The chief dates in the controversy were these. In 1587 Dr John Bridges, Dean of Salisbury, and afterwards Bishop of Oxford, published _A Defence of the Government established in the Church of England for Ecclesiastical Matters_, in answer to the Puritan controversialists Cartwright and Travers--a very long, well-meant, and learned, but lumbering book. Just at this time the Act of Uniformity was pressing heavily on the Puritans. There were two who were especially aggrieved,--John Udall, who had been expelled from his pulpit at Kingston because, as his friends alleged, he had denounced a local money-lender from whom the archdeacon of the diocese wanted to borrow £100; and John Penry, an able, honest, but headlong Welshman. In or about March 1587 Penry published at Oxford a tract with a long-winded title, which is called for short _The Equity of a Humble Supplication_. It was an address to Parliament representing the undeniably neglected state of the Welsh parishes. Unfortunately for Penry, it contained one passage which, with no more unfairness than was usual in State prosecutions, whether conducted for the king or the Long Parliament, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, might be represented to be treasonable. It insinuated plainly that the queen consented to leave Wales in religious ignorance and immorality. The press was then under censorship. Only two printers were allowed out of London--one at Oxford, another at Cambridge. In London the number was limited. No press could be held except by a member of the Stationers’ Company, and any one could be confiscated by the Warden, over whom the Bishop of London had general powers of control as censor. Penry’s treatise was suppressed, and he was in great peril.