ELIZABETHAN PROSE—TWO SCHOOLS OF WRITERS—ROGER ASCHAM—HIS BOOKS AND STYLE—WEBBE AND PUTTENHAM—THE SENTENCE—EUPHUISM—THE ‘ARCADIA’—SIDNEY’S STYLE—SHORT STORIES—NASH’S ‘UNFORTUNATE TRAVELLER’—NASH AND THE PAMPHLETEERS—MARTIN MARPRELATE—ORIGIN OF THE MARPRELATE TRACTS—THE ‘DIOTREPHES’—COURSE OF THE CONTROVERSY—ITS PLACE IN LITERARY HISTORY—HOOKER—‘THE ECCLESIASTICAL POLITY.’

The reign of Elizabeth and the first years of James, which cover the period of the Later Renaissance in England, were times of poetry and not of prose. It is true that much prose was written, that some of it is admirable, and that more is interesting. It is also true that some of the greatest masters of English prose were alive, and were working in these years. Yet these men, whose chief was Bacon, belong, by their character, their influence, and by the dates of their greatest achievements, to the generations described as Jacobean and Caroline. In the Elizabethan time proper there is but one very great name among prose-writers, that of Hooker; while before him and around him there are many whose work was meritorious, or interesting, or curious—anything, in fact, but great—and of not a few of them it has to be said that in the long-run they were not profitable.

The difficulty of marshalling these men of letters in an orderly way is not small. The chronological arrangement, besides being ill-adapted to contemporaries, does not show their real relations to one another, or their place in English literature. The division by subject is utterly mechanical, when very different matter was handled in the same style and often by the same men. Nash is always Nash, whether he was writing Christ’s Tears over Jerusalem, or Have with you to Saffron Walden, or The Unfortunate Traveller. We shall be better able to make a survey of this side of the literature of the Later Renaissance in England if we class its prose-writers by their spirit and their style, and treat their dates and their matter (which, however, are not to be dismissed as of no importance) as subordinate.

If this classification, then, is permitted, we may divide the Elizabethan prose-writers into those whose aim it was to give “English matter in the English tongue for Englishmen,” and those who strove for something better, more ornate, lofty, peculiar, and, as they held, more literary, than was to be reached by the pursuit of this modest purpose. The chief of the first in order of time was Ascham, who, however, belonged to an earlier generation, though he died in the queen’s reign, and part of his work was published after his death. The great exemplar of the second was Lyly. In neither case did the followers merely imitate their leader. There is much in Hooker which is not in Ascham. The enredados razones—the roundabout affectations of the authors of the Spanish Libros de CaballerÍas—may have had some influence on Sidney, who certainly knew them. Rabelais and Aretino were much read and imitated by some who also “parled Euphues.” But the distinction holds good none the less. On the one side are those who, having something to say, were content to say it perspicuously. On the other were those who, whether they had something to say or whether they were simply determined to be talking, were careful to give their utterances some stamp of distinction. If the first were liable to become pedestrian, the second were threatened by an obvious danger. It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for the writer who has got tired of milking the cow, and wants to milk the bull, to escape sheer affectation—which affectation, again, is in the great majority of cases a trick, a juggle with words repeated over and over again.

The prose which was first written for literary purposes in Elizabeth’s time was an inheritance from the reign of Henry VIII. It was the plain downright style of Ascham—the style of a man who thought in Latin, and turned it into good current English.

