In 1583, the appointment of John Whitgift as Archbishop of Canterbury had signalled the beginning of a drive against the Presbyterian movement in the church, and an era of censorship began.
[citation needed] Recent scholarship, the most authoritative and exhaustive being Joseph Black's The Martin Marprelate Tracts: A Modernized and Annotated Edition, has established that Throckmorton was the main author, assisted by Penry.
The government was concerned enough at the virulence of the attacks on the ecclesiastical hierarchy to respond in kind, hiring professional writers such as Thomas Nashe, Robert Greene and John Lyly to write counter-tracts.
"[10] Francis Bacon also involved himself in the pamphleteering, writing An Advertisement Touching the Controversies of the Church of England in 1589, a piece which did not leave the bishops free from criticism.
The Marprelate tracts are important documents in the history of English satire: critics from C. S. Lewis to John Carey have recognised their originality.