the rhetoric of reaction: the martin marprelate tracts (1588-89), anti- martinism, and the uses of...

The Rhetoric of Reaction: The Martin Marprelate Tracts (1588-89), Anti- Martinism, and theUses of Print in Early Modern EnglandAuthor(s): Joseph BlackSource: The Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 28, No. 3 (Autumn, 1997), pp. 707-725Published by: The Sixteenth Century JournalStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2542987 .

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Sixteenth CenturyJournal XXVIII/3 (1997)

The Rhetoric of Reaction: The Martin Marprelate Tracts (1588-89), Anti-Martinism, and the Uses of Print in

Early Modern England

Joseph Black University of Toronto

The pseudonymous Marprelate tracts sparked one of the most famous pamphlet wars in sixteenth-century England.This article focuses on the anti-Martinist response, drawing on manuscript and printed sources to explore the ways in which church and state sought to counter Martin's Presbyterian message.At the heart of the controversy lay questions not only of ecclesiology but also of style, decorum, and audience. the tracts' notoriety stemmed largely from their use of polemical strategies aimed at attracting a popular audience, and the anti-Martinist campaign reveals the anxiety with which Elizabethan officials viewed these efforts to foster public debate by means of the press.To some contemporaries, however, the polemic deployed to defend the Church helped legitimize rather than suppress "Martinist" discursive freedom.The Marprelate controversy consequently provides a case study of a society still negotiating the social and political implications of print culture.

ON NOVEMBER IS, I588, THE ANTIQUARY FRANCIS THYNNE wrote Lord Burghley, Elizabeth's chief minister, to lobby for a position in the College ofArms. His letter is ostentatiously allusive, a rhetorical display designed to prove himself fit for office. Unfortunately for Thynne, the theme he is best able to embroider is that of bad luck and missed opportunity: "Your Lordship may suppose," he begins, "that I have muche idle tyme and litle wisdome, to write so often & spede so seldome."1 Thynne had "knockt to late" to be considered for several positions recently available in the College,2 so in the spirit of disinterested public service he brings to Burghley's attention the sorry state of heraldry in general and the shortcomings of the college's current officers in particular. Employing occupatio for the purpose, he prefaces a litany of incompetence with the disclaimer that he "will not Anotomyze

1Public Record Office, State Papers [PRO SP] 12/218/23. Printed in Thynne, Animadversions Uppon the Annotacions and Corrections of Some Imperfections of Impressiones of Chaucers Workes, ed. EJ. Fur- nival (London: Early English Text Society, 1865), xci-xciii. Furnival's transcription does not include the "PS." Thynne wrote in the top margin, an indication that the extant letter is the postscript only of a longer document now lost.

2For the appointments made, see Walter H. Godfrey, Sir Anthony Wagner, and H. Stanford, The College of Arms (London: College of Arms, 1963), 48, 111, 123, 156. Thynne was eventually created Lancaster Herald in 1602.

707



708 Sixteenth CenturyJournal XXVIII /3 (1997)

every perticular default of everye manne and matter in that office. (Lest I might be counted one of thee foolishe sonnes of Martine Mareprelate)."Thynne was being conspicuously au courant: the only Marprelate tract available by this date was the Epistle (1588), printed a few weeks earlier in mid-October.3 The Epistle would soon spark the most famous pamphlet war in Elizabethan England.What is inter- esting about Thynne's use of Martin's first work is that he offers a relatively innocent reading of the text-Martin here exemplifies little more than bad form. Within a few months, however, the Marprelate tracts were to be demonized for having transgressed a number of political, religious, and polemical boundaries, and the treason thought to lurk at the heart of the Martinist project was not a resonance a job seeker such as Thynne would any longer dare evoke.

This paper explores the means by which church, state, and the independently outraged sought to shape the reception of the Marprelate tracts-how they fash- ioned a discursive realm in which Thynne's lighthearted appropriation of the persona would soon be if not impossible at least ill advised. My emphasis is on the ways in which contemporary responses to the tracts reflect the concerns of a culture still negotiating the protocols governing the uses of print. The fundamental aim of those involved in the Marprelate project was of course ecclesiological:They wanted to replace bishops with presbyters and rebuild the English church on a Scottish or Genevan model.4 Theirs was the losing cause, and widespread disapproval of"Mar- tinism," even among fellow reformers, likely contributed to the decline of organized Presbyterianism in the early 1590s.5 It was Martin's style, not his arguments on church government, that would ultimately have the greater impact. Martin

3A. W Pollard and G. W. Redgrave, A short-title catalogue of books printed in England, Scotland, & Ire- land and of English books printed abroad, 1475-1640, 2d ed. rev by WA. Jackson et al., 3 vols. (London: Bibliographical Society, 1976-91) [STC], 17453. For the movements of the Marprelate press, see Leland H. Carlson, Martin A'Iarprelate, Gentleman: MasterJob Throkmorton Laid Open in His Colors (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1981), xviii, 31-52. Picking up on Martin's threat in the Epistle to place "sonnes" in every parish to scrutinize the behavior of the officials in residence (40),Thynne here antic- ipates Marprelate's subsequent development of the trope of filiation. In July 1589, the Martinists would produce tracts by "Martin Junior" and "Martin Senior" (STC 17457, 17458).

4For the religious, political, and polemical background to the Marprelate controversy, see Edward Arber, An Introductory Sketch to the Martin Marprelate Controversy, 1588-1590 (London: Archibald Con- stable, 1895); William Pierce, An Historical Introduction to the Marprelate Tracts (London: Archibald Con- stable, 1908); William Pierce, ed., The Marprelate Tracts, 1588, 1589 (London:James Clarke, 1911), xiii- xxviii; Ronald B. McKerrow, "The Marprelate Controversy," in The Works of Thomas Nashe, 5 vols. (1904-10; rpt., Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958), 5:34-65;J. Dover Wilson, "The Marprelate Contro- versy," Cambridge History of English Literature, ed. Sir A. W Ward and A. R. Waller, 14 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1907-16), 3:425-52; Carlson, Martin Marprelate; Raymond A. Anselment, "BetwixtJest and Earnest": Marprelate, ,Iilton, Marvell, Swift & the Decorum of Religious Ridicule (Toronto: U of Toronto Press, 1979),33-60.

5For reform disapproval of Martin, see Martin Marprelate, Epitome [Fawsley, 1588], A2r; Martin Junior, Theses Martinianae [Wolston, 1589], A2r; Richard Bancroft, A Survay of the Pretended Holy Disci- pline (1593),430;Thomas Cartwright,A BriefApologie (1596), C2v;John UdaEl,A New Discovery (1643), 24; Thomas Fuller, The Church-Historie of Britain (1655), 193; The Notebook ofJohn Penry, 1593, ed. Albert Peel, Camden Society, vol. 67 (London: Camden Society, 1944), 71; Arber, Introductory Sketch, 99. In his Plea of the Innocent (1602),Josias Nicols discusses the publication of the tracts as one of the "greevous accidents" which did "verie much darken the righteousnes of our cause" (31-32). For the decline of English Presbyterianism after 1590, see Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967), 385-467.



