ABSTRACT
1588! the ‘year of wonders’ for which apocalyptic calamities had been anciently prophesied proved, as even modem schoolboys know, a wonderful year in a better sense for the protestant England of Elizabeth. Josias Nichols of Kent, speaking of this time, recalled a mood of ‘partly fearing and partly hoping’, while ‘the time slipped away, and men’s minds wavered this way and that way.’ The fears were the reflection partly of an increasingly menacing ecclesiastical and political situation, partly of an inner uncertainty of direction and purpose. Historians have often pointed to the defeat of the Armada as a reason in itself for the collapse of the puritan movement. With the death of Leicester, the political foundations of Elizabethan puritanism began to crumble away. Most Elizabethans who got their hands on the tracts must have been entertained by Martin’s scandalous humour.
