The Book in the Renaissance by Pettegree Andrew

Author:Pettegree, Andrew [Pettegree, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2010-06-08T16:00:00+00:00

Unforgiving friends

The outrage of disposed Catholic prelates was to be expected. Few in the Elizabethan hierarchy could have anticipated the speed with which disenchantment would spread among Protestant zealots, many of them former colleagues of the Marian exiles. The first confrontation, over clerical dress, found only a faint echo in print.31 Although the Vestment Controversy led to the dismissal of a significant portion of the London preaching ministry, no press in London could be found to publish the opinions of the dissident ministers.32 This would be a recurrent theme of the confrontations between the Anglican establishment and their increasingly embittered opponents. The Admonition to Parliament, the literary highlight of the Presbyterian Parliamentary campaign of 1572, was published on a specially established press in Hemel Hempstead (Hertfordshire), 40 miles out of London.33 This press, like all subsequent similar ventures, proved short-lived. In 1573 a royal proclamation ordered the suppression of this and Cartwright’s Second Admonition and the author fled abroad. Cartwright’s further answer to Archbishop Whitgift was put to the press in two parts at Basel and Heidelberg. The Hemel Hempstead press was dismantled.

This case illustrates very well the uneven struggle facing critics of the Elizabethan regime in bringing their views to a wider public. If it was difficult to persuade a London printer to take on projects critical of the regime, it was almost impossible to maintain a press outside London and escape detection. In 1580 and 1581 a fugitive Catholic press was briefly operating at East Ham in Essex. This managed only five small tracts.34 The overwhelming proportion of Catholic polemic, in both Latin and English, was published abroad.

The most audacious attempt to publish books critical of the regime in England was the work of a dissident London printer, Robert Waldegrave, publisher of the Marprelate tracts. These irreverent, malicious and often very funny diatribes against the establishment were printed on a press that Waldegrave set up first at East Molesey near Kingston upon Thames. As the authorities closed in, Waldegrave moved first to the home of a sympathetic Puritan in Northamptonshire, and thence to Coventry. The final Marprelate tracts were printed at yet another location, at Wolston in Warwickshire.35 Yet this was a strategy always destined to fail. The more rural the location, the more certain it was that a printing press would attract attention and the greater the difficulty of securing necessary supplies of paper and ink.

Waldegrave abandoned Marprelate just in time; his collaborators were not so fortunate. Criticism and ridicule had touched a sensitive nerve, and several of those taken in the search for culprits suffered exemplary punishment. The separatist critics of the Elizabethan Church that emerged in the last decade of the reign, the supporters of Henry Barrow and the Brownists, wisely did not repeat the doomed experiment of the fugitive press. Instead they looked once more abroad, and particularly to the newly established print centres of the free northern Netherlands. Here during the 1590s a sizeable number of tracts were published, for the use of the nascent separatist exile communities and their adepts in England.

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