Black / Marprelate Tracts (1588-89), Anti-Martinism, & Printing 709

hoped to popularize the Presbyterian agenda by expanding the audience for religious polemic. Through the use of fictional strategies, a racy, colloquial prose, anecdotes anchored in the everyday details of their readers' lives, and a willingness to put into print the personal failings of individual bishops, the tracts courted a notoriety that would ensure dissemination of Presbyterian complaints about the status quo.6 In effect, the reformers who produced and distributed the Marprelate tracts sought to encourage wider participation in ecclesiological debate, a polenmi- cal strategy that dovetailed with the political and social implications of their Pres- byteriamsm.

This aspect of the Martinist program did not go unnoticed, and underlying the flurry of commentary the tracts produced is a profound uneasiness over their attempt to use print to spread the Presbyterian message among a popular audience. That is, the response to the Marprelate tracts shows that the debate they generated over the language appropriate to religious controversy was concomitant with a fundamental disagreement over who had authority to participate in discussions concerning the church. Implicitly or explicitly, anti-Martinist texts warn readers of the destabilizing potential of a "popular" polemic in a hierarchical society. Through sermons, proclamations, pamphlets, and even stage burlesques, the anti-Martinist campaign sought to counter Martin's efforts to create a public sphere for debate.To do so, however, it had to address the same audience Martin had targeted, and a key strategy in the campaign was to achieve this end by appropriating Martin's own polemical mode. For some contemporaries, the tensions generated by this decision helped clarify the political implications of a burgeoning print culture. But despite fears that major components of the campaign were self-contradictory, the defensive tactics developed within a year of Martin's appearance-the demonization that effectively preempted "innocent" readings similar to Thynne's-would become standard weapons throughout the following century in the ongoing battle against Martinist irreverence.

* * *

Lord Burghley had himself been thinking about Martin the day before Thynne wrote his letter; in fact, he had just set in motion the reaction that would make such references unlikely in the near future. On November 14, Burghley wrote John Whitgift, archbishop of Canterbury, that "hir Majestie hath understandyng of a lewd & seditious book lately prynted as it shuld seme in secret manner, & as secretly dispersed by persons of unquiet spyrittes." The Epistle, he reported, aimed principally to "move a mislike" of the present system of church government by bishops, and the queen thought that the book's malicious charges set a "daungerous

6For discussions of Martinist style, see J. S. Coolidge, "Martin Marprelate, Marvell and Decorum Personae as a Satirical Theme," PMLA 74 (1959): 526-32; Anselment, "BetwixtJest and Earnest," 33-60; Ritchie Kendall, The Drama of Dissent: The Radical Poetics of Nonconformity, 1380-1590 (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina Press, 1986), 173-212;John S. Benger,"The Authority ofWriter andText in Radical Protestant Literature 1540 to 1593 with Particular Reference to the Marprelate Tracts" (D.Phil. diss., Oxford, 1989), 168-324;Joseph Black, "Pamphlet Wars: The Marprelate Tracts and 'Martinism,' 1588- 1688" (Ph.D. diss.,Toronto, 1996), 69-119.




example to encourage privat men in this covert manner to subvert all other kyndes of government under hir Majesties charg, both in the Church and Commen weale."Whitgift was therefore instructed to "serch out the authors ... and ther Complices, and the prynters and the secret dispersers of the same; and to cause them to be apprehended and committed."7 Spurred by this threat to the very idea of hierarchy, the archbishop instituted a nationwide search for the Martinist press, and the narrative of the remaining six Marprelate tracts was played out against a backdrop of informers, raids, disguises, manuscripts left surreptitiously under hedges, conversations in the middle of fields, and ever closer pursuit as the secret press was carted from one house to another.

The first printed response to the tracts appeared inJanuary 1589, about three months after the appearance of the Epistle. Bishop Thomas Cooper's Admonition to the People of England (1589) was a collaborative effort in which various disputants all attempted to clear their names from Martin's "untruethes, slaunders, reproches, raylings, revilings, scoffings, and other untemperate speeches" (35). John Aylmer, the bishop of London, was particularly upset with the manner in which he had been singled out for criticism, spluttering against Martin's "bitter stile of malicious Momus dipt in the gall of ungodlinesse" (58). Cooper himself objects to Martin's style, reminding readers of the recently averted threat of the Spanish Armada and contrasting the pious gratitude of the patriotic with these "slaunderous Pamphlets fresh from the Presse, against the best of the Church of Englande ... not giving prayse to God, but scoffing, mocking, rayling, and depraving the lives and doings of Bishoppes" (34). He concludes by warning that, "if this outragious spirit of boldenesse be not stopped speedily, I feare he wil prove himselfe to bee, not onely Mar-prelate, but Mar-prince, Mar-state, Mar-lawe, Mar-magistrate, and all together, until he bring it to an Anabaptisticall equalitie and communitie" (36).

That every bishop named in the Epistle felt compelled to respond to Martin's charges reveals how seriously both the work and the medium were taken: Elizabe- than print culture remained sufficiently small-scale to lend some authority to any printed text.8 A dignified silence appears not to have been an option to these officers of the church once accusations against them had been published. Aylmer, for one, might have been better advised to restrict himself to a generic condemnation of Martin's text rather than offer detailed, magisterial, and usually self-implicating justifications of all his actions-such as refuising to return stolen property found dis- carded on his lands. Aylmer in particular seems to have been unable to distinguish between banter and serious charges. But his heavy-handed literalism is representative of a general difficulty the church had in learning to read Martin's text.While they were perfectly comfortable with the weapons of scripture, tradition, and

7BL Lansdowne MS 103/43. Printed in Arber, Introductory Sketch, 107-8. 81n 1586, there were only twenty-five authorized printers in England, twenty-three in London,

and one each in Oxford and Cambridge; by 1588 there were twenty-four, since RobertWaldegrave (the printer of the first four Marprelate tracts) had been barred from the trade for unlicensed printing; the list of printers is printed in A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers, ed. Edward Arber, 5 vols. (1875-94; rpt., Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1967), 5:1ii.




authority, the bishops seem to have been unprepared for the sharper edge of satire and the ad hominem thrust. In fact, the Admonition played right into Martin's hand by providing him with an irresistible new target: Cooper would become "the Tub- trimmer of Winchester" throughout the tracts that followed. The object of the attack had been to push discussion of controverted issues into the public realm, and Martin's episcopal opponents appeared only too eager to oblige him.

In February, on the first Sunday of the 1589 Parliament, Richard Bancroft preached a sermon against the Marprelate tracts from Paul's Cross, the traditional site for the dissemination of the official line on political and religious issues. The site and the timing indicate the seriousness with which the government now took the Martinist attack.9 A royal proclamation against the tracts appeared the Wednes- day after Bancroft preached.t0 A Proclamation against Certaine Seditious and Schismat- ical Bookes and Libels describes the consequences of the Martinist publications in language that exposes the concerns fueling the archbishop's search for the press. According to the queen, these "secretly published ... schismatical and seditious bookes, diffamatorie Libels, and other fantasticall writings" tended ultimately to the "abridging, or rather to the overthrowe of her Highnesse lawfull Prerogative, allowed by Gods lawe, and established by the Lawes of the Realme."tt That is, to push for innovation in church government was to call into question the legal foundations of monarchical sovereignty-a version of the slippery slope argument that James I, drawing on his experience in Presbyterian Scotland, would later summa- rize as "No bishop, no king."12 To Elizabeth, as to James and Charles after her, episcopacy was the natural corollary of monarchy, whereas the more republican polity of Presbyterianism was by nature antipathetic to rule by a queen or king.The proclamation furthermore associates the tracts' liberty of language with the political lib- erties they threaten. In "rayling sorte, and beyond the boundes of all good humanitie," they present "matters notoriously untrue, and slaunderous ... against the persons of the Bishoppes, and others placed in authoritie Ecclesiasticall under her Highnesse by her authoritie." By calling attention to what is most characteristic

