IV.

JOHN UDALL, THE PRESBYTERIAN MARTYR, 1592.

OUR interest in the name of JOHN UDALL culminates in his most noteworthy State trial, which grew out of the Marprelate excitement, and which issued in his being condemned to death simply on a charge of libelling the Bishops, as if that very offence itself were felony and treason against the Crown.

The conviction of such a man on such grounds is, according to Hallam, "one of the gross judicial iniquities of Elizabeth's reign," while the trial itself "disgraces the name of English justice."

Udall, as a learned Puritan of most pronounced Presbyterian convictions, had been repeatedly before his ecclesiastical superiors, and been silenced and imprisoned like multitudes of his brethren, more than once. We need not dwell on his early career; only noting that, having entered Cambridge University as a sizar of Christ's College, 15 March, 1577-8, and migrating afterwards to Trinity, he proceeded B.A. 1581; M.A. 1584, and became the ordained preacher at Kingston-onThames and the writer of some practical religious books. His Puritan ways soon brought him under notice of the Archdeacon's Court; and on 26 Sept., 1586, he was convened before the Bishop of Winchester (THOMAS COOPER), and the Dean of Windsor (WILLIAM DAYE); and then, on 17 October, before the High Commission at LAMBETH.1

After much trouble and delay, Udall was restored to his ministry, through the influence and importunity of the Countess of Warwick and Sir Drue Drury; but having in the

1 For a full report of the inquisitorial procedure both before the Diocesan and the High Commission Courts, see Brook's Puritans, vol. ii. pp. 1-9, taken from the MS. Register, or "Second part of a Register," in the Morrice collection of MSS. in the Williams Library.

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Roger Morrice was one of the ejected clergy in 1662-from Duffield, Derbyshire. "This gentleman," says Strype, was a very diligent collector of Eccl. MSS."— Brook's Puritans, iii. p. 539.

meantime subscribed The Book of Discipline, he was more than ever a marked man; and in 1588 he was altogether suspended and deprived of his living.

"After I was silenced at Kingston, I rested about half a yeare preparing myself to a private life, for that I sawe so little hope of returning to my ministry, or any reste in it to the good of the Church. But God would not have it so. For meanes were made by some that feared GOD in NEWCASTLE-UPON-TYNE to the EARLE OF HUNTINGDON1 to sende me thither, who did so. And I was received thither in such sorte as contented mee, and joyned in the ministry of the Word there with two godlie men, Master HOULDSWORTH, the Pastor, and Master BAMFORD, a teacher through whose joint labours, GOD vouchsafed so to draw the people to the love of the Word (notwithstanding that the Plague was grievous in the Towne all the while I was there, and consumed aboute 2,000 of the Inhabitants) as we had hope in time to see much fruit and receive great comfort of our labours." 2 He then gives an account of his being called before the High Commission, and the dialogue between LORD CHIEF JUSTICE ANDERSON and himself thus proceeds:—

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ANDERSON. How long have you bin at Newcastle?"

UDALL. “About a yeere, if it please your Lordship."

A.

U.

"Why went you from Kingston-upon-Thames?"

"Because I was silenced there, and was called to Newcastle."

BISHOP. "What calling had you thither?"

U. "The people made means to my Lord of Huntingdon, who sent me thither."

BISHOP. "Had you the allowance of the Bishop of the Diocese? U. "At that time there was none." (The See of Durham was vacant for a considerable interval at this time, as was also the Archbishopric of York. It was a custom of the Queen and Council to keep a Diocese or living vacant, in order that the Government might draw the revenues.)

A. "You are called hither to answer concerning certain books which are thought to be of your making.”

U. "If it be for any of Martin's books, I have already answered and am ready to do so again.”

A.

"Where have you answered, and in what manner ?”

1 The Earl of Huntingdon was then the Lord President of the Council of the North.

This account by Udall of his temporary ministry at Newcastle-on-Tyne, with his arraignment before the High Commission and his condemnation to death at the Croydon Assizes is contained in "A NEW DISCOVERY of Old Pontifical Practises for the Maintenance of the Prelates Authority and Hierarchy, Evineed by their Tyrannical Persecution of that Reverend, Learned, Pious and Worthy Minister of Jesus Christ, Master JOHN UDALL, in the Raigne of Queene Elizabeth," etc.; also State Trials, vol. i. pp. 144-146, edit. 1719.

U. “At Lambeth, a year and a half ago, I cleared myself not to be the Author, nor to know who he was."

Thus we see how Udall, in 1588, had been one of those vehemently suspected and cross questioned about the Marprelate productions. We will find him repeating his regret and disapproval of their tone and spirit, and disavowing all guilty knowledge of them. The only connection he admits was of the most innocent and casual kind, some notes of his own experiences at the hands of the Bishops and the Commission having been (unknown to him) worked up into the first Martinist Tract. On this account he was credited by some of his contemporaries (as in Harleian MS. 7042, p. 56, probably written about 1589), though mistakenly, with the authorship of this first tract, called The Epistle.

His relation to other two secretly-printed treatises, on which the indictment was founded, we know to be different, and he had no wish to disavow either his approval or authorship of them, though complaining that no legal proof of his authorship of these books had ever been adduced.1

1 Udall, beyond all doubt, was the author of the two remarkable tractates, called for brevity's sake, “DIOTREPHES," or "A DIALOGUE," and "THE DEMONSTRATION," or more fully,—

a." THE STATE OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND, laid open in a CONFERENCE between DIOTREPHES, & Bishop, TERTULLUS, a Papist, DEMETRIUS, a Usurer, PANDOCHUS, an Innkeeper, and PAUL, a Preacher of the Word of God." (April, 1588.)