Yet the writers who were content to be as plain and downright as Ascham do not require many words. Such treatises as Webbe’s Discourse of English Poetrie, printed in 1586, or the Arte of English Poesie, published in 1589, and attributed to George Puttenham by Carew in 1614, are interesting, but it cannot be said that they hold an important place in English literature, or had any considerable effect. The Arte of English Poesie is indeed a very sane and thorough critical treatise, one proof among others that if so many of the Elizabethan writers were wild and shapeless, it was not because none in their time thought wisely on questions of literary principle and of form. The explanation of their extravagance may be more safely looked for elsewhere. When Nash was reproached for his “boisterous compound words,” he answered, “That no wind that blows strong but is boisterous, no speech or words of any power or force to confute, or persuade, but must be swelling and boisterous.” This is BrantÔme’s excuse for the rodomontade, that superb and swelling words go well with daring deeds. The Elizabethans were so vehement and headlong, that they sought naturally for the “word of power,” for the altisonant and ear-filling in language, and were more tolerant of bombast than of the pedestrian. "The sentence." Their general inability to confine themselves to the sentence may be excused on the same ground. They felt so much, and so strongly, that they could not stop to disentangle and arrange. Certainly if Englishmen sinned in this respect it was against the light. Models were not wanting to them, and they were not unaware of the virtue of being clear and coherent. Whoever the author of Martin Marprelate’s Epistle may have been—Penry, Udall, Barrow, or another—he knew a bad sentence as well as any of the Queen Anne men. He fixes, as any of them might have done, on the confused heap of clauses which did duty for sentences in Dean John Bridges’s Defence of the Government of the Church of England. “And learned brother Bridges,” he writes, “a man might almost run himself out of breath before he could come to a full point in many places in your book. Page 69, line 3, speaking of the extraordinary gifts in the Apostles’ time, you have this sweet learning,[77] ‘Yea some of them have for a great part of the time, continued even till our times, and yet continue, as the operation of great works, or if they mean miracles, which were not ordinary, no not in that extraordinary time, and as the hypocrites had them, so might and had divers of the Papists, and yet their cause never the better, and the like may we say of the gifts of speaking with tongues which have not been with study before learned, as Anthony, &c., and divers also among the ancient fathers, and some among the Papists, and some among us, have not been destitute of the gifts of prophesying, and much more may I say this of the gift of healing, for none of those gifts or graces given then or since, or yet to men, infer the grace of God’s election to be of necessity to salvation.’”

The Dean’s meaning reveals itself at the third or fourth reading, but this is the style of Mrs Nickleby. Martin Marprelate saw its vices, and noted on the margin, “Hoo hoo, Dean, take breath and then to it again,” as Swift himself might have done. Dr Bridges is no authority in English literature, but he was a learned man, and must have had some practice in preaching. Yet we see that he fell into a confusion which at any time after the seventeenth century would have been a proof either of extreme ignorance, or of some such defect of power to express himself as accounts for the obscurity of Castlereagh. Dean Bridges shows only the disastrous consequences of that disregard of the proper limit of the sentence which was common with some of the greatest writers of his time. Take, for instance, this passage from Sir Walter Raleigh’s account of the loss of the Revenge, published in 1591. He begins admirably: “All the powder of the Revenge was now spent, all her pikes were broken, forty of her best men slain, and the most part of the rest hurt.” Several rapid sentences follow, and then we come to:[78] “Sir Richard finding himself in this distress, and unable any longer to make resistance having endured in this fifteen hours’ fight, the assault of fifteen several Armadoes, all by turns aboard him, and by estimation eight hundred shot of great artillery, besides many assaults and entries, and that himself and the ship must needs be possessed by the enemy, who were now all cast in a ring about him; the Revenge not able to move one way or other but as she was moved with the waves and billow of the sea, commanded the Master Gunner, whom he knew to be a most resolute man, to split and sink the ship, that thereby nothing might remain of glory or victory to the Spaniards, seeing in so many hours’ fight, and with so great a navy they were not able to take her, having had fifteen hours’ time, fifteen thousand men, and fifty and three sail of men of war to perform it withal. And persuaded the company or as many as he could induce to yield themselves unto God, and to the mercy of none else, but as they had like valiant resolute men repulsed so many enemies, they should not now shorten the honour of their nation, by prolonging their own lives for a few hours or a few days.”