91n addition to its role in the anti-Martinist campaign, this sermon is also often described as one of the earliest English defenses of episcopacy jure divino; see W. D.J. Cargill Thompson, "A Reconsider- ation of Richard Bancroft's Paul's Cross Sermon of 9 February 1588/89,"Journal of Ecclesiastical History 20 (1969): 253-66. For responses to this sermon, see John Penry,A Briefe Discovery of the Untruthes and Slanders (Against the True Governement of the Church of Christ) Contained in a Sermon, Preached ... by D. Ban- croft [Edinburgh, 1590]; John Davidson, D. Bancrofts Rashnes in Rayling against the Church of Scotland (1590);W D.J. Cargill Thompson, "Sir Francis Knollys's Campaign Against the Jure Divino Theory of Episcopacy," Studies in the Reformation: Luther to Hooker, ed. C.W Dugmore (London: Athlone, 1980), 94-130.Two editions ofA Sermon Preached at Paules Crosse were published in 1589; it would be reprinted in 1636 and 1637 (and again in 1709) during renewed debates on the status of episcopacy.

10The proclamation does not name Marprelate, but the tracts are clearly the target: a document in the Canterbury city archives lists a payment to a pursuivant for delivering this proclamation and describes it as "for Martin Marprelate." Cited in Tudor Royal Proclamations, ed. Paul L. Hughes and James F Larkin, 3 vols. (New Haven:Yale UP, 1969), 3:34.

11Quotations from the broadsheet original, rather than the modern spelling version in Tudor Royal Proclamations, 3:34.

12Recorded in William Barlow, The Summe and Substance of the Conference, which, it Pleased his Excel- lent AlIajestie to Have ... at Hampton Court (1604), 36, 82.




of Martin's approach-his attack on the "persons of the Bishoppes" as well as on their office-Elizabeth, an expert herself in constructing images of authority, reveals her awareness of how vulnerable these images were to deflation. Other readers of the tracts drew similar conclusions. When Sir Richard Knightly (in whose house the second Marprelate tract was printed) sent copies of the first three pamphlets to his brother, the earl of Hertford, he received a message in return that spoke to the concerns of the aristocracy with the same analogical argument that James invoked at Hampton Court: "as they shoote at Byshopps now," the earl warns, "so will they doe at the Nobilitie also, if they be suffred."'13

In addition to the archbishop's investigation, Cooper's Admonition, Bancroft's sermon, and the queen's proclamation, the government tried to counter the influence of the Marprelate tracts by sponsoring a parallel pamphlet campaign that sought to turn Martin's own style against him. Bancroft, later archbishop of Can- terbury but at the time canon at Westminster, is usually credited with the strategy. In the early 1580s, Bancroft had prepared a refutation of the "Precisians" (Presby- terians) and the Separatist Robert Browne.Albert Peel suggests that it was this document, Certen Slaunderous Speeches against the Present Estate of the Chturch of England Published to the People by the Precisians, that first brought Bancroft to the attention of the newly appointed Whitgift as a potential hunter of heretics.14 Displaying the polemical strategies with which he would make a successful career, Bancroft links Separatist arguments with various ancient heresies, then tars Presbyterians with the same brush through a chain of association leading back through the Family of Love to Anabaptism. Given the Separatist denial of the legitimacy of a state church, the gap separating them from the Presbyterians was wide. Bancroft, however, worked assiduously to conflate the two: "The difference that is herein betwixt them," he argues, "may well be resembled to one and the same lute stringe sett up a note or two higher" (Tracts, 18).

Certen Slaunderous Speeches is a working document, an outline Bancroft com-- piled for his own use. But even in this context he put into writing his primary anxiety concerning these books: that they were "published to the people" (title). Bancroft realized that the debate over church government had entered the public realm, and when the Marprelate tracts appeared a few years later, he believed that the official response needed to reach the same audience that Martin had targeted. Bancroft's role in the anti-Martinist campaign is outlined in a letterWhitgift wrote on his behalf in 1597 when Bancroft was being considered (successfully) for the bishopric of London. The testimonial concentrates on Bancroft's opposition "against all Sects & Innovations"; amongst the good services with which Whitgift credits Bancroft is that "He was by his diligent search the first Detector of Martin Mar-Prelat Press & Books.... By his advice, that Course was taken, which did principally stop Martin and his Fellows' mouths viz: to have them answered after their own vein in writings."15 Whitgift had appointed Bancroft his personal chap-

13BL Lansdowne MS 61/22. Printed in Arber, Introductory Sketch, 114-17. 14Albert Peel, ed., Tracts Ascribed to Richard Bancroft (Cambridge: UP, 1953), x. 15Bancroft, Tracts, xvii-xviii.




lain in 1592 and consequently, as Patrick Collinson points out, had "a motive for exaggerating the services of his 16 But other evidence links Bancroft with the prosecution of the Martinists,17 and Whitgift's juxtaposition of the effort to suppress Martin accords well with the strategies Bancroft followed in his life- long pursuit of uniformity in the church.

Over twenty explicitly anti-Martinist works survive.18 Some ofthese are probably independent work, but the texts that deploy a recognizable Martinist style are likely those published with official encouragement. Anonymous rhymesters were the first into the fray, with the collection Mar-Martine and A Whip for an Ape: Or Martin Displaied appearing in early summer 1589.19 Mar-Martine, attributed to John Lyly and Thomas Nashe as collaborators, blames the Marprelate tracts for introduc- ing theatrical license into religious debate: "These tinkers termes, and barbers jestes first Tarleton on the stage, / Then Martin in his bookes of lies, hath put in every page."20 A Whip for an Ape, attributed to Lyly,21 takes this argument a step further, foregrounding the theatricality of Martin's polemic and self-presentation with an extended metaphor in which Martin plays the role of performing ape, for whom "Martin" had been a traditional name.22 The poem begins by drawing attention to Martin's pseudonymity ("A Dizard late skipt out upon our Stage; / But in a sacke, that no man might him see"23), then offers a series of similarities between the polemicist and his namesake. The emphasis, to be repeated throughout the anti- Martinist campaign, is on the gap between the matter under discussion and the style in which Martin has handled it: "But Martin, why in matters of such waight / Doest thou thus play the Dawe and dancing foole?" (lines 43-44). RichardTarleton is again pressed into service to supply Martin with an appropriate genealogy:"Now Tarleton's dead the Consort lacks a vice: / For knave and foole thou maist beare pricke and price" (lines 53-54).The identification of Martin with the comic actor

16Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 404; see also Owen Chadwick, "Richard Bancroft's Submission,"Journal of Ecclesiastical History 3 (1952): 58-73.

