SIXTEENTH CENTURY.
405
suddenly hurried from his dinner to a temporary
gallows; a circumstance marked by its cruelty,
but designed to prevent an expected tumult.
He left a wife and four infants to deplore his
untimely fate.
The populace seems to have been divided in
their opinions respecting the sanity of his
politics, as appears by some ludicrous lines,
made on Peniy's death, by a Northern rhimer:
The Welshmim is hanged, Who at our Kirke flanged. And at the state banged.
And brened are hla bidn. And though he be hanged. Yet he Is not wranged ; The De'il has him fiuoged
In his kiuked kluks. WetBti't FmeraU MoitumeiU; p. SS, Edit 1()31.
Few political conspiracies, wherever religion forms a pretext, is without a woman. The old women, and the coblers (Cliffe and Newman,) connected with these Martin Marprelates, are noticed in the burlesque epitaphs on Martin's death, supposed to be made by his favourites, a humorous appendix to Martin' t Month* mind. One dame Lawson is thus noticed in the mock epitaphs on Martin's funeral.
Away with silk, for I win mourn in sacke t Martin Is dead, our new sect goes to wiaek. Come, gossips mine, pat linger in the ele. He made us laugh, but now must make us crie.
Dami Lawson.
Cliffe's epitaph, on bis friend Martin, is not
without humour:
Adieu, both naule and bristles now for enef)
The shoe and soale— Alk woe Is me I— must sever.
Bewaile, mine awle, thjr sbarpest p«int is gone I
My bristle's broke, and I am left alone.
Farewell old shoes, thumb-stall, and cloating-leather}
Martin is gone, and we undone together.
Nor is Newman, the other cobler, less morti- fied and pathetic:
My hope once was. my old shoes should be stltcht i My thumbs ygilt, that were beplcht : Now Martin's gone, and laid full deep in ground. My gentry's lost, before it cotdd be found.
Contrasted with this fiery Mar-prelate, was another, the learned and subtile John Udall. His was the spirit which dared to do all that Penry had dared, yet conducting himself in the heat of action with the tempered wariness of age : " If they silence me as a minister," saiA he, it " will allow me leisure to write ; and then I will give the bishops such a blow as shall make their hearts ache." It was agreed among the party neither to deny, or to confess writing any of their books, lest among the suspected the real author might thus be discovered, or forced solemnly to deny his own work ; and when the bishop of Rochester, to catch Udall by surprise, suddenly said, "Let me ask you a question concerning your book," the wary Udall replied, "It is not yet proved to be mine!" He adroitly explained away the offending pas- sages the lawyers picked out of his book, and in a contest between him and the judge, not only repelled him with his own arms, but when his lordship would have wrestled on points of divinity, Udall expertly perplexed the lawyer,
by showing he had committed an anachronism of four hundred years ! He was equally acute with the witnesses ; for, when one deposed that he had seen a catalogue of Udall's library, in which was inserted The Demomtration of Ditci- pline, the anonymous book for which Udall was prosecuted, with great ingenuity he observed that this was rather an argument that he was not the author, for " scholars use not to put their own books in the catalogue of those they have in their study." We observe with astonishment, the tyrannical decrees of our courts of justice which lasted till the happv revolution. The bench was as depraved in their notions of the rights of the subject in the reign of Elizabeth, as in those of Charles II. and James II. The court refused to hear Udall's witnesses, on this strange principle, that " Witnesses in favour of the prisoner were against the queen !" To which Udall replied, it is for the queen to hear all things, when the life of any of her subjects is in question." The criminal felt what was just, more than his judges.
The last stroke of Udall's character is the history of his condemnation. He suffered the cruel mockery of a pardon grtmted conditionally, at the request of the Scottish monarch, but never signed by the queen — and Udall mouldered away the remnant of his days in a rigid imprison- ment* He died in the Marshelsea about the latter end of the year 1592.
The writers on the side of the church yield not to the Martinittt in buffoonery and abuse ; by their extraordinary effusions, prodigal of hu- mour and invective almost unparalleled. This was the proper way to reply to such writers, by driving them out of the field with their own implements of warfare ; and this author and his party more honourably tritimphed than the government, who silenced Martin Marprelate by the cord. One of the most celebrated govern- ment pamphlets was entitled Pappe with an hatchet,-f and was probably written after Martin
- What different conclusions are drawn trom different
&cts by different writers. Heylln, arguing that UdaU had been Justly condemned, adds, "the man remained a timng momiment of the archbishop's goodness to him, in the preserving of that life which by the law he had for. felted." But Neale, on the same pout, considers liim as one who died for his conscience, and stands upon record at a momtment of the oppression of the government. All this opposition of feeling is of the nature of party apirit; but whist is more corions in the history of human nature^ is the ciumge of opinion in the same family, in the course of the same generation. The son of this Udall was a great zealot for conformity, and as great a sufferer for it from his fother's party, when they possessed political power. This son would not submit to their oaths and covenants, but, with his bed-ridden wife, was left unmercifully to perish in the streets. — Walker's St^eringt of the Clargm, part ii. p. 188.
t Pappe teitk an hatchet, alias, a fig far my godaon ; or, crack me ihie nut; or, a antntrie cutte, that U, a eound box of the ear for the idiot Martin to hold hit peace, teeing the patch wilt take no warning: Written by one, that daret call a dog a dog, and made to prevent Martin' t dog daiet. Im- printed by John Anoke, and John AtHle, for the ioyfnie of Withemtun, Cum privilegio paraanitatis, and are to be told at the ^gne of the Crab-tree eudgell, M Thwack-coat-lane. A sentence, Martin hangt fit for my mowing. Dedicated to the father, and the two ionnet,H^e, Rtffe, and Sni^e, the three tame ruffiant of the church, which take pepper in the note, became they cannot Marre Prelatet: grating, issff. Quarto.
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