HUMPHREY NEWMAN, the main distributor of the tracts, evidently had been trained as a cobbler. In his Answere (1595), Matthew Sutcliffe referred to Newman’s extensive travels while distributing the tracts, writing sardonically that “good it was for him, that he was a cobler, for if
he had not bin able to mend his shoes himselfe, he had never bene able to beare the charges” (fol.
73r). Newman was examined in July 1590, and provided a great deal of valuable information
about the movements of the press: his deposition in itself does not survive, but is cited
throughout the summary of evidence reproduced as document 17. At his trial in 1591 he was
found guilty of dispersing seditious books and sentenced to death; the Privy Council intervened
and he was allowed to sign a submission for pardon (Acts of the Privy Council, n.s. XXI, 130).
The submission survives as British Library Add. MSS 48064 (formerly Yelverton MS 70), fol.
181v, and is printed in Carlson, Martin Marprelate, 79-80. His pardon, signed by John
Puckering, is Huntington Library Ellesmere MS 3318.