17See Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan AIovement, 404n. 18Carlson, Martin Marprelate, 53-74, provides summaries. Published works (some only implicitly

anti-Martinist) that were probably independent productions include A. L., Anti-Martinus (1589); three pamphlets by Leonard Wright,A Summonsfor Sleepers (1589), The Hunting of Antichrist (1589), and A Friendly Admonition to AIartine Marprelate, and his Mates (1590);Tobias Bland,A Baitefor Momus (1589); Anthony Marten, A Reconciliation of all the Pastors and Cleargy of this Church of England (1590); Asinus Onustus:TheAsse Overladen (1642), presented to the queen in manuscript inJuly 1589; and the "neutral" works discussed at the end of this article.

19Margaret Crum, First-Line Index of English Poetry 1500-1800 in Manuscripts of the Bodleian Library Oxford, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969), 1:540, lists a manuscript version of Alar-Martine entitled "An admonition to the Parlament. 1588. made by a frantick foole to beware of Martin," as well as a response, "An answere to the forsayd admotion & slaunderous lib[el] made agaynst Martyn. 1589," directed against Whitgift (Crum L776; both in Bodleian MS Rawlinson C. 849, fol. 396 r-v). There were likely other manuscript contributions to the controversy from both sides that supplemented their print cam- paigns.

20Mar-Martine, I Know Not Why a Trueth in Rime Set Out [1589],A4v. For attribution, see R.War- wick Bond, ed., Complete Works ofJohn Lyly, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1902), 1:387-88.

21See Bond, ed., Complete Works ofJohn Lyly, 3:415-16. 22OED, s.v. "Martin," cites examples through to the late seventeenth century. 23In Complete Works ofJohn Lyly, 3:418.



714 Sixteenth CentuiryJournal XXVIII /3 (1997)

Tarleton, who was famous for his extemporized routines, reflects the improvised, railing quality of Martin's style, and reveals the concern over his deliberate appeal to (presumably) base popular taste through theatrical techniques.

The prevailing tone of anti-Martinist prose is of literary one-upmanship, as if the authors of these pamphlets were competing not only with Martin but also with one another to devise the most imaginative insults, scatological metaphors, or witty comparisons. The result, most of the time, is rather uninspired abuse, though Mar- tins Months Minde (1589) makes effective use of the conventions of the deathbed, providing the reader with the narrative of Martin's last days, his speeches of repen- tance, the results of the autopsy, his funeral, last will, and the epitaphs produced by the event.The problem with much anti-Martinist material is that the style is often an end in itself, and quickly becomes tiresome-even, at times, to the writers themselves. In Pappe with an Hatchet (1589),John Lyly seems bored with the conventions of scurrility the attack required: after the occasional slip into real argument, he pulls himself back with lines such as "Hollow there, give me the beard I wore yesterday" or "A fine period; but I cannot continue this stile."24

Nearly a century after the controversy, Anthony a Wood wrote approvingly that "these Buffooneries and Pasquils, did more non-plus Penry John Penry, whom Wood credits with authorship of the tracts] and his disciples, and so consequently made their Doctrine more ridiculous among the common sort, than any grave or learned Answer could do."25 At the time, however, answering Martin in his own manner was much more problematic. In his preface to Pappe with an Hatchet, Lyly recognizes that his borrowed style needed defending. He informs the "indifferent reader" that if the Martinists

be answered by the gravitie of learned Prelates, they presentlie reply with railings.... Seeing then either they expect no grave replie, or that they are settled with railing to replie; I thought it more convenient to give them a whisk with their owne wand.... [I]f here I have used bad tearmes, it is because they are not to bee answered with good tearmes: for whatsoever shall seeme lavish in this Pamphlet, let it be thought borrowed of Martins language.26

Other writers had fewer qualms: given official sanction to publish in a language that matched Martin's, many of these polemical mercenaries clearly relished the opportunity. The author of An Almondfor a Parrat (1589), for example, warns his readers to "catch not the hicket with laughing," and appropriates the theatrical and

24In Complete Works ofJohn Lyly, 3:403; Bond discusses Lyly's authorship in 3:390-92. 25Athenae Oxoniensis (1721), 1:260.Wood's emphasis on "the common sort" indicates the public,

at least in the opinion of this seventeenth-century reader, that both Martin and his opponents were trying to reach.

-6Complete Works v/john Lyly, 3:396. In his An Anstvere to a Certaine Libel Supplicatorie (1592), Mat- thew Sutcliffe also justifies his language against those who "mislike" it by arguing that he is responding not to "such as desire to learne, or finde out trueth: but against ignorant, wilfull, and seditious Libellers ... against whom no sharpnesse of stile can be sufficient" (B1 r).




jest-book genealogy accorded Martin by dedicating the work to "Monsieur du Kempe,Jestmonger andVice-gerent generall to the Ghost of Dicke Tarlton."27

As these potentially conflicting messages indicate, some ambivalence attended the attempt to claim the moral high ground on issues of decorum and polemical theatricality in pamphlets that deployed rhetorical strategies identical to those being denounced. The slippage consequent to the exercise is best exemplified by the third prong of the literary attack on Martin, which involved the use of stage burlesques to supplement the efforts in verse and prose.Throughout the summer of 1589, notes Martins Months Mind, "everie stage Plaier made a jest of him, and put him cleane out of countenance" (E4r). The descriptions of these performances- and descriptions are all that remain-indicate that they were interludes rather than full plays. The pseudonymous Pasquill uses the term "Vetus Comaedia,"28 the Aris- tophanic "old comedy" of personal invective, to describe them, and they appear to have drawn on the resources of such traditional theatrical genres as the beast fable and the morality play.29 Martin, however, might have taken some comfort in this component of the response. Stage presentations so suggestive of the pantomime have meaning only in the context of public notoriety: an audience needs first to know about the polemical Martin before it can make sense of a character disguised as an ape. The use of such tactics could indicate that the Martinists had enjoyed some success in their efforts to broaden awareness of their challenge.Apprehension soon spread over the bawdiness of these performances, however, and in the autumn of 1589 they were banned, in their own right, for treating matters "unfytt and undecent to be handled in playes, both for Divinite and State."30 Given the terms of this disapproval, the anti-Martinist theatre seems likely to have been independent of the official campaign, a product more of theatrical enterprise than episcopal pro- paganda-though the Elizabethan government was not above officially condemn- ing what it unofficially supported.31

In addition to their concern with Martinist language and theatricality, the anti-Martinists also deployed arguments that exploited uneasiness over a number of

27In McKerrow, ed., Works of Thomas Nashe, 3:339, 341. McKerrow includes this tract among Nashe's "doubtful" works (see 5:59-63). But the argument for Nashe's authorship in DonaldJ. McGinn, "Nashe's Share in the Marprelate Controversy," PMLA 59 (1944): 952-84, is generally accepted.

28The Returne of the Renowned Cavaliero Pasquill (1589), in Works of Thomas Nashe, 1:92. McKerrow discusses the authorship of the three anti-Martinist "Pasquill" tracts in 5:52-53, where, despite including them in his edition, he doubts the attribution.

29E. K. Chambers collects the references to the theatre connected with the Marprelate controversy in The Elizabethan Stage (1923; rpt., Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), 4:229-33. For an intriguing discussion of the influence of anti-Martinist theater on later stereotypes of "Puritanism," see Patrick Collinson, "Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair: The Theatre Constructs Puritanism," in The Theatrical City: Culture, Theatre and Politics in London, 1576-1649, ed. David L. Smith, Richard Strier, and David Bev- ington (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995), 157-69. For other discussions of theatrical anti-Martinism, see Black,"Pamphlet Wars," 139-44.

