those which set the model. On the Puritan side there are four,—the Diotrephes, which, though strictly speaking antecedent to Martin, gave tone and marked the lines, the Epistle, the Epitome, and the Hay any Work for Cooper. The Pappe with a Hatchet and An Almond for a Parrot may stand as examples of the anti-Martinist pamphlets. The peacemakers were of less account. The proposition that there is a great deal to be said on both sides, and the appeal “Why cannot you be reasonable?” may be full of good sense, but they seldom inspire men to words or deeds of a decisive character. Looking at the leading things on either side, one sees that they have one feature in common. They are extremely unfair. But there is a great difference in their way of being unjust, and on that depends their literary value. The distinction is all to the honour of the Puritan pamphlets. Diotrephes shows both the doctrine and the spirit of the writers. They started by laying down the law to the effect that whoever exercises pre-eminence over his brethren in the ministry is an “antichrist” and a “petty pope,” and that no church office not explicitly mentioned in the New Testament is Christian. Therefore they endeavoured to discredit the bishops by showing that they habitually did such acts as an antichrist and petty pope might be expected to do. We need not stop to argue that this was unjust. Of course it was, but from the literary point of view the interesting question is, How was the injustice worded? The Martin Marprelate men had a firm grip of the pamphlet style. The ridicule they poured on the long-winded sentences of Dr Bridges and Bishop Cooper shows that they were perfectly well aware of the advantages of a simple direct manner. Their own sentences are brief, and stab with a rapid alert movement. Their abuse is furious, but it is seldom mere scream. “Sodden-headed ass” is bad language, but if it is ever to be pardonable, it is when you have caught your adversary reasoning badly, and this the Martinists at least tried to do. It was indecent to call the Bishop of Winchester “Mistress Cooper’s husband.” It is a foul hit to remind your opponent that his wife is a profligate termagant, but more ingenuity is needed to do that, by naming what it would have been more fair to pass in silence, than merely to bawl the slang name for the husband of an unfaithful wife, and apply it to a whole class of men at large. And Martin had intelligence enough to understand that a show of fairness can be effective. He could bring himself to allow that if John of Canterbury (Dr Whitgift) did ever marry, he would no doubt choose a Christian woman.

When we turn to the anti-Martinist pamphlets we find the same unfairness of spirit, with little and often none of the cleverness and the ingenious form. If Lyly wrote the Pappe with a Hatchet, he was in a better place when he was in Euphues his lonely cave in Silexedra. The elegance, real of its artificial kind, is gone, and in place of it we get a loud vaunting howl of abuse. One-half of the qualification of the “slating reviewer” was wanting to the anti-Martinists. They hated the man, but they did not know the subject. The Royalist general who answered Fairfax’s self-righteous boasting of the good discipline of the Parliamentary soldiers by telling him that the Puritan had the sins of the Devil, “which are spiritual pride and rebellion,” struck him harder, and showed a finer wit than all the pamphleteers whom it has been in my power to see. They miss his vulnerable points, they bellow bad language and accusations of the kind of misconduct from which the Puritan was as free as the universal passions of humanity permitted. The difference between the two may be quite fairly put this way. The worst calumny of the Martinists can be quoted, but the anti-Martinists are naught when they are not using language which is nearly as unquotable as any written by the worst scribblers of the Restoration. The least nauseous passages are those in which these defenders of the Church gloat over the whips, branding-irons, and mutilating knife of Ball the Hangman. Now Martin rarely goes beyond threatening the bishops with a premunire, and when he does he stops at a “hemp collar.” |Its place in literary history.| The Martin Marprelate men were fighting in a now obsolete cause, in a style which has manifest faults of taste and temper. But they were on the right path, they set the example of pamphlet controversy from which the press was to come in time, and they did it in a way which only needed amending. The author of the Anatomy of an Equivalent had learnt that when you have proved your opponent to be “a sodden-headed ass,” it is superfluous to pelt him with the name. Yet he was truly the successor of Martin, while the line of the anti-Martinists ended in Ned Ward.

Hooker.

It is sometimes said that the Martinists were routed by Lyly and Nash, which is certainly unfair to the Earl of Derby, and not quite just to Ball the Hangman. As far as they were routed by literary weapons, the honour of defeating them is due to a very different hand. The doctrine of the Puritans was confuted in the Ecclesiastical Polity of Richard Hooker—the greatest masterpiece of Elizabethan prose.[88] Hooker was born at Heavitree, near Exeter, in 1553. His family was poor, and, like many of his contemporaries, he was educated by the kindness of patrons. Dr Jewel, the Bishop of Salisbury, and Edwin Sandys, then Bishop of London, and afterwards Archbishop of York, successively protected him at Oxford. He was tutor to Sandys’ sons. If Isaac Walton was correctly informed, he was somewhat tamely annexed by a scheming landlady as husband for her daughter. He had to resign his fellowship upon his marriage in 1584, and was appointed to the living of Drayton Beauchamp, in Buckinghamshire. In the following year he was appointed Master of the Temple. Here he became widely known by a controversy with the Puritan Walter Travers, conducted on both sides with more moderation than was usual in those times. After holding the Mastership for seven years, he resigned it for a living in Wiltshire. He died at Bishopsbourne, near Canterbury, in 1600.

The Ecclesiastical Polity.