re_, the author found more
honour conferred on his MSS. than his genius cared to receive. It was
this very principle which proved so fatal, at a later period, to a
more elevated politician than Penry; yet Algernon Sidney, perhaps,
possessed not a spirit more Roman.[421] State necessity claimed
another victim; and this ardent young man, whose execution had been at
first unexpectedly postponed, was suddenly hurried from his dinner to
a temporary gallows; a circumstance marked by its cruelty, but
designed to prevent an expected tumult.[422]

Contrasted with this fiery Mar-Prelate was another, the learned
subtile John Udall. His was the spirit which dared to do all that
Penry had dared, yet conducting himself in the heat of action with the
tempered wariness of age: "If they silence me as a minister," said he,
"it will allow me leisure to write; and then I will give the bishops
such a blow as shall make their hearts ache." It was agreed among the
party neither to deny, or to confess, writing any of their books, lest
among the suspected the real author might thus be discovered, or
forced solemnly to deny his own work; and when the Bishop of
Rochester, to catch Udall by surprise, suddenly said, "Let me ask you
a question concerning your book," the wary Udall replied, "It is not
yet proved to be mine!" He adroitly explained away the offending
passages the lawyers picked out of his book, and in a contest between
him and the judge, not only repelled him with his own arms, but when
his lordship would have wrestled on points of divinity, Udall expertly
perplexed the lawyer by showing he had committed an anachronism of
four hundred years! He was equally acute with the witnesses; for when
one deposed that he had seen a catalogue of Udall's library, in which
was inserted "The Demonstration of Discipline," the anonymous book for
which Udall was prosecuted; with great ingenuity he observed that this
was rather an argument that he was not the author, for "scholars use
not to put their own books in the catalogue of those they have in
their study." We observe with astonishment the tyrannical decrees of
our courts of justice, which lasted till the happy Revolution. The
bench was as depraved in their notions of the rights of the subject in
the reign of Elizabeth as in those of Charles II. and James II. The
Court refused to hear Udall's witnesses, on this strange principle,
that "witnesses in favour of the prisoner were against the queen!" To