30Privy Council to the Master of Revels, November 12, 1589, cited in Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, 1:295. See also Richard Dutton, Mastering the Revels: The Regulation and Censorship of English Renaissance Drama (Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1991), 74-81.

3'AJacobean example might be the nine-day run enjoyed by Middleton's anti-Spanish A Game at Chess (1624) before it was shut down.




related political issues. Most of these lines of thought were in some degree traditional, in that they had been used in England against reformers long before Martin Marprelate appeared on the scene. But to meet the challenge of what contemporaries recognized as the radical culmination of Presbyterian rhetoric, these counter- ing measures were given unusually strong formulations, formulations that would dominate defenses of the church through to the 1640s and survive in one form or another to the end of the seventeenth century.At the root of all these anti-Martinist tropes is the argument that any challenge to the authority of the church was fun- damentally treasonous. From the earliest official responses to Martin to the documents compiled for the 1591 trials of the Presbyterian leadership, the government used the Marprelate tracts to construct an image of Presbyterianism as a sect given to violence and revolution. One of the Star Chamber briefs for the 1591 trials cites "Martin" for the charge that "One of our late libellers braggeth of an hundreth thousand handes: & wisheth the Parlement to bring in this Refourmation, though it bee by with-siandinge her Queenes majestie."32 If the forms of church government were not divinely ordained but subject to the discretion of the magistrate, ran this argument, then ecclesiological challenges were simultaneously challenges to the monarch's prerogative powers. According to Almond for a Parrat, Martin was therefore celebrated on the Continent for attempting what "neither the Pope by his Senminaries, Philip by his power, nor all the holy League by their underhand practises and policies could at any time effect": to draw the English away from their allegiance to their sovereign.33 Lyly rhymes the charge concisely in Whipfor an Ape: "Yes, he that now saith,Why should Bishops bee? /Will next crie out,Why Kings? The Saincts are free" (lines 83-84). Anti-Martinist writers consistently paint the Presbyterian challenge to episcopacy as the first step in a selfish elevation of the individual over all external forms of authority, including the monarch from whom that authority ultimately derived.

The standard Presbyterian response to this argument was that if the forms of church government prescribed by scripture were immutable and binding, as they believed, then efforts to restore the church to its divinely ordained model in no way impinged on the legitimate powers of the state. Presbyterian reasoning on this issue, however, was seriously compromised by the juxtaposition of the Marprelate attack with the most prominent Catholic threat of the era: the attempted invasion by the Spanish Armada. In his opening oration at the 1589 Parliament, Christopher Hatton surveyed the enemies of England, beginning with the pope and the king of

32BL Lansdowne MS 120/3, "[The] proceedinges of certeyne undutifull [mi]nisters tending to innovation," fol. 75v. In addition, BL Lansdowne MS 119/7, "The doctrines, and some practises of sundry troublesome Ministers in England," cites the Epitome and Martin Senior, The Just Censure and Reproofe of Martin Junior [Wolston, 1589] (fol. 105v); BL Lansdowne MS 101/51, which comprises twelve leaves of quotations extracted from the Epistle, the Epitome, and Hay any Workefor Cooper [Cov- entry, 1589], likely also played a role in the prosecution of the case. A similar set of excerpts is in Bod- leian Library, Tanner Papers, vol. 78, fols. 192-93. For the 1590-91 Star Chamber proceedings, see Collinson, Elizabethan Puritan Movement, 403-31 The claim of "an hundreth thousand" supporters is fromnJust Censure [1589], C4r.

33 In Works of Thomas Nashe, 3:342.




Spain. But in the middle of his denunciations of these foreign adversaries, he intro- duced the specter of native Protestants "of latter days risen up," men "of a very intemperate humour" who "do greatly deprave the present estate and reformation of religion."While the queen expected such railing from the Catholic opposition, he reported, she grieved to find her own subjects joining them in slandering the church. Hatton consequently warned the assembled members that their sovereign had commanded them not to "so much as once meddle with any such matters or causes of religion, except it be to bridle all those, whether Papists or Puritans, which are therewithal discontented."34 Anti-Martinist writers quickly exploited this now officially sanctioned connection, and the representation of "puritan" agi- tation as being equally dangerous as Catholic machination would become a polemical commonplace throughout the following century.35

Some Catholic controversialists attempted to turn this juxtaposition to their advantage. In October 1591, the queen established commissions against seminary priests and Jesuits.36 One response to the proclamation argued that the "cause of the troubles" the queen hoped to remedy was not the peaceful Catholics. The "Martinistes or Puritans," writes Richard Verstegan, were "much more dangerous for dornistical broyles, then the Spaniardes for open warres," and he cites a list of both Martinist and anti-Martinist works to illustrate the point937 But to English officials, the justice of the comparison was confirmed by evidence of Catholic approval of Martin supplied by English agents on the Continent. In the spring of 1591, RogerWalton told vice chamberlain SirThomas Heneage about one How- son, an English Catholic he had met in France. Howson's plot, according to Wal- ton, was to arrange some means of burning the Navy moored at Chatham; among the "publicke matters" the two discussed leading up to this revelation was "what successe the new seckt of martinists had in England, which sayd Howson said was a thinge raysed by god to win manye to the catholicke faythe."38 During an exam- ination in 1592, George Dingley (alias Thomas Christopher, alias JamesYoung), an English Jesuit from the College in Rheims, claimed that English Catholics abroad-the "Rebels beyond the seas"-knew of the tracts, and that "the mutter- ing of the martinists they gretlye rejoysed translating that boke into spanishe & pre- senting it unto the king [Philip II] judging by the hote woordes viz of an C [hundred] thousand fystes about ther eares that were uttryd in the boke, that short- lye some uprore wold be movyd by the factyon." A marginal note in a different

34Cited inJ. E. Neale, Elizabeth I and Her Parliaments, 1584-1601 (London:Jonathan Cape, 1957), 198-99.

35For representative subsequent examples, see William Watson, A Decacordon of Ten Quodlibeticall Questions (1602), 26-47; Oliver Ormerod, Puritano-Papismus: Or a Discoverie of Puritan-Papisme, published in The Picture of a Puritane (1605); David Owen, Puritano-Jesuitismus, the Puritan turn'dJesuite (1643);Thomas Edwards, Gangraena (1646), 45-46;A Parallel betwixt Popery and Phanaticism [1681?].

36See Tudor Royal Proclamations, 3:86-93. 37Verstegan,An Advertisement Written to a Secretarie of my L. Treasurers of Ingland ([Antwerp?] 1592),

19. This work is a summary of Andreas Philopatrum [Robert Parsons], Elizabethae Angliae Reginae hae- resim Calvinianam propugnantis (Augustae [i.e.Antwerp], 1592).

