Aspects of Recusant History 2020011553, 2020011554, 9780367364434, 9780429346057

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Aspects of Recusant History

Thomas Anthony Birrell (1924–2011) was a man of many parts. For most of his working life he was Professor of English and American Literature in the University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands, where he was famous for his lively, humoristic and thought-provoking lectures. He was the author of some very popular surveys of English Literature in Dutch, but – first and foremost – he was a bibliographer and a historian. His scholarly oeuvre is extensive and includes such highlights as English Monarchs and their Books (London 1986), a study of the Old Royal Library. However, many of his publications are hidden in occasional publications, periodicals and introductions to books no longer in print. That is why a – posthumous – selection of his bibliographical essays appeared in 2013, entitled Aspects of Book Culture (Ashgate 2013), and that is why it was decided to bring out a companion volume containing a selection of his essays in the field of recusant history. The present edition contains fourteen of Birrell’s articles published between 1950 and 2006. They all demonstrate his bibliographical expertise, his in-depth knowledge of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English Catholic history and his absolute determination to examine every scrap of archival material that might shed light on the episodes he was investigating. But, perhaps most important of all, he combined his scholarship with an intense interest in the individual lives that shape and are shaped by history, so the lasting impression that these articles will make is the sense of getting close to a whole series of personalities caught up in the turmoil of their time. Aspects of Recusant History was edited by Jos Blom, Frans Korsten and Frans Blom, all three former students of Tom Birrell and, both individually and collectively, authors and editors of a whole range of important book historical publications. T.A. Birrell (25 July 1924–22 May 2011) was Professor of English and American Literature at the Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands, and Editor of the international periodical English Studies. In 1985 he retired from university in order to return to England and devote himself entirely to bibliographical and historical research. He became known as the historian ‘who charted the miraculous survival of the Old Royal Library’ (The Independent, 10 August 2011) and was a prominent member of the Catholic Record Society. He published extensively on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century book culture and recusant history.

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VARIORUM COLLECTED STUDIES

Aspects of Recusant History

T.A. Birrell

Aspects of Recusant History

Edited by Jos Blom, Frans Korsten and Frans Blom

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Jos Blom, Frans Korsten and Frans Blom; individual chapters, T.A. Birrell The right of the editors to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the author for the individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Birrell, T. A., author. | Blom, Jos, editor. | Korsten, F. J. M. (Franciscus Johannes Marie), editor. | Blom, Frans editor. Title: Aspects of recusant history / T. A. Birrell ; edited by Jos Blom, Frans Korsten and Frans Blom. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2020. | Series: Variorum collected studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020011553 (print) | LCCN 2020011554 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367364434 (hbk) | ISBN 9780429346057 (ebk) Subjects: LCSH: Catholic Church—England—History. Classification: LCC BX1492 .B485 2020 (print) | LCC BX1492 (ebook) | DDC 282/.42—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020011553 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020011554 ISBN: 978-0-367-36443-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-34605-7 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC VARIORUM COLLECTED STUDIES SERIES CS1092

CONTENTS

List of figures Preface Acknowledgements

ix x xiii

Introduction

1

1 Catholic Allegiance and the Popish Plot: a study of some Catholic writers of the Restoration period

4

2 Non-Catholic writers and Catholic Emancipation: an aspect of Sidney Smith, Shelley, Coleridge and Cobbett

21

3 Latter-day recusants

38

4 English Catholics without a Bishop 1655–1672

49

5 Robert Pugh, Blacklo’s Cabal (1680)

83

6 Joseph Berington, The Memoirs of Gregorio Panzani (1793)

86

7 James Maurus Corker and Dryden’s conversion

92

8 English Catholic mystics in non-Catholic circles: the taste for Middle English mystical literature and its derivatives from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries

102

9 Recusant historiography: an historian looks at the achievements of 25 years’ study of recusancy

157

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CONTENTS

10 William Leslie, Henry Howard and Lord Arlington 1666–67

161

11 John Brown, Scottish Minim (1569–1643): a tale of three title pages

178

12 English Counter-Reformation book culture

189

13 Review of Paul Arblaster, Antwerp & the World: Richard Verstegan and the International Culture of Catholic Reformation (Leuven University Press 2004)

199

14 William Carter (c. 1549–84): recusant printer, publisher, binder, stationer, scribe – and martyr

204

Index

226

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FIGURES

11.1 11.2 11.3 14.1 14.2 14.3

Title page In benedictiones, BL 1020.h.7. Title page A Discovery of the proceedings of William Laud, BL E.172 (37). Title page The Confession of John Browne, a Jesuite, BL E.173 (1). Richard Topcliffe’s notes on Gregory Martin’s Treatise of Schism (1578). Bodleian Library 8o C.95(3) Th, front flyleaf. Bodleian Library 8o C.95(3) Th, sig. D. ii recto. Bodleian Library 8o C.95(3) Th, sig. D. ii verso.

ix

179 186 187 216 217 218

PREFACE

‘As you follow the irresistible and triumphant progress of von Hügel’s lurching, elephantine prose, you feel the vicarious sense of power that Little Toomai must have felt on the back of Kala Nag.’ This is how Professor T.A. Birrell describes his feelings when reading von Hügel’s massive Mystical Elements of Religion (see note 104, Chapter VIII). The least you can say about somebody who can compare the sensations evoked by reading a learned philosophical/theological treatise with the exhilaration experienced by Kipling’s juvenile hero on the back of an elephant is that he has a strikingly original mind. And that is what the present selection will amply demonstrate. Tom Birrell (1924–2011), bibliographer, historian of English Catholicism and Professor of English and American Literature, left an extensive scholarly oeuvre (his bibliography amounts to some 220 items). He was a prominent member of the group of historians that gave the Catholic Record Society (founded in 1904) a new lease of life after WWII. However, many of his research projects are hidden in occasional publications, Libri Amicorum, periodicals, introductions to books that are out of print, or – as in the case of two inaugural lectures delivered to the University of Nijmegen – published in the form of pamphlets of which hardly any copies survive. That is why we, together with him, decided back in 2010 to republish a number of his articles in two separate collections, one comprising book historical essays, the other one concerned with the history of recusancy. Aspects of Book Culture appeared in 2013, but due to various delays the recusancy volume had to wait till now. As with the previous book, Tom Birrell himself selected the items he wanted to be included, and he wrote his own Introduction; furthermore decisions were taken about editorial procedures, such as the silent amendment of minor flaws and the exercise of the utmost restraint in the insertion of additional notes. Perhaps it is appropriate to comment briefly on the title that Birrell chose for his collection: Aspects of Recusant History. The editors are well aware of the fact that in the past decades the term recusant has become much less unequivocal than it is in the pages of the present book. Obviously it is impossible to adequately summarise these recent developments within the confines of this Preface, but suffice it to say that of late scholarship has concentrated on the Englishness of the English x

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Catholics rather than on the idea of a homogeneous embattled minority; that the Catholic community has been studied as a branch of the English nonconformist tradition; that much more emphasis has been put on the integration of the Catholic community rather than on its separation; that the emphasis has shifted from the nobility and gentry towards the lower ranks; and that recusant has been investigated as a legal term instead of a badge of honour. This change of perspective was the main reason why the house organ of the Catholic Record Society altered its name in recent years from Recusant History to British Catholic History. For Birrell the concept of recusancy was crystal clear, and the definition he gives in his Introduction seemingly ignores these complexities: ‘Recusant history is the history and sufferings of the English Catholic minority from the reign of Elizabeth I to the repeal of the penal laws in 1845’. However, this simplicity proves deceptive as chapter after chapter demonstrates. As an example one might take one of the most substantial contributions, ‘English Catholics without a Bishop’ (Chapter IV, 17,000 words), in which he is concerned with a period of less than twenty years (1655–72). In an incredibly minute and exhaustive archival study he unravels quarrels and portrays personalities, thus giving the reader insights into the prominent issues of the day and the political games that were being played (sometimes from day to day) while relating all this to the wider historical context in an unprecedented – almost novelistic – way; his dissection of the unedifying battles that were fought is, moreover, the opposite of hagiographical. However odd it may sound as a characterisation of a highly scholarly collection, novelistic might well be the term for the unique approach demonstrated in this book: Birrell was after all Professor of Literature for nearly forty years. We see the same intense interest in individuals in other chapters: James Palmer, James Maurus Corker, John Warner, Robert Pugh, Joseph Berington, William Leslie, John Brown, Richard Verstegan, William Carter. The author’s archival and bibliographical expertise results in very vivid pictures of the men who shaped aspects of the specifically Catholic history of England. A brilliant demonstration is to be found in Chapter II where Birrell portrays three non-Catholic authors who contributed to Catholic emancipation: Sydney Smith, ‘sparkling like a Chinese cracker’ in the salon of Lady Holland; Percy Bysshe Shelley – ‘a tangled mass of flowing hair, a pallid, excited face, and a broad, untied white silk collar’ – spouting impassioned rhetoric in a Dublin lecture hall; and William Cobbett, ‘whose prose is like facing into the fresh blustering wind blowing straight off the Hampshire Downs’. Aspects of Recusant History has also other things to offer: three review articles – witty, pungent and occasionally highly critical – fill in gaps that the authors of the books discussed unduly neglected, or offer crucial additional information. ‘English Catholic mystics in non-Catholic circles’ (Chapter VIII) is a tour de force which follows the vicissitudes of three English mystical books from the sixteenth to the middle of the twentieth century through a detailed study of a whole range of library catalogues. The unique feature of the inaugural lectures is that they look back at history from the perspective of the 1950s, thus combining two historical moments enabling one – for example – to view the seventeenth-century Popish xi

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Plot in terms of the 1950s political world. After pointing out that the history of the Popish Plot persecution bears a sickening resemblance to modern persecutions with ‘discoveries’ of alleged conspiracies and carefully staged treason trials, Birrell calls his readers’ attention to the present topical significance of the situation with which English Catholics were confronted nearly two hundred years ago. In Eastern Europe at the present time, many millions of Catholics are having to decide which things are, and which things are not Caesar’s, and the outcome of their decisions is, for many of them, literally a matter of life and death. The articles in this collection are arranged in the chronological order of their publication dates, but they do not necessarily have to be read in that order. If one wants to get the full flavour of Birrell’s approach one might even start with the very last item of the book, ‘William Carter (c. 1549–84): recusant printer, publisher, binder, stationer, scribe – and martyr’. The impetus for the article was the acquisition by the Bodleian of a hitherto unknown tract volume published by William Carter. It was the inspiration for an exploration of Carter’s life, publications and chequered career, partly based on earlier sources, but what stands out is Birrell’s account of the trial which led to Carter’s execution. First of all he reconstructs the composition of the bench and gives the track record of each of the judges in the condemnation of Catholics during earlier trials. Subsequently he gives an extremely vivid account of the trial itself, based on a Latin text that in the past had defeated earlier researchers. The result is the indelible picture of a little man, scared but courageous, facing a formidable array of political bigshots cynically determined to send him to his death in order to further their own political – and commercial – objectives. Jos Blom Frans Korsten Frans Blom Nijmegen February 2020

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We want to thank the editors, publishers and organisations for their permission to republish articles for which they hold the copyright: the Catholic Record Society, Recusant History, Cambridge University Press, English Studies, Taylor & Francis, The Downside Review, The Trustees of Downside Abbey, SAGE Publishing, The Tablet. The British Library Board granted permission to reproduce the images in Chapter XI, and the Bodleian Library was kind enough to waive any fees with regard to the reproduction of the illustrations in Chapter XIV. We are also grateful to the late Astrid van Hoek for her work on a number of articles in the past. Finally, it has been a great honour as well as a great joy for us to edit this collection of Tom’s articles.

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INTRODUCTION T.A. Birrell

For the present purposes, recusant history may be understood as the study of the history and sufferings of the English Catholic minority from the reign of Elizabeth I to the repeal of the Penal Laws in 1845. Up to the end of WW II the approach was either hagiographical or antiquarian. The hagiographical, i.e. the study of the Catholic martyrs, was principally undertaken by the clergy, secular and religious: they had a vested interest – and the time and money – in the beatification and canonization of their members. The antiquarian, in which the laity played their part, was chiefly the work of geriatric genealogists, in tracing the histories of ‘the old English catholic families’. Recusant history ends in 1845 rather than in 1829. How many people have actually read the so-called Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829? It is an extraordinarily mean and restrictive document. If it had been strictly enforced it would have reduced the English Catholic minority to a state-controlled sect. The chief benefit of the Catholic Emancipation Act was that it got Daniel O’Connell into Parliament, and it introduced populist Irish Catholicism as a factor in English politics – but that is another story. In 1988, in the celebration of the centenary of ‘the Glorious Revolution’ Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II announced that 1688 ushered in an age of toleration. Not for the English Catholics it didn’t – though it may have initiated toleration for the nonconformists. It was the unduly neglected lawyer T.C. Anstey (1816–1873) who realized that the 1829 Emancipation Act was an anomaly, and who brought about the repeal of the Penal Laws in 1845 – till then Parliament can never be called the friend or protector of English Catholic liberties. Recusant history, as a university subject, came very slowly in the second half of the twentieth century. Mediaeval history, i.e. English Catholic history up to the Reformation, was perfectly respectable, and so was the Oxford Movement and its converts to Catholicism, though Newman knew more about the Arians of the fourth century than about the English history of the Church he was entering. It was the bit in the middle, between the Reformation and the Oxford Movement, that was so slow in getting into academia. In 1945 it was unthinkable that a student of recusant history would be appointed to a post in the history department of an English university. 1

INTRODUCTION

The change came slowly. Firstly, a rejuvenation of the Catholic Record Society and the foundation of the journal Recusant History. The CRS no longer confined itself to the publication of texts but also organized annual conferences and supported local recusant history societies. Diocesan and religious archives became accessible – Westminster even splashed out on a fully paid professional archivist (alas no longer sustained). Recusant book production was recorded in three catalogues: 1475–1640; 1641–1700; and 1701–1800 and catalogues of archives began to appear. It is significant that it was the work of academic librarians and archivists that provided the initial impetus, and they did it in their own time and out of their own pockets. Recusant history eventually got into university studies as part of social history, i.e. English Catholic history without the Penal Laws, without the elephant in the room. English Catholics from Elizabeth I to Newman were the awkward squad. Now it is a characteristic of a persecuted minority to squabble amongst themselves like rats in a sack, and the recusants were no exception. The primary seed of discord was the question of allegiance: did the recusants owe loyalty to the State or to Rome? Related to this was another bone of contention: toleration. If the recusants were to be tolerated, could they expect a re-establishment of the preReformation church order, with diocesan bishops, deans and chapters and so forth, or was England to be a ‘missionary country’, with a hierarchy appointed directly from Rome and liable to be dismissed ad notum? This problem was especially acute after the establishment of the Congregation of Propaganda Fide in 1623. In all these controversies it may be said that the Jesuits were the hard-liners, who advocated no concessions to the government. They aroused the envy of their opponents, chiefly the secular clergy, because they were a naturally elitist body. The chief failing of the Jesuits was that they could not understand that people could dislike you because you were successful and because you were right. But without the uncompromising stand of the English Jesuits in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it is very likely that there would have been little recusant history to talk about. My association with the CRS, and with recusant history, began in 1948 when I was invited to edit the Latin text of a history of the Popish Plot (1678–82) by John Warner SJ. So my interests were concentrated mainly on the recusant history in the latter half of the seventeenth century. Popular anti-catholicism was still very prevalent, and the mob could be whipped up for political purposes: the record of Parliament and of the State Church during this period was appalling. Even excluding the threat of Irish Catholicism, English recusancy still played a role in national politics. Charles II used his offer of conversion to Catholicism as a trump card in his negotiations with Louis XIV: the high point was the Secret Treaty of Dover (1672). The Restoration was a tawdry, vulgar age. I was surprised to find toleration and crypto-Catholicism as prominent themes. Looking at it with hindsight, toleration – let alone public conversion of the monarch, the state party and the Church – were utterly futile ambitions. Yet the recusants, grasping at straws, quarrelled amongst themselves as to the possible terms 2

INTRODUCTION

for toleration: William Leslie, a very influential figure at Propaganda Fide, had fatuous hopes of a national conversion. And a prominent group of secular clergy bombarded Rome in vain for the restoration of the hierarchy. The present selection of essays reflects my interests in the various aspects of recusancy: principally in the later seventeenth century and the persistency of recusant squabbles up to the Catholic Emancipation, with a glimpse of recusant printing in the reign of Elizabeth I.

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1 CATHOLIC ALLEGIANCE AND THE POPISH PLOT A study of some Catholic writers of the Restoration period*

I have chosen to speak this afternoon on the subject of Catholic Allegiance and the Popish Plot of 1678, a subject which involves the study of some Catholic writers of the Restoration period. The writers with whom I propose to deal are Roger Palmer, Earl of Castlemaine, Dom James Maurus Corker, monk of the English Congregation of the Order of St Benedict, and Fr John Warner, Provincial of the English Province of the Society of Jesus. You may reasonably wonder why, out of the wide variety of topics which English Literature presents, I should have chosen a subject with which the majority of you are, I imagine, totally unfamiliar. You may even doubt whether the works of the writers with whom I am about to deal are entitled to the name of literature at all for you will find none of them mentioned in such a repository of orthodox critical opinion as the Cambridge History of English Literature. To the charge of irrelevance and obscurity, I would make two answers. Firstly, that this is a Catholic University, and that here, if anywhere, we should be interested in the study of Catholic writers of other countries, and of how they, as individuals, reacted to a given political situation. The Popish Plot was the last nationwide persecution of Catholics in England. Secondly, I would call your attention to the present topical significance of the situation with which English Catholics were confronted nearly two hundred years ago. In Eastern Europe at the present time, many millions of Catholics are having to decide which things are, and which things are not Caesar’s, and the outcome of their decisions is, for many of them, literally a matter of life and death. Now the number of martyrs in the Popish Plot persecution was, in contrast with some modern persecutions, comparatively small. Between 1678 and 1681 twenty-five1 priests and laymen died on the scaffold, and more than a dozen others are known to

* Originally delivered as an inaugural lecture on 16 March 1950 on the occasion of Birrell’s appointment as Reader in English Literature at the Catholic University of Nijmegen (now Radboud University Nijmegen). 1 R. Challoner, Memoirs of Missionary Priests, ed. J.H. Pollen (London 1924), p. xxxvi.

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have died in prison.2 But the episodic history of the Popish Plot bears a sickening resemblance to the pattern of modern persecution. There was the ‘discovery’ of an alleged treasonable plot, there were the carefully staged treason trials, there was an elaborate campaign to vilify and to calumniate the Catholic body as a whole and to stir up public animosity against it, and there was an attempt to create a schism among the Catholics themselves by offering them an Oath of Allegiance which denied the authority of the Pope. History indeed repeats itself. It may be worthwhile, I think, to study some few forgotten writers in a neglected episode in English history, if only for the light which they may throw upon our present problems. The objection, that the kind of writing with which I shall be dealing is not literature, is based on a misconception, a Romantic misconception, that literature ought to deal only with the sublimities of self-expression. But the Restoration was the age of ‘occasional’ literature, and the age when English prose fully developed itself as a medium for the communication of ideas in the cut and thrust of political and religious controversy. The Catholic pamphleteers, whose work was composed in haste and stealth, and printed and distributed under the conditions of the gravest difficulty and personal danger, played their part, too, in the development of a modern prose style. The Popish Plot persecution could never have occurred had not the Restoration period been one of moral disintegration and decay. I refer, of course, not only to the symptoms of moral decay (in the narrowest sense of the word moral) that we find in the Restoration drama, but also to the wider collapse of social and political morality which, in turn, can be attributed to the collapse of the court culture of the early Stuart period. The rise of a figure like Shaftesbury during the Restoration marks the beginnings of modern politics in the worst sense. Shaftesbury brought into existence the party machine as a vehicle of political expediency. He divorced politics from moral and ethical considerations, and set about the reorganization of the national administration and system of justice as an instrument of local and immediate political triumph and power. One has only to read Sir George Sitwell’s book The First Whig3 or North’s Examen4 to see with what skill and assiduity the law courts, the popular press, and popular demonstrations and displays, were organized to make public opinion the instrument of political power. It is only if we have a sense of the political decadence of the period that we can appreciate how the Popish Plot persecution came into existence at all. For the earlier persecutions of Catholics from the time of Henry VIII had been motivated by the assertion of Royal Supremacy, but the Popish Plot began and ended as a screen under which an unscrupulous politician aimed at the total overthrow of monarchical authority – and lying, slander, jobbery, and judicial murder were but the means that Shaftesbury used to attain his ends.

2 Challoner, p. 564. Of course the numbers of those who died in gaol will never be accurately known until the post-mortem inquisitions of all the English gaols are collated. 3 Brighton 1894. Esp. Chaps V and VI. 4 London 1740.

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Charles II had had no children by his Catholic wife. The heir to the throne was therefore James Duke of York, a professed Catholic. The King of France, England’s great rival, was a Catholic. It was these three simple facts which formed the basis for what F.S. Ronalds has rightly called ‘the attempted Whig revolution’.5 It is not to my purpose to describe in detail the history of the Plot. Suffice it to say that Titus Oates, a seedy adventurer and pathological liar, came forward with a fantastic story of a plot by the English Catholics, aided by an invasion from France, to rise up and overthrow the Protestant government. Oates’s appearance before Parliament in October 1678 was shortly followed by the mysterious death of the very magistrate before whom he had originally laid his story. The occasion was ideal for the Whig propaganda machine. A reign of terror swept from London across the whole country. Catholic priests and laity (and especially Jesuits or those connected in any way with the Royal Household) were arrested indiscriminately, and held in prison until Oates and his accomplices were ready to fix some tale of murder or treason upon them. Anti-Catholic and anti-Papal processions were organized in London, and anti-Catholic fears and prejudices, and particularly the memory of the Gunpowder Plot, were revived. The Catholic community, priests and laity alike, who had hitherto lived quietly and peaceably among their fellow countrymen since the Restoration, now found that, owing to the slanders of Oates and his masters, they were regarded as a body capable of treason and murder, to say nothing of perjury. To add to their difficulties, the Catholics were confronted with a great stumbling-block in the very question of their loyalty to the Throne. Many Catholic families had suffered by loss of life and estates during the Civil Wars, and yet, much as they would have liked to make a public affirmation of their loyalty, the only means by which they could do so was to take the Oath of Allegiance.6 The Oath of Allegiance had been first formulated in the reign of James I, after the Gunpowder Plot, with the deliberate intention of creating a schism among Catholics on a doubtful point of doctrine. It was drafted by an apostate Jesuit, Perkins, who well knew the difficulties of conscience that this Oath would cause, for, besides a declaration of loyalty to the Crown, it contained unwarrantable aspersions on Papal authority. The Oath was condemned by two breves of Pope Paul V in 1606 and 1607,7 but the controversy among Catholics which raged around it is a sad indication of the almost diabolic ingenuity of its devisers. At every ensuing outbreak of persecution, their enemies forcibly presented Catholics with the Oath, for it served a twofold purpose. Firstly, it divided the Catholics against themselves, and served to break their united front, and secondly, it meant that those

5 F.S. Ronalds, ‘The Attempted Whig Revolution of 1678–81’. Illinois Studies in the Social Sciences (Urbana 1937), Vol. XXI, Nos. 1 & 2. 6 cf. C. Dodd, Church History of England, ed. M.A. Tierney (London 1841), Vol. IV, pp. 66 sq. 7 Printed in Dodd, pp. xcl and cxlvi.

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who refused it on conscientious grounds could be held up to public execration as refusing to declare their loyalty to the Crown. This ‘state trick’, as Dodd, the Catholic historian, calls it,8 brings us to the central issue confronting the Catholic body during the Popish Plot. Catholics had been, and were to continue to be until the death of the Young Pretender, instinctively loyal to the House of Stuart. And yet the good Catholic, however eager to show himself a loyal subject at such a crisis as the Popish Plot, was forced, on conscientious grounds, to refuse the Oath of Allegiance, and his conduct was thus made to appear in the eyes of the world as an admirable confirmation of all the current slanders against him. The foregoing description of the broad outlines of the political and social setting has been made in order to bring out, as clearly as possible, the precise situation with which the Catholic writers of the Restoration period had to contend. The first Catholic pamphleteer to whom I should like to draw your attention was a representative of the Catholic laity – Roger Palmer, Earl of Castlemaine.9 Castlemaine began as a pamphleteer before the outbreak of the Popish Plot, and the three of his works which I shall consider are The Catholique Apology (1674), the Compendium (1679), and the Manifesto (1681).10 When I say that Castlemaine represents the Catholic laity, I mean of course that he represents the Catholic nobility and gentry, for it was not yet the Age of the Common Man. For an instance of Castlemaine’s social views, we may quote his answer in the Apology to the charge that Catholicism goes together with ignorance: But the greatest Wonder of all is, to heare Protestants still tell us, that Ignorance is a helpe to our Religion, whereas they see that not only the Catholics, that have bin from their Infancy bred so, are of the chiefest Ranck in England, and inferior to none in all natural & artificial Endowments, but that our Converts were, and still are Persons of Eminency both in their Parts and Quality. And whereas heretical seducers ever prey upon the meanest and simplest of the Land, & if they come to be considerable, ‘tis at last by their Number; On the contrary our Missioners had rather deale in Universities, than shops, because deep Points of Divinity (being always to be demonstrated a posteriori & by Deductions) are best comprehended by the wise; and therfor they not only gladly preach to the Learned and Noble, but as I said, when they chance to make Converts, ‘tis ten to one but they are Persons of prime Note, either for their Fami-

8 Dodd, p. 79. 9 cf. J. Gillow, A Literary and Biographical History or Bibliographical Dictionary of English Catholics (London 1885), Vol. I, pp. 424 sq. 10 These are listed in D. Wing, Short Title Catalogue 1641–1700, as C 1240, C 1241, and C 1245 respectively.

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lies or Accomplishments; & who instead of their former worldly hopes, contentedly resolve for Persecution, which to the amazement of their Enemies they so magnanimously undergo. (pp. 163–4)11 The Catholic martyrs of the Western Rising in the reign of Edward VI he calls ‘Devonshire clowns’ and their action ‘the madnesse or Capricio of an unruly Rabble’ (p. 386). Now I do not mean to designate Castlemaine as a snob – he received his own title, albeit with reluctance, for his unenviable position as husband of the King’s mistress. But in pre-industrial England, the existence of the Catholic laity as a body depended on the existence of the Catholic nobility and gentry. Castlemaine, then, was speaking for the Catholic landowning class. The trump card in his argument, which he plays over and over again, is that the Catholic gentry suffered in the King’s cause during the Civil Wars by the loss of their lives and estates, and that yet at the Restoration they were in a worse position than the very people who rebelled against the King. They were the object of every irresponsible calumny; they had the whole weight of the Penal Laws against them, and by the Test Act of 1673 they were debarred from many of their employments. Castlemaine’s Apology (1674) is devoted principally to the maintenance of this point of view, and to the defence of the Catholics from various common charges made against them. He deals with the stock topics used by contemporary Protestant controversialists against Catholics: the persecution under Queen Mary, the Gunpowder Plot, the St Bartholemew’s Day Massacre, and the Fire of London.12 On the vexed question of the Oath of Allegiance, Castlemaine takes an independent but, I think, quite orthodox stand. He denies that the power of the Pope to depose Kings and Princes is an article of Catholic Faith. He does not attempt to deny the charge that certain Jesuit writers may have advocated the doctrine of deposing Kings, but remarks very sensibly that the mere fact of the Jesuits acting as confessors to many of the Catholic Kings of Europe is a sufficient indication of their loyalty to royal authority: As for the Jesuites, their Order is still in being, & must answer for their own Doctrine; nor are they backward to give satisfaction in this, or any other Points, that shall be demanded of them. I must also affirme that for my owne part, were I no Catholique, I should not thinke them King

11 All quotations are given with original spelling and punctuation. 12 He is also at pains to disown two Catholic writers who had advocated recognition of the Commonwealth regime viz., Thomas White, a secular priest whose book The Grounds of Obedience and Government (1653) was a serious blow to those Catholic Cavaliers who were hoping for a full promise from Charles II of the removal of the penal laws (cf. Calendar of Clarendon State Papers, Vol. IV, p. 56), and John Birchley, vere Austin, author of the First and Second Moderator (1651 and 1652) who sought for toleration from the Cromwellian government.

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haters, seing Kings would hate them, instead of making them, as they do, their Confessors & Instructors . . . for Kings though Papists are not alwayes Fools. But if Jesuits were Villains, what is it to the Catholique Faith, for it is to prejudice that, that my Adversary is so severe? (p. 118) On the all-important question of the Oath of Allegiance, Castlemaine points out that the taking of the Oath is, in itself, no guarantee of loyalty, as the Civil Wars showed, and he claims that Catholics would not hesitate to take any other form of the Oath, provided that it were suitably worded: Oaths in themselves everybody knows, are not by our Tenets unlawfull; nor can it be for want of Zeale to our Prince that any refuse this, since we all like one man stood faithfull by him in his unparallel’d Troubles, even against those who had so often taken it. ‘Tis the ill wording of it that we scruple at, for it was fram’d by one Perkins, an Apostat Jesuit, who knowing what we could, and what we could not take, mingled several Truths with several Speculative Points, &, which is yet more, with False Notions, on purpose to make us fall within the Law of Refusal. (p. 98) By 1679, the date of his next work, all Castlemaine’s worst fears had been realized. The Popish Plot had broken out, numbers of Catholic clergy and laymen had been tried and condemned for treason on nothing but the perjured testimony of Oates and his associates, and the whole country was thrown into a state of antiCatholic hysteria by the publications of the Whig press and the slogans of the Whig political organization, the Green Ribbon Club. In the Compendium: or a Short View of the Late Tryals in Relation to the Present Plot Against His Majesty and Government, Castlemaine first gives a survey of the Plot trials, and demonstrates the obvious falsity of the testimony of Oates and his associates. The second part of the book is devoted to defending the good faith of the last speeches of those Catholics who had died on the scaffold. Now the speech from the scaffold by a condemned man before his execution seems to have been a traditional custom of public hangings. The speeches of the priests and laymen who had suffered at Tyburn for the Plot had been printed and published by the Whig press, presumably in order to terrify other Catholics. But the effect was very much the reverse.13 The obvious sincerity of the condemned men in their protestations of innocence undoubtedly made a favourable impression upon the more fair-minded of their Protestant fellow-countrymen. The result

13 Comparable, in modern times, with the publication by the Mexican government of the photographs of the execution of Fr Pro SJ. [Miguel Agustin Pro Juarez (1891–1927), Mexican Jesuit whose public execution, intended as a deterrent, had a completely opposite effect. Eds].

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of this was that the Whig propagandists had to put about the malicious slander that, by reason of certain dispensations, Catholics were permitted to lie and equivocate even at the moment before death, and that therefore the dying speeches and protestations of innocence of the condemned Catholics could not be believed. One of the chief pamphlets in this campaign was that of Thomas Barlow, Bishop of Lincoln, called Popery: or the Principles and Positions approved by the Church of Rome are very dangerous to all; and to Protestant Kings and Supreme Powers more especially Pernicious (1678).14 In the second half of the Compendium, Castlemaine directly answers Barlow and similar propagandists. He begins by pointing out that it was through their rigid adherence to principle that Catholics had incurred so much suffering for themselves even before the Plot actually came about: Was there ever a Party in this Nation, that has so eminently as ours refused (ever since the Reformation) the Preferments, to which their great Birth and Quality gave them pretences, or more Heroically underwent the Rage & Fury of all the other Lawes, when one Halt, or one False Step would have put them within the Capacity of their Birthright? Have not all our Protestant Parliaments, ownd this implicitly by the penal Acts, which from time to time they have made; for he that denies it, makes them worse than Gotams,15 since everybody now knows, that no Cuckow can be hedg’d in, that has wings to fly over the Enclosure? Nay did they not explicitly also confess it, when in the next Session, after the Act passed, for putting Catholics out of Offices, they publicly congratulated the success of the Test, & then went on to new Rigours? Are not these then invincible Arguments, that there can be no jugling with us in Religion? And do not they also amply prove, that we are (as I first hinted) the persons that stand most on Principles, seeing there was not one man, of anyone party here besides ourselves, that left the least Employment upon the score of the said Test, though it commanded not only a Kneeling at the Communion, and a compliance with several other Popish Ceremonies, as they are call’d, but contained also some speculative Points, which many of the Church of England themselves thought very new and thwarting? (p. 71) Castlemaine then goes on to say that the Catholic Church has no patience with those of her flock who try to alter their principles to suit the changes of political events. He calls such people ‘Nicodemuses and Dissemblers’ – he lived before the time when the Vicar of Bray was a byword. He continues by answering Bishop

14 Wing B 839–41. 15 The inhabitants of Gotham were renowned for their stupidity.

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Barlow’s charge that Catholics can have a dispensation to lie even in their speeches on the scaffold: We have therefore Reason certainly to complain of our late Usage, where thirteen Christian men of great probity (even among their Protestant friends) should be decry’d as most infamous Lyars, because with their last breath, they solemnly asserted an Innocence, which was never question’d or blasted, but by the now Testimony of four execrable Persons, who did not urge the least circumstance, matter or thing against them, that depends not wholly on their bare Word and Credit. . . . Is it not also pleasant that there could be a Dispensation for Dissembling and Lyes, when these poor Men (on the one side) with their blood disown the Power both in the Pope and Church, and we on the other, deny it also with the loss of our Liberties and Estates, seeing we could save both in any storm, if (Watermen like) we could look one way and row another.16 (p. 72) He concludes his spirited defence by insisting once again on the loyalty of Catholics to the monarchy, and by warning his readers that, as in the reign of Charles I, an attack on Popery was but the prelude to an attack on the monarchical system: Who could have ever thought, (unless it were to make the folly everywhere proportionable), that we who have so eminently hazarded our ALL for the King, that have so entirely loved his person, and that have so constantly even doted on Monarchy, should be thus accused as the grand Parricides, and that they that are generally reported to hate King, and Kingship, should be now the Sticklers & Zealots for both. Is there not then some further Trick and Design in this new Loyalty? And may not the Papists (as the Dogs in the Fable)17 be thought too great a safety for the Fold? Yes certainly; for as the Apologist has long ago observ’d, The Prerogative never suffer’d: no great Statesman has ever been disgrac’t; nor the Church of England itself (nor the Liberties of the People) ever wounded, but a fearful Outcry against Popery has still preceded. . . . Therefore for Liberties sake, for Monarchies sake, for Religions sake, put a stop to this present Tempest, which bearing up Perjury, has not only destroy’d all Trade and Commerce among us, but render’d us a Laughing-stock to the whole world, and shaken the very Basis and Foundation of our Island. (p. 86)

16 Like the great-grandfather of Bunyan’s Mr By-Ends. 17 [A reference to ‘The Wolves and the Sheep’, one of the collection of Aesop’s Fables. Eds].

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In 1680 Castlemaine found himself on trial for his life, in connexion with the Meal Tub Plot, an extension of the Popish Plot. Fortunately the public hysteria had somewhat subsided,18 and Castlemaine’s witnesses were given a sufficiently adequate hearing to secure his acquittal. In view of the garbled reports of it which had been printed, Castlemaine decided to publish his own account of his trial, together with a detailed defence of his own position, and that of the Catholic laity in general. This he called The Earl of Castlemain’s Manifesto (1681). He begins his defence by insisting that, though he himself is an admirer of the monarchical system of government, yet the Catholic, as a good citizen, is bound to defend the established government of his country, of whatever type it may be: As to Government in general, I believe Monarchy (from my heart) to be the best; & I think far the better of it as often as I consider our late Miseries and Disorders; yet had I been born in a lawful Commonwealth, Aristocracy, or Elective Kingdom, I should look upon myself bound in conscience to defend the Establishment, as I found it (let it be which of these it will) against all pretences to the contrary, though they suited never so much with my own inclinations and Judgement. (p. 125) As to the Oaths, he rejects them as they stand, but points out that Catholicism is not incompatible with the most autocratic monarchical power – he refers, of course, to France under Louis XIV. Castlemaine concludes the Manifesto on a personal note, by describing his services to King Charles II. He had sent the King money while he was in exile, and was ready to rise in 1659 with men, horses and arms. He was imprisoned under the Commonwealth for conspiring to restore the King, but was eventually released and chosen a member of that Parliament which voted for the King’s return. He had hazarded his life in the Dutch wars, and had printed an account in French to vindicate the English side. He concludes this description of his loyal services with the following words: ‘Tis not by way of Exprobration, that I offer this Memorial, but ‘tis to remember the Reader, that a long series of Loyal Actions, indicates a Loyal Heart, and that Habits are not lost on a sudden. (p. 133) Castlemaine’s style, as you may gather, combines homely simplicity with a vigorous directness, and in his style, as in his line of argument, he may be taken as typical of the loyal Catholic Cavalier gentry.

18 Though Blessed Oliver Plunket was to suffer later in the same year.

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The second writer whom I should like to bring to your attention is a Benedictine monk, Dom James Maurus Corker,19 who is known incidentally to literary history as the priest who received John Dryden into the Catholic Church in the reign of James II. Before the Plot he had acted as one of the Queen’s chaplains, and served the chapel in the Savoy authorized by the Portuguese Marriage Treaty. His arrest at his lodgings by Titus Oates, on the eve of the opening of Parliament in October 1678, was a part of the Whig plan to discredit the Queen through her chaplains. Corker was brought to trial for treason on 18 July 1679, in company with two fellowBenedictines and Sir George Wakeman, the Queen’s physician. Fortunately for Corker, Wakeman was able to bring conclusive proof from a public official of the untrustworthiness of the prosecution witnesses, and all four of the accused were acquitted. However, contrary to all principles of fair play, Corker and his two Benedictine companions were remanded in prison, and subsequently brought to trial again in January 1680, this time for the simple fact of being priests. They were condemned to death, but were reprieved by the King, and Corker remained in gaol until 1685. But his stay in gaol did not stop Corker’s apostolic work. We find records of him acting as spiritual adviser and confessor to many Catholics who were imprisoned, like himself, on account of the Plot, and he also contrived to publish the trials, dying speeches and devotions of some of those who actually died on the scaffold.20 But there is one tract by Corker which I should like to discuss especially this afternoon, namely, Roman Catholic Principles in Reference to God and the King (1680).21 This work, like Castlemaine’s Compendium, was partly a counterblast to Bishop Barlow’s Popery and similar pamphlets. It was also intended to serve as a guide for the consciences of those Catholics who at that time were unable to see clearly the principles underlying the problem of conflicting loyalties – loyalty to one’s Faith and loyalty to one’s country. The importance of the book was soon brought to the public notice. In December 1680, the Blessed Martyr William Howard Viscount Stafford, old, deaf and infirm, and by no means skilled in religious controversy, was brought to trial for treason at the Bar of the House of Lords. In his defence, Stafford explicitly referred to Corker’s pamphlet as an exposition of the question of the duties of Catholic subjects to their King.22 As a lucid exposition of moderate Catholic opinion on the all-important topic of Allegiance, Corker’s tract was in great demand by Catholics and non-Catholics

19 cf. Gillow, Vo1. I, p. 568, and N. Birt, Obit Book of the English Benedictines (Edinburgh 1913), p. 76. [See also the entry in ODNB. The present article is one of its sources. Eds]. 20 Wing C 6301 and C 6306. 21 Wing C 6302. My quotations here are taken from Stafford’s Memoires (1682) in which the text is reproduced. 22 Cobbett, State Trials, Vol. VII, col. 1358. Stafford’s reference clinches the ascription of the work to Corker made by Weldon in his MS ‘Collections’ at Downside. Dryden also mentions the pamphlet in the preface to Religio Laici.

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alike. In fact, for a Catholic pamphlet, it is somewhat of a bibliographical phenomenon. Six editions were published by 1684, six more between 1685 and 1686, and another twenty-six editions were published by 1815. The tract had the honour, moreover, of being referred to in the House of Commons by Grattan and others in the discussions on Catholic Emancipation in the early nineteenth century.23 Corker begins his work with a preface addressed to those anti-Catholic writers who had misrepresented the Catholic Faith to the world at large. ‘To accuse Men’, says Corker, ‘as guilty in matters of faith, which they never own’d, is the same thing, as to condemn them for matters of fact, which they never did’ (p. 129). He then proceeds to what he calls ‘a true and candid Explanation of my Belief and Judgment in the main points of Faith and Loyalty, controverted between Catholics and Protestants, as they severally relate to God and the King’ (p. 132). There are twenty-five points in all, the first twelve being devoted to the Catholic Faith and Church in general, and the remainder to the relations between spiritual and temporal authority. I have only time here to deal with Corker’s treatment of the topic of the Oath of Allegiance. On this topic Corker takes a very moderate, in fact I might almost say, a quasi-Gallican,24 view. He begins by saying that a General Council is only infallible when it makes a pronouncement under pain of heresy, on faith or morals, and that therefore no Catholic would be bound to submit to a decree of a General Council which undertook to depose a King, and to absolve his subjects from their allegiance to him. Therefore, he continues, The Subjects of the King of England lawfully may, without the least breach of any Catholic Principle, Renounce, even upon Oath, the Teaching, Mantaining [sic], or Practising the Doctrine of Deposing Kings Excommunicated for Heresie, by any Authority whatsoever, as Repugnant to the Fundamental Laws of the Nation, Injurious to Soveraign Power, Destructive to the Peace and Government; and by consequence, in His Majesties Subjects, Impious and Damnable. Yet not properly Heretical, taking the Word Heretical in that connatural, genuine sense, it

23 J. Kirk, Roman Catholic Principles. . . . to Which Is Prefixed an Enquiry Respecting the Editions and the Author of That “Valuable Tract” (London 1815), p. 70. 24 This epithet is justified also by his attitude towards the doctrine of Papal Infallibility which he explicitly rejects: ‘It is no matter of Faith to believe, That the Pope is in himself Infallible, separate from a General Council, even in Expounding the Faith: By consequence Papal Definitions or Decrees, though ex Cathedra, as they term them (taken exclusively from a General Council, or Universal Acceptance of the Church) oblige none under Pain of Heresie, to an interior Assent’ (p. 141). Dom Cuthbert Butler OSB in The Vatican Council (London 1930), Vol. I, p. 27 writes ‘The Gallican position was practically French only.’ It is interesting, therefore, to find that a monk of Dom Cuthbert’s congregation anticipates by two years the doctrine of the celebrated ‘Gallican Articles’.

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is usually understood in the Catholick Church; on account of which, and other Expressions (no wise appertaining to Loyalty) it is, that Catholics of tender Consciences refuse the Oath commonly called the Oath of Allegiance. (p. 138) You will note that this is a very moderate position. The Oath formula had required Catholics to swear that the doctrine of deposing kings was ‘impious, damnable, and heretical’. Corker reduces Catholic objections to the Oath down to one word: heretical. And his objections to that one word are based on his previous contention that, as the deposition of Kings is not a matter of faith or morals, the Church could not define it as a doctrine to be held under pain of heresy. So, you see that Corker’s objections to the Oath are very negative indeed. Castlemaine’s objections, like those of Pius V in his breve, were more general. He maintained that the Oath had been deliberately worded so as to provide a stumbling-block for Catholics. Yet another school of thought, to which we might in retrospect apply the convenient label of Ultramontane, claimed that the State had no right to demand from Catholics, under the binding penalties of an oath, any denial of Papal authority, however worded. Looking at the event from the comfortable, and comparatively secure, distance of nearly three centuries, we can see that the Ultramontane view was the right one in principle. But that should not make us withdraw our sympathies altogether from those clergy who, like Corker, sought in all good faith, to reduce the Oath to a permissible formula. To speak in human terms, the psychology of martyrdom in the modern world is by no means as simple as the romantic attitude of some pious hagiographers would have us believe. The enemies of the Faith always seek to confuse the minds of the faithful. The martyrdom of St John Fisher and St Thomas More, for instance, shows us that those two martyrs not only had more courage than the majority of their Catholic contemporaries, but they also had more wisdom and better judgement. They had the power of judging the precise moment at which it was impossible for them to temporise any longer, even at the cost of their lives. They would go so far, but no further: they knew when and where to make their stand. The situation confronting the Popish Plot victims was even more complex than that confronting More and Fisher. A campaign of calumny and slander, and the introduction of the insidious Oath formula, had served to make the essential Catholic standpoint more difficult to perceive, and the conflict of conscience more intense. We should remember that Corker lived as a fellow prisoner for six years among men who were being offered their lives on one or other of two conditions: either, that they would acknowledge the Plot to be true, or, that they would take the Oath of Allegiance. Corker’s aim, therefore, was to find some alternative oath formula in order to avert any possible cases of naufragium fidei. Furthermore, it was the drafting of an admissible oath formula that was the core of the Catholic

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Relief legislation of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the taking of the oaths then formulated, though not of course approved at Rome, was not condemned, and it seems therefore to have been at least tacitly tolerated.25 In marked contrast to Corker is the third and last writer with whom we are to deal, Fr John Warner, of the Society of Jesus. Warner is a writer who has suffered unduly from neglect. He has to his credit a Latin manuscript ‘History of the Popish Plot’, and eighteen printed books – four in Latin, four in French, and the remainder in English.26 Several of his English works ran to more than one edition. Yet Gillow fails to include Warner at all in his Bibliographical Dictionary of English Catholics, and Sommervogel, in his Bibliothèque des Écrivains de la Compagnie de Jesus, ascribes only ten printed books to Warner, two of which are not by Warner at all.27 Warner had formerly been a secular priest and Professor of Divinity at the English College Douay, but in 1662 he entered the Society of Jesus and at the outbreak of the Popish Plot was Rector of the Jesuit College at Liège. One of the first victims of the Plot to be imprisoned was Fr Whitbread, the English Provincial, and Warner was created Vice-Provincial to transact the affairs or the Province in Whitbread’s absence. In June 1679 Whitbread was executed, and in December of the same year Warner was appointed Provincial in his place.28 The story of Warner’s efforts to administer the English Province of the Society of Jesus during one of the most difficult periods of its history is a matter for some future historian of the Society. What concerns us here is his activity as a pamphleteer during that period. Besides his works in French, which were obviously intended to explain the position of Catholics in England for the benefit of continental readers, and to refute the calumnies of anti-Catholic propagandists, Warner’s principal English pamphlets were Anti-Fimbria or an Answer to the Animadversions uppon the Last Speeches of the Five Jesuits Executed at Tyburne June 20/30 1679 (Antwerp 1679) and A Vindication of the Inglish Catholiks from the Pretended Conspiracy against the Life and Government of His Sacred Maiesty. Discovering the Chiefe Falsities & Contradictions contained in the Narrative of Titus Oates (Antwerp 1680). Anti-Fimbria was, like Castlemaine’s Compendium, directed against the numerous hostile ‘animadversions’ on the dying speeches of the Jesuit martyrs.

25 Butler, Vol. I, p. 20. 26 A handlist of Warner’s works, together with a fuller account of his life, will be found in an edition of his History of the English Persecution of Catholics and the Presbyterian Plot (The Catholic Record Society 1953–55, Record Series XLVII–XLVIII). 27 i.e. Blackloanae Haeresis . . . Auctore M. Lomino, Gandavi MDCLXXV (probably by Archbishop Peter Talbot – Warner disowns it in his History of the Plot) and Anti-Goliath . . . . by E.W. 1678 (by Fr Edward Worsley SJ, edited posthumously by Warner. Sommervogel here relies on the information of Dom Raymund Webster OSB which, on this point, is incorrect). 28 Catholic Record Society, Vol. XI, p. 539 and H. Foley SJ, Records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus: Collectanea (London 1875–83), p. 819.

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Warner begins with the claim that Catholics are staunch upholders of monarchical authority: Comparisons are allways odious, and cheifly in odious matters: wherefore I will not compare the Principles of Catholick Religion, with those of your Reformation, to shew, that ours are more conformable to Monarky. This I will say, that Monarky flourisht more yeares in the Persons of Catholick Princes, than months in those of Protestants; that it was never shaken till your pretended Evangelical Liberty, (the ground worke of your Reformation) had Loosened the reynes of Gouernment, and weakened the hands of the Gouernors; That before one age had past, you turned it out of the Throne, and since its happy restauration, you put it to greater Plunges, then in all the time, whilest Catholick Religion prevailed, it endured. Insomuch as I heare some of your owne are of opinion that Monarky in England cannot emerge, or long subsist, without Popery, or Popish Principles. (p. 18) It will be seen that Warner is a skilled controversialist. His manner is vigorous and unconciliatory, and he carries the attack into the enemy’s camp. He goes on to illustrate the absurdity of the argument of Bishop Barlow and similar anti-Catholic pamphleteers who maintain that the Jesuit martyrs, in protesting their innocence on the scaffold, were acting in bad faith, and he shows the absurdity of supposing that the Jesuits could have suffered death simply out of a desire to appear as martyrs in this world: Now consider what thoughts you fancy in these executed Innocents: of malice in Promoting the Plot: spite against the Witnesses: reuenge against Protestants in all countryes: vanity, and folly in purchacing the name of Martyrs in this world, with the losse of their souls in the other, as if they would fry in Hell fire really for an eternity, prouided men uppon earth for a time, myght say they were brave boys. What ground have you to surmise such Antichristian Dispositions in their minds? At a much easier rate, and with lesse sin, or rather no sin at all, as you say, they might haue purchaced their Pardon, and liued contentedly in this world, and dyed happily for the next, by only owning the crime, of which they were really guilty. What reason haue they given you to judge them soe silly, or soe mad rather? . . . What ground can you have then, for this hard censure? Without your selfe nothing occurres, wherefore I am forced to surmise, that all the ground you have taken is from your own hart, which is taken up and possessed with thoughts of this life, and worldly designes, and that you judged others by your selfe. (p. 23) 17

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Warner’s more widely read work, however, was the Vindication of the Inglish Catholicks. It was a detailed examination, point by point, of the eighty-one depositions of Oates concerning the alleged Plot, and was carried on in the same lively and forthright style that we found in Anti-Fimbria. Warner exposes the palpable absurdity of Oates’s accusations, and collects attestations from many continental sources concerning the movements of many of the persons named by Oates in his Narrative and Oates’s relations with the Jesuits. The Vindication, besides being very entertaining to read, is a document of major historical importance, as it is the only published example of a detailed refutation of Oates by a contemporary Catholic writer. It has been much used by Miss Lane in her recent biography Titus Oates (London 1949), though she seems to be unaware of Warner’s authorship. Warner begins the Vindication with an examination of Oates’s ‘Epistle Dedicatory’, and his analysis displays, in a most explicit form, the political standpoint of what I have loosely called the Ultramontane Catholics of the period. For, together with Warner’s vehement rejection of the Oath of Allegiance (which we find particularly in his MS correspondence), there goes his uncompromising championship of strong monarchical power. To Warner, Presbyterianism and the political implications of Non-Conformity, are quite incompatible with sound principles of government. The very idea of democracy is to him anathema. It would be impossible here to analyze the detailed examination of Oates’s depositions, but for a sample of Warner’s vigorous rhetoric we may take his address to Oates at the conclusion of the book: You swear all you have said is true; we know, and will prove all is false. . . . Your story is incredible, and morally impossible; ours evidently probable, and morally certain: Your Tale is every day changed, as being the Off-spring of your fancy, and having no subsistance but from it; ours always the same, as being grounded on real Facts. In fine, all your Art, though directed by some more wise than your self, and seconded by Bedlow,29 and such Fellows, could never make out the Truth of anyone material point questioned by us, nor the falshood of any material point alledged in our defence. So the lying Spirit doth evidently discover it self in your Narrative; and the Spirit of Truth is clearly seen in our Apology. We suffer with Truth, we suffer for Truth, and Truth will free us. (p. 40) Warner made every effort to dispel invincible ignorance and to see that copies of his pamphlets were well-distributed. The Vindication was publicly advertised by the non-Catholic bookseller James Vade,30 and was answered by Milton’s nephew,

29 [William Bedloe (1650–1680), adventurer and Popish Plot informer, who claimed that he had been anticipated by Oates in his revelations about the Plot. Eds]. 30 W.H. Hart, Index Expurgatorius Anglicanus (London 1872), Item 275.

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John Phillips.31 Vade’s advertisement appears in a catalogue of pamphlets of 1680, and in the British Library copy of this catalogue there appear the following words written in a contemporary hand: ‘This is a popish libel, and asperses the justices of the nation, and reflects on the King’s witnesses most scandalously’ (BL 128. a. 3/3, p. 5). Warner was evidently not preaching to the converted. Warner also sent anonymously copies of his pamphlets to the members of the Privy Council and to the Lords’ Committee for the investigation of the Plot.32 The effects of his efforts he notes with a certain wry humour in a manuscript extract from the Domestic Intelligence of 19 December 1679, written on the flyleaf of his own copy of Anti-Fimbria, now in the British Library: We have an account that a Person of Quality lately received a packet from Flanders by ye post, from an unknown person, with a blank cover, and two bookes enclosed therein, ye contents whereof was scandalous and Treasonable, vindicating ye Innocency of the five Jesuits lately executed, to ye dishonour of his Majesty’s Government, and ye Justice of ye Nation, who are fully satisfied of their guilt: and they particularly inveighed against the King’s evidences, especially Dr Oates and Mr Bedlow. (BL 860. i. 12/5) I hope that this brief sketch, albeit perfunctory, has served to give you a little glimpse of the variety, as well as of the vigour, of Catholic pamphleteers in a period that was a golden age of pamphleteering. I leave you to draw for yourselves the contrasts between the simple- and single-minded Cavalier, the sincere but circumspect Benedictine and the shrewd, vigorous and uncompromising Jesuit. Of the three I think myself that Warner is the greatest, not only for his stylistic qualities, but also for the more comprehensive grasp, which he shows throughout his works, of the central political and religious issues at stake. But without going into invidious comparisons, let us take these three writers together, and place them beside Macaulay’s famous verdict on the state of Catholic writers in 1685, of which an extract may suffice: It was indeed impossible for any intelligent and candid Roman Catholic to deny that the champions of his Church were, in every talent and acquirement, completely overmatched. The ablest of them would not, on the other side have been considered as of the third rate. Many of them, even when they had something to say, knew not how to say it. . . . They . . . had almost unlearned their mother tongue. . . . Their diction was disfigured by foreign idioms; and, when they meant to be eloquent,

31 Dr Oates’s Narrative of the Popish Plot Vindicated . . . by J. P. Gent (London 1680). 32 Historical MSS Commission, 11th Report Appendix, Part II, pp. 97–100.

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they imitated, as well as they could, what was considered as fine writing in those Italian academies where rhetoric had then reached the last stage of corruption.33 It has been not the least part of my object this afternoon to try to show you that such a verdict on the Catholic writers of the Restoration can only be attributed to crass ignorance, if not, indeed, to malice. And now, in conclusion, let us all hope that the prayers of those Blessed English Martyrs of the Popish Plot may avail to preserve the remnants of Western civilization from another epoch of religious hatred and persecution.

33 Thomas B. Macaulay, The History of England (London 1858), Ch. VI, p. 365.

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2 NON-CATHOLIC WRITERS AND CATHOLIC EMANCIPATION An aspect of Sidney Smith, Shelley, Coleridge and Cobbett* For the first three decades of the nineteenth century Catholic Emancipation, generally referred to as ‘the Catholic Question’, was one of the foremost topics of general discussion in England and Ireland. It is not surprising, therefore, that we should find references to the Catholic Question in the writings of the chief literary figures of the period. What is surprising is that the literary aspect of the topic has been so little investigated. Four non-Catholic literary figures were closely associated with Catholic Emancipation – Sidney Smith, Shelley, Coleridge and Cobbett – names which are familiar to every student of English literature. Yet there is no treatment of any of them in Bernard Ward’s seven monumental volumes on the history of Catholic Emancipation.1 The reason for this neglect is, I think, that Catholics have been too little interested in examining and analyzing the contemporary non-Catholic viewpoint on the Catholic Question; we have been far too parochial in our outlook. In the brief survey that follows I shall try to redress the balance a little. Sidney Smith was the best type of Church of England parson in Regency England, and something more besides. Kindly, generous and active in his parochial duties, his was the religion of the good heart, uncomplicated by dogmatic niceties: ‘Every sincere Christian who leads a good life, and interprets the Scriptures in the best manner he is able, has an equal chance of salvation, let his creed be what it may.’2 To such clergy of a decidedly eighteenth century stamp, the fervour of the Wesleyans was a sign of ill breeding, and the liturgical interests of the Tractarians were to be viewed as esoteric and antiquarian crankishness. But Sidney Smith was more than the typical Regency clergyman. Beneath the chubby and jovial exterior there was an irrepressible and seemingly irresponsible

* Originally delivered as an inaugural lecture on 8 May 1953 on the occasion of Birrell’s appointment as Professor in English Literature at the Catholic University of Nijmegen (now Radboud University Nijmegen). 1 B. Ward, The Dawn of the Catholic Revival in England (1781–1803) (London 1909), 2 Vols; The Eve of Catholic Emancipation (1803–1829) (London 1911), 3 Vols; The Sequel to Catholic Emancipation (1830–1850) (London 1915), 2 Vols. 2 G. Bullett, Sidney Smith (London 1951), p. 286.

