In 1578 it appeared likely that Queen Elizabeth intended to marry the Catholic Duke of Anjou. The prospect of this marriage dismayed her Protestant subjects, and in August 1579 John Stubbs voiced their apprehensions in a pamphlet called The Discoverie of a Gaping Gulf . . . , which, as William Camden makes clear below, gave great offence to the Queen.
Her Majesty ... burned with choler that there was a book published in print inveighing against the marriage, as fearing the alteration of religion, which was intitled A gaping gulf to swallow England by a French marriage.... Neither would Queen Elizabeth be persuaded that the author of the book had any other purpose but to bring her into hatred with her subjects, and to open a gap to some prodigious innovation....
She began to be the more displeased with Puritans than she had been before-time, persuading herself that such a thing had not passed without their privity; and within a few days after, John Stubbs of Lincoln's Inn, a zealous professor of religion, the author of this relative pamphlet (whose sister Thomas Cartwright the arch-Puritan had married), William Page the disperser of the copies, and Singleton the printer were apprehended: against whom sentence was given that their right hands should be cut off by a law in the time of Philip and Mary against the authors of seditious writings, and those that disperse them....
Not long after, upon a stage set up in the market place at Westminster, Stubbs and Page had their right hands cut off by the blow of a butcher's knife with a mallet struck through their wrists. The printer had his pardon. I can remember that, standing by John Stubbs, so soon as his right hand was cut off he put off his hat with the left, and cried aloud, 'God save the Queen!' The people round him stood mute, whether stricken with fear at the first sight of this strange kind of punishment, or for commiseration of the man whom they reputed honest, or out of a secret inward repining they had at this marriage, which they suspected would be dangerous to religion.