38PRO SP 12/238/135.




hand summarizes the danger: "hope of contencion by [i.e. as a result ofl the mart- tynistes."39

The government was not slow to exploit the possibility of Catholic approval of Martin to their own ends. In June 1589, Thomas Phelippes, the coordinator of English agents abroad, supplied one of his spies with suggestions for a credential- establishing letter to a Catholic contact. Among the tidbits of intelligence he provided was that "the division betwene the protestants & puritanes is no other than [it] hath bene a long time ... that which latelye hath bene bruted [concerned] the boke which came forth in the name of martine marprelate."40 A similar letter to the same agent for use with a different contact notes that Marprelate is "in every mans mouth" and that "a boke in rime called marmartin published then sold in every booke shoppe was it seemeth to be cum privilegio.'541 These letters confidently invoke "Martin Marprelate" as if there is no doubt that English Catholics in France would have heard of him. Phelippes in fact appears to be using the Martinist attack as a tool with which to gain the confidence of Catholic conspirators: England, the letters imply, is weak and self-divided. One question is the extent to which Phelippes and other government officials (as opposed to the outraged bishops) actually thought this. Do they truthfully inform their contacts in order to hear about Catholic plots initiated in consequence of the encouraging news, or is their use of Marprelate a ploy-or something in between? In any case, the Marprelate tracts offered a tidy synecdoche for the "puritane" cause; in the wake of the anti- Martinist campaign, Martin became widely identified, even on the Continent, as the epitome of domestic opposition the summarizing statement of everyone who, as Phelippes suggests in the first letter cited above, "finde fault with the church."

Antireform polemic associated Catholics and Presbyterians as types of the bad subject. Both, it was argued, owed primary allegiance to a power other than the monarch-the pope on the one hand, a self-serving individual conscience on the other. At the other end of the religious spectrum, Presbyterians were often linked with Anabaptists to provide the reform movement with an appropriately frighten- ing myth of origin. Thomas Cooper's warning in the Admonition concerning the Anabaptists and their levelling principles was frequently repeated in subsequent anti-Martinist writing. Popularly represented as advocating a radical overthrow of all custom, the Anabaptists served as reminders that even in times of rapid social and political change there remained boundaries of behavior that should not be crossed.42 In the context of English reform, fear-mongering over Anabaptist ten-

39PR0 SP 12/243/11. I have not been able to find any evidence for the Spanish translation. 40PRO SPAddenda 13/31/32. 41PRO SP Addenda 13/31/33. 42For contemporary English accounts of Anabaptism, see The Works of Richard Hooker, gen. ed.

W Speed Hill, 6 pts. in 7 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1977-), 1:42-49 and commentary. Thomas Nashe draws on the standard anti-Anabaptist tropes in his fictive description of Jack Wilton's visit to Miinster in The Unfortunate Traveller (1594). For continental Anabaptism, see James M. Stayer, "The Anabaptists," Reformation Europe: A Guide to Research, ed. Steven Ozment (St. Louis: Center for Reformation Research, 1982), 135-59, and George Huntson Williams, The Radical Reformation, 3d ed., Sixteenth Century Essays & Studies, vol. 15 (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth CenturyJournal, 1992).




dencies among reformers crystallized anxieties about the erasure of hierarchy.That is, the use of the affiliation reflected worries about the egalitarian implications of Presbyterian polity as well as with the reformers' willingness to solicit popular participation in decisions concerning the church. Matthew Sutcliffe, for example, invokes the ghosts of MUnster to counter any sympathetic feelings a reader may have about Martin's attempt to broaden the public sphere: "The precedents of the Anabaptists, doe teach us what an unbridled thing the people is, where they take the sword to worke reformation with."43 Other writers invoke the comparison in such a way as to make explicit the appeal to self-interest that underlay the trope. In his Paul's Cross sermon, Richard Bancroft linked Anabaptist claims for equality with the accusation that English reformers wanted to challenge lay impropriations, asking his audience, "especially you of the richest ... how you like this doctrine."44 Where the link with Catholicism worked to make suspect Presbyterian professions of loyalty, the link with Anabaptism provided a suitably threatening image of the inevitable conclusion to the call for reform.

Through allusion and association, the anti-Martinist campaign sought to reveal Martin in his true colors. Far from being a politically benign purification of the church, Presbyterianism, they argued, represented a treasonous attack on both the foundations of the country and the economic rights of the individual. Recurrent attacks on the scholarship of Presbyterian polemic clinched the argument by revealing that at the root of reform lay ignorance. "Learning hath lost almost all reputation, while these unlearned and unwise consistorians declame against learning, and seeke no further divinitie, than Calvins and Bezaes and Junius his glosses and commentaries," complains Matthew Sutciffe.45 An Almondfor a Parrat intro- duces its readers to "Profound Clffie, the ecclesiastical cobler," a type often used in anti-Martinist material to illustrate the consequences of an indiscriminate call for preaching: "The blinde, the halt, or the lame, or any serves the turn with them, so he hath not on a cloake with sleves, or a cap of the university cut."46 Of course this debate over education predates the Reformation, and it constitutes part of the age- old struggle for ownership of doctrine. Presbyterian reformers had been leveling similar charges against the church for decades, especially as it was represented at the parish level. In the early 1580s, for example, the charge that the church was ordain- ing ignorant men as part of its effort to oust Godly ministers played a central role in the "Abstract" controversy between Richard Cosin and Dudley Fenner.47 On both sides, these arguments about education recapitulate the more general conflict

43Sutcliffe, An Answere (1592), 72. 44Bancroft,A Sermon Preached at Paules Crosse (1588 [i.e. 1589]), 26.An Almondfor a Parrat likewise

summarizes the Presbyterian agenda as an effort to "Perswade Noble men and Gentlemen to sell theyr landes, and laie the money at your feete; take away the tide of mine and thine from amongst us, and let the worlde knowe you heerafter by the name of Anabaptistes" (in Works of Thomas Nashe, 3:352).

45Sutcliffe, A nswere, A2 v. 46In Works of Thomas Nashe, 3:344,370. 47The works involved are listed in Peter Milward, Religious Controversies of the Elizabethan Age (Ilk-

ley: Scolar, 1977), 77-79. For a general discussion of these issues, see John Morgan, Godly Learning: Puritan Attitudes towards Reason, Learning and Education, 1560-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986).




between the claims of the individual interpreter and the claims of institutional tradition.The concept of the priesthood of all believers challenged hierarchy, not only that of the church but also, by analogy, that of the body politic. Martin Marprelate had set new precedents for the extent to which conventions of discourse could be violated; the anti-Martinist response consequently challenged the authority of all reform utterance. In essence, the charge that reformers sought to elevate the uned- ucated to the ministry was shorthand for their subversive unwillingness to use the language and ideas on which the major institutions of the country were founded.