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wit which made him the most fashionable society preacher and an indispensable feature of the London salons. The salon of Lady Holland at Holland House dominated the London social arena,3 and Sidney Smith dominated Holland House. Round Holland House there breathed an air of complacent opulence and intellectual curiosity. In the lofty dining-room, flanked by crimson damask walls on which the heavy gilt mirrors jostled the Reynolds and Kneller portraits,4 the ruling oligarchy shared its talk with the leading literary and social figures of the day. Brougham and Canning, Grenville and Palmerston, mingled with Scott and Byron, Bentham and Macaulay. And into this rarefied atmosphere bounced Sidney Smith, sparkling with innocent humour like a Chinese cracker. Had he lived in the Middle Ages, Smith would have been a court jester; because he lived in the nineteenth century he was made Canon of St Paul’s. It is an added irony of fate that this man who was more than representative of the Church of England should owe his survival in English literary history to the authorship of a work in favour of Catholic Emancipation. Sidney Smith’s Letters of Peter Plymley were published anonymously between 1807 and 1808, and they had a wide and immediate sale. In these letters Peter Plymley, an imaginary character, discusses the objections against Catholic Emancipation raised by his brother Abraham, a very conservative country parson. Sidney Smith, in the person of Peter Plymley, seeks to allay the objections against allowing Catholics to become officers in the army or officials in municipal and parliamentary government. The army question was, of course, extremely pressing at the time, since the penal laws then in force prevented the recruitment of Catholic, and especially Irish Catholic, officers for the Napoleonic wars. But Smith’s manner of tackling the subject may appear to us a little alarming: I am as disgusted with the nonsense of the Roman Catholic religion as you can be: and no man who talks such nonsense shall ever tithe the product of the earth, nor meddle with the ecclesiastical establishment in any shape; but what have I to do with the speculative nonsense of his theology, when the object is to elect the mayor of a county town, or to appoint the colonel of a marching regiment? Will a man discharge the solemn impertinences of one office with less zeal, or shrink from the bloody boldness of the other with greater timidity, because the blockhead believes in all the Catholic nonsense of the real presence. I am sorry there should be such impious folly in the world, but I should be ten times a

3 It is of course difficult to estimate comparative influence. Certainly the great heyday of Holland House came somewhat later; cf. H. Pearson, The Smith of Smiths (London 1948), p. 116 and G.M. Young, Early Victorian England (Oxford 1934), Vol. I, p. 183. But at the time of which we are speaking Holland House was at least a prima inter pares. 4 cf. L. Sanders, The Holland House Circle (London 1908), p. 91, quoting Princess Liechtenstein. [Birrell here refers to Princess Marie Liechtenstein, Holland House (London 1874), 2 Vols. Eds].

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greater fool than he is, if I refused, in consequence of his folly, to lead him out against the enemies of the state. . . . The state has nothing whatever to do with theological errors which do not violate the common rules of morality and militate against the fair power of the ruler.5 ‘It is all the more to the credit of Sidney Smith’, said Chesterton, ‘that he fought so hard for the rights of a religion that he did not in the least understand.’6 Such a passage as I have just quoted might well cause reflection on the limitations of Smith’s understanding of Catholicism. But it is precisely the element of the licensed jester that conditions Smith’s attitude. The jester is in a precarious position. He must expose the follies of the great without losing his position among them. Peter Plymley and Sidney Smith are not exactly the same person. Peter Plymley has to convince Abraham, the narrow and suspicious country parson of the old school, whose opposition to Catholicism is not based on dogmatic differences but on fear for the stability of his own position, and, above all, on fear that Catholic Emancipation will bring loss of tithes. Smith was not concerned in the Plymley letters to argue the abstract justice of the Catholic case, but to make it palatable to the average ‘squarson’ of the Established Church. So he argues that Catholic Emancipation will bring more security rather than less. Parliamentary representation will serve to reduce the violence of political agitation: Whatever you think of the Catholics, there they are – you cannot get rid of them; your alternative is to give them a lawful place for stating their grievances, or an unlawful one: if you do not admit them to the House of Commons, they will hold their Parliament in Potatoplace, Dublin, and be ten times as violent and inflammatory as they would be at Westminster. Nothing would give me such an idea of security as to see twenty or thirty Catholic gentlemen in Parliament, looked upon by all the Catholics as the fair and proper organ of their party. I should have thought it the height of good fortune that such a wish existed on their part, and the very essence of madness and ignorance to reject it. Can you murder the Catholics? Can you neglect them? They are too numerous for both these expedients. What remains to be done is obvious to every human being.7 Further, argues Smith, if the Protestant clergy really want to wean the Irish Catholic nobiliy and gentry away from their Catholic faith, then the best thing to do is to admit them to the temptations of London society life. By being ostracized from

5 Bullett, p. 185. 6 In his Introduction to Pearson, p. 9. 7 Bullett, p. 193.

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all public offices, the Catholic aristocracy are only confirmed in their religious bigotry: If a rich young Catholic were in Parliament, he would belong to White’s and to Brookes’s, would keep race-horses, would walk up and down Pall Mall, be exonerated of his ready money and his constitution, become as totally devoid of morality, honesty, knowledge, and civility, as Protestant loungers in Pall Mall, and return home with a supreme contempt for Father O’Leary and Father O’Callaghan. I am astonished at the madness of the Catholic clergy in not perceiving that Catholic emancipation is Catholic infidelity; that to entangle their people in the intrigues of a Protestant Parliament and a Protestant court is to insure the loss of every man of fashion and consequence in their community. The true receipt for preserving their religion . . . is to deprive every rich Catholic of all the objects of secular ambition, to separate him from the Protestant, and to shut him up in his castle, with priests and relics.8 This passage is a typical specimen of Smith’s manner of argument. He is paradoxically pleading for a measure in favour of Catholics on the grounds that it will certainly undermine the Catholic life of those whom it is supposed to benefit. Why should we deprive the Catholics, he says in effect, of the opportunity of becoming ‘as totally devoid of morality, honesty, knowledge and civility, as Protestant loungers in Pall Mall’? Smith never really openly reveals his own standpoint. He prefers to attack the bigotry and inconsistency of certain of the Protestant clergy and placemen, rather than to defend the Catholic position on its own merits. The basis of Augustan and Regency churchmanship was the dogmatic indifferentism of Locke’s Letters on toleration. But Locke’s concept of toleration, which represented a solution of the problem of national religious divisions by the typically English method of compromise, did not extend to toleration for Catholics. Smith, writing from the centre of the stronghold of the new Whig liberalism, strove to pursue the principle of toleration to its logical conclusion. Our next glimpse of the Catholic Question is in a very different setting. On 28 February 1812, there was a crowded aggregate meeting of the Catholic Committee in the Fishamble Street Theatre, Dublin, to protest against the arrest of one of their members.9 The hall was brilliantly lit, the galleries filled with Dublin society eager to hear the great O’Connell. Discreetly concealed in the auditorium was a Mr Farrell, a government police spy, sent there on the orders of the Lord Lieutenant.10

8 Bullett, p. 249. 9 K.N. Cameron, The Young Shelley (London 1951), p. 145. 10 W.J. Fitzpatrick, Correspondence of Daniel O’Connell (London 1888), Vol. II, pp. 419–24.

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As speech followed speech, the evening wore on. Then, from the body of the hall, a young man – he could be but barely twenty – rose from his seat to ask for a hearing. As the gentry craned over the edge of their boxes to observe the newcomer, they would have seen a tangled mass of flowing hair, a pallid, excited face and a broad, untied, white silk collar gleaming out over a glossy black velvet jacket.11 The young man had little new to say, but he was received with applause. ‘He was,’ he said, ‘an Englishman, and when he reflected on the crimes committed by his nation on Ireland, he could not but blush for his countrymen, did he not know that arbitrary power never failed to corrupt the heart of man. (Loud applause for several minutes) . . . He had come to Ireland for the sole purpose of interesting himself in her misfortunes. . . . He walked through the streets, and he saw the fane of liberty converted into a temple of Mammon. (Loud applause)’12 Mr Farrell, the government spy, had heard all this sort of thing before. He merely recorded in his notebook the name and nationality of the speaker: ‘Mr Shelley, who stated himself to be a native of England.’13 Shortly after his expulsion from Oxford for the publication of his pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism in 1811, Shelley chose Ireland as the next scene of his activities. The outburst of oratory to which I referred above was not the only result. Between his arrival in February 1812 and his departure in April of the same year, Shelley wrote three pamphlets for the Irish.14 The first was An Address to the Irish People. In this, Shelley begins by insisting that it is the virtuous life which alone matters, not religious differences. In the past Catholic has persecuted Protestant, and Protestant has persecuted Catholic; let there now be an age where both can live as brothers. ‘It is not a merit to tolerate, but a crime to be intolerant.’15 He advocates the growth of a revolutionary but non-violent spirit. The first thing is for the Irish to reform themselves; ‘habits of Sobriety, Regularity, and Thought must be entered into, and firmly resolved upon’.16 Shelley is extremely sanguine about the granting of Catholic Emancipation. The King is no longer the effective ruler, and the Prince Regent is known to favour the Catholic cause. But Catholic Emancipation is to be but the prelude to a wider emancipation: I write now not only with a view for Catholic Emancipation, but for universal emancipation; and to this emancipation complete and unconditional, that shall comprehend every individual of whatever nation or principles, and that shall fold in its embrace all that think and all that

11 12 13 14 15

cf. N.I. White, Shelley (London 1947), Vol. I, pp. 479, 557. Report from The Dublin Evening Post, cited in Cameron, pp. 146–7. Farrell’s report is in the Public Record Office, London. Home Office Papers (Ireland), 1812/655/3. The third, a broadside called a Declaration of Rights, was never in fact issued in Ireland. The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. R. Ingpen and W.E. Peck (London 1928), Vol. V, p. 221. 16 Ingpen, p. 226.

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feel, the Catholic cause is subordinate, and its success preparatory to this great cause, which adheres to no sect but society, to no cause but that of universal happiness, to no party but the people.17 He concludes with an appeal that Catholics and Protestants should work together in this great cause. Shortly after this there appeared a second pamphlet, the full title of which gives an idea of its nature: Proposals for an Association of those Philanthropists, who convinced of the Inadequacy of the Moral and Political State of Ireland to produce Benefits which are nevertheless attainable, are willing to Unite to accomplish its Regeneration.18 In this pamphlet Shelley stresses the repeal of the Union between England and Ireland as being of more importance than the Emancipation Question. It is the political rather than the religious grievances of Ireland that concern him here. This pamphlet expresses much more overtly Shelley’s revolutionary idealism. He explicitly states that his principles of political philanthropy ‘have their origins from the discoveries in the sciences of politics and morals which preceded and occasioned the revolutions of America and France’,19 and he refers to Paine and Lafayette (though not to Godwin) as his chief masters. It should be clear that Shelley’s religious indifferentism has a very different basis from that of Sidney Smith. Smith saw the Catholic Question as something to be solved by common sense and the generous feelings born of solid Whig policy. Shelley came to Ireland filled with the half-digested theories of revolutionary libertarianism which he had imbibed from Paine and William Godwin. It is significant that he formed his closest friendship in Ireland with the revolutionary agitator John Lawless, rather than with O’Connell. Most revealing of all is his own comment, in a letter to a friend, as to the underlying intention of his Address to the Irish People: It is secretly intended also as a preliminary to other pamphlets to shake Catholicism at its basis, and to induce Quakerish and Socinian principles of politics, without objecting to the Christian religion, which do no good to the vulgar just now, and cast an odium over the other principles which are advanced.20 Shelley’s brief intervention had virtually no tangible effect on the Irish Question. He distributed copies of his pamphlets to all the Dublin notabilities, and as we know from the story which all his biographers repeat,21 even scattered them

17 18 19 20 21

Ingpen, p. 237. Ingpen, p. 251. Ingpen, p. 263. Ingpen, p. 301. cf. White, Vol. I, p. 209.

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from the balcony of his house upon the heads of the passers-by. But the Dublin politicians had something better to do than to listen to the idealistic outpourings of a young man barely twenty years old. Shelley’s butterfly mind soon flitted on to other topics, and in later life he seems never to have reverted publicly to the Catholic Question. To English eyes perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the whole episode is that after two months among the Irish people, Shelley still managed to retain unshaken his faith in the perfectibility of human nature. In contrast with Shelley, Coleridge’s interest in Catholic Emancipation came towards the end of his life. As is well known, after the idealistic and Unitarian phase of his early political and religious beliefs, Coleridge moved towards a kind of eclectic conservatism in his later years. He lived to see with horror the anarchy and confusion left by the ideas of the French Revolution, and by the growth of laissez faire industrialism in England. In political theory he may be considered, very broadly speaking, as the successor to the anti-Jacobinism of Burke.22 As for his religious beliefs, his fantastically wide reading in seventeenth-century literature led him more and more towards an ideal vision of the Church of England which can be associated in some points with the Tractarian movement, and in others, with the Broad Church school of Archdeacon Hare, the Arnolds, and F.D. Maurice.23 But such comparisons are only very approximate terms of reference. Coleridge’s prose – rambling, brilliant and bristling with perversely encyclopaedic learning – is always sui generis. Before we can understand his attitude to Catholic Emancipation, we must first understand Coleridge’s attitude to the National Church. In the Statesman’s Manual (1816), Coleridge had deplored the growth of undenominational and purely pragmatic education, and the poisonous effects of the ‘liberal idea’. In A Lay Sermon (1817) he attacked the development of Socinian and Unitarian principles and the consequent growth of the commercial spirit in all branches of English society, and he insisted that the State has an obligation to maintain positive Christian principles in the conduct of the life of the nation. ‘If we are a Christian nation, we must learn to act nationally, as well as individually, as Christians.’24 The Christianizing force in the national life was to be the National Church. But it is his last work, On the Constitution of Church and State (1830), which concerns us here most directly. In it Coleridge seeks to square his support for the passing of the Catholic Emancipation Bill of 1829 with his ideal of the National Church. Coleridge views the Emancipation Bill not as a boon, but as an unavoidable necessity, and as such he had supported it, or rather, refused to sign a petition against it. To explain his position he seeks to clarify the constitutional principles

22 cf. A. Cobban, Edmund Burke and the Revolt against the Eighteenth Century (London 1929), pp. 178–86. 23 cf. C.R. Saunders, Coleridge and the Broad Church Movement (Durham, NC 1942), pp. 73–4. But Saunders quotes chiefly from The Friend and Aids to Reflection. 24 A Lay Sermon, 2nd ed. (London 1839), p. 409.

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which, he maintains, should underlie the Bill. The National Church, in his theory, represents a very necessary third estate of the realm. Its function is educative and cultural. It is through the universities and through the clerisy, who comprise the learned in the liberal arts and sciences, that the National Church serves to keep the past in contact with the present and to secure and improve the standards of civilization. But this National Church must be distinguished from the Church of Christ or Christianity. The Church of Christ is the ecclesia, ‘the communion of such as are called out of the world’; the National Church is the enclesia, ‘an order of men chosen in and of the realm and constituting an estate of that realm’.25 In relation to the National Church, ‘Christianity, or the Church of Christ, is a blessed accident, a providential boon, a grace of God, a mighty and faithful friend’.26 But the clergy of the Church of Rome cannot be considered corporately as an estate of the realm, firstly, on account of their vow of celibacy, and secondly, on account of their allegiance to a foreign power, i.e. the Papacy. We are left to infer that Coleridge is prepared to consider the individual Roman Catholic as a member of the Church of Christ. But the Roman Church as a visible body, or what he calls ‘the Romish hierarchy’, is dealt with as ‘the third possible Church, the Church of Antichrist’. Coleridge maintains that a too-conciliatory attitude is held by the Church of England towards the Church of Rome. He deplores the view that she is ‘a right, though erring sister’ and believes that the theories of conciliation towards Roman Catholicism spring from a fear of Jacobinism. He seeks to prove his own view by what may seem an extraordinary petitio principii, for, he says: [I]f the Papacy, and the Romish hierarchy as far as it is Papal, be not Antichrist, the guilt of schism in its most aggravated form lies in the authors of the Reformation. For nothing less than this could have justified so tremendous a rent in the Catholic Church with all its foreseen most calamitous consequences.27 To prove that the Church of Rome must be the Church of Antichrist because, if it were not, there would be no justification for the Reformation, is to beg a very large question indeed. Whatever one’s attitude towards the Church of Rome and the Reformation, to adopt Coleridge’s line of argument is to put the cart before the horse. In the final part of his book, Coleridge reprints some reflections he had written before the Emancipation Act of 1829 became law. To understand these remarks it is necessary to consider a few of the proposals which led up to the Act.

25 On the Constitution of Church and State According to the Idea of Each, 3rd ed. (London 1839), Chapter VI. 26 Constitution, p. 58. 27 Constitution, p. 145.

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One of the chief grievances of the Irish Catholics was that they had to pay tithes to the local Protestant clergy besides having to support their own clergy. To remedy this, the government had proposed that the Catholic clergy should also be given salaries from the tithe funds. In return for this grant, two concessions were asked for from the Catholic side. Firstly, that the English government should have the power of veto in the appointment of Irish bishops, and secondly, that the Irish electorate should be restricted and that the voting rights of the socalled forty-shilling freeholders should be withdrawn. This last point was in fact conceded by O’Connell, though the proposal for salaries and veto was never put into effect. Coleridge insists that on no account should the government provide salaries for the Irish Catholic clergy. It was a question of principle and not merely a matter of expediency, for to do so would be to consider the Catholic clergy as part of the National Church and give legal recognition to the status of the Catholic Church in Ireland. Further, the Catholic hierarchy should not be permitted to take the titles of their sees from those held by Protestant bishops – this last point was in fact given effect to by Lord John Russell’s Ecclesiastical Titles Bill, passed after the anti-Catholic outburst at the time of the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in England in 1851.28 As for the question of the electoral franchise, Coleridge maintains, and rightly so, that it should be considered apart and treated quite separately from the Emancipation Bill, though he makes it clear that he is in favour of the principle of electoral restrictions. The Constitution of Church and State was almost, if not quite, Coleridge’s swan song.29 Among the Table Talk we find recorded under 5 February 1833 the following remark on the Union with Ireland: ‘If any modification of the Union take place, I trust it will be a total divorce a vinculo matrimonii. I am sure we have had a cat and dog life of it. . . . England, in all its institutions has received injury from its Union with Ireland.’30 Coleridge wanted to conserve the status of the Protestant Church in Ireland, but he had come to realize that the whole question of involvement with Ireland was a menace to his vision of the function of a National Church. For all its brilliance, we can sense in Coleridge’s later prose a certain lack of grip, an ineffectualness and a remoteness from the actuality of things. The atmosphere of that frowsty bedroom in Highgate still clings to the written word. His writing, like his talk and his dreams, goes on, and on, and on. It would be so easy and so tempting to dismiss Coleridge’s attitude to the Catholic Question as an individual aberration, but we cannot, we must not. Just as he had so unerringly diagnosed the spiritual needs of his time, so too he had shrewdly put his finger on

28 cf. J. Morley, Life of William Ewart Gladstone (London 1905), Vol. I, pp. 408–51. 29 Coleridge’s manuscript fragment on the Catholic Question, British Library MS Egerton 2800 f. 109, is too hopelessly confused to merit consideration here. 30 The Table Talk and Omniana of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. T. Ashe (London 1896), p. 187.

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the weakest spot of the political agitation for Catholic Emancipation. Coleridge’s distrust of the Emancipation movement was not unique, it was shared by many a sincere Anglican. It should be sufficient to cite from a context which is familiar to all of us, Newman’s Apologia. In the course of a discussion of his attitude towards Rome in 1840, Newman writes: I was driven, by my state of mind, to insist upon the political conduct, the controversial bearing, and the social methods and manifestations of Rome. . . . I can hardly describe too strongly my feeling upon it. I had an unspeakable aversion to the policy and acts of Mr O’Connell, because, as I thought, he associated himself with men of all religions and no religion against the Anglican Church, and advanced Catholicism by violence and intrigue. When I found him taken up by the English Catholics, and, as I supposed at Rome, I considered I had a fulfilment before my eyes how the Court of Rome played fast and loose, and fulfilled the bad points which I had seen put down in books against it. Here we saw what Rome was in action, whatever she might be when quiescent. Her conduct was simply secular and political.31 Newman then quotes from a letter which he wrote to Fr Ignatius Spencer, the wellknown Passionist and crusader for Church unity: You invite us to a union of hearts, at the same time that you are doing all you can, not to restore, not to reform, not to re-unite, but to destroy our Church. . . . You are leagued with our enemies. . . . You are a political, not a religious party . . . in order to gain an end on which you set your hearts – an open stage for yourselves in England – you ally yourselves with those who hold nothing against those who hold something. . . . Break off, I would say, with Mr O’Connell in Ireland and the liberal party in England, or come not to us with overtures for mutual prayer and religious sympathy.32 This testimony from Newman clearly shows that Coleridge had discovered a real scandalum, a stumbling-block, in the Catholic Emancipation Question. That much of the opposition to Catholicism came from conservative bigotry and ‘vested interests’ is understandable. But we must also not forget that a sincere mistrust of Catholicism was felt by those idealistic Anglicans33 who saw the Emancipation movement as something which sought to undermine the very principles on which

31 J.H. Newman, Apologia, Everyman ed. (London 1912), pp. 127–8. 32 Newman, pp. 128–9. 33 H.N. Fairchild, Religious Trends in English Poetry (New York 1949), Vol. III, p. 315, calls Coleridge ‘an Arminian in the best Anglican tradition’, but this is an over-simplification.

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they were engaged in reforming and rebuilding the National Church. Even after his conversion, Newman never really got round to understanding or appreciating Daniel O’Connell. Nothing could provide a greater contrast to Coleridge, both in manner and in matter, than William Cobbett. To read Cobbett’s prose is like facing into the fresh blustering wind blowing straight off the Hampshire Downs. This self-taught yeoman farmer, who for more than thirty years was the leading English political journalist, is almost the perfect specimen of the Continental idea of John Bull. Blunt and forthright, honest and open in his prejudices, a champion of the oppressed, staunchly conservative yet furiously radical, Cobbett is the concrete embodiment of that theme so beloved of sociologists and historians, the enigma of the English character. Cobbett’s most celebrated work, A History of the Protestant Reformation, was written in 1824–5 at the height of the Emancipation controversy, and with a direct eye to the contemporary political implications. It is, so far as I know, the only work by a Protestant author to have been reprinted by the English Catholic Truth Society and also probably the only work by an English Protestant to have been printed in an Italian translation by the Vatican press. Based on the work of two contemporary English Catholic historians, Dr Lingard34 and Bishop Milner,35 Cobbett’s book is a popular and incisive exposition of a pro-Catholic view of the English Reformation which we have now come to associate with the name of Mr Hilaire Belloc. At the conclusion of his book, Cobbett explains his motives for writing: Born and bred a Protestant of the Church of England, having a wife and numerous family professing the same faith, having the remains of most dearly beloved parents lying in a Protestant church-yard, and trusting to conjugal or filial piety to place mine by their side, I have, in this undertaking, had no motive, I can have had no motive, but a sincere and disinterested love of truth and justice. It is not for the rich and powerful of my countrymen that I have spoken; but for the poor, the persecuted, the proscribed.36 Cobbett does lie buried with his wife and parents in Farnham churchyard. The visitor to Farnham who has passed down the sunken flagstone path, between the trim avenue of elms, to visit Cobbett’s rough, grey granite tombstone which lies sheltered in the lee of the little ivy-covered Norman church cannot fail to realize that Cobbett belongs not only to England but also to all that is best in the spirit and tradition of the Church of England.

34 J. Lingard, History of England (London 1819–30), 8 Vols. 35 J. Milner, The History, Civil and Ecclesiastical, and Survey of the Antiquities of Winchester (Winchester 1798–1801), 2 Vols. 36 W. Cobbett, A History of the Protestant Reformation (London 1829), Vol. I, para. 479.

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But it would be a mistake to assume that Cobbett’s concern with the Catholic Question centred solely on his History of the Protestant Reformation. Cobbett’s interest in Catholic affairs dates from the earliest years of his weekly magazine, the Political Register. In 1803 he was advocating a financial subsidy for the Irish clergy,37 and between 1804 and 180638 he sponsored a series of eight anonymous articles written by Fr William Coombes39 which dealt at length with the problem of religious and political liberty in Ireland. Coombes was an English priest of the Western District, a close friend of Bishop Walmesley, and as such, of the small party of English Catholics who strongly opposed any compromise with the government on the toleration question. Another of the same group, Bishop Milner, a personal friend of Cobbett,40 published a letter in 1810 in the Political Register41 urging the Catholic claims, and in the following issue Cobbett warmly supported it with an article himself.42 That Milner’s letter was not everywhere well received is clear from a private letter of the ageing and crusty Marquis of Buckingham to his younger brother Lord Grenville, the Prime Minister: ‘His [Milner’s] last letter . . . in Cobbett’s paper is that of a very dog.’43 Cobbett was convinced that Catholic Emancipation in Ireland was bound up with the economic question. Religious oppression went hand in hand with commercial exploitation. The primary necessity of Catholic Emancipation, as Cobbett saw it, was a liberation of the Irish Catholic peasants from the obligation of paying tithes to the Protestant clergy of the Church of Ireland. The real opposition to Catholic Emancipation came therefore from ‘vested interests’, and Cobbett put the point with his customary bluntness: It is not the Pope; it is not Antichrist, as our Parsons call him; it is not the ‘aud whoore’, as the Scotch Parsons call him; it is not images and wafers

37 Political Register (London), Vol. IV, col. 949. 38 Political Register, Vol. V, cols 385, 737, 859; Vol. VI, col. 900; Vol. VII, col. 33; Vol. VIII, cols 635, 803; Vol. X, col. 429. 39 cf. G. Oliver, Collections, Illustrating the History of the Catholic Religion (London 1857), s.v. Coombes; and J. Gillow, Bibliographical Dictionary (London 1885), Vol. I, p. 559 [see also ODNB. Eds]. 40 cf. letter of Cobbett to Milner, 8 December 1824, printed in Hampshire Registers, ed. R.E. Scantlebury, Vol. I, pp. 138–40 (Catholic Record Society, Vol. XLII (London 1949). 41 Political Register, Vol. XVII, col. 52. Towards the end of his life, however, Milner took a more cautious view of Cobbett’s activities, cf. Milner’s letter of 12 August 1825 to Fr Dunn SJ: ‘Mr O’Connell’s fame is evidently on the wane: he was too much flattered and feasted when he was in London, but he is sensible of that now. I wish that Cobbett and other writers would not drive him to extremities. as they seem disposed to do.’ (Milner MSS, Archives English Province SJ, Vol. I, f. 184). 42 Political Register, Vol. XVII, col. 78. 43 Historical MSS Commission: Report on the Manuscripts of J. B. Fortescue Esq., Preserved at Dropmore (London 1927), Vol. X, p. 7.

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and saints in calendar; it is not any of these, that the opposers of your emancipation talk about; it is the two millions a year of Church Property as they call it, that they have in their eye, and that a Reformed Parliament would soon put to rights.44 It was hatred for bigotry and hypocrisy which led Cobbett to a defence of the religious orders against contemporary prejudice. ‘Every one to his taste’, he says, ‘. . . but if I must have one or the other, fifty thousand monks and friars, or fifty thousand taxgatherers, give me the former.’45 Later, at the time of the passing of the Emancipation Bill, Cobbett rose to the defence of the Jesuits against a protestant clergyman who had attacked them. Cobbett’s line of defence is, to say the least of it, original: What do we not owe to these Jesuits? Where, had it not been for them, where would we have found a map of China, or known anything about that country, more than we know about the regions of the moon? Parsons, who are so fond of turkeys as to cause the rump to be compared to their nose, ought to recollect that Europe owes that bird to the Jesuits; and, I dare say now, if a fever were shaking you, or your nerves or some other things were making you begin to think about the churchyard, you would not object to a dose of Jesuits’ bark! In short, there is no art or science, no useful thing that I know of, in the invention or in the improvement of which the members of this famous society have not had a hand.46 What rather spoils Cobbett’s little joke is that the rump of the turkey, besides being called the ‘Parson’s Nose’, is also called the ‘Pope’s Nose’. The Emancipation Question was, for Cobbett, to be an all or nothing affair. He saw the great potential force of a disciplined popular movement in Ireland, and he wanted that force to be used to the widest possible advantage. Besides the granting of Catholic Emancipation he hoped that the Irish Catholic movement would help to secure a general parliamentary reform, the abolition of tithes, the disestablishment of the Protestant Church, and the introduction of measures for the amelioration of the economic conditions of the labouring classes. It is necessary to understand these points before we can appreciate the standpoint of Cobbett’s pamphlet of 15 November 1828, called A Letter to His Holiness the Pope on the Character, the Conduct and the Views of the Catholic Aristocracy and Lawyers of England and Ireland.47 Cobbett begins his open letter by saying that he had heard that the Pope had expressed surprise that he,

44 45 46 47

Political Register, Vol. XLIII, col. 588. Political Register, Vol. XLVII, col. 159. Political Register, Vol. LXVII, col. 169. ‘Jesuits’ Bark’ is, of course, Cortex Peruviana, or quinine. Also printed in Political Register, Vol. LXVI, col. 613. A copy of the pamphlet was actually handed to the Pope himself on Cobbett’s instructions.

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Cobbett, had not been given financial support by the English and Irish Catholics for his championship of their cause. Cobbett explains that on the contrary, he had been snubbed by the English Catholic Association, and especially by their secretary, Charles Butler. Cobbett warns the Pope not to come to any form of concordat with the English government, or to allow the English and Irish Catholics to submit to any form of compromise on the question of their Emancipation claims: The object of these compromising parties is to blind and delude the Catholic people, while they themselves make a bargain with the government that will, in fact, undermine the Catholic religion and let them into a share of the general spoils. The people, whether Catholic or Protestant, have little or no power to resist the execution of their schemes; if these men and the government agree, there will be nothing to resist the success of their projects, unless they meet that resistance from Rome. They hope for, and they are now, it is said, hard at work to obtain, the sanction of your Holiness to some concordat, or some bargain or other, with a view of effecting their purposes with your apparent sanction; for, without this they can effect nothing with the Catholic people; with this, they would, in a short time, leave scarcely the name of Catholic existing in any part of this Kingdom; and thus, that which three hundred years of oppression and cruelties, exercised on Catholics by the bitter enemies of their church, have been unable to effect, would be completely effected by one single word written by the hand of the Pope.48 It is extraordinary to find Cobbett, a true son of the Church of England, urging upon the Pope himself such a policy of ultramontane intransigence. It would be interesting to know the reaction of the tired and ailing Leo XII to Cobbett’s inflammatory letter.49 Indeed, Cobbett had a far more exalted idea of Papal power than such courtly diplomatists as Cardinals Consalvi and Fransoni, who lay under the fascinating spell of Metternichian politics. In a most striking passage, attacking Bishop Doyle of Kildare50 for suggesting an agreement with the English government on the limitation of papal jurisdiction, Cobbett says:

48 Political Register, Vol. LXVI, col. 616. 49 For interesting sidelights on the attitude of the Pope and the Papal Curia on Anglo-Irish affairs, see J.T. Ellis, Cardinal Consalvi and Anglo-Papal Relations 1814–24 (Washington 1942) and J.F. Broderick SJ, The Holy See and the Irish Movement for the Repeal of the Union with England 1829–47 (Rome 1951). 50 Cobbett’s attack on Bishop Doyle was, in fact, based on a temporary misunderstanding. In the main, there was no warmer admirer of Bishop Doyle than WiIliam Cobbett. Indeed, on the several questions of ‘securities’, the Repeal of the Union, the Poor Laws, and tithes. Cobbett’s views accord with Doyle’s rather than with O’Connell’s, cf. W.J. Fitzpatrick, The Life, Times, and Correspondence of the Rt. Rev. Dr Doyle (Dublin 1861), Vol. I, p. 430; Vol. II, pp. 223, 364, 404.

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My brother Protestants will ask, why am I such a stickler for the retention of the power of the Pope; and why I should object to the Catholic Church becoming ‘more national’ . . . why I should be more of a Papist than a Catholic Bishop is. . . . I wish the Pope’s power to exist, as a protection of us Protestants against an increase of power in that Government which has already too much power over the people.51 Here we find in Cobbett a truly mediaeval conception of Papal authority as the necessary counterbalance to the authority of the nation state, a conception which I venture to suggest is quite unique among nineteenth-century English writers. In the pages of the Political Register, Cobbett has never a good word for the English Catholic Association. Their secretary and leading spirit, Charles Butler, he refers to as ‘this old scrabbling, gabbling, rabbling, scraveling lawyer’.52 The English Catholic Association was composed almost entirely of the Catholic aristocracy, gentry, and professional classes. It was not a popular movement in any sense. Its views of papal authority were gallican and cisalpine in the extreme, and it favoured considerable compromise with the government on the Emancipation Question. Cobbett saw the English Catholic Association as a selfish, upper-class group who sought for a backstairs agreement with the government which would open the legal, military and political professions to a relatively small social class of Catholics, in return for increased governmental control over the Catholic Church in England. The members of the English Catholic Association are referred to as: consisting chiefly of an ambitious yet abject aristocracy, and of the scum of the Inns of Court . . .53 these poor, timid, rich, miserly, boroughmongering creatures never could have got anything by their own exertions: they might have petitioned till they had used all the ink and paper in the Kingdom; they might have gone upon their knees until they had worn away their breeches and stockings and got to the bare bone, and they would still have been spurned and despised. Is it they who have terrified the government? Is it they who have made Peel make his enormous sacrifices; is it they who have roused English and Irish America? . . . Oh, no! none of these things have been accomplished by the soft-tongued, the submissive, the patient, the rich, the mean, the dastardly Catholic aristocracy and lawyers of England. All the honour of the achievement is due to Ireland.54 Because it is a popular movement, Cobbett has no such harsh language for the Irish Catholic Association. Nevertheless, his attitude to Daniel O’Connell varies

51 52 53 54

Political Register, Vol. LXVII, col. 13. Political Register, Vol. LXIII, col. 95. Political Register, Vol. LXVI, col. 41. Political Register, Vol. LXVII, col. 253.

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from time to time. Cobbett always praises O’Connell for his energy and leadership, but offers advice and reproof when O’Connell shows signs of being too conciliatory to the English government. On 5 July 1828 he praises O’Connell for having secured election to the parliamentary seat at Clare: ‘I am for Mr O’Connell; and everything, be it what it may, that I can lawfully do to aid him in the great, brave, and truly glorious undertaking, I am resolved to do.’55 Later, however, he girds against O’Connell for not coming to London to take up his parliamentary seat without delay, and in the negotiations over the passing of the Emancipation Bill itself he attacks O’Connell most bitterly for sacrificing the voting rights of the ‘forty shilling freeholders’ to the government.56 Far from approving the passing of the Emancipation Bill, Cobbett refers to it as ‘a most odious measure . . . there is a meanness belonging to it which makes it perfectly disgusting’.57 In the years that followed, however, Cobbett came to appreciate the work of O’Connell and the other Irish members in the House of Commons. The support of the Irish members, Cobbett maintains, was essential for the passage of the great Reform Bill of 1832.58 Although not wholeheartedly supporting O’Connell’s efforts for the repeal of the Union, Cobbett was warm in his praise: I have never had before an opportunity of witnessing his surprising quickness, and the irresistible force of that which drops from his lips. His sincerity, his good humour, his zeal, his earnestness, his willingness to sacrifice everything for the cause of the people, for the cause of those who can never serve him in any way whatsoever; it is only necessary to be a witness of these, to explain why it is that the people of Ireland love him and confide in him; and why it is that he is so hated and detested by everyone who has a tyrant’s heart in his body.59 The admiration was mutual. When Cobbett came to visit Ireland in September 1834, O’Connell wrote in an enthusiastic letter: I really think him . . . one of the most useful men living . . . when we look at his astonishing literary labours – when we see that he has published the very best and most practically useful books of instruction – that he has written the most pure English of any writer of the present day, and embraced and illustrated more topics of popular and sound politics than any other living, or perhaps dead author . . . in short, take him for all in

55 56 57 58 59

Political Register, Vol. LXVI, col. 29. Political Register, Vol. LXVI, col. 104. Political Register, Vol. LXVII, col. 345. Political Register, Vol. LXXVI, col. 671. Political Register, Vol. LXXIX, col. 668.

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all, I am convinced that he is of living men one of the greatest benefactors of literature, liberty, and religion.60 The painting in the National Portrait Gallery of the first Reformed House of Commons shows the two great men sitting together on the opposition benches. Cobbett, the older man, is leaning forward, half turned towards O’Connell and talking excitedly. O’Connell sits passively, looking straight ahead, his hands folded on his chest. The glimpse is symbolic. Cobbett has the energy and the intransigence of the writer and the prophet. O’Connell has the paradoxical calm and passivity of the active politician. As we look back over the material which we have been briefly discussing, its most outstanding feature is surely the variety of standpoints from which our four writers have approached the Catholic Question – Sidney Smith the whig parson, Shelley the revolutionary idealist, Coleridge the conservative Anglican, Cobbett the ultramontane radical. Is there any generalization that can be made to sum up the effect of the very different approaches of these four men of letters? Their writings certainly show that the respect of the non-Catholic for the Catholic position was an intangible asset of great value and worthy of preservation. The Catholics lost nothing by a clear and open statement of the principles upon which they were acting. On the other hand, nothing was to be gained by compromise on matters of religious principle, by political opportunism, by backstairs intrigue and by personal bargaining with the powers that be. The gallican and cisalpine tendencies of the English Catholic Association were particularly regrettable – the English Catholics did nothing to help and everything to hinder that Emancipation which they lived to enjoy. When Emancipation came, it came on the crest of the wave of the Irish popular movement. But there is one lesson to be learnt from these four non-Catholic writers which surely holds good today. Catholics in England may expect at times a good deal of misunderstanding of the Catholic position on various topics, but they must never forget, or underestimate, the existence on the non-Catholic side of a great deal of sincere goodwill.

60 W.J. Fitzpatrick, Correspondence of Daniel O’Connell (London 1888), Vol. I, p. 535. There is also a similar regard for Cobbett expressed in a speech of O’Connell in 1810, quoted in M.F. Cusack, The Liberator: His Life and Times (London n.d.), p. 306.

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3 LATTER-DAY RECUSANTS*

The cinema and the newspapers and novels of today provide us with a staple diet of men on the run, spies, informers, bogus plots and forced confessions. It is not surprising, therefore, that Elizabethan recusant history is enjoying at the moment a mild boom; we ourselves live much more closely to the atmosphere of terror than our Victorian forebears, and it is easier for us than for them to get the feel of the world of John Gerard and Edmund Campion. The history of the Catholic recusants of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries will never be popular in that sense; it lacks the glamour of the ‘heroic age’ and will always remain more or less a closed covert for the antiquarian and the professional historian. Fr Dockery’s recent book seeks to shed some light on one of the figures of the pre-Emancipation period. The life of Peter Barnardine Collingridge OFM (1757– 1829) has a threefold interest: firstly as the leading figure and sometime Provincial of the dwindling body of English Franciscans; secondly, as a Vicar Apostolic in that Cinderella (or white elephant) of the Vicariates, the Western District; and thirdly, as one of the figures, albeit a minor one, involved in the thorny questions of Catholic politics prior to Emancipation. The most readable and informative part of Fr Dockery’s book is that which deals with Franciscan affairs, and it is to be hoped that this original material will some day be systematically incorporated into a full history of the Province. It is primarily due to Collingridge that the tiny group of Observant Franciscans in England – reduced indeed to the proportions of that happy little band chronicled by Eccleston1 nearly six centuries before – managed to retain their individuality as a province until they were able to flourish once again in the late nineteenth century. The healthy proliferation of the religious orders in England today makes us prone to judge too hastily those like Bishop Peter Baines (1786–1843) who

* Originally published in The Dublin Review, Vol. CXIX, 1955, pp. 262–74. This article organically grew out of a review of a book by J.B. Dockery OFM, Collingridge: A Franciscan Contribution to Catholic Emancipation (Newport 1954). 1 [Thomas of Eccleston (fl. 1250), Franciscan who wrote ‘De adventu fratrum minorum in Angliam’ (printed 1858); the English translation appeared under the title The Chronicles of Thomas of Eccleston. Eds].

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advocated a policy of secularizing and co-ordinating the smaller groups of religious. What a wonderful ‘planner’ Baines would have been. Leaving aside the question of his personal vanity and ambition, we cannot help feeling that in terms of worldly prudence Baines’s policy was right: the organization of the English mission – above all in the Western District – presented an extraordinary picture of improvisation and ‘muddle through’ in the first half of the nineteenth century. Surely the most logical thing to do was to centralize and co-ordinate. Baines’s undoubted efforts to dislodge the Observant Franciscans were thwarted by Collingridge, and in his later efforts against the Benedictines one can only feel that at Downside Baines met his Crichel Down.2 Subsequent history has vindicated the apparently last-ditch attitude of the Franciscans and the Benedictines. But of all the Vicariates in the Bleak Age of English Catholicism, the Western District really was the bleakest. Its history since the Revolution had been a chequered one – for twenty-seven years it had been without a bishop, thanks largely to the suicidal feuds between the seculars and regulars. It had no seminary; geographically it was a monstrosity. Its Vicars Apostolic, usually aged, ailing and by no means wealthy, were expected to cover an area from Wales to Cornwall, and that at a time when there was no Severn Tunnel, and every journey had to be made via Gloucester. It goes without saying that in such circumstances Wales and Cornwall had been virtually lost to the Mission long before the nineteenth century. The little Franciscan mission was doing what it could in South Wales,3 and Fr Dockery’s picture of Fr Richards OFM, ‘the Apostle of Glamorgan’, is delightful.4 But a few pages later on we read of the difficulties that Collingridge encountered when he asked Bishop Poynter of the London District for the services of a Welsh-speaking priest, Fr Havard. Poynter’s reply is a monument of pettyminded officialdom.5 Apart from Plymouth, Bristol and Bath, and the areas round monastic and conventual establishments and a few country houses, missionary activity was decidedly on the ebb.6 Individual patronage of country stations by the few surviving Catholic land-owners was no longer an effective answer to the missionary problem, and the growth of Catholic congregations in the new urban centres had not yet really begun. It is pitiful to see what had happened to such traditionally Catholic counties as Monmouth and Hereford, which had been flourishing even in the late seventeenth century. On the credit side, Collingridge deserves all praise for his foresight in trying to provide missions at Newport and Merthyr.

2 [The ‘Crichel Down Affair’ was a political scandal dating to the 1950s involving broken promises by the government and the subsequent resignation of a minister. Eds]. 3 Together of course with the long-established Jesuit mission at Holywell. 4 Dockery, pp. 138 sq. 5 Dockery, p. 142. 6 If Bishop Baines’s statistics for 1840 are to be trusted, the tide had perceptibly turned before the middle of the century. Cf. W.M. Brady, The Episcopal Succession (Rome 1877), Vol. III, pp. 314 sq.

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Collingridge’s letters provide an admirable picture of the day-to-day life of a pre-Emancipation bishop, even though we may suspect that Fr Dockery may tend at times to overestimate the capacities of his hero. But when Fr Dockery comes to deal with the political problems with which Collingridge had to deal, we must regretfully point out that his book is by no means adequate. The entire question of the attitude of the English recusants of this period to the problems presented by the Emancipation Question is so complex, and the assessment of individual motives so precarious, that we must be convinced that any writer on the subject is possessed of the necessary historical equipment. This, we must reluctantly point out, Fr Dockery lacks. On the purely technical side, his handling of manuscript material leaves much to be desired. He almost constantly omits to cite the day of the month of the letters which he quotes, thus making them unnecessarily difficult to trace. We have taken the trouble of checking some of the correspondence cited in Chapters IV and V, and find it abounds in errors of transcription. On page 80 a letter of 1818 is cited under 1808 and has six errors in fifteen lines. On page 87 what is cited as ‘part of a letter’ of 14 February 1810 in Westminster Archives is in fact part of a draft of a letter which exists in its entirety in print in exactly the same volume of the Archives. This letter refers to the famous ‘Fifth Resolution’ at the meeting in the St Albans Tavern, ‘at which alone’, says Collingridge, ‘I was present’. Fr Dockery’s footnote, ‘yet according to other accounts Poynter also was present’, makes us think that either Fr Dockery cannot understand plain English, or else he does not know much about the history of the period. What Collingridge clearly means is that he was present at the St Albans Tavern meeting and not at the previous informal meeting at Doran’s Hotel.7 On the same page Fr Dockery quotes what he calls ‘an extremely important letter’ from Collingridge to Poynter on 8 May 1810, accusing Milner of having told Lord Clifford that he might sign the resolutions. Why the letter is now so extremely important is difficult to understand. This accusation has already been made in print against Milner, and has been answered by Husenbeth in his biography of Milner.8 In all fairness, Fr Dockery might have given us Milner’s side of the case as well, instead of producing an old charge as if it were some new discovery. On page 90 Milner’s accusation that Collingridge was influenced in signing the resolutions by a subscription from the Catholic gentry is refuted by a letter from Collingridge to Milner which Fr Dockery cites as his authority for saying that ‘the subscription was begun two or three years before the 5th Resolution was composed’. In fact the letter in question states that the subscription was projected two or three years before, and begun one year before the Resolution. If we are going to have the facts, let us have them right.

7 F.C. Husenbeth, The Life of the Rev. John Milner, D.D. (Dublin 1862), p. 172. 8 Husenbeth, p. 175.

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Another instance of slipshod citation is on the following page (p. 91), where five lines are given in inverted commas as being a direct quotation from a letter of 20 September 1810 – in fact they are a summary of the document in what are presumably Fr Dockery’s own words. To justify Collingridge’s behaviour in the events of 1810–1, Fr Dockery thinks it necessary to make Milner the whipping-boy. Collingridge’s approval of the 5th Resolution was as much due to his political innocence as to anything else. He did not realize that it had been drafted with the approval of Lord Grenville, and that its loose wording was deliberately intended to imply an acceptance of the Veto. But in the affair of the Abbé Trévaux (which Fr Dockery mentions on p. 95, but makes no attempt to explain), the attitude of Collingridge and of most of the Vicars Apostolic was really irresponsible. Trévaux was one of the French émigré clergy who had been suspended for subscribing to a printed attack on Papal authority, and the suspension had been made with the joint concurrence of the Irish as well as the English bishops. Trévaux had made a form of retraction, and Bishop Douglass, to whose District Trévaux belonged, had restored his faculties. The Irish Hierarchy, led by Troy and by Milner their agent, objected that the form of the retraction was insufficient to warrant restoration of faculties, and that a priest who had been suspended with the approval of all should have been restored with the approval of all. Bishop Douglass was a man of peace, and in a touching letter to Poynter of 6 August 18119 took the responsibility of his action entirely on himself, and urged that the answer to Archbishop Troy should be a mild one. He wanted at all costs unity between the Irish and English episcopate: ‘I trust no real cause has been given by me to make any of my Brethren break communion with me. . . . If I have been betrayed into an error in this act of lenity, the error was not wilful.’ But it was Poynter and Collingridge who inflamed this question into a matter for a breach between England and Ireland. Collingridge’s approach to the Irish criticism was hot-headed and irresponsible: ‘If such unlimited pretensions for interference be once allowed to pass into precedent, I for one would not hesitate to beseech His Holiness to release me from the burden of office become insupportable and hereafter quite ineffective in the exercise of any part of its authority.’10 This shows little of ‘the characteristic humility’ which Fr Dockery tells us (p. 91) that Collingridge possessed. But enough of irritating particularities. What is fundamentally lacking in Collingridge, and in Collingridge’s biographer, is the awareness of the deep historical roots of the deplorable quarrels and misunderstandings in which almost every recusant of note at the dawn of Emancipation took sides. As Milner put it in a letter of 31 August 1818, ‘it is evident to me that a considerable degree of party spirit which was the bane of our mission during the seventeenth century actuates too

9 Westminster Archives. 10 Westminster Archives, 24 July 1811. The innocuous parts of the letter are quoted by Fr Dockery, p. 94.

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many of my brethren in the nineteenth’.11 Unlike Collingridge, most of the leading latter-day recusants, Milner included, were steeped in the recusant writings of the seventeenth century, and all the moves for government toleration in the nineteenth century are paralleled by similar moves in the seventeenth. The great stumbling-block in the seventeenth century was the Oath of Allegiance, condemned by the Pope, but supported by some of the recusant clergy and laity. Into every offer of toleration in the seventeenth century, successive governments, working on the staple principle of divide and rule, managed to incorporate the Oath in order to split Catholic opinion. Anyone who looks through the famous letter of 1 September 1789 from Charles Butler to the Vicars Apostolic cannot fail to be struck by Butler’s approving citation of Preston’s defence of the Oath and of Peter Walsh’s Irish Remonstrance.12 Butler’s Blue Books of November 178913 also quote approvingly the same and other seventeenth-century attempts at compromise on this question. Even so reputable a figure as Lingard defends the Oath, and cites constantly and approvingly the renegade Franciscan Redmond Caron, author of the Remonstrantia Hibernorum.14 The extremist defenders of the Oath in the pre-Emancipation period, Joseph Berington and Charles O’Conor,15 give their case away completely in the eyes of the modern reader, for they argue that the recusant martyrs who died for refusing the Oath were not martyrs at all – a view not held by the Sacred Congregation of Rites which has in the twentieth century beatified them. Milner’s attitude has often been misunderstood because his principal political achievements were in wrecking government efforts to introduce measures of toleration which included oaths or other measures (such as the Veto) which interfered unwarrantably with Papal authority. He has been accorded the sort of grudging admiration that one gives to a man who goes ‘misère’ on a ‘nap’ hand. But a careful reading of his letters will show that he was far from being a mere intransigent. Milner, like Archbishop Troy, was perfectly willing that the Catholics should offer ‘a pure and unconditional oath of loyalty’16 but not that this should take the form of an Oath which involved anything of a religious nature. Milner’s loyalty was of the old-fashioned sort – love God, honour the King. He certainly used the radical journals, Cobbett’s Register and W.E. Andrews’s Orthodox Journal, but that was because he wanted to gain as popular a platform as possible for airing the Emancipation issue. He parted with Andrews (on terms of mutual respect) when the latter came more and more to mix radicalism with Catholicism, and in later life he considered Cobbett’s interest in Ireland as being more political than religious.

11 12 13 14 15

Archives of the English Province SJ. BL MS Add. 14422, f. 43v and f. 45r. BL MS Add. 7962, ff. 19r-20v. cf. A Collection of Tracts by the Rev. J. Lingard (London 1826), pp. 265 sq. cf. J. Berington, Memoirs of Gregorio Panzani (Birmingham 1793), pp. 85–6; and C. O’Conor, Columbanus, No. VI (Buckingham 1813), p. 116. 16 Letter to Fr Charles Plowden, 27 January 1791, Arch. Eng. Prov. SJ.

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Milner had been blamed for acting as agent for the Irish Hierarchy (cf. Fr Dockery, p. 93). The charge goes back a long way, for when Cardinal Consalvi came to England he saw the Catholics as being divided into two camps. On the one hand Milner and the Irish, making themselves a nuisance to the government, on the other the remaining Vicars Apostolic, peaceable and on good terms with the government. Milner he describes as ‘uomo di buonissime massime, ed assai attaccato alla Sta. Sede, ma di testa caldissima, ed intrigante molto e perciò invississimo al Governo’.17 Castlereagh had dropped Consalvi the hint, in no uncertain terms, that he would be glad if the Pope would get rid of Milner.18 Now without doubting Consalvi’s good faith (we recall Milner’s comments on him: ‘That low church Cardinal’ and ‘Thank God he is not a priest!’)19 we must realize that Consalvi’s aim was not Catholic Emancipation. He was the emissary of the hard-pressed Papacy; he had come to England to ingratiate himself with Castlereagh and gain British recognition of the Papal States at the Congress of Vienna. Catholics who were out of favour with the Ministry were out of favour with him, and he and Pacca20 did all they could to repress the activities of Milner and of the Irish Hierarchy and to support the policy of Poynter and the other English Vicars Apostolic. We cannot take as impartial Consalvi’s estimate of Milner’s alliance with the Irish Hierarchy. If we look at the situation from the historical English recusant viewpoint, what was odd was surely not that one English Vicar Apostolic was acting as agent for the Irish Hierarchy, but that all the English Vicars Apostolic were not eager to try to co-operate with the Irish Catholics on the Emancipation issue. It is sad but true that governments, and especially British ones, do not make concessions out of grace and favour; they only yield when they can do little else. Castlereagh may not have liked the numerical strength, the political danger and the general nuisance-value of Irish Catholicism, but it was certainly something he could not ignore. The English Catholics by themselves were an insignificant group who could be ignored with impunity. But furthermore, if we look to the seventeenth century, we shall see the historical precedents for considering the political problems of the English and Irish Catholics as being, in government eyes, inseparable. Ever since the time of the Confederacy the relationship of English and Irish Catholics to the Royalists was inseparably linked, whether the Catholics themselves liked it or not. At the Restoration the Dean and Chapter of the English secular clergy threw in their support on the side of the Irish Remonstrants,21 who were clearly being used by the

17 I. Rinieri, Il Congresso di Vienna e la S. Sede (Rome 1904), p. 171. 18 Rinieri, pp. 174–5. 19 Milner to F. Plowden, 23 May 1818, Arch. Eng. Prov. SJ; and W.E. Andrews, The Truthteller (3 June 1826), p. 282. 20 [Bartolomeo Pacca (1756–1844), Italian cardinal who became Secretary of State; he served as apostolic nuncio to Cologne and later to Lisbon. Eds]. 21 cf. Letter of the Dean and Chapter to the Bishop of Dromore, 18 October 1662, cited in P. Walsh’s, History and Vindication of the Loyal Formulary (1674), pp. 55–6.

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government as a stalking-horse for the domination of the Irish Church. To the Irish clergy in the early nineteenth century the discussion of the ‘Veto’ provoked memories of the attempts, albeit unsuccessful, of the Restoration government to dominate the National Synod.22 By the time of the Emancipation period the Irish had learnt their lesson; they had no vocal ‘compromise’ party. So whereas in the seventeenth century an alliance between the English chapter and the Irish Remonstrants had served the purpose of weakening the Catholic front, Milner’s alliance with the Irish Hierarchy was a move to strengthen the position. The historical precedent for an alliance was there, albeit the purpose of such an alliance was directly the opposite. Consalvi, and Poynter and the other Vicars Apostolic, could hardly blame Milner for taking his chance. The question of the Jesuits is bound up with the question of the Oath of Allegiance and of toleration in general, and it goes back to well before the days of the Gunpowder Plot. From the very beginning of the seventeenth century, if not before, there had been a group of Catholics who maintained that the presence of the Society in England was the main obstacle to toleration of Catholics by the English government. The government itself, for obvious reasons, did little to discourage this view; a bone of contention among the recusants themselves was a far more satisfactory way of weakening the Catholic body than any form of overt persecution. It is a mistake to think that the attempts to sell the Jesuits ‘down the river’ ended with the Civil Wars. The anti-Jesuit campaign reopened with renewed vigour after 1660. At the meetings of the Catholic body to negotiate with Clarendon, the Jesuits were specifically excluded; they were attacked in print by the Irish Remonstrant Fr Peter Walsh and by Dr Henry Holden of the Sorbonne, who urged them in no uncertain terms to clear out of the country; an Appellant Manifesto was reprinted in 1675; and at the height of the Popish Plot persecution two members of the English secular clergy chapter came forward to calumniate the Jesuits in public, both in print and before the House of Commons.23 In fact, the government could always maintain the split among the recusants so long as they kept the Oath of Allegiance on the tapis and so long as ‘subservience to a foreign power’ could be used as an effective slogan by any irresponsible politician. The period preceding Emancipation covered the suppression and the restoration of the Society. The problem for the Jesuits in England was, under the suppression, to preserve at least their corporate identity as ‘the Gentlemen of Stonyhurst’ and maintain the privileges of Stonyhurst as a Pontifical College, and then, after the restoration, to secure from the Vicars Apostolic the effective recognition of the

22 Walsh, p. 640; and T. Carte, History of the Life of James Duke of Ormonde (London 1736), Vol. II, Appendix, p. 101. 23 cf. Southwark Archidiocesan Archives MS 106, Vol. III, f. 391; P. Walsh, The More Ample Accompt (London 1662), p. 106; The Jesuits Reasons Unreasonable (London 1662), pp. 20–1 (this was reprinted in 1675 and 1688); H. Holden, Check, or Inquiry (1662); A Collection of Several Treatises (London 1675), Vols II and III; P. Walsh, An Answer to Three Treatises (London 1678); The Informations of John Sergeant and David Maurice Relating to the Popish Plot (London 1681).

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implications of the general restoration for the Society in England. Now the Vicars Apostolic (with the notable exception of Milner) had been more or less unhelpful towards the Gentlemen of Stonyhurst, and as fabian as possible in the recognition of the restoration of the Society. We would not of course suggest for a moment that the attitude of the nineteenth-century Vicars Apostolic was inspired by the utterly unchristian bitterness of a Watson, a Walsh or a Sergeant. Nor indeed that the mentality of a Pitt or a Grenville was inspired by the motives of a Cecil or even a Clarendon. The later Hanoverian governments, despite their lip service to the Church of England, had a purely secular approach to the problem. Their only trouble was that the Jesuit issue could still be made politically ‘hot’ by any irresponsible demagogue or fanatical ecclesiastic of the Establishment, and the Vicars Apostolic were prepared to satisfy the government by ‘soft-pedalling’ such a controversial issue as far as was morally possible. It is certainly true that the Vicar Apostolic who finally secured from Rome in 1829 the technical instrument restoring the Society in England was Collingridge. But when such a distinguished historian of recusancy as Fr Godfrey Anstruther OP is capable, in his brief review of Collingridge in The Tablet (1954), of combining a general attack on Milner with praise of Collingridge for the latter’s part in the restoration of the Society, then it is time that a clearer statement of the case should be made. Of Collingridge’s attitude to the Jesuits it is sufficient to say, bene sed tarde venisti. Collingridge’s approach to the ‘problem’ of the Jesuits in England had shown no special warmth until a very late stage; so much is evident from Fr Dockery’s book itself. To Milner the credit is due for having championed them during and after the suppression at a time when they most needed support. Furthermore, Milner’s support of the Society was undertaken in no party spirit, but solely from the desire to secure as many priests as possible for the mission. Though he had several personal friends among the Jesuits, his attitude in all his dealings with the Society is objective and dispassionate, and marked by a degree of prudence that we would not expect if we read only Fr Dockery, Fr Anstruther or Mr Christopher Sykes.24 In 1804 Milner’s attitude to the restoration of the Society is cautious. As for the question of the ordination of students from Stonyhurst, he writes to Bishop Poynter (20 October 1804)25 expressing his view that they should be examined by the Vicars Apostolic before ordination (contrary to the wishes of Fr Stone SJ – and indeed contrary to the privileges granted in the Papal Brief of 15 October 1778),26 and querying Fr Stone’s right to decide which District the ordinands shall work in. He has decided to consecrate three Stonyhurst students ‘on condition that we [the Vicars Apostolic] stand by the future decision of the Holy See’. Indeed, at

24 For a grotesque, inaccurate and Stracheyesque portrait of Milner see C. Sykes, Two Studies in Virtue (London 1953), pp. 25–6. 25 Westminster Archives. 26 cf. J. Gerard SJ, Stonyhurst College (Belfast 1894), pp. iii sq.

