em awaie for newe broomes, or carrie them forth
to the dunghill and leave them there." The writers of these Martin
Mar-Prelate books have been tolerably ascertained,[419] considering the
secrecy with which they were printed--sometimes at night, sometimes hid
in cellars, and never long in one place: besides the artifices used in
their dispersion, by motley personages, held together by an invisible
chain of confederacy. Conspiracy, like other misery, "acquaints a
man with strange bedfellows;" and the present confederacy combined
persons of the most various descriptions, and perhaps of very opposite
views. I find men of learning, and of rigid lives, intimately
associated with dissipated, or with too ardently-tempered youths;
connected, too, with maniacs, whose lunacy had taken a revolutionary
turn; and men of rank combining with old women and cobblers.[420]
Such are the party-coloured apostles of insurrection! and thus their
honourable and dishonourable motives lie so blended together, that the
historian cannot separate them. At the moment the haughty spirit of
a conspirator is striking at the head of established authority, he
is himself crouching to the basest intimates; and to escape often
from an ideal degradation, he can bear with a real one.

Of the heads of this party, I shall notice Penry and Udall, two
self-devoted victims to Nonconformity. The most active was John Penry,
or _Ap Henry_. He exulted that "he was born and bred in the mountains
of Wales:" he had, however, studied at both our Universities. He had
all the heat of his soil and of his party. He "wished that his head
might not go down to the grave in peace," and was just the man to
obtain his purpose. When he and his papers were at length seized,
Penry pleaded that he could not be tried for sedition, professing
unbounded loyalty to the Queen: such is the usual plea of even violent
Reformers. Yet how could Elizabeth be the sovereign, unless she
adopted the mode of government planned by these Reformers? In defence
of his papers, he declared that they were only the private memorandums
of a scholar, in which, during his wanderings about the kingdom, he
had collected all the objections he had heard against the government.
Yet these, though written down, might not be his own. He observed that
they were not even English, nor intelligible to his accusers; but a
few Welshisms could not save Ap Henry; and the judge, assuming the
hardy position, that _scribere est age