The Martinists responded to the work of Bancroft's hired pens throughout the last four Marprelate tracts, taking advantage of the opportunity they presented to return the arguments of decorum with which they had been attacked. But they were not alone in their objections to the strategies the anti-Martinists employed: the style of the controversy soon generated works that regretted the tactics of both Marprelate and the church.A Myrrorfor Martinists (1590), for example, is critical of "the late Martine libellers, and their favorites, who having a bad cause, do as leudly handle the same" as well as his "repliers, who notwithstanding they have chosen the better part, yet handle it not so charitably and modestly as it requireth" (1). Marre Mar-Martin (1589?) goes further by arguing that the accusations of treason levelled by both sides mask the real danger: "Traitor, no traitor, here's such traitors striving, / That Romish traitors now are set a thriving" (A3r).48

Marre Mar-Martin's fear for the future of religion indicates that he, like the other writers grouped here as neutral commentators, was not indifferent to established polity.What unites these texts is disapproval not of church government by bishops but of the tactics the hierarchy adopted in its defense: they regret the unex- pected direction that discussion of serious issues had taken. Richard Harvey's Plaine Percevall the Peace-Maker of England (1590) by no means defends Martin: "Thy foam- ing mealy mouth betokeneth stomacke, and young unbridled fits, for all thy fatherly countenance" (4). But he is equally hard on the anti-Martinists, those "Whip Johns, and Whip Jackes: not forgetting the Cavaliero Pasquill, or the Cooke Ruf- fian, that drest a dish for Martins diet, Marforius and all Cutting Hufsnufs, Rois- ters, and the residew of light fingred younkers, which make every word a blow, and every booke a bobbe" (4). Like the quarrel in the universities between the Aristo- telians and the Ramists, Harvey argues, the only consequence of such contention is division within the community: the premises of the two sides differ too widely for anything constructive to emerge. Harvey recognizes that it was the audacity of Martin's style that lured his confuters into imitating his manner-they "blame a certaine Pipe of Pistling" (13) for their desire for revenge. Harvey himself, however, succumbs equally to the tracts' colloquial appeal, adopting Martin's rustic

48Originally published as Mar-Martin. I Knowe Not Why a Frutelesse Lye in Print [1589?], but reprinted with an added title page that reflected its position in the controversy more accurately: Marre Mar-Martin: or Marre-Martins Medling, in a Manner Misliked [1589?].




persona and homespun metaphors in his own contribution.49 In a work written in 1589 but not published until 1593, Gabriel Harvey,

Richard's brother, offers a more scholarly version of the neutralist position. Attack- ing Lyly as the author of Pappe with an Hatchet, he argues that it is better to confute levity with gravity, "ridiculous Martin with reverend Cooper," than enlist in the defense of the church this "professed jester, a Hick-scorner, a scoff-maister, a playmunger, an Interluder; once the soile of Oxford, now the stale of London, and ever the Apesclogg of the presse." Harvey denounces Lyly's "alehouse and tinkerly stuffe' pointedly noting the inappropriateness of such "rancke scurrility" in discussion of ecclesiastical causes.50 But Harvey's argument appeals to more than decorum. In both the Advertisement and Pierces Supererogation (1593), the attack on Nashe in which the Advertisement was published, Harvey sets the work of his opponents against a range of recent English and continental publication, contrasting their "brothellish" (133) and railing wit with their contemporaries' more substantial literary, scholarly, scientific, and devotional achievements. The implied critique is partly the insider's snide refusal to be impressed by the efforts of a fellow stylist:"the finest wittes," he remarks, "preferre the loosest period in M. Ascham, or Sir Philip Sidney, before the tricksiest page in Euphues, or Pap-hatchet.'"51 But Harvey also wants to argue that this appropriation of Martin Marprelate's disorderly language threatened to displace not only quality literature but also the fundamentals of civil discourse on which society rested. "If the world should applaude to such roister- doisterly Vanity," he warns, "what good could grow of it, but to make every man madbrayned, and desperate; but a generali contempt of all good order, in Saying, or Doing; but an Universal Topsy-turvey?" (74). As for Martin, Harvey takes his own advice and offers a scholarly rebuttal of what he saw as the fundamental weak- nesses of the Presbyterian cause. His "coole dealing" with Martin, Harvey notes, does not mean that he in any way approved of their "hoat pratising with Lordes, and Princes" (98). Instead, his moderate defense is intended to mirror the virtues of the polity he seeks to justify. Harvey's central argument is that the creation of a "perfect Ecclesiasticall Discipline, or autentique Pollicy of the Church" (76) was not the work of one pamphlet or one man. Arguing along lines later developed by Richard Hooker in his Lawes of Ecciesiasticall Politie (1593), Harvey insists that government is a long-term, negotiated process that works within the given social and political structures of a state. Harvey's prevailing vision is corporate rather than individual, and, given a monarchical framework, there can be no further reforma-

49Harvey also rings the changes on the anti-Martinist tropes in A Theologicall Discourse of the Lamb of God (1590), linking Martin and Nashe, "who taketh uppon him in civill learning, as Martin doth in religion, preemptorily censuring his betters at pleasure" (a2v). Nashe responded to the juxtaposition in Strange News (1592) (Works of Thomas Nashe, 1:270).

:'0Harvey,An Advertisementfor Pap-hatchet, and Martin A'Iar-prelate, published in Pierces Supererogation (1593), 72-75. Nashe defends the anti-Martinist project in Have with You to Saffron- Walden (1596) (Works of Thomas Nashe, 3:138).

51Harvey,Advertisement, 137. See also Harvey, Pierces Supererogation, 48-55, 136, 191-92.




tion in England, he summarizes, without "an Upsy-downe" (84) in political structure.52

In his response to Martin, Harvey articulates one of the central arguments that the church would eventually formulate in its defense. But of all the contemporary responses the Marprelate tracts generated, the most sophisticated analysis of the controversy was a government brief written by Francis Bacon. Bacon wrote All Advertisement Touching the Controversies of the Church of England in the summer of 1589, when the contention over the tracts was at its peak.53 Reading polemic with an empiricist's eye for constituent causes, Bacon concludes that the central difficulty was neither theology nor ecclesiology, but the language in which the debate had been conducted. He begins by denouncing the theatrical turn the controversy had taken: "it is more than time," he declares, "that there were an end and surseance made of this immodest and deformed manner of writing lately entertained, whereby matters of religion are handled in the style of the stage."54 Bacon deplores Martin's undignified language, his tendency "to turn religion into a comedy or satire; to search and rip up wounds with a laughing countenance; to intermix Scrip- ture and scurrility sometime in one sentence" (8:76). But he also finds the official strategy of lowering the response to Martin's level equally misguided: "afool was to be answered, but not by becoming like unto him" (8:77), he advises, citing the passage in Proverbs (26:5) that was to turn up with increasing frequency throughout seventeenth-century discussions of polemical decorum. Bacon did not accept the official line that the reformers were simply a turbulent faction. He recognized the need for the church to compromise, to assimilate what was good in the reformers-their faith-and to remedy or at least admit its own failings, which he itemizes with some daring: "The wrongs of them which are possessed of the government of the church towards the other, may hardly be dissembled or excused" (8:89). The officially sanctioned pamphlets, Bacon consequently argues, deserved suppression just as much as the works they attacked.

Foreshadowing the methodological concerns he would develop in the component works of the Instauratio, Bacon analyzes the psychology of controversy to discover the mistakes against reason typically found in "church controversies." While these include the inappropriate use of foreign models, ad hominem attacks, and

52Harvey returns to these concerns about the social implications of disorderly writing in Foure Let- ters (1592), a sustained attack on the pamphleteer Robert Greene: "in this Martinish and Counter-martinish age," he complains, "the Spirit of Contradiction reigneth, and everie one superaboundeth in his owne humor" (35).

53An Advertisement remained in manuscript until 1641, when it was published under the tide A Wise and Moderate Discourse, Concerning Church-Affaires. But it did circulate in manuscript outside government circles, and it is cited in works on both sides of the controversy: see e.g. A Petition Directed to Her Most Excellent Majestie [Middelburg, 1592], 6; Richard Bancroft, A Survay of the Pretended Holy Discipline (1593), *2r-v; and the manuscript "An advertisement towching seditious wrytings" (c. 1590), which reproduces many phrases from the Advertisement (PRO SP 12/235/81). Peter Beal lists 14 copies of the Advertisement in Index of English Literary Manuscripts. vol. 1, 1450-1625, 2 pts. (London: Mansell, 1980),1:30-31 (BcF 62-75).