This is the style of a writer who does not know when a sentence has come to an end, and who, when he writes one which is properly constructed, does it mainly by good fortune. If it is more intelligible than Dr Bridges, the cause of the superiority lies at least partly in this, that Raleigh had the easier task to perform. He had only to state facts, not to expound doctrine.

While making allowance for the inward and spiritual cause of the invasion of English by the long, confused, overladen sentence, it must also be confessed that the evil was largely due to the prevalence of affected styles of writing, which lent themselves to over-elaboration. Two bad models were set before Englishmen about the middle of the queen’s reign, and they unfortunately became, and remained for long, exceedingly popular—Lyly’s euphuism, and the wiredrawn finicking style of Sidney’s Arcadia, to which no name has ever been given. The lives of these authors have already been dealt with under another head. Their style, as shown in their stories, and its effect on English literature, are the matters in hand. Euphuism and the manner of the Arcadia appear to have been elaborated by their authors about the same time, though Lyly takes precedence in the order of publication. Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit, was printed in 1579, Euphues and his England in the following year.[79]

Euphuism has become a name for literary affectation, and is in that sense often used with very little precision. It is a very peculiar form of affectation. The two main features of the style—the mechanical antitheses and the abuse of similes—have been described already. Euphues, in so far as it is a story, is as near as may be naught. The hero from whom it takes its name is the grandfather of all virtuous, solemn, and didactic prigs. He makes two excursions into the world from his native Athens. In the first he induces a lady at Naples to jilt her lover Philautus, and is by her most justly jilted in turn. He floods southern Italy with antithetical platitude, and retires to Athens. Then Euphues and Philautus come to England, where the second, after philandering with one lady, marries another. Euphues remains didactic and superior. At last he goes back to a cave in Silexedra. There is a great deal of praise of Queen Elizabeth in the second part, as indeed there was in all the literature of her time as high as Shakespeare’s plays and the Ecclesiastical Polity. There are also pages of such matter as this: “But as the cypress-tree the more it is watered the more it withereth, and the oftener it is lopped the sooner it dieth, so unbridled youth the more it is also by grave advice counselled or due correction controlled, the sooner it falleth to confusion, hating all reasons that would bring it from folly, as that tree doeth all remedies, that should make it fertile.” Unbridled youth might have answered that if lopping and watering are bad for the cypress he must be a poor forester who persists in lopping and watering. But the youth of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, which was unbridled enough, was also more respectful. It listened to the due correction and grave counsel of Euphues with deference. It did more, for it imitated him. The unbridled Nash euphuised, and so did many another. Alongside the fire from heaven, and elsewhere, of the Elizabethan time, there was an unending wishy-washy, though frequently turbid, flow of copy-book heading, which came from the great Lylyan source. It looks strange that a time which loved Tamburlaine and produced the great lyric, should also have delighted in this square-toed finical vacuity. But perhaps, again, it is not so wonderful. There was also in the Elizabethan time a liking for what looked superior to the common herd. About the Court there was much foppery, and there were many who wished to resemble the fine gentlemen of the Court, while the reviving morality of the age, compatible as it was with much individual profligacy, made men respectful of virtuous commonplace. With the minority of Edward VI. and the brutality of the Court of Henry VIII. close behind them, it was as yet hardly the case that “the cardinal virtues were to be taken for granted among English gentlemen.” Surrey may have been jesting when he told his sister to make herself the king’s mistress, but what a society that must have been in which a brother, and he “a mirror of chivalry,” thought this a mere jest. Now Lyly was very moral, a fop to his fingers’ ends, and with all his oddity and his pedantry, there is a real, though very artificial, distinction about him. Finally, there were as yet few and insignificant rivals. It is not then at all surprising that his style was taken up at Court as “the thing,” and accepted by the honest admiration, to say nothing of the snobbery, of the outer world.

