cryed aloud “God save the queen.” The people round about stood mute, whether stricken with fear at the first sight of this kind of punishment, or for commiseration of the man whom they reputed honest’ (Stow, Annales, 1605, p. 1168; the date is wrongly given 1581). Page, when his bleeding stump was being seared with hot iron, exclaimed, ‘There lies the hand of a true Englishman.’ Stubbe was carried back to the Tower in a state of insensibility. His wife vainly petitioned the queen for his release. On 31 Aug. 1580 he appealed to Lord Burghley for his discharge, on the ground of his wife's ill-health. He repeated the request on 3 Dec. in an appeal to the lords of the council, and he was set at liberty some months later, after an imprisonment of eighteen months.
Stubbe's fidelity to his sovereign answered all tests. Persecution so brutal and undeserved failed to excite in him any lasting resentment. He could now write only with his left hand, and added the word ‘Scæva’ to his signature. But he readily accepted the invitation of his former persecutor Burghley to pen an answer to Cardinal Allen's ‘Defence of the English Catholics.’ He is also stated to have aided William Charke [q. v.] in his ‘Answere to a Seditious Pamphlet’ by Edmund Campion [q. v.] (1580), and John Nicholls [q. v.] in his ‘Recantation’ (1581). Less controversial, but equally indicative of his puritan piety, was his translation from the French of Theodore Beza's ‘Meditations on Eight of the Psalms,’ which he dedicated from his house at Thelveton, on 31 May 1582, to Anne, wife of Sir Nicholas Bacon, the lord keeper. It was not printed, and the manuscript is now at Arbury.
Meanwhile Stubbe played some part in municipal and political affairs in Norfolk. He was sub-steward of the borough of Great Yarmouth in 1588–9, and was elected member of parliament for the borough early in 1589. He paid occasional visits to France, and is said to have at length volunteered for military service there in behalf of Henry IV. He died in 1591 at Havre, soon after his arrival. He was buried with military honours on the seashore.
By his wife Anne he had two sons, Edmund and Francis. Two sons of the latter, Edmund (d. 1659) and Wolfram (d. 1719), were fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge. John's widow is said to have married one Anthony Stapley.
[Cooper's Athenæ Cantabr. ii. 111–12; Strype's Annals; Hallam's Constitutional Hist.; Retrospective Review, new ser. ii. 407.]
STUBBS or STUBBES, PHILIP (fl. 1581–1593), puritan pamphleteer, born probably about 1555 ‘of genteel parents,’ is said by Wood to have been ‘a brother or near kinsman’ of John Stubbes [q. v.], but no mention of him occurs in John Stubbes's will or in that of his father. He ‘was mostly educated in Cambridge, but, having a restless and hot head, left that university, rambled thro' several parts of the nation, and settled for a time in Oxon, particularly, as I conceive, in Gloster Hall’ (Wood, Athenæ, ed. Bliss, i. 645). He did not graduate at either university, and soon resumed his roving habits, his object being, in his own words, ‘to see fashions, to acquainte myselfe with natures, qualities, properties, and conditions of all men, to breake myselfe to the worlde, to learne nurture, good demeanour, and cyuill behaviour; to see the goodly situation of citties, townes, and countryes, with their prospects and commodities; and finally to learne the state of all thinges in general, all which I could neuer haue learned in one place’ (Anatomie of Abuses, ed. Furnivall, p. 22). In 1583 he declared that he had spent ‘seven winters and more trauailing from place to place euen all the land ouer.’ Stubbes's career as an author began before or in 1581, about which year he published in the form of a broadside a ballad entitled ‘A fearefull and terrible example of Gods iuste iudgement executed vpon a lewde Fellow, who vsually accustomed to sweare by Gods Blood. …’ A copy belonged to Payne Collier, who reprinted it in his ‘Broadside Black-letter Ballads,’ 1868. A copy of a second edition, dated 1581, is in Lambeth Library; it is bound up with Stubbes's second work, also a ballad, the two being entitled ‘Two wunderfull and rare examples of the undeferred and present approaching iudgement of the Lord our God …’ London, 1581, 4to. The titles sufficiently indicate the character of the ballads. The second ballad treated of one Joan Bowser of Donington, Leicestershire, who instituted legal proceedings against Stubbes for his reflections on her (Lansdowne MS. 819, ff. 85–95). Of a third work, ‘A View of Vanitie, and Allarum to England or Retrait from Sinne, in English verse by Phil. Stubs, London, by T. Purfoot,’ 1582, 8vo; no copy is known to be extant.
In 1583 was published Stubbes's most important book. It was entitled ‘The Anatomie of Abuses: containing a Discoverie, or Briefe Summarie of such Notable Vices and Imperfections as now raigne in many Countreyes of the World; but (especiallye) in a famous Ilande called Ailgna [i.e. Anglia]