The scene of the Dialogue is laid in Pandochus's Inn, at some posting town in the North of England, on the high road from London to Edinburgh.

b. "A DEMONSTRATION of the truth of that Discipline, which Christ hath prescribed in His Word, for the government of His Church in all times and places until the end of the world." (July-November, 1588.)

This able treatise of eighty-three pages opens with an Address "To the supposed governors of the Church of England, the Archbishops, Lord Bishops, Archdeacons, and the rest of that order;" and then an "Address to the Reader." There are nineteen chapters; the more important headings being :

1. The Word of God describeth perfectly the lawful form of Church government and the officers to execute the same.

2. Every Church office should have express scriptural authority.

3. Church officers cannot be non-resident.

4. Appointment of officers rests with the Church, and not with patrons. 7-14. Church officers should be ordained with prayer and laying on of hands. In every Church there should be a Bishop or Pastor as President, a Doctor or Teacher if possible, and Elders for government. Deacons attend to money matters. 15. CHURCH GOVERNMENT IS ONLY SPIRITUAL; therefore its governors may not meddle in civil causes or secular affairs.

[For evidence that Udall wrote these two tractates, v. Arber. (Introd. to Marprelate Cont. 121–122 and 171), who says also, "The DIALOGUE, while written with a

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DIOTREPHES is a quietly satirical and pungently sarcastic dialogue against the prelatic administration; and while not at all a Martinist tract, nor yet in the savage, mocking Martinist vein, it was the immediate herald and precursor of the series, besides being printed at the same secret press which produced. the earlier Marprelate broadsides.

The cross-questioning is thus resumed:

Lord Chief Justice A:

"What say you of a DEMONSTRATION and a DIALOGUE? Did you not make them?"

Udall. "I cannot answer."

A.

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Why would you clear yourself of Martin and not of these, but that you are guilty?"

U. "Not so, my Lord. I have reason to answer in the one, and not in the other."

A. "I pray you let us hear your reason, for I cannot conceive of it, seeing they are all written concerning one matter."

U. "This is the matter, my Lord. I hold the matter proposed in them to be all one; but I would not be thought to handle it in the manner which the former books do; and because I think otherwise of the latter, I care not though they should be fathered on me."

After some queries by Lord Buckhurst (in answering which Udall explains his intimacy with Penry, and declares, “Nor do I think him to be Martin,") he replies to Lord Cobham, another of the High Commissioners:

Cobham. "If you be not the author, Mr. Udall, say so; and if you be, confess it. You may find favour."

U. "My Lord, I think the author, for anything I know, did well; and he is enquired after to be punished;" ""and because," as he added, " if every suspected person were to deny it, the author must needs be found out." And so, although "he likes the books and the matter handled in them," he declines to say whether he is their author or not; the more especially because he is not required by law to do so, and he had painful experience of treachery on a former occasion. "I was called to answer certain articles upon mine oath (the hateful ex officio oath he means), when I freely confessed that against myself which could never have been proved;

quietude of expression, is as vigorous a bit of Puritanism as anything that has come down to us from that age,” p. xiv. of Introd. to reprint of it.

As to the Demonstration, meant, as he says, "to be a kind of ecclesiastical Euclid," he declares that "Nowhere else do we get in so short a space such a clear tracing of the precise rift in matters of public worship and Church order between the two systems of the Episcopacy and the Eldership, as they subsisted in Elizabeth's reign." P. xi., Introd. to reprint of Demonstration.]

and when my friends laboured to have me restored, the Archbishop answered that there was sufficient matter against me by my own confession. . . . Whereupon I covenanted with mine own heart, never to be mine own accuser in that sort again."

On refusing, therefore, to take the entangling and inquisitorial ex officio oath :

"You must go to prison, and it will go hard with you," he was told. "God's will be done," he replied; "I had rather go to prison with a good conscience than be at liberty with an ill one." And so he adds: "I was carried to the Gate-house by a messenger, who delivered me with a warrant to be kept close prisoner; and not to be suffered to have pen, ink, or paper, or any person to speak to me. At the end of half a year I was removed to the White Lion in Southwark, and then carried to the ASSIZES at Croydon."

On July 24, Udall, with "fetters on his legs," was taken to these Surrey Assizes at Croydon, on a charge of felony, before Baron Clarke and Serjeant Sir John Puckering. The passage founded on in the indictment was from the dedication of The Demonstration of Discipline, and it is the only offensive gibe the preface contains against the Bishops, of whom it sharply says:

"Who can, without blushing, deny you to be the cause of all ungodliness, seeing your government is that which giveth leave to a man to be anything save a sound Christian? For certainly it is more free in these days to be any most wicked one whatsoever. . . And I could live these twenty years, any such, in England (yea, in a Bishop's house it may be), and never be much molested for it. So true is that which you are charged with in a ' DIALOGUE' lately come forth against you, and since burned by you, that you care for nothing but the maintenance of your dignities, be it to the damnation of your own souls and infinite millions more."

There was a measure of painful truth in the insinuation about the Bishops looking more sharply after their dignities than the care of souls. But however indefensible the tone of the passage, how singular to found on it an indictment involying a death penalty!

Udall was willing to explain and apologize for that particular paragraph, as we shall find him doing immediately; but the fact was, while this particular paragraph was brought forward,