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this stage, Milner may have seemed far more cautious than Bishop Sharrock OSB, who wrote on 4 November 180427 to Bishop Douglass expressing the hope that the Society would be recognized in England, and that the ‘prelaticall body’ should stick together on the point, for ‘if we break we are undone’. The difficulties began of course from the failure of the Vicars Apostolic (including, at the outset, Bishop Milner) to recognize the peculiar status of Stonyhurst as a Missionary College, and from the reluctance of Bishop Gibson (in whose district Stonyhurst lay) to ordain candidates from Stonyhurst for the mission. The Vicars Apostolic might be excused for failing to recognize the restoration of the Society in England in 1803 in virtue of its reunion with the Russian Province, but no such excuses can be made for the delay in recognition of the Society from the time of the universal restoration of 1814 till the eve of Emancipation in 1829. The stories of Milner’s efforts at Rome in 1814 and 1815 on behalf of the Society and of the opposing mission of Howard and Silvertop (in which Milner’s championship of the Jesuits was but one item in the charges against him) are already well known. The strongest card that could be played against Milner and the Society was of course the desire to placate the government, who were as anxious as the Holy See to avoid the occasion for any public manifestation of anti-Jesuit bigotry. But there can be little doubt that Consalvi and the Cisalpines exaggerated the dangers. But apart from the abstract expediency of the delay in recognizing the Society, the historical factor must again not be neglected. The entire situation in the nineteenth century must have evoked for Milner the memories of the unhappy conflicts of the seventeenth. Denial of recognition of the Society could not be justified on grounds of inopportunism alone – there was also a century and more of patent injustice to be put right. Nevertheless, in his letters to his many friends in the Society,28 Milner warns them of the dangers of urging their case too strongly: ‘I am still undecided whether or no it is prudent to bring the cause of the Society before a bigotted and yet Deistical English Public. Should the Protestants declare against you, as I fear they will, depend upon it, your best friends among the Catholics . . . will give you up.’ In a letter of 3 November 1815 to Fr Tristram SJ, he makes the point that any measures taken against the Jesuits must logically apply also to the other religious orders as well: ‘It is next to impossible, in this age and country to frame an Act of Parliament against the clerks of the Society of Jesus which shall not equally attack all other Catholic clerks, and the very attempt to introduce such a bill would be so odious, as it would be a direct religious persecution, that few if any members could be found to second Sir John Hippisley in any experiment of this nature.’ (Collingridge only got round to this way of thinking more than ten years later.) Milner further advises the Jesuits to avoid getting involved in public controversy

27 Westminster Archives. 28 All subsequent citations are from Arch. Eng. Prov. SJ.

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themselves, and to leave the work to be done by outsiders like himself and Mr Dallas.29 He ends characteristically with an expression of his distrust of the motives of the Catholic Board: ‘There are not six in the whole number of them who however well-affected to the Society in other circumstances, would not send the whole of it to Botany Bay, in order to carry their darling Emancipation.’ A word should be said here on Milner’s handling of that venerable fire-eater, Fr Robert Plowden SJ, the details of whose conflict with Bishop Collingridge are treated of at length by Fr Dockery. As early as 21 December 1813, Milner urged on Fr Robert the inexpediency of his theological quarrel, and refused to authorize the latter’s book on attrition if he published it in the Midland District. In 1815 (9 June) he offered to act as a moderator between Plowden and Collingridge, and in 1816 he reiterated his warning to Plowden against impugning the authority of Collingridge and pointed out the general ill effects of the controversy for Stonyhurst and for the Society in England. In 1817 (15 July) he refused to engage in controversy with Collingridge on Plowden’s behalf, and ultimately (10 October) refused to answer in person what he considered to be a too immoderate letter from Plowden. This resulted in a personal call from the latter, who after a visit of two days departed in a more peaceable state of mind. It will be seen from this episode that far from being an agent provocateur, Milner did his best to act as a peacemaker in the relations between individual members of the Society and his fellow Vicars Apostolic. On the general aspects of the position of the Society in England his letter of 5 January 1821 (probably to Fr Scott SJ) provides a convenient summary of his views: Neither monks nor friars nor nuns nor the supremacy of His Holiness itself are recognized by our laws any more than Jesuits, but it answers the purposes of religion that they are tolerated, and so Jesuits are and will continue to be if jealous and narrow-minded Catholics did not excite opposition against them in England and Rome. What a shocking and sinful thing it is for Catholic Bishops who themselves are obnoxious to the Penal Laws in so many respects [to be] dabbling in the Penal Laws against Jesuits, who are so useful and even necessary to help them in taking care of their flocks. That these oppose their authority, or behave in any way disrespectfully or disorderly to them, I who am a competent judge in this matter maintain and am prepared openly to prove is a gross calumny. The late provincial Fr. Stone is and always was a model of humility and submission to authority and the present provincial, Fr. Charles Plowden, by his writings and his interest with the Weld family and other families and individuals, was the main support of the Pope’s

29 The New Conspiracy against the Jesuits detected by R.C. Dallas (1815), pp. 261–333: Letters of Clericus to Laicus by Charles Plowden SJ.

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Vicars and the Pope’s authority itself when a powerful combination among several of our Nobility and Gentry was bent upon their common destruction.30 No doubt but our No Popery Ministers, as they are justly called, if asked the question, will answer that they wish the Jesuits to be abolished (they would make the same answer if they were asked about suppressing Monks and Nuns), but, in my opinion the Vicars Apostolic ought to be strictly prohibited from consulting or communicating with Protestant or Deistical ministers on the concerns of the Catholic religion. Let us express and prove our loyalty to the State, which no Catholics do more fully than the members of Stonyhurst; but let us treat about the concerns of our religion with the Holy See and among ourselves. That the opposition to Jesuits [in] England arises from certain Vicars Apostolic, backed by such Catholics as Mr. George Silvertop, and not from Ministers, is demonstrated by its not existing in Ireland, which is the principal object of Ministerial jealousy. Milner certainly had no illusions; that he felt strongly the folly and injustice of the attitude of certain of his fellow Catholics in their hostility to the Society is due to his ever-present awareness of the historical background to the problem. But the underlying note of moderation, hope, and quiet confidence is typical of many other letters on the subject. What started as a review of a book about Collingridge has ended up as a discussion of Milner. For Milner is the architect of Catholic Emancipation just as Allen and Parsons were the architects of the Counter Reformation in England. That Milner’s standpoint was to be justified by the future course of events was not due to guesswork or to prophecy, but to his clear interpretation of the past. Milner and the latter-day recusants play out their roles in the last act of tragedy on which the curtain went up with the accession of Elizabeth. In the latter half of the nineteenth century the stage was to be occupied by the converts of the Oxford Movement, new men who were more familiar with, let us say, the Arians of the fourth century than with the recusants of the seventeenth and eighteenth. The bicentenary of Milner’s birth passed by unnoticed in our Catholic Press in 1952. He would scarcely have minded, for he was a very humble man. As he said himself, ‘my object is, or ought to be, ad maiorem Dei gloriam and the salvation of souls’.31

30 He is referring to the negotiations of 1788–91. 31 To Fr Tristram SJ, 17 October 1815.

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4 ENGLISH CATHOLICS WITHOUT A BISHOP 1655–1672 *

The period from 1655 to 1672 forms a convenient unit in recusant history. After the death on 18 March 1655 of Richard Smith, Bishop of Chalcedon, there was a series of attempts by the English clergy to obtain from Rome the appointment of a bishop for England, which culminated in the issue of a brief for the consecration of Philip Howard OP on 16 May 1672. In spite of this, Howard’s consecration did not take place, and the English Catholics were without a form of episcopal government till 1685, when John Leyburne was appointed Vicar Apostolic. The reasons for this state of affairs have been the subject of some comment, not all of it well-informed, by those who have treated of English Catholic history in the seventeenth century. The purpose of the present study is to try to present, as objectively as possible, the course of events as it is reflected in the negotiations of the successive agents sent to Rome on behalf of the English clergy during the period 1655–72, together with the relevant background.

Events immediately previous to Smith’s death The general pattern of the situation at Smith’s death calls for a brief explanation. Smith had left England and withdrawn to France in 1631, after an episcopate marked by bitter dissensions between himself and the regular clergy. It is sometimes presumed that, on his withdrawal to France, he retired altogether from participation in English affairs, but this is not the case.1 He asserted to the end his authority over the secular clergy by means of the chapter which had been erected by his predecessor, William Bishop, and reorganized and enlarged by himself, though it had never been expressly confirmed by Rome. In the years immediately preceding Smith’s death, a split had developed within the chapter itself. The two principal opponents in the quarrel were Thomas White

* Originally published in Recusant History, Vol. IV, No. 4, May 1958, pp. 142–78. Republished courtesy of the Catholic Record Society and Cambridge University Press. 1 At Rome, Smith was considered to have offered his resignation and it was accepted; see L. Hicks SJ, CRS XLI, p. 46n., and authorities there cited; contrast P. Hughes, Rome and the Counter Reformation in England (London 1942), p. 390, who gives no authorities for his opinion.

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(usually known by his alias ‘Blacklo’), the author of several books of more than dubious orthodoxy, and Dr George Leyburne, who in 1652 became President of Douay College. The chief subjects of dispute were: 1) the orthodoxy of Blacklo’s theological views; Leyburne strenuously sought to secure the condemnation of his books at Rome; 2) the authority of Smith over the chapter; Blacklo and his supporters wanted to be independent of the authority of the aged bishop and to secure from Rome at least a coadjutor for him, if not three more bishops for England. Leyburne, for his part, consistently upheld Smith’s authority; and 3) the question of allegiance to Cromwell or to the exiled Charles; this does not come into the open until 1655 when Blacklo published his book The Grounds of Obedience and Government, in which he made it clear that he favoured a rapprochement with the Cromwellian government; Leyburne always supported the Royalist cause. There had been many preliminary skirmishes throughout the 1640s, but a decisive stage was reached when, from Paris, on 6 August 1649, Bishop Smith, describing himself as ‘Ordinarius Catholicorum Angliae’, summoned the chapter to meet in London.2 Peter Fitton was then Dean and George Gage Secretary. Smith nominated Leyburne as his Vicar General in solidum, but this aroused fierce opposition, and he therefore nominated also Mark Harrington (a supporter of Blacklo) as a second Vicar General.3 The chapter in England and some of their adherents abroad (including Dr Henry Holden at Paris) were anxious at this juncture to secure some form of toleration from Cromwell’s party in return for an Oath of Allegiance to the new government and the banishment of the Jesuits. Bishop Smith, Dr Leyburne and others of the clergy with Royalist sympathies opposed this, and Leyburne’s presence at the 1649 chapter meeting was to ensure that the chapter did not compromise itself with the government. Feeling between the two parties was bitter. Holden went so far in his hostility to Leyburne as to try to secure his arrest while in England.4 The lines of division were certainly by now quite clear, and in the last years of Smith’s life the rift widened still further, one part of the chapter insisting with increasing vehemence on their independence from his authority.5 Matters came to a head in May 1653 when Mark Harrington, without Smith’s concurrence, convened a chapter meeting for July. When it assembled on 11 July, the chapter proposed sending an agent to Rome to ask for a coadjutor for Smith and for three other bishops for England. On 25 July Smith, acting on Leyburne’s information, issued a letter dissolving the Assembly and negativing its acts. On

2 WA xxx, 363, 383. 3 J. Gillow, Bibliographical Dictionary of the English Catholics (London 1885), Vol. IV, p. 222; C. Dodd, Church History of England (Brussels 1742), Vol. III, p. 304. 4 R. Pugh, Blacklo’s Cabal (n.p. 1680), pp. 74–7. 5 WA xxx, 391, ‘Quaerita super Authoritate Ep. Calcedon. in Anglia’; it is suggested that twenty-six years of the chapter’s existence renders Smith’s approbation unnecessary. See also WA xxx, 423, where Smith refused to surrender the right to appoint Canons despite the request of Mark Harrington, George Gage and three other members of the chapter.

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1 August the chapter justified its actions, and on 19 August Smith retracted his censures and made them only conditional on any attempt directly to attack his authority.6 In the eyes of Smith’s opponents in the chapter, the chief obstacle to their plans for independence was Leyburne, who since 1652 had been President of Douay and thus in a position of great influence. Their major fear was that he might be appointed Smith’s successor when the latter died.

Laurence Plantin’s Agency Smith’s death in 1655 opened a phase of positive negotiations. The chapter appointed Laurence Plantin as their Agent in Rome and instructed him to propose either Henry Taylor or Henry Turberville as Bishop (the draft proposals also have the name of William Clifford, but this was subsequently deleted).7 One of the lines of argument which the chapter authorised Plantin to put forward was that if no bishop were appointed to succeed Smith, they – as the chapter – would feel themselves empowered to govern the clergy in their own right: ‘If the Clergy obtain not a Bishop they will stand upon their chapter’s authority to the which they conceive the Pope’s confirmation not necessary’.8 In October Plantin was in Paris, sounding the leading English Catholics there. He called on Abbot Montagu and his chaplain Robert Pugh, and later on Fr Stephen Gough the Oratorian, all of whom were sympathetic; Gough promised to write to the Dutch Vicar Apostolic, James de la Torre, Archbishop of Ephesus, then in Rome, to ask him for his help.9 Dr Henry Holden, William Clifford and Thomas Carre (vere Miles Pinkney) were all favourable to the project.10 Plantin’s report from Paris was addressed to the new secretary of the chapter, John Sergeant (alias Holland) a supporter of Blacklo and a strong advocate – at this time – of rapprochement with the Cromwellian government. Sergeant replied on 15 October warning Plantin against any idea of proposing Abbot Montagu as bishop, ‘because he is known to have tampered in the King’s affair’. (In his first draft of the letter Sergeant had written: ‘he will be very ungrateful to our Government because he is looked upon here as one who hath treated much for the King in his pretences against them and therefore we do not accept of his government nor render him obedience’.)11 Meanwhile in a letter on 22 September to Mangelli, the acting internuncio at Brussels, Leyburne had put forward the names of four episcopabiles: (i) Henry

6 7 8 9

WA xxx, 521, 597. WA xxxi, 37. WA xxxi, 41. De la Torre had owed his appointment to the recommendation of Chigi, then nuncio at Cologne and now Cardinal Protector of England (L.J. Rogier, Geschiedenis van het Katholicisme in NoordNederland in de 16e en de 17e Eeuw, 2nd ed. [Amsterdam 1947], Vol. II, p. 181). 10 WA xxxi, 9. 11 WA xxxi, 13.

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Taylor, (ii) Peter Fitton (who had in fact already declined, on grounds of infirmity, the chapter’s offer to nominate him, though Leyburne did not know this),12 (iii) William Clifford, and (iv) Edward Daniel.13 The fact that the chapter and Leyburne were in agreement on Taylor as the first choice for bishop was a hopeful sign. Unfortunately Taylor’s chances as a compromise candidate were blocked by the personal intervention of Henrietta Maria, who objected to the Pope that Taylor was too closely connected with Spanish influence, and herself put forward the name of William Clifford.14 Taylor was in fact chaplain to the Archduke Leopold and had served the Spanish Court on diplomatic service in Poland and England. The internuncio described him as one who had risen from humble birth to better fortune, who was obedient to the Holy See and averse from Jansenism.15 The Queen’s opposition to Taylor’s candidature was a very unfortunate initial setback. Meanwhile Plantin had arrived in Rome on 20 November 1655 and had visited the Dutch Vicar Apostolic, de la Torre. He reported to the chapter: ‘I have been with the Bishop of Holland and delivered your letter which I had of Mr Fitton. He took it kindly and assured me of his assistance, but having enough to do for his own business I cannot expect much from him. Besides I am told he is without any power’.16 Plantin’s negotiations dragged on during the winter and on 14 February 1656 he reported that the Congregation of Propaganda were determined ‘point blank’ against a bishop for England: In a hot bout I had with Albizzi, one of the three [members of the Congregation] and a great stickler of the Patres [i.e. Jesuits], I discovered that he was the man that had done this good office partly to please the Patres and partly out of a hatred to Sir Kenelm Digby who had to do with this business in Innocent’s time. . . . [T]hey would fain put upon us an Archpriest which I have absolutely protested against as a thing both odious and inconsistent with our safety.17 Plantin then proposed to drop the question of a bishop and go forward with the question of the confirmation of the chapter; but not much help was to be expected either of the Archbishop of Ephesus or of the Spanish Ambassador. Sergeant replied on 10 March strongly discountenancing any attempt to press for

12 WA B Series xlvii (originally Stonyhurst MS Anglia viii) no. 91, letter of 18 Feb. 1685 from Florence. 13 PRO 31/9/96. 14 PRO 31/9/96, letter of 21 Jan. 1656. 15 PRO 31/9/96, letter of 2 June 1657. 16 WA xxxi, 297; letter misdated 1656. Peter Fitton, Dean of the chapter, resided at Florence, from 1653 till his death in 1657, as librarian to the Grand Duke of Tuscany. 17 WA xxxi, 273; letter misdated 1653. For Digby’s mission see V. Gabrieli, ‘La Missione di Sir Kenelm Digby alla Corte di Innocenzo X, 1645–1648’, in English Miscellany (Rome 1954), Vol. V, pp. 247–289.

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confirmation of the chapter. Plantin should ‘desist from any such pretence, for besides that it is never likely to be granted, it may occasion our less Authority by its denial and turn to our great prejudice’.18 By 21 March Plantin reported that the Congregation had definitely refused a bishop and that the chapter was neither confirmed nor condemned. Finally, he intended to appeal directly to the Pope.19 On 3 April Plantin reported to Sergeant the result of his final interview with Alexander VII: contrary to his expectations, the Pope held out hope of a bishop within seven months. Before leaving Rome Plantin recommended the care of the Agency to Robert Pendrick, a Scotsman: ‘He hath been divers years agent for the Queen in this Court, knowing the language well, hath great acquaintance, he is honest, faithful and able, so found both by me and Mr Fitton before me.’20 Plantin’s last action before winding up his Agency was to ask the Dutch Vicar Apostolic, de la Torre, to recommend the name of Henry Taylor to the Brussels internuncio on his way back to Holland.21 The Pope’s promise of a decision within seven months naturally aroused varying reactions. Within two days, on 5 April, Fr Thomas Courtney SJ (Rector of the English College, Rome, 1610–44, and subsequently English Penitentiary of St Peter’s) wrote to Cardinal Barberini to say that he had heard that Propaganda had offered to give England a Vicar Apostolic ‘secundo d’usanza di Ollanda’. He requested Barberini to avoid the disaster which would be the inevitable consequence of such a decision. The political situation was such that Cromwell would say that the appointment of a Vicar Apostolic was a Spanish stratagem and that it was part of the preparations for an invasion by the exiled King Charles II. It would unite the Protestant states on the side of Cromwell and give a motive for further persecution. He concluded with the warning: ‘Non si deve misurare l’Inghilterra con Olanda. Troppo grand differenza è di genio, di legge, di persecutione.’22 While Taylor’s name was still being canvassed, it was rumoured that the name of Abbot Montagu was also being put forward in certain quarters. On 26 October 1655 Sergeant wrote to Holden, Clifford and Carre at Paris complaining that they had put forward the name of Montagu without the consent of the chapter. On 20 December they replied jointly that the charge was incorrect, but that Henrietta Maria had objections to Taylor and that the chapter should put forward a wider selection of names to choose from.23 18 19 20 21 22

WA xxxi, 285. WA xxxi, 291. WA xxxi, 301. WA xxxi, 307, letter of 10 April 1656. PRO 31/9/130 (Barb. 8622). During the Civil War and Commonwealth period Fr Courtney had been supplying Barberini with a series of very well informed newsletters from England. When Algernon Sidney visited Rome in November 1660, he reported Fr Courtney as ‘sick, old and decrepit’, but that Cardinal Francesco Barberini ‘is very little changed since I formerly saw him: though he is old, he is so fresh and strong as to be likely to live many years’. (Sydney Papers, ed. R.W. Blencowe [London 1825], p. 244). 23 WA xxxi, 323, 331.

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In November 1657 the chapter met and decided on six names to be put forward; the list included neither Montagu, nor George nor John Leyburne (his nephew), nor Ludovic Stuart Aubigny (whose possible promotion to the Cardinalate had already been mooted in the reign of Charles I). The meeting was a stormy one, but the supporters of Dr Leyburne were outnumbered. One of them, Thomas Progers, recorded his protest against: i) the doubtful authority of the chapter; (ii) the fact that they refused to condemn the doctrines of Blacklo, and (iii) the fact that the list of episcopabiles excluded Montagu, the Leyburnes and Aubigny. He wrote: ‘It much increased my suspicion of their being satisfied in this present government, and not desiring a bishop, to see them so peremptory in refusing to subscribe to a disclaimer from all novelties and scandalous opinions taught by Mr White or any other.’24

The Agency of Richard Lassels (alias Bolds) In March 1658 the chapter informed the Pope that Robert Pendrick was their general Agent and that Richard Lassels was to be their Agent for the special mission concerning the appointment of a bishop for England.25 Lassels’s instructions were issued on 11 June 1658: (i) the bishop must be an ordinary (cum potestate ordinarii); (ii) he must be one of those named; (iii) if any other person or any other form of authority was proposed, the Agent was to reject the proposal.26 ‘These manly sentiments’, as Joseph Berington calls them, were, however modified by a second set of instructions. If the Agent found the Congregation in favour of a person who was not one of the six proposed, and if he were a person favourable to the chapter, the Agent was to nominate him on behalf of the chapter; at all events the Agent was to ‘stick firmly to’ the chapter’s right of nomination. The Agent should also make it clear that the maintenance of a bishop would be at the cost of the chapter and without any burden to the Holy See.27 Very little seems to have come of Lassels’s mission: in fact Dodd implies that Lassels declined to undertake it, though he certainly visited Rome at this time.28 One of the secular clergy writing to Sergeant in December 1658 offered his suggestions on the conduct of the Agency: I am sorry there be so many Popes at Rome. Your best course is to petition and humble yourselves to them that rule the roost, and tell them you will have no Bishop but one of their Order, or such a one as shall swear

24 WA xxxi, 357. 25 WA xxxi, 431. 26 WA xxxi, 465. The full text is in J. Berington, The Memoirs of Gregorio Panzani (London 1793), p. 297. 27 WA xxxi, 467. 28 C. Dodd, Church History of England (Brussels 1742), Vol. III, p. 304. It is fairly clear, however, from WA xxxi 421, that he actually went to Rome.

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or vow blind obedience to their Provinciall here pro tempore existenti. This way you may chance to speed. Or you may send 100 or 200 pieces of English gold to Alexander’s nephews; the rarity of the coin may take; munera placant and red caps love money.29

The Agency of Francis Gage On 7 March 1659 Francis Gage was appointed as special Agent at Rome for the chapter and clergy.30 After nearly a year of negotiations Gage reported a flat refusal from the Secretary of the Congregation for English affairs31 to grant his requests; indeed the Secretary saw no need at all for an Agent at Rome.32 Gage asked to be recalled, and on 29 March 1660 he decided to put in writing his advice for any future Roman Agents: (i) ‘Not to receive a superior but one of our own election’; (ii) ‘not to admit of any superior contrary to the Ancient Laws of England’; (iii) ‘never to abandon our Dean and Chapter’.33 But the news of the Restoration of the monarchy in England roused new hopes. By 26 April 1660 Gage sounded more cheerful, and asked Sergeant for further possible names of episcopabiles – he had already four: Mr Humphrey Ellis, Mr Falkener, Mr Stephen Lee and Mr Richard Lassels.34 In a letter of 13 June written to one of the English clergy resident in France, possibly Montagu, he gives a considered appreciation of the situation which is worth quoting in full, as it clearly reveals his willingness to compromise: Most honoured Sir, some few months ago I signified unto you the order I had from England in case I could not obtain a Bishop with ordinary power, to return home, and accordingly I made ready to begin my journey. But in taking my leave of the Court, I found a great unwillingness in many of the chief ministers to let me go without any satisfaction. They and the encouragement of some of our friends in England prevailed with me to stay some few months longer, whereby I have with much importunity gotten the congregation deputed for our affairs to meet in consult about them; I having beforehand given up unto them a true relation of the state of our clergy and the necessity of putting some redress to the disorders grown up amongst us, especially for want of a lawful and unquestionable

29 WA xxxi, 509, letter from Thomas Barker 21 Dec. 1658. 30 WA xxxi, 515. Gage left England in March 1659, left France in April and arrived in Rome in June. He left Rome in May 1661 and was back in England in July and present at the general chapter meeting in September (WA xxxiv, 466, Gage’s Journal). 31 The Congregation for English affairs seems to have been a sub-committee of the Congregation de Propaganda Fide set up as and when required. 32 WA xxxii, 33. Gage’s letters to Sergeant are addressed to ‘Signor Carlos’. 33 WA xxxii, 45. 34 WA xxxii, 47.

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authority to govern us. The experience I have gained of the knowledge of this court hath discovered to me an error in the manner of our proceeding hitherto, which was as it were to give the law unto them, by not only exposing our necessities, but also prescribing unto them the particular means to supply them; which they that sit at the highest Tribunal cannot brook, and upon this account did ever reject our suing for an ordinary, the confirmation of the Chapter, and the like. But now I have taken this course barely to express our necessities, and to request such redresses as in their wisdom they shall think fit. Wherefore, after much debate, it is in a manner resolved to grant us a bishop, though his power and faculties are not yet agreed upon and as to the quality of Ordinary I see little hope to obtain it, both in regard they allege that neither of our former Bishops were truly such, though they had the same faculties which Ordinaries have, but their power over England was by delegation and ad beneplacitum, which is opposite to the nature of an Ordinary, as also because it was never seen in the Church, that one man was Ordinary over a whole kingdom or two, so that I believe that the most we shall be able to procure will be a Vicar Apostolic such as the Bishop in Holland is: Though for the name of Vicar peradventure we may waive it. This I foresaw long ago like to be the height of what we were to expect from the court, and therefore represented it to the consideration of our brethren in England, who as in all things else were in this point also mainly divided, some being content to accept of such an one rather than nothing; others conceiving this like to be the ruin of our clergy by bringing it and all that accept of such an extraordinary Authority, under the lash of premunire, according to the Ancient laws of the kingdom. For my part I am so much a friend to order and discipline, that I should easily prefer a legal and well grounded government before this tottering and problematical Authority that is amongst us, which men submit to rather out of compliment than obedience, and as easily cast off when they please. It’s strange what means were used to poison the good intentions of the congregation towards us, especially by the monks’ agent here,35 who amongst other things persuaded the Cardinals, that our king desired that no Bishop should be sent into England. For other news I have none worth your knowledge and therefore must humbly take leave, and remain, your most faithful servant, F. Gage.36 On 20 June William Leslie, the Agent for the Scots and Dutch clergy at Rome, wrote a long letter to Humphrey Ellis, the Dean of the chapter, urging the establishment

35 i.e. Dom Gregory Bernard Palmes OSB (alias Conyers), Procurator at Rome for the English Benedictine Congregation 1657–63. 36 Bodley’s Library MS Rawl. D.840, f. 268v. It is reproduced as part of a MS pamphlet, presumably written for publication, dated 16 April 1673. The difference in tone between this and the letter to Sergeant of 22 March 1660 implies a certain degree of two-facedness in Gage.

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of a permanent Agency at Rome and commenting favourably on the progress of Gage’s negotiations; Leslie considered that the power of the regulars at Rome to hinder the negotiations was exaggerated in England.37 Gage’s interpretation of the situation at Rome was that Propaganda was prepared to grant only a Vicar Apostolic and that anything else was out of the question. He urged the chapter to accept this, and by doing so at least secure someone of their own choosing; if the chapter were intransigent there was a likelihood that Propaganda would appoint Dr Leyburne as Vicar Apostolic on the Dutch model, and the chapter would be even worse off than they were before. Thomas Carre and Dr Holden had written urging him to insist on an ordinary, but with the proviso that ‘rather than fall upon the rock of Schism to accept of a Vicar Apostolic or anything that may keep a lawful jurisdiction amongst us’.38 The reaction of Sergeant and the chapter to these signs of compromise in Gage was to order him to withdraw from Rome, and to step up their attacks in all directions on Dr Leyburne. On 16 November 1660 the chapter sent a long letter of complaint against Leyburne to the new Brussels internuncio, and on 2 December Sergeant followed this up with a personal letter of the same tenor to the Paris nuncio.39 The chapter’s recall of Gage just when negotiations seemed propitious for a Vicar Apostolic well bears out the judgment of Robert Pugh that the chapter were really not in earnest about a bishop at all.40 Gage’s Agency at Rome must of course be seen in the light of the official reports to the Protector, Chigi, by the internuncio at Brussels. In a survey of the situation at the Restoration, the internuncio, de Vecchii, recounted the history of the English Mission from the times of the Archpriest controversy and advised the appointment of a bishop; the principal obstacles were the heterodox doctrines of Blacklo and the dubious authority of the chapter.41 He was kept informed of the English situation by Dr Leyburne, who was over in England by the autumn of 1660. Leyburne’s reports reveal that he had visited Clarendon who had said that the secular clergy should have a bishop, but one only, and someone loyal to the King. Leyburne had also visited the leading London chaptermen who had refused to declare against Blacklo’s doctrines or to subscribe to a condemnation of Jansenism. The Oaths were another difficulty; as they stood the Oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy were unacceptable, but the seculars and regulars had met to devise an oath formula that could lawfully be taken. Nonetheless a book had appeared, of which Sir Kenelm Digby was the suspected author, which argued that the present Oath of

37 38 39 40

WA xxxii, 51. WA xxxii, 75. WA xxxii, 59, 131, 135. Writing under the name of Peter Hoburg (an anagram of ‘Robert Pughe’) to Barberini, 13 November 1661 (Stonyhurst MS Anglia V 58). The letter is printed, without realization of Pugh’s authorship, as an appendix to Remarks on a Book Entitled Memoirs of Gregorio Panzani, by C. Plowden SJ (Liège 1794). 41 PRO 31/9/97; 8 and 28 Aug. 1660.

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Allegiance could lawfully be taken; Sir John Winter, too, advocated acceptance of the oaths.42 Finally, at the end of the year, Leyburne reported the failure of his efforts. At the instance of the chapter, George Digby, Earl of Bristol, had urged him to desist from pressing for an anti-Blacklo declaration; as for the question of the oaths, Bristol wanted the whole question of formulas to be dropped, and would try to rely on a simple assurance to the king of the loyalty of the Catholic nobility.43 Indeed, Gage’s mission collapsed in the end because the chapter were hoping for some striking change in the situation in England. Charles II was anxious for some ecclesiastical title for his nephew Ludovic Stuart Aubigny. In 1661 there had been plans for making him Bishop of Dunkirk, i.e. though belonging to the French hierarchy he would be bishop of an English possession. The scheme came to nothing, but in October 1662 Sir Richard Bellings went from the English court on a special mission to Rome for the purpose of obtaining a cardinalate for Aubigny. The mission failed, and part of its failure should be seen in the light of the activities of the Catholics in England in the period immediately preceding. In 1661 a committee of the House of Lords had been set up to consider the removal of the Penal Laws. The leading chaptermen were prepared in return to agree to the exclusion of the Jesuits from the general repeal, and to advocate an Oath of Allegiance denying the Pope’s deposing power.44 The campaign against the Jesuits was conducted in pamphlets and in private letters by Dean Ellis, Secretary Sergeant and Dr Holden.45 At their General Assembly of September 1661

42 Several books on the question of allegiance appeared about this time, but none have elsewhere been attributed to Sir K. Digby, Reflexions Upon the Oathes of Supremacy (1661), is attributed to John Sergeant (Wing S2581 [Entry cancelled in the 1972 ed. of Wing – now attributed to Hugh Paulin Cressy, Wing C6901. Eds]); Some Few Questions Concerning the Oath of Allegiance (1661), to Peter Walsh (Wing W641–3); and Observations Upon the Oath [1662?] to Sir John Winter (Wing W3081–2). 43 PRO 31/9/98, ff. 228, 238, 244, 259, 261, 277, 278. The letters are subscribed with the name of ‘Vigilio’. 44 On 16 July 1661 a Lords Committee under the presidency of the Duke of York, and including the Lord Treasurer and the Lord Privy Seal, was set up to consider preparing a bill to remove certain penal statutes. On 18 July the Attorney General was co-opted, and on 25 July, he was instructed to prepare a draft bill for the consideration of the Committee. Among the proposals were: that concerning 27 Eliz. 2, ‘the first clause concerning priests, Jesuits etc. (except Jesuits) be repealed’; that concerning 3 Jac. 4, ‘no clauses be repealed as to the Jesuits’, that priests should notify their address to the Secretary of State within 20 days of arrival in England; ‘that an Oath of Allegiance shall be taken by all priests and Roman Catholics’; ‘that no Jesuits shall come into this Kingdom upon pain of High Treason’. The document upon which this information is based, WA xxxii, 275, is endorsed ‘What Mr. Waring [i.e. Ellis, the Dean of the chapter] judged proper to be tendered to the Parliament in 1661’. The Dean had thus evidently been consulted by the Lords Committee and the Attorney General on the draft proposals for the bill. 45 e.g. WA xxxii, 225, where the Jesuits are accused of adhering to Cromwell during the Commonwealth. Fr Martin Grene SJ, wrote An Account of the Life and Doctrine of the Jesuits (1661; Wing G1825) to answer calumnies current against the loyalty of the Jesuits. In The Jesuits Reasons Unreasonable (1662; Wing J725; attributed to Sergeant) the writer maintains that the exclusion

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the chapter, at the instigation of Sergeant, resolved inter alia that they had succeeded to and were possessed of the authority of the late Bishop of Chalcedon, sede vacante, and that they renounced ‘all foreign power, temporal of Prince or ecclesiastical of the Pope, inasmuch as he shall pretend to free us from obedience to his Majesty or depose him from his throne’, and that they would not receive any Bulls, Breves or decrees sent by the Pope without the approval and consent of the King if the King so desired.46 A further significant chapter ‘consult’, was held in August 1662. It appears from the records of this meeting that during the course of the year, a series of conferences of the regular and secular clergy had been held – the Jesuits excluded: ‘the Jesuits were not thought of as being held too addicted to their own ways’. The representatives of the chapter, i.e. the Dean and Secretary, Ellis and Sergeant, had produced a declaration of allegiance which the regulars, Dominican, Benedictine and Franciscan, had not been able to accept. The chapter now decided, therefore, that it was prepared to negotiate alone with Clarendon, the Lord Chancellor.47 In this same year the Dean and chapter gave their blessing to the formulary of the Irish Remonstrance, drawn up, it must not be forgotten, in London, by Peter Walsh and the Bishop of Dromore.48 The Bellings mission and its failure has already been described in detail by Professor Ruth Clark.49 The whole project for a Bishopric or Cardinalate for Aubigny probably did the English Catholic cause more harm than good. There was a real fear among Catholics that the chapter was using the whole Aubigny project to secure a relaxation of the Penal Laws at the price of discrimination against the Jesuits, and the enforcement of some declaration of allegiance which would repudiate the Pope’s authority over Catholics in this country. On 5 December 1662 an English Catholic wrote to Fr John Poynz SJ at Rome: ‘Mr Belling was departed before I came, to town. . . . He is doubtless one, who deserves much of the good opinion you have there of him, and as we believe, of himself very orthodox, yet being to follow punctually his instructions he may likely propose something in the behalf of some scribling Irish friars not so orthodox as himself such as busy themselves too forwardly with pressing our English likewise to subscribe their Irish Protestation against the Pope’s power.’50

46 47

48 49 50

of the Jesuits from any benefits of a relaxation of the Penal Laws is justified; it is right that they should be sacrificed for the general good of the English Catholics. WA xxxii, 294 sq. Southwark Cathedral Archives MS 106. iii. 391. This is a nineteenth-century transcript of a document in the chapter Archives (and not now at Westminster). It is inserted loosely into a grangerized copy of Dodd’s Church History Vol. III, which Canon Tierney evidently intended as the basis for the uncompleted volumes of his revised edition. P. Walsh, History and Vindication of the Loyal Formulary (1674), pp. 55–6. Strangers and Sojourners at Port Royal (Cambridge 1932), Ch. VII. WA xxxii, 391; signed RSP (?Robert Pugh).

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Rome’s refusal to grant Aubigny a Cardinalate deeply offended Charles II, but he behaved with consideration and tact towards his Catholic subjects, suppressing the chapter proposals lest the Catholics ‘should be involved in internal dissensions and end by exposing those who remained faithful to the Pope to all the rigours of the previously existing laws’.51

William Leslie intervenes As the pontificate of Alexander VII drew to its close in 1667, William Leslie at Rome began once more to urge the question of a bishop. He wrote at length to Lord Henry Howard, brother of Philip Howard OP, the Queen’s almoner, to urge him to come to Rome to act as an impartial and independent Agent in this affair. For Howard’s information, Leslie sent a voluminous account of the religious situation in England since the Reformation, and a series of trenchant profiles of the Cardinals of the Roman Curia at the time.52 Lord Henry was, however, unwilling to undertake the Agency or, indeed, to run the risk involved in correspondence with Leslie. He handed over Leslie’s papers to Lord Arlington, and a copy now reposes in the Public Record Office with the following note: ‘Memorandum. This was copy of a Paper written to Mr Henry Howard of Norfolk 1667 by one Lesley a Scotch priest at Rome, and by him for his own discharge communicated to my Lord Arlington, with renunciation of all such correspondencies for the future. Joseph Williamson.’ On 30 August 1667 Lord Henry Howard wrote a letter to Leslie which, according to Canon Tierney, displays ‘so beautiful a picture of his own mind and character – of the prudence that guided and the loyalty that animated him’. In this letter Howard, besides refusing to have any ‘manner of tampering with Rome’, declares: ‘In secular matters and things not of faith, but of secular power and interest, should the pope himself come with an army to invade us, I dare swear that ne’er an understanding papist in England but would, upon that score, shoot a bullet in his head; for I am sure I would: for, in all matters abstracting from secular government and our copyholds here, I’ll believe as far as any in spiritual matters.’53 But he does not reveal to Leslie that he is delating Leslie’s letters to the Secretary of State.

Alexander Holt as agent Leslie had also written to Dr Leyburne expressing hopes of a bishop and urging an Agency. When they came to hear of this the chapter were disturbed. Among the points to be considered at their General Meeting of May 1667 were noted:

51 Mgr A.S. Barnes, ‘Charles II and Reunion with Rome’, Monthly Review, Vol. XIII (Dec. 1903), p. 146. A most useful article, in addition to sources cited by Professor Clark, but tantalizingly vague on the precise location of its sources. 52 PRO SP 9/203/7, 8, 9. 53 M.A. Tierney, The History and Antiquities of . . . Arundel (London 1831), Vol. II, pp. 524–5. See also M.V. Hay, The Jesuits and the Popish Plot (London 1934), pp. 98 sq.

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‘(i) Whether at this juncture it may be convenient to petition for a Bishop. (ii) Whether the having a bishop may not make void and null the chapter, or to have some regular made bishop, and put upon the clergy to govern them. (iii) Which episcopal men are to be proposed and how many. (iv) What title the Bishop shall be accepted with; and being it is very probable a Bishop will not be guaranteed but with the title of Apostolical Vicar, that good and solid reasons be given that may satisfy all the clergy why a Bishop cannot be accepted with that title. (v) That it be considered how a Bishop may be maintained.’54 Eventually the chapter decided to appoint a new Agent, Alexander Holt,55 who favoured the policy of the Dean and Secretary. Sergeant wrote a personal letter to Montagu on 10 August 1667, accrediting Holt as Agent and giving six names of episcopabiles (of whom, this time, Montagu himself was the first), but hinting that, ‘perhaps we may fear some difficulty at Rome to obtain that Authority which only we dare admit, that is an Ordinary as Bishop’.56 Holt also carried with him to Rome an official letter from the chapter which was loud in denunciation of Dr Leyburne who ‘hath for this twenty years perpetually disquieted our church, calumniated his brethren and almost ruined our Colleges’. In this letter the chapter urged that Leyburne’s calumnies against them at Rome should be disregarded, as being due to spite against them for not having nominated him to be bishop.57 Another letter from the chapter, dated 27 August, was given to Holt for Cardinal Antonio Barberini, but was not delivered because Barberini was in France at the time of Holt’s arrival in Rome. In this letter the chapter urged that John Leyburne, Dr George Leyburne’s nephew, be appointed president of the English College at Douay, ‘donec turbulentus Frater noster, D. Georgius Leyburn, qui cuncta pro arbitrio regit (seu, verius pessundat) in Collegio Duaceno, et, imperitandi libidine ductus, factionibus pro more suo cuncta miscere conatur in Anglia, pacem atque ordinem nostrum perturbaverit’.58 The more important items of Holt’s instructions are worth giving at length: 3

4

That when it shall be fit to declare he move first that this Bishop be an Absolute Ordinary, such as was given in the Primitive times to Churches in persecution; at least that His Holiness please to declare in his Patent that he constituted him Ordinary of England. In case that cannot be maintained, then to supplicate for a Bishop in the same tenor as my Lord of Calcedon was: that is, with the faculties and powers of an Ordinary here, and that he endeavour what he can, to get that power well and indisputably expressed.

54 WA xxxii, 584. Alexander VII died 22 May 1667. 55 Holt was born 1629, entered the English College Rome 1652, ordained priest Dec. 1656, sent to England April 1659 (Foley, Records SJ [London 1880], Vol. VI, p. 387; CRS Vol. XL, p. 52). 56 WA xxxii, 587. 57 WA xxxii, 588. 58 WA xxxii, 613.

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5 6

7

8 9

That he be one of the six named by the clergy [i.e. Walter Montagu, Thomas Godden, Humphrey Ellis, John Leyburne, Francis Gage, and Robert Manly]. That if any other Title or Authority, inconsistent with what formerly belonged to our Bishops be endeavoured to be imposed, then that he resolutely oppose it, and disclaim from it, as directly forbidden by the State, and against the constant sense of our Brethren. That if he hear anything objected against the Authority of the present chapter, he be ready modestly to defend it, by laying open how it was instituted, how accepted, how long [blank in ms.] and how allowed by his Holiness’ Predecessor, and corresponded with from time to time. Also, that if he hear anything against us for doctrine, he be ready to clear us by alleging how we censured Mr. Blacklo’s books. That if he judges it compassable, he endeavour to join with the Dowetians in this conjuncture to out Dr. Leyburne and get Mr. John Leyburne put in his place. That in case they at Rome nominate some other person for a Bishop, if you think he will be very grateful to our Clergy, to accept of him; not as nominated by them, lest you wrong our right to nomination (which you are desired to stick to) but declare that you have power to nominate in our names; and, so, seeing this person grateful to our Clergy and acceptable to them, you nominate him accordingly.59

Accompanying the instructions were confidential directions for ‘how to manage’ them, written by John Sergeant ‘by order of the chapter’. Concerning point 5 Sergeant adds: If Dr. Leyburne be nominated, signify how by unanimous vote of our brethren in two General Assemblies he has been positively excluded and excepted against by the Representatives of the clergy as their implacable enemy and most unjust calumniator. Add his misgovernment of the College, and that therefore, were he our best friend, we durst not in Prudence or Conscience think him fit to govern a Church, who hath so strangely misgoverned his family. Concerning point 6, and the powers of the bishop, he adds: To receive an Extraordinary Authority hath been expressly interdicted us by a message from his Majesty, viz. in Archivis Capituli, and frequently by his Minister of State, whom we dare not disgust on any consideration not falling within the compass of tenets or practices of Faith . . . in a word, that the Lord Aubigny, when he attempted to be Vicarius Apostolicus

59 WA xxxii, 619. The MS being slightly damaged, a few obvious lacunae have been silently supplied.

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was reclaimed against by the Laity and diverse Religious; and himself professed that considering our Laws, he durst not attempt it without a diploma from the King, which he in vain hoped to obtain. Concerning point 7 and the authority of the chapter, it had been acknowledged by all the secular clergy for the past forty years: none disobeying or questioning it, till Dr. Leyburne, angry we would not make him our superior (whom we judged for his disquiet nature and factious proceedings unworthy of that dignity), began to make a Schism and gathered hands to piece up a faction of some few weak followers, not one eminent man having adhered to him. As a last resort, the Agent might put forward the following reasons for the maintenance of the chapter’s authority: First, that His Majesty and the State are very well satisfied with the Dean and Chapter; that the State Officers converse civilly with us, and advise us of imminent danger; that they have a good conceit of our Allegiance; and, therefore, if anything be attempted against us, they would judge ‘tis to bring in some other Authority, of the nature of which they cannot be as confident as they are of this: and consequently they will be ready to hinder the reception of any act against the chapter, as savouring of Extraordinary Authority. If Rome decided anything against the chapter, the Agent was to return home.60 Francis Gage wrote to Holt with advice for the conduct of the Agency, even down to such details as what he should wear. The archives of the Agency, he said, were with Robert Pendrick who lived in the Strada Gregoriana; if he should be dead, Holt was to ask William Leslie, who lived in the Propaganda. Holt should keep on good terms with Lord Thomas Somerset and the Rector of the English College Rome, ‘but beware to have anything to do with the scholars’. ‘In my time’, he said, ‘a Mgr Alberigi and Abbate Hilarione were persons well affected to our country and our cause. Cardinal Albici was one of our greatest enemies; nor was Barberini at all our friend.’61 On arriving in France, Holt wrote back on 24 September 1667 to Mr John Singleton, Treasurer to the chapter, saying that in France the interpretation of his instructions was that the chapter did not want a Bishop.62 Four days later he wrote to Dean Ellis (then living with Lord Baltimore) saying that Abbot Montagu had

60 WA xxxii, 620–2. See note above. 61 WA xxxii, 627–9. 62 WA xxxii, 641.

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suggested that ‘we make a total submission of ourselves to his present Holiness [i.e. Clement IX, elected 20 June 1667], signifying that we are ready to accept whatsoever he shall judge most convenient for us’.63 Such a declaration would disarm Dr Leyburne’s accusation of insubordination in the chapter. Whatever the effect of this proposal might have been in Rome, its repercussions in the chapter were immediate and far-reaching. John Sergeant’s behaviour in obstructing this proposal so irritated the moderate members of the chapter that he was eventually compelled to resign as Secretary, and John Leyburne was appointed in his place. With Sergeant’s removal from office in the chapter, the way was open for the possibility of some compromise.64 The efforts of the chapter to dislodge Dr Leyburne from Douay, however, continued unabated. Complaints against him were directed to the internuncio at Brussels, the nuncio at Paris, and Philip Howard OP, the Queen’s Lord Almoner.65 Holt, at Rome, referred a list of complaints against him to the Pope and asked for a visitation of Douay by the French nuncio.66 In fact, Holt seems to have devoted more of his first months in Rome to intriguing against Leyburne than in urging a bishop. On 10 December 1667 he wrote to John Singleton, warning the chapter against William Leslie: ‘Pray beware you meddle not with Mr Leslie or his Propaganda, for I have discovered clearly that every motion which steers that way, tends to our immediate ruin.’ Holt clearly feared that Leslie and Propaganda favoured a Vicar Apostolic and that George Leyburne was to be the man.67 On 24 December he asked Singleton for more testimonies against Leyburne: Procure me a letter from Mr H.H. [Henry Howard] to the Protector: speak also fair to Mr. Montagu in France that he oppose not but assist us, as you know he promised. And if none of these be of sufficient force to gain our

63 WA xxxii, 645. 64 At the end of September, in a joint letter to the chapter from Paris, the leading Catholic clergy there, Montagu, Clifford, Carre and Gough, had suggested that Holt take with him to Rome a general submission from the chapter to Clement IX; this they considered a necessary preliminary to any Papal decision concerning (i) the question of the relation between the chapter and Douay, and (ii) the appointment of a bishop. The Dean replied that the proposal had been rejected by the chapter, as binding them in advance. Richard Russell, Bishop-elect of Portalegre, privately informed Montagu that the moving force behind the chapter’s refusal was in fact John Sergeant, the Secretary. In view of this evidence of lack of good will, Montagu refused to consider being nominated by the chapter in their list of episcopabiles. The reaction of Clifford, Carre and Gough is not known, but it is clear that Sergeant’s attitude was alienating the support of the more influential neutral figures. See R. Pugh, Blacklo’s Cabal (1680), pp. 108–26. 65 WA xxxii, 673–87. 66 Agretti, Minister Apostolic to the internuncio at Brussels, was considered as prejudiced against the chapter. WA xxxii, 559, 703–9. 67 WA xxxii, 697. Holt’s letters are usually addressed to Captain William Sacarville (or Pulton), a chapterman living in London, for John Singleton, who lived out of town.

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right, bethink yourselves how to make friends by the power of France; that seems to me a good reserve. . . . I learned from a friend . . . that Mr. President agrees not with the French, he being too much Hispaniolized. Which allegations I reserve in Petto as back cards to play when others cannot come in. By pumping Leslie I have discovered that he is linked to the President, perhaps also in fee with him. Whence you may well conclude that all our complaints which have come to his hand are stifled. I wonder how he came to be trusted in anything, old Mr. Pendrick being our procureur and having the Cardinal’s ear twenty times for the other’s once, and being honest. . . . Now as to the point of a Bishop, you know ‘tis contrary to my instructions to move anything of that nature; and I assure you as opposite to my thoughts and intentions. For should we mention any such thing, all here would take us for madmen. Presumably by bishop here, Holt means an Ordinary as opposed to a Vicar Apostolic.68 On 21 January 1668 Holt wrote to Singleton with further comments on Leslie: ‘He thinks we have no more to do but to let him lay us flat on our backs that we may afterwards reach him our hands to be helped up.’ The Procurator of Douay, Edward Lutton, one of Dr Leyburne’s opponents, ‘hath sent a relation of the state of the College, as he calls it, but ‘tis rather a boyish declamation.’69 By February Holt was getting tired: ‘I am almost killed with standing three hours in antecameras . . . here will be nothing done for us nor against us at this conjuncture. ‘Twere but prudence to recall me this spring.’ On 21 April, Holt wrote to Dean Ellis warning him that the Brussels Internunciature was hostile to the chapter in the Douay affair. In May, Holt was urging Singleton and Thomas Carre (the latter confessor to the English nuns in the Fosse S. Victoire, Paris) to lay detailed accusations against Dr Leyburne to the Paris nuncio, Bargellini.70 (Little did Holt realize that Bargellini would write to Cardinal Francesco Barberini in the following November, warning him that the chaptermen were infected with Jansenism and were planning to elect a bishop without the authority of the Holy See.)71 In May a special congregation for English affairs was set up in Rome, consisting of the Cardinal Protector (Francesco Barberini), the Cardinal Nephew (Rospigliosi) and Cardinals Chigi, Azzolini and Albizzi, with Mgr Baldeschi as secretary. For the first time Holt expressed the fear that Philip Howard OP might be made a Vicar Apostolic.72 Then, on 26 May, he wrote to William Pulton, a chapterman,

68 69 70 71 72

WA xxxii, 701. WA xxxiii, 5, 7. WA xxxiii, 33, 35, 37. PRO 31/9/130 (Barb. 8620), 13 Nov. 1668. WA xxxiii, 39, 45.

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telling him of an interview with the Protector, who had recently received a letter from George Leyburne: His Eminence is hard to be persuaded but that there be some favourers of Mr Blaclo amongst us. I think it were good to contrive a letter of Vindication drawn out of the Encyclical and Manifest [two pamphlets in the controversy between Dr Leyburne and the chapter],73 comparing also Mr. Geo. Leyburne to Mr. Geo. Blackwell [the Archpriest], who in like manner slandered as schismatics all who would not permit him dominari in clero.74 After the Congregation had met at the end of July, Holt wrote a long, sad letter to Dean Ellis on the failure of his mission: after the meeting, the Protector and Assessors had called him into the room and had told him they could not take away the President of Douay’s authority because he was old, had served the Church long and had suffered much for religion, and had formerly been liked by the clergy. The Congregation also raised objections against the Dean and chapter, ‘a quell Capitulo noi non approviamo qui’; but, added Holt, ‘so long as there’s no judicial act of reprobation I hope words will not put us in any confusion’. The Protector told Holt that Airoldi, the new Brussels internuncio, would examine the business of Douay but that Abbot Montagu ‘had refused to meddle in our concern of the College by reason that it seemed a business of intrigue’.75 On 11 August Holt reported a further interview with the Protector, ‘who seeming conscious of breaking our heads, pretended a desire to give us a plaster i.e. to find some person who should be (as he termed it) indifferent, neither too much Jesuited nor too much the contrary’. When the Assessor put forward the name of Philip Howard OP, Holt, who suspected William Leslie behind the proposal, became angry. ‘What I replied I conceive not fit to set down here, but ‘twas so home and in so plain terms, that not only put him to silence, but moved the Cardinal to take my part and bid him hold his peace of the point till we made instance.’ Holt felt there was very little point in staying on longer in Rome and asked for his recall.76 Holt need not, in fact, have been so disparaging about the efforts of the Congregation. As early as April 1668 it had dispatched a long and detailed appreciation of the English situation to the internuncio at Brussels. Apparently Leyburne had

73 i.e. An Encyclical Epistle sent to their Brethren by the Venerable Dean and chapter of the Catholic Clergy in England, upon occasion of Dr Leyburn (1660; BL 3935. b. 33/1); and A Manifest Publisht to their Brethren by the General chapter of the English Clergy in Vindication of their Innocency from the False Calumnies laid upon them in a Seditious Libel lately publisht by Dr. Leyburn (1661; BL 701. h. 4/8). 74 WA xxxiii, 47. The letter is addressed care of Daniel Arthur, the Irish Catholic merchant of Lothbury, London. 75 WA xxxiii, 87. 76 WA xxxiii. 93.

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written to Rome in favour of a Vicar Apostolic with the title as in Holland, to be followed by the appointment of a Prefect of the Mission with twelve assistants in various parts of the country (or alternatively, the dissolution of the present chapter and the erection of a new one). The Congregation had considered Leyburne’s proposals exhaustively with arguments pro and con. In principle it favoured the appointment of a Vicar Apostolic, who must be moderate and prudent – the painful experience with Richard Smith of Chalcedon was ruefully recalled. Such an authority was necessary to restore order and discipline among the clergy (the idea of an Archpriest was ruled out), and to obviate the necessity and expense of maintaining a series of Agents, procurators and ‘sollecitatori’ at Rome.77 The Congregation had weighed the risks involved: it was not thought that such an appointment would increase the persecution against Catholics. As for the King, information from various sources indicated that he was not opposed to the idea in principle, but wished the matter to be deferred to a more favourable opportunity. As for Dr Leyburne at Douay, Holt’s complaints had clearly made some impression. Leyburne’s good faith was not put in question, but the internuncio was instructed to see if he could persuade him to retire on grounds of age and come to live in Rome, with the proviso that his nephew John Leyburne should succeed him in the Presidency.78 Although Holt did not know of all this, it says little for his capacities as a diplomatist that he had placed at the head of a list of possible successors to Leyburne which he gave to the Assessor on 5 June the names of Thomas Shepherd and Edward Lutton, two men whom Leyburne had ejected from the College.79 However, despite all rebuffs from the Congregation, Holt continued his campaign against Leyburne, his main policy now being to bring the question of Douay into the international field, and to try to set the French interest against the Spanish.80 As for the question of a bishop, Holt’s suspicions began to increase that Philip Howard OP was the coming candidate. On 8 September he wrote to John Leyburne (now secretary of the chapter) deploring any suggestion that the Queen should urge Howard’s candidature. John Leyburne evidently reproved Holt for so bluntly discountenancing the Assessor’s suggestion of Howard, but Holt was unrepentant.81 Howard had in fact already, on 3 July, written to William Leslie proposing himself as the most suitable person to be Vicar Apostolic, since the Queen, whose Grand Almoner he was, was entitled to a bishop under the terms of the marriage treaty. He also proposed that Rome should establish an arbiter between Sergeant

77 Holt himself suggested that the money spent at Rome on the Agency (he was in debt for some 5,000 or 6,000 crowns at that moment) would be better spent to begin ‘a little foundation at Paris’ (WA xxxiii, 99). It might also have been spent to help the precarious finances at Douay and to train priests for the mission. 78 PRO 31/9/99, 150–61. 79 WA xxxiii, 170. 80 WA xxxiii, 113. 81 WA xxxiii, 105–6.

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and George Leyburne.82 Meanwhile John Leyburne had been sounding the chaptermen outside London as to their feelings about Howard’s candidature.83 Holt strongly disapproved of this procedure and insisted on official instructions in writing from the Dean and Secretary before he approached the Protector concerning Philip Howard: ‘I admire [i.e. am surprised at] your order [i.e. method] of petitioning for a bishop. . . . [W]e must have the King’s consent and something to show for it. . . . [T]o demand such a thing is to seek the ruin of the clergy.’ John Leyburne’s letters to him are ‘set to so melancholy a tune that they only add to my distracted thoughts’. ‘Is it come to polling,’ he asks, ‘whether we shall have a clergy or no clergy. ‘Tis high time for me to retire for . . . I had rather live a saint in my own country than be buried amongst the saints in a strange soil. You have a mind to try my fidelity, and I to live and die a true clergy-man.’84 But despite Holt’s disapproval, Howard’s candidature was considered as likely in many quarters. Indeed, Ralph Sheldon, arriving in Rome with Lord Lumley in January 1669, recorded in his diary the gossip he had picked up from Pendrick and Holt himself: ‘Mr Howard, Lord Almoner to the Queen endeavours in the Propaganda Fide to be made Bishop in England: Mr Leslie his agent’.85 Cosimo de Medici, visiting England in the spring of the same year, stressed the necessity of some authority to put an end to the dissensions and disorders amongst the clergy: To settle the differences at once, it has been wished at Rome to consecrate, as titular bishop in England, some ecclesiastic of integrity and talent, a native of the kingdom, who may watch over the missions in the same manner as is done in Holland. For this purpose they cast their eye upon Philip Howard, Grand Almoner to the Queen, having ascertained that the King was in no way averse from such a step; but the affairs of the kingdom being in a condition not very favourable to the Catholics, owing to the inveteracy of the Parliament, it was thought unseasonable, and was judged more prudent, the same having been hinted by the King, to put off the execution of such a proceeding to some other more favourable opportunity. In the meantime, the Bishops of Ireland perform the episcopal functions for the benefit of the Catholics, and come over occasionally to exercise their charge in the best manner in their power.86 The appointment of six Irish Bishops in the course of the first half of 166987 gave some grounds for hope that Propaganda was prepared to take some action in relation to England. Holt’s decision to stay on in Rome during the summer heats

82 83 84 85 86 87

CRS Vol. XXV, 45 sq. WA xxxiii, 135, 139, 145, 147, 153, 181. WA xxxiii, 188, 197. Bodley’s Library MS Wood B. 14. f. 61r. Travels of Cosmo the Third (London 1821), pp. 461 sq. W.M. Brady, The Episcopal Succession (Rome 1876), Vol. I, pp. 227, 239, 336; Vol. II, pp. 25, 145.

