A History of English Literature, George Saintsbury [readnow .TXT] 📗

[41] Arber, Introductory Sketch. p. 40 sqq. All the quotations and references which follow will be found in Arber's and Petheram's reprints or in Grosart's Nash, vol. 1. If the works cited are not given as wholes in them, the fact will be noted. (See also Mr. Bond's Lyly.)

Udall was directly, as well as indirectly, the begetter of the Martin Marprelate controversy: though after he got into trouble in connection with it, he made a sufficiently distinct expression of disapproval of the Martinist methods, and it seems to have been due more to accident and his own obstinacy than anything else that he died in prison instead of being obliged with the honourable banishment of a Guinea chaplaincy. His printer, Waldegrave, had had his press seized and his license withdrawn for Diotrephes, and resentment at this threw what, in the existing arrangements of censorship and the Stationers' monopoly, was a very difficult thing to obtain—command of a practical printer—into the hands of the malcontents. Chief among these malcontents was a certain Reverend John Penry, a Welshman by birth, a member, as was then not uncommon, of both universities, and the author, among other more dubious publications, of a plea, intemperately stated in parts, but very sober and sensible at bottom, for a change in the system of allotting and administering the benefices of the church in Wales. Which plea, be it observed in passing, had it been attended to, it would have been better for both the church and state of England at this day. The pamphlet[42] contained, however, a distinct insinuation against the Queen, of designedly keeping Wales in ignorance and subjection—an insinuation which, in those days, was equivalent to high treason. The book was seized, and the author imprisoned (1587). Now when, about a year after, and in the very height of the danger from the Armada, Waldegrave's livelihood was threatened by the proceedings above referred to, it would appear that he obtained from the Continent, or had previously secreted from his confiscated stock, printing tools, and that he and Penry, at the house of Mistress Crane, at East Molesey, in Surrey, printed a certain tract, called, for shortness, "The Epistle."[43] This tract, of the authorship and character of which more presently, created a great sensation. It was immediately followed, the press being shifted for safety to the houses of divers Puritan country gentlemen, by the promised Epitome. So great was the stir, that a formal answer of great length was put forth by "T. C." (well known to be Thomas Cooper, Bishop of Winchester), entitled, An Admonition to the People of England. The Martinists, from their invisible and shifting citadel, replied with perhaps the cleverest tract of the whole controversy, named, with deliberate quaintness, Hay any Work for Cooper?[44] ("Have You any Work for the Cooper?" said to be an actual trade London cry). Thenceforward the mêlée of pamphlets, answers, "replies, duplies, quadruplies," became in small space indescribable. Petheram's prospectus of reprints (only partially carried out) enumerates twenty-six, almost all printed in the three years 1588-1590; Mr. Arber, including preliminary works, counts some thirty. The perambulating press was once seized (at Newton Lane, near Manchester), but Martin was not silenced. It is certain (though there are no remnants extant of the matter concerned) that Martin was brought on the stage in some form or other, and though the duration of the controversy was as short as its character was hot, it was rather suppressed than extinguished by the death of Udall in prison, and the execution of Penry and Barrow in 1593.