54The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath, 14 vols. (London, 1857-74),8:76.




"undue and inconvenient propounding, publishing, and debating" (8:79), the primary source of difficulty lay in human nature.The accident of personality, not reason, was the prime mover in these debates. Neither side lacked those who sought authority over the opinions of others, nor those who were easily led: "few follow the things themselves, more the names of the things, and most the names of their masters" (8:82). Like Harvey, Bacon consequently seems less concerned with the validity of the arguments offered by both sides than with stability and social har- mony. As Julian Martin points out, Bacon viewed the debate from the essentially secular perspective of the statesman: his "arguments imply that the Church government was legitimate because it was a part of the royal machinery of governance."55 Given these concerns, Bacon was well equipped to see beyond the political and ecclesiological implications of the Martinist program. His emphasis is on style, and his message to the state is that the freeing up of polemical language, this "strange abuse of antics and pasquils" (8:94), represented a danger that the state's own campaign was helping to legitimate rather than suppress. Bacon realized that printed controversy tended to become self-perpetuating, and he could see, with the stir caused by Marprelate, how quickly these controversies could become widely public matters.A colloquial, popular polemic-a polemic that used the language of the stage could only help speed up this diffusion. The style of both Marprelate and the anti-Martinists reached out to a more broadly constituted audience than had been the norm for ecclesiological debate, and Bacon was no egalitarian: "whatsoever be pretended, the people is no meet judge nor arbitrator, but rather the quiet, moderate, and private assemblies and conferences of the learned."56

* * *

Martinist and anti-Martinist works participated in a complex dialogue.The Mar- prelate project almost certainly did not begin with a plan for a grand narrative spread over eight or more texts; conceivably, the entire campaign could have ended with the second tract, the Epitome, if Bishop Cooper had not provided the irresistible fresh fodder of the Admonition. Each successive work consequently shaped ensuing publication on the opposing side, both in terms of argument, as they alter- nated efforts to rebut individual charges and to take advantage of slips, and in terms of framing strategies, as they played on and developed the fictive tactics adopted by one another. Martinism and anti-Martinism are collaborative discourses, and not only because both are products of communities acting on shared beliefs. In a very real sense, they are also products of one other.What came out of this paper skirmish was not new ideas about the ideal organization of the church but new ways of pre- senting those ideas to a public increasingly recognized as an entity that could be

55Martin, Francis Bacon, the State, and the Reform of Natural Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992), 38.

56Works, 8:94. Bacon returns to this concern in Certain Considerations (1604), his book of advice to the new king on the issues discussed at the Hampton Court conference-a text also republished as a separate work in 1640. Bacon here counters the objection that change inevitably breeds a desire for further innovation by arguing that this happens only "where things were carried at the appetite of multi- tudes, which can never keep within the compass of any moderation" (Works, 10:107).




addressed in print. And the polemical strategies developed by Martinist and anti- Martinist alike while competing for this audience subsequently helped shape pamphlet wars through the next century.

Bacon's fear that Martin's polemical tactics represented a more insidious threat than his platform was confirmed by events a half-century later. In the summer of 1637, a Northamptonshire vicar wrote Archbishop William Laud to complain that his parishioners were reading the Marprelate tracts and learning from Martin a lack of respect for the religious and political status quo. In addition to "jeering and sporting themselves whenever anything was read which inveighed against the juris- diction episcopal," they now reacted to his exhortations on the need to pay the unpopular tax of ship money with "open sedition if not more."57 Since Northamp- tonshire had been an early center of organized Presbyterianism,58 this case offers a rare glimpse into the workings of an oppositional tradition at the local level, a tradition maintained by the surreptitious handing down of key texts within a community. The circulation of these kinds of texts, however, would soon become much more widespread: the breakdown of the censorship laws in the early 1640s saw the resurrection of the Marprelate works and persona in the renewed attack on episcopacy that preceded the civil war. The future Leveller Richard Overton was likely responsible for preparing two new editions of Martin's Hay any Worke (1589) as well as two editions of the Presbyterian pamphlet A Dialogue. Wherin is Plainly Laide Open (1589), now attributed to Job Throkmorton (the probable author of the Mar- prelate tracts), and credited in the reprints to "the worthy Gentleman, D. Martin Mar-prelat."59 Overton would become one of the more formidable polemicists of the era, and the first pamphlet of his own that he published reveals that, given an opportunity to present a case for reform, he looked initially to the Marprelate tracts for a model.A poem prefixed to his Vox Borealis (1641 [i.e. 1640?]) begins:"Martin Marprelate was a bonny lad, / His brave adventures made the Prelates mad: / Though he be dead, yet he hath left behind / A generation of the Martin kind" (A2v). 60 But the parishioners of Kilsby, Northamptonshire, and political radicals such as Richard Overton were not the only ones reading these fifty-year-old pamphlets. There are numerous references in the early 1640s to Marprelate and the Elizabethan pamphlet wars, including reprints of several works originally written

57CSP Domestic 16/362/96, Nicholas Darton to Laud, June,] 1637. Laud appears to have taken the case very seriously; the petition is accompanied by detailed notes on the case and various statements of evidence it generated.

58See W J. Sheils, The Puritans in the Diocese of Peterborough 1558-1610 (Northamptonshire: Northamptonshire Record Society, 1979).

59Hay any Worke was reprinted as Reformation No Enemie (1641) and under its original title in 1642; A Dialogue (1640) was later retitled The Character cf a Puritan (1643). For the evidence of Overton's responsibility, see Marie Gimelfarb-Brack, Libert', Egalite, FraterniteJustice! La vie et l'oeuvre de Richard Overton, Niveleur (Berne: Peter Lang, 1979), 123-24.

60In the mid-1640s, Overton would return to this affiliation in a series of pamphlets that used a Marprelate-inspired persona to attack a newly triumphant Presbyterianism. See Gimelfarb-Brack, Over- ton, 1 19-80, and Nigel Smith, "Richard Overton's Marpriest Tracts: Towards a History of Leveller Style," Prose Studies 9 (1986): 39-66.



Black / Marprelate Tracts (1588-89),Anti-Martinism, & Printing 725

on both sides of the controversy.61 Among these publications was Bacon's Advertise- ment. In this round, however, Bacon's was the losing cause: the flood of pamphlets now appearing-1,850 in 1641, almost 3,000 in 164262-created an expectation of public discussion, and would make it impossible for his "private assemblies and conferences of the learned" to monopolize debate in the civil war decade. Fifty years after the Marprelate press had been seized and its printers put to the rack, Martinism-defined by his enemies as treason and by Martin in his last pamphlet as "the discrying and displaying" of bishops through the medium of print-would have the last word.63

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61For these reprints and allusions, see Black, "Pamphlet Wars," 262-81. 62From Sheila Lambert, ed., Printingfor Parliament, 1641-1700 (London: List and Index Society,

1984), ix. These figures represent an increase from an average of 550 to 600 titles annually throughout the 1630s.While provisional, Lambert's count provides a more accurate indication of the totals than the frequently cited figures from the catalogue of the Thomason tracts.

63The Protestatyon of Martin Marprelat [Wolston, 1589], 7.



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