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was partly actuated by the fear that Propaganda might do something without his knowing it. He maintained his policy of urging the appointment of an Ordinary from the ranks of the chapter, and he seemed to have hopes of favourable treatment from Mgr Baldeschi, secretary of the English Congregation.88 In fact, for a short time he thought that he had succeeded in his efforts. On 27 July he wrote to Pulton: My chief request of us having an absolute ordinary is granted, but the difficulty will be in pitching upon a person. Wherefore orders are sent to Sigr. Agretti to come over to you to take information in that point. His instructions are to apply himself to the Venice Ambassador. Here are also come two letters, one from Mr. P.H. [Philip Howard], another from Archbishop Talbot, both speaking very honourably of our chapter, but the latter recommending the former as most fit for our superior. But if you carry our business well he may be Bishop and we have an ordinary besides. But you see ‘tis necessary to make friends with the Venetian Ambassador, with Sigr Agretti and with our own Court, and get recommendation. I have brought things to this posture treating nakedly without all manner of assistance, but to end all well you must play sure cards.89 But these hopes were based on faulty information and wishful thinking, and Holt’s feelings of triumph soon subsided, as he found that the Congregation were not so tractable as he had thought. The letter to which he refers from Peter Talbot, Archbishop of Dublin, recommending the appointment of Philip Howard, so far from ‘speaking very honourably of our chapter’, had recommended that the chapter be declared null.90 As for Agretti’s mission, we shall return to that in a moment. Meanwhile Holt turned his attention again to the Douay Presidency. On 10 August he wrote to John Leyburne: ‘As for the Presidentship, had a person of your worth and abilities accepted it seven years ago, it had been the greatest good to our body imaginable.’ But now, he says, the affair is delayed because the nuncio and internuncio cannot agree on a nomination, and ‘as for the Protector, he grumbles and shuffles as much as ever’.91 By September George Leyburne had submitted to the Protector, Cardinal Francesco Barberini, the names of possible successors to himself at Douay. Holt on principle raised objections with Propaganda to every nominee of Leyburne’s92 and asked the chapter to supply him with detailed information against them: Honest friends here judge it necessary to us, if any be made at the Doctor’s recommendation, immediately to oppose him. For they cannot eas88 89 90 91 92

WA xxxiii, 249, 251. WA xxxiii, 253. W.M. Brady, Vol. III, pp. 106–7. WA xxxiii, 257, 259, 263. WA xxxiii, 273.

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ily imagine him such a fool as not to name a worse and more troublesome person than himself, to the end he may have play against us, and say we are content with none but Blackloists, whose ashes he strives to keep above ground. Holt maintained that the Protector’s attitude was motivated by anti-French policy. The Protector, he says, is resolved ‘to mine our College, chiefly because ‘tis under France. I say he will do his utmost to destroy it except his Most Christian Majesty or his Ministers protect us. . . . If France approve in our cause Barberini’s malice cannot hurt us’; otherwise, he continued, ‘Barberini’s malice will sink us to the bottom. . . . [M]ethinks the French should not permit a Spanish Internunce to put a Spaniard into a frontier town to be President in a College.’93 In September 1669, Agretti, Minister Apostolic in Belgium, arrived in England from Brussels to report on the situation.94 In October Holt warned the chapter to beware of Agretti: ‘He is a thorough-paced Jesuit, and the Internunce little better. Take heed of them.’95 He warned the chapter not to desert the Dean or permit of his removal: And pray take example from the Hollanders who, though they admit the Vicar as an extraordinary person, yet conserve divers Chapters, and permit the Vicar to meddle only as much as they please. I say let us imitate them in conserving our Chapter, not in admitting a Vicar. They know Mr. Dean is a person beyond exception and therefore conclude that if he were removed the rest of the building would fall. Pray observe that Agretti’s business is but to feel your pulses, as Panzani’s was before him, and then give a relation hither. Yet they [the Jesuits] vexed him [Panzani] so, that his relation yet extant in the Propaganda is totally against them and favourable to our predecessors.’96 This last remark is a reasonable indication that Holt was getting access to Propaganda Archives, perhaps through William Leslie the archivist. Meanwhile Leyburne decided to come to Rome.97 On the news of his arrival there in November, Holt, perhaps frightened of what had happened in the days of the Appellants, burned most of his correspondence from the chapter. Holt met Leyburne and reported that he ‘spoke pretty civilly’ and that he said he was for the ‘old way of our ancestors, for the old clergy’ and that he wanted to be rid of the burden of the Presidency.98 But one of the consequences of his visit, accord-

93 94 95 96 97 98

WA xxxiii, 277, 5 Oct. 1669. W.M. Brady, Vol. III, pp. 107 sq. WA xxxiii, 289, letter to Pulton. WA xxxiii, 297. PRO 31/9/137, letter to Barberini 26 Sept. 1669. WA xxxiii, 301.

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ing to Holt, was that he succeeded in clearing himself in the eyes of the Protector from the charges which the chapter had made against him, with the result that the Protector cooled markedly towards Holt.99 In order to secure peace between the London chapter and the rest of the clergy, Dr Leyburne resigned the Presidency of Douay at the end of 1669, and early in the new year his nephew John Leyburne was appointed in his place by the internuncio.100 However, before the arrival in Rome of Agretti’s report on the English situation, which favoured (with reservations) the appointment of Howard as Vicar Apostolic, Clement IX died on 9 December 1669, and affairs were once more at a standstill.

The Agency of Thomas Forbes Holt stayed in Rome to see the new Pope, Clement X, elected on 29 April 1670, but he was determined to give up his Agency. He recommended Thomas Forbes to continue it for the chapter as he was ‘the only person here that understands our state and condition . . . ‘tis true Mr. Leslie is his friend and comrade, but Mr. Leslie desires his judgement much, and he tells him freely of his folly and weakness’.101 Thomas Forbes, second son of the first Protestant Bishop of Edinburgh, had gone from Aberdeen to the Scots College, Rome, in 1646. He had left the College after three years without taking Holy Orders, and entered the service of Cardinal Barberini. He was frequently employed by foreigners to do business for them at the Roman Court, and he died in Rome a wealthy man in 1711.102 Forbes’s first extant letter to the chapter (addressed to William Sacarville, i.e. Pulton, who was temporary secretary since John Leyburne’s appointment to Douay) is dated 3 July 1670. He reported that Holt had left Rome three weeks before. Howard had been proposed as an ordinary and as archbishop, and Agretti had told Propaganda that the chapter did not really want a bishop. Forbes asked whether he should insist on an ordinary or concede to a Vicar Apostolic.103 The letter must have gotten through quickly, for on 22 July, Pulton replied that Forbes might accept an ordinary by delegation, provided that the power of an ordinary was amply expressed in the appointment.104 On 5 August Holt himself sent his advice to Forbes: (i) if Howard were appointed he should have ordinary jurisdiction; (ii) Howard should have the title of an archbishop in partibus, or at least of a bishop; (iii) on no account should Howard be a Vicar Apostolic; (iv) the chapter must retain the right to nominate its own members, for ‘should we admit either of your court or even the bishop to name or make our chaptermen, we might quickly

99 100 101 102 103 104

WA xxxiii, 307. PRO 31/9/99, 219, 227. WA xxxiii, 433. M.V. Hay, Failure in the Far East (Wetteren [Belgium] 1956), p. 61, n.l. WA xxxiii, 493. WA xxxiii, 503.

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have a chapter of regulars and our body be destroyed’.105 On 30 August Forbes reported to Pulton that Dr Leyburne was no longer of much influence in Rome and that the Protector was tired of him. The Jesuits had put in a memorial to Baldeschi saying that the appointment of a Bishop was inopportune, but if there had to be one, then it should be Dr Leyburne.106 On 9 September the Congregation for English affairs met and decided on the appointment of Howard as Vicar Apostolic of all England, provided the Pope would consent.107 Their deliberations were kept as secret as possible. ‘I have never seen . . . any business so closely clasped’, wrote Forbes.108 However, within a month, he was able to send the chapter an account of the Congregation’s deliberations: Not without great pains and importuning my friends here have I got at the last a copy of what Baldeschi in his audience two days only ago said to the Pope concerning what had been resolved a month ago in the Congregation. I send it you here enclosed, but I request you make your use wisely and discreetly of it, lest it being discovered here my friend should suffer for it.109 Meanwhile Airoldi, the Brussels internuncio, had been sent to England by Cardinal Altieri (Prefect of Propaganda) to report on the state of affairs there at first hand.110 On 28 October Holt wrote to Forbes to say that he had heard from Airoldi that Forbes had proposed to Baldeschi: (i) that the chapter were content that the election of a bishop should be made by the Pope; (ii) that the nomination of the chief chaptermen should also be made by the Pope; (iii) that the chapter were agreeable to subscribe to an anti-Blacklo formula.111 Forbes in his turn complained to Holt that Baldeschi had become aware of a leakage of information in Propaganda; when Airoldi arrived in England he had been surprised to find that the chapter knew all about the special Congregation of 9 September, and had reported the leakage to Baldeschi, who traced the source to Forbes’s informant, a certain clerk in Propaganda called Giovanni Battista. Fortunately the clerk had in fact been dismissed two days previously for another offence: ‘This was a particular providence for me, for if the Internunce his letter had come sooner, undoubtedly the said Giovanni Battista had been put away upon this other cause, which had been an unspeakable grief to me.’112

105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112

WA xxxiii, 511. WA xxxiii, 523. W.M. Brady, op. cit., Vol. III, p. 118. WA xxxiii, 541. WA xxxiii, 545. His report is in Brady, Vol. III, p. 119 sq. WA xxxiii, 557. WA xxxiii, 695, letter of 3 Jan. 1671.

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Propaganda was concerned also at this time with a parallel problem in Holland. In September 1670 John Neercassel, the Vicar Apostolic of Utrecht, had set out for Rome to defend his position in relation to the conflict between the secular and regular missionaries. In a sermon at Utrecht, announcing his departure, he had told his congregation that he had no acquaintances or friends at Rome except a single Scots priest – in other words, William Leslie, Agent for the Dutch and Scots clergy.113 Neercassel had been informed by Cosimo de Medici of the state of affairs in England, and pointed the moral that one of the effects of the lack of a bishop in England was that the missionaries left the country stations and flocked to London.114 Neercassel arrived in Rome at the end of November 1670;115 early in 1671, Holt wrote to Forbes: ‘Dr Leyburne persuades his Lordship [Howard] that his presence would do much in that Court because the Bishop of Holland is like to do great matters. But I believe as you say, that he makes but a povera figura’.116 Forbes indeed saw Neercassel’s case as a warning for England: ‘The Vicar Apostolic of Holland here, for so they call him here and never Bishop, is so tossed betwixt the Fathers his adversaries and the Congregation of Propaganda that I am sure that such a title and delegate power will never be accepted of by any that sees and hears how this Prelate has been both in his own country and here persecuted by his adversaries and ill protected by those who would make the world believe that they are the upholders of episcopacy.’117 Nonetheless, Forbes took the pains to transmit to the chapter the decrees of Propaganda relating to Dutch affairs;118 and indeed Neercassel returned to his own country well satisfied with what he had achieved in Rome. The question of Howard’s appointment dragged on. In November 1671 Forbes reported to Holt the substance of a conversation with Baldeschi before a meeting of the special Congregation for English affairs. Baldeschi had said that Howard was to have the same faculties as Chalcedon, but somewhat restricted so far as the

113 ‘Ik tot Romen geen kennis off vrienden heb, als eenen enckelen Schotsen priester’. See F. van Hoeck SJ, ‘Eenige Bijzonderheden over . . . Neercassels Reis naar Rome in 1670’, Archief voor de Geschiedenis van het Aartsbisdom Utrecht, Vol. III (1926), p. 255. 114 F. van Hoeck SJ, ‘Eenige Bijzonderheden over . . . Neercassels Reis naar Rome in 1670’, Archief voor de Geschiedenis van het Aartsbisdom Utrecht, Vol. III (1926), p. 257. See also G.J. Hoogewerf, ‘Twee Reizen van Cosimo de Medici Prins van Toscane door de Nederlanden 1667–1669’, in Historisch Genootschap (te Utrecht), 3e Serie no. 41 (Amsterdam 1919), pp. 62, 319. 115 For a fuller account of his mission, see R.R. Post, ‘De Apostolische Vicaris Johannes Neercassel naar Rome’, Mededeelingen van het Nederlandsch Historisch Instituut te Rome, 2e reeks, Deel IV (1934), pp. 97–132. 116 WA xxxiii, 607. 117 WA xxxiii, 609. 118 WA xxxiii, 621, 657, Decree on the Affairs of Holland 10 March 1671. Also in WA xxxiii, at ff. 625 and 633, there are Propaganda documents relating to Dutch ecclesiastical affairs of 1623, especially the conflict with the Jesuits. It is possible that these were collected by Bishop Richard Smith at the time and have been misbound in the present volume.

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regulars were concerned: ‘I told him that I believed my Lord Almoner would not accept the restriction since all Bishops everywhere have an illimited power over regulars’.119 Still nothing happened, and by January 1672 Forbes suggested that one of the reasons for the delay might be that Rome was waiting for the outcome of the Duke of York’s marriage negotiations.120 The chapter met in April 1672. Among their resolutions it was ‘unanimously agreed not to admit the title of Vicar Apostolic as a thing of great danger in many respects. . . . ’Twas judged also unanimously not to be in the power of a new Bishop to dissolve the chapter.’121 Meanwhile Forbes had been keeping his ear close to the ground in Rome. At the end of April he reported that ‘Baldeschi was very busy seeking out in the Propaganda a copy of the faculties they use to give Apostolic Vicars’.122 On 7 May he informed Holt that the Congregation had ordered the internuncio to call Howard over to Flanders to consecrate him ‘with such faculties as Calcedon had under the name of Vicar Apostolic’, but that nothing was decided concerning the status of the chapter. Forbes advised that one of the chapter should go over to Flanders with Howard to hinder the title of Vicar Apostolic being imposed.123 On 20 August Forbes wrote again, but in much stronger terms: the Congregation, he said, intended to make Howard a petty Apostolic Vicar, with so limitate and subordinate a power to Baldeschi that it would neither be his [Howard’s] nor your honour nor the good of the Catholic faith there to admit an imaginary episcopal character without an ordinary, stable and illimitated jurisdiction. Besides, if you once admit this slavery, you will never be able to get out of it, for this court aims at nothing else but to make you altogether dependent even in trifles from the Congregation of the Propaganda, that is to say from Baldeschi.124 In fact, the special Congregation for England had decreed Howard’s appointment as Bishop in partibus and Vicar Apostolic of England on 26 April, and on the following day the Pope had given his approval without the matter going to the General Congregation. Howard’s briefs were issued on 16 and 17 May and despatched to the Brussels internuncio with instructions to use his discretion in putting them into effect.125

119 120 121 122 123 124 125

WA xxxiii, 689. WA xxxiv, 5. WA xxxiv, 57. WA xxxiv, 49. WA xxxiv, 59. WA xxxiv, 89. W.M. Brady, Vol. III, pp. 128–9; Hierarchia Catholica . . . 1667–1730, ed. R. Ritzler and P. Sefrin (Patavii 1952), Vol. V, p. 217.

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Two days before Howard’s briefs were issued at Rome, Airoldi, the Brussels internuncio, had written to Baldeschi expressing his reluctance for any positive decision about a Bishop for England in view of the whole background of the Dutch War and the effect of the Declaration of Indulgence in England. He was awaiting a letter from a person of credit in London before coming to a definite decision.126 This person was Lord Clifford of Chudleigh, who had been, until the previous year, still toying with oath formulas. (Clifford’s adviser was Serenus Cressy OSB. Cressy had proposed that several Vicars Apostolic be appointed, and that these, with the priors and superiors of the regular orders, should constitute a synod. As a temporary expedient Cressy suggested a Court of Commission under the presidency of the Queen’s Lord Almoner, i.e. Howard, to carry on ecclesiastical government and preserve unity until a Bishop was appointed.) Clifford, who knew the terms of the Secret Treaty of Dover, advised the internuncio against the consecration of Howard at that particular juncture.127 It is quite understandable that the King would have wished Airoldi to withhold Howard’s briefs. The Dutch War was coming to an end, and the Declaration of Indulgence would be more difficult to maintain. The situation in Ireland was far from satisfactory; Berkeley had had to be replaced by Essex; the admission of Catholics to the corporations was causing trouble; and the activities of Archbishop Talbot and Oliver Plunket had already come under fire in the House of Commons.128 At the same time, despite opposition from Ormonde and his group, Charles was feeling his way towards establishing a firm French alliance, and he had to convince Louis XIV and Colbert that he was seriously intending to declare himself a Catholic and that he was prepared to make secret enquiries about Catholic tenets to satisfy his conscience.129 Charles was prepared to play that sort of game to the very end; but if an English Catholic Bishop had been appointed at that critical juncture, and there had been an outcry against his arrival in England (which the chapter would surely have made public), Charles would have been compelled to disown him, and all his diplomatic manoeuvres would have come to nothing. 126 PRO 31/9/99, 306. 127 Brady, Vol. III, p. 129; C.H. Hartman, Clifford of the Cabal (London 1937), Ch. XI. The internuncio must also have had a secret interview with Arlington during the latter’s embassy in the Low Countries. Research by the present writer has failed to bring to light any official reference to the meeting. On 9/19 July, Arlington, Buckingham and Halifax met Monterey in the convent of the English Carmelite nuns at Antwerp – it is possible that the interview with the internuncio may have taken place there. But the mention in the expense account of the embassy of the payment of £200 to the Abbess of Ghent may suggest that Ghent was the rendezvous – it would, of course, have had to be kept secret from Halifax. See PRO SP 84/190, 46, 165. 128 Journals of the House of Commons, Vol. IX, pp. 203–4. 129 V. Barbour, Henry Bennet Earl of Arlington (Washington 1914), pp. 178, 189; PRO 31/3/127 Baschet Trans. Arch. Aff. Étr. Angleterre: no. 103 f. 184, Colbert to Louis XIV, London 11 April 1672; no. 104 f. 211, same to same, London 9 May 1672.

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Forbes had assiduously collected and forwarded to Holt all the information he could obtain concerning the activities of Propaganda relating to the question of a Bishop for England and the status of the London chapter. One of the most interesting documents is a long memorandum by Baldeschi which Holt translated into English.130 Baldeschi urged the necessity of a Bishop for discipline and for authority over the regulars. The only suitable candidate was Howard, who had been recommended by the Grand Duke of Tuscany; the Brussels internuncio, Airoldi; the Minister Apostolic, Agretti; and Oliver Plunket the Archbishop of Armagh. The chapter, through their Agent, had now also put him forward as Bishop, though before they had seemed averse to his exaltation. The Bishop should not be an Ordinary: in this Baldeschi agreed with the Cardinals. An Ordinary would arouse the jealousy of the Protestant Bishops ‘and irritate them as if some novelty were a-plotting’. Howard should therefore be made a Vicar Apostolic, ‘from whom you [the Cardinals of Propaganda] may arbitrarily either take away or moderate the authority’. As to Howard’s powers, Baldeschi urged the Cardinals to consider if those must be limited which are wont to be granted to Apostolic Vicars, and in what your Eminences may consider according to the dictamens of your prudence, and especially if [it] be convenient to tie his hands in such a fashion that he be hindered from confirming the Chapter or troubling unduly the Regulars; and the dextrous manner which must be observed in doing this, that neither he nor the Secular ecclesiastics be aware of it, nor take offence: a point that hath need of particular advertence, the Agent of the Clergy having divulged here that if the Bishop which is to be made shall not be furnished at least with the same authority formerly granted to the Bishops of Calcedon, that he would neither be received nor obeyed. Baldeschi turned then to the question of the chapter. Agretti and others had reported adversely on it; the chapter did not deserve to be confirmed as they had pretended to themselves jurisdiction and authority sede vacante which other chapters have, but knowing that they were not confirmed by the Holy See. The chapter had given faculties to administer parochial sacraments and given authority to Aubigny to perform the Royal marriage. Agretti had said that this should be borne in mind when considering the nullity of the chapter acts. Agretti had also reported that the chapter were willing to subscribe to a declaration of obedience to the Holy See and to a rejection of Blacklo’s doctrine, but that such a declaration could not be made public. ‘Neither are the offers of blind obedience to be relied on whilst ‘tis seen in effect that their conceived hatred against the President of Douay to have proceeded in great measure because he would have obliged the Alumni to

130 WA xxxiv, 99 and 103 sq. In subsequent quotations we have used the wording of Holt’s rather literal translation.

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have sworn obedience to the orders of this Holy See.’ Howard, the Jesuit Provincial and others had advised that the chapter should be declared null: Justice persuades it and every other consideration seems to oblige us to do it. But for the time of executing it, almost all concur in the opinion that it be deferred, because we are to deal in a case of disorder and long continued abuse, for the removing of which the time is to be sought. And also a dexterity, not to cause by the remedy greater disorders than spring from the abuse itself; as also there seems danger of the Chaptermen’s not obeying, whence might spring great tumults, knowing the adherents they have amongst the ecclesiastics and secular [i.e. laity], which last induced by kindred and friendship, and the first by interest, by reason of the Chapter’s having the management of a certain fund left for ecclesiastics, and that they distribute it amongst their adherents; neither would it contribute to destroy that boldness wherewith they act, or that which follows, viz. the opposition of Regulars. Much more for sustaining their authority the Queen should [i.e. would] interest herself, for not to put in doubt the validity of her marriage, unto which . . . acted as . . . parish priest one deputed by the Chapter. Moreover, to provide not only against old disorders, and hinder that new ones spring not up, but also to smooth or facilitate the way for the declarations of this court, by the nullity of the Chapter, there seems to be no better way than to make a Bishop. This makes the authority of the Chapters legally instituted to cease; much more would it make the usurped authority of these English priests to cease; it being to be hoped that the management of their fund left for ecclesiastics, notwithstanding the opposition of the Chaptermen, would in a like progress of time fall into the Bishop’s hand. By which means he would fortify himself and his party and weaken that of the Capitulars, towards whom he might proceed afterwards with greater severity; when they by being accustomed to obey the Bishops, which the King said he would oblige them to do, that haughtiness or pride being laid aside which is proper to their nation, and which is increased in them by the long exercise of an usurped authority.131 There is little wonder that Forbes now called Baldeschi ‘a most wicked enemy of the Clergy’ saying, ‘he is a fellow that cares neither for God nor man, but so far as either interest or ambition permits him. So long as he is in charge we can expect no good.’132

131 WA xxxiv, 103–6. The part of Baldeschi’s report relating to Douay College is unfortunately missing. 132 WA xxxiv, 121. Forbes to Holt 24 Dec. 1672.

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In April 1673 Baldeschi became assessor of the Holy Office, and Mgr Urban Cerri succeeded him in Propaganda. But Baldeschi took with him the affair of the English bishop and chapter.133 The See of Helenopolis i. p. i. was kept vacant for Howard till 1673, when it was disposed of to another.134 But after 1672 the practicability of a bishop for England receded more and more until the accession of James II.135 Howard was made Cardinal in May 1675. On 25 July he wrote to William Leslie at Propaganda, thanking him, rather smugly, for his congratulations on the promotion, ‘there having been so little of human interest engaged to produce this change, I may with you look upon it as coming from the hand of God in a particular manner’.136

Some comments and conclusions We have given this history of the negotiations at some length, with extensive quotations from hitherto unpublished documents, in order to enable the reader to form his own judgment, not only as to the course of events, but also as to the emotional tone and intentions of the participants. But perhaps it may not be amiss to attempt some general observations of our own. The chapter must have been quite out of touch with reality if they thought that their repeated insistence on an Ordinary would be accepted. Nowhere in the negotiations is there any sign that Propaganda were thinking of anything else but a Vicar Apostolic. When one Agent, Dr Gage, had the sense to report that Propaganda were prepared to grant a Vicar Apostolic and advocated the acceptance of that as a compromise, he was at once recalled by John Sergeant, the Secretary of the chapter. Time and again we find outside observers interpreting the chapter’s intransigence as implying that the chapter did not really want a Bishop at all. The Agency was bedevilled by having more than one objective. The question of a Bishop seems to have been subsidiary in the mind of the chapter to two other considerations: the confirmation and authority of the chapter itself, and the removal of Dr George Leyburne from Douay. The quarrel with Dr Leyburne makes very painful reading indeed. Apart from the doctrinal controversy concerning ‘Blackloism’ there can be little doubt that the Civil Wars left deep wounds among the clergy. In 1647 and again in 1649 and 1655, the London chapter were toying with the idea of submission to the Independents and to Cromwell, and it was Dr Leyburne who stood in their way. At the Restoration the situation was a little ironical, for it was the chapter who were the advocates of the Oath of Allegiance to Charles II. After the Restoration, one of the

133 WA xxxiv, 189, Forbes to Holt 1 April 1673: ‘The affair of the Bishop and chapter are still in Baldeschi’s hand, for which I am heartily sorry’; see also Brady, Vol. III, p. 130. 134 Hierarchia Catholica, Vol. V, p. 217. 135 For the subsequent period see B. Hemphill OSB, The Early Vicars Apostolic of England 1685– 1750 (London 1954). 136 CRS XXV (1925), p. 67.

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main objects of the chapter’s policy was to break the credit of Dr Leyburne and to undermine his authority at Douay. Some of the complaints that were sent in to Rome have to be seen to be believed, so petty and trivial are they. An instance of Dr Leyburne’s brutality was that he had turned a boy out of the sanatorium who had become sick through smoking tobacco (admittedly, on doctor’s orders)! An instance of his maladministration was that he had ordered English troops visiting the College to be served with wine instead of beer, and on another occasion he had quarrelled with the Procurator over whether the students should have two barrels of strong beer or three of weak!137 When eventually Leyburne expelled two of the College staff, Thomas Shepherd and Edward Lutton, for consistent mischief-making among the staff and students and attempting to undermine his authority by appealing directly to the chapter, it was precisely those two names that the chapter had the impudence to suggest to the Protector as possible successors to Leyburne in the Presidentship. Of course Leyburne was old and obstinate and quick-tempered, with the tongue and pen of a blunt north countryman, but the way in which the chapter badgered and baited him and sacrificed the well-being of Douay to their own personal animosity makes most unedifying reading. The continuance of a certain chapter policy is maintained in a fairly consistent chain. John Sergeant, pupil and supporter of Blacklo, is Secretary of the chapter from 1655 till 1667, and the principal adviser in the day-to-day policy of the Agents. When the moderate John Leyburne is appointed Secretary, Holt, then Agent, seems to correspond more freely with John Singleton (the Treasurer) and William Pulton, two chaptermen who favour Sergeant’s policy. Then the intransigent Holt himself becomes Secretary, and corresponds with his successor and nominee, the new Agent Thomas Forbes. How far, then, the policy of the London chapter was truly representative of the secular clergy as a whole, and how far of a very small clique, is an important consideration which any future historian of English Catholicism in the seventeenth century will have to consider, though it is outside the scope of the present article. There was one period when the appointment of a bishop seemed definitely practicable, and that was directly after the Restoration. The failure then was due to a variety of reasons. The candidature of two obvious figures, Dr Leyburne and Abbot Montagu, was blocked by the chapter because of the loyalty of these two men to the Stuarts during the Civil War. The candidature of the compromise figure, Henry Taylor, was blocked by the personal intervention of Queen Henrietta Maria. Aubigny’s candidature is said to have failed because of his suspected Jansenism, but that is not the whole story. The entire project was ruined because the chapter allowed itself to play Clarendon’s game in the matter of discriminatory (i.e. anti-Jesuit) penal legislation, protestations of allegiance and proposals for reunion-all-round. (Of course the chapter were not the only dabblers in this kind of thing. On the question of the Oath of Allegiance they were greatly influenced

137 WA xxxiv, 27.

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by Peter Walsh and his Irish associates. Santa Clara OFM, and Cressy OSB – a former member of Clarendon’s circle – were also fascinated by plans for reunion.) Indeed the situation became so dangerous that Abbot Montagu urged Propaganda not to condemn the Irish Remonstrance of 1662 (which the chapter had endorsed), in case this would provoke its imposition on both English and Irish Catholics as a Government reprisal.138 Clarendon and Ormonde had an almost pathological dislike of Catholicism; one cannot help feeling that the series of discussions after the Restoration relating to the removal of the Penal Laws, and the Bellings mission, were never meant to succeed, and were initiated by them purely for the purpose of causing fresh divisions among the Catholics. With Clarendon out of the way in 1667, and Ormonde temporarily in eclipse, there might have been another chance. Certainly, the radical renovation of the Irish hierarchy in 1669 raised high hopes, though Archbishop Peter Talbot showed himself a very poor judge of character in putting so much trust in the good offices of a man like Buckingham.139 If the affair of an English bishop had speedily been brought to a conclusion in 1669 it might have had a chance of succeeding. But the obstacles then were the long-drawn-out quarrel over the Douay Presidency and the obduracy of the Agent, Holt, in refusing to countenance the candidature of Howard. By the time that Dr Leyburne had resigned from Douay, and Baldeschi had got the affair of the Vicar Apostolic of Holland out of the way and could concentrate on England, the political opportunity had slipped by. It may be tempting to lay the blame for the troubles of the Church on the Roman Curia. My personal impression, however, is that Propaganda comes out of this particular piece of history quite well. In the space of ten years it sent three emissaries140 to report on the state of English affairs at first hand – de Vechii in 1662, Agretti in 1669, and Airoldi in 1670. When one looks at the extreme divergence of the reports and complaints sent in to Propaganda by the English themselves, one can only admire its patience. It went slowly to work, to be sure, and the longwindedness of its memoranda sometimes makes tedious reading, but its primary concern was the salvation of souls. It was prepared to tolerate a situation that, canonically speaking, was most unsatisfactory, for fear that a sudden and radical decision might either cause a schism among the English Catholics (a situation which did in fact arise in Holland at the end of the century), or else provoke increased persecution from the Government. If a criticism may be made, it is on the lack of internal security in Propaganda. The essence of diplomacy is secrecy. We have seen, however, that Forbes, the chapter Agent, was able to get hold of confidential material. The indiscretions of William Leslie, Keeper of the Propaganda Archives, have been the subject of recent study by Malcolm V. Hay.141 For the English Government, Sir Joseph Williamson had on his payroll in Rome 138 139 140 141

PRO 31/9/137 (Barb. 8659), 26 March 1664. P. Moran, Spicilegium Ossoriense (Dublin 1874), Vol. I, p. 472. Four, if one counts Dr Leyburne himself in 1660. Failure in the Far East, passim.

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the Abbate Scarlatti, secretary to Cardinal Antonio Barberini, to say nothing of a regular news service from Joseph Kent, the Consul at Leghorn, who was moved specially to Rome in 1665.142 That Baldeschi was clearly aware of the difficulty is evident from the fact that, in the matter of Howard’s briefs in May 1672, he bypassed the General Congregation altogether and took the decision of the Special Congregation direct to the Pope. His manoeuvre was successful, for as late as 12 December 1673 the chapter were in the dark about what had actually happened; Holt then wrote to Forbes: This is to desire a favour of you, if you can compass it; and ‘tis that you will be pleased to try whether you can privately get a copy of a certain Brief which (as we are informed) was made above a year ago in the Congregation. It was made for My Lord Almoner and in it some authority granted him, as a Vicar or Bishop, but what the limits of it were is unknown to him and us; a copy of it would be very acceptable to both; and that such a thing was done, is certain, as divers have asserted, both of your Court and others, though your Grandees deny any such thing now to have been done. If it could be discovered ‘twould be a great light to us how to proceed.143 Baldeschi maintained close personal supervision over the matter for as long as possible. When he became assessor to the Holy Office in 1673 he kept the affair of the Bishop and chapter in his own hands, and as late as 1677 his successor at the Propaganda, Mgr Urban Cerri, reported to Innocent XI that the Holy Office and not Propaganda were still in charge of it, in order that secrecy might be better maintained.144 In 1685 John Leyburne was eventually appointed Vicar Apostolic, and he arrived in England under oath not to recognize the chapter. Speaking of the chapter’s activities in the preceding period, Mgr Philip Hughes says that: it served as a rallying point for English Catholicism. . . . [I]t never ceased to keep before the mind of the English Catholics and of the officials in Rome, that what most of all was needed in England was the restoration of Episcopal rule. It was but justice that the chain of events which resulted in the restoration of 1685 should begin with the chapter’s activity.145 The present writer is reluctantly forced to a contrary conclusion. Far from being a rallying point for English Catholicism, the chapter was repeatedly a source of contention and strife. Indeed, one of the major factors contributing to the long delay 142 143 144 145

PRO SP 85/8, passim. WA xxxiv, 233. WA xxxiv, 189 and W.M. Brady, Vol. III, p. 130. Clergy Review (Sept. 1935), Vol. X, p. 201.

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in the appointment of a Vicar Apostolic for England was the policy and conduct of the chapter and its Agents. [The principal manuscript sources are from the Westminster Cathedral Archives (WA) and the Public Record Office (PRO). The documents at Westminster are principally from the former chapter Archives (parts of which were transferred to Westminster in the 19th century) and chiefly comprise letters from the Roman Agents and from English clergy abroad, drafts of letters from the chapter and copies of the minutes of chapter meetings. The documents in the Public Record Office consist chiefly of transcripts from Roman sources, principally the Barberini Archives. It is to be regretted, however, that the PRO lacks a full sequence of transcripts from the reports of the Brussels internuncio and the Paris nuncio for the period after the Restoration.]

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5 ROBERT PUGH, BLACKLO’S CABAL (1680)*

The first thing to be noted about this volume is the circumstances surrounding its publication in 1680. At the height of the Popish Plot, in 1679, two priests of the English Catholic secular clergy chapter, John Sergeant and David Morris, came forward in public as informers against the Jesuits, and it was evident that a small group of English secular priests hoped to obtain toleration from the government by taking the forbidden Oath of Allegiance and by agreeing to the expulsion of the Jesuits. Father John Warner SJ, the Jesuit Provincial at the time, wrote to Cardinal Howard at Rome to urge the Roman authorities to make some explicit declaration against Sergeant and his friends, for ‘not a Jesuit passes into England, that Mr Sergeant can hear of, but his name is carried to the [Privy] Council, and . . . he hath his brethren at or about the sea ports, who give him informations of such things’. It was as a measure of retaliation against this state of affairs that Warner published Blacklo’s Cabal.1 His aim was to show the consistency of the policy of a small clique within the secular clergy chapter, Thomas White (or Blacklo), Henry Holden and John Sergeant, whose aim was to bargain with the government of the day, be it Cavalier or Roundhead, to obtain toleration at the price of the exclusion of the Jesuits from England.2 * Originally published in 1970 as an ‘Introduction’ to the Gregg International reprint of Blacklo’s Cabal Discovered in Severall of Their Letters Clearly Expressing Designs Inhuman against Regulars, Uniust against the Laity, Scismatical against the Pope, Cruel against Orthodox Clergy Men and Owning the Nullity of the Chapter, Their Opposition of Episcopall Authority Published by R. Pugh I.V. Doctor (The second edition, Douay? 1680, Wing P4186). 1 See J. Warner’s, ‘History of the Popish Plot’, Catholic Record Society, Vols. XLVII–XLVIII (1953/55) and M.V. Hay, The Jesuits and the Popish Plot (London 1933). 2 The most recent study of Blacklo is R.I. Bradley’s, unpublished Ph.D. thesis (Columbia 1963); cf. his essay in From Renaissance to Counter Reformation, ed. C.H. Carter (London 1966). A chronological account of Blacklo’s life by D. Shanahan is appearing in the Essex Recusant. [Since the appearance of Birrell’s ‘Introduction’ there have been further accounts of Blacklo, notably in the ODNB and in B.C. Southgate, ‘Covetous of Truth’: The Life and Work of Thomas White, 1593–1676 (London 1993). Eds]. It is interesting to note that Sir Kenelm Digby settled an annuity of £300 p.a. on Blacklo, which passed to John Sergeant on Blacklo’s death (Barrett Papers, Berkshire Record Office). For Henry Holden, see R. Clark, Strangers and Sojoumers at Port Royal (Cambridge 1932). For Sergeant see M.V. Hay, op. cit.

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The dossier of letters that Warner published had been collected by Robert Pugh (1610–79), who had been arrested during the Plot and died in Newgate goal. The dossier had been deposited at the Jesuit College at Ghent and presumably on Pugh’s death Warner felt entitled to use it. Pugh had entered the Society of Jesus, but had been dismissed in 1645 for taking up arms in the Civil War. Though a secular clergyman, he had always been opposed to the anti-Jesuit faction in the chapter, and had always maintained that the regular clergy should be exempt from the jurisdiction of the chapter. Pugh had been friendly with Abbot Walter Montagu (1603–77), chaplain to Queen Henrietta Maria in her exile, and it was through Montagu that Pugh obtained the dossier.3 The first group of letters, from 1645 to 1653, centres round Sir Kenelm Digby and his embassy at Rome on behalf of Henrietta Maria.4 The principal object of Digby’s mission to Rome was to secure Papal aid for the English Royalists. The Papal nuncio Rinuccini had been despatched to the Irish Confederates in 1645. Digby’s primary task was to ensure that not all Papal aid went to Ireland, but that something at least went directly to England. Then, after the King’s decisive defeat at Naseby in June 1645, all efforts were directed to encouraging a compromise between the Confederacy and the Royalist army in Ireland under the Viceroy Ormond. The difficulty of the whole situation was that, while the Papacy demanded evidence of toleration of Catholicism, the King could not publicly make concessions to the Catholics without antagonizing his Protestant supporters. Furthermore, after Naseby the King was in no position to effectuate any promises he might make, even if he had wished to.5 The principal concerns of Digby’s mission hardly emerge in Blacklo’s Cabal. Instead we find some of Digby’s friends in the English secular clergy chapter using Digby’s presence in Rome to try to obtain Papal recognition of the authority of the chapter and, if possible, a bishop (or bishops) for England. Then, when the

3 An important letter by Pugh under the alias Petrus Hoburgus, an anagram for ‘Robertus Pughus’ to Cardinal Francesco Barberini, dated 13 November 1661, gives a complete survey of the troubles of the English clergy from 1633 onwards. It is printed in C. Plowden’s, Remarks on a Book Entitled Memoirs of Gregorio Panzani (Liège 1794), pp. 360–79 [reprinted as Chapter VI of the present book]. A description of Pugh in Welsh is to be found in ‘Mawl Penrhyn’ by William Pugh OSB (National Library of Wales MS 4710 B f. 335) which states, inter alia, that Pugh had been tutor to Henry Duke of Gloucester. (I owe this reference to Mr Geraint Bowen). 4 Two recent works purport to deal with this episode in Digby’s career: V. Gabrieli, Sir Kenelm Digby (Rome 1957) and R.T. Petersson, Sir Kenelm Digby (London 1956). Neither seem to have much understanding of the historical background, and the inaccuracy of Petersson is really irresponsible. That a philosophical flaneur like Digby was totally unsuited for any diplomatic mission whatsoever is well borne out by these letters. 5 The primary source for Rinuccini’s mission is of course the Commentarius Rinuccinianus now published by the Irish Historical Manuscript Commission in 6 Vols (Dublin 1932–49). M.J. Hynes, The Mission of Rinuccini (Dublin 1932) is a useful guide. The unpublished London University Ph. D. thesis 1960 by J. Lowe, ‘Negotiations between Charles I and the Confederation of Kilkenny 1642–49’, deals with Henrietta Maria, Urban VIII and Innocent X on pp. 367–408. G. Leyburne’s, Memoirs (London 1722) are especially relevant.

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royal cause is clearly lost, they veer round to try to do a deal with the Cromwellian government.6 Holden’s letters to Digby in 1649, in which he attacks George Leyburne, the Vicar General of Richard Smith, Bishop of Calcedon, and hopes that Leyburne will be arrested by the authorities, are most damning. So too are Digby’s dealings with Thomas Watson, scoutmaster to the Army, and his sycophantic pleas to the Government in 1650–2. In fact the Civil War and Commonwealth split the secular clergy chapter very bitterly. The continental exiles on the whole remained Royalist in sympathy, but there was a definite breakaway movement in England within the chapter itself, whose supporters wished to disown the authority of the exiled Vicar Apostolic, Bishop Richard Smith. After the Restoration this led to friction between the London chapter and the President of Douay, Dr George Leyburne, a staunch Royalist and supporter of Bishop Smith. The final group of letters in Blacklo’s Cabal dates from 1667. At this period there were further efforts to obtain a Catholic bishop for England. The chapter feared that George Leyburne might be appointed and did everything to make his position at Douay untenable. It would seem that the chapter were hoping for Abbot Walter Montagu as a compromise figure, but he wisely refused to be considered. On the other hand, Montagu had insisted that the chapter agent at Rome should present to the Holy See a protestation of loyalty and a disavowal of the theological unorthodoxy of Blacklo. This suggestion was frustrated by John Sergeant, the then secretary of the chapter and a staunch supporter of Blacklo. The trouble over this matter eventually forced Sergeant’s resignation as secretary.7 Lord Acton included Holden, Blacklo and Sergeant among the handful of ‘original thinkers among the English Catholics’.8 But the evidence of Blacklo’s Cabal may serve to put them in a somewhat different perspective.

6 In all fairness to the chaptermen it must be said that they were not alone in wishing to obtain toleration from the Independents at that juncture. Of course, after 30 January 1649, dealings with the Cromwellian government must be looked on in a different light. 7 See ‘English Catholics without a Bishop 1655–1672’, Chapter IV of the present book. 8 Letters of Lord Acton to Mary Gladstone (London 1904), p. 140.

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6 JOSEPH BERINGTON, THE MEMOIRS OF GREGORIO PANZANI (1793)*

‘When I succeeded, many years ago, in obtaining a copy of this remarkable book (of which I made great use in John Inglesant) I had so much difficulty in obtaining it, that I suspected the Romanists of destroying copies. . . . Reading it now, you would suppose it was written by a rabid Protestant’ (Life and Letters of J.H. Shorthouse [London 1905], p. 365). Berington’s Memoirs of Panzani, though not rabidly Protestant, is certainly the most succinct example of what one might call the Cisalpine view of English Catholic history. It is a view expressed in Charles Dodd’s Church History (1737), in Charles Butler’s Historical Memoirs (1822), in M. A. Tierney’s revision of Dodd (1839) and passim in the writings and correspondence of Lord Acton. It is a view which rests on the following propositions: (i) that under Henry VIII the breach with Rome would never have occurred but for the intransigence of the Court of Rome; (ii) that under Elizabeth I a reasonable toleration for Catholics might have been obtained but for the Papal bull Regnans in Excelsis; (iii) that under James I toleration was prevented by the Papal condemnation of the Oath of Allegiance and by Jesuit involvement in the Gunpowder Plot; (iv) that under Charles I attempts at a reunion between the Anglican and Roman Churches were frustrated by Jesuit and Papal intransigence; and (v) that at the end of the 18th century, the chief obstacles to Catholic Emancipation were the continued refusal of the Papacy to countenance an Oath of Allegiance and the continued presence in England of the Society of Jesus. Berington’s book must be seen as a manifesto on behalf of a group of English Roman Catholic gentry in the Emancipation campaign, and as such must be used with great caution and tested against the facts of history. Joseph Berington (1743–1827) was that rare phenomenon, an English Catholic priest of the ‘Enlightenment’. He was a scholar of wide attainments and considerable polish, in marked contrast to the majority of the English Catholic clergy of * Originally published in 1970 as an ‘Introduction’ to the Gregg International reprint of The Memoirs of Gregorio Panzani: Giving an Account of His Agency in England in the Years 1634, 1635, 1636. Translated from the Italian Original, and Now First Published . . . By the Revd. Joseph Berington (Birmingham 1793).

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the time. Some of his historical works, written with Gibbonian irony and suavity, and heavily condescending towards mediaeval superstition, acquired a wide circulation. For a great part of his life he resided at Buckland, Herts., as chaplain to his friend and protector, Sir John Courtenay Throckmorton, Bart. (1753–1819), one of the leaders of the Cisalpine party in the Catholic Emancipation movement in England.1 Berington’s first work on English Catholic history was The State and Behaviour of English Catholics from the Reformation to the year 1780, with a view of their present Number, Wealth, Character (London 1780, revised edition 1781). Then in 1793, he published The Memoirs of Gregorio Panzani, and this was reprinted in 1813 under the more striking title of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Catholic Religion in England . . . from the reign of Elizabeth to the present time, including the Memoirs of G. Panzani. In The Memoirs of Panzani Berington makes the mission of Panzani to England 1634–6 the centre-piece of the survey of English Catholic history which he had already adumbrated in The State and Behaviour of English Catholics in 1780. It would be far beyond the scope of this introduction to comment much on Berington’s account of English Catholic history in its entirety, but in view of the fact that so much stress is laid on Panzani’s mission, and on his Relazione of 1637, it may not be amiss to put this in its true historical perspective. Panzani’s report was important to Berington, and to the Cisalpines, because it seemed to represent the report of an Italian emissary from the Roman Court who was favourable to the English secular clergy chapter, hostile to the Jesuits, and hopeful of reconciliation between English Catholics and the Roman Court, if Rome were willing to make concessions on the Oath of Allegiance – and hopeful even of reunion between the Roman and Anglican churches if certain concessions were made. The first question is the authenticity of Berington’s text. It is certainly not a forgery, but it is a distinctly garbled version of Panzani’s Relazione. Pages 114–32 of Berington follow Panzani fairly closely, with some omissions, but from there onwards his use of the original is eclectic, and interspersed with some of Panzani’s letters to Barberini.2 But a true understanding of the significance of Panzani’s mission can only be obtained by an examination of all the correspondence between Panzani and Barberini3 and, especially, of Panzani’s day-to-day diary of his mission.4 Furthermore, the attitudes of the English secular clergy may be followed in the archives of the Archdiocese of Westminster, and the policy of Windebank and

1 cf. B. Ward, The Dawn of the Catholic Revival in England (London 1909). 2 For a full transcript of the Relazione see BL MS Add. 15389. A translation of parts of this may be found in W.M. Brady, The Episcopal Succession (Rome 1876), Vol. III, and compared with Berington. 3 Public Record Office, Roman Transcripts. 4 Vatican Archives, Nunziatura d’Inghilterra 3A. Though Gordon Albion refers to this in Charles I and the Court of Rome (London 1935), he does not make much use of it.

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the government are clearly expressed in the Clarendon State Papers (published Oxford 1767) which Berington had at his disposal. Gregorio Panzani was an Italian priest attached to the Oratory, sent to England on a purely exploratory mission. His task was to ascertain the situation in England, particularly with regard to the question of the possible appointment of a bishop. With Henrietta Maria as Catholic Queen, the possibility of a mutual Agency between her court and the Court of Rome was to be investigated, and this depended on the attitude of the King and his ministers towards Catholicism. The chief trouble lay in the personality of Panzani and in the circumstances in which he found himself. He knew no English, and his French was so weak that he had to have French lessons even during the period of his agency. He was a vain and credulous man (his successor, the Scotsman George Conn calls him a ‘pazzo’, a madman), who continually exceeded his instructions to act as an observer, and tried to engineer diplomatic coups. At an early stage he became a partisan of the opinions and policy of certain members of the English secular clergy. And most important of all was his failure to understand the realities of government policy: in his constant optimism in the teeth of the facts he appears, in his letters to Barberini, like a sort of diplomatic Micawber, hoping for something to turn up. At an early stage in his Agency he became involved in a government intrigue. For many years Thomas Preston OSB had written in defence of the Oath of Allegiance, with the active encouragement of Abbot, the Archbishop of Canterbury. On the death of Abbot, in 1633, Preston found a new patron in his successor, Laud, and in Laud’s henchman Windebank, the Secretary of State. In 1634 there appeared a further defence of the Oath, A Pattern of Christian Loyalty under the name of William Howard, Windebank’s secretary, but in fact written by Preston. A young Jesuit, Edward Courtney, was induced to write an answer; the manuscript was delated to Windebank, and Courtney was imprisoned at the end of October. The government were now able to claim that it was the Jesuits who opposed the Oath of Allegiance. Panzani arrived in London on 15 December 1634 (o.s.). On 22 December he was visited by Preston who brought with him William Howard. Howard called again on 31 December to suggest talks with Windebank concerning the Oath. Panzani consulted the Queen as to the advisability of talks; the Queen was doubtful, but Panzani overruled her. It was in this setting that the talks with Windebank began. At the first meeting, on 7 January 1635, Panzani made it clear that he had come on account of the controversy over a bishop and that he had no instructions on the question of the Oath. Windebank replied that the country would never have a Catholic bishop with jurisdiction, and urged Rome to mitigate its condemnation of the Oath and to formulate a new one. On 14 January Windebank repeated that ‘for the present the King did not see that it was possible to admit a Bishop without prejudice to the State’ and asked that the Pope should do what he could to assist in the marriage of the daughter of the Prince Palatine and the King of Poland’s brother. On 7 February Father Robert Philip, the Queen’s chaplain, informed Panzani that the King had informed the Queen that a bishop could not be tolerated 88

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in England and that ‘if a Bishop should come here he could not do less than make a severe demonstration’. Panzani did his best to keep this unequivocal statement secret. Despite this clear information concerning the major part of his mission, Panzani continued the conversations with Windebank, who seems to have adopted a policy of stringing Panzani along.5 On 24 February Windebank brings up the question of reunion. On 28 February he suggests that the Jesuits should be removed, or at least that their numbers should be diminished, for whenever one wished to arrive at a decision, they would join with the Puritans. Panzani replied that ‘it was necessary to do something for the Pope, that he on his side might be animated also’. In other words Panzani patently encouraged Windebank in the idea of trying to do a deal with Rome at the expense of the Jesuits. This is quite unpardonable in one who was supposed to be an impartial agent. The fact was that from the outset of his mission Panzani had yielded a more ready ear to those hostile to the Jesuits, favourable to the Oath (or at least a modified oath) and favourable to a bishop. His diary reveals that his most frequent visitors were the secular clergy, men like George Leyburne (agent of Bishop Smith), John Southcott and George Muskett. Southcott had prepared a copious dossier of complaints against the Jesuits which was given to Panzani.6 On 17 November 1635 a ‘concordat’ was signed between representatives of the secular clergy and the religious orders. The Jesuits were left out, but after the fait accompli they were invited to sign. The Jesuits rightly refused these terms and stuck to the fact that the disputes between regulars and seculars had already been settled by Papal decree, to which they adhered. The whole episode seems to have been engineered to put the Jesuits in a false position. Panzani’s gullibility about English sympathy for Rome was boundless. On 4 July 1635 Lord Herbert of Cherbury called, and, under the seal of secrecy, protested that he reverenced the Roman church as his mother, and offered to submit his books to the Holy See. Less than two months previously Herbert had presented to the King a tract in which he asserted that only a powerful king could be head of the church.7 Most serious of all was Panzani’s pathetic faith in the sincerity of Windebank. The Clarendon State Papers show clearly Windebank’s (and Charles’s) cynicism. The Benedictines Preston and Jones and the Franciscan Santa Clara (Christopher Davenport), with their schemes of Oath formulae and reunion, were simply being

5 This is borne out by the interview with Cottington on 26 March; Cottington insisted that a bishop must not be sent without the consent of the King, but ‘what is not obtained today, may be obtained tomorrow’. 6 Westminster Archives, Vol. XXVIII, ff. 49–76. A comparison between the correspondence and memoranda of Leyburne, Lovell, Muskett, Boswell and Fitton in Westminster Archives with Panzani’s letters and Relazione is very instructive. It shows clearly how much of the material that Panzani transmitted to Rome as his own considered opinion was in fact taken over uncritically from the secular clergy sources. 7 S. Lee, The Autobiography of Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury (London n.d), p. 143–4.

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used to create internal dissensions among the Catholics.8 When the idea of an English agent (ostensibly from the Queen) to the Court of Rome had been decided on, Windebank wrote to the King, on 6 October 1635, giving his idea of the agent’s duties. This was to include ‘endeavouring to discover the correspondences of the Roman Catholick party here in England, and their ways, and . . . fomenting their schisms and differences here; which he must do if he serves your Majesty well’.9 Brett’s instructions were signed by Charles on 28 October. They included the following points: Forasmuch as we find that the number of Jesuits increaseth daily here, who, being for the most part practick and overbusy in matters of state, may become dangerous, and yet we are not willing, but upon great necessity, to use remedies which our laws do provide against them; you shall therefore use the best means you can for their revocation, that so this mischief may be prevented quietly, and rather by the hand of that See than by ours, which must fall more heavily upon them. In the meantime, you are to discover what intelligences they hold, both here and there, and diligently observe their ways, and to give advertisement of them hither. . . . You shall hold acquaintance and converse chiefly with those that are most moderate, and best affected to us and our state. And yet, if any Jesuits, or others of their party, shall visit you, you may admit them, and use them kindly respectively, observing well their ends, and advertise them hither; and you are to make use of them for our service.10 The English government was in fact completely opportunistic on the Catholic Question. Discussions of union, toleration, and bishops were encouraged with the sole object of dividing and weakening the Catholic body as a whole: it was the

8 W.K.L. Webb, ‘Thomas Preston’, Biographical Studies, Vol. II (1953/4), pp. 216–68, is excellent. G. Sitwell, ‘Leander Jones’s Mission to England 1634–5’, Recusant History, Vol. V (1960), pp. 132–82, is valuable, but rather apologetic in tone, and politically a little naïve. J.B. Dockery, Christopher Davenport (London 1960) is the only recent book on the subject of Santa Clara [see also ODNB for which article Dockery is still the most important source. Eds]. 9 State Papers Collected by Edward Earl of Clarendon (Oxford 1767), Vol. II, p. 217; italics mine. The whole letter is a protest by Windebank against the appointment of Arthur Brett as agent, on the grounds that he is too much under the influence of Father Robert Philip, the Queen’s confessor. 10 State Papers Collected by Edward Earl of Clarendon (Oxford 1767), Vol. II, pp. 249–50; italics mine. In Charles I and the Court of Rome (London 1935) the ecumenical historian Gordon Albion makes no mention at all of the letter from Windebank to Charles. Of Charles’s instructions to Brett the only reference is as follows: ‘Then, giving way to that obsession he had inherited from his father, Charles said he intended to check the daily increase of the English Jesuits who “being for the most part practicall and overbusy in matters of state, may become dangerous, and yet [Charles’s natural self breaks in here] we are not willing but upon great necessity to use remedies which our laws do provide against them”.’(p. 156) Those who read the full quotation may get a better idea of ‘Charles’s natural self’ than that provided by Dr Gordon Albion.

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same policy under Elizabeth I, under James I and, for that matter, under George III. The only difference under George III was the numerical weight and general nuisance value of Irish Catholicism – English Catholicism by the time of Berington was something that could be ignored with impunity.11 The views of Panzani and Berington may be very attractive; the trouble is that they do not square with the facts of history.12 However, as Maitland has said, ‘The essential matter of history is not what happened but what people thought or said about it.’

11 ‘Latter-day Recusants’ [reprinted as Chapter III of the present book]. 12 As a small example of the precariousness of historical truth we may note the following episode. Panzani’s Diario reveals the fact that on 7 February 1635 William Howard told him that ‘John Penruddock, a great friend of the Jesuits, has said that religion would never more be restored except by the sword’. In Berington’s Panzani, (p. 151) this has become ‘The Jesuits were not willing to hearken to an accommodation on the terms that were commonly proposed. Their usual language was, that the Roman Catholic religion would never be restored in England, but by the sword. This topic was very displeasing to Panzani.’ This is repeated by Mgr Nédoncelle in Trois Aspects du Problème Anglo-Catholique au XVIIe Siècle (Paris 1951), pp. 85–6. Panzani, he maintains, possessed much judgement, a sign of which was the fact that: ‘il se méfiait surtout des Jésuites qui ne rêvaient, selon lui, qu’à une victoire par l’épée’.

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7 JAMES MAURUS CORKER AND DRYDEN’S CONVERSION *

Despite the extensive literature on the conversion of John Dryden, the name of the man who received him into the Roman Catholic Church does not seem to be generally known. In the ‘Historical Memoirs of the English Benedictines’, a manuscript written by Dom Ralph Benedict Weldon (1647–1713),1 there occurs the following entry under the year 1700: ‘On the 12th of May Mr. Dryden the great poet of England, one of our Revd. Fr. Maurus Corker’s converts, died at London and was most sumptuously buried at the cost of four Lords in Westminster Abbey in the very grave of the first English poet old Chaucer.’2 It may be useful to give some account of Maurus Corker and to see if his life and writings throw any light on the background to Dryden’s conversion.3

* Originally published in English Studies, Vol. LIV, No. 5, Oct. 1973, pp. 461–9. Republished by permission of Taylor & Francis. 1 For Weldon see N. Birt, Obit Book of the English Benedictines (Edinburgh 1913), p. 74. Copies of Weldon’s manuscript ‘History’ are at Downside Abbey, Ampleforth Abbey and Douai Abbey. [The present Abbot of Douai Abbey, Dom Geoffrey Scott, is engaged on an extensive research project concerning Weldon’s life and writings. For a brief biographical sketch of Weldon, see also the Introduction to Catalogus Librorum Bibliothecae Benedictorum Anglorum Sti Edmundi (Upper Woolhampton 2017). Eds]. 2 Weldon’s MS ‘History’, Vol. II, f. 494. 3 The account of Francis and James Maurus Corker is based on the following: C.C. Vigurs, ‘Francis Corker, Vicar of Bradford, Yorks’, Bradford Antiquary, N.S., Vol. VI (1940), pp. 123–40; Weldon’s MS ‘History’; Weldon’s Chronological Notes, Containing the Rise, Growth, and Present State of the English Congregation of the Order of St. Benedict (Stanbrook 1881); Peter Athanasius Allanson OSB (1804–76), ‘Biographies of the Monks of the English Congregation’, MS at Downside and Ampleforth, Vol. I, ff. 305–15 [it was published at Ampleforth in 1999 as Biography of the English Benedictines. Eds]; J. Gillow, Bibliographical Dictionary of the English Catholics (London 1885), Vol. I, pp. 568–71; T.A. Birrell, Catholic Allegiance and the Popish Plot (Nijmegen 1950) [now Chapter I of the present book. Eds]; and G. Lucius Graham OSB, ‘A Benedictine of the Seventeenth Century’, The Raven, Vol. XLI (1950), pp. 53–65. It was the late Dom Lucius Graham who first realized the significance of Corker’s role in Dryden’s conversion. [Since the publication of the present article there have been more biographical accounts of Corker, partly based on Birrell’s findings; see, in particular, the entry in ODNB by Geoffrey Scott. Eds].

