Historical Notes

The Marprelate Controversy was only too real for the government and church officials who struggled to put an end to it. For everyone else, it was a year-long entertainment of the Elizabethans’ favorite kind: a witty war of words. The core of the controversy was nothing to scoff at, however. Puritans, the sneer word for Presbyterians and Calvinists, wanted to tear down the hierarchy of the established church. They wanted to replace a religious aristocracy with a religious democracy — tantamount to treason in those days. With the advantage of hindsight, we can understand why the government considered daring propagandists like Martin Marprelate to be serious threats. Puritans played a major role in the conflicts that led to the English Civil War, which began only sixteen years after Francis Bacon’s death.

Martin has never been identified, to this day. That’s one of the things that attracted me to this controversy. Most of his co-conspirators genuinely didn’t know who wrote the works they helped to publish and distribute. Martin really did leave his manuscripts in a secret place to be picked up later. He put his under a hedge, which is why I had to learn about oiled cloth. Hedges are moisty, people. Not a good place to store books!

Martin’s last blast, The Protestatyon, was published in October, 1589. Thomas Nashe et al. continued to publish anti-Martin pamphlets into the spring of 1590. The most famous of these is An Almond for a Parrot. (You give the parrot on your ship an almond to get it to repeat gossip.) I fiddled the publication date of Nashe’s A Countercuffe given to Martin Junior, moving it up a little to keep up the pressure. I made up Martin’s Mirror Mar’d — or rather the title — to get the ball rolling earlier. I did not write a whole Martin Marprelate pastiche, although I still feel the tug of a job left undone.

Twenty-two candidates have been proposed for Martin over the 390 years since The Protestatyon appeared. The list includes such worthies as Robert Cecil and the Earl of Essex, and is a classic example of what I call male pattern blindness. In spite of the fact that many women, like Lady Bacon and Lady Russell, wrote finely crafted religious works and that two women crucially supported Martin by providing house-room for his printers, no one in all those 390 years ever considered the idea that Martin might be a woman. I feel I have rectified a gross error in the realm of historical speculation.

John Penry, a Welsh preacher, was certainly the organizer of Martin’s presses, the role I gave to Peter Hollowell. Penry never murdered anybody, but he was hanged in May, 1591, for writing a different treasonous book, Reformation No Enemie. He escaped to Scotland in 1589, where he could have lived a full life, if he’d minded his own business. But no, he kept writing and publishing those radical Presbyterian works. Lord Burghley pressured King James into banishing him from Scotland in 1590, after which he apparently lived secretly on the outskirts of Edinburgh, where his wife continued to live. He popped down to London to engage with some other conspirators. When they were arrested, he zipped back up to Scotland, just in time for the birth of a daughter, aptly named Safety. We can understand why the authorities tried, sentenced, and executed him so quickly once they finally caught the slippery eel. His story is a cautionary tale for those who are inclined to view the Elizabethan period as a police state. In their dreams, maybe.

Penry has been a leading contender for the role of Martin in his time and ours, but Carlson rules him out with an analysis of his prose style. Martin is witty; Penry is dull.

Historian Leland Carlson makes the best case in his book Martin Marprelate, Gentleman: Master Job Throkmorton Laid Open in His Colors, (Huntington Library, 1981.) I relied on this excellent and beautifully written book for all the facts of the case but one: my Martin is not Job Throckmorton. Mr. Throckmorton himself denied the charge during his trial for treason in 1590. “I am not Martin. I know not Martin,” he said. He was acquitted and lived until 1601.

Some twenty-three people were involved in getting Martin’s manuscripts into the hands of the reading public. Penry is the only one who hanged. The lesser folk — the printers and their assistants — spent many months in prison, but were eventually let go. The greater folk were fined and imprisoned for a few months at the queen’s pleasure. Sir Richard Knightley was fined £2000. Mrs. Wigston, in whose Warwickshire home both Martin Junior and Martin Senior were printed, was fined £1000. She declared, under oath before the whole Privy Council, that she alone was responsible, saying her husband “being neither overcurious nor meddlesome,” knew nothing about it. They evidently believed her, because they only fined him £333 and let him off with an admonishment about letting his wife dominate him. Mrs. Elizabethan Crane, in whose home Martin’s early works were printed, refused to take an oath or engage legal counsel or cooperate in any way whatsoever. She was fined £500 and spent a few months in the Fleet.

If you haven’t had enough Martin, read my blog (where I have links to many of the works), read Mr. Carlson’s excellent book (interlibrary loan, y’all), and then treat yourself to a little Thomas Nashe. The Countercuffe is short and not too bizarre, and An Almond for a Parrot contains the most hard information about Martin. You can also find Martin’s works at archive.org: https://archive.org/details/epistleseptembe00arbegoog.

I made one other little fiddle in time for this book. Bacon wasn’t offered the reversion to the office of the Clerk of the Counsel in Star Chamber until October, 1589. The office would have been worth £600 per annum, tripling Bacon’s income, but he didn’t succeed to it for twenty years, by which time King James I had made him Solicitor General. Bacon described the useless reversion as like having "another man's ground buttailing upon his house; which might mend his prospect but did not fill his barn." Ah, Francis!

On to the real historical persons who appear in this book. It would be shorter to list the ones I made up, because nearly everyone in this book is real. I include the regular cast for completeness.

