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No. VI . SOME HOSTILE " TRUE REPORTS
" OF THE MARTYRS.
CONTRIBUTED BY FATHER C. A. NEWDIGATE, S.J.
B. EVERARD HANSE, July 31, 1581.
I.
THOMAS ALFIELD AND V. THOMAS WEBLEY , July 6, 1585. II. . B. FOURTEEN MARTYRS OF THE ARMADA YEAR August , 1588.
III
IV.
, BB. JOHN HEWETT (als. WELDON) , WILLIAM HARTLEY AND ROBERT SUTTON, October 5, 1588 .
V. B. CHRISTOPHER BALES AND HIS COMPANIONS , March 4, 1590. VI . V. ARTHUR BELL , O.F.M. , December 11 , 1643. The six Tracts here for the first time reprinted belong to a class of * writings which fills an important place in English literature of prenewspaper times. They will be welcomed by all who have at heart the story of our English Martyrs . Published as they were officially at the very time of the martyrdoms and with the express object of casting odium and discredit on the sufferers and their cause, they are chiefly valuable for the light they throw on the spirit by which the persecutors were animated. They will also be found to have preserved for us not a few details respectingsome of the martyrs which we should not otherwise have known, or to confirm what was otherwise only known from friendly witnesses . It is hardly necessary to point out how much more valuable evidence may often be when it comes from hostile sources than when it comes from friends. The first five of our Tracts are reprinted from copies, unique or almost so , in the library of the Archbishop of Canterbury at Lambeth. For their preservation we are indebted to the contemporary Archbishop Bancroft, to whose private library they originally belonged , and whose initials and arms are on their covers ; the permission to transcribe them we owe to his Grace the present Archbishop and to the late Archbishop Davidson. Number 6 is from the copy among the Thomason Tracts in the British Museum , which were presented to the nation by King George III in 1762 . The following are the full titles of two books several times referred
to below :
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(1) Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London 1554-1640 , edited by E. Arber, 1875-1894 . (A continuation of the same to 1708 was edited for the Roxburgh Society in 1913-1914.) 2 A Short Title Catalogue of English Books, 1475-1640 , edited by A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave , 1927.
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* Since these pages were in print a book has been published from the Princeton University Press, under the title William Shakespeare adapts a Hanging, in which the author , Dr. T. W. Baldwin , Professor of English in the Universityof Illinois, propounds a very interesting theory_connecting Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors with the martyrdoms of 1588. In support of he reprints , among other documentary evidence, the two tracts which we have numbered III and IV.
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