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The family of James Corker (Maurus was his religious name) were Yorkshire Protestant gentry on the decline; the grandfather had dissipated the family estates. His father, Francis Corker, was an Anglican clergyman, Vicar of Bradford, who had a very chequered career. At the Civil War, Francis Corker joined the Royalist army, was taken prisoner at Gainsborough, was sentenced to be executed, but escaped to Holland. He was later captured at sea, imprisoned in Winchester gaol for a year and then escaped. He settled in Sussex as a schoolmaster, was captured a third time in 1656 and sent to John Thurloe, the Cromwellian Secretary of State. After all this resistance Francis broke down and agreed to act as a spy against the Royalists, for which he received a comfortable salary. At the Restoration he was imprisoned in the Tower, but was eventually discharged and allowed to resume his vicarage at Bradford. He died in 1667. James Maurus Corker was born in 1636. He felt very deeply the disgrace of his father’s disloyalty to the Royalist cause. He broke away from the family circle in 1656, became a Roman Catholic and joined the English Benedictine monastery at Lamspringe, near Hildesheim, in the territory of the Elector of Bavaria. By 1665 he was back in England as chaplain in the household of a Mrs Francis Cotton, a relative of Sir Robert Cotton the antiquary, and he later became one of the chaplains in attendance on Catherine of Braganza. At the time of the outbreak of the Popish Plot in September 1678 he lodged at the Savoy. He was arrested in connection with the Popish Plot and brought to trial for treason on 18 July 1679 and was acquitted after a spirited defence. He was then remanded back to gaol and again brought to trial, with five others, for the simple fact of being a priest (which was of course also treasonable). He was condemned to death on 17 January 1679–80 but was reprieved, and remained in Newgate Gaol till the accession of James II. During his stay in Newgate he had received over a thousand people into the Roman Catholic Church. At the accession of James II the Benedictines were put in charge of the chapel of Mary of Modena at St James’s Palace. Corker also opened a chapel in the Savoy until the Jesuits were installed there by the King. On account of difficulties with the Jesuits, Corker then moved to Clerkenwell where he erected a chapel which was subsequently burned by the mob in 1688. After the Revolution, Corker went to the Continent and was elected abbot of his monastery at Lamspringe in 1690. After many difficulties in this post, Corker resigned in 1696 and returned to London where he remained till his death in 1715. One of his Protestant relatives, Edward Corker of Gray’s Inn, visited him in January 1704 and reported that ‘so zealous was the old gentleman that I remember he told me when he lay under sentence of death his greatest comfort was that his blood might expiate the blood of the family’, referring to Francis Corker’s treason under the Commonwealth. James Maurus Corker’s publications are of some interest. When in gaol at the height of the Popish Plot he published in 1680 a small pamphlet, Roman Catholic Principles with reference to God and the King. Within a year it had run to three editions and in 1681 he incorporated it in another book, Stafford’s Memoires

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(reprinted 1682), an account of the trial and execution of William Howard, Viscount Stafford. Roman Catholic Principles was reprinted no less than twelve times before 1686, and another twenty-six editions had been published by 1815; it became the basis of a standard handbook of Roman Catholic apologetics in the nineteenth century.4 Roman Catholic Principles was also appended to Corker’s Remonstrance of Piety and Innocence (1683), an edificatory work containing the prayers and dying speeches of those executed for the Popish Plot and also other devotional material suitable for the times. Also in 1683 Corker wrote a sprightly satire, published by Roger Lestrange, Oates’s Manifesto; or the Complaint of Titus Oates against the Doctor of Salamanca, in which he exposed the inconsistency of Oates’s evidence at various Popish Plot trials. In the last decade of the seventeenth century, about 1698–9, Corker wrote a short pamphlet of theological apologetics, of which the full title is revealing: A Rational Account given by a young gentleman to his unkle, of his motives and reasons why he is become a Roman Catholic. And why he now declines any further disputes or contests about matters of Religion.5 The fact that Dryden chose to be received into the Roman Catholic Church by an English Benedictine monk is not without significance. In England in 1684–5, the period of Dryden’s conversion, there were three main groups of priests: the Jesuits, the Seculars and the Benedictines, each with specifically recognizable group attitudes (the Dominicans, Franciscans and Carmelites were numerically too few to be important as groups). Dryden’s view of the Jesuits is clearly documented, both in his Postscript to the History of the League (1684) and in The Hind and the Panther (1687). Rightly or wrongly, Dryden equated the political theories of the Jesuits with those of the Protestant Sectaries and Presbyterians. For him, the Jesuits upheld the temporal power of the Papacy and the right of the Pope to depose heretical kings and absolve subjects of their allegiance to the monarchy; in a word, they favoured ‘democratic’ government.6 In a well-known passage in the History of the League, Dryden draws the analogy between the wars of the League in France and the English Civil Wars:

4 cf. E. Duffy, ‘Ecclesiastical Democracy Detected’, Recusant History, Vol. X (Oct. 1970), p. 309 and T.A. Birrell, Chapter I, p. 113–6. 5 It was published under the initials ‘M.B.’ (presumably for ‘Monachus Benedictinus’) and is recorded in W.G. Hiscock, The Christ Church Supplement to Wing’s Short Title Catalogue 1641– 1700 (Oxford 1956), B 139 +. The pressmark of the Christ Church Library copy, formerly owned by William Wake, is W.b.63(3). Hiscock gives the date ‘c.1690’, but Wake answered Corker’s pamphlet in 1700 in The Church of Rome no guide in matters of Faith: in answer to a late letter from a nephew to his unkle; the word ‘late’ in Wake’s title would imply the fairly recent appearance of Corker’s work. 6 The literature on Jesuit ‘democratic’ political theory is very extensive. Reference should be made to J.N. Figgis, The Theory of the Divine Right of Kings (Cambridge 1896) and Studies of Political Thought from Gerson to Grotius (Cambridge 1907); J.W. Allen, History of Political Thought in the Sixteenth Century (London 1957); and J.H. Salmon, The French Religious Wars in English Political Thought (Oxford 1959).

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our Rebels have left this eternal brand upon their memories, that while all their pretence was for the setting up of the Protestant Religion, and pulling down of Popery, they have borrowed from Papists both the model of their design and their arguments to defend it. And not from loyal, wellprincipled Papists; but from the worst, the most bigotted and most violent of that Religion. From some of the Jesuits, an order founded on purpose to combat Lutheranism and Calvinism. The matter of fact is so palpably true, and so notorious, that they cannot have the impudence to deny it. But some of the Jesuits are the shame of the Roman Church, as the Sectaries are of ours. Their tenets in politics are the same; both of them hate Monarchy, and love Democracy: both of them are superlatively violent; they are inveterate haters of each other in religion, yet agree in the principles of Government. And if after so many Advices to a Painter, I might advise a Dutch maker of Emblems, he should draw a Presbyterian in Arms on one side, a Jesuit on the other, and a Crowned Head betwixt them: for ‘tis perfectly a Battle-royal. Each of them is endeavouring the destruction of his adversary; but the Monarch is sure to get blows on both sides.7 The English secular clergy, on the other hand, had been resolutely opposed to the Jesuits on a number of issues from the days of Queen Elizabeth I onwards, and the quarrels between the two groups had been very bitter. After 1623 the representative body of the English secular priests was established as the secular clergy chapter.8 At the time of the Civil Wars and Commonwealth the chapter was gravely divided within itself, and several of its members, led by Thomas White (alias Blacklo) and Henry Holden of the Sorbonne, had advocated a compromise deal with the Cromwellian government: toleration for Catholics in return for recognition of Cromwell and the expulsion of the Jesuits. Thomas White was a friend of Hobbes and in 1655 he had published The Grounds of Obedience and Government, which was intended as a philosophic defence, on Hobbistic lines,9 of acceptance of the Cromwellian government. This work caused great offence to the Royalist exiles, and Clarendon never forgot or forgave the Catholics for it.

7 Spelling and orthography have been modernized in quotations. 8 The account of the controversies between Jesuits and Seculars in England is based on the following: T.G. Law, Historical Sketch of the Conflicts between Jesuits and Seculars in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth (London 1889); P. Renold, The Wisbech Stirs, Catholic Record Society, Vol. LI (London 1958); P. Hughes, Rome and the Counter-Reformation in England (London 1944); J. Warner SJ, The English Persecution of Catholics, Catholic Record Society, Vols XLVII (London 1953) and XLVIII (London 1955); M.V. Hay, The Jesuits and the Popish Plot (London 1934); T.A. Birrell, ‘English Catholics without a Bishop 1655–1672’, Recusant History, Vol. IV (Jan. 1958), pp. 142–78 [now Chapter VI of the present book. Eds]. 9 In fairness to White it must be said that he consistently denied all accusations of ‘Hobbism’.

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At the time of the Popish Plot, hostility between the Jesuits and the chaptermen was further inflamed. In 1680 the Jesuits had published Robert Pugh’s Blacklo’s Cabal,10 a dossier of letters of the Commonwealth period which revealed, amongst other things, that White and Holden had been in contact with Cromwell’s spymaster. Furthermore, two priests of the chapter, John Sergeant and David Morris, the former a friend and admirer of White, came forward during the Plot to act as public informers against the Jesuits. Shaftesbury and the Whig plot-managers were intending to produce Sergeant and Morris as the star performers in support of Oates at the Oxford Parliament of 1681; Charles’s sudden dissolution of the Oxford Parliament frustrated the Whig plans. Besides being associated with a certain political line, the same group of chaptermen also seems to have shared certain common theological attitudes, especially in the matter of scripture, tradition and the ‘rule of faith’. Philip Harth, in Contexts of Dryden’s Thought (1968), has shown most interestingly that in a great deal of the argument in The Hind and the Panther Dryden is concerned to dissociate his own position as a Roman Catholic from that of the ‘Blacklowists’, i.e. Thomas White, Henry Holden and John Sergeant. The Blacklowists had tried to make tradition the sole guide in the interpretation of scripture, thus excluding faith, the guidance of the Spirit, and the authority of a teaching Church, a position which Dryden rejects.11 As far as the English Benedictines were concerned, they had had an impeccable record of loyalty to the Stuart cause. During the Civil Wars and Commonwealth period their monasteries and convents on the Continent had offered hospitality to the exiled Royalists. It was a Benedictine monk, John Huddleston, who had been instrumental in the escape of Charles II after the Battle of Worcester in 1651 and who subsequently received Charles into the Roman Catholic Church on his deathbed. On the island of Jersey Charles II had been attended by a Benedictine, Dunstan Everard, and at the Restoration the King invited the Benedictines to nominate some of their monks to serve the chapel of Catherine of Braganza at his expense. At their General Chapter of 1661 the English Benedictines ‘strictly forbade their religious to concern themselves with the odious fooleries of Blacklow (alias Thomas White)’.12 The English Benedictines represented a visible testimony to the persistence of the mediaeval tradition, to the pre-Reformation glories of the great abbeys. Nevertheless, at the accession of James II they explicitly renounced all claims to

10 White’s Grounds and Pugh’s Blacklo’s Cabal have recently been reprinted by the Gregg Press Ltd., Farnborough, Hants. [For the ‘Introduction’ to Pugh see Chapter V of the present book. Eds.]. 11 For a favourable account of the theology of the Blacklowists, see G.H. Tavard, ‘Scripture and Tradition among Seventeenth Century Recusants’, Journal of Theological Studies, N.S., Vol. XXV (1964). 12 Weldon, ‘Chronological Notes’, f. 197. Weldon also records that in January 1686/87 James II called together the bishops and superiors of the regular clergy in England and warned them of the ‘erroneous principles’ of Blacklo and his followers (ibid., f. 228).

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religious property, thus allaying any fears of Protestant landowners;13 this action of the Benedictines is specifically referred to by Dryden in The Hind and the Panther (lines 1218–20). Furthermore the pietas of the English Benedictines were not merely historical and antiquarian. The main emphasis in their publications was on devotional and liturgical writing, rather than on theological polemics. Corker’s Roman Catholic Principles first appeared two years before the celebrated ‘Gallican Articles’ in France, but on the subjects of Papal infallibility and of the temporal power and the deposing power of the Papacy, and allegiance of subjects to their rulers, it is quite Gallican in outlook.14 Corker states the principles of Catholic loyalty to the monarchy, while at the same time explaining why Catholics could not take the Oath of Allegiance as then formulated: It is no article of Faith to believe that General Councils cannot err, either in matters of fact or discipline, alterably by circumstances of time and place; or in matters of speculation or civil policy, depending on mere human judgement or testimony. Neither of those being Divine Revelations deposited in the Catholic Church, in regard to which alone she hath the promised assistance of the Holy Ghost. Hence it is deduced, if a General Council (much less a Papal Consistory) should undertake to depose a King, and absolve his subjects from their allegiance, no Catholic, as Catholic, is bound to submit to such a Decree. Hence it also followeth: the subjects of the King of England lawfully may, without the least breach of any Catholic principle, renounce, even upon oath, the teaching, maintaining or practising the doctrine of deposing Kings excommunicated for heresy, by any authority whatsoever, as repugnant to the fundamental laws of the nation, injurious to sovereign power, destructive to the peace and government; and by consequence, in his Majesty’s subjects, ‘impious and damnable’. Yet not properly ‘heretical’, taking the word ‘heretical’ in that connatural, genuine sense it is usually understood in the Catholic Church; on account of which and other expressions (no wise appertaining to loyalty) it is that Catholics of tender consciences refuse the Oath commonly called the Oath of Allegiance. On scripture and tradition Corker’s Principles is orthodoxly Roman Catholic and anti-Blacklowist. On such peripheral matters as the worship of saints and images,

13 On 13 November 1686 the Benedictine Philip Ellis preached a sermon in which he renounced his order’s claims to all monastic property appropriated at the Reformation; the sermon was printed in the same year (Wing E598). In the following year Nathaniel Johnston M.D. published The Assurance of Abby and other Church Lands in England to the possessors, Cleared from the Doubts and Arguments Raised about the Danger of Resumption (London 1687; Wing J872). It was written in collaboration with his brother the Benedictine monk, Henry Joseph Johnston; both men were antiquaries of some repute and friends of Sir William Dugdale. 14 T.A. Birrell, ‘Catholic Allegiance’ [Chapter I of the present book, note 24].

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purgatory and prayers for the dead, it takes a distinctly ‘minimalist’ line. Corker’s Principles is not theology for theologians, but a short, concise and carefully formulated statement to be understood by laymen, Roman Catholic and non-Catholic alike. It steers a middle way between the extreme positions of the Jesuits and the secular clergy chaptermen. Corker’s other apologetic pamphlet was written many years after he had received Dryden into the Roman Catholic Church. Nevertheless, it gives an insight into Corker’s whole approach to religious controversy. A Rational Account is a short pamphlet, in the form of an imaginary letter from a recently converted Catholic to his Protestant uncle, in which the nephew sets out his motives for his recent conversion. The line of argument of the nephew is remarkably brief. His reason shows him the insufficiency of reason as the rule of faith, and his reason shows him the necessity of a Church; that Church cannot be the Church of England (and the same may be said of the Presbyterian, Anabaptist or other Dissenting Churches) because it did not exist before the Reformation. He does not want any further disputes on religion: ‘Why should I embroil myself in endless and fruitless conferences, disputes and amusements, managed usually with passion, partiality and prejudice, about matters of faith, of which I am already fully satisfied?’ The imaginary nephew maintains the rationality of his change of religion: Sir, I did make use of the reason God has given me; and think my proceedings herein have been exactly conform to that reason . . . in case you should overpersuade me under the notion of reason to stifle and extinguish all sense and thought of submitting my judgement to the conduct of any one universal Church at all, in explaining the Scriptures, adjusting controversies, and asserting matters of Faith deposited in her, I should then indeed be no Roman Catholic: but withal, I profess I should hardly continue any longer a Christian; for the testimony and authority of an unerring Church once removed, there remains to me no extern evidence or rational motive of credibility whereon to ground an assurance requisite to faith. And on this acount I think it is, we find so many Deists or Naturalists daily swarming and multiplying amongst the Wits of our reformed Protestant Nation. The whole pamphlet claims a rational, not a fideistic, basis for conversion. On the other hand it testifies to a wariness of theological controversy.15

15 The tenor of Corkers’s Rational Account may be compared with a striking aside in Dryden’s Life of Lucian (1696) quoted by Harth, op. cit., p. 265: ‘We have indeed the highest probabilities for our revealed religion; arguments which will preponderate with a reasonable man, upon a long and careful disquisition; but I have always been of opinion, that we can demonstrate nothing, because the subject-matter is not capable of a demonstration. It is the particular grace of God, that any man believes the mysteries of our faith; which I think a conclusive argument against the doctrine of persecution in any church’.

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Now Dryden was concerned with just such a situation in his Defence (1686) of the conversion of the Duchess of York. The story of her conversion was very simple. On reading the account of the Reformation by the Protestant bishop, Peter Heylyn, she had become convinced that the Church of England lacked that essential mark of the Church: holiness. Beyond that, ‘I am not able, nor if I were, would I, enter into disputes with anybody. I only say this for my change of religion: I would never have done [so], if I had thought it possible to save my soul otherwise. I thank God I found no difficulty in the choice.’ The Duchess of York’s account of her conversion was attacked very wittily, not to say superciliously, by Bishop Stillingfleet. Dryden’s defence of the Duchess is very touching, because he is obviously sympathetic to the situation in which she found herself. He can understand the attitude of someone who has simplicity, sincerity and common sense. His defence is simply an expansion of her account (and an attack on Stillingfleet’s tone and manner). Any history of the Reformation, says Dryden, will show that the apostolic succession was broken through the personal desires and ambitions of Henry VIII and the ministers of Edward VI and Elizabeth. For Stillingfleet to cite bad popes or abuses in the Roman Church is not enough. The Church in England could not reform itself by Act of Parliament. ‘The Church of England’, says Dryden, ‘has no authority of reforming herself, because the doctrine of Christ cannot be reformed, nor a National Synod lawfully make any definitions in matters of Faith, contrary to the judgement of the Church Universal of the present age, shewn in her public liturgies; that judgement being equivalent to that of a General Council of the present age.’ Even more significant is the stress that Dryden lays upon the importance of holiness within the Church. He elaborates the Duchess’s point that it was partly her experience of Catholic life on the Continent that had brought her to Roman Catholicism. The Duchess’s account of her conversion, and Dryden’s defence of it, may not be based on elaborate theological debate but, rightly or wrongly, it was a very human and real position in the seventeenth century. And it was a position which accords well with what Corker and the English Benedictines stood for. Firstly, for the link with historical tradition, with the pre-Reformation past. It was a Benedictine, George Touchet, who had produced in 1674 an apologetic work based entirely on extracts from Protestant historians of the Reformation, chiefly from Bishop Peter Heylyn.16 Secondly, for piety and pietas, for the devotional life over against rational theology. For that is the story of a convert like Hugh Cressy, who left the circle of Falkland and Chillingworth at Great Tew, with its grand theological debates, to become a Benedictine monk and editor of Sancta Sophia, the mystical treatise of Augustine Baker, a fellow Benedictine convert,

16 G.A. Touchet OSB, Historical Collections Out of Several Grave Protestant Historians Concerning the Changes of Religion and the Strange Confusions Following from Thence: In the Reigns of Henry the Eighth, King Edward the Sixth, Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth (n.p. 1674).

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and of the Revelations of Juliana of Norwich and of the Scale of Perfection of Walter Hilton.17 Corker’s heyday, as it were, was the period of the Popish Plot. His publications, his defence of himself at two public trials, and his ministrations while in gaol to other Plot victims, certainly brought him to public attention at that time.18 Now so far as one can judge, it was the chain of events beginning at this period – the Popish Plot, the Exclusion Crisis and the Rye House Plot – which provoked Dryden to a serious reconsideration of his religious position. The hysteria of the mob and of Parliament, the unscrupulous use by the Whigs of informers like Oates, the readiness of Shaftesbury and the Whig Plot-managers to send palpably innocent men to their death in order to attain political ends and, one regrets to say it, the pusillanimous and time-serving attitude of many of the Anglican bishops – these were all contributory factors. Dryden’s purchases of books at the auctions of Richard Smith and Sir Kenelm Digby, including a considerable number of devotional and liturgical as well as apologetical works, show that his religious interests date from at least the period 1680–2.19

17 Cressy’s significance has been noted by Earl Miner and Philip Harth. The fullest modern account of his relationship to Anglican thinking is in B.H.G. Wormald, Clarendon: Politics, History and Religion (Cambridge 1951). 18 See The Tryals of Sir George Wakeman, Barronet, William Marshall, William Rumley and James Corker, Benedictine Monks, for High Treason, for Conspiring the Death of the King, Subversion of the Government, and Protestant Religion . . . 18 July 1679 (London 1679); The Tryals and Condemnations of Lionel Anderson, Alias Munson, William Russell, Alias Napper, Charles Parris, Alias Parry, Henry Starkey, James Corker and William Marshall for High Treason as Romish Priests Upon the Statute of 27 Eliz. Cap. 2 . . . January 17th 1679 [o.s.] (London 1680); A Brief Account of the Proceedings against the Six Popish Priests . . . (London 1680); and Some of the Most Material Errors and Omissions in the Late Printed Tryals . . . (London 1680). It is interesting that Dryden also knew another of the priests arraigned with Corker, the Dominican Lionel Anderson, alias Munson (for whom see J. Warner, op. cit., p. 325). In 1691 Dryden wrote a letter to the Earl of Dorset in favour of Munson (see The Letters of John Dryden, ed. Charles E. Ward, [Durham N.C. 1942], p. 48). As a matter of genealogical curiosity, Dryden was related, albeit distantly, to two Catholics executed during the Popish Plot: through his mother, to the Benedictine laybrother, Thomas Pickering; and through his wife, to William Howard, Viscount Stafford. 19 See my article in English Studies, Vol. XLII (1961), pp. 193–217 [Reprinted in Aspects of Book Culture (2013). Eds]. That Dryden the poet was the purchaser at these sales has been discounted by C.E. Ward in John Dryden (Los Angeles 1967), p. 5, and by J.M. Osborn in PQ, Vol. XLI (1962), p. 584. But the assumption that the ‘Dryden’ at these auctions can be anyone other than John Dryden, the poet, is very improbable. In my article I showed that a number of these volumes were consistent with Dryden’s interests, and the recent studies of E.R. Miner, P. Harth, T.H. Fujimura, E.J. Chiasson, V. Hamm and S. Budick would seem to indicate that Dryden’s interest in theological matters was considerable. An examination of the existing marked copies of book-auctions up to 1700 shows that extensive buyers are either identifiable members of the book-trade, or identifiable book-collectors and public figures: philosophers, divines, lawyers, etc. ‘Sherburne’ and ‘Locke’ are, for instance, common enough names at the sales, but if Professors Ward and Osborn want to deny that these are Sir Edward Sherburne and John Locke, we can show the auction purchases in their library catalogues. There are no book-sellers by the name of Dryden. The idea that an unidentifiable nobody by the name of Dryden would buy 92 books at a single London auction in 1680

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For Dryden to have been received into the Roman Catholic Church by a Jesuit or a priest of the secular clergy chapter might have given some grounds for doubts about his seriousness and sincerity. The fact that he was received by an English Benedictine monk, James Maurus Corker, is at least consistent with what can be established about the lines of development of his thinking.

(and a further 52 at another sale in 1682) is contrary to all evidential probability. We must all defer to Professors Ward and Osborn in their knowledge of Dryden’s life; but there is no need to defer to their knowledge of book-auction practice in the seventeenth century.

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8 ENGLISH CATHOLIC MYSTICS IN NON-CATHOLIC CIRCLES The taste for Middle English mystical literature and its derivatives from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries*

The cumbersome subtitle of this essay requires some explanation. The term mystical is not intended to imply any elaborate theological definitions and distinctions. In fact, as far as Middle English literature is concerned, it is simply meant to cover Walter Hilton’s The Scale of Perfection, Dame Juliana’s Revelations and the anonymous The Cloud of Unknowing. The term taste for is used in preference to influence of also to avoid any theological subtleties. We are simply concerned with people who were interested in the Middle English mystics, who referred to them, who quoted them or who took the trouble to possess, or to copy, their works. As for ‘derivatives’, this is meant to cover three Roman Catholic writers of the seventeenth century: Benet Canfield, author of The Rule of Perfection; Augustine Baker, author of Sancta Sophia, edited by Serenus Cressy; and Dame Gertrude More, author of Spiritual Exercises (or Confessiones Amantis). The Middle English mystics are by now part of the accepted canon of English literature. Although they form, in a sense, a corpus, the three books are markedly different from one another. Hilton’s Scale is more didactic and practical than the others; Juliana’s Revelations are more personal and ‘literary’; and The Cloud is the most ‘mystical’, though couched in language of exquisite limpidity. They have been admirably discussed by David Knowles, Gerard Sitwell and Edmund Colledge; the latter gives the most up-to-date bibliographies.1 Unlike their mediaeval prototypes, the seventeenth-century Catholic derivatives have yet to be fully accepted as part of English ‘literature’, so a few words of pedestrian description may perhaps be not out of place. * Originally published in three instalments in The Downside Review, Vol. XCIV, 1976, pp. 60–81, 99–117, 213–31. Republished courtesy of SAGE Publishing and the Trustees of Downside Abbey. 1 D. Knowles, The English Mystics (London 1927), and The English Mystical Tradition (London 1961); G. Sitwell, Mediaeval Spiritual Writers (London 1961); E. Colledge, The Mediaeval Mystics of England (London 1962).

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Benet Canfield (1562–1610),2 whose real name was William Fitch, came from Canfield in Essex, of a family of puritanly inclined, well-to-do landed gentry. He studied law at the Middle Temple and was converted to Catholicism in 1585 by Robert Darbyshire, an old Carthusian priest imprisoned in the Gatehouse. He left England and joined the Capuchins at their house in the Rue St Honoré, Paris. He returned to England as a priest in 1599 and was soon imprisoned; he was banished in 1603 and returned to France. His spiritual teaching had been developed verbally, if not in manuscript, by the end of the sixteenth century. He attempted to publish The Rule of Perfection in England in 1602, but the press was seized and the text destroyed. In 1609, English and French editions, containing the first two parts, were published in France. The following year, French and Latin editions, containing the third and most mystical part, were published in Paris. The place of Canfield’s Rule of Perfection in the history of French religious thought is, of course, well known and well documented; a popular and highly dramatized account may be found in Aldous Huxley’s Grey Eminence (London 1941). It is the interest in Canfield shown by his fellow countrymen that will chiefly concern us in this essay. It is agreed by all commentators that Canfield’s Rule of Perfection, especially the third part, owes a great debt to The Cloud of Unknowing. Canfield certainly possessed a copy of The Cloud, in a transcript of Carthusian provenance made in 1582. This came into the possession of the Benedictine monk, David Augustine Baker (1575–1641), whose commentary on The Cloud was first fully published in the present century. Augustine Baker3 was born at Abergavenny, studied at Oxford University and the Inns of Court and became Recorder of his native town. In 1603, he was converted to Catholicism and entered the Benedictine monastery at Padua. He travelled much between England and the Continent, lived with the community of English Benedictines at Douay and, after many vicissitudes, died in London in 1641. Besides being a lawyer, he was also an historian, was a friend of William Camden, John Selden, Sir Henry Spelman and Sir Robert Cotton and used the resources of Cotton’s library for compiling an important history of mediaeval English monasticism. The development of Baker’s mystical teaching belongs to the period 1624–33, when he was spiritual adviser to a newly formed community of aristocratic English nuns at Cambray. It is noteworthy that in 1629 he wrote to Sir Robert Cotton, asking for spiritual books, manuscript or printed, and

2 The fullest account is still Optatus van Veghel, Benoît de Canfield (Rome 1949). 3 The most recent book on Baker is Anthony Low, Augustine Baker (New York 1970), in Twayne’s English Authors Series, No. 104. [A modern biographical work on Baker is M. Woodward, That Mysterious Man, Essays on Augustine Baker (Abergavenny 2001). In the last twenty-five years there has been a spate of printed editions of Baker’s treatises by John Clark (Analecta Carthusiana, Salzburg). Eds]. For Baker’s ownership of Canfield’s copy of The Cloud, see J. McCann (ed.), The Cloud of Unknowing (London 1941), pp. 290–1.

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especially Hilton’s Scale of Perfection, for the use of the nuns.4 Baker did not write for publication in print but for a small, and, as it were, captive, audience. Stylistically he was voluminous and disordered. His Sancta Sophia, published posthumously in 1657, was a skilful synthesis made by a fellow monk, Hugh Serenus Cressy (1605–74). Cressy had studied at Oxford, took orders in the Church of England and became chaplain to Lucius Cary, Viscount Falkland. When Falkland was appointed Secretary of State, Cressy became a canon of Windsor in 1640. After Falkland’s romantic death at the battle of Newbury in 1643, Cressy travelled on the Continent and became a Catholic in 1646, and joined the English Benedictines in 1649. At the Restoration he returned to England where he died. As a member of the Falkland circle, Cressy had taken part in the grand theological debates at Great Tew, with Chillingworth and Clarendon. Cressy’s account of his conversion, Exomologesis (1647, 1653 and 1679), was as much as anything a register of his dissatisfaction with the intellectualistic polemics of the Great Tew circle, and a plea for a return to the devotional life. As will be seen later, the crisis of conscience produced by the Civil Wars and Commonwealth was itself part of the stimulus towards a return to the mystical and devotional tradition. Indeed, in his extremely intelligent preface to Sancta Sophia, Cressy shows himself to be perfectly aware of this: It is to be feared that the fanatic sectaries which now swarm in England more than ever, will be ready to take advantage from hence [i.e. from Baker’s book] to justify all their frenzies and disorders; all which they impute with all confidence to divine inspirations, illuminations and impulses. For can we forbid them to practise what we ourselves teach to be a Christian duty? Cressy answers this objection very carefully. It is characteristic that Cressy also published Hilton’s Scale of Perfection (1659) and Dame Juliana’s Revelations (1670) as part, as it were, of his programme for a revival of mystical literature.5 Dame Gertrude More (1606–33) was the great-great-granddaughter of St Thomas More.6 She was one of the founding members of the English Benedictine 4 D. Rogers, ‘Some Early English Devotional Books from Cambray’, The Downside Review, Vol. LVII (1939), has examined the extent of Sir Robert Cotton’s response to Baker’s appeal. 5 There had already been four editions of The Scale before the Reformation (1494–1533). A new edition of Dame Juliana by Professor E. Colledge is forthcoming, and may throw further light on Cressy’s edition. [The edition was published in 1978: E. Colledge & J. Walsh, A Book of Showings to the Anchoress Julian of Norwich, 2 Vols (Toronto). Eds]. Two very helpful accounts of Cressy are D.H. Steuert, ‘A Study in Recusant Prose: Dom Serenus Cressy 1605–74’, The Downside Review, Vol. LXVI (1948), pp. 165–78, 287–301, and B.H.G. Wormald, Clarendon (Cambridge 1951), pp. 262 sq. 6 D.B. Weld-Blundell, The Inner Life and the Writings of Dame Gertrude More, 2 Vols (London 1910), and J. McCann, ‘Father Baker’s Dame Gertrude’, The Downside Review, Vol. XLVII (1929), pp. 157–67.

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convent at Cambray and one of Augustine Baker’s most ardent disciples and, like Baker, her books were published posthumously. The Holy Practices of a Divine Lover, or the Saintly Ideot’s Devotions appeared at Paris in 1657. The greater part of this was also included in Baker’s Sancta Sophia so that there is some doubt as to what is by the disciple and what by the master. One of the items that is virtually identical in both volumes is a ‘Catalogue of Devout Books’. The catalogue includes St Bernard, St Bonaventure, Climachus, Cassian, Dionysius the Areopagite (probably Deonise Hid Divinite, a work frequently included in codices of The Cloud, is meant), Dionysius the Carthusian (the Dutchman, Denis van Rijckel), Harphius (another Dutchman, Hendrik Herp), Thomas à Kempis, Ruusbroec, Tauler, Suso, St Teresa – and Benet Canfield and Hilton’s Scale of Perfection. A striking criticism of Jesuit mystical books is added: To save thee a labour, never look to find any book for thy turn in this way written by any of the Society of Jesus, whose genius is in the active way, and in that they are excellent and very commendable, but in this contemplative way, few or none hath appeared since their first institute [i.e. institution] above these hundred years. In 1658, Dame Gertrude’s Spiritual Exercises . . . or . . . Confessiones Amantis appeared from the same Paris publisher, edited by Francis Gascoigne. It is extremely carelessly put together. Dame Gertrude’s very lengthy preface is clearly made up of a patchwork of miscellaneous texts, and whole sections of the preface are then repeated again verbatim as part of the main text. Despite these shortcomings, it is a vivid document of a vivid personality. Dame Gertrude was obviously gifted, lively, shrewd and very much her own woman. She appeals for the contemplative method as opposed to the discursive method of meditation employed by the Jesuits. She pleads for a spirituality of unity, simplicity and humility. Her defence of Augustine Baker’s method, in the face of official opposition, leads her on to the question of obedience to religious superiors, which must not be servile nor, as she puts it with a surprising candour, ‘like that wherewith servants are subject for fifty shillings a year in the world’. She sums the matter up in a most striking terminology: ‘None can truly see how to obey but out of an internal light given and imparted to the soul by God.’ That the seventeenth-century derivatives of the Middle English mystics were Catholics is not unexpected. That Canfield, Baker and Cressy were all converts, and that Dame Gertrude was a champion of ‘the inner light’, is of considerable significance when we come to see the wide range of appeal of the English mystical tradition in non-Catholic circles. In what follows it will often be seen that in many cases the taste for English mysticism is, in fact, part of a more general taste for mystical writings. It is a taste which is both eclectic and esoteric. Eclectic in that unorthodoxy is almost the hallmark, whether it be for ancient or modern, pietist or quietist, Catholic or Protestant, English, French, German or Spanish; esoteric in that bibliography is more important than theology: lists of 105

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recommended books and select mystical libraries are an essential part of the dissemination of the vogue. This study may be divided into three periods: (I) the seventeenth century, up to about the 1690s. In this period the taste for the English mystics is a matter of individual interest, though certain general tendencies can be discerned; (II) the eighteenth century: here we can speak of general movements as well as of individuals; (III) the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: here we can see the interest moving from England to America and back again.

I. The seventeenth century The Civil War and Commonwealth period saw a remarkable increase in the output of sectarian literature. In 1646, there appeared a book with the title A Bright Starre, leading to, and centering in, Christ our perfection, or a Manuell, entituled by the author thereof, The third part of the Rule of Perfection. It was in fact a translation of the third part of Canfield’s Rule of Perfection. The translator was Giles Randall, a university-trained Puritan preacher who, like many others, had broken with orthodox Presbyterianism and gone over to ‘popular’ separatism.7 In an extensive preface, Randall praises the book (without mentioning the name of the author), and justifies the publishing of it in English on the grounds that even ‘the more common and vulgar people’ are entitled to learn of the ways of spiritual perfection. ‘I have observed’, he says, the ever-to-be-bewailed non-proficiency of many ingenuous spirits, who through the policy of others, and the too too much modesty and timerity of themselves, have precluded the way of progress to the top and pitch of rest and perfection against themselves, as being altogether unattainable. . . . Poor souls after many years travell being found in the same place, going the same pace without fruit, as if they had reached the highest at first, and that there were not yet more excellent things, heights, lengths, breadths, depths of sweetness and fulness beyond measure in the Abysse of the Divine Vision. As part of his campaign for spiritual democracy Randall also published translations of Nicolas of Cusa’s De Visione Dei and of Castellio’s Latin translation of the Theologia Germanica. Copies of A Bright Starre are now rare. One is in Lambeth Palace Library. Another is recorded in the auction sale of Thomas Lye (1621–84), an ejected Puritan minister, renowned as a catechist and an instructor of children; Calamy

7 The best account of Randall is in R.M. Jones, Spiritual Reformers in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New York 1914, repr. Boston 1959), pp. 253 sq. For the general background see W.H. Haller, The Rise of Puritanism (New York 1938, repr. 1957), pp. 262 sq.

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says of him that ‘he was not satisfied with conveying a little notional knowledge, but did his utmost to set things home upon the heart’.8 The British Museum has recently acquired a copy belonging to Sir John Salusbury, MP and Recorder of Denbigh (d. 1684).9 Salusbury had acquired the book from his aunt, Mary Bentley, and the flyleaf has an interesting manuscript list of other mystical writings: Boehme, St Teresa, Blosius, Harphius, Ruusbroec, Tauler, St Francis de Sales, B. Riccius, Alvarez de Paz, Alfonso Rodriguez, etc. (Here we have a list where the contemplative writers and the Jesuit meditative writers are not mutually exclusive.) Another copy of A Bright Starre is recorded in the library of Benjamin Furly, the English Quaker merchant of Rotterdam, and this was acquired in 1714 by Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach; these two figures will recur later in this essay. The Rule of Perfection had another admirer of about the same period. In October 1652, Daniel Foote made a beautiful transcript of the English edition.10 Foote matriculated at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1645, proceeded BA in 1650, MA in 1653, and MD the following year. He was Vicar of Swaffham Bulbeck, Cambridgeshire, from 1653 till his ejectment in 1662. He then moved to London, took lodgings in Sion College, and gained his living as a medical practitioner. Besides medical manuscripts, Foote possessed many other mystical writings, including a translation made in 1682 of the Interior Christian by Jean de Bernières Louvigny. (This translation seems to be quite independent of the version published at Antwerp in 1684.)11 Foote seems to have been acquainted with Algernon Sidney and Benjamin Furly. His manuscripts, sacred and secular, were acquired by Sir Hans Sloane, presumably for the sake of those of medical interest. The Cloud of Unknowing was never published till the nineteenth century. A copy was, however, prepared for the printer in 1647 by William Parish (1603–89), Vicar of Tilney in Norfolk. The manuscript includes a Calvinistic justification of faith alone, written by Parish himself.12 What did get into print, however, was an English translation of the Theologia Mystica of Dionysius the Areopagite, one of the main sources of The Cloud. In its Middle English form, Deonise Hid Divinite13 occurs in the major codices of The Cloud, and it is generally accepted that this Middle English translation is by the author of The Cloud. In 1653 it was printed in volume II of John Everard’s Some Gospel Treasures Opened, together with

8 E. Calamy, The Non-Conformist’s Memorial (London 1802), Vol. I, p. 84. 9 Pressmark C. 124 aaa.31. I am grateful to Mr R.J. Roberts for drawing my attention to this acquisition. The book was probably part of the extensive library at Llyweni, was later acquired by Sidney Williams Wynn and then by Douglas Cleverdon. The Lambeth copy was missing when I was there twenty-five years ago, but a microfilm was available. For Sir J. Salusbury see Blessed Oliver Plunket, Historical Studies (Dublin 1937), p. 133 sq., and W.J. Smith (ed.), Calendar of Salusbury Correspondence (Cardiff 1954). 10 BL MS Sloane 601. 11 BL MS Sloane 629. 12 University Library, Cambridge, MS Ff. vi. 41. 13 Early English Text Society, No. 231, 1955.

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selections from Cusa’s De Visione Dei, Tauler, Eckhart and Hermes Trismegistus. John Everard (1575–1650) was of Clare College, Cambridge and Rector of St Martin-in-the-Fields. He was repeatedly in trouble with the authorities during the Laudian period, and in mystical matters probably collaborated with Giles Randall. Some Gospel Treasures Opened was popular in Quaker and Pietistic circles (Penn called Everard ‘the great spiritual separatist’) and the book was frequently reprinted. The British Library copy of the Germantown reprint of 1757 belonged to Anthony Benezet (1713–84), the Quaker philanthropist of Philadelphia.14 Later in the seventeenth century a manuscript copy of The Cloud was made by a certain Robert Bacon.15 The Dictionary of National Biography has no entry for Robert Bacon,16 yet his chequered career is characteristic of the religious crosscurrents of the period. Parts of Bacon’s career are well documented from his own writings. He was born in 1612, the son of John Bacon of East Garston, Berks, and studied at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He went to Bristol as a young Puritan minister about 1635 and became the leader at St Ewen’s parish of a small separatist group, who began to scruple to attend the Common Prayer services. The group consisted of a farmer, a butcher, a farrier, the wife of the minister and Bacon himself ‘that chiefly was the speaker or teacher’. By about 1640 the group took a decisive step: ‘they met together and came to a holy resolution to separate from the worship of the world and the times they lived in’. After the taking of Bristol by the Royalist forces, Bacon moved to Gloucester in July 1644, where he became involved in controversy with John Corbet, the Calvinist chaplain to the Parliamentary forces; Bacon tells the story in The Spirit of Prelacy yet working, or Truth under a Cloud (1646). The furious theological debates on the nature and efficacy of baptism that ensued, in a city beleaguered by the Royalist troops, are characteristic of the period and have been well described by a Gloucester historian:

14 BL 4454. df. 17. Benezet presented the works of Leighton, A.W. Boehm, Mme Guyon, George Cheyne and Molinos to the Quaker Library at Philadelphia. Cf. G.S. Brookes, Friend Anthony Benezet (Philadelphia 1937). The Germantown edition omits the Dionysius translation, however. 15 The manuscript is now in the Univerity Library, Hamburg; it came there from the library of Benjamin Furly, via Zacharias von Uffenbach. As well as the works cited in the text, the main outlines of Bacon’s life can be reconstructed from: J. Corbet, Vindication of the Magistrates and Ministers of the City of Gloucester from the Calumnies of Robert Bacon (London 1646); R.B. of N.W. [i.e. Robert Bacon of New Windsor], A Word of Information and Advice Touching Tythes (London 1652); R.B. [i.e. Robert Bacon], A Taste of the Spirit of God (London 1652); Reliquiae Baxterianae (London 1696), pt I, p. 41; T. Crosby, History of the English Baptists (London 1740), Vol. III, p. 39; Bibliotheca Gloucestrensis, ed. J. Washbourn (Gloucester 1825), Vol. I, p. xcii; A.F. Mitchell and J. Struther, Minutes of the Sessions of the Westminster Assembly (Edinburgh 1874), pp. 335, 337, 340; E.B. Underhill, Records of the Church of Christ Meeting in Broadmead, Bristol (London 1842), Vol. II, pp. 16–27; W.A. Shaw, History of the English Church 1640–1660 (London 1900), Vol. II, p. 524; Victoria County History of Berkshire, Vol. II, p. 42. 16 [In the ODNB he still does not have a separate entry, but he figures prominently in the lemma on John Robins. Eds].

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There was exhibited for two days in the Cathedral of Gloucester the singular spectacle of a theological dispute conducted in the presence of the military governor [Massey], the committee, and principal inhabitants, sitting as moderators at a table in the choir, and surrounded by an immense concourse of people. The antagonists stood on opposite sides; and a marshal with his halbert was placed at the elbow of the respondent during the whole ceremony. On the first day it lasted five hours. Bacon was ordered out of Gloucester under escort and found his way to London. There he stayed in Threadneedle Street with Edward Barber, a Baptist minister to the Spital, Bishopsgate Street, ‘a gentleman of great learning who was first a member of the established church and embraced the principles of the Baptists long before the breaking out of the Civil War’. Bacon seems to have returned to Bristol for a short time after its capture by the Parliament in September 1645, but in March 1646 he was examined by the Westminster Assembly and reported as being unfit to officiate the cure of St Andrew’s Wardrobe, and indeed as being unfit ‘for any other ministerial employment in regard of his erroneous and dangerous opinions’. Bacon, however, was protected by William Fiennes, Viscount Say and Seale, one of the powerful Parliamentary aristocrats who opposed Charles I. Fiennes hoped to the last that Charles would come to terms and that the Army would prevail over the extreme elements in Parliament. It was probably as part of Fiennes’s policy that Bacon issued his next book, The Labyrinth the Kingdom’s in . . . by R. Bacon, a lover of mankinde (London 1649). It is an appeal to the Army as the arbiters between the Royalists, the Presbyterians and the Independents. The Army constitute ‘the top power of the nation . . . let them be a sanctuary of rest to all, even the persons of Roundheads and Cavaliers’, let them ‘set up a high court of grace, mercy and favour’. The pamphlet had been written before the execution of the King; the postscript reveals that it was not published till after the execution of Charles on 30 January; by 7 February George Thomason, the London bookseller, had acquired a copy. Despite his troubles with the Westminster Assembly, by 1649 Bacon eventually got a ‘lectureship’ in the parish of New Windsor, but soon quarrelled with the other ministers there, probably on account of a pamphlet he issued against the use of tithes as part of ministers’ salaries. Then, after the Restoration, Bacon came into the news again. Robert Rich (d. 1679),17 a wealthy Barbados merchant, and a former Quaker, having heard of the devastation caused by the Fire of London in

17 R. Rich, Love Without Dissimulation (London 1667); Mr Robert Rich His Second Letter (London 1669). In a Quaker pamphlet by G. Roberts, Impudency and Ranterism Rebuked (London 1670), Rich and Bacon are referred to as ‘outcasts from among the people called Quakers, which in plainness are Ranters’ (unique copy, Friends’ House, London, Pamphlets, Vol. 62/3). Rich denied he was a Ranter; all he wanted was ‘a generous tolerance founded on mystical love’, Hidden Things Brought to Light (London 1678).

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1666, decided on an ecumenical gesture. He sent gifts of £30 each to ‘the Seven Churches of London’, to wit, the Roman Catholics, the Episcopal Protestants, the Presbyterian Professors, the Professors of Independency, the People called Anabaptists, the People called Quakers and, lastly, the Seventh Church, ‘the Church of the First-born, who worship God in Spirit and have their conversation in Heaven’. The chief members of this Church were ‘Mr Robert Bacon, Mr William Rawlinson and Mr Blackborrow, a leatherseller, formerly of Old Change, but now of Aldersgate Street’. The Quakers indignantly rejected the gift of their former coreligionist – the amount involved unfortunately lent itself to pharisaical remarks about ‘thirty pieces of silver’. Robert Bacon spent the money on a ‘love feast’ for his congregation. Robert Rich left Bacon all the spiritual books in his library, so it would seem that Rich remained to the end in sympathy with Bacon’s religious views. In 1676, Bacon edited the Remains of Dr Robert Gell (1595–1665). Gell was a distinguished biblical scholar, an associate of the Cambridge Platonist circle of Dr Henry More and Anne Conway and a bit of an astrologer. Richard Baxter called him a ‘sect-maker’, and in 1659 Jeremy Taylor considered him to belong to the ‘Perfectionists’ or ‘Castellians’, who believe that ‘it is possible to give unto God perfect unsinning obedience, and to have perfection of degrees in this life’.18 Besides Bacon’s transcript of The Cloud there are other mystical treatises among his surviving MSS, the most interesting of which is a translation (dated 1676) of Hugo de Palma’s Theologia Mystica (Amsterdam 1647), edited by Abraham von Frankenberg and issued concurrently with Frankenberg’s edition of the works of Jacob Boehme.19 A Puritan intellectual, a major figure in the early history of the Baptists in England, an associate of one of the most powerful and devious political figures in the English Civil War, translator of a mediaeval mystical tract issued under Behmenist auspices, editor of a neoplatonist astrologer and leader of an exiguous universalist sect – such was the man who transcribed The Cloud of Unknowing. So far, we have seen the taste for English mystics among Puritans and antinomian sectaries. Let us now turn to the Anglicans. Thanks to T.S. Eliot, the most famous shrine of seventeenth-century Anglican piety is Little Gidding. Nicholas Ferrar (1592–1637), the leader of the community, was openly, pronouncedly and genuinely hostile to Roman Catholicism. Yet there exists a curious manuscript which casts an interesting light on the Little Gidding approach to our mystics. It is called ‘Of a Contemplative Life’ and it belonged to John Collett (b. 1633), a London merchant and grandnephew of Nicholas Ferrar, and was probably compiled

18 Reliquiae Baxterianae (London 1696), pt. I, p. 78; The Whole Works . . . Jeremy Taylor (London 1822), Vol. I, p. lxxxv. 19 De Palma, or de Balma, a Carthusian, advocates the ‘triple way’ of the mystics – purgative, illuminative and unitive. There is no copy of the Amsterdam, 1647 ed. in BL. Bodley’s copy is a recent gift from the Codrington Library, All Souls.

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in the Little Gidding household. It is in fact a most interesting adaptation and abbreviation of Baker’s Sancta Sophia. Its contents are best summarized by Clara Kirchberger: Everything connected with . . . Benedictinism and specifically Roman Catholic doctrine has been omitted. The object has been to give an account of the contemplative life and contemplative prayer for those dedicated to God in the world. Nothing has been added to Baker’s text. . . . With something amounting almost to genius, Collett follows Baker’s analyses faithfully, picking out the general principles, retaining all that is best, most sure and indeed most perfectly expressed, but passing over the minutiae, the distinctions, the hair-splitting, which make Baker difficult to our generation.20 There is another probable connection between Little Gidding and our mystics. Nicholas Ferrar, it should not be forgotten, came from the London business world. His deathbed at Little Gidding was attended by three former business associates and well-known capitalist entrepreneurs from the City: Sir Thomas Myddleton, Sir Hugh Myddleton, his brother, and Robert Bateman. Bateman (d. 1658) was a wealthy City merchant, Deputy-Governor of the New River Company, Master of the Skinners Company, Chamberlain of the City of London and father of a future Lord Mayor, Sir Anthony Bateman. In view of this somewhat worldly background, it is perhaps surprising to find that Bateman was the owner of the best Middle English text of The Cloud of Unknowing (and Deonise Hid Divinite), which passed after his death into the library of Bishop Stillingfleet, and thence to the Harleian Library.21 During the Restoration period the diversity of interest in the English mystics is equally striking. Students of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress know that one of the analogues for this book is The Parable of the Pilgrim (1665) by Simon Patrick (1626–1707). Patrick was associated with one of the most attractive Cambridge Platonists, John Smith (1618–52), and was one of the leaders of the revival of the spiritual life of the Anglican Church in the later seventeenth century; he ended his career as Bishop of Ely. In his preface, Patrick explains the origin of the title of

20 This quotation is a conflation of Miss Kirchberger’s account of Bodley MS Rawl. c. 587 in her catalogue of the mystical MSS in Bodley and her article in Theology (1949), pp. 294–8, ‘A Link with Little Gidding’. See also her article in the Bodleian Quarterly Record, Vol. III (1951), pp. 155–64, ‘Bodleian Mss Relating to the Spiritual Life’, and The Tablet, 18 May 1940. 21 For information on Robert Bateman see B. Blackstone (ed.), The Ferrar Papers (Cambridge 1938), p. 66; J.W. Gough, Sir Hugh Myddleton (Oxford 1964); A.W. Hughes Clarke, Registers of St Mary Magdalene, Milk Street, Harleian Society, Vol. 72 (1942), pt. I, p. 56; R.R. Sharpe, Calendar of Wills in the Court of Hustings (London, Index Society 1889). Bateman’s signature is on f. 38 of BL MS Harl. 674, and has been missed by both P. Hodgson (ed.), The Cloud of Unknowing (London 1944), Early English Text Society, No. 218, and by C.E. Wright, Fontes Harleiani (London 1972).

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his book: ‘Reading a little while agone the works of a late writer [marginal note: Baker’s Sancta Sophia], I found amongst other matters a short discourse, in the compass of four or five leaves, under the name of The Parable of the Pilgrim’. When we turn to Baker’s Sancta Sophia we find that for his chapter, ‘The Parable of a Pilgrim’, Baker has simply quoted verbatim eight pages from Book II chapter 21 of ‘that excellent treatise called Scala Perfectionis, written by that eminent contemplative, Dr Walter Hilton, a Carthusian monk, in which, under the parable of a devout pilgrim desirous to travel to Jerusalem (which he interprets as the vision of peace or contemplation), he delivers instructions very proper and efficacious touching the behaviour in a devout soul for such a journey’ (I. I. vi). Is it too much of an exaggeration to suggest that a line runs from Hilton, via Baker and Patrick, to John Bunyan? Another connection with the Cambridge Platonists is John Worthington, DD (1618–71), who had been Master of Jesus College, Cambridge, from 1650 till he was ejected in 1660. In a letter of 21 January 1669 to Dr Henry More, Worthington is replying to a letter in which More had jokingly suggested that Worthington was overimpressed by Faithorne’s picture of Baker, which formed the frontispiece to Sancta Sophia: The picture of Aug. Baker which I like, is the picture of his serious thoughts, his affectionate sentiments; and where he meddles not with any of the particular doctrines, modes, and rites of the Romish Church, but delivers himself concerning such practical matters and experimental truths, as those who are most inwardly and seriously religious do agree in and heartily relish. To me he seems to represent them so properly, so powerfully and clearly, and so unaffectedly . . . that I know but few Protestants do better, or write with such life and energy, and in so spiritual a strain and so searchingly about mortification and self-abnegation, to the discovery of selfness and nature in her many close interests and designs, and most secret insinuations, whereby she sometimes seeks her self and her own satisfaction, even when she seems to be crosst. So that as I cannot but love and own good savoury truths, when they are earnestly commended to us wheresoever I see them, whether in Thomas à Kempis, Thaulerus, Jacob Behmen, or others, notwithstanding the stubble and wood and hay in their writings, and tho’ they were of such a Sect or Church, I cannot but think what excellent instruments such as these would have been, if freed from the Popish entanglements, or the fooleries of enthusiasm (which Jacob Behmen was in). But besides the mark of the beast, the Popery in Aug. Baker’s books, there is a deal of stuff, when he treats of Contemplation and its parts, Unions active and passive, &c. that to me is insignificant. He seems to me to talk in divinity (as to such points) as Plotinus talks in his Philosophy, things not to be seen, felt, or understood. I fear, there wants humility at the bottome, and there is at the top, too much of fancy and self-conceit. But take him out of the opinions and usages proper to 112

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the Church he was bred in, and take him out of his mystical notions about Contemplation, what is practical in him is set forth with peculiar advantages to a good and honest heart, and a practical Christian. And therefore I wonder not, that amongst the carnal and unspiritual Clergy of the Romish Church, the works of Aug. Baker were not (and are not) relisht so much. For whereas Cressy talked of a 2d. impression to be expected, there never came out any, though it be thirteen years since the book was printed. There are several passages all along the book, wherein he lessens the esteem of outward performances, vocal prayers, corporal austerities, scrupulous observances of modes and rites, to the prejudice of due liberty of spirit (besides what he inculcates about scrupulous confessions, and supposing so much need of a priest) that are distastfull to most of that Church: so that if he had lived in Spain, and published his writings (though he seems to have designed them only for the private use of some religious) he would scarce have escaped the Inquisition. And in other parts, to all their unspirituall clergy, and also to the seemingly spiritual but rigid, he must needs seem despicable; he treating much of what is inward, and to be known and relisht only by the inward Christians.22 Worthington’s reference to Baker and the Spanish Inquisition is a shrewd one. The Spanish Carmelites had constantly opposed the tendencies to ‘passive’ contemplation which clearly linked such writers as Canfield and Baker to their English source in The Cloud of Unknowing. Furthermore, the Index of 17 August 1559, compiled by the Grand Inquisitor Fernando de Valdes, had condemned some of the works of John of Avila, Louis de Granada and Harphius.23 Though there are no direct references to our mystics in the works of the Presbyterian divine, Richard Baxter (1615–91), yet he certainly had Canfield’s Rule of Perfection (Latin version), Hilton’s Scale and Baker’s Sancta Sophia in his library of 1,400 titles. He also had Cusa, Thomas à Jesu ODC, Raymond Lull and Constantine Barbanson.24 A prominent Quaker, the aristocratic Scot, Robert Barclay (1648–90), quotes Baker in defence of the Quaker teaching with regard to worship in spirit, without set liturgy and in silence. Such worship, says Barclay, has always been approved of by the Christian mystics, whose writings are full both of the explanation and of the commendation of this sort of worship; where they plentifully assert this inward

22 Diary and Correspondence of Dr John Worthington, ed. R.C. Christie (Manchester 1886), Vol. II, part II, Chetham Society, Vol. CXIV, pp. 322–3. 23 J. Orcibal, La Rencontre du Carmel Thérésien avec les mystiques du Nord (Paris 1959), p. 40; and J. Orcibal, Saint Jean de la Croix et les mystiques rhéno-flamands (Paris 1966). 24 G.F. Nuttall, ‘A Transcript of Richard Baxter’s Library Catalogue’, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Vols II and III (1951–2).

