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in which the conduct of the sacred services approached buffoonery. The charge of blasphemy against Martin was sustained by his episcopal contemporaries by a reference to his practice of substituting Sir for Saint as a title: Sir being the equivalent for our ecclesiastical title of Reverend. The reader can turn to HAY ANY WORKE1 and see what it amounts to. The charge can only be repeated to-day by those who describe the Tracts without reading them. Nothing could be more obvious than that they are inspired by an intensely religious spirit.

2. The Alleged Scurrility. The accusation that the Tracts are scurrilous ought not to be made on the strength of one or two extracts; certainly not without a sufficient knowledge of the circumstances which explain them and modify their interpretation. Take two standing charges which appear in all the contemporary denunciations of Martin: the one, that he called the members of the English episcopate, 'Bishops of the devil'; the other, that he said that their laws had no more authority than the laws which governed brothels.

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(a) As regards the first, it has been shown that the railing epithet is a humorist's logical quip. Martin retaliating upon the episcopalian misconstruction of his figurative expressions, makes Dean Bridges to be the author of the statement; he therefore constitutes it one of his Minerall School Points,' a proposition to be academically defended; so that the defendant in this point (I thank him) is Father John [Bridges] o' Sarum.'2 He makes his point, briefly, in this way. Bridges quotes, in the Fourth Book of his Defence, Beza's division of Bishops into three classes: Bishops of God, of man, and of the devil; he then declares dogmatically that there is no Bishop of man; every Bishop, he says, being of necessity either a Bishop of God, or a Bishop of the devil. Martin upon this shows that the Bishops owe their election not to any divine right; a claim which Elizabeth could be trusted, if ever it were made by those who owed their position and emoluments entirely to 1 Op. cit. 2.

2 School Point No. 15.

her benevolence, to meet in her own vigorous way. Bridges indeed does not make any such claim. Now, says Martin, if the Dean says that the Bishops are not of man, and for fear of her Majesty dare not say that they are of God, he means to say that they are of the devil.1 The Dialogue Wherin is Plainly laid open, which borrows most of its controversial points from the Marprelate writings, embodies this quip in its title. It professes to deal with certaine points of [the Bishops'] doctrine, wherein they approue them selues (according to D. Bridges his judgement) to be truely the Bishops of the Diuell.' So when the Bishops

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chose to believe, though it was the merest pretence of belief, that when Martin threatened them with 'twenty fistes about [their] eares more then [their] own,' he really 'threatened blowes'; though, as Martin says, none could be so 'grosshead' as not to understand that he meant the number of hands which would be occupied in writing against them—and this pretence, persistently repeated had most serious consequences to those who came before the ecclesiastical courts, on the suspicion that they belonged to the secret company concerned in the production of the Tracts-Martin retaliates; not by the stupidity of interpreting a metaphor in an unfigurative way, but by an ingenious play of logic proving that Bridges has, in effect, called the reverend Fathers the 'bishops of the devil.'

(b) In regard to the second common charge, that Martin declared that the laws of the Bishops had no more authority than the laws regulating brothels, the reader will possibly be surprised to learn that there had been, at no remote date, to the great scandal of the Christian conscience, licensed 'stewes,' and that the laws regulating them had been framed by a Bishop of Winchester. They stood on the Bankside near Winchester House, and were in the jurisdiction of the Bishop. Such laws, though drawn up by a Bishop, could have no more moral authority than had they been laws purporting to regulate the conditions 1 See HAY ANY WORKE, 26-28. 2 THE EPISTLE, 2. 3 HAY ANY WORKE, sig. A 3 rect.

under which men might commit murder. The fact that laws emanated from a Bishop gave them per se no moral authority; no more moral authority than appertained to the laws of the stewes,' which a former Bishop of Winchester promulgated. The keepers of these evil-houses were called Winchester geese.'

(c) In reply to the charge against Martin of calling the Bishops devilish' and 'murderers of souls,' other, and perhaps stronger, ground must be taken. It was the belief of the Bishops, as it was also that of their victims, that the eternal welfare of man depended upon his hearing and accepting a certain body of revealed truth. Apart from the acceptance of the infallible creed, neither Whitgift nor Cartwright knew of any way of human salvation. Indeed, they did not expect that any excessive multitude would achieve that happy lot. Such being the stern and inflexible fact, why delay a single hour in proclaiming the 'conditions of salvation'? Reasoning from the position occupied by the Bishops and their antagonists in common, we might say that the Bishops deprived the people of salvation in various ways. First, by not preaching the Gospel, which in the face of the desperate fate of the ignorant and the careless, ought to have been their primary duty. Secondly, by their commendams; for they took as many rich livings as they could get, and reserving to themselves the incomes from these benefices, they appointed as their substitutes inferior, incapable, and even unworthy men, the majority of whom were not able to preach; the only class of men they

