the Court in 1587. So great was the secular power of these 'right puissante and terrible priests' that even the Press was subject to them for every book and pamphlet that was printed. The only remedy for the Puritans was a secret press, and it is known that Penry managed the Marprelate printing arrangements with remarkable daring and skill. Could it be wondered that prelacy was for him the symbol of a brutal and stupid tyranny? It was not an age to distinguish between principles and persons; and to him the respectable timeserving prelates were truly the Bishops of the Divell,' 'men of sinne, the Canturburie Caiaphas with the rest of his anti-Christian beasts, who beare his abominable marke.' The Bishops were more Protestant than the Queen, and Martin Marprelate was but one degree more Protestant than the Bishops. He knew that they were not in accord with the Catholic formularies of the Church that paid them; he knew that the religious settlement was not complete; and like every Puritan he believed that the goal of a complete Protestantism on the basis of the best reformed churches' would soon be reached. Yet, whenever a Puritan attempted to carry the Reformation another step forward, he found himself sternly

suppressed by Bishops who did not believe in episcopacy and were Anglicans not from principle but for policy. He used the only weapon in his power, and he had to use it ferociously to make it felt.

Since the Marprelate controversy is typical of much that is characteristic in the history of pamphlets, and because the principles involved are still often misunderstood, it is worth while to ask ourselves what was their effect; and the answer to that question may be applied to the great Puritan movement of the seventeenth century as well.

In the first place the Martinists did not fight for freedom, except in so far as every pamphleteer desires freedom for his own opinions. The history of pamphlets is naturally united rather closely with that of toleration; but it is hardly honest to claim any pamphlet writer as an apostle of liberty, merely because he happened to represent the opinions of a minority and was therefore anxious that his own party should be unmolested. The growth of toleration has been very slow, and the belief in it confined at first to those who were persecuted. We cannot credit any sect or party with its possession, except those which never attained to power; we can only be certain

that the idea has grown painfully from age to age, leaving each generation a little more tolerant than that which preceded it. Cromwell, for instance, was more genuinely tolerant than Elizabeth, but he could not extend his toleration to Anglicans and Papists; which meant in fact that he was tolerant to his fellow Puritans, and to them only. In the sixteenth century most men believed fervently in persecution. Cartwright, for instance, the idol of Marprelate, gloried in it, and went out of his way to say so in very strong language. The Martinists in fact did not pretend to want tolerance: they were fighting for something quite different. They claimed that their church-system, the 'divine' system of Calvin, should be established by law upon the ruins of the existing 'human' one; and at that time there seemed every likelihood that the Anglican settlement would indeed prove to be but the preliminary to a state-Calvinism. The Martinists fought against tyranny, and for that we are grateful to them: nevertheless, had they triumphed, England would have suffered under a tyranny of the 'saints,' which would have caused men to look back upon the Court of High Commission as the symbol of a golden age. What such a tyranny could become we

can learn from the condition of Connecticut in 1650, when blasphemy, adultery, sorcery, theft and disobedience to parents were punished with death on the model of the Levitical code, when Baptists and Quakers were scourged and Papists hanged. Very fortunate was it for England,' says the most sympathetic critic of the Marprelate writings, 'that the Bishops held their own, and kept these jot and tittle men out of the power to compel (as by the will of God) all men to think as they did.' For, had they triumphed, 'not a play would have been permitted to be represented, still less to have come to the press.' It was not then for any principles they held that the Martinists helped on the cause of freedom, nor for any opinions in advance of their age: for their religion consisted in a blind worship of the letter of the Old Testament, which would have replaced the law of Christ by that of Moses; but because they were forced to fight for their own sakes against Whitgift's organised suppression of the Press, and that iniquitous secular jurisdiction of the Bishops, which finally came to an end in the triumph of seventeenth century Puritanism, and did not reappear with the restoration of the Church in 1660.

The effect of the Marprelate libels upon the

history of religion is also less simple than is sometimes thought. They of course were one of the educational factors in preparing the way for the temporary ascendency of Puritanism in the next century; and so far was this recognised at the time of the Great Rebellion that several of Martin's pamphlets were reprinted and widely circulated. Yet their counter effect upon the Church was of far more permanent importance. Appearing just at the time when religion was in a state of flux and even the Bishops did not know where they stood, the libels divided the shifting waters of opinion and clarified the whole thought of the country. The gain to the Church was considerable, for the Church had been dying of indefiniteness. But in the very year of the Armada, when men were least disposed to look favourably on division or disloyalty, appeared the Marprelate libels, which, on the one hand, by shewing forth Puritanism in its most unamiable light, led men to see that it was 'not a plea for toleration of non-episcopal Christianity, but an attempt to enforce the Presbyterian system upon the country as God's ordinance,' while, on the other, they forced the Church to a true setting forth of what episcopacy is. Whitgift in his controversy with Cartwright,

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