Francis Bacon.
Lady Anne Bacon, Bacon’s mother.
Lady Elizabeth Russell, Bacon’s aunt.
Robert Devereux, 2^nd Earl of Essex.
William Cecil, Lord Burghley.
Robert Cecil, Bacon’s cousin. Robert was knighted by Elizabeth in 1591. A few weeks later, he was appointed to the Privy Council. (Bacon wasn’t knighted until 1603, in a mass ceremony, by the new King James.) Cecil’s rivalry with the Earl of Essex grew steadily through the 1590s, during which period Cecil increasingly took over management of the state’s intelligence service.
Sir Francis Walsingham was Elizabeth’s Secretary of State. known, then and now, as her principal spymaster. He died in 1590.
John Whitgift was the Archbishop of Canterbury from 1583 to 1604. He was Francis Bacon’s tutor during Bacon’s short time at Trinity College, Cambridge University and he really did hate Martin Marprelate with a blistering passion.
Richard Bancroft was the Canon of Westminster in 1589. He was also a prebendary of St. Paul’s Cathedral and probably had an office there, but it was simpler to put him in Lambeth Palace. He became the Archbishop of Canterbury after Whitgift’s death in 1604.
Christopher Marlowe keeps coming back. I can’t resist him, but I can’t give him much play either, because he’s too competent! He was a playwright; in 1589, he was THE playwright, author of the spectacularly successful plays Tamburlaine the Great, Parts I and II. He did something in the intelligence line; what, nobody knows. I think he ran important messages to and from the Continent, in the service of Sir Francis Walsingham.
Thomas Nashe, another irresistible Elizabethan. He didn’t write Martin’s Mirror Mar’d, because I made that one up, but he did write the Countercuffe. He came to London during the height of the Marprelate controversy and really was hired by Canon Bancroft to write anti-Martin tracts. Nashe made a scruffy living with his quill, writing bits and pieces for the government, plays, and pamphlets. He wrote a work that some consider a novel, The Unfortunate Traveller: or, the Life of Jack Wilton. It’s funny and available for free in all digital formats.
Robert Greene was the most prolific and popular writer of his day. He was probably the first Englishman to make a living writing. He was notoriously dissolute and loved battling with other writers. He’s the one who famously referred to William Shakespeare as “an upstart Crow.” He died in 1592.
Emma Ball was Greene’s landlady and mistress. She took care of him when no one else would. She lived in Norton Folgate and had an ill reputation, but I like her.
John Dando and Oliver Oatmeale. Believe it or not, these knaves were real; at least, those are the real pseudonyms of popular pamphleteers. Nothing is known about them, as far as I could discover, beyond those names and the titles of representative works: Dando’s “Banke’s Bay Horse in a Trance,” and Oatmeale’s “A quest of enquirie, by women to know, whether the tripe-wife were trimmed by Doll yea or no.” I made up everything else about these characters.
Anthony Munday worked for Sir Richard Topcliffe catching Catholics and for Canon Bancroft fruitlessly pursuing Martin. History books refer to him as a hack writer — one who would write anything for a fee — but that term didn’t come around until the turn of the twentieth century, so I can’t use it. He wrote a dozen or so plays, which were appreciated in his time, but not ours. He also wrote poetry and pamphlets on many themes. Thomas Nashe didn’t like him, which is good enough for me.
Giles Wigginton was a fiery, irrepressible, Puritan preacher and a perennial thorn in Archbishop Whitgift’s side, going back to their Cambridge days. He was arrested many times, including in the course of the Marprelate Controversy. I badly wanted to give him a whole chapter, but the old rascal had nothing to contribute to the story. He had no idea who Martin was, but loved spouting insults at the Privy Council.
Richard Field doesn’t appear, but I use his name. He had the printshop around the corner from Lady Russell’s house in Blackfriars, in reality as well as in this book. He came from Stratford-upon-Avon, where his father was a tanner. He and Shakespeare must have known each other there. Field printed the early editions of three of Shakespeare’s poems, including Venus and Adonis.
John Lyly is mentioned but doesn’t appear. He was the inventor of the highly mannered literary style called euphuism, about which I happily know nothing. It was all the rage in court circles in the 1580s.
Sir Richard Knightley really was involved in the Marprelate Controversy. He housed Martin’s printers on his estate in Fawlsey, Northamptonshire. Nashe got onto Martin’s trail there somehow, mentioning Fawlsey in his Countercuffe. Sir Richard was imprisoned and questioned, but got off with a stiff fine.

On to the places. Francis lived in the house his father built at Gray’s Inn on and off for his whole adult life. His mother lived on the family estate in Gorhambury, near St. Albans in Hertfordshire, until her death in 1610, after which the estate passed to Francis. Lady Russell lived in a house in Blackfriars and attended that little church of St. Ann around the corner and upstairs. That building fell down in 1597, after which the church was rebuilt, but then it burned with everything else in 1666. You can still visit the tiny churchyard. Find it by touring London’s city gardens; the tour meets at the tourist information office near St. Paul’s.

Sir Francis Walsingham did have a house on Seething Lane, which is very near the Tower of London and also close to the Thames. Archbishop Whitgift received visitors at Lambeth Palace, south of the river. The Stationers Hall was near the deanery on Ludgate Hill in 1589, but the company moved to larger quarters on Ave Maria Lane in 1606.

I made up the Goose and Gall and the Antelope Inn, but the Mitre in Barnet and the Angel in Islington were there then and are still there now, if you want to pop in for a mug. The Black Bull and the White Hart outside Bishopsgate were real, but are gone now. The liberty of Norton Folgate really was full of writers and actors, garbage and casual violence. You wouldn’t want to live there! Christopher Marlowe, Richard Burbage, actor William Beeston, Thomas Kyd, Thomas Watson, and William Shakespeare all lived in this disreputable district at some time or another. We’ll be forced to return there in some future book.

I think that’s it for factuality. If you spot something missing or something wrong, please write and let me know: castle@annacastle.com I love digging into the details of this fascinating period, but there’s a lot to learn. I would love to learn from you as well.

* * *

Thank you for reading Publish and Perish. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please help other people find it by writing a review.

* * *

For news on upcoming books and free reads, sign up for my newsletter, the Castle Circle: