[3] Although he gained a reputation and influential patrons, Udall's insistence on a literal observance of scriptural precepts was held to infringe the orthodoxy of the Church of England and in 1586 he was summoned by Thomas Cooper, bishop of Winchester and William Day, dean of Windsor to appear before the court of high commission at Lambeth.
In this work Diotrephes,[5] named after a minor New Testament character, Udall waxed satirical, and the pamphlet gained public attention.
Udall supplied him with information that had come to his knowledge of the illegal practices of the bishop of London, and Penry embodied it in the first of the Martin Marprelate tracts, which was known as The Epistle.
[3] In fact Penry's major collaborator is now thought to have been Job Throckmorton, and the centre of printing moved away to Warwickshire.
[14] In it Udall denounced ‘the supposed governors of the church of England, the archbishops, lord-bishops, archdeacons, and the rest of that order.’ The Demonstration was secretly distributed in November, at the same time as the Epistle, the first of the distinctive Martin Marprelate tracts, which Waldegrave also put into type at the East Molesey press.
[3] In his Demonstration Udall relies on the New Testament for church polity: his view was that it sets down prescriptively a scheme that is a definite requirement.
[15] His Biblical literalism is qualified on the title page, by the words the proofes thereof; out of the scriptures, the euidence of it by the light of reason rightly ruled.
[21] Replies to Udall appeared in 1590, one attributed to Matthew Sutcliffe[22] one being an intervention by Anthony Marten in A Reconciliation of All the Pastors and Cleargy of the Church of England.
[24] In July 1588, Udall, although his authorship of Diotrephes was hardly suspected, and the Demonstration was as yet unpublished, again offended the court of high commission by uncompromising sermons in the parish church of Kingston.
[3] After a period resting with the intention of leading a private life, he was invited in December by Henry Hastings, 3rd Earl of Huntingdon and the inhabitants of Newcastle-upon-Tyne to resume his preaching there.
Newcastle was in an area of active Calvinist ministry, with the Scot John Magbray (Mackbury, Mackbrey) vicar at Billingham from 1577 to 1587.
He arrived on 9 January 1590, and four days later appeared at a council meeting that was held at the Blackfriars house of William Brooke, 10th Baron Cobham.
[3] On 24 July 1590 Udall was placed on trial at the Croydon assizes, before Justice Robert Clarke and Serjeant John Puckering, on a charge of having published ‘a wicked, scandalous, and seditious libel’ entitled A Demonstration.
Past supporters, who had shown sympathy with Udall's religious views in earlier days, including Sir Walter Ralegh and Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, interested themselves on his behalf.
[3] Ralegh intervened, as he had done in other cases of conscience, and a scheme was worked out under which Udall would swear loyalty to the Queen[31] but accept exile.
A fourth collection of five sermons ‘preached in the time of the dearth in 1586,’ was called The true Remedie against Famine and Warres (London, 1586).
While at Newcastle Udall published in London, under his own name, a new volume of sermons entitled ‘Combat between Christ and the Devil.’ This was of non-controversial character.
[32]Also [...] Udall's paradigm of the sermon explained in A Commentarie vpon the Lamentation of Ieremy became a standard for preaching in England and America.
The Jewish Encyclopedia notes it as one of the first Hebrew grammars in a living European language, with the one in Italian by Guglielmo dei Franchi, Sole della Lingua Sancta (1591).
[35][36] The work was prized by James VI of Scotland, who reportedly asked for Udall on his arrival in England in 1603, and, on learning that he was dead, to have exclaimed, ‘By my soul, then, the greatest scholar of Europe is dead.’[3][37] In 1593 also appeared (anonymously in London) the first edition of Udall's Commentarie on the Lamentations of Jeremy; other editions are dated 1595, 1599, and 1637.
Udall's Certaine Sermons, taken out of severall Places of Scripture, which was issued in 1596, is a reprint of his Amendment of Life and Obedience to the Gospel.