Lyly sinned by setting an example of a stilted style; but his sentence (for he had but one) is as complete as the constant use of the formula, “As the A is B, so the C is D, and the more E is F the more G is H,” can make it. "The Arcadia." With Sidney’s Arcadia[80] we come to another kind of affectation. The circumstances in which it was written must be taken into account. Sir Philip Sidney wrote to please his sister, the Countess of Pembroke, a lady who was somewhat of a prÉcieuse, and who was all her life the centre of some literary coterie. Her patronage of the Senecan play shows that her leanings were towards the superfine, and away from what was natural to Englishmen. The Arcadia, therefore, is coterie work, and does not seem to have been looked upon as very serious by Sir Philip himself. It was written by fits and starts, and sent off to his sister in instalments. The date of composition must have been about 1580 and later, but it was not published till after the author’s death in 1584, and remains a fragment, though a large one. The Arcadia is much longer than the “tedious brief” masterpiece of Lyly, even without taking into account the verse, of which much is written in the classic metres. It is also far more interesting. Although we are accustomed to speak of it as a pastoral, mainly, it may be, on the strength of the name, it is much more a Libro de CaballerÍas. There is a pastoral element in it unquestionably, as there is in the stories of Feliciano de Silva, but in the main its matter is that of the books of “Knightly Deeds”—challenges and defiances, combats of champions, loves of cavaliers and ladies, the rout of mobs of plebeians by the single arm of the knight. There are wicked knights who drag off ladies on the pommel of their saddles and beat them, good knights who rescue these victims, captures and deliverances of damsels, and everywhere the finest sentiments or the most extreme wickedness, just as in the Amadis or the Palmerin. It is a very entangled book, and is not made clearer by the fact that one of the heroes, who is disguised as an amazon, figures alternately as “he” and as “she.” Yet Sidney does achieve the great end of the story-teller, which is to keep alive his reader’s desire to know what is going to happen next. The morality of the book has been very differently judged. It has been called “a vain and amatorious poem,” a “cobweb across the face of nature,” and it has also been described as noble and elevating. Yet it would be a curious morality which could be affected by the doings of personages who are either too seraphic for flesh and blood, or so wicked that the most shameless of mankind would resent being compared to them.

The “vanity” of the book lies in the wordy amatoriousness of its style. We have perhaps pushed the practice of accounting for all fashions in literature by imitation too far. It is quite as possible to explain Lyly without Guevara as it would be to account for GÓngora without Lyly. Given the desire to write in a fine peculiar form, and the adoption of some trick with words follows naturally, while the number of tricks which can be played is not indefinite. Yet it is at least as likely that Sir Philip Sidney was set on his peculiar form of affectation by the Libros de CaballerÍas, published from thirty to forty years earlier, and certainly known to him. Such sentences as these send us back at once to Feliciano de Silva: “Most beloved lady, the incomparable excellences of yourself, waited on by the greatness of your estate, and the importance of the thing whereon my life consisteth, doth require both many ceremonies before the beginning and many circumstances in the uttering of my speech, both bold and fearful.” And, “Since no words can carry with them the life of the inward feeling, I desire that my desire may be weighed in the balances of honour, and let Virtue hold them; for if the highest love in no base person may aspire to grace, then may I hope your beauty will not be without pity.” Turn to the first chapter of Shelton’s Don Quixote, and you meet with those “intricate sentences” from Feliciano: “The reason of the unreasonableness which against my reason is wrought, doth so weaken my reason as with all reason I doe justly complaine on your beauty.” And, “The High Heavens which with your divinity doe fortifie you divinely with the starres, and make you deserveresse of the deserts that your greatnesse deserves,” &c.[81]

We must not push the comparison too far. Sidney had qualities of imagination which raised him far above the Spaniard, and he never rings the changes on the same word so fatuously as Feliciano and other later authors of Libros de CaballerÍas. Yet the juggle on the two forces of the word “desire” is quite in the Spanish taste. The immediate success of Don Quixote in England may be explained not only by the permanent merits of Cervantes’ romance, but by the fact that we had our examples of the literary affectation which he attacked. The practice of labouring the expression of sentiment, of repeating, qualifying, and counterbalancing, would inevitably lead to long straggling sentences, while it was also a direct invitation to the frigid conceits in which Sidney abounds.

