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 502 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 503 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 504 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 505 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. 506 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, 507 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]