Welsh Journals

JOHN PENRY: MARPRELATE AND PATRIOT? ALTHOUGH David Williams's most important published contributions to Welsh history have been concerned with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century subjects, he has for more than twenty years taught with conspicuous success the history of Tudor Wales as a special subject for undergraduates. He has also made some notable and characteristic forays into print on the subject of the Welsh Puritan, John Penry.1 So it seems not inappropriate to offer him some reflections on two aspects of Penry's career, which have in no small measure been stimulated by his own contributions to that subject. I. JOHN PENRY AND THE MARPRELATE TRACTS The identity of the author of the Martin Marprelate Tracts of 1588-89 has always been an astonishingly well preserved secret. But it has been no secret, from the time the Tracts first appeared, that John Penry had a close connexion with the clandestine press which published them. He has always been given the chief credit for the day-to-day organization of the venture. It was further believed by some of his contemporaries that he was the secret author. However, most scholars who have studied the subject have come to the conclusion that he was not Martin Marprelate.2 Controversy on this point might have been regarded as closed until the publication last year by Professor Donald McGinn of the most detailed and sustained effort to establish Penry as the author of the Tracts.3 In the light of so positive an affirmation of Penry's authorship it seems worth-while briefly reviewing the evidence again. There are two kinds of evidence bearing on this problem-external and internal. The former falls broadly into three categories: (i) the testimony of those charged with complicity in the Martinist publications and examined during 1588-89 to discover what they 1 'The enigma of John Penry'. The Welsh Review, IV (1945). His most important contribution is his edition, with its admirable introduction, of John Penry's Three Treatises concerning Wales (Cardiff, 1960). His latest publication is a characteristically concise and lucid review of D. J. McGinn, John Penry and the Marprelate Controversy, in Studia Neophilologica (Uppsala, 1967), XXXVIII, 370-72. 2 For the bibliography of the subject see Conyers Read, Bibliography of British History: Tudor Period 1485-1603 (Oxford, 1959), pp. 205-6; see also note 34 below. 8 Donald J. McGinn, John Penry and the Marprelate Controversy (Rutgers University Press, 1966).