Stories of a kind, translations from or adaptations of the Italians, and notably Bandello, with imitations of Euphues and the Pastorals, were common in Elizabethan literature. But, perhaps because it suffered from the overpowering rivalry of poetry and the stage, the prose tale is rarely among the good things of the time. Greene, Lodge, and Breton[82] are interesting to the student, but it cannot be said, with any measure of accuracy, that they have a place in the history of the English novel. They were part of the literary production of their time, but were mostly imitation, and were too completely forgotten, and too soon, to produce any effect. An exceptional interest attaches to Nash’s Unfortunate Traveller, to which attention has again been attracted of late. It is curious that a story which has considerable intrinsic force should have put the model of the Novela de PÍcaros before English readers five years earlier than the publication of Guzman de Alfarache in Spain, and that it should have been so completely forgotten that when this model was again introduced among us by Defoe, his inspiration came from Le Sage.[83]

Thomas Nash (1567-1601), who was chiefly known as a pamphleteer, published The Unfortunate Traveller in 1594. It is difficult to read, at any rate the earlier parts of the story, and we doubt that the author had seen, if not the original of the Lazarillo de Tormes, then at any rate the French version of Jean Saugrain, published in 1561. If his work is quite independent, then we have a very remarkable instance of exact similarity in the method and spirit of two writers separated from one another in race and by an interval of nearly half a century, during which the first had enjoyed a wide popularity. This is difficult to believe. Nothing can be more like Lazarillo’s doings than the tricks which Nash’s hero, Jack Wilton, plays on the old cider-selling lord and the captain. It would seem, however, that the time had not come when the picaresque method was to be really congenial to Englishmen. Nash wanders away from it when he introduces the story of Surrey and the Fair Geraldine. Yet he comes back to it with the hero’s love-affairs with Diamante, the wife of a Venetian, whom he meets in prison at Venice. He keeps to it very close when Wilton runs away with his “courtezan,” and gives himself out to be the Earl of Surrey. From the time the hero and Diamante reach Rome the picaresque tone disappears, and Nash drops into familiar Elizabethan “blood and thunder.” With the inconsequence of his time he gives at the end a defiant last dying speech and confession of an Italian malefactor, who bears the English name of Cutwolf. Perhaps a certain want of finish, and an air there is about it of being hasty work done to make a little money, injured its effect. Yet The Unfortunate Traveller did show Englishmen a way they were to follow in the future, and it came before the Guzman de Alfarache.