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introversion and abstraction of the mind, as they call it, from all images and thoughts, and the prayer of the will: Yea, they look upon this, as the height of Christian perfection; so that some of them, tho’ professed papists, do not doubt to affirm (as in a Book, called Sancta Sophia, put out by the English Benedictines, printed at Doway, Anno 1657. Tract. I. Sect. 2. cap. 5.) that such as have attained this method of worship, or are aiming at it, need not, nor ought to trouble or busie themselves with frequent and unnecessary confessions, with exercising corporal labours and austerities, the using of vocal voluntary prayers, the hearing of a number of masses, or set devotions, or exercises to saints, or prayers for the dead, or having solicitous and distracting cares to gain indulgences, by going to such and such churches, or adjoining ones self to confraternities, or intangling ones self with vows and promises; because such kind of things hinder the soul from observing the operations of the divine spirit in it, and from having liberty to follow the spirit, whither it would draw her. And yet who knows not, that in such kind of observations the very substance of the popish religion consisteth? Yet nevertheless, it appears by this, and many other passages, which out of their mystic writers might be mentioned, how they look upon this worship, as excelling all other; and that such as arrived hereunto, had no absolute need of the others.25 Barclay goes on to quote Baker’s example from the life of Balthazar Alvarez as one who found that a taste of the mystical life made him feel that ‘the other forms and ceremonies of worship were useless’. Before his conversion to Quakerism, Barclay had received his education under his uncle and namesake, Robert Barclay, at the Scots College for secular clergy in Paris, and probably he had got to know of Baker at that time. Another Scot, Robert Leighton (1611–84), is also of importance. Leighton’s father had suffered severely under Laud for hostility to episcopacy, yet Robert himself, after studying at Edinburgh, spent about ten formative years at Douay in Flanders with Catholic relatives; the town of Douay was a centre for the English Catholic exiles on the Continent. (Robert’s brother, Sir Ellis Leighton, the royalist courtier, seems to have become a Catholic.) Robert Leighton returned to Scotland in 1641 and was ordained a Presbyterian minister. In 1653, he was appointed Principal of Edinburgh University and Professor of Divinity. After the Restoration, in 1661, he was appointed Bishop of Dunblane and later, in 1669, Archbishop of Glasgow, but he retired from his charge in 1674. Leighton favoured a moderate episcopacy, and, like all moderates, suffered from attacks on both sides: on the one hand from the English ecclesiastical politicians of the Anglican Church, who had no understanding of the situation in Scotland, and on the other hand from the rigid Calvinist fanatics of the Scottish Kirk. Politically, Leighton was a failure.

25 R. Barclay, Apology for the True Christian Divinity, sixth ed. (London 1736), p. 380.

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But as a thinker, as part of the history of ideas, he has a remarkable importance, an importance less perhaps for the seventeenth than for the nineteenth century. It was Coleridge who singled out Leighton’s case as a sort of parable for the times. Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection (London 1825) is, in structure, virtually nothing but a commentary on Leighton; and Leighton is presented as an example of Calvinistic morality, tempered and humanized by Platonic philosophy. In England, Aids to Reflection had its influence within the Oxford Movement and the Broad Church Movement. But perhaps even more important was its influence in America: on Emerson and the Transcendentalists, and also on the St Louis Hegelians.26 It has been said of Leighton that ‘holy meditation seems to have been the one absorbing interest of his life’. He left part of his library to Dunblane, his first episcopal see. There we find Hilton’s Scale of Perfection (1659 ed.) and Baker’s Sancta Sophia, together with à Kempis, Richard of St Victor, Drexelius, Camus, Jean de Serres, Rodriguez, Theologia Germanica (in the English translation of Giles Randall, 1640, with MS notes by Leighton himself), Thomas à Jesu ODC, Johannes à Jesu Maria ODC, St Teresa of Avila (complete works in Spanish and French, 1645 and 1657), Plotinus (complete works, Greek and Latin, ed. Ficino 1570), Jacob Boehme and the Poemander of Hermes Trismegistus (ed. Ficino 1554). It was certainly a mixed bag, but hardly merits the remark of Wodrow, the Scottish Calvinist church historian, that ‘by many he was judged void of any doctrinal principles: and his close correspondence with some of his relations at Douay, in Popish orders, made him suspected as very much indifferent to all persuasions which bear the name of Christian’. Leighton had studied Baker carefully and made copious extracts in manuscript from Sancta Sophia. This MS, together with transcripts of Leighton’s sermons, passed into the hands of the non-juring bishop, Francis Turner, and thence into the Rawlinson collection in Bodley’s Library.27 Leighton’s deathbed was attended by a Scots cleric of a very different calibre, the garrulous, ambitious, tergiversatious and uxorious Gilbert Burnet (1643– 1715). During the reign of James II, Burnet travelled on the Continent and published some accounts of his travels. One of these was ‘A letter writ from Rome to one in Holland concerning the Quietists’.28 This gives what purports to be

26 M.H. Nicolson, ‘James Marsh and the Vermont Transcendentalists’, Philosophical Review, Vol. XXXIV (1925), pp. 28–50. There were two American editors of Aids to Reflection: John McVickar (1838) who justified Coleridge to the Episcopalians and James Marsh (1829) who justified Coleridge to the Calvinistic Congregationalists and to the Unitarians. 27 Catalogue of the Leightonian Library, Dunblane (Edinburgh 1843), (Bodley, Gough Additionals Scotland 8vo, 1860; no copy in BL [However, BL does have an Edinburgh 1793 edition. Eds]); W.J. Couper, Bibliotheca Leightoniana (Glasgow 1917); J.B. Craven, The Esoteric Studies of Robert Leighton (Selkirk 1918); D. Butler, Life and Letters of Robert Leighton (London 1903); Bodley MS Rawl. D. 142, abstracts from Augustine Baker and sermons of Robert Leighton. 28 In Three Letters Concerning the Present State of Italy (n.p. 1688). The work is anonymous. For Burnet’s authorship see H.C. Foxcroft, Supplement to Burnet’s History (Oxford 1902), p. 247. The

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an account of the Quietist controversy in Rome, told with a somewhat gleeful Schadenfreude. Burnet relates that in February and March of 1687 some two hundred people had been imprisoned by the Inquisition for Quietism; it was the material miseries of Italy that had led men to Molinos and Quietism, ‘men that are sick turn to all sorts of remedies’. Though Molinos did not favour superstition, ‘he gave in to the method of the mystical Divines’. Burnet then gives a somewhat simplified account of the development of Quietism. Cassian’s Collations ‘is their ancientiest book writ in that strain’. Then comes Denis the Areopagite, Tauler, Ruusbroec, Harphius, Suso, ‘but above all, Thomas à Kempis’. Quietism was again raised up in the last age with much lustre by S. Teresa, and after her by Baltasar Alvarez, a Jesuit. . . . And as England produced a Carthusian in King Henry VI’s time, one Walter Hilton, who writ The Scale of Perfection, a book inferior to none of those I have cited, and more simple and natural than most of them; so of late F. Cressy has published out of F. Baker’s papers, who was a Benedictine, a whole body of that method of Divinity and devotion. Burnet then contrasts the meditative and the contemplative states. Contemplation ‘adores God, it loves him and resigns itself up to him; and without wearying itself with a dry multiplicity of Acts, it feels in one act of Faith more force than a whole day of meditation can produce’. Furthermore, ‘every man is capable of the simplicity of contemplation’, and the Rosary and Breviary and common devotion to saints are laid aside ‘by those who rise up to the Contemplative state’. Besides the absence of a clear definition of Quietism, there is a curious ambiguity in Burnet’s attitude; unlike President Coolidge’s preacher on sin, it is hard to tell whether he is for it or against it. On the one hand Quietism is typical of Popish superstition, enthusiasm and fanaticism; on the other hand it has been condemned by the obscurantist Inquisition and Court of Rome, so there must be something good about it.29 In fact, Burnet’s acquaintance with mysticism went back more than twenty years. He had felt the stresses and strains of the Scots religious situation from his earliest youth. His upbringing had been almost symbolic of the problems of the Scots Church; his father was an Episcopalian and his mother a fanatical Presbyterian. In his autobiographical writings he tells us that, before his ordination to the ministry, ‘I insensibly came to love a monastic state of life. I hated our contentions at home, and my melancholy prevailed so upon me, that nothing but strong and

Three Letters are frequently catalogued as part of Burnet’s Some Letters containing an account of what seemed most remarkable in Switzerland, Italy, etc., first published at Rotterdam in 1686. 29 The translator’s preface to the English translation of Molinos’s Guía espiritual [Spiritual Guide, n.p. 1688], adopts the same tone and attitude.

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clear principles could have preserved me from going over to the Church of Rome, and entering into a religious order.’ He then turned to Tauler and the Cambridge Platonists. In 1664, he visited Paris, and made some acquaintance in many religious houses, for I had then a great inclination to that state of life. . . . I did not at all like the Jesuits. . . . I saw a vast pride and vanity among them, and a most horrid rage against all that they looked on as enemies of their order. I saw nothing among the Carthusians but dullness and stupidity. They were overgrown with fat; some were full of phlegm, and others were hypochondriacal; and no wonder, considering what a violence it is to a Frenchman’s nature to be in perpetual silence. The Benedictines seemed a plain, honest sort of people. They were very rich and much despised; but they spoke of all orders with great contempt in comparison of their own. . . . I looked often to find out some that understood the mystical divinity, and that followed the rules of it, but I could never fall on any. In 1665, he returned to Scotland to take up his first ministry, as successor to the pious Dr Henry Scougall in the parish of Saltoun. In 1666, at the age of twentythree, and only one year after ordination, Burnet sent a scathing letter to the Scots bishops, protesting against their worldly conduct. They treated me very severely on that occasion and threatened me with high censures, but the thing had got abroad and was so well liked that they thought fit to dismiss me with a reprimand for my presumption. Upon this I resolved to let the world see that I had done nothing on design to make myself popular. I retired from company, I stayed constantly at home, I entered into an ascetic course of life for two years till the whole mass of my blood was corrupted by my ill diet. . . . With my ascetic course of life I joined the reading all the Mystical Authors I could find; in particular all Teresa’s works. They are all brought into a system by Baker in his Sancta Sophia. I read also volumes of the Lives of the Saints of the Church of Rome, but these are of such a fabulous and ridiculous contexture, that it was no small exercise to my patience to bear with them. The Mystics are writers of a better strain; but being writ by recluse, melancholy people they are full of rank Enthusiasm, and if in the Church of Rome they had not set up the principle of submitting to the Church and of being resigned to the conduct of a confessor as the superior principle to which all are to subject themselves, their Mystical Divinity must have led them to all the extravagances of Enthusiasm. I have often wondered to find that my course of life and of study both concurring that way, I was never in danger of being misled. But as I had nothing of the spleen or melancholy in my natural constitution, so my philosophical studies had taught me to distinguish between 117

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the effect of a heat in the animal spirits and that which lay in the superior powers of the soul.30 So philosophy, self-interest and three wives triumphed over Sancta Sophia. In a career which culminated in active support for the Revolution of 1688 and his subsequent appointment to the bishopric of Salisbury, Burnet followed a very different course from the other mystically inclined Scotsmen whom we shall meet with in the eighteenth century. For an instance of a well-intentioned misapplication of Sancta Sophia, we may cite the case of Denis Granville (1637–1703), Dean of Durham and later Jacobite exile. In 1681, Granville drew up an extensive memorandum for the edification of his godson. As part of the young man’s religious formation, Granville recommended the daily practice of meditation in the garden or the fields: indeed, such an exercise of devotion in the fields and open air is so pleasant as well as profitable, that I would advise him to the practice thereof sometimes (when the weather and season will permit) rather than in the most retired corner within doors. . . . For the better performance of such exercises I recommend to him the perusal of the Ars Cogitandi and some select pieces of Riccius de Arte Meditandi, but the last with great caution, as also some part of Father Baker’s Sancta Sophia, but with greater wariness than the former, because some of his writings are very enthusiastical. Having thus employed himself a reasonable time in the foresaid devotions, he ought to proceed to exercises of a higher nature, such as consist chiefly of acts of the will.31 Here Baker is taken (with considerable reservation) as a guide to meditation, and is bracketed together with the Port Royal Ars Cogitandi and the Jesuit Bartholomew Ricci. For the more advanced forms of spirituality the godson is advised to look elsewhere – to the Psalms, in fact – even though Sancta Sophia concludes with a section devoted to ‘immediate acts and affections of the will’. This section may be rounded off with a notice of two explicitly hostile witnesses. In 1701, William Nicholls, DD (1664–1712), rector of Selsey, issued a translation of St Francis de Sales’s Introduction to a Devout Life, ‘reformed from the errors of the Popish edition’. He prefaced this with ‘a discourse of the rise and progress of the spiritual books in the Romish Church’. The preface acknowledges the growing interest for some years past in English translations of continental piety. The success of such books, says Nicholls, attests to the impartiality of English readers, but the books should be purged of their errors. St Francis de Sales, however, ‘does not run into the mystical stuff of Teresa, Blosius, Sancta 30 Foxcroft, op. cit., pp. 39, 97, 472–3 and O. Airy (ed.), Burnet’s History (Oxford 1897), Vol. I, pp. 387–8. 31 The Remains of Denis Granville (Durham 1865), Surtees Society, Vol. 47, p. 67.

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Sophia, etc.’. Indeed, he continues, after St Augustine ‘spiritual writing began to run into a ridiculous sort of lying or perfect quakerism’, and he instances the Revelations of Juliana of Norwich, St Gertrude of Hackeborn, St Mechtild of Magdeburg, St Catherine of Siena and St Brigit of Sweden as ‘Bedlam divinity’, while stressing that ‘many of the soberer divines of that Church have avoided these extravagances’. In itself, Nicholls’s preface testifies to a wide interest in all varieties of mystical and devotional literature, and to a conscious attempt to adapt a small part of it to the sober requirements of the prevailing post-Revolution Anglican religious ethos.32 A much more penetrating attack had been launched almost thirty years earlier, in 1672, by Bishop Edward Stillingfleet (1635–99), the most well-read, the most intelligent, and the most repulsive, of the Restoration Anglican divines. The first assault came in A Discourse concerning the Idolatry practised in the Church of Rome (1672), which was primarily concerned with worship of images, adoration of the Host, invocation of saints, and the doctrine of Purgatory. After all that, Stillingfleet goes on to deal with the ‘fanaticism’ of the Roman Church. The Catholics had maintained that private judgement in the Protestant Churches had led to fanaticism and enthusiasm. But the Romanists themselves were far worse: Do we collect Fanatical Revelations, and set them out with comments upon them, as Gonsalvus Durantus hath done those of St Brigit? Have we any mother Juliana’s among us? or do we publish to the world the Fanatick Revelations of distempered brains, as Mr Cressy hath very lately done, to the great honour and service of the Roman Church, The Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love shewed to a devout servant of Our Lord (and Lady too) called Mother Juliana? We have, we thank God, other ways of employing our devout retirements, than in reading such fopperies as these are. Excellent men! that debar the people reading the Scriptures in their own tongue, and instead of them put them off with such Fooleries, which deserve no other name at the best than the efforts of Religious madness. Were we to take an estimate of Christian Religion from such Raptures and Extasies, such Visions and Entertainments as those are, how much must we befool ourselves to think it sense? Did ever H.N. [Hendrik Niclas], Jacob Behmen, or the highest Enthusiasts talk at a more extravagant rate than this Juliana doth? (p. 224) After quoting more than a page of extracts from Juliana, Stillingfleet comments: We may justly admire what esteem Mr Cressy had of that Lady, to whose devout retirements he so gravely commends the blasphemous and sense-

32 Cardinal Newman owned a copy of Nicholls’s edition.

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less tittle-tattle of his historical gossip. It were endless, to repeat the canting and enthusiastic expressions, which signify nothing, in Mother Juliana’s Revelations; and one would wonder to what end such a book were published among us, unless it were to convince us of this great truth, that we have not had so great Fanaticks and Enthusiasts among us, but they have had greater in the Roman Church. And by this means they may think to prevail upon the Fanaticks among us, by persuading them, that they have been strangely mistaken concerning the Church of Rome, in these matters; that she is no such enemy to Enthusiasms and Revelations, as some believe; but that in truth she hath not only always had such, but given great approbation and encouragement to them. (p. 226) Stillingfleet then has a field-day with the accounts of private revelations in the lives of the saints: St Benedict, St Romuald, St Simon Stock, ‘the Quakerism of St Francis described from the best Authors’ and ‘the Sect of Quakers a new order of Disciples of Ignatius’. He then goes on to deal with the fanatic and enthusiastic devotions of the Roman Church. It began with the monastic orders, but the chief exponents were Ruusbroec, Suso, Harphius and Blosius. For a current example he turns to Cressy’s introduction to Baker’s Sancta Sophia: ‘we may as well hope to understand the Quaker’s canting, as Mr Cressy’s’. Then, after more than five pages of extensive quotation from the text of Sancta Sophia itself, Stillingfleet concludes: I do not think such expressions as those I have already produced, can be parallelled by the most frantic Enthusiasts that have been since the beginning of the Family of Love. Yet these Books are licensed, approved, nay admired in the Roman Church; whereas we have always disowned, disproved, and condemned any such writers among us, and have used all care to suppress and confute them. The plain effect of such Enthusiastick fooleries is to make Religion laughed at by some, despised by others, and neglected by all, who take no other measures of it, than from such confounded writers. If once an unintelligible way of practical Religion become the standard of devotion, no men of sense and reason will ever set themselves about it; but leave it to be understood by madmen, and practised by Fools. (p. 291) Within the same year, Cressy replied to Stillingfleet, in Fanaticism Fanatically Imputed, and defended the life of prayer and contemplation. Cressy draws attention to the earlier contemplative tradition of writers such as Cassian and Dionysius the Areopagite. As for Stillingfleet’s charge that the language of contemplation is ‘unintelligible canting’, what about the language of St Paul himself? As for Dame Juliana, 120

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I must needs signify my wonder, what could move his spleen and choler against her little book. It is true, her language to the ears of this age seems exotick; but it is such as was spoken in her time, therefore she may be excused. Her expressions touching God’s favours to her are homely, but that surely is no sin. (p. 64) Cressy cannot resist a dig at Stillingfleet’s wide range of references: He may by such a way of writing beget in the minds of the vulgar sort of readers a high opinion of the vastness of his unnecessary reading and his well-furnished library. Stillingfleet answered Cressy in 1675, in An Answer to Mr Cressy’s Epistle Apologetical. He returned to his attack on the style of Augustine Baker’s language: The Christian religion is a very plain and intelligible thing, and if it had not been so, I do not know how men should be obliged to believe it. . . . There seems to be nothing in this state of Pure Contemplation of which a reasonable account cannot be given from a natural temper heightened and improved by the force of imagination. (pp. 25 and 81) Are not the same phenomena, he continues, to be found among ‘the Gentiles of Hindostan’? Stillingfleet accepts Cressy’s link between Baker and Dionysius the Areopagite, ‘who makes it his business to patch together the sublimest notions of the modern Platonists, and to make them pass for good Christian Doctrine’. Stillingfleet elaborates on this link with the neo-Platonist tradition – Plotinus, Proclus, Iamblicus, Hermes Trismegistus and, in the Renaissance, Ficino and Pico – and claims that ‘the fundamentals of mystical theology were first taken out of these Philosophers who were the greatest enemies to Christians, and who seemed to set up this, in opposition to it, as a more sublime way to perfection’ (p. 134). Stillingfleet’s attack on Cressy, Juliana and Baker is of cardinal importance in the transition from the Restoration to the Augustan world. Even allowing for the then-current conventions of controversy, there is a parboiled narrowness and an aggressive complacency in Stillingfleet which far exceeds that of the other Anglican writers of his time. It is much more common half a century later, in the predominantly Augustan ethos. One recognizes the tone again in the self-satisfied Deism of a writer like Bolingbroke (1678–1751), the arch-enemy of what he called ‘metaphysical philosophy’.33 As Cressy had foreseen, if you reject Dame

33 The best introduction to the Augustan mentality is a reading of Bolingbroke’s ‘Letters or Essays addressed to A. Pope’, Works (London 1777), Vols III, IV and V. The following sentence is typical:

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Juliana and Augustine Baker, you have to end up by blackballing St Paul from your Club as well.

II. The eighteenth century The next phase involves four identifiable groups: (i) the Philadelphians; (ii) the Scots Episcopalians, especially those connected with Aberdeen; (iii) those linked with the Scots Episcopalians, the English Nonjurors; (iv) those linked with the third group, at the end of the century, certain of the Methodists. Taken together, they represent the varying strands of Quietism, Pietism and Sentimentalism; they point forward to one aspect of Romanticism at the end of the eighteenth century; they typify those who, in the Age of Reason, were seeking for the religion of the heart. And these groups are connected with two figures in Holland: Benjamin Furly of Rotterdam and Pierre Poiret of Rijnsburg. Benjamin Furly (1636–1714) was a Quaker of an extraordinary range of interest and lack of orthodoxy.34 He was the intermediary between the English and the Continental Quakers and had helped Fox with his writings, besides having several translations (English-Dutch as well as Dutch-English) to his credit. Besides his friendship with the Quakers, he was also the friend and host of Algernon Sidney, John Locke and the third Earl of Shaftesbury. Furly’s library, of over 4,000 titles, attests to his liberal and eclectic views. It is a remarkable collection that might well serve as a bibliographical guide to the history of ideas in the early eighteenth century. It is particularly rich in mystical, astrological, cabbalistic and Socinian literature. Among his printed books Furly had a copy of Randall’s Bright Starre (London 1646), as well as the complete Dutch version of Canfield’s Rule of Perfection (Regel der Volmaaktheid, Antwerp 1659); he also had two editions of Hilton’s Scale of Perfection (London 1659 and 1672) and the Revelations (n.p. 1670) of Juliana of Norwich. Among his manuscripts he had Robert Bacon’s transcript of The Cloud of Unknowing and the translation of Hugo de Palma. In 1710, Furly was visited by the itinerant book-collector and insufferable Besserwisser, Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach (1682–1734). Uffenbach had studied at Halle, the centre of German Pietism, and had been so impressed by reading the Kirchen- und Ketzer-Historie of the Pietist, Gottfried Arnold, that he determined to make a study of the varieties of religious experience. One class of book in which he was particularly interested was de docta, pia ac necessaria in theologiis et mysteriis sacris ignorantia. After Furly’s death, Uffenbach

‘All the ways of acquiring a more direct knowledge of God by archetypal ideas which we discern in an intimate union of the human with the divine mind, by the irradiations of mystic theology, or by the inward light of quakerism, and several more, which the phrenzy of metaphysics, not very distant from that of enthusiasm, has invented, are too ridiculous to deserve the regard of commonsense’ (Vol. V, p. 539). 34 W.I. Hull, Benjamin Furly and Quakerism at Rotterdam (Swarthmore College Monographs 1941); Bibliotheca Furliana (Rotterdam 1714).

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bought from the Amsterdam bookseller, John Henry Wetstein, a large number of Furly’s ‘mystic, Quaker, Socinian and atheistical’ books and manuscripts. In the catalogue of his own library Uffenbach classes Juliana’s Revelations under Prophetarum, Chiliastarum, ac commentariorum in apocalypsin perversorum scripta, and Hilton’s Scale under Theosophica, mystica, Weigeliana, Labbadistica, Quietistica &c. scripta. Uffenbach’s library of printed books was ultimately dispersed, but his letters went to the University Library at Frankfurt, and his other manuscripts were acquired by J. C. Wolf of Hamburg and ultimately came to the University Library there; and that is how Robert Bacon’s transcript of The Cloud of Unknowing came to its ultimate resting-place on the Elbe.35 One of the many books translated into English by Benjamin Furly was The Light upon the Candlestick (1662).36 This was a tract probably produced by one of the ‘Collegiants’ at Rijnsburg, near Leiden. The Collegiants were an extreme Remonstrant, i.e. anti-Calvinistic, sect of liberal and pietistic tendencies, and The Light upon the Candlestick was written while Spinoza was living with them: ‘we exhort everyone to turn in to the Light that is in him; we give it rather the appellation of Light, than any Thing else, otherwise it is all one to us whether ye call it Christ, the Spirit, the Word, etc., seeing these all denote but one and the same thing’. It is quite obvious that the Quakers would feel a natural affinity to the Collegiants, and in Holland the Mennonites and the Collegiants supplied most of the recruits to Quakerism. In 1688, the Collegiant group at Rijnsburg was joined by Pierre Poiret (1646–1719), the French Protestant mystic.37 Poiret studied at Basle University and, after being a preacher at Heidelberg (1668) and Anweiler (1672), he attached himself to Antoinette Bourignon (1616– 80), a Flemish lady of mystical pretensions. She was born at Lille and brought up a Catholic, but her visionary experiences brought her into conflict with the ecclesiastical authorities, and in 1667 she fled to the Netherlands. From there she attempted to found a religious community, consisting of Quakers, Jansenists and Mennonites, on the island of Nordstrand in Schleswig Holstein. By 1676, this enterprise had completely failed, and she returned to the Netherlands, where she died. Pierre Poiret took it upon himself to be the editor and expounder of her voluminous visionary writings; perhaps he saw himself as a sort of Fénelon to his Mme

35 Z.C. von Uffenbach, Merkwürdige Reisen (Frankfurt 1753), Vol. II, p. 278; J.G. Schelhorn (ed.), Commercii Epistolaris Uffenbachiani (Ulm 1753), Vol. III, p. 157; J.B. Mayor (ed.), Cambridge under Queen Anne (Cambridge 1911), pp. 341–7; Bibliotheca Uffenbachiani Universalis (Frankfurt 1729–30), Vols I and III; K. Franke, ‘Z.C. von Uffenbach als Handschriftensammler’, Börsenbl. f.d. Deuts. Buchhandel, Vol. LI (1965), Frankfurter Ausgabe, pp. 1235–388; F.C. Hoffman, ‘Johann Christoph Wolf’, Serapeum, Vol. XXI (1863), p. 320 sq. 36 Furly’s translation was published in London in 1663 when the name of the author was wrongly given as William Ames, the Quaker; see W. Sewel, History of the Quakers (London 1772), p. 717. 37 R.M. Jones, Spiritual Reformers (London 1914), chap. VII; W.C. Braithwaite, The Beginnings of Quakerism (London 1912), p. 409; J.C. van Slee, De Rijnsburger Collegianten (Haarlem 1895); Max Wieser’s two pioneering books are invaluable: Peter Poiret, Der Vater des romantischen Mystik in Deutschland (München 1932) and Der sentimentale Mensch (Gotha 1924).

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Guyon. For some time Poiret was in Amsterdam, where Mme Bourignon had established her printing house,38 and later he moved to Rijnsburg. Poiret was much more intelligent than his spiritual mistress, and indeed he attempted to put his own mystical teaching on a philosophical basis by connecting it with the Cartesian doctrine of ideas. But Poiret’s most important and influential work was his attempt to provide a systematic guide to, and inventory of, all the mystical writings that were amenable to liberal, pietistic, religious idealism. This was embodied in his Théologie Réelle (Amsterdam 1700) and in a more extended form in his Bibliotheca Mysticorum Selecta (Amsterdam 1708). This contains an extensive bibliography of mystical and devotional books of all varieties and periods, together with a separate list of mystical writers with brief qualifications of their significance; some are specially selected as being of major importance and marked, Baedeker fashion, with an asterisk. All our English mystics qualify for the asterisk: Backer [sic], Augustinus, Sancta Sophia, Anglice. Contemplator solidus et illuminatus . . . à Canfield, Benedictus. Illuminatus, doctus . . . Cressy, Serenus. Angl. Editor Scriptorum D. A. Backer, et Revelationum M. Julianae . . . Gertrudis More. Illuminata, solidissima, humillima, fervens resignatissima, clara, facilis, utilissima . . . Hilton, Walter, Scala Perfectionis, Angl. Lond. 1659. Illuminatus . . . Julianae, Matris Anachoretae. Revelationes de amore Dei. Anglice. Theodacticae, profundae, ecstaticae. Poiret’s card-index system seems to have slipped up, for Gertrude More appears again as ‘Mora, Gertrudis, illuminata, pietatis, humilitatis, mansuetudinis, incomparabilis’. Where had Poiret acquired his knowledge of the English mystics? There is no concrete evidence that Poiret knew Furly personally, but his geographical proximity to Furly’s library, representing a unique collection of English mystical books in Holland, provides very strong circumstantial evidence. Another possibility, which does not exclude an acquaintance with Furly’s library, is Poiret’s known association with the English Philadelphians and with the Scots Episcopalians. It is common knowledge that Poiret and his mystical catalogue were of incomparable importance in the growth of the German Pietist movement, and, through Pietism, he may be said to have contributed to German Romanticism. His bibliography certainly formed an essential part of the Apparat of the Franckesche Stiftungen at Halle, the German Pietist centre. At the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, in Catholic Bavaria, we even find the great ecumenical theologian, Bishop Joseph Sailer, using Poiret’s Bibliotheca Mysticorum as a basic

38 For the Bourignon-Poiret press see J.G. Riewald, Reynier Jansen of Philadelphia (Groningen 1970).

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bibliography for the spiritual formation of young seminary students and as a major source for the revival of Catholic spirituality.39 The two principal channels for the spread of Poiret’s bibliography into German pietistic circles were Gottfried Arnold (1666–1714) and Gerhard Tersteegen (1697–1769). Gottfried Arnold praised Poiret for drawing the attention of the Protestant Pietists to what was spiritually valuable in Popish writers, and he referred to Dame Juliana, Augustine Baker, Gertrude More and Canfield in a list which lumped together Scupoli, Harphius, St Francis de Sales, St Ignatius of Loyola, Suso and St John of the Cross, in addition to Bunyan, Donne and Jeremy Taylor.40 It is surely significant that, at a turning point in Arnold’s own spiritual life, when he painfully asserted the claims of his own inner light against the pressures of Lutheran orthodoxy, he translated Gertrude More’s Confessiones Amantis into German (Frankfurt 1700), with a laudatory preface.41 Gerhard Tersteegen is probably best known as a hymn writer and spiritual director. He inherited Poiret’s literary manuscripts and used them as the basis for the publication of his large collection of biographies and autobiographies of the mystics, Auserlesene Lebensbeschreibungen heiliger Seelen (Solingen 1733–53), which includes an extensive extract from the Revelations of Juliana of Norwich – set between the life of St Francis and the life of St John of the Cross. Not only did Tersteegen know Cressy’s printed edition of 1670, he had also seen a manuscript of Juliana’s Revelations in Poiret’s library; and he also knew Baker’s Sancta Sophia. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Holland was the Mecca for German (and, indeed, Scandinavian and English) Protestants seeking for a renewal of the spiritual life. Poiret was strategically placed, and it is indeed thanks to Poiret that so much Catholic spirituality, including the English Catholic mystics, was put on the German Pietist map.42

39 H. Schiel, J. M. Sailer, 2 Vols (Regensburg 1948–52), Vol. I, p. 390, Vol. II, pp. 81, 555; and I. Weilner, Gottselige Innigkeit (Regensburg 1949). I understand that the unique copy of Sailer’s library catalogue was destroyed with Schiel’s possessions during the Allied bombardment of Frankfurt. [BL does have a modern reprint of a list of books from Sailer’s library: P. Scheuchenpflug (ed.), Die Privatbibliothek Johann Michael Sailers: Nachdruck des Verzeichnisses von Büchern aus Sailers Nachlass (Sulzbach/Oberpfalz 1833) . . . mit einem Vorwort von Bernhard Gajek (Frankfurt am Main; Oxford: Lang, c.2006. Eds]. 40 G. Arnold, Historie und Beschreibung der Mystichen Theologie (Frankfurt 1703), chaps XXIV to XXVI. Canfield ‘wird auch sonderlich recommandiert wegen seines gründlichen ordentlichen und deutlichen vortrags’. Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (London 1624) appears as Joh. Donni, Meditationes de morbo suo. 41 I have only the authority of Arnold and Poiret themselves for this, and have never seen the book itself. [However, the German Union Catalogue (GBV) lists several copies of a Frankfurt 1704 edition of Confessiones amantis, oder heilige Liebes-Bekäntnisse . . . tr. Gottfried Arnold. Eds]. Arnold also mentions a French translation, but there is no copy in the Catalogue of the Bibliothèque Nationale. [Nor in Ccfr. Eds]. 42 For the general background to German Pietism see the two recent books of F.E. Stoeffler, The Rise of Evangelical Pietism (Leiden 1971); and German Pietism during the 18th Century (Leiden 1973).

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As for Poiret’s connections with England, the first group to be mentioned should be the Philadelphians, as the influence was probably mutual. The Philadelphians really go back to the cult of Jacob Boehme during the Civil War and Commonwealth period.43 The chief apostle of Boehme at that time was John Pordage (1607–81), Rector of Bradfield, Berks. By the 1670s he had attracted the discipleship of Jane Leade (1623–1704), a visionary and ‘enthusiastic’ of an extreme type. But by the end of the century she in her turn had attracted a number of intellectuals, dissatisfied with the spiritual aridity of the age. Among these was Francis Lee (1661–1719), who resigned his Fellowship at St John’s College, Oxford, at the Revolution and went to Leiden to study medicine. While in Holland he became acquainted with Jane Leade’s writings,44 which had been translated into Dutch and German by Lothar Visscher. Lee knew Furly, who gave him Jane Leade’s address.45 At Furly’s house Lee met two other admirers of Jane Leade, Dionysius Andreas Freher of Nuremberg and Heinrich Johann Deichmann of Einbeck in Hanover. All three went over to England in 1694, and Lee eventually married Mrs Leade’s daughter and settled down with his wife and mother-inlaw. In an interesting correspondence of 1699 with Henry Dodwell, the Nonjuror, Lee answers Dodwell’s charge that the Philadelphians are separatists. Lee distinguishes separatism from freedom of the spirit. Among the writers of the Roman Church he instances Fr Baker and Gertrude More as ‘writing expressly against that servile obedience which the Jesuits generally required’. Baker and Gertrude More, he continues, explicitly declare that the true object of obedience is God alone, and that none can live in true obedience without attending to the internal Divine call, whatever their superiors persuade to the contrary, or their spiritual directors dictate. And herein we cannot but concur with them; yet do not for this think that we separate from the Church whereof we were before members, any more than they did separate from theirs, unless that Church that claims us should either deny this Divine call, or prohibit the obedience to it.46 Lee also contrasts the Passive Contemplation of Baker and Gertrude More with the meditative methods of the Jesuits:

43 The literature on Behmenism and the Philadelphians is extensive. Apart from the writings of R.F. Jones and Stephen Hobhouse, the unpublished Oxford B.Litt. thesis (1934) of Reginald Maxse merits attention. Desirée Hurst’s Hidden Riches (London 1964) is original and informative. 44 Jane Leade’s writings were published in German at Amsterdam in the 1690s by the Wetsteins, cf. C.W.H. Hochhuth, ‘Geschichte und Entwicklung der philadelphischen Gemeinden’, in Zeitschrift für die historische Theologie (Gotha 1865), pp. 171–290. 45 C. Walton, Notes and Materials (London 1854), p. 508. Walton prints Visscher as Tischer and Furly as Finley. 46 Walton, Notes, pp. 217–8.

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The method of the Jesuits has always been against this Passive Contemplation . . . preferring meditation on their Spiritual Exercises, that they may not put themselves out of the protection of Christ by too much abstractedness and silent recollection; and upon this score they made in the last age such a violent opposition against Father Austin Baker, and against Dame Gertrude More; whose reasons, which they bring in vindication of their simple and plain way, are not perhaps unworthy of consideration. In the same treatise on Passive Contemplation, Lee also praises Canfield: There is a book of Benedictus Anglus which for the settling you fully as to this matter deserves to be recommended to your perusal, if you can procure it in either Latin or English, which bears for title De Triplici Voluntate Dei; whose two first parts do make in English The Rule of Perfection, and the third The Bright Star, I have found much benefit by it; but the last part in the English wants of that Union which is to be found in that of the two former. The sum of all is contained in the exercise of the Divine Call.47 Among Lee’s manuscripts is a proposal, dated 1703, for printing a series of volumes to constitute a mystical library including the Desert Fathers, the best of the heathen mystics, the Jewish Cabbala and the Christian mystics of the Middle Ages. As well as proposing that Poiret’s list should be translated, and that translations should be made of approved writers of mystical theology in Italian, French, High Dutch and Flemish, he also proposed ‘that our English mystics of the former ages as many as can be found, whether in print or in manuscript, that are of value, shall be diligently revised, and methodized in convenient portable volumes; and so as they may come at a most easy rate to the buyers’.48 In 1697, Lee was joined by a colleague from St John’s, Richard Roach (1662– 1730),49 and the two men set to work to organize the Philadelphian Society as something that was ‘not a visible pompous church’, but ‘the church mystic and

47 Walton, Notes, p. 172 and p. 507. Lee’s treatise on Passive Contemplation is dated 9 August 1700. 48 Walton, Notes, p. 237. Lee published anonymously a very knowledgeable life of Thomas à Kempis in which he discussed the possibility of Hilton’s authorship of the Imitatio on the basis of the Magdalen and Bodleian MSS of the de Musica Ecclesiastica; cf. BL IX App. 40: The Christian Pattern: Or the Imitation of Jesus Christ, Vol. II . . . recommended by George Hickes (London 1707), p. xl. 49 Useful biographies of Lee, Roach and other mystically inclined members of St John’s are in W.C. Costin, History of St John’s College Oxford, 1598–1850 (Oxford 1958; Oxford Historical Society n.s. XII). Richard Rawlinson’s comments on Roach are unflattering: ‘he was a bubble to a set of crafty designing villains who abused his innocence and sponged on his purse’ (Bodley MS Rawl. D. 1152, flyleaf).

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catholic wherever dispersed through the Christian world’. They accepted ‘all the mystic writers, in the forward way and conduct of the soul by the holy Ghost, that are among all parties’.50 In 1725, Roach, who managed to combine his admiration for the Philadelphians with the Rectorship of St Augustine’s, Hackney, published The Great Crisis, or the Mystery of the times and seasons unfolded. Roach includes ‘an account and catalogue of the spiritual and mystical writers in the several ages of the Church’. Referring to the restorers of divinity in the West he admits that works in the English language are mostly translations, and ‘but very few written in it originally that bear a high character’, besides Hilton’s Scale of Perfection, Baker’s Sancta Sophia and Canfield’s Rule. Among the ‘mystical virgins’ he lists Juliana of Norwich and Gertrude More, whose book is ‘full of breathings of divine love and interspersed with rapts of divine poetry’.51 As we have already mentioned, one of the Philadelphians was a German, D. A. Freher (1649–1728),52 who was a thorough-going Behmenist. Among Freher’s surviving manuscripts is a volume containing transcripts from part III of Canfield’s Rule of Perfection. Freher lived in England from 1694 till 1728, and for a considerable time at the house of the Revd Edward Waple (d. 1712), Vicar of St Sepulchre’s, Holborn. Like Lee and Roach, Waple was a Fellow of St John’s College, Oxford, and indeed a considerable benefactor to his College. Waple had a magnificent library of mystical literature, which he left to Sion College, London; among his books were Hilton’s Scale and Baker’s Sancta Sophia, together with Alvarez de Paz, Ruusbroec, St Francis de Sales, The Orchard of Sion (1529), Richard Whitford’s Pilgrimage of Perfection (1531), St John of the Cross, Blosius and Poiret’s Théologie Réelle (1700).53 At this point we may refer to the remarkable inclusion of Baker’s Sancta Sophia in the printed catalogue of the Church of the New Jerusalem at Tranquebar. The catalogue, issued in 1714, contains books in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, French, Portuguese, German, Danish, Tamil, Armenian, Malay, Formosan and English.54 The contents are clearly that of a missionary library with a strong evangelical and pietistic bias. There are about a hundred English books, mostly printed after 1690. There are a few exceptions, e.g. Gell’s Remains, edited by Robert Bacon (London 1676), John Everard’s Some Gospel Treasures Opened (London 1653) and

50 Bodley MS Rawl. D. 833. 51 R. Roach, The Great Crisis (London 1725), pp. 165–71. 52 For Freher see Walton, Notes, pp. 678–88 and C.A. Muses, Illumination on Jacob Boehme: the Work of Dionysius Andreas Freher (Columbia 1951); Freher’s Canfield transcripts are in Dr Williams’s Library, London, MS Walton 1107(3). 53 Waple’s library can be partly reconstructed from the 1724 Sion College Library Catalogue, though a number of his books have been disposed of as duplicates (cf. G. Keynes, Bibliotheca Bibliographica [London 1964], items 1834 and 2458). 54 Catologo dos Livros que se achao na Bibliotheca da Igreja chamada Jerusalem em Tranquebar . . . Tranquebar, na Estampa dos Missionarios Reaes de Dennemarck Anno de 1714 (Bodley MS Rawl. D. 834, f. 63 sq.). Ziegenbalg brought fifty copies of the catalogue to Europe in 1715 and gave this one to the S.P.C.K.

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Baker’s Sancta Sophia (Douay 1657). How did Augustine Baker come to find himself on the coasts of Coromandel, dans cette galère? King Frederick IV of Denmark, at the instigation of his Pietist chaplain, had determined to provide missionaries at the Danish trading settlement of Tranquebar, in the East Indies. Not being able to find any Danes willing to undertake the task, he applied for help to A. H. Francke at the Pietist centre of Halle. Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg and Heinrich Plütschau, two of Francke’s students at Halle, were willing to go, and they thus became the first Protestant missionaries to the Indies.55 When they arrived in 1706, the missionaries appealed for material assistance to their Pietist friends in Halle, Berlin, Copenhagen and London. Their London contact was A.W. Boehm (1673–1722), chaplain to Prince George of Denmark.56 Boehm was a German pastor who, on account of his Pietist convictions, had had difficulties with the Lutheran authorities in the County of Waldeck-Pyrmont, and had gone to England in 1701. He had obtained the post of court chaplain through the good offices of a fellow-Pietist, H.W. Ludolph,57 secretary to Prince George. Another of Boehm’s friends was the American Henry Newman, secretary to the S.P.C.K., and through him Boehm interested the S.P.C.K. in the Danish Pietist mission at Tranquebar. But Boehm also had friends and contacts among the Philadelphians.58 As early as 9 June 1708, we find H. J. Deichmann writing from Windsor to his fellow-Philadelphian, Richard Roach, to say that ‘Mr Boehm thinks it necessary for these pious gentlemen in the East Indies to settle a correspondence between them and him, and promote this design either by the sending of books or what assistance else by pious and charitable Christians shall come to his hands’. Now Roach was at that time living at Hackney with Sir Thomas Cooke, Governor of the British East India Company, and Deichmann wanted Roach to persuade Cooke to carry materials from England to Tranquebar on the East India Company’s ships that were en route for the nearby Fort St George and Fort St David.59

55 For the story of the Danish Mission at Tranquebar, see K. Latourette, History of the Expansion of Christianity (London 1940), Vol. III, pp. 277–82 and literature there cited. The fullest missionary letters are in Der Königl. Dänischen Missionarien aus Ost-Indien eingesandter ausführlichen Berichten (Halle 1729 sq.), Vol. I, pp. 249–50; Vol. II, pp. 44–6. See also W. Germann, Ziegenbalg und Plütschau (Erlangen 1868), and Eric Beyreuther, August Hermann Francke und die Anfänge der ökumenischen Bewegung (Leipzig 1957). 56 J.J. Rambach, Memoirs of the Life and Death of the Late Rev. Mr Anthony William Boehm, trans. J.C. Jacobi, preface by Isaac Watts (London 1735). For Boehm’s troubles in Germany, see W. Irmer, Geschichte des Pietismus in der Grafschap Waldeck (Griefswald 1912), pp. 26 sq. 57 For Ludolph see Gustav Kramer, A. H. Francke, 2 vols (Halle 1880), Vol. I, p. 258, and J. Tetzner, H. W. Ludolph und Russland (Berlin 1955), p. 63. Boehm published a funeral sermon on Ludolph, The Faithful Steward (London 1712). 58 For connections between the Philadelphians and the S.P.C.K. see Garnett V. Portus, Caritas Anglicana (London 1912), p. 163. The Philadelphians called themselves ‘a Religious Society for the Reformation of Manners, for the Advancement of an Heroical Christian Piety, and Universal Peace and Love towards All’. 59 Bodley MS Rawl. D. 832 f. 38 (the whole of this volume contains letters of the Philadelphians); C. Hochhuth, op. cit., note 41. Deichmann was a graduate of Kiel University, pupil of Christian

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By 1709, the Tranquebar missionaries had determined to set up a library on the model of ‘Bray’s parochial libraries’. Thomas Bray (1658–1730) was a clergyman who had established a scheme for developing parochial libraries in England and North America as part of the Anglican religious revival at the turn of the century. His work was the main inspiration behind the activities of the S.P.C.K. By 1710, the East India Company’s ships were carrying not only books, but also a printing press and type, from the S.P.C.K. to the mission at Tranquebar. Now there are many lists of ‘Bray libraries’ available for comparison with the Tranquebar catalogue. On the whole, the Tranquebar library fits into the ‘Bray’ pattern, with a strong addition of recent Pietist books. But neither Baker, nor for that matter Everard or Gell, occur in the standard ‘Bray’ lists. It is a very fair assumption that Baker’s Sancta Sophia owes its presence at Tranquebar to the influence of the Philadelphian circle of Deichmann, Roach, Lee and Freher.60 The connections between the Scots Episcopalians and Pierre Poiret have been admirably illustrated by G.D. Henderson in his valuable collection of documents, Mystics of the North East (Aberdeen 1934). After the Glorious Revolution of 1688 the religious life of the Scots Episcopalians seems to have turned inwards towards various forms of spiritual religion and mysticism, and in the North East of Scotland at least, in Aberdeenshire and Banffshire, they were relatively unmolested by the Scots Presbyterians. By the turn of the century Episcopalian spiritual life centered round James Garden (1647–1726) and his brother George (1649–1733), both Professors of Divinity at Aberdeen. James Garden’s Comparative Theology (London 1700), an appeal for an eclectic mysticism and an appreciation of Mme Bourignon, was originally a lecture to his students. It was translated into Latin by Poiret in 1702 and republished in 1708 as part of the Bibliotheca Mysticorum. George Garden, his younger brother, acted as spiritual adviser to many of the Episcopalian gentry. One of these, James Cunningham of Barns (1680–1716), had gone to Bath in 1709 to take the waters. In a letter to Garden he writes: In my journey down I enjoyed a perfect solitude of ten days, the sweetest time I ever passed in my life. I employed my spare hours in reading Baker’s Sancta Sophia, and when I came home I found a strong attachment to practise the prayer of affection, or forced acts of the will, which he so Kortholt (senior) and friend of Kortholt’s son, Christian Kortholt (junior), who visited the Philadelphians in England. Deichmann’s dissertation dated April 1690, is in BL 591. e. 33(5) and concerns the Christian interpretation of Aristotle’s Ethics. For references to Sir Thomas Cooke, see W.R. Scott, Constitution and Finance of English, Scottish and Irish Joint Stock Companies, 3 Vols (Cambridge 1911), Vol. II, p. 160; and Beckles Willson, Ledger and Sword (London 1903), pp. 414 sq. 60 Bodley MS Rawl. D. 834 contains the papers of Henry Newman, secretary of the S.P.C.K.; it includes manuscript lists of typical S.P.C.K. book packets and ‘Bray libraries’, together with the printed Tranquebar catalogue. For Henry Newman see L.W. Cowie, Henry Newman (London 1956), esp. chap. 5. For further information on Bray and samples of Bray libraries, see The Parochial Libraries of the Church of England (London 1959).

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largely describes. . . . I spent several weeks in perusing all the Mystics, especially John of the Cross. . . . The more silent my prayer was, and the less mixture of anything of my own, the stronger was my conviction; and on the other hand I found my belief herein powerfully to promote my prayer, and render it more habitual and delightful. It was now no longer in my power to doubt that this was the voice of God into my soul calling it powerfully inward, as from all the outward distractions, so from my own judgment and opinions, thoughts, imaginations and affections, that every thing of the creatures in me being annihilated, He might become All in All. (pp. 200–3) George Garden foresaw the dangers that were entailed in an uncritical absorption of the mystics by an overemotional layman. He advised caution: This prayer of silence, both that of acquired and that of infused contemplation, has, you know, been treated of by most of all the spiritual writers, and is the present exercise of the Quietists throughout the Roman Communion, by which they seem to be distinguished from the rest of the Church. It appears that you have been insensibly led to this, first by the practice of the prayer of the Affections so largely treated of by Baker in his Sancta Sophia, and then attracted insensibly thereby into a state of silence. . . . As there are never wanting some who counterfeit the best things, so there hath been in the world, and may still be, a spurious quietism. . . . The only way which a soul which applies itself to acquire silent prayer can be put out of hazard of delusion therein, is, by seeking therein to adore in pure faith as present to it and in it, the invisible, unconceivable, unfigurable, supreme, infinite Being and Good, and to love Him as such; and while it thus employs its Faith and Love it cannot be deceived. But if from thence it pass to rely on extraordinary Lights and Sensations that come to it thereby, these are no God, this is not pure faith, in these a soul may be deceived as in other ways. (pp. 211–2) But James Cunningham would have none of this, and refers Garden back to Baker’s Sancta Sophia: You have indeed said a great many excellent and useful things anent the prayer of Internal Silence, but still there remains something in which our notions about it seem to differ. A. Baker in the 7 chap. of the 3d Sect. of his 3d Treatise has so admirably, and from such a fund of vital experimental knowledge, given a description of that prayer, of its nature and advantages, that instead of repeating anything there said, I choose to refer you to it. . . . I have found upon the exercise of this prayer, my 131

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soul restored to its former tranquillity and conviction, and the doubts quite evanished, though perhaps for a considerable time after no satisfaction as to them afforded to the rational faculty. It were needless to mention more instances, but tell me, my Dear Friend, how can I doubt of my being in these determined by some superior, yea Divine, Influence, unless I should accuse all the mystics not only as so themselves deceived, but gross deceivers of others; since they have all with one voice recommended this as an infallible method for obtaining of light in all doubtful cases. It were tedious to you to mention them all, but ‘tis most fully handled in 4, 5, 6, 7 Chap. of the 2d Section and 1st Treatise of Sancta Sophia. (pp. 222–4) What George Garden foresaw came unfortunately to pass. Cunningham’s spiritual reading which, besides Baker, included St Augustine, Cassian, St John of the Cross, Boehme, Baron Metternich and Angela of Foligno, led him to an attraction towards the more sensational manifestations of religious hysteria. He eventually joined the Camisards or ‘French Prophets’, the extreme French Protestant sect, some of whose exiled members were active in Edinburgh at this period.61 Cunningham’s medical adviser was Dr George Cheyne (1671–1743), the fashionable Scots physician of Falstaffian proportions and a specialist in what might be called early psychosomatic medicine. He was the friend of Arbuthnot, Pope, David Hartley, Samuel Richardson and William Law and wrote best-selling books, much admired by Dr Johnson, on the cure of melancholia. Cheyne recommended books on mystical religion to his patients and to his friends. In 1742, he suggested to Samuel Richardson that the latter should compile a ‘catalogue of books for the devout, the tender, valetudinarian and nervous’, which perhaps might be called the ‘Catalogue of Pamela’s Library’. Such a catalogue, said Cheyne, could be modelled on Poiret’s catalogue of mystical writers, which Richardson might obtain from Paul Vaillant’s shop in the Strand, where Cheyne had obtained his own copy.62 The most northerly example of an interest in the English mystics is to be found in the Orkneys. The library inventory, dated 1729, of Alexander Tulloch, minister of the ‘church people’ at Kirkwall, included the works of Mme Bourignon, Mme Guyon, Poiret, St Francis de Sales, Molinos, the Behmenist tract Faith and

61 Henderson, op. cit., pp. 191 sq. 62 C.F. Mullett (ed.), Letters of George Cheyne to Samuel Richardson (Columbia 1943), pp. 110–1. Paul Vaillant II belonged to a family of distinguished Huguenot booksellers who had settled in London after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. He became Sheriff of London, first library agent to the British Museum, and ‘Father’ of the Stationers Company (H.R. Plomer, Dictionary of . . . Booksellers 1726–75 [London 1932], p. 250).

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Reason by Baron von Metternich (London 1713),63 an Abstract of the Douay Catechism (London 1688), Patrick’s Parable of the Pilgrim (London 1665) and Baker’s Sancta Sophia. Tulloch was a son of the manse. He graduated from King’s College, Aberdeen, in 1693, and thus would have come under the influence of the Garden brothers. He first set up as a merchant in Elgin, and only took orders later in life. His library has been described as characteristic of a Nonjuring Episcopalian divine of the period.64 The same sort of Pietist-Quietist books (including Poiret’s Biliotheca Mysticorum) can be found, on an extended scale, in the library of the Scottish Episcopal Church at Edinburgh. These come largely from the library of Alexander Jolly (1756–1838), the pious, learned and eremitic Episcopalian Bishop of Moray. Jolly not only owned a copy of Baker’s Sancta Sophia, he had also made a transcript of Cressy’s edition of Juliana’s Revelations. With Jolly the tradition of the ‘mystics of the North East’ is brought into the nineteenth century, and it is interesting to note that Jolly’s works were considered by some of his contemporaries to be part of the Tractarian revival; his concern for the mystical life did not exclude a strongly sacramental theology.65 The English Nonjurors, like the Scots Episcopalians, were also an inwardlooking group. Some of them turned to scholarship, history and antiquarianism, like Thomas Baker, Roger North, George Hickes, Richard Massey, and Thomas and Richard Rawlinson. An interesting example of the overlap between antiquarianism and mysticism is the fact that the manuscript collections donated to the Bodleian Library by the Nonjuring Bishop, Richard Rawlinson (1690–1755), include a considerable number from the mystical library of Dr James Keith (1657– 1726). Keith was the son of an Episcopalian minister of Aberdeen; he travelled on the Continent, studied at Leiden and was admitted to the London College of Physicians in 1706. His circle of friends included not only a large number of Scots Episcopalian nobility and gentry, but also Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford. He knew and corresponded with Dr Cheyne, Francis Lee and with the Garden brothers; he was an admirer of Mme Bourignon and Mme Guyon, and his library included a wide range of mystical, Pietist and Quietist literature in many languages. He seems to have been the London agent for the importation and distribution of mystical books from the bookselling firm of Wetstein at Amsterdam. It is from his library that we find among the Rawlinson MSS in Bodley not only the fullest history of the Philadelphians, but also manuscripts of Augustine Baker and Gertrude More. Keith also knew and befriended the pioneer Arabist, Simon Ockley 63 This book (Eng. trans. 1713) was by Baron Wolf von Metternich (1660–1731), an admirer of Mme Guyon. A copy was lent by Dr Cheyne to William Law and provided Law’s first introduction to Jacob Boehme (S. Hobhouse, ‘Fides et Ratio’, Journal of Theological Studies, Vol. XXXVII, no. 148, pp. 350–68 [October 1936]). 64 J.B. Craven, History of the Episcopal Church in Orkney (Kirkwall 1912), pp. 64 sq. 65 Catalogue of the Scottish Episcopalian Church Library (Edinburgh 1863); M. Lochhead, Episcopal Scotland (London 1966), pp. 37–46.

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(1678–1720), and this suggests perhaps the first signs of a taste for Eastern as well as Western mysticism, which we shall see developing more fully in America in the nineteenth century.66 The library of the Nonjuring Bishop, Thomas Ken (1637–1711), has been discussed by E. H. Plumtre in his Life (London 1888). Ken owned a wide range of French and Spanish Catholic mystics, but Plumtre makes no reference to any books in the English Catholic mystical tradition. My own efforts to examine Ken’s library catalogues at first hand have so far been of no avail. The English Nonjuror most celebrated as a mystic is of course William Law (1686–1761). Although his library contains Poiret, and the usual assortment of Pietist and Quietist theology in several languages, the English Catholic mystics are remarkable by their absence.67 Law did, however, possess the manuscripts of Francis Lee, which, as we have already noted, contain praise of Gertrude More, Augustine Baker and Benet Canfield. Christopher Walton, in his Notes on Law (p. 505), states that Law had the works of Canfield in his library, but he gives no authority for this assertion. The library catalogue of one of Law’s most ardent disciples, John Byrom, FRS (1692–1763) is, however, much more rewarding.68 Byrom came from an old Manchester family of Jacobite sympathies. He studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, under Bentley, and was elected Fellow, but resigned his fellowship on account of the oath to George I. To earn his living he set up as an itinerant teacher of his own shorthand system. Shorthand, like mysticism, was essentially an esoteric study, and brought Byrom into personal contact with some of the leading intellectual figures of his day. He was a sociable, lovable eccentric, a minor poet and author of several hymns (including ‘Christians, awake’) and an indefatigable book collector. He was neither a recluse nor a mystic, and he was pious rather than pietistic. His interest in mysticism seems to have been stimulated by Malebranche’s neoCartesian theory of the direct divine inspiration of all human knowledge. Byrom was an omnivorous collector and reader of mystical, Pietist and Quietist theology. He became acquainted with Law’s Serious Call in 1729, and this led to a great admiration for Law himself, whom he taught shorthand.69 He was friendly, too,

66 For Keith see G.D. Henderson, op. cit., p. 56 sq.; for Keith-Ockley-Lee correspondence see BL MS Add. 15911 and 23204; for an appreciation of Ockley see A.J. Arberry, Oriental Essays (London 1960), pp. 1–47; for English Nonjurors in general see J.H. Overton, The Nonjurors (London 1902). 67 Catalogue of the Library at King’s Cliffe founded by William Law (Stamford 1927). 68 Catalogue of the Library of the late John Byrom (Manchester 1848); R. Parkinson (ed.), Private Journal and Literary Remains of John Byrom, 4 Vols (Manchester 1854–7) (Chetham Soc.); H. Talon, John Byrom (London 1950). 69 Shorthand at this time was not only an accomplishment for the scientifically-minded virtuosi. For the intensely earnest young men who gathered round the young Wesleys at Oxford (1729–35) the study of shorthand was almost de rigueur as the symbol of their conversion to a serious life and to a thrifty use of every available moment of time (cf. L. Tyerman, The Oxford Methodists [London 1873]).

