In Scottish affairs, the tangle, unravelled even still, of which Mary Stuart was the centre, led at last to her death. Walsingham, with extraordinary skill, managed to tempt her into a dangerous correspondence, all of which he tapped on the way: he supplied to her in fact the very instrument--an ingeniously made beer-barrel--through which the correspondence was made possible, and, after reading all the letters, forwarded them to their several destinations. When all was ripe he brought his hand down on a group of zealots, to whose designs Mary was supposed to be privy; and after their execution, finally succeeded, in '87, in obtaining Elizabeth's signature to her cousin's death-warrant. The storm already raging against Elizabeth on the Continent, but fanned to fury by this execution, ultimately broke in the Spanish Armada in the following year. Meanwhile, at home, the affairs of the Church of England were far from prosperous. Puritanism was rampant; and a wail of dismay was evoked by the new demands of a Commission under Whitgift's guidance, in '82, whereby the Puritan divines were now called upon to assent to the Queen's Supremacy, the Thirty-nine Articles and the Prayer Book. In spite of the opposition, however, of Burghley and the Commons, Whitgift, who had by this time succeeded to Canterbury upon Grindal's death, remained firm; and a long and dreary dispute began, embittered further by the execution of Mr. Copping and Mr. Thacker in '83 for issuing seditious books in the Puritan cause. A characteristic action in this campaign was the issuing of a Puritan manifesto in '84, consisting of a brief, well-written pamphlet of a hundred and fifty pages under the title "A Learned Discourse of Ecclesiastical Government," making the inconsistent claim of desiring a return to the Primitive and Scriptural model, and at the same time of advocating an original scheme, "one not yet handled." It was practically a demand for the Presbyterian system of pastorate and government. To this Dr. Bridges replies with a tremendous tome of over fourteen hundred pages, discharged after three years of laborious toil; and dealing, as the custom then was, line by line, with the Puritan attack. To this in the following year an anonymous Puritan, under the name of Martin Marprelate, retorts with a brilliant and sparkling riposte addressed to "The right puissant and terrible priests, my clergy-masters of the Convocation-house," in which he mocks bitterly at the prelates, accusing them of Sabbath-breaking, time-serving, and popery,--calling one "dumb and duncetical," another "the veriest coxcomb that ever wore velvet cap," and summing them up generally as "wainscot-faced bishops," "proud, popish, presumptuous, profane paltry, pestilent, and pernicious prelates."