Thomas Nash was himself perhaps intrinsically the most able, and certainly not the least typical, member of a whole class of Elizabethan men of letters. He was born at Lowestoft, “a son of the manse,” in 1567, and was educated at St John’s, Cambridge. It has been supposed on the strength of some passages in his writings that he travelled abroad in his youth, though he does not write in his Unfortunate Traveller like a man who had seen Venice and Rome. He was settled in London by 1588, and lived the very necessitous life of a man of letters who depended wholly on his pen, till his early death in 1601. It was the misfortune of Nash and of many of his contemporaries that they were born too soon for the magazine or newspaper. His work consists mainly of matter written to please prevailing tastes of the time. Christ’s Tears over Jerusalem, a long, wordy, and decidedly pretentious collection of preachment, and denunciation of the sins of London, his violent quarrel with Gabriel Harvey, or rather with the whole Harvey family, which was rolled out in pamphlets for the amusement of the world, his collection of ghost stories, The Terrors of the Night, and what he called Toys for Gentlemen, which are lost, and into the nature of which it is perhaps better not to inquire, were journalism before its time. His Have with you to Saffron Walden, a piece of vigorous literary horseplay at the expense of Gabriel Harvey, is an excellent pamphlet of its kind—in the kind of Mr Pott and Mr Slurk; while his burlesque almanac, called A wonderful strange and miraculous Astronomical Prognostication, though undoubtedly suggested by Rabelais, and therefore not quite original, is a piece of solemn fun worthy of the irony and the good sense of Swift. Nash had ideas of style which sometimes led him into involved pomposity, but which also supplied him with an effective, though blackguard, controversial manner. Nobody was a greater master of loud-mouthed bragging, of the fashion of telling an opponent over pages of repetition of the dreadful things you are going to do with him. Consciously, or unconsciously, the Elizabethans were great believers in the maxim that if you throw mud enough some will stick, and it was one of the signs of their youth and primitive simplicity of nature that when they were angry they gave way to the instinct which leads men to scream vituperation and curses, with no regard to their application to the subject. To call a very eminent man on his trial for treason—and on the most flimsy evidence too—“a spider of hell” would now be thought not less silly than ignoble. But that is what Coke called Raleigh, and it is a very fair specimen of Elizabethan satirical controversy. Around Nash was a whole class of men engaged in the same work of writing little stories—pastoral or euphuistic—and pamphlets moral, satirical, political, which were often in verse. When they dealt with the low life of London, as in the case of Dekker (1570?-1641?), they possess a certain value as illustrations of contemporary manners. It is curious, when their bulk and their popularity are considered, that no London printer thought of bringing out a miscellany of them at regular intervals. He would have found abundant matter ready to his hand, and the magazine, if not the newspaper, would have been founded at once.

One section of the pamphlet literature of the time possesses an enduring interest, if not for its intrinsic value, though that is not inconsiderable, then for historical reasons. This was the famous Martin Marprelate controversy, which was not the first example of an appeal to the people by the press on religious and political questions, for that had been done on the Continent by the Huguenots, but was the earliest effective instance among us. It grew out of the conflict between the Church, which was fighting for uniformity with the hearty support of the queen—at least from the day on which she found her power sufficiently established to allow her to disregard the Calvinist princes of the Continent—and a body of Englishmen who were desirous to adopt the Calvinist Presbyterian model.[84] According to our view the question was one to be argued peacefully, and those who could not believe the same things ought to have agreed to differ. That was not the opinion of any country, or of either side in the sixteenth century. The Puritans were as convinced of the need for uniformity as the Church or the Spanish Inquisition, and would have enforced it with no sparing hand if they had had the power. They complained quite as bitterly of the toleration which they alleged was shown to the Papists (who for their part cried out loudly of persecution), as of the severities exercised on themselves. As the power was with the bishops, those who would not conform were expelled from the universities and from their livings. The persecution to which they were subjected was enough to exasperate, but not to crush, and the embittered Puritans cast about for a weapon to use against their opponents. The pamphlet lay ready to their hand.[85]

The chief dates in the controversy were these. In 1587 Dr John Bridges, Dean of Salisbury, and afterwards Bishop of Oxford, published A Defence of the Government established in the Church of England for Ecclesiastical Matters, in answer to the Puritan controversialists Cartwright and Travers—a very long, well-meant, and learned, but lumbering book. Just at this time the Act of Uniformity was pressing heavily on the Puritans. There were two who were especially aggrieved,—John Udall, who had been expelled from his pulpit at Kingston because, as his friends alleged, he had denounced a local money-lender from whom the archdeacon of the diocese wanted to borrow £100; and John Penry, an able, honest, but headlong Welshman. In or about March 1587 Penry published at Oxford a tract with a long-winded title, which is called for short The Equity of a Humble Supplication. It was an address to Parliament representing the undeniably neglected state of the Welsh parishes. Unfortunately for Penry, it contained one passage which, with no more unfairness than was usual in State prosecutions, whether conducted for the king or the Long Parliament, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, might be represented to be treasonable. It insinuated plainly that the queen consented to leave Wales in religious ignorance and immorality. The press was then under censorship. Only two printers were allowed out of London—one at Oxford, another at Cambridge. In London the number was limited. No press could be held except by a member of the Stationers’ Company, and any one could be confiscated by the Warden, over whom the Bishop of London had general powers of control as censor. Penry’s treatise was suppressed, and he was in great peril.

