Elizabeth Hussey

[7][8] For many years Hussey was wrongly identified as the wife of the Puritan minister Nicholas Crane, who died in Newgate prison about 1588.

[9][10] However, in 1931 McCorkle established that Hussey's first husband was Anthony Crane (d. 16 August 1583), Elizabeth I's Cofferer[11] and Master of the Household,[12] who had Puritan sympathies.

Her husband survived her, and in 1608 was recorded as 'holding the manor of East Molesey by virtue of letters patents granted to Anthony Crane'.

[2] According to the later testimony of her servant, Nicholas Tompkins, when the Puritan printer Robert Waldegrave's press and type were being destroyed by officers of the Stationers' Company in May 1588 as a result of his having printed John Udall's The State of the Church of England Laid Open, commonly referred to as Diotrephes' Dialogue, she allowed Waldegrave to bring a case of type, hidden under his cloak, to her London home in St Mary Aldermanbury.

[2] Penry and Waldegrave then embarked on an even more controversial enterprise, the printing of the first four of the seven tracts written against the ecclesiastical authorities by an unknown satirist using the pseudonym Martin Marprelate.

[23] Shortly thereafter the press was moved East Molesey to the Whitefriars, Coventry, the home of Knightley's great-nephew, John Hales,[24] where Certain Mineral and Metaphysical Schoolpoints and Hay Any Work for Cooper were printed, the former in early January and the latter in late March 1589.

[25] Waldegrave then refused to print any further tracts, citing the Puritan ministers' disapproval of Martin Marprelate's course of action.

[28][30] The interrogations of Knightley, Hales and the Wigstons likewise failed to elicit the identity of Martin Marprelate, which appears to have been unknown to those who harboured the secret press.