Robert Codrington, the seventeenth-century biographer of
the earl of Essex, records a now-famous encounter between that as-
piring young courtier and his volatile sovereign. ¹ Elizabeth, so the
story goes, was excoriating the libelous attacks of Martin Marprelate
upon her bishops before certain members of the court. Among her
audience was Essex. Observing the queen's displeasure with the un-
known satirist and reminded of the prohibition against his work,
Essex is said to have plucked the offending volume from beneath his
robes, exclaiming in mock terror, "Why, then, what will become of
me?" The incident, if true, would seem to substantiate the extrava-
gant claims Marprelate himself made for his popularity among the
English nobility. "I have been entertained at the Court," he writes in
his second satire. "Every man talks of my Worship. Many would
gladly receive my books, if they could tell where to find them." ² The
sudden and dramatic appearance of the contraband text from be-
neath the folds of the earl's cloak also captures something of the
surprise that must have greeted the first appearance, in the autumn
of 1588, of Martin's peculiar brand of religious disputation. Up to
that moment nothing in the battle between Anglican and Puritan had
quite prepared court and country for these exercises in calumnious
wit.

To their Elizabethan audience, the satires of Martin Marprelate
may well have seemed the product of spontaneous generation; to the
modem historian blessed with hindsight, Martin's treatises betray a
more conventional mode of parentage. In a sense, their appearance
can be traced to the unwillingness of more illustrious Puritans to
debate the reformation of the English Church beyond the limits dic-