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with other eighteenth-century religious figures: Thomas Deacon the Nonjuror, Dr Cheyne, Joseph Butler, the Wesleys and Count Zinzendorf. The catalogue of Byrom’s library was printed in 1848, and the library itself is incorporated in Chetham’s Library, Manchester. Byrom has Poiret’s Théologie Réelle and Bibliotheca Mysticorum, and the by now customary mixture of Pietist and Quietist literature.70 Unlike Furly, Byrom does not go in much for the writings of the Quakers or the extreme sectaries, nor indeed for the wilder Behmenists and Philadelphian writers, though he has plenty of Boehme’s own works. In contrast, he has a good deal of patristic and liturgical literature, and a lot of seventeenthcentury English Catholic literature, some of it of considerable rarity, as well as two copies of that useful bibliographical tool, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. He has Hilton’s Scale of Perfection in the Wynkyn de Worde edition of 1494 and Baker’s Sancta Sophia and, which is rather remarkable, two manuscripts of Baker: ‘The Spiritual Alphabet’, transcribed by Gertrude More; and ‘The Fall and Restitution of Man’ transcribed in 1675 by Dom Leander Pritchard.71 Byrom was looking for a gentler, more delicate spirituality than anything the mainstream of eighteenth-century religion could offer. Towards the end of his life he was certainly interested in Methodism: John Wesley called him ‘an uncommon genius, a man of the finest and strongest understanding’; on the other hand the insensitive Bishop Warburton thought he was simply mad. Among the other eighteenth-century Nonjurors, Richard Middleton Massey, FSA, FRS (d. 1743), at one time Underkeeper of the Ashmolean, and later a practising doctor, gave an early sixteenth-century text of The Cloud of Unknowing to the Bodleian in 1770.72 Thomas Hearne (1678–1735) was interested in Middle English mystical writers in an antiquarian way, but his extensive diaries reveal nothing of his spiritual interests, if he had any. George Ballard (1706–55), though not a Nonjuror, was an antiquarian friend of Hearne. In his Memoirs of British Ladies (London 1775) Ballard refers to the 1670 edition of Juliana’s Revelations by Cressy, ‘the learned and indefatigable editor’. Ballard quotes two pages of Cressy’s appreciation of Juliana and concludes: ‘These are Mr Cressy’s thoughts of Juliana and her writings; but this author was a priest of her communion: how far the divines of the Church of England will correspond with him in his senti-

70 Byrom owned a book from Poiret’s Library: F. Laurent, La Théologie de la présence de Dieu (Cologne 1710), revised in MS by Poiret, presumably for a new edition (missing when I last visisted Chetham’s Library in 1960). 71 J. McCann, ‘Ten more Baker MSS’, Ampleforth Journal, Vol. LXXIII (1958). (A Baker MS that came on the market in the early eighteenth century was ‘Funiculus Triplex or Flagellum Euchonomachorum against the impugners and wilful neglecters of mental prayer’ at the auction of Peter Le Neve, the herald and antiquary, 22 February 1731, lot 489). Byrom also owned a seventeenth-century MS translation of the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius; so far as is known, no English translation of the Exercises existed in print in the seventeenth century. 72 P. Hodgson (ed.), The Cloud of Unknowing (London 1944; E.E.T.S. No. 218), p. xvi; F. Madan and H.E. Craster, Summary Catalogue of Western MSS in the Bodleian Library (Oxford 1895), Vol. V, p. 312.

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ments, I leave others to determine’. Interestingly enough, Ballard also refers to the printed edition of The Book of Margery Kempe, of which only two copies were then known: it is ‘written in the style of our modern Quietists and Quakers, etc., concerning the internal love of God, perfection, etc.’. He also apologizes for not dealing with, inter alia, Gertrude More.73 This account of the fortunes of the English Catholic mystics in the eighteenth century may conveniently close with reference to a figure who is connected, not only with William Law and the Behmenists, but also with John Wesley and the Methodists. In the Christopher Walton Collection, in Dr Williams’s Library, London, the copy of Cressy’s edition of Dame Juliana’s Revelations (1670) is inscribed as having been owned in 1776, by Henry Brooke. This was not Henry Brooke (1703–83), author of The Fool of Quality, but his nephew Henry Brooke (1735–1806), an Irishman who came to London in 1761 and made a reputation for himself as an historical painter.74 He married in 1767 and returned to Dublin. He seems to have lost his money in unsuccessful family investments in cotton spinning and made a living by decorating Roman Catholic churches. Like his more celebrated uncle, our Henry Brooke had Pietist and Quietist sympathies, and his brother, Thomas Digby Brooke, republished the Life of Mme Guyon, with a translation of her opuscula. But whatever the wider range of his religious interests, Henry Brooke considered himself essentially a Wesleyan Methodist, and for forty years he was one of the leading Methodists in Dublin. He was in correspondence for several years with Thomas Langcake, the editor of William Law’s works, and in October 1782 we find him asking Langcake for information on Law’s spiritual reading: Our friend gave me reason to hope that you would not esteem it troublesome to send me a copy of Mr Law’s letter concerning the mystic writers, more especially the Philadelphian Society and its members, among whom I esteem Bromley, Leade, Pordage, etc. Their writings, I confess, I have never ranked but in the third class. The Sacred Scriptures standing first. Jacob Boehme first of the second class, among whom are Dionysius, Macarius, Bertot, Molinos, Jean de la Croix, Canfield, Thauler, the two Catharines, etc. And in the third class the number of those who, in all

73 G. Ballard, Memoirs of British Ladies (London 1775), pp. 1 and 5. The eccentric John Beaumont (d. 1713) was an admirer of Walter Hilton. In his Treatise of spirits and magical Practices (London 1705), Beaumont quotes Hilton in support of the existence of angelic spirits; cf. H. Gardner, ‘Hilton and the Mystical Tradition in England’, Essays and Studies, Vol. XXII (1936). 74 Isaac D’Olier, Memoirs of the Life of the Late Excellent and Pious Mr Henry Brooke, second ed. (Dublin 1816); S. Redgrave, Dictionary of Artists of the English School (London 1878), p. 57; Dr Williams’s Library, London, Walton MS 1123 (I.i.43) is a transcript of some correspondence relating to Brooke and his uncle that has been used in D. Hirst, Hidden Riches (London 1964), chap. 9. Brooke’s copy of Juliana’s Revelations (1670), pressmark E. I.23(W) has been heavily marked, especially ‘all shall be well’.

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the divided Churches, and even in Pagan and Mahomedan nations, taught their disciples to penetrate from the outward to the inward, and seek after the divine life – of a God in them, the hope of glory.75 Brooke’s circle of correspondents included Moravians, Swedenborgians, Millenarians and religious enthusiasts of various kinds, all of whom he treated with much circumspection. One clearly defined group, with whom Brooke was most obviously in sympathy, was that of Methodists of mystic inclinations who were distressed by John Wesley’s outspoken distrust of Law, Boehme and of mysticism in general. A letter to Brooke from a fellow-Methodist in Manchester is typical: ‘We have had Rev. Mr Wesley at Manchester this week. He cannot help yet condemning the Pious Boehme and Law, yet he says he hopes to meet them in heaven.’76 As a young man at Oxford, John Wesley had been attracted, via à Kempis and Jeremy Taylor, to William Law and to Mme Guyon and the Quietists; but by the late 1730s he became convinced of the absolute necessity of the decisive act of personal conversion to justification by faith, and to practical evangelical piety. In his published letter, of 6 January 1756, to William Law, Wesley had written: O that your latter works may be more and greater than your first! Surely they would, if you could ever be persuaded to study, instead of the writings of Tauler and Behmen, those of St Paul, James, Peter and John; to spew out of your mouth and out of your heart that vain philosophy and speak neither higher nor lower things, neither more nor less, than the oracles of God; to renounce, despise, abhor all the high-flown bombast, all the unintelligible jargon of the Mystics, and come back to the plain religion of the Bible, ‘we love him because he first loved us’.77 In his preface to Hymns and Sacred Poems (London 1739), Wesley had been even more outspoken: ‘Holy solitaries’ is a phrase no more consistent with the Gospel than ‘holy adulterers’. The Gospel of Christ knows of no religion but social; no holiness but social holiness. But Wesley was not consistently rigid in his attitude. In his Christian Library many of the Continental mystics were included, though suitably adapted in the

75 Walton, Notes, p. 593. 76 Dr Williams’s Library, Walton MS 1123 (I.e.43), f. 84, William Smith to Brooke, Manchester, 23 May 1783. 77 Unless otherwise stated, all quotations from John Wesley are taken from the 12 vol. ed. of his Works (London 1831).

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interests of practical piety; we do not, however, find there any of our English Catholic mystics.78 In a letter of 19 September 1773, to Miss Bishop of Keynsham, Wesley writes: There are excellent things in most of the Mystick writers. As almost all of them lived in the Romish Church, they were lights whom the gracious providence of God raised up to shine in a dark place. In 1783, at the age of eighty, Wesley went over to Dublin to heal the serious divisions among the Dublin Methodists.79 During his visit, Brooke evidently reproved Wesley for the vehemence of his hostility to the growth of the mystical element in Methodism. Wesley replied with the generosity and serenity of old age: Dear Harry, Your letter gave me pleasure, and pain too. It gave me pleasure, because it was written in a mild and loving spirit; and it gave me pain, because I found I had pained you, whom I so tenderly love and esteem. But I shall do it no more: I sincerely thank you for your kind reproof; it is a precious balm – and will, I trust, in the hands of the Great Physician, be the means of healing my sickness. I am so sensible of your real friendship herein, that I cannot write without tears. The words you mention were too strong, they will no more fall from my mouth.80 We must certainly sympathize with Henry Brooke, in the aridity of Georgian Dublin – that affront to God and man – turning for spiritual comfort from orthodox Methodism to Law, Boehme and Mme Guyon, and to Dame Juliana and Canfield. But when we move on to the mid-nineteenth century, to a figure like Christopher Walton, the Methodist-cum-Theosopher, we must also give credit to Wesley for his prescience as to the possible direction that mystical Methodism might take.

III. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries Gordon Square, London, is the very heartland of Bloomsbury, and one associates it instinctively with the agnostic intellectualism of such former residents as the Woolfs, Arthur Waley and C. K. Ogden. But on the west side of the Square there stands the symbol of a more durable religious tradition: the solid and decorous

78 See J. Orcibal’s very full and useful study, ‘Les spirituels français et espagnols chez John Wesley et ses contemporains’, Revue de l’Histoire des Religions, Vol. CXXXIX (1951), pp. 50–109. 79 L. Tyerman, Life and Times of John Wesley (London 1890), Vol. III, pp. 392–3. 80 I. D’Olier, Memoirs of . . . Henry Brooke (Dublin 1816), p. 194 and Walton, Notes, p. 91. The exchange of letters took place while Wesley was in Dublin. Brooke was very friendly with J.W. Fletcher, the famous Methodist minister of Madeley, whom he induced to come over to Dublin shortly after Wesley’s visit; cf. L. Tyerman, Wesley’s Designated Successor (London 1882), pp. 507, 518, 521.

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frontage of Dr Williams’s Library. This was founded by a legacy of the wealthy Presbyterian minister, Dr Daniel Williams (1643–1716), and after several migrations was established on the present site in the mid-nineteenth century.81 In the course of over two hundred years’ history, Dr Williams’s Library has acquired a number of individual collections, but surely none more remarkable than the gift, in 1876, of the Theosophical Library of Christopher Walton. Before he had even found a home for his collection, Walton had already printed his library ticket, and pasted it into the books: Walton’s Library of ancient and curious books and manuscripts on Theosophy, Philosophy and Mystical Theology, and on correlative subjects of physical science. This unique Collection, being essential for the proper study of the Grand Circle of Being, its history and constitution, to be deposited in the . . . Library. Christopher Walton (1809–77) came from a Wesleyan Methodist family originating in Cumberland. His father was a Manchester merchant who acquired a considerable fortune through the manufacture of a patent milling machine. Christopher Walton himself first came to London in 1830 as a silk mercer, travelled on the Continent, and eventually established himself as a goldsmith and jeweller on Ludgate Hill, with a house in Highgate as well.82 Walton is not an attractive personality, and certainly not possessed of that serenity to be expected of the mystics. His personal correspondence makes painful reading. He was touchy, possessive and supremely self-centred; his treatment of his prodigal only son, so far from resembling that of the forgiving father of the Gospels, is more reminiscent of the self-righteous Victorian pater familias depicted in The Barretts of Wimpole Street. But his collection of mystical books and manuscripts is extremely valuable, and so too is his extraordinary publication, the Notes and Memorials on William Law. Walton had started with an admiration for the mystical writings of Law, and went from there to an interest in Jacob Boehme, and in Boehme’s commentators, Freher and Gichtel; from there to the eighteenth-century French masonic ritualist and occultist Saint-Martin; and from there to animal magnetism and vegetarianism. In building up his collection Walton used Poiret’s Bibliotheca Mysticorum and Byrom’s library catalogue. He owned the manuscripts of Francis Lee, books and manuscripts of Henry Brooke and Freher’s transcript of Canfield, all of which have been previously referred to

81 S.K. Jones, Dr Williams and his Library (Cambridge 1948); K. Twinn, Dr Williams’s Library, Guide to the Manuscripts (London 1969). Dr Williams’s own collection owed much to the library of Dr William Bates (1625–99), an ejected minister, which he bought en bloc in 1699 on the latter’s death. 82 The account of Walton is based on his private papers in Dr Williams’s library, especially MS 189.3 and MS 189.6.

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in this essay. In the twentieth century his collection was used and recommended by Evelyn Underhill and Aldous Huxley.83 Like many practical men of business, Walton was extremely impractical in other matters. The very title page of his book gives a good impression of the mind of the author: To the Christianity, the Philosophy, the Erudition, Science and Noble Intelligence of the Age. Notes and Materials for an adequate Biography of the Celebrated Divine and Philosopher William Law. Comprising an elucidation of the Scope and Contents of the writings of Jacob Boehme, and of his great commentator Dionysius Andreas Freher; with a notice of the mystical divinity and most curious and solid science of all ages of the world. Also an indication of the true means for the instruction of the intellectual ‘heathen’ Jewish, and Mahometan nations into the Christian Faith. The Time is born for Enoch to speak, and Elias to work again. The manifestation of the ‘mystery of Christ’ – of Deity, Nature and all things (and universal refinement of philosophy and theology) was the Elias mission of Behmen, Freher and Law, and God’s last dispensation to mankind. Printed for Private Circulation. Five hundred copies – London A.D. 1854. Walton’s Notes is one of the most exasperating books ever published. It is a bibliographer’s nightmare, and it must have been a printer’s nightmare too. Walton began writing in 1852, and started to send the manuscript to the printer in that year, even before he had finished the book. Although the recto of the title page is dated 1854, the verso of the title page is dated 1861, and by the time he got to the end of the book, he cancelled the opening pages and started again. But although the printing stopped in 1861, Walton continued to alter the printed copies in manuscript, with the result that hardly two copies are the same. The book consists of 700 pages of microscopic print (how the near-blind Aldous Huxley read it is a miracle), with footnotes running for hundreds of pages, and in many cases occupying nine-tenths of the page. As for the digressions, the chapter beginning on page 632 opens with the remark, ‘we now resume the subject of the present work, from which we broke away on page 3 into a large digression’. Walton’s original intention was to set out the qualifications required for some future ideal biographer and editor of William Law: WANTED a Gentleman of high Literary Talent, and deep Devotional Spirit, not under forty years of age, who, during his scholastic studies, has been well versed in the casuistry and metaphysics of ancient divinity,

83 C. Williams (ed.), Letters of Evelyn Underhill (London 1943), p. 69; A. Huxley, Perennial Philosophy (London 1946), p. 349.

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and whose style of composition is that of strict logical argumentation, however its severity may be arrayed in the simplicity and graces of rhetoric, to assist in writing an elevated religious and philosophic biography. Walton then proposes an elaborate reading-list for the middle-aged literary and devotional gentleman. It is a programme very similar, at the outset, to Francis Lee’s plans for a Christian Library (and of course Walton had Lee’s papers at his disposal). It consists of the devotional and ascetical writings of the Church Fathers, the Trappists and the Jansenists; the meditative classics of the Jesuits; the Rhineland mystics and à Kempis; the Spanish Carmelites, the Cambridge Platonists, the Pietists, the Quietists, the Behmenists and the Philadelphians; then occultist, vegetarian and Fourierist works; and then, to sober down a little, the Wesleyan classics, the Anglican divines and the Bible. It is in the section of the Philadelphians that Walton puts, as collateral reading, Canfield’s Rule of Perfection, Part III and P. Evangelista of Bois le Duc’s Kingdom of God in the Soul, Part II, together with Eckhart, Tauler, Ruusbroec and Boehme.84 Besides his own reading-lists, Walton also reprints in its entirety Poiret’s Bibliotheca Mysticorum, together with notes in Latin, French and English (by G. Arnold, Poiret and Walton himself). We have already discussed in this essay the general importance of Poiret’s catalogue; suffice it to note that Walton has special comments on Dame Gertrude More and on the further mystical bibliography contained in her Holy Practices of a Divine Lover (1657). Walton distributed complimentary copies of his book to the principal libraries of England and America, as well as to Mount St Bernard and La Grande Chartreuse. Although his own individualistic brand of theosophy has a distinctly fatuous air, his Notes are a mine of original, if disordered, information on Behmenism in England. Walton deeply resented Wesley’s suspicions of mysticism; in fact, at the beginning of the book he deliberately refuses to mention Wesley by name. But Walton’s own development towards occultism is surely a vindication of Wesley’s suspicions. For the purposes of the present study, however, the chief value of Walton’s Notes lies in its bibliographical expertise. By reprinting Poiret’s Bibliotheca Mysticorum, Walton keeps Hilton, Juliana, Baker, Gertrude More and Canfield in the centre of eclectic mystical bibliography in the mid-nineteenth century. Another mystical library that was formed in England in the mid-nineteenth century was that of James Pierrepont Greaves (1777–1842).85 After an unsuc-

84 Swedenborg is conspicuous by his absence. Walton had certainly read him extensively, but his comments on Swedenborg, though lengthy, are very reserved. Cf. Notes, p. 158 sq. 85 For Greaves see the introductory memoir in A. Campbell (ed.), Letters and Extracts from the Manuscript Writings of James Pierrepont Greaves, 2 Vols (Ham Common 1843); A.F. Barham, An Odd Medley of Literary Curiosities (London n.d.), pt II; [R.W. Emerson], ‘James Pierrepont Greaves’, The Dial (Oct. 1842); K. Silber, Pestalozzi, the Man and his Work (London 1960), pp. 295 sq. The most useful study of Greaves’s London background is Emerson’s article, ‘The English Reformers’, The Dial (Oct. 1842).

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cessful business career, Greaves became interested in the Pestalozzian school established in Ireland by John H. Synge, the grandfather of the dramatist. Greaves visited Pestalozzi at Yverdun in 1817 and stayed there for several years. He then visited the universities of Basle and Tübingen and attracted a number of disciples, including the young David Friedrich Strauss. On his return to England in 1825, Greaves became secretary of the London Infant School Society and set up a Pestalozzian school at Ham Common, in Surrey, which he called Alcott House, as a tribute to the educational experiments of Bronson Alcott. Besides the school, Greaves also established at Ham a commune, or phalanstery, known as the ‘Concordium, or Harmonious Industrial College, a home for the affectionate, skilful and industrious, uncontaminated by false sympathy, avaricious cunning, or excessive labour’. The commune was a small one, practising handicrafts, working eight hours a day, rising at 5 a.m. and going to bed at 10 p.m. and living entirely on vegetables and water. Amos Bronson Alcott (1799–1888), the namesake of Alcott House (and father of the authoress of Little Women), was perhaps the most eccentric and woolly of the New England Transcendentalists.86 His model school at Boston had been a failure (amongst other attractions, the teachers were to be punished by the pupils), and he was naturally delighted to hear that his educational ideas were admired in England. In 1842, he came to England and visited the school at Alcott House. There he met Greaves’s disciples, Charles Lane, manager of the London Mercantile Price Current (a bulletin for investors on the Stock Exchange), and Henry G. Wright, a teacher at Alcott House. Alcott returned to New England with Lane and Wright, and with the library of the Concordium. In 1843, they set up a utopian community at Fruitlands, a farm near Harvard village. Fruitlands did not last a year. Lane went off to join the Shakers (and later returned to England and to the London Mercantile Price Current, married a lady from an Owenite community and died in 1870); Bronson went back to the neighbourhood of the protective Emerson; and the precious library was sold at auction. It is thanks to the bibliographical instincts of Henry David Thoreau (1817–62) that a record of the Greaves-Fruitlands library still exists. In 1843, Thoreau had temporarily taken over from Emerson the editorship of the Boston Dial, the organ of the New England Transcendentalists. He approached Lane for copy for The

86 For Alcott and Fruitlands, see F.B. Sanborn, Bronson Alcott (Cedar Rapids 1908), passim; H.D. Thoreau, ‘The Library at Fruitlands’, The Dial (Apr. 1843), pp. 585–648; H.D. Thoreau, Correspondence, ed. W. Harding and C. Bode (New York 1958), pp. 85 sq.; R.W. Emerson, Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks (Cambridge, MA 1970), Vol. VII, p. 298 and Vol. VIII, pp. 300 and 403 (Emerson was chary of Lane and Wright); G.W. Cooke, Historical and Biographical Introduction to Accompany the Dial (New York 1961 [repr. of 1902]), Vol. II, p. 41 and pp. 148 sq.; H.H. Hoeltje, Sheltering Tree (Duke University, Durham, NC 1943), pp. 68 sq. I regret I have not been able to find in England a copy of C.E. Sears, Bronson Alcott’s Fruitlands (Boston 1915), but I am very grateful to Mr William Henry Harrison, Director of the Fruitlands Museums, for his helpful answer to my queries.

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Dial and got from him an article on J. P. Greaves, together with a catalogue of the library. Out of the 800 titles Thoreau selected about 200 of the most noteworthy and unusual, and published the list in The Dial of April 1843, with the following introduction: Mr Alcott and Mr Lane have recently brought from England a small but valuable library amounting to about a thousand volumes, containing undoubtedly a richer collection of mystical writers than any other library in this country. To the select library of the late J. P. Greaves, ‘held by Mr Lane in trust for universal ends’, they have added many works of a like character by purchase or received as gifts. In their catalogue, from which the following list is extracted, they say ‘the titles of these books are now submitted, in the expectation that the library is the commencement of an institution for the nurture of men in universal freedom of action, thought and being’. We print this list, not only because our respect is engaged to views so liberal, but because the arrival of this cabinet of mystical and theosophic lore is a remarkable fact in our literary history. It is certainly a remarkable list. Besides twelve volumes of the manuscripts of J.P. Greaves, it includes Boehme, Law and the Philadelphians; Bourignon and Poiret; Guyon and Fénelon; Molinos; Lamy’s Life of St Bernard; Herbert, Crashaw and a lot of emblem books, English and foreign; Spinoza and Malebranche; Joanna Southcott; Henry More and Peter Sterry; John Byrom and John Norris; almost all the works of Thomas Taylor the Platonist, including his translations of Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras and Proclus; a lot of occultist and alchemical books including van Helmont and H. C. Agrippa; books on vegetarianism and hydropathy; the works of Novalis; the works of Confucius, the Laws of Menu and the Desatir, the sacred writings of the ancient Persian prophets; Sir Kenelm Digby’s On the Nature of Bodies and Man’s Soul (London 1645), John Sergeant’s Transnatural Philosophy (London 1700) and the Revelations of St Bridget (1500) and of Juliana of Norwich (1670). The Platonism, Behmenism, Quietism and Pietism, Philadelphianism and alchemism and vegetarianism are by now quite familiar. Digby and Sergeant are presumably there as anti-Cartesian and anti-Lockean. The inclusion of Eastern mysticism was very acceptable to the Transcendentalists,87 and the presence of Dame Juliana’s Revelations in this list is by no means fortuitous. Greaves’s whole concept of an idealistic community must be seen against the background of the socialistic theories of his time, especially Owenism.88 In A New View of Society 87 See A. Christy, The Orient in American Transcendentalism (New York 1932); W. Harding, Thoreau’s Library (Charlottesville 1957), p. 15; K.W. Cameron, R. W. Emerson’s Reading (Hartford 1962). 88 The literature on Owenism, Fourierism, phalansteries, Brook Farm and similar idealist socialistic communities in the nineteenth century, is too extensive for enumeration. Students of my own

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(London 1813) Robert Owen had described his socialistic experiments at New Lanark. Greaves was vehemently opposed to Owenite Socialism because its basis was purely materialistic. In his very repetitive writings Greaves insists on the necessity of a spiritual basis for the ideal commune – a basis of inward, individual spirituality, that is, and not the grandiose apocalyptic visions of the continental Fourierist phalansteries, nor the pragmatic materialistic planning of Robert Owen. Greaves’s published correspondence consists entirely of letters to Alexander Campbell, an Owenite socialist of Stockport, whom Greaves considered to be amenable to conversion from Owenism: Social feelings must be submitted to the spiritual. Our efforts must be directed inwards, not outwards. The Divine, not the Social, must be allowed to reign. Owen offered only the promotion of the material welfare of human beings. Greaves wanted to introduce a religious element into Owenite socialism, or, as he put it, to substitute Sacred Socialism for Physical Socialism: We must proclaim the celestial socialism if we mean to mend the terrestrial, and only when we do this shall we succeed. . . . All systems for man’s improvement which are not, like the divine laws, in harmony with LOVE, must be wrong, and must produce misery and disappointment. . . . Remember, when I use the word LOVE, it is the same to me as God, Spirit, or any name others use expressive of Deity. It is not man, or woman, or creature; it is that which creates – is before all things, and after all things – it is not passion or lust, or any feeling but that which sustains the universe. It is coeval with Light and Life – it is LOVE, the only name that will do for it – spirit, not soul, not body. (Letters, Vol. II, pp. 2 and 29; orthography as in original) It is not hard to see the attraction of Greaves to Dame Juliana. Greaves passes over Juliana’s elaborate and emphatic dogmatic Christology and concentrates, for his own purposes, on the conclusions of the final chapters of her Revelations: I had, in part, touching, sight and feeling in three properties of God, in which the strength and effect of all the Revelation standeth. . . . The properties are these: Life, Love and Light. (Juliana’s Revelations, ch. 83). I desired oftentimes to learn what was our Lord’s meaning . . . and I was answered in ghostly understanding, saying thus: Wouldst thou learn thy Lord’s meaning in this thing? Learn it well: Love was

generation may recall with pleasure the lucid and stimulating introduction to these matters contained in Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station (London 1941).

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His meaning. Who shewed it thee? Love. What shewed He thee? Love. Wherefore shewed it He? For Love. Hold thee therein and thou shalt learn and know more in the same. But thou shalt never know or learn therein other thing without end. Thus I learned that Love was our Lord’s meaning. (Juliana’s Revelations, ch. 86) It is not difficult to see the connection between Dame Juliana, Greaves and his disciples and the undogmatic idealistic optimism of the American Transcendentalists. Indeed, Dame Juliana’s wrestlings with the problems of sin and predestination were even more likely to be understood in a New England which was still trying to liberate itself from the rigidities of the Calvinist system. Now it is a rather odd fact that the first modern reprints of our mystics89 came from America: Baker’s Sancta Sophia was reprinted in New York in 1857 by the leading Catholic publishers, Dunigan and Kirker, and Juliana’s Revelations was reprinted in Boston in 1864 by the well-known firm of Ticknor and Fields, who were publishers of the major Boston Brahmins, Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow and Wendell Holmes.90 There is a short introduction to Juliana by I. T. Hecker in which he remarks that Translations of books of a similar character from the German, Spanish and Italian have recently enriched our literature, but we know of no spiritual writer who has combined such rare thought, warmth of piety, and charming simplicity, as our English nun. There is no attempt at composition, no mere reproduction of remembered thought, but the very heart of a contemplative soul, whose inspirations, whether natural or above nature, are fresh and divine. Isaac Thomas Hecker (1819–88)91 was a second-generation immigrant of German Moravian stock. He began his career as a semi-literate New York baker with a passionate desire for intellectual and spiritual self-improvement. He came into

89 Leastways, under Catholic auspices; there was a non-Catholic reprint of Juliana’s Revelations published in Leicester and London in 1843 by George Hargreave Parker, about whom I am unable to find any information, except that he also published a tract by John Eaton, a seventeenth-century antinomian divine, and wrote on the revolutions of 1848. [In an article available on the internet, ‘Julian of Norwich and her Children Today: Editions, Translations and Versions of her Revelations’ the author, Alexandra Barratt, states that Parker was an Anglican clergyman with a strongly antiRoman Catholic bias, who was vicar of a parish in Bethnal Green. Eds]. 90 For Ticknor and Fields see V.W. Brooks, The Flowering of New England (New York 1941), pp. 478 sq.; W. Charvat, The Profession of Authorship in America (Ohio 1968), ch. 10; J. Tebbel, History of Bookselling in the United States (New York 1972), Vol. I, pp. 309–10. In so far as Ticknor and Fields had any religious connection, it was with the Baptists. 91 For Hecker see V.F. Holden, The Early Years of Isaac Thomas Hecker (Washington, DC 1939), and his later volume, Yankee Paul (Milwaukee 1958); see also W. Elliott, The Life of Father Hecker

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contact with Orestes Brownson (1803–76),92 that stormy petrel of the American religious and social revival, and with the Transcendentalists. In January 1843, Hecker stayed at Brook Farm, the Transcendentalist phalanstery, and studied contemporary German and French philosophy under George Ripley, the leader of the community. On 19 June of the same year, he went to Fruitlands for four days, and decided to try his vocation in Alcott’s community. He moved to Fruitlands on 11 July 1843 but left on 26 July. In April 1844, he stayed with Thoreau and Thoreau’s mother at Concord, learning Greek and Latin, and visited Charles Lane who, after the collapse of Fruitlands, had joined the Shaker colony just outside Harvard village. In August 1844, Hecker was received into the Catholic Church. He then joined the Redemptorists, and was stationed in various houses of that order, including Wittem in the Netherlands and Clapham in London.93 After returning to America he was dismissed from the Redemptorists in 1857, and, after some vicissitudes, succeeded in 1858 in obtaining permission from Rome to establish a new religious order, the Paulist Fathers, which was extraordinarily successful in stimulating the American Catholic revival of the later nineteenth century. Hecker must be one of the few men who came to Catholicism by way of a thorough immersion in Transcendentalism. Though dissatisfied with Emerson and Alcott, he seems to have respected Ripley, Thoreau and Charles Lane.94 There is no concrete evidence for the precise dating of his interest in the mystics. Certainly, by 1848 he was reading, besides St John of the Cross and St Teresa, Ruusbroec, Suso, Tauler, Blosius, Surin and Augustine Baker95 – a surprising range for a Redemptorist in Clapham before the middle of the nineteenth century. In 1857, he published Aspirations of Nature, an amazingly avant-garde book (for the Englishspeaking Catholic world at least), in which he puts forward Catholicism as the fulfilment of the aspirations of the Romantic poets and philosophers. He quotes Juliana’s Revelations as evidence of the freedom of spirit compatible with membership of a visible, dogmatic Church: ‘Catholicity inaugurates the inward oracle

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(New York 1891). I am grateful to the Revd L.V. McDonnell, CSP, Archivist of the Paulist Fathers, for supplying me with a copy of Hecker’s Preface to Juliana. For Brownson see A. Schlesinger, Orestes Brownson (Boston 1939). Brownson is an unduly neglected figure in Catholic intellectual history, but a very unsympathetic personality – a striking contrast to the gentle and vulnerable Hecker. The Redemptorists at Wittem had inherited a Capuchin library, now at the Radboud University, Nijmegen, which contained many works of continental mysticism. In a letter of 24 April 1844 Hecker wrote to his family: ‘Emerson and his followers seem to me to live almost a pure intellectual existence . . . They are heathens in thought and profess to be so. They have no conception of the Church: out of Protestantism they are almost perfectly ignorant. They are the narrowest of men, and yet they think they are extremely “many-sided”. And forsooth, they do not comprehend Christendom and reject it.’ (quoted Holden, Early Years, p. 321). Of Alcott, Hecker said later: ‘I don’t believe he ever prayed. Whom could he pray to? Was not Bronson Alcott the greatest of all? He was his own God’ (Holden, p. 153). Cf. Elliott, The Life of Father Hecker, pp. 224–7.

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of the soul, and claims for its dictates a divine authority’.96 Is it really too fanciful to suggest that Isaac Hecker first met with Juliana’s Revelations on the shelves of Charles Lane’s library, during his visit to Fruitlands in 1843? In England at this time, the Middle English mystics were not without their admirers. F. W. Faber (1814–63) who became a Catholic in 1845, the same year as Newman, and who founded the London Oratory, is usually thought of as being an admirer of an excessively Italianate spiritual literature. Yet in his book All for Jesus, published in 1853, he repeatedly refers to Baker and Juliana in the most glowing terms; and in 1857 he warmly supported a project for reprinting English spiritual classics: ‘No foreign books suit us as our own old ones do’.97 In the second half of the nineteenth century there were several reprints of Juliana, Hilton, The Cloud and Baker, on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1896, the Edinburgh Review carried an article on ‘Catholic Mystics of the Middle Ages’, which dealt principally with St John of the Cross, Suso and Juliana.98 After extensive quotation from Juliana, the writer suggested a relationship between her mystical language and that of the literature of German chivalric romance, and of Fouqué and Novalis – and even perhaps of Hawthorne: Perhaps some kindred film crept over Hawthorne’s pen when he wrote his tales, where, trembling on the brink of the unseen, the figures of his men and women rise in the moonlight of his creative fancy. For the Edinburgh Review, from the days of Francis Jeffrey onwards, the words mystic and misty were synonymous. *****

96 Aspirations of Nature, p. 301. The divine authority was, of course, the Holy Ghost. Hecker develops the point elsewhere: ‘The essential mistake of the Transcendentalists is the taking for their guide the instincts of the soul instead of the instinct of the Holy Ghost. They are moved by the natural instincts of human beings instead of the instinct of the Holy Ghost. But true spiritual direction consists in discovering the obstacles in the way of the Divine Guidance, in aiding and encouraging the penitent to remove them, and in teaching how the interior movements of the Holy Spirit may be recognized as well as in stimulating the soul to fidelity and docility to his movements’ (quoted in Elliott, The Life of Father Hecker, p. 308). 97 All for Jesus, fourth ed. (London 1854), pp. 33, 44, 154, 183, 198–9; and R. Addington, Faber, Poet and Priest (Cowbridge and Bridgend 1974), pp. 22 and 289. Dunigan and Kirker’s New York edition of Sancta Sophia in 1857 explicitly refers to Faber’s approval in All for Jesus, and adds: ‘This [i.e. Sancta Sophia] is one of the most admirable treatises on contemplation ever written, and has always been regarded as the masterpiece of English ascetical literature’ (see Dunigan’s American Catholic Almanac, New York 1858). But Dunigan and Kirker were the publishers for Hecker and the Paulists, and published Aspirations of Nature in the same year as Baker; it is reasonable to presume that the reprint of Baker’s Sancta Sophia in New York in 1857 owed as much to Hecker as to Faber. 98 Edinburgh Review (October 1896), Vol. 184, pp. 289–321. The author was Una Taylor, daughter of Sir Henry Taylor.

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By the time the twentieth century is reached, the interest in the English Catholic mystics, in the form of text editions and monographs, scholarly and popular, Catholic and non-Catholic, has grown to such an extent that it would be impossible and unprofitable to attempt a complete survey. It should be sufficient to confine our attention to the taste for the English Catholic mystics among the major literary figures, W.B. Yeats, Aldous Huxley and T.S. Eliot, and to see where it leads us. In November 1901, Mrs Patrick Campbell performed in Björnson’s Beyond Human Power at the Royal Theatre, London. W.B. Yeats wrote her a fan-letter: I happened to have in my pocket The Revelations of Divine Love by the Lady Julian, an old mystical book; my hand strayed to it all unconsciously. There is no essential difference between that work and your acting; both were full of fine distinction, of delicate lyric, of that life where passion and thought are one. Both were utterly unlike Björnson’s hero.99 To compare the performance of a fashionable West-End actress with the mystical revelations of a mediaeval nun may seem somewhat odd, but the reference in itself is interesting. Yeats’s use of the title ‘the Lady Julian’ rather than ‘Dame Juliana’ indicates that he had been reading the edition of Grace Warrack,100 which uses the same style of address, and which had appeared in July of the same year. Yeats at this period was very active as a member of The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a magical and occult secret society into which he had been initiated in 1890, after a previous period of interest in theosophy. The inner history of the Golden Dawn has been described in recent years, and it is difficult for an outsider to restrain his feelings of derision and repulsion.101 The fact remains that, despite the antics of many of its members, Yeats’s interest in the Golden Dawn was intensely serious and religious. And although the Christian basis of his thinking was rather vague, Yeats was certainly strongly opposed to the pseudoEgyptian occultism which attracted many of his fellow members. In the spring of 1901, when the Golden Dawn was going through one of its many crises, Yeats (who was official instructor in ‘mystical philosophy’ to the Order)102 was provoked into an impressive declaration of faith in mental discipline, as opposed to external ritualism. The document has only recently been published, and perhaps the peroration is worth quoting:

99 A. Wade (ed.), The Letters of W. B. Yeats (London 1954), p. 360. 100 Grace Warrack (1855–1932), an Edinburgh spinster, also did some verse translations from Italian and French. I can find little about her, but presume she was a Scots Episcopalian. [She was indeed; at present she does not have an entry in ODNB, but there is an article in Wikipedia. Eds] 101 E. Howe, The Magicians of the Golden Dawn (London 1972), is a nice, poker-faced account; G.M. Harper, Yeats’s Golden Dawn (London 1974), is rather schwärmerisch, but the appendices are useful. 102 Howe, op. cit., p. 228.

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In our days every idler, every trifler, every bungler, cries out for his freedom; but the busy, and weighty-minded, and skilful-handed, meditate more upon the bonds that they gladly accept, than upon the freedom that has never meant more in their eyes than the right to choose the bonds that have made them faithful servants of law. It was the surrender of freedom that taught Dante Alighieri to say ‘Thy will is our peace’; and has not every man who ever stooped to lift a stone out of the way, or raised his hand to gather fruit from the branch, given up his freedom to do something else?103 Thirty years later, Yeats read Baron von Hügel’s Mystical Element of Religion,104 a delicate and sensitive accommodation of mysticism to Christianity that draws frequently on Dame Juliana. By that time Yeats certainly realized that his sort of mysticism could never be called Christian, even on von Hügel’s most generous terms. In his poem Vacillation (1932), a significant title, Yeats wrote: Must we part, von Hügel, though much alike, for we Accept the miracles of saints and honour sanctity? . . . I – though heart might find relief Did I become a Christian man and choose for my belief What seems most welcome in the tomb – play a predestined part. Homer is my example and his unchristened heart. The lion and the honeycomb, what has the Scripture said? So get you gone, von Hügel, though with blessings on your head. But that was thirty years on. In 1901, before Yeats came to see himself as a Homeric lion, what distinguished him from so many other members of the Golden Dawn was his extensive knowledge of the literature of Western mysticism. Another member of the Golden Dawn, contemporary with Yeats, and with an equally wide knowledge of mystical literature, was A.E. Waite (1857–1942), sometime managing director of Horlicks Malted Milk.105 Waite described himself in Who’s Who as ‘the exponent in poetical and prose writings of sacramental religion and the higher mysticism, understood in its absolute separation from psychic and occult phenomena’. He had been baptized a

103 G.M. Harper, op. cit., pp. 267–8. 104 F. von Hügel, Mystical Element of Religion (London 1909). The major part of the book is an exhaustive biography of St Catherine of Genoa, a not very attractive mystic. The study of St Catherine is sandwiched between a general study of mystical theology. The introduction, of eighty pages, on ‘The Three Chief Forces of Western Civilization’, is masterly. As you follow the irresistible and triumphant progress of von Hügel’s lurching, elephantine prose, you feel the vicarious sense of power that Little Toomai must have felt on the back of Kala Nag. 105 Waite’s autobiography, Shadows of Life and Thought (London 1938), is maddeningly obscure, and lamentably short on dates and hard facts.

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Catholic and attended the Dominican church at Haverstock Hill, but seems to have given up orthodox religion in early manhood, after reading Robert Chambers’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (London 1844). Thereafter he turned to the study of Masonic, Rosicrucian and alchemical books, in which he was subsidized by the Honourable Stafford-Jerningham, later Lord Stafford, a hermetic researcher interested in the transmutation of metals. Waite joined the Golden Dawn before the turn of the century. Though always personally friendly with Yeats, Waite broke away from the main group in 1903 and founded ‘the Isis-Urania Temple’, despite Yeats’s attempts to reconcile him. In his Lamps of Western Mysticism (London 1923), Waite shows a knowledge of The Cloud, Juliana and Augustine Baker, as well as of St John of the Cross, St Teresa, Molinos and the Quietists, Eckhart, Ruusbroec, the Victorines, St Bonaventure and St Hildegard of Bingen. Waite’s great admiration is The Cloud; its author is ‘one of the crowned masters . . . who carries a solar glory. . . . The Cloud stands at the apex of our mystic literature’. And in the chapter on ‘Christian Pantheism’, Augustine Baker and The Cloud are linked; The Cloud ‘is like the waters of unity offered in a great chalic [sic]’. Now in 1912, John M. Watkins, a publisher and bookseller specializing since the ‘nineties in Eastern and Western mysticism and the occult,106 issued The Cloud of Unknowing, edited by Evelyn Underhill, who was a member of Waite’s Isis-Urania Temple of the Golden Dawn. Evelyn Underhill (1875–1941)107 had been attracted to Catholicism through visiting Italy and reading Dante, and had attended the Carmelite church in Kensington. She married in 1907 and, in deference to her husband’s wishes, abandoned any thoughts of membership of the Catholic Church. (A contributory factor may have been the Papal encyclical against Modernism, Pascendi, issued in September 1907 – it is noteworthy that George Tyrrell’s troubles with the Catholic Church authorities started with his interest in Juliana of Norwich.)108 Miss Underhill’s letters contain spiritual advice to an anonymous disciple, ‘MR’, and from these we can obtain a good idea of her reading. In 1907, she recommends St Augustine’s Confessions, Ruusbroec, the Theologia Germanica and Juliana’s Revelations,109 and among the moderns, Tyrrell and Coventry Patmore. She also recommends Dr Williams’s Library in Gordon

106 The firm still happily flourishes today; they have been in the same premises in Cecil Court, off Charing Cross Road, since 1900; see D. Low, With All Faults (Tehran 1973), p. 18). 107 See M. Cropper, Evelyn Underhill (London 1958); C. Williams (ed.), Letters of Evelyn Underhill (London 1943); preface by Anne Ridler to C. Williams, The Image of the City (London 1958). 108 G. Tyrrell, The Faith of the Millions (London 1901), ch. XIII ‘Juliana of Norwich’, and Tyrrell’s preface to Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love Shewed to Mother Juliana (London 1902). In a letter of 27 October 1907, Tyrrell wrote to the Bishop of Southwark saying that Pascendi ‘constitutes the greatest scandal for thousands who, like myself, have been brought into, and kept in, the Church by the influence of Cardinal Newman and of the mystical theology of the Fathers and the Saints’ (quoted M.D. Petre, Autobiography and Life of George Tyrrell [London 1912], Vol. II, p. 342, italics mine). 109 She advises Grace Warrack’s edition of Juliana, which ‘has quite a nice introduction instead of that stuffy essay of Tyrrell’s’ (Letters, p. 76).

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Square: ‘it is quite unsuitable for dissenting ministers, but I am sure you would like it’. In 1908–9 she advises Baker’s Sancta Sophia: ‘I am so glad you like Holy Wisdom. I think it is very solid and trustworthy’. She also refers to Hilton’s Scale but finds him ‘not such a poet as Juliana’. To another disciple she writes in 1911: ‘Do you know Gertrude More? She is quite neglected now, but rather wonderful, I think’; and in 1925 she admits: ‘much of The Cloud is beyond most of us! It is one of the books that keep on and on revealing new depths’. Evelyn Underhill was no recluse. Her early circle included Mrs Belloc Lowndes, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Arthur Machen, Maurice Hewlett, Arthur Symons, Ernest Dowson and May Sinclair. In 1911, she came to know Baron von Hügel, who clearly exercised an influence on her approach to mysticism – I think he taught her how to be eclectic without being syncretist. Meetings of Miss Underhill with T.S. Eliot and his Anglican clerical friends are recorded from 1935 onwards, but there is a strong indication that she and Eliot shared the same circles long before that. When the young Ezra Pound descended on London before the First World War, he wrote home triumphantly to his father: ‘we had a terribly literary dinner on Saturday (31st May 1913): Tagore, his son and daughter-in-law, Maurice Hewlett, May Sinclair, George Prothero (editor of The Quarterly Review), Evelyn Underhill (author of divers fat books on mysticism), Hilda Doolittle [the poetess] and myself’.110 May Sinclair (1870–1946), mentioned by Pound, was a pioneer ‘stream of consciousness’ novelist, a friend and patroness of T.S. Eliot,111 and, in mystical matters, a friend and disciple of Evelyn Underhill. In a philosophical work, A Defence of Idealism (London 1917), Miss Sinclair strongly pressed the claims of Eastern mysticism, and suggested Juliana’s Revelations as a possible basis for rapprochement between East and West: ‘There is a great gulf fixed between Eastern and Western mysticism. Sometimes the Catholics bridge it, which is seldom. But Juliana of Norwich, for one, managed to get over. Her First Revelation of Divine Love might have come straight from the heart of Asia.’ After then comparing Juliana’s Revelations with the Upanishads, Miss Sinclair concludes: ‘her way is the way of the mystic, Kabîr, and of the Vaishnavists, and the humanists of India’ (the poems of Kabîr had been recently edited and translated by Tagore and Underhill).112 Another admirer of Juliana was Charles Williams, who seems also to have combined an interest in Anglo-Catholicism and the occult. In an essay on D. H. Lawrence entitled ‘Sensuality and Substance’, he begins with a quotation from Juliana: For I saw full assuredly that our substance is in God, and also I saw that in our sensuality God is; for in the self point that our soul is more sensual, 110 D.D. Paige (ed.), Letters of Ezra Pound (London 1951), p. 57. 111 For connections between T.S. Eliot and May Sinclair see H. Howarth, Notes on Some Figures Behind T. S. Eliot (London 1965), pp. 272–7. 112 A Defence of Idealism (London 1917), pp. 304 sq.

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in the self point is the City of God ordained to him from without beginning’. Another of Williams’s favourite quotations from Juliana was ‘even sin shall have its worship in heaven.113 It would seem as though Williams was one of those people who prefer Dostoievsky to Tolstoy. It is not easy to say precisely when Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) came to an interest in mysticism in general and in English mystics in particular; the middle 1930s is a reasonable estimate. Eyeless in Gaza (London 1936) concludes with a reference to the celebrated utterance of Juliana, ‘all shall be well’, and Ends and Means (London 1937) refers to the author of The Cloud as ‘that most remarkable of the later mediaeval mystics’, and to Dom John Chapman’s article on Catholic mysticism (in Hastings’s Encyclopaedia) as ‘an admirable essay’.114 At about this period Huxley was interested in meditation as a means of fostering world peace. In a letter to T.S. Eliot, dated 8 July 1936, he discusses the problem: I quite agree with you that meditation requires a metaphysical or theological background. . . . Meditation itself is just a method of training, comparable to that, on the physical plane, of the athlete. . . . It can be used for strengthening the powers at the disposal of pride and ambition, or of lust, or of mediumship, just as effectively as it can be used for strengthening the powers at the disposal of the desire for perfection. . . . There is a very well-informed and interesting book by a Catholic priest, Fr Bede Frost, called The Art of Mental Prayer – do you know it? – which summarizes the very numerous techniques of meditation evolved at different times during the last five centuries.115 The Art of Mental Prayer by Bede Frost, an Anglican clergyman who had connections with Nashdom Abbey, was published in 1931. Frost refers to Hilton, Juliana and Baker, but not to The Cloud, and he makes very stringent remarks on amateur mystics that, if written today, would probably have got him in trouble with the Race Relations Board: Catholic mysticism has lately attracted a motley band of camp-followers who are a distinct peril to the unwary, who from their ignorance of the subject and of the dangers which are inherent in amateurs meddling with any science, are easily led astray by some facile presentation labelling itself mystic . . . every phase of pseudo-mysticism flourishes in our 113 C. Williams, The Image of the City (London 1958), pp. 68 and 109. 114 Ends and Means (London 1937), pp. 291–2. 115 Letters of Aldous Huxley, ed. G. Smith (London 1969), pp. 405–6.

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day . . . usually the product of an uneducated American from somewhere west of Chicago, or the astute mind of an Anglicised ‘babu’.116 Dom John Chapman’s Spiritual Letters appeared in 1935 and had a wide audience among non-Catholics. Chapman refers to Baker and Gertrude More, but his favourite is clearly and repeatedly The Cloud. An interesting and unusual feature of the book is Chapman’s open and tolerant attitude towards Eastern mysticism, to Sufism, Buddhism and Tagore. In 1911, Chapman could write to a Jesuit: ‘Evelyn Underhill’s is the most readable – and I think the most enlightening – book on mysticism I have read’.117 Chapman’s Spiritual Letters have no reference to Juliana or to Benet Canfield. Aldous Huxley presumably came to Canfield and Père Joseph through Henri Brémond’s Histoire du Sentiment Religieux en France (Paris 1916), Volume II: the English translation appeared in 1930. For Brémond, the friend of Tyrrell and von Hügel, Canfield was always ‘Benoît de Canfeld’, a part of French mysticism. Huxley’s approach to Canfield was essentially that of haute vulgarisation (and sometimes not so very haute, either). The French Capuchin friar, Père Joseph de Paris, l’éminence grise, the political agent of Richelieu, was a spiritual disciple of Canfield; he was thus an example of the combination of a practising mystic and a ruthless power politician. Huxley’s Grey Eminence (London 1941) seems to have been written to prove that politics and religion do not mix, a not very unusual point of view that would have been quite acceptable to Huxley’s grandfather. Huxley’s exposition of Canfield’s teaching, and of Canfield’s indebtedness to The Cloud, is lucid enough, but by a curious line of argument Huxley seems to suggest that it was precisely because Canfield’s teaching is so strongly and unusually Christocentric that it was susceptible of corruption by Père Joseph. It is not possible to say at what date Huxley first read Canfield. In the immediate preparations for the book, in 1940, he used an Italian translation at Harvard and a microfilm of the Latin version from the British Museum (which he later lent to Alan Watts, the authority on Zen Buddhism).118 In 1946, Huxley published The Perennial Philosophy (London), an attempt to delineate a kind of fundamental mystical philosophy common to East and West, and transcending the diversity of religions and nations. Here his reading of our mystics is clearly set out: Baker, Chapman, The Cloud, John Everard, Bede Frost, Hilton’s Scale, von Hügel’s Mystical Element, Juliana, Walton’s Notes and Materials on William Law, Gertrude More and Evelyn Underhill. Strangely enough, though Canfield is referred to several times in the text, he is not mentioned at all in the exhaustive bibliography. Like so many brilliant agnostic intellectuals, Huxley seems to have combined a rigorous scepticism of orthodoxy with a gullibility towards the unorthodox that far 116 B. Frost, The Art of Mental Prayer (London 1931), p. 39. 117 D.J. Chapman, The Spiritual Letters (London 1935), pp. 33, 39, 85, 128, 135, 149, 244, 264, 265. 118 Letters of Aldous Huxley (London 1969), pp. 461 and 504.

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exceeded the faith of a pilgrim to the Holy House at Loreto. One cannot resist the conclusion that mysticism was much on a par with his other fads – health foods, colonic lavage, chiropractors and mescalin. The impression that emerges from Sybille Bedford’s recent biography is of a most kindly and lovable man afflicted with an almost crippling fatuity.119 T.S. Eliot’s references to Eastern and Western mysticism in Four Quartets are well known – in East Coker (1940) to St John of the Cross, in The Dry Salvages (1941) to the Bhagavad-Gita, and in Little Gidding (1942) to Juliana and The Cloud. Dame Helen Gardner is disconcerted by this juxtaposition of Eastern and Western mysticism,120 yet, as we have already seen, from the days of Alcott and Emerson this mystical electicism is a characteristically American attitude – and T.S. Eliot is non Anglus sed Anglicanus.121 Evelyn Underhill, May Sinclair, Charles Williams and Aldous Huxley were all among Eliot’s circle of friends. His satire of theosophy and occultism begins as early as Gerontion (1920) and The Waste Land (1922), and it is reasonable to assume that he knew the mediaeval English mystics from the early 1920s as well. What seems worth stressing in the present context is that it was very late in Eliot’s career before he came to an unembarrassed public acceptance of the mystics. In The Dial of February 1928, Eliot reviewed von Hügel’s Selected Letters (London 1927). The whole tone of the review was cold and supercilious, culminating in a quotation from Bossuet, borrowed from Irving Babbitt: ‘true mysticism is so rare and unessential, and false mysticism is so common and dangerous, that one cannot oppose it too firmly’. To slap down the gentle and gracious von Hügel with a quotation from Bossuet, taken at second hand from, of all men, the philistine Babbitt – there is only one word for it: impertinence. Of course, Eliot was writing for American agnostic intellectuals (the New York Dial was a very different publication from the old Boston Dial of the Transcendentalists);122 and 1928 was

119 To take an example: Huxley had a fervent faith in the ‘technique’ of F.M. Alexander, who believed that the key to existence lay in the correct position of the head on the top of the spine. As Huxley put it: ‘for some obscure reason, the great majority of those who have come in contact with urbanized, industrial civilisation tend to lose the innate capacity for preserving the correct relation between neck and trunk, and consequently never enjoy completely normal organic functioning’ (S. Bedford, Aldous Huxley [London 1973], Vol. I, p. 312). Huxley presumably never had a nanny who told Master Aldous to sit up straight. At a time when he was by no means well off, Huxley paid good money to learn ‘the Alexander technique’. And it was Huxley who upbraided D.H. Lawrence for being ‘anti-scientific’! The miner’s son certainly had his head firmly screwed on to the top of his spine. 120 See her essay, ‘Four Quartets, a Commentary’, in B. Rajan (ed.), T. S. Eliot, a Study of His Writings by Several Hands (London 1947), pp. 69–70. 121 Eliot’s admiration for the prickly Erastian, Lancelot Andrewes, is that of an innocent outsider. A good antidote to Eliot’s For Lancelot Andrewes is Hugh Ross Williamson’s essay on Andrewes in Four Stuart Portraits (London 1949), pp. 61–82. Eliot’s other essay on an Anglican Caroline divine, John Bramhall, is really all about Thomas Hobbes. 122 See the excellent study of the New York Dial in G.A.M. Janssens, The American Literary Review (The Hague and Paris 1968), pp. 32–89.

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only a year after his entry into the Anglican Church, and he was obviously very anxious to show that he had not gone soft. But the von Hügel review was not an isolated instance. All through the late 1920s and the 1930s, whenever Eliot writes on poetry and mysticism, poetry and religion, poetry and belief, his tone and manner is always awkward and embarrassed. It was more than just a matter of his insisting that poetry can never be a substitute for mysticism, or religion, or belief; Eliot shies away from mysticism because he seems frightened that it is connected with sentimentality, romanticism, the inner light and ‘tender-mindedness’. The most notorious episode was the course of lectures printed as After Strange Gods (London 1934), where Eliot seems to have held up the religion of the heart as a subject for quick laughs from his audience of Southern gentlemen at the University of Virginia. When all is said about the ‘art’ of Four Quartets, the striking difference about the poem from most of Eliot’s previous work is its relaxedness and openness, its spontaneity and, dare one use the word, its piety – and an index of this is Eliot’s uninhibited use in Little Gidding of some of the tenderest quotations from the English mystics.123 ***** At the end of this long catena of facts, from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, one may perhaps be permitted the luxury of a few generalizations. The first point that comes to mind is, surely, why have these simple facts never been put together before? Even the twentieth-century editors of individual English mystical texts seem to be either uninterested in, or ignorant of, the reception of their author, and such full-scale monographs as have appeared (e.g. on Canfield and Baker) are equally defective in this matter. Non-Catholic scholars do not care; and Catholic scholars do not want to know – the knowledge that the English Catholic mystics should have flourished in such strange surroundings might seem to diminish their stature. The second point is that, since the English Catholic mystics were not really read for their own sakes, but were used, or misused, as part of something else (Behmenism, Pietism, Nonjuring, Theosophy, Syncretism), it may be argued that to study them as a separate group is to give them a significance they do not deserve. But a full-scale history of Western mysticism has yet to be written.124 To follow the fortunes of a small group, like the English Catholic mystics, through four centuries, is at least a manageable undertaking, and provides an angle of vision on the major religious currents. One thing is clear: once a book is published, it passes outside and beyond the author’s intentions. Men will deduce a religious system from a

123 At a different, but analogous, level, compare the diffident and reserved tone of Eliot’s essay on George Herbert in The Spectator of 1932 (12 March) and the totally relaxed and generous treatment of Herbert in his British Council pamphlet of 1962. 124 [However, there is now the authoritative seven-volume survey of Christian mysticism by B. McGinn (ed.), The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism (New York 1991– 2017). Eds].

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book of pious inspiration, and derive pious inspiration from a book of religious system. In the field of religious literature, men do not usually read to learn, but to reinforce their own predilections. And finally, has this undertaking provided any particular conclusions? The real question is, who is it who wants to draw the conclusions? The students of mystical theology and mystical philosophy will probably continue to do as they do. If this long and laborious essay should be of any use, it will be for the students of comparative literature and the history of ideas.

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9 RECUSANT HISTORIOGRAPHY An historian looks at the achievements of 25 years’ study of recusancy*

In 1958 a conference on ‘Post-Reformation Catholic History in England and Wales’, at St Anne’s College Oxford, was organised by A.F. Allison of the British Museum and D.M. Rogers of the Bodleian Library. A quarter of a century later this annual conference at St Anne’s is still going strong. The conferences themselves have always been delightfully informal and a good mix of young and old, clerical and lay, amateur and professional. Besides fulllength papers there are shorter communications and brief announcements of work in progress. Sometimes there is a trip to a country house of Catholic interest, always a visit to the Bodleian and to Blackwell’s, and always animated discussions in the dining hall, in the corridors, on the lawn and in the local pub. It is a very pleasant sight to see some eager young post-graduate beaver, just starting out on his or her DPhil with a virginal card-index, having questions very precisely answered by an elderly cleric who has never even heard of the words social demography. In a very relaxed atmosphere there is a generous pooling of information. Since 1974 the conferences have been ‘officially’ considered as part of the activities of the Catholic Record Society, which now holds its annual general meeting during the proceedings. These annual conferences have certainly led to the formation of a number of local history societies, many with their own periodicals. Furthermore, county archivists and keepers of private Catholic archives have found common ground, and this has resulted in the formation of another institution, the Catholic Archives Society, which has now its own annual conference and its own periodical.

Recusant history ‘Post-Reformation Catholic history’ is a bit of a mouthful: recusant history, the history of English Catholics under the Penal Laws, from Elizabeth I to Victoria, is a more convenient term (after all, the Penal Laws were not taken off the Statute Book till 1845). The major development in the last twenty-five years is the

* Originally published in The Tablet, 26 June 1982, pp. 650–1. Republished courtesy of The Tablet.