1 See First Part of K. Hen. VII. Act i. sc. iii. The houses on the Bankside are mentioned in the reign of Hen. II., in 1162, being then eighteen in number. Strict rules were issued for their regulation, the Clink prison being originally provided to receive transgressing 'stew-holders.' The title of the rules established by the Act 8 Hen. II. runs, Ordinances touching the government of the Stewholders in Southwark under the direction of the Bishop of Winchester.' As further indicating their ecclesiastical patronage, one of the houses bore the sign The Cardinal's Hat.' They were not finally abolished till 1546, under Hen. VIII.; until which time the profits accruing from their licences were no doubt in the hands of the Bishop of Winchester. See Manning and Bray's Hist. of Surrey (London, 1814), iii. pt. 3, p. 587; Stowe's London (ed. 1754), ii. 9; Maitland's London, ii. 1391; Harrison's Description of England (Furnivall's ed.), App. by W. Rendle, F.R.C.S.

were likely to get for the pittance on which they had to subsist. Next, they tolerated the like pluralism in others, with similarly disastrous results. Moreover, for mere matters of external form they deprived the men who did preach the Gospel with power, and placed in their stead men utterly unfitted for such an office. Aylmer had the shocking effrontery to pension off his purblind gate-keeper by giving him the living of Paddington.1 Of the scandalous ignorance and unsanctified ways of the clergy Martin gives some instances. That his instances are nothing very exceptional may be easily shown. For example, we learn from a contemporary Survey the condition of the churches of Essex (formerly included in the see of London) after Aylmer had deprived all the laborious nonconforming ministers. Its testimony is painful enough. Gamesters and alehouse haunters are of frequent occurrence in the clerical list. The curate [deputy minister] of Little Eston was sometime a pedlar; a swearer.' The vicar of Shopland was sometime a serving-man; unable to preach, for he cannot render an account of his faith, neither in Latin nor English.' At Munden there is also a serving-man; at Tolleshunt D'Arcy an ex-tailor; and at Upminster an exgrocer. The curate of Romford was thrice presented for a drunkard'; and there are a number of others guilty of the same evil habit. The curate of Alberton had been a linendraper; another, a mender of saddles and pannels; the parson of South Hanningfield was first a fishmonger, and after that a buttonmaker; the parson of Widford was 'heretofore a serving-man or a soldier; a gamester, a pot companion was called to the spiritual court for the same; the curate of Blackmore a sow-gelder.' But we need not pursue the matter further in this place. It has been referred to more than once in these pages, and occurs many times in the annotations to the Tracts. The point to be borne in mind is, that the Bishops and the 'seekers after

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1 THE EPISTLE, M. 19, f. 52, and note.

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2 The Survey is printed in extenso in Davids' Annals of Evang. Nonconformity in Essex, 88-105.

reformation' believed that human salvation rested upon the acceptance of a definite evangelical truth, failing which a soul went of necessity to an eternal hell of fire; we can therefore understand the cry of these 'painfull preachers,' and of gravely religious men of the class of Knightley of Fawsley and Job Throkmorton of Haseley, that, by their suppression, on the ground of some twopenny informality, of the earnest, spiritually-minded ministers, and by their institution of this riff-raff into the sacred office, the Bishops were responsible for the ignorance and the abounding wickedness of the parishes; were, indeed, none other than 'murderers of souls.'

3. The Patriotism of Marprelate.-Martin Marprelate takes a definite stand upon the unconstitutional character of Whitgift's procedure in the Court of High Commission. In this denunciation he has the support of the strongest legal minds of his time, and in succeeding ages no one has been found to dispute Coke's opinion of the essential illegality of the tribunal. The reviving act at the beginning of Elizabeth's reign could only renew the life and currency of what was previously legal; it could neither restrict nor yet enlarge the scope of a revived statute. Nor could the constitutional foundations of the kingdom be abrogated by first legally creating a royal commission, and then illegally endowing it with new and unknown and extra - statutory powers.1 Reference is not infrequently made to the statute 13 Eliz. cap. 12, which concerns the 'Reformation of Disorders in the Ministers of the Church.' It enacts that all priests or ministers not ordained under the authorised form of Edward VI. and Elizabeth, shall subscribe to all the Articles of Religion, which only concern the Confession of the true Christian faith and the Doctrine of the Sacraments,' and were agreed upon at the Convocation of 1562.2 This many of the imprisoned reformers were ready to do; it was a different matter to compel them to subscribe to Whitgift's

1 See above, p. 75.

2 See the Statute. The section is given in Sparrow's Collection and in Prothero's Select Statutes.

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