Note 420 — QUARRELS OF AUTHORS; (continued 5)

The execution of Hacket, and condemnation of his party, who had declared him “King of Europe,” so that England was only a province to him, is noted in our “General History of England.” This was the first serious blow which alarmed the Puritanic party. Doubtless, this man was a mere maniac, and his ferocious passions broke out early in life; but, in that day, they permitted no lunacy as a plea for any politician. Cartwright held an intercourse with that party, as he had with Barrow, said to have been a debauched youth; yet we had a sect of Barrowists; and Robert Brown, the founder of another sect, named after him Brownists; which became very formidable. This Brown, for his relationship, was patronised by Cecil, Earl of Burleigh. He was a man of violent passions. He had a wife, with whom he never lived; and a church, wherein he never preached, observes the characterising Fuller, who knew him when Fuller was young. In one of the pamphlets of the time I have seen, it is mentioned that being reproached with beating his wife, he replied, “I do not beat Mrs. Brown as my wife, but as a curst cross old woman.” He closed his life in prison; not for his opinions, but for his brutality to a constable. The old women and the cobblers connected with these Martin Mar-Prelates are noticed in the burlesque epitaphs on Martin’s death, supposed to be made by his favourites; a humorous appendix to “Martin’s Monthminde.” Few political conspiracies, whenever religion forms a pretext, is without a woman. One Dame Lawson is distinguished, changing her “silke for sacke;” and other names might be added of ladies. Two cobblers are particularly noticed as some of the industrious purveyors of sedition through the kingdom—Cliffe, the cobbler, and one Newman. Cliffe’s epitaph on his friend Martin is not without humour:—

“Adieu, both naule and bristles now for euer; The shoe and soale—ah, woe is me!—must sever. Bewaile, mine awle, thy sharpest point is gone; My bristle’s broke, and I am left alone. Farewell old shoes, thumb-stall, and clouting-leather; Martin is gone, and we undone together.”

Nor is Newman, the other cobbler, less mortified and pathetic. “The London Corresponding Society” had a more ancient origin than that sodality was aware.

“My hope once was, my old shoes should be sticht; My thumbs ygilt, that were before bepicht: Now Martin’s gone, and laid full deep in ground, My gentry’s lost, before it could be found.”

Among the Martin Mar-Prelate books was one entitled “The Cobbler’s Book.” This I have not seen; but these cobblers probably picked up intelligence for these scandalous chronicles. The writers, too, condescended to intersperse the cant dialect of the populace, with which the cobblers doubtless assisted these learned men, when busied in their buffoonery. Hence all their vulgar gibberish; the Shibboleth of the numerous class of their admirers—such as, “O, whose tat?” John Kankerbury, for Canterbury; Paltri-politans, for Metropolitans; See Villains, for Civilians; and Doctor of Devility, for Divinity! and more of this stamp. Who could imagine that the writers of these scurrilities were learned men, and that their patrons were men of rank! We find two knights heavily fined for secreting these books in their cellars. But it is the nature of rebellion to unite the two extremes; for want stirs the populace to rise, and excess the higher orders. This idea is admirably expressed in one of our elder poets:—

“Want made them murmur; for the people, who To get their bread, do wrestle with their fate, Or those, who in superfluous riot flow, Soonest rebel. Convulsions in a State, Like those which natural bodies do oppress, Rise from repletion, or from emptiness.” Aleyne’s Henry VII.