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acceptance of recusant history as a respectable object of study. Thomas More and Newman have always been well-established industries. But the study of English Catholicism in between those two figures was for long considered to be something rather apologetical, polemical, anti-ecumenical, hagiographical and sentimental. The change in attitude has been partly brought about by external factors: the expansion of postgraduate studies and the Pirandello-like spectacle of researchers in search of a thesis; the development of local and regional historical studies, and the improvements in the national archive system; the intense, Marxist-inspired, interest in social history; and the seemingly everlasting debate about the decline of the gentry – the recusants can certainly provide more than their fair share of declining gents. The primary step in the new development has been the registration of, and the making accessible of, the materials for recusant history. The catalogue of the Birmingham Catholic Diocesan Archives by the late D. McEvilly, and its publication by the National Register of Archives, was a model of its kind. Then there was E.M. Poyser’s reorganisation of Westminster Catholic Archives and the complete microfilming of the main archive at Westminster and of the Old Catholic Chapter Archives (the contents of the latter were not so sensational as some people used to think – omne quod ignotum pro magnifico). Recusancy is now beginning to get expert treatment in the Victoria County Histories, and items of recusant interest are being included in the annual publications of several county historical associations. The pioneer in the study of the legal records was the late H. Bowler OSB, whose introduction to Recusant Roll 2 (CRS Vol. LVII, 1965) is the fruit of a lifetime’s experience: his work is being continued now by T. McCann.1 The art of synthesising local records into vivid social history is exemplified in the work of J.H. Aveling for York (Catholic Recusancy in the City of York, CRS Monograph Series, Vol. II, 1970) and J.A. Williams for Wiltshire (Catholic Recusancy in Wiltshire, 1660–1791, CRS Monograph Series, Vol. I, 1968) and Bath (Post-Reformation Catholicism in Bath, Vol. 1, CRS Vol. LXV, 1975 and Vol. 2, CRS Vol LXVI, 1976) – Mr Williams is now engaged on a guide to the sources of recusant history.2 The last twenty-five years have marked several changes of attitude towards recusant history. Firstly, the historian can look at Catholic recusants objectively, as a minority group comparable with Nonconformist dissenters. The title of P. McGrath’s Papists and Puritans under Elizabeth I (Blandford P. 1967) explains its viewpoint, and E. Duffy follows the same pattern in his forthcoming lecture to the Friends of Dr Williams’s Library, ‘Peter and Jack: Catholicism and Dissent in Eighteenth-Century England’3 – twenty-five years ago such a lecture title,

1 [T.J. McCann (ed.), Recusants in the Exchequer Pipe Rolls 1581–1592 (CRS Records Series Vol. LXXI, 1986). Eds]. 2 [Published in 1983 as Sources for Recusant History (1559–1791) in English Official Archives (Sutton Coldfield). Eds]. 3 [Published in 1982 as Peter and Jack, Roman Catholics and Dissent in Eighteenth-Century England (London, Friends of Dr Williams’s Library, no. 36). Eds].

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for such an audience, would have been hardly imaginable. The extreme limits of recusant revisionism are reached in J. Bossy’s The English Catholic Community 1570–1850 (London 1975), which discusses the recusants as if they were masters of their own fate, with no persecution, no penal laws and no social discrimination.

Recusant literature Recusancy has its literature as well as its history, and Allison and Rogers laid the foundations for scholarly study with their Catalogue of Catholic Books 1558–1640 (Bognor Regis 1956) and English Catholic Books 1641–1700 (Chicago 1974 [rev. Aldershot 1996. Eds] by T. Clancy SJ carries on the good work – a revised edition of ‘A. & R.’ is in active preparation [published as The Contemporary Printed Literature of the English Counter-Reformation between 1558 and 1640, 2 Vols, Aldershot 1989 and 1994. Eds]). There have been several scholarly editions of recusant poets, the most notable being Brown’s edition of Robert Southwell for the Oxford English Texts (Oxford 1967). The interest in emblem literature and in meditative literature, begun by Mario Praz and Louis Martz, has resulted in a growth of interest in the influence of continental Catholic devotional literature in England. For sheer volume, the most outstanding achievement has been the Scolar Press series, English Recusant Literature 1558–1640, which provides photographic reprints of every recusant book in the period, under the editorship of ‘A. & R.’. J. M. Blom’s Post-Tridentine English Primer (CRS, Monograph Series, Vol. III, 1982) shows that the English translations of the Breviary hymns were the staple poetic diet of the recusants for two hundred years. A most striking development has been the more even distribution of interest in recusancy through its four centuries – a breakout from the Elizabethan corral. A visitor to that first recusancy history conference in 1958 might have had a vision of the late Fr Leo Hicks SJ standing on the poop-deck of the flagship of the Spanish Armada, and of the late Brigadier Trappes-Lomax standing grimly on Dover Beach, pike in hand, ready to send the Spanish packing. We have now tended to move away from those problems of conflicting allegiance. In articles in Recusant History and elsewhere, E. Duffy has opened up the study of recusancy in the Enlightenment, and has recently edited a most refreshing symposium, Challoner and his Church: a Catholic Bishop in Georgian England (Darton 1981); M. Rowlands has pioneered the study of urban Catholicism before the Irish deluge;4 N. Abercrombie has vividly evoked the political and social background of the Emancipation period – his life of Charles Butler (1750–1832) is eagerly awaited;5 and the unheroic days of Douay have been recorded in P. R. Harris’s admirable

4 [See, for example, her later publication Catholics of Parish and Town 1558–1778 (CRS Monograph Series Vol. V, 1999). Eds]. 5 [Apart from two earlier articles in Recusant History, no full-length life of Butler by Abercrombie has yet appeared. However, see the ODNB article on Butler for a recent biographical account. Eds]

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edition of Douay College Documents 1639–1794 (CRS Vol. LXIII, 1972). The European context of recusant history has not been neglected and in Recusant History both A.F. Allison and J. Bossy have illustrated various aspects of the French connection. The unrivalled command of Spanish archives by A.J. Loomie SJ has given us The Spanish Elizabethans (New York 1963) and Spain and the Jacobean Catholics (CRS Vols LXIV and LXVIII, 1973 and 1978). The limpid elegance of H.O. Evenett’s Spirit of the Counter-Reformation (Cambridge 1968) reminds us of the European context of the history of ideas. Another major change has been a distinct lowering of the temperature in the treatment of internal quarrels among the recusants: the classic controversies of seculars versus regulars or of Jesuits versus the rest. The defensive and/or aggressive tone of clerical history is becoming a thing of the past. Symbolic of the new atmosphere is the magnificent four-volume biographical dictionary of the English secular clergy in penal times, The Seminary Priests (Ware 1968–77), a labour of love compiled by the Dominican historian G. Anstruther OP. Institutional histories are now being written which are not merely for internal consumption, but which will stand up as scholarly historical monographs: D. Milburn’s History of Ushaw College (Durham 1964) and M.E. Williams’s The Venerable English College Rome 1579–1979 (Associated Catholic Publications for the Venerable College, Rome 1979) are obvious examples. D. Lunn’s English Benedictines 1540–1688 (London 1980) deals with the early constitutional problems of the English Benedictine Congregation with extreme detachment; and the editing of the Letter book of Lewis Sabran SJ 1713–15 (CRS Vol. LXII, 1971) by T.G. Holt SJ is exemplary – the annotation and commentary are explanatory without being apologetic. Perhaps the day will come when we shall be given an edition of the letters of Robert Parsons SJ, presented in the same way – so that we can make up our own minds about him? Anyway, to remind us that among the recusants there were not only contentious clerics, but lovable laymen, we have T. Bongaerts’s study of the seventeenth-century antiquary Thomas Blount 1618–79 (Amsterdam 1978) and F. Tyrer’s three-volume edition of The Great Diurnal of Nicholas Blundell 1702–28 (Chester 1968–72), a vivid picture of a robust Lancashire squire. This brief sketch can only be illustrative, not exhaustive. It is merely an attempt to indicate certain lines of development, to suggest that a definable rationale is perceptible in what seems like a very miscellaneous output.

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10 WILLIAM LESLIE, HENRY HOWARD AND LORD ARLINGTON 1666–67 *

Introduction In a previous article in Recusant History (Jan. 1958), passing reference was made to two substantial documents by William Leslie (about 20,000 words in all) in the Public Record Office: ‘A Relation of the Cardinals of the Court of Rome’ and ‘Concerning the affairs of Rome in relation to England’ (PRO SP 9/203/7, 8 and 9). They are part of the archives of Henry Bennet, Lord Arlington, Secretary of State 1662–74, and have been endorsed by Arlington’s secretary, Joseph Williamson, in the form: ‘This was a copy of a paper written to Mr Henry Howard of Norfolk 1667 by one Leslie, a Scottish priest at Rome, and by him for his own discharge communicated to my Lord Arlington, with renunciation of all such correspondences for the future.’ The documents are too verbose to be worth editing in full, but their contents, and the circumstances surrounding their transmission to Henry Howard, are of some significance for recusant history.

William Leslie (1619–1707) William Leslie came from an old Aberdeenshire family. He left Scotland in 1640 for the Scots College Douay, went almost immediately to the Scots College Rome, and was ordained there in 1647. He spent two years in Paris, 1647–9, where he was eye-witness to the troubles of the Fronde. He returned to Rome in 1649 as Procurator of the Scottish mission, living with free board and lodging in the household of Cardinal Carlo Barberini. He worked in Bramante’s Palazzo Bella Cancellaria for the rest of his long life.1

* Originally published in Recusant History, Vol. XIX, no. 4, October 1989, pp. 469–83. Republished courtesy of the Catholic Record Society and Cambridge University Press. 1 The principal printed sources for Leslie’s life and activities are M.V. Hay’s two books, The Jesuits and the Popish Plot (London 1934) and Failure in the Far East (Wetteren 1957). Hay also uses Leslie’s correspondence with Howard, but from a different angle to my own: he was not aware of the documents in the PRO. Hay should be supplemented by J. Metzler (ed.), Sacrae Congregationis

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In 1656 and 1658 Leslie prepared lengthy reports on the Scots and English missions, urging frequent and strict visitations of the missionary colleges, and complaining that the secular colleges served as novitiates for the religious orders, especially the Jesuits. It was these reports that resulted in the decree of Propaganda of 20 July 1660, which enforced the missionary oath on the colleges. In November 1660, Leslie maintained his advice in support of the decree, despite opposition from many quarters. In 1661 Leslie was appointed as the first Archivist to Propaganda, a position which he held till 1672. On 7 May 1665 Leslie proposed to visit Scotland, but Propaganda turned down his request: Leslie’s sudden desire to leave Rome, as we shall see later, was due to a conflict of policy regarding the appointment of bishops for Ireland. Meanwhile, in 1657, he had met Mgr François Pallu2 (1626–84) during the latter’s visit to Rome, and was paid by Pallu as a personal agent, in order to assist in the delicate matter of appointing three French missionary bishops for the Far East, and of circumventing the Portuguese rights of patronage. In 1662, when Pallu left for the mission, Leslie continued correspondence with Fr Gazil of the Société des Missions Etrangères in Paris, asking for money for copying confidential documents at Propaganda: eventually in 1666 Gazil agreed to employ him as the official Procurator for the Société. Leslie also acted from 1665–74 as Agent for the Dutch Vicars Apostolic and secular clergy.3 From his office in the Papal Chancery Leslie thus had access to Papal missionary policy both for Europe and for the Far East. He met Henry Howard in Rome in the summer of 1666: the nature and fruits of their contact is the subject of this article.

Henry Howard (1628–84) Henry Howard was the acting head of the leading Catholic family in England, but his position was vulnerable in many ways.4 His grandfather, Thomas Howard Earl of Arundel, the great virtuoso, had died in 1646, leaving a massive burden of debt and inevitable family quarrels. His father, Henry Frederick Earl of Arundel, had died in 1652. His elder brother Thomas, heir to the family titles and estates,

de Propaganda Fide Memoria Rerum 1662–1972 (Rome 1971), Vol. I part I, which contains J. Metzler, ‘Die Kongregation in der Zweiten Hälfte des 17 Jahrhunderts’ and R. Wiltgen, ‘Propaganda Is Placed in Charge of the Pontifical Colleges’. Leslie’s threat to leave Rome for England (ostensibly Scotland) in May 1665 is corroborated by C. Giblin, ‘The Acta of Propaganda Archives and the Scottish Mission’, Innes Review, Vol. V (1954), p. 70. 2 A selection of Leslie’s letters to Pallu and Gazil is in A. Launay, Documents Historiques relatifs à la Société des Missions Etrangères (Vannes 1904), Vol. I, pp. 248–83; there is one letter of Pallu to Leslie in A. Launay, Lettres de Mgr. Pallu (Angoulème 1905), Vol. I, p. 127. 3 Letters to and from Leslie and the Dutch secular clergy are in the State Archives at Utrecht: they have been inventoried in J. Bruggeman, Inventaris van de Archieven bij het Metropolitaan Kapittel van Utrecht van de Roomsch Katholieke Kerk der Oud Bisschoppelijke Clerezie (‘s-Gravenhage 1928; this book is not in the British Library). 4 The basic facts on the Howards are in V. Gibbs (ed.), Complete Peerage (London 1910).

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was a violent lunatic, living under restraint at Padua since 1645, at considerable expense – he did not die till 1677.5 As a Catholic Royalist under the Commonwealth and Protectorate, Henry Howard’s principal concern was the management of his sequestered estates. In the short-lived parliament of Richard Cromwell he was involved in a contested election and was the subject of a committee of investigation which came to nothing when parliament was dissolved.6 In the revived Rump parliament Howard supported Lambert, in the hope of increased toleration for Catholics: this put him in a very awkward situation when Lambert was swept aside by Monck. Howard was cordially disliked by the active Royalist conspirators in England, and he keenly felt the insecurity of his position. At the dawn of the Restoration he wrote a long self-exculpatory letter to Charles II, protesting his loyalty: Charles II had sent him a standard anodyne letter of encouragement,7 and immediately after the Restoration the revived Dukedom of Norfolk was conferred on the lunatic Thomas Howard – Henry was to inherit the dukedom on Thomas’s death in 1677. The Howards had achieved respectability, but Henry Howard still had to be careful: his chief friend at the Restoration court was Charles II’s personal companion, Henry Bennet, Lord Arlington, Secretary of State 1662–74. Henry Howard’s wife, Anne Somerset, daughter of the second Marquis of Worcester, died in 1662, and Howard was able to live more or less openly with his mistress, Jane Bickerton, and their children. In the winter of 1664–5 he left England to go on an embassy to the Imperial Court at Vienna, and from thence with Count Walter Leslie (1606–67) to Constantinople to visit the Ottoman Porte. On the return journey he travelled to Rome, where in the summer of 1666 he met William Leslie in the household of Cardinal Carlo Barberini, and established a correspondence with Leslie in the course of the journey back to England.8

5 There are several medical reports (from 1655 to 1667) on Thomas Howard in Arundel Castle Archives, Original Letters 1632–1723, ff. 385, 392, 394 (on 24 January 1655 Sir Thomas Browne certifies that he is ‘a madman and outragious’), 395, 397, 401 – they make very painful reading. 6 J.T. Rutt (ed.), Diary of Thomas Burton (London 1828), Vol. IV, pp. 301 & 369; S. Bethel, Interest of the Princes and States of Europe (London 1694), p. 341; G. Davies, The Restoration of Charles II (London 1955), p. 47; G. Davies, ‘The Election of Richard Cromwell’s Parliament 1658–59’, English Historical Review, Vol. LXIII (1948), p. 493. 7 Bodley MS Clarendon 72, f. 146; 73 ff. 67–8; Charles II’s letter was apparently sent to other royalists as well. Howard was particulary disliked by John Vct Mordaunt and Sir Philip Warwick: see M. Coate (ed.), Letterbook of John Vct. Mordaunt 1658–60 (Camden Soc. 3rd series), Vol. LXIX (1945), p. 65; Calendar of Clarendon State Papers, Vol. IV, pp. 200, 235, 275, 281; Vol. V, p. 25; P.H. Hardacre, The Royalists during the Puritan Revolution (The Hague 1950), pp. 136 sq. There is an interesting defence of Howard’s conduct at the end of the Protectorate in J.A., A Vindication of the Roman Catholics (London 1660; Wing C. 611); this has been wrongly attributed to Redmond Caron by Thomas Grenville, and Grenville’s misattribution has been taken over by all subsequent bibliographers. 8 Scottish Catholic Archives BL 1/33 and 35. In May 1666 Howard had stayed a fortnight in Florence with Sir John Finch, English Resident in Tuscany, who reported to Clarendon on his visit: cf. Bodley MS Clarendon 84, ff. 148–9, 232–3.

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Howard arrived in London in November 1666 and immediately wrote to Leslie, insisting that he could not undertake any direct correspondence with Barberini, especially on Irish affairs: What I wrote in Italy was not within our King’s dominions, and besides bare letters of ceremony, but now here to enter the lists and correspond with a Cardinal may forfeit my whole estate, which is good for a dozen informers to live on. . . . I never shall nor ever expect to cross the seas again, but live privately here, grow rich, and speak well of all men. . . . I have acquainted his Majesty [with Barberini’s letter on Irish affairs] and showed him the note of the picture of Romanelli,9 so you must return thanks and make the due grimaces to the Cardinal as the case requires. In the true Roman style, Barberini had evidently tried to combine diplomacy with the gift of a picture. On 14 December 1666 Howard wrote again to Leslie, but in a very different tone: It will be no news to you now to repeat how great my obligations are to my Lord Arlington, and how ready I am to serve him or obey any of his commands. Wherefore finding he wanted a correspondent at Rome, and a person of such sobriety and integrity as he might believe and trust to all he should write, I proposed your person to him as one for whom (though his Lordship be a stranger to you) I could be answerable to his Lordship for your sufficiency in being in every way situated for his purposes. Howard then promises that he himself will pay Leslie a regular salary for the correspondence, which is to be in the form of newsletters once a fortnight via Sir William Temple, the British Envoy at Brussels. After making arrangements as to code-names and so on, Howard continues: This enclosed note is all of my Lord Arlington’s own handwriting, and though he knows not nor would I have him know that I send it to you, yet I do it because you may see he is eager and desirous of your correspondence, and that you may hereafter know (having his hand by you) when his [letters] to you arrive, if they be of his own hand or not. . . . This correspondence of yours thus established may be of good use to you. Before Leslie had received this, another letter from Leslie to Howard had arrived, this time on the question of Dr Leyburne’s presidency of Douay. On 11 January

9 Giovanni Francesco Romanelli (1610–62), a protégé of the Barberinis; two of his paintings are at Hampton Court: cf. U. Thieme & F. Becker, Allgemeines Lexicon der Bildenden Künstler (Leipzig 1902), Vol. XXVIII, p. 544.

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1667 Howard writes to Leslie to stop him from writing directly to Howard in England on English Catholic affairs: I have been very near beshitting myself lest some of your letters should have been opened and racked to a wrong sense. For though I know I dare swear you mean no hurt, yet it is not a time to talk anything of Dr Leyburne or such ticklish matters, and I pray have a care you bring not your friends in trouble . . . for such matters are not fit to be in letters which come nearer this place than Flanders. On 22 March 1667 Howard informed Leslie that his correspondence is much esteemed by Lord Arlington: five days later, Howard was created Baron Howard of Castle Rising – for services rendered. On 21 June 1667 Howard acknowledged the two memoranda, now in the PRO, which are the subject of this article: I have received your last with many thanks for the character of the redcoats [i.e. the Cardinals] . . . for God’s sake let me still repeat to you never to write anything to me which may hurt my Papistship, for I had rather be ignorant in foreign intelligence than imprisoned or suspected at home. On 30 August 1667 Howard wrote to Leslie to inform him that Arlington wanted to know more details about the ‘secrets of high consequence’ which Leslie had promised to disclose in the memorandum received on 21 June: [Lord Arlington] says it will be a great kindness to him if you can without prejudice disclose this secret, which I wish may be sent first to me . . . and if you can disguise it so to me as to refer all to my ultimate discovery, it will be an advantage. But Howard goes on to insist that he wants nothing to do with ‘Dr Leyburne’s business’. The Catholics do not live under a very heavy persecution. They do not want their peace disturbed by the intervention of Parliament, and they also do not want to be accused of any dependence on Rome in secular affairs. Howard preserved two scribal copies of this latter part of the letter as evidence of his loyalty to the Crown, and this was printed by Tierney in his History of Arundel.10 But a copy of the first part of the letter, however, with its evidence of Howard’s connections with Arlington, and with Howard’s request for the revelation of Leslie’s secret information, was not preserved. This is one occasion when Tierney cannot be accused of suppressing awkward facts.

10 M.A. Tierney, The History . . . of Arundel (London 1834), Vol. II, pp. 524–5.

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On 15 November 1667 Howard ordered Leslie to stop all correspondence, both with himself and also with Arlington. After the fall of Clarendon the political situation was too precarious.

‘A relation of the Cardinals of the court of Rome’ This must have been composed early in 1667,11 though it did not reach Howard till July of that year. Pope Alexander VII (Fabio Chigi) had been ailing for some time (he died in May 1667), and Leslie’s intention was to give an idea of the Cardinals who would be involved in the next conclave: whether they are pro-French, pro-Spanish, of the ‘squadrone volante’, or simply neutral.12 He also indicates their potential usefulness for English affairs. Unfortunately he only deals with the Cardinals of the creations of Urban VIII and Innocent X, thirty-eight in all, and omits the thirty Cardinals of Alexander VII’s own creation. In fact, the manuscript breaks off abruptly in the middle of a sentence, as if the copyist had become tired of Leslie’s ramblings. The memorandum is of uneven value. Sometimes Leslie is merely repeating common curial gossip, and sometimes he reveals a surprising ignorance: for instance, he speaks of Cardinals Colonna (died Finale Ligure 4 September 1666) and Filomarino (died Naples 3 November 1666) as if they were still alive. He also is not very good at spotting future popes: he thought nothing of the chances of Cardinals Rospigliosi (Clement IX, 1667–69), Altieri (Clement X, 1670–6) or Odescalchi (Innocent XI, 1676–89). Leslie certainly knew the Barberinis. Cardinal Francesco Barberini is now proSpanish, having formerly been pro-French; but though he is Cardinal Protector of England and Scotland it is unlikely he will do anything important for English affairs. Antonio Barberini is pro-French; though he is nominally Cardinal Protector of Ireland, all serious business relating to Ireland is dealt with by a special congregation consisting of other cardinals. As for Carlo Barberini, he is too young: ‘he is the best pilot we can have in time of tranquillity, but in tempest we have need of a harder head’. Leslie has great praise for Cardinal Pallotta, who ‘would do great things for England’, but who is unlikely to become Pope as he is not much liked by the other cardinals. His nephew, Giovanni Baptista, is

11 Cardinal Maculani OP died in Rome 16 February 1667: Leslie describes him as still living. For basic facts on the Cardinals, see P. Gauchat, Hierarchia Catholica (Monasterii 1935), Vol. IV (1592–1667). 12 The ‘squadrone volante’ can best be translated in 17th century parliamentary terminology as ‘Trimmers’, i.e. their object was to ‘trim the boat’ and keep it steady by using their votes to achieve a balance between the pro-French and pro-Spanish factions: this is not the same as being neutral or indifferent. Leslie says of Cardinal Albizzi that he was formerly of the ‘squadrone volante’ but is now neutral.

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a man of most noble talents, just understanding, courteous, and civil extremely, and having been brought up in the English College has not only taken a great affection to all our Isles, but has perfectly learned the English tongue: he speaks also Spanish, French and Dutch. In one word, I know not a more complete cavalier in all Italy, and as I believe, he will make a great [? figure] in time at this Court. We have all reason both to hope well of his favours, and to pray God for his advancement, for I know not another so able nor so affectionate as he is. He doth me the favour to testify a great deal of love towards me, and communicates unto me his most secret thoughts, so I may promise something of his favours if honour does not change his manner, of which I fear nothing, for amongst his other parts I admire in him an unparallelled modesty, and prudence, as also a contempt of this world in the great abundance of riches and honours. This Giovanni Baptista can be identified with the official who was subsequently dismissed from the Curia for breaches of security.13 Cardinal Gabrielli is avaricious and ‘sordidously’ greedy. Cardinal Maidalchini, nephew of Donna Olympia, is a spendthrift, ‘a man of no qualities, no parts, no talents at all’. Cardinal Rossetti, formerly Apostolic nuncio to the court of Charles I, is out of favour with the present Pope, and furthermore is quite out of contact with the present situation in England. Leslie’s portrait of Cardinal Albizzi, secretary of the Congregation for Irish affairs, is clearly based on first-hand knowledge: I have had the occasion to deal diverse times with him in affairs that were very hard and difficult, and from which he had a great aversion, and inclined to do just the contrary of what I desired; but bringing my reasons and rendering him capable of the motives on the other side, he changed his mind and became my protector as before he was my adversary. . . . There is not any Cardinal in the whole College that is better informed of all our affairs than he, for when he was Assessor of the Holy Office they all passed through his hands; and since he is Cardinal whatsoever is done for England he hath ever been on the deliberation thereof, and shows to be most zealous for the conversion of that kingdom. And I really believe he would proceed vigorously in our affairs if we should make use of him, and in the congregations concerning our business [he] will ever cast the balance, and do what he pleases, by reason of his bold13 Recusant History, Vol. IV (1958), p. 163. On 3 March 1643, Giovanni Battista Pallotta, aged 17½, from the Marches of Ancona, was admitted as convictor to the English College, Rome, at the urgent request of his uncle, Cardinal Pallotta: see H. Foley, Records SJ (London 1880), Vol.VI, pp. 358, 624.

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ness of dealing, and by his vigorous and efficacious fashion of carrying on what he aims at. So by all means possible he must be gained and made our friend, for otherwise he is capable to mar all and hinder at least whatsoever we propose. Leslie concludes with the story of the intrigues and horse-trading that led up to the election of Fabio Chigi as Pope Alexander VII on 7 April 1655, after an eightyday conclave. Leslie’s account corresponds more or less with the historical facts as we know them, but his narrative is so confused that it is necessary first to read Pastor’s analysis of the same events14 in order to understand what Leslie is driving at. Indeed, Leslie’s entire picture of the Roman Curia is blurred and distorted by his inveterate prolixity: as a diplomatic aide mémoire its value must have been very limited.

‘Concerning the affairs of Rome in relation to England’ The memorandum ‘Concerning the affairs of Rome in Relation to England’ is of more immediate and personal significance. Leslie’s arguments are very convoluted, and when stripped of their verbosity they are sometimes astonishing. The following synopsis may make the document seem clearer and more coherent than it really is. Leslie begins by deploring the excommunication of Henry VIII by Pope Clement VII; the break with Rome might have been avoided. He contrasts Clement VIII’s acceptance of Henry IV of France, and the settlement of the divorce of Queen Margaret of Valois by the French bishops. Both the Papacy and England have suffered through the break with Rome. The Papacy has lost a million and a half crowns in Peter’s Pence and has lost England as a potential ally against France and Spain. England has lost through the divisions in religion: as on the one side unity in religion is the best fundament of union in Estate, so divisions in religion bring for the most part rebellion with them . . . this loss without question had not been if we had reaped the Catholic faith, nor had we seen the mad pranks of our Scotch Puritans nor their abominable Covenants with the English Roundheads if we had all been under the obedience of the Pope. Sectarianism is a constant source of rebellion, but in a Catholic country rebellion is easier to suppress: It is not difficult to Catholics when rebellion comes, especially if the clergy be well affected to the crown, to both hinder and extinguish it

14 L. Pastor, History of the Popes (London 1957), Vol. XXXI, pp. 1–9.

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when it falls out by a fury of the people; for though the heads care little for conscience in all professions, yet the people are altogether guided by such motives. Now when rebellion falls out amongst Catholics, the clergy presently interposes itself, and by denying the sacraments to the rebels, makes them presently quit the party and return to obedience. Leslie adduces recent examples in Naples and in France: In France the first rebellion began about Christmas, but ended about Easter when all the people going to confession, and finding that the priests would not absolve from the sin of rebellion till they had laid down their arms, they made tumults, and running towards the Palace or Parliament house, called for peace, which was the cause of that peace which was made at Ruell 1649, to all which I was eye witness. This fits in with Leslie’s two years in Paris 1647–9. England suffers in other ways from not being Catholic. It is excluded from the possibility of acquiring the elective kingdom of Poland, for the crown of which the Duke of York might have been eligible. If England were Catholic it might also qualify, at some future date, for the kingdoms of Sicily and Naples. England’s foreign policy also suffers because we have no hope of having the Pope as an ally. Leslie then adduces even more curious arguments, of a socio-economic nature. Because of the Reformation, the king now has no church benefices available with which to win over the nobility and gentry. The recent example of France is contrasted with the Civil Wars in England: The example of France is evident proof of this, for it is most certain that there was not a more potent motive to hold many in obedience, and withdraw others who had already rebelled to the court party, than the promises of Abbacies, of Bishoprics, Priories, Canonries and suchlike benefices, which weakened extremely the contrary party and fortified the king’s army of the best swords in the realm, who if there had not been those hopes would have without question followed Condé and the Parlement of Paris. And Mazarin made so good use of this advantage that all those rebels were still betrayed by their own. And if his Majesty [Charles I] had had in the last troubles all the ancient Church rents in his hands, there was scarce any of his enemies but might have been drawn over to his Majesty’s service by the offer of a good benefice. Furthermore, because of the lack of rich benefices in England, few gentlemen or noblemen become clergymen, and the middle classes, who at present are clergymen, would be much better employed as merchants. Pursuing the economic argument, Leslie goes on to say that if England were Catholic, the rich merchants of France, Spain and Italy might come to England and 169

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spend their money there (the argument from tourism!). Furthermore, because it is not Catholic, England is deprived of a very lucrative trade with Rome: Likewise Rome alone and the Pope’s estates, with which now we [have] little or no traffic, would be capable to draw into our Islands infinite store of good monies. For we see that Genoa alone takes every year out of Rome above six hundred thousand crowns of dry money [i.e. cash], and as we are more upright and sincere in our dealing than they, if we were Catholics we might have all this gain, which would be a great help to us by reason money is a great deal more advantageous than merchandise. But now they will not hear of us nor deal with us in this town. Then, reverting to the problem of lack of Church benefices in England on account of the Reformation, Leslie argues that the wrong class of people are engaged as merchants: As long as the Catholic faith was in England, the most part of the nobility and gentlemen, speaking of cadets and second sons, made themselves clergymen and religious, as I have said; now they apply their mind to be merchants, which without difficulty brings more evil than good to that trade. For as long as the gentleman’s or nobleman’s second brother is low and has no monies in his pocket, he attends to his trading very accurately, but as soon as he comes to have monies and to be rich, he remembers of his extraction, and so begins to have good clothes, servants, lackeys, fine houses, great equipage, dogs, hunting, and all such pastimes as are rather for a man of great birth than to an industrious merchant. This is seen in all those public places and merchant towns where the English have factories and trading, for none compares so gallant and so magnificent as they over the whole world. After a very extensive discussion on this point, Leslie moves to higher ground. He sees no possibility whatever in any schemes of re-union of the Catholic and Protestant churches: It is impossible ever to see any reconciliation, and it were vain to undertake any such thing; and although the Protestants of England should hold all the Catholic tenets, only one excepted, that alone were sufficient to hinder eternally all reconciliation . . . so there remains only a full conversion, which can never be hoped for until his Majesty be greatly pleased to grant either a universal liberty of conscience, or at least a toleration. On matters not of faith, Rome is quite ready to make concessions. In the event of conversion, the restoration of Church lands is not a problem: the clergy would be

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supported in their minimum necessities by the laity, and Rome would be willing to make some contribution. Now Leslie turns to the realities of the present. In the past the Popes had tried to achieve the conversion of England by wars and foreign alliances, but that method has failed. The present Curia leave the conversion of England to God: the Cardinals either do not know or do not care about England, and the Popes are given to enriching themselves and their families. If anything is to be done, the English Catholics must take the initiative themselves. Leslie divides English affairs at Rome under two heads: firstly, general policy concerning the total conversion of the kingdom, the relations with the King, and the appointment of bishops; secondly, particular administrative matters concerning the day-to-day regulation of the mission and the seminaries, and the role of a bishop in such matters. For the general policy level, there must be either some Resident or Ambassador sent from the Court privately or publicly [italics added] . . . if at this Court we had a man of great nobility, rich, wise, of great authority and withal of great piety and zeal, and who on the other part would propose means feasible and probable to help us, there is no question but here in urging accurately our affairs, all that either we could wish and desire would be done, and we might hope one day to see Britain flourish not only in the Catholic faith, in religion, piety and doctrine, far above the other kingdoms in the whole world, as it did when we had that happiness in Catholic times to our immortal renown, fame and glory throughout the whole world. But moreover we might be even in temporal affairs more powerful and considerable than ever those islands were before, since now we are united and joined together under our own Prince, whose power without question would be formidable to all, both neighbours and those who are far removed from us, if we had the true religion which is the best fundament of temporal power itself. It is perfectly obvious that Leslie has Henry Howard himself in mind as the proposed Resident or Ambassador from the English court. At the second, administrative level, the Popes and the Curia are inclined to leave affairs in the hands of the superiors of the seminaries and colleges: The other affairs that are treated in this court concerning England are, as I said, the missions, the clergy, the colleges, and the head of them, the bishops. Their affairs, as they are more feasible, they are also more looked upon, because the colleges have their superiors, who have care of young men who mind to study letters and piety, and by that means intend to help the Catholics and the country. And the Popes and Cardinals leave almost all those affairs in the said superiors’ hands, of which the

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superiors being conscious, exercise almost despotical power over those youths, which is oft times the cause of great disorders and disgusts. And many youths go home with great rancour and intention to do more harm than good, which breeds great divisions in the country amongst those that are of diverse factions. Now and then those colleges are visited and some order put to them, but because there is none who looks narrowly to those businesses . . . things return always to a certain lethargy, and the immediate superiors to their ancient power, or rather, to a negligence of teaching the scholars piety, devotion and doctrine. The missions themselves are chiefly in the hands of the religious, who are divided amongst themselves, besides being opposed to the clergy – all of which produces scandal. Appeals to the Protector, Cardinal Francesco Barberini, are of little effect: he either will not hear us, or for fear to enter in jarres with religious men, and for respects, will not put efficacious remedies to the disorders, so that in the missions everyone does what he likes without any fear of chastisement or hope of reward. The chief cause of these divisions on the missions, and of the weakness of the clergy, is lack of a bishop, and the lack of a bishop is on account of the lack of a permanent Agent in Rome: the clergy did not keep here a constant Agent to urge that business, to which the religious did all oppose themselves to the uttermost of their power, and he whom the clergy sent, not having the patience to follow out the business nor means to maintain himself at this court, nothing has been concluded about it. For after he was gone, and after Lord Aubigny his death [1665], here they have not so much as thought upon the affair. A committee of the Holy Office had been set up to consider the matter, consisting of Cardinals Francesco Barberini, Spada (died 1660), Albizzi, Rospigliosi, Azzolini and Flavio Chigi, the Pope’s nephew. (This was a very strong committee, consisting of the most distinguished members of the Curia – Rospigliosi was the next Pope, Clement IX.) The present secretary of the committee is: Mr. Marescotti of a Scottish extraction . . . who conserves a most particular love to us. He is a very good and wise prelate, and if ever our affairs be put again on the table, they will altogether pass through his hands, and we may hope all services possible of him, for absolutely he is a man most fit for our purpose, being both wise, prudent, extreme civil, of sufficient doctrine and letters, and withal very zealous for those countries of which his forebears are come. 172

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In point of fact, Galeazzo Marescotti (1627–1726) did not stay long as a Curial secretary but was destined for higher things: he was Papal nuncio in Poland and Spain, and was created Cardinal in 1675. But Leslie’s point, of course, is that he, Leslie, would be able to get on very well with him. For even a well-disposed secretary can achieve nothing without an active permanent Agent, and that is the role for which Leslie casts himself. The Agent will have: nothing else to do but run up and down, now to the Pope, now to the Cardinals, now to the prelates and to the congregations, to press to make their people take resolutions which will be convenient for our good, and to redress the disorders of both colleges, missions and clergy, which is not a small task. For he will have hands daily full, and many difficulties on every side, together with horrible contradictions and almost a universal enmity of all, by reason he must inform the court of Rome both of the ill and of the good of all those persons who are interested in the said business. So he must be a man of great patience, great constancy, sincere, and above all have a great experience, knowledge and authority at this court. But if such a one be found, it will be easy to him to redress the disorder of all the aforesaid colleges, missions and clergy. The proposed Resident cannot be expected to concern himself with all the details of the Agent’s activity, but the authority of the Resident will add weight to the position of the Agent, who must act as the Agent and secretary of the Resident, besides being Agent of the clergy. Leslie’s concept of an Agency would clearly give him de facto authority over the missions and the seminaries. The affairs of Scotland run parallel to those of England. If the Scots Catholics were to have liberty of conscience, they would convert the Puritans and then the King will be so strong that he may enterprise whatsoever he pleases. . . . The Congregation of Propaganda takes a particular care of Scots priests in that kingdom, and their Procurator [i.e. Leslie himself] has a care also to solicit and urge the said Congregation for the said priests, which succeeds pretty well with him. For besides divers faculties and instructions how to guide themselves towards all sort of people with edification and peace, not offending any but keeping good correspondence with all sort of people, and especially with regulars, he sends them home every year as much money as can maintain them; and this is a notable help to the country, which is not burdened with their sustentation, which makes them welcome whenever they come. The priests on the Scottish mission did not have such a sanguine view of their finances as Leslie had, and Leslie’s attitude towards the regulars was certainly not as irenic as he here implies. 173

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In turning to Irish affairs, Leslie contributes an interesting piece of autobiographical information. The Irish have constant recourse to Propaganda because of their imprudent quarrels, and Propaganda cannot decide on the appointment of bishops for Ireland: That which most troubles this court is that on the one side they would find men who may hold up the Pope’s authority in the Kingdom, and on the other side be so wise and prudent as not to raise up a persecution greater than is already, by irritating the temporal powers and magistrates. . . . The Friend whom you know of [i.e. Leslie himself] being asked his opinion concerning these affairs made a writt [i.e. report] wherein he pressed to show that the most solid way to keep that Kingdom was to provide it, it is true, with Bishops, but that such men amongst other qualities should also be friends more partial to his Majesty, and that on that score they should at last [i.e. ultimately] under hand press to know his Majesty’s mind and intention concerning all those whom they intended to promote. You cannot imagine what a stir this made, so that some Cardinals were very irritated against our Friend for it, as if he would have given the nomination of bishops to heretic Princes. . . . And these things came so far on that our Friend was half resolved to come home and put himself in his Majesty’s protection. But afterwards the Friend, not meddling any more in those affairs, and so no more stir being made by reason all resolutions were deferred, he attended to other affairs, and no more troubles were given him thereabout. This must have been the occasion of Leslie’s offer to go on the mission in May 1665, which was refused by Propaganda – though Propaganda did not realise that Leslie’s intention was to ‘put himself in his Majesty’s protection’. Leslie has quoted the case of Ireland as an illustration of the necessity of an English Resident at Rome to protect the interests of the English government in English Catholic affairs: It is most sure that foreign princes for politic ends have and do actually procure to send home to all those Islands, but to Ireland especially, men passionately affected to them, with intention to make use of such men’s foolishness for their ends to give them correspondence, and stir [i.e. rebellion] also, if they think fit. For some are so mad and foolish that they imagine that the good and evil of the Catholic religion in those Islands depends rather on foreign princes and their prosperity than, under God, our own Sovereign’s benignity. The above passage has been marked ‘N.B.’ by Arlington. Leslie concludes by stressing that an English Resident at Rome could remove disloyal priests and bishops from the mission: if Howard is willing to undertake the task, Leslie can supply him with more confidential information: 174

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Being a man that has true loyalty in his head, [the Resident] can easily free the three kingdoms of all such foolish men by making them be recalled presently [i.e. immediately] by his Holiness, or hindering their going home to Britain; which is a thing to be most maturely considered and taken notice of by his Majesty, and is able to prevent and free him of a thousand troubles to which otherwise he is exposed. And having freed his Kingdoms of such men, it will be a great security to him that the Catholic party will make no stir within the Islands, but on the contrary will be continually on his side. . . . I come not to particulars on this point until I hear how you like it, and what are your commands in it. And then I shall not fail to discover many secrets of high consequence and moment, which now it is not needful to touch, and according as affairs go they may be made manifest to you and his Majesty alone; for if they were to come to other hands who would not make so good use of them as I know you will, I would not so much as insinuate them. . . . For if a man of your authority and credit, so well beloved by all that have the honour to know you, both in the Island and abroad, should undertake such a generous enterprise, I put no question but it would succeed happily.

Conclusions It is perfectly clear that Henry Howard had neither the inclination nor the temperament to concern himself with the internal quarrels of the English Catholic clergy and religious: ‘our English Popish clergy are of so many different sorts of formal opinionated fools’ (3 May 1667). What he had intended to do was to set up a strictly diplomatic newsletter service between the Roman Curia and Arlington as Secretary of State, at Arlington’s behest. Howard had wanted to do a favour to the English government. His whole endeavour at this period was to appear in the public domain as one of ‘the great and good’: the donation of the Arundel Library to the Royal Society and the College of Arms, the donation of some of the Arundel Marbles to Oxford University, the embassies to Constantinople and Tangier – all are part of the same policy. Leslie’s turgid and indiscreet memorandum was the very last thing that Howard wanted. He was certainly not going to be ‘used’ by Leslie, and the role of Resident or Ambassador at Rome, even if it were not politically impossible, was not a role that he had any ambition to play. We do not know the contents of Leslie’s regular newsletters to Sir William Temple at Brussels, but it is equally unlikely that they were quite what the diplomatic service wanted either. One thing is clear however: Williamson’s endorsement on these documents cannot be taken at its face value; Arlington and Williamson were perfectly aware, all along, of Leslie’s connection with Howard.15

15 Recusant History, Vol. IV (1958), p. 152 states that Howard was ‘delating Leslie’s letters to the Secretary of State’: this is not of course true.

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Leslie was simply the wrong man for Howard’s purpose: in November 1667, with the fall of Clarendon and the consequent uncertainty of the political situation, Howard ordered Leslie to stop the whole newsletter service to the government, as well as any correspondence with himself – if Leslie wanted to maintain a correspondence, it must be henceforth with Howard’s brother Philip, the Dominican. Henry Howard was not a likeable man, but he deserves some respect: he remained true to his Catholic faith, he eventually married his mistress, and showed great dignity and civil courage at the time of the Popish Plot. Extensive extracts have been given from Leslie’s text in order to convey some idea of the style, as well as of the contents. Le Style, c’est l’homme même: for a man who was supposed to be a Curial bureaucrat, Leslie was singularly incapable of drafting a memorandum – indeed, he seems at times to be incapable of sequential thought. As for Leslie’s ideas of church polity, he is as much an Erastian as a Gallican. His principles are clear: Catholicism was the religion best suited for the maintenance of absolute monarchical government – and, incidentally, for international trade. Excommunication was a useful instrument for securing political loyalty to the throne. (It was wrong for the Pope to excommunicate monarchs, but it was apparently quite all right for bishops to excommunicate those who rebel against monarchs.) Leslie’s opinion that the monarch (even though an heretic) should have the power to approve or veto the appointment of bishops, was an acceptable enough Gallican standpoint at the time, but Leslie goes much further. He wants the monarch, where necessary through the proposed Resident and Agent at Rome, to control the appointments to the seminaries, and be able to remove obnoxious missioners from the British Isles – and from what we know of Leslie from other sources, that meant the Jesuits for a start. Leslie had no illusions about a possible re-union between the Protestant and Catholic churches: in that he shows a healthy realism which was singularly lacking in men like Christopher Davenport OFM and Serenus Cressy OSB. But nevertheless, his first thoughts, as late as 1667, are of a complete conversion to Catholicism: liberty of conscience is a means to this end – hardly an attractive argument to Arlington, let alone Clarendon. The idea that the Scottish Catholic missioners will convert all the Puritans is fantastic – and the idea of Charles II distributing Catholic church benefices to loyal nobility and gentry is a non sequitur: for if England were to be restored to Catholicism, there would be no benefices available anyway. Leslie’s enthusiasm constantly blinded him to political realities. Furthermore, he completely misread Henry Howard’s character and intentions, and Howard was not a difficult man to read. Leslie was not, I think, a man of such bad faith as M.V. Hay would have us believe. At worst, he was a very bad security risk: his memorandum to Howard concludes with the offer of ‘many secrets of high consequence’, and his correspondence with Mgr Pallu and the Société des Missions Etrangères, and with the Dutch hierarchy, reveals the same lack of any sense of secrecy or confidentiality, let alone loyalty to his employers in Rome. Nor should we take Leslie at his own

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valuation of his importance, i.e. as seriously as do Fr J. Metzler and R. Wiltgen.16 Leslie was certainly a well-intentioned man: to the very end of his long life he was compiling grandiose memoranda on the foreign missions.17 But his character was flawed by a fatal fatuity and garrulity. The memorandum of 1667 displays the would-be worldly wisdom of a desk-bound worldly innocent. It was the combination of good intentions, fatuity and a position of some influence, that made Leslie such a dangerous man.

Sources The two principal sources of this article are PRO SP9/203/7, 8 and 9, for Leslie’s memoranda, and Scottish Catholic Archives, Edinburgh, SCA BL 1/33 and 35, for Howard’s letters to Leslie. As these documents are quoted in sequence, I have omitted to give detailed folio references in order to save unnecessary annotation. I have also consulted Arundel Castle Archives and Bodley, Clarendon MSS, for further background on Howard. My special thanks are due to Dr Mark Dilworth OSB and Dr C. Johnson at Edinburgh, and Miss P. Taylor and Mrs S. Rodger at Arundel, for their helpfulness and hospitality. Thanks are also due to the appropriate custodians/owners for permission to quote from the manuscripts. Spelling and punctuation of quotations have been modernized; dates are given in New Style.

16 See notes 1 and 17. 17 J. Metzler, ‘Päpstlichen Primat als Pastorale Verantwortung und Missionarischer Auftrag in früher Dokumenten der Propaganda-Kongregation’, in G. Schwaiger (ed.), Konzil und Papst . . . Festgabe fur Hermann Tüchle (München 1975), pp. 373–86.

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11 JOHN BROWN, SCOTTISH MINIM (1569–1643) A tale of three title pages*

If one wants to get some idea of books by British authors printed in Italy in the seventeenth century, Dennis Rhodes’s catalogue is the best place to go.1 One intriguing entry started me off on what has proved to be a long trail: Bruno, Joannes, Scotus, In benedictiones XII Patriarcharum commentaria et quaest. analyticae, page 205. Venetiis, apud Ioan. Baptistam Collosinum, 1604, 8° (BL 1020.h.7). The book is part of the Old Royal Library. It is not the sort of theology in which James I was particularly interested, and was probably among the books of Isaac Casaubon which were acquired for the King in 1614.2 On the title page the Scottish author tells us that he is of the order of Minims, has been professor of theology at Alcalá (a centre for Hebrew studies) and is now professor at the Academy of Avignon. He also claims on the title page that he will reveal the most hidden mysteries, and that he is going to refute the Jewish rabbinical commentators; and in his preface to the reader he warns that he will be disagreeing with some of the most celebrated Catholic scholars: Baronius, Pererius, Pineda, Maldonatus and Masius (the first three were still alive). Joannes Bruno was not hiding his light under a bushel: he was obviously intending to write what, in the scholarly world of his time, was to be a sensational book. He may have been a Minim, but he was out for a maximum effect. Now Jacob’s ‘blessings’ of the twelve patriarchs (Genesis, chapter 49) is one of the oldest collections of Hebrew poetry in the Bible. It is a notoriously difficult text, and some passages are virtually unintelligible. Modern biblical scholarship sees it as a vaticinium ex eventu, a collection of ancient aphorisms, perhaps originally not even a single poem, dating from the period of the Judges (the section on Judah being added in the period of David), which was inserted into the Hexateuch

* Originally published in The Italian Book 1465–1800: Studies Presented to Dennis E. Rhodes on His 70th Birthday, ed. Denis V. Reidy (London 1993), pp. 225–34. 1 Catalogue of Seventeenth Century Italian Books in the British Library, ed. D.E. Rhodes, with the assistance of R.S. Pine-Coffin and J.L. Mainprice, 3 Vols. (London 1986). 2 For Casaubon’s books see Hellinga Festschrift, ed. A.R.A. Croiset van Uchelen (Amsterdam 1980), pp. 59–68.

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Figure 11.1 Title page In benedictiones, BL 1020.h.7. Source: Reproduced courtesy of the British Library Board.

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in the post-exilic period.3 Such a description would of course be incomprehensible to any seventeenth-century commentator. But even judged by the standards of his own day, Bruno’s book is not very impressive. It is cast in a scholastic form (in contrast to the elegant running commentaries of Cajetan (1470–1534), which are still a pleasure to read), and is committed to the untenable proposition that Jacob’s words are all prophetic blessings and not curses, and that the blessings on Judah are a prophecy of the coming of Christ as Messiah. It was one of the characteristic distinctions of post-Reformation commentaries on Genesis that the Protestants pointed out, and even enlarged on, the sins of the patriarchs, in order to insist on the doctrine of free election rather than merit, whereas the Catholics ‘felt somewhat duty bound to mitigate the faults of the patriarchs and to enlarge on their good works’.4 One does not have to be a biblical exegete (and I am certainly not one) to realize that Bruno’s book is not really much of a contribution to scholarship, even for his own time. His main concern is to show off his knowledge of Hebrew and to score points off other commentators. When Diego de Celada came to write his exhaustive 472-page treatise, De Benedictionibus Patriarcharum, fol. Lugd. 1657, he did not so much as mention Bruno’s book, and I have not found any references to Bruno in such other seventeenth-century commentaries on Genesis 49 as I have consulted. Bruno’s commentary is really a ‘curriculum vitae book’, a not particularly useful display of learning in order to get the author a job.5 The real interest of Bruno’s book lies not in the text, but in the context: and the key to the book is the prelims. Joannes Bruno’s real name was John Brown, probably from Moray, born in 1569. It is not known when Brown went to the Continent, but he joined the French province of the Minims at the convent of Nigeon, near Paris, in 1595.6 The Minims were founded in Calabria in 1474 by St Francis of Paola: as the name of the order implies, the Minims were intended to be an even stricter order, in the matter of poverty, austerity and stability, than the Friars Minor. St Francis of Paola spent the last twenty-five years of his life in France, and by the seventeenth century the French province was well established: one of its most important houses was at Avignon.7

3 J. Skinner, Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Genesis (Edinburgh 1930), p. 507; G. von Rad, Genesis, a Commentary (London 1961), p. 421; B. Vawter, A Path through Genesis (London 1957), pp. 293–301. 4 A. Williams, The Common Expositor: An Account of the Commentaries on Genesis 1527–1633 (Chapel Hill 1948), p. 171. 5 I originally formed this view on the basis of Brown’s book alone, before learning of the facts of Brown’s subsequent career, which confirmed my original impression. 6 J. Durkan’s ‘The Career of John Brown, Minim’, Innes Review, Vol. XXI (1970), pp. 161–70, provides a valuable chronological framework for the whole of Brown’s tortuous career. This present article is chiefly concerned with the details of Brown’s career as an author. 7 J.S. Whitmore, The Order of Minims in 17th Century France (The Hague 1967). Whitmore is useful for the general background, but is chiefly based on Minim sources: he knows nothing of Brown’s career.

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The title page of Brown’s book announces that it is dedicated to Bernardinus Paulinus, Datarius, and in his dedicatory epistle, which is preceded by an engraving of Paulinus’s armorial bearings and prelatical hat, Brown thanks Paulinus for his personal patronage and for his generous benefactions to the Scots, and especially for his munificence towards the college which has been established at Rome by his persuasion and advice. This is followed by two Latin epigrams to Paulinus, signed ‘G.S.S.’, and a Latin poem in praise of Brown by Mutius Riccerius, Picenus (i.e. from the Abruzzi).8 The clue to all this is the foundation of the Scots College at Rome by the reigning Pope, Clement VIII (1592–1605), Ippolito Aldobrandini. From 1592 onwards, Clement VIII had pursued an extensive diplomatic correspondence with James VI of Scotland, in the hope of obtaining concessions towards Catholics in return for papal support of James’s claims to the English throne.9 As part of his Scottish policy, the Pope established the Scots College at Rome by a bull dated 5 December 1600, and as head of the new college he appointed his datarius, Bernardino Paolini.10 The datarius was the highest official in the papal chancery (usually a cardinal and at least a prelate), responsible for issuing letters of appointment and exemptions etc., reserved to the Pope alone:11 it was thus a very lucrative office. The previous datarius had been Clement VIII himself, when he was a cardinal, and when he became Pope in 1592 he sold the job to Monsignor Paolini.12 The rectorship of the new college could not have been very arduous: the students had no obligation to become priests, and of the first batch of eleven who enrolled in 1602, two died, four left without ordination, and the remainder left to join religious orders, such as the Jesuits and the Oratorians. In 1608 there were fourteen students and ‘the greatest number made but a short stay’.13 It was more of a hostel than a college. The building itself was a house on the Via delle Quattro Fontane, near the Palazzo Barberini: this property had been given in exchange for the old pre-Reformation Scottish hospice across the road, which had consisted of buildings belonging to the church of S. Andrea delle Fratte, and which, after the Reformation, was turned into a Roman convent for the Minims. At the formal opening of the college in 1602, a Latin verse panegyric was composed in Paolini’s honour by one of his chancery staff, none other than Mutius Riccerius,14 who later wrote the congratulatory verses to John Brown.

8 According to Graesse-Benedict-Plechl, Orbis Latinus (Brunswick 1972). 9 I. Pastor, History of the Popes (London 1952), Vol. XXIV, pp. 52–8. 10 W.J. Anderson, ‘Abbé Paul MacPherson’s History of the Scots College Rome’, Innes Review, Vol. XII (1961), pp. 14–17. See also The Scots College Rome (London 1930), pp. 2–11, and Records of the Scots Colleges (Aberdeen 1906). 11 Du Cange suggests that the word datarius is derived from the subscription to all the documents that were issued: ‘Datum Romae’. 12 This was the usual custom: see K. Swart, Sale of Offices in the 17th Century (The Hague 1947). 13 Anderson (note 10), p. 16; D. McRoberts, ‘Scottish National Churches in Rome’, Innes Review, Vol. I (1950), pp. 116, 120. 14 Carmen ad Bernardinum Paulinum (Rome 1602): copy in the Barberini Library, pressmark 4.LXVI.A.10.

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Brown’s dedicatory epistle to Paolini is dated Rome 5 January 1604. The nihil obstat of Ignatius à Capua, censor deputatus, is dated Venice 18 April 1604, and the imprimatur of Stephan Augier, Provincial of the Venetian Minims, is dated Venice 13 June 1604. This raises two questions: firstly, why did Brown have the book censored and printed in Venice, rather than Rome; and secondly, how did the manuscript get from Rome to Venice between January and April 1604? The answer to the first question may be that Venice was the most logical place for printing a book that required Hebrew types – though none of Colosini’s other books in the British Library use Hebrew types, and Brown’s book as a whole is an undistinguished piece of printing.15 The other possibility is that Brown did not want his superiors at Rome to know what he was up to: I shall return later to this hypothesis. The clue to the transmission of the manuscript of Brown’s text from Rome to Venice lies in the initials ‘G.S.S.’, appended to the two Latin epigrams to Paolini. The initials stand for ‘Georgius Strachanus Scotus’. George Strachan (1572– c.1634) was the most intellectually distinguished of the little band of Scotsmen at the Scots College: besides being a neo-Latin poet he was also a mathematician and an Arabist.16 The evidence of Strachan’s album amicorum shows that he was in Rome between 8 and 27 January 1604 (his last contact with the Scots College). He left immediately thereafter for Paris and on 7 March 1604 an entry in his album establishes him at Venice.17 It seems probable that Brown travelled with Strachan as far as Venice – it is reasonable to allow the censor at least a month to come up with a nihil obstat by 18 April. Brown stayed on in Venice to see his manuscript through the press and, indeed, somewhat longer. On 14 December 1604, in the company of John Fenton and Giacomo Castelvetro, he visited Thomas Seget, a fellow Scot, who was in gaol in Venice, and on 4 June 1605, he visited Seget again, this time in the company of John Fenton and the publisher, G.B. Ciotti. (Brown’s own publisher, G.B. Colosini, visited Seget on 16 August 1605, in the company of John Fenton and others, and again on 3 September 1605, in the company of John Fenton and Giacomo Castelvetro.)18 Why had Brown left Avignon to go to Rome? Apparently he felt harassed by the Jesuits, who had accused him of preaching erroneous and scandalous doctrines,

15 Rhodes’s Catalogue (note 1) gives us the best picture of Colosini’s publishing activity: it lists seven imprints as against only two in M.E. Cosenza, Biographical and Bibliographical Dictionary of Italian Printers (Boston 1968). 16 G.L. Dellavida, George Strachan: Memorials of a Wandering Scottish Scholar of the 17th Century (Third Spalding Club, Aberdeen 1956). This book is unaccountably not in the British Library: I am grateful to Miss Jean Archibald for lending me her copy. 17 J.F.K. Johnstone, The Alba Amicorum of George Strachan, George Craig, Thomas Cumming (Aberdeen 1924), p. 12. 18 For Seget and his prison visitors see A. Favaro, Amici e Corrispondenti di Galileo Galilei (Venice 1911, repr. 1983), pp. 624–50; and also The Panizzi Lectures 1986 (London 1987), pp. 48–50. For Ciotti see D. Rhodes, The Library, 6th series, Vol. IX (1987), pp. 225–39; for Castelvetro see K.T. Butler, Italian Studies, Vol. V (1950), pp. 1–42.

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and when in Rome Brown prevailed on Cardinal Barberini to order the vice-legate at Avignon to silence the Jesuit attacks. But jealousy and hostility between the Jesuits and Minims at Avignon at this time was a general phenomenon, and not specifically confined to Brown’s case.19 Indeed, all the subsequent evidence of