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.

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.

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.

In the chapter of his Constitutional History which deals with Elizabeth’s laws against the Non-Conformists, Mr Hallam has written: “But while these scenes of pride and persecution on one hand, and of sectarian insolence on the other, were deforming the bosom of the English Church, she found a defender of her institutions in one who mingled in these vulgar controversies like a knight of romance among caitiff brawlers, with arms of finer temper and worthy to be proved in a nobler field.” If this sentence is to be understood to mean—as from the context it perhaps must—that Hooker mingled in the Martin Marprelate conflict, it is inaccurate. He answered Cartwright and Travers, as Dr Bridges had done, and whatever may be said of these men it would be silly to call them caitiff brawlers, while it would be difficult to say what nobler field Hooker could have found for his arms than that in which he justified the faith and religious practices of Englishmen. Yet Mr Hallam has fairly singled out the predominant characteristic of Hooker. There is something knightly about him, something of the chivalry of Sir Galahad. He could strike with telling force, as he does in the one passage of fine scorn devoted to the jeering Puritan pamphlets—beside which all the scolding of their proper opponents is mere brutal noise. Yet what prevails with him so completely that the exceptions are hardly noticeable is the moderation which has earned him his name of “Judicious.” It is not the easy moderation of one who does not care much, but of a man who was very convinced, very earnest, and also very good. The Ecclesiastical Polity is not chiefly valuable as a piece of reasoning. It has for one thing not reached us complete. The first four books, which must have been begun while he was at the Temple, were published in 1594. The long fifth book appeared in 1597. The three, which make up the total number of eight, were left unfinished at his death, and passed into careless, if not unfaithful, hands. But the five undoubted books were enough to do Hooker’s work for the Church of England, and they did not do it by presenting his readers with such a closely reasoned and compact system as they might have found in the Institutions of Calvin. Englishmen have never cared much for consistency of system. It was enough for them that Hooker justified usages, ceremonies, and forms of Church government to which they were accustomed, against the “Disciplinarians” who condemned them for wanting the express authority of the New Testament, by proving that they had prevailed among pious men of former times, were in themselves innocent, and could therefore be accepted by sincere Christians as convenient, pious, and of good example, even if they had no “divine right,” when they were imposed by authority. In substance this was no new doctrine. Her Majesty in Council had been saying as much for years, and so had Whitgift and Bridges, and all the defenders of the Establishment. But what they did by dry injunction or laboured scholastic argument, Hooker did by persuasion, by pathos, and by noble rhetoric. The criticism that he sometimes gives eloquence where he ought to give argument, does not go far when the purpose of his book is allowed for. It was not by logic that God elected to save His Church in former centuries, nor yet in the sixteenth. In Hooker’s case, as fully as in the case of any poet, literature vindicated itself. The beauty of the style, always essentially pure English in spite of an occasional Latin turn of the sentence, is the great merit of the Ecclesiastical Polity. The famous eloquent passages arise naturally because they always correspond to the greater pathos, or sanctity, or the deeper passion of that part of his subject which he is handling at the moment. The Englishman stood between the Calvinist on the one hand and the Roman Catholic on the other, both appealing to him on religious grounds. There was a real danger that his own Church would find nothing to tell him except that decency was decent, that he had better not trouble himself about debatable matters he would never understand, and that he must obey the Queen. If this was all it could find to say, Englishmen who were concerned about religion—the majority of thinking men, whether ignorant or learned—would assuredly have gone either to Geneva or to Rome, while the unthinking mass alone would have remained to the Church. In that case it would have gone down for ever in the Civil War. From that fate it was saved by Hooker.