Between October 1588 and September 1589, Puritan pamphlets attacking the Church of England and John Whitgift, the Archbishop of Canterbury, appeared under the pseudonym "Martin Marprelate". Whitgift, a Calvinist, like Elizabeth I, harboured a great dislike for the Puritans. The state church responded by commissioning writers such as Anthony Munday, John Lyly and Thomas Nashe (perhaps Robert Greene) to fight back. The anti-Martinists wrote the counter-pamphlets to the Martin Marprelate pamphlets.
It has never been clarified beyond doubt who was behind Martin Marprelate. Presumably it was the English parliamentarian Job Throckmorton, a nephew of the diplomat Nicholas Throckmorton and thus a cousin of Elizabeth Throckmorton, Walter Raleigh’s wife, and the Welsh preacher John Penry.1
In retrospect, this controversy seems trivial, similar to the dispute over Pierre de la Ramée’s doctrine. As in science, however, the disputes over direction within the Church of England were highly topical in terms of day-to-day politics and, moreover, could end tragically. Although Penry’s involvement in the Martin Marprelate pamphlets was never proven, he had incurred the implacable hatred of John Whitgift, who was instrumental in Penry being convicted and executed on a flimsy charge in 1593.
The pamphlets had a lasting influence not on the Church, but on literature, especially because of the resulting long-running dispute between Thomas Nashe and Gabriel Harvey.
"The Marprelate controversy and the quarrel of Harvey and Nashe suppled the joints of English prose almost incredibly. Without such models one could hardly imagine the language of Lyly and Greene being accelerated in less than a generation into the talk of Falstaff or such a gem of vilification as that of Kent ond Oswald […]"2
Marlowe himself was not involved in the debate. For this, he was mentioned several times in writings by Harvey and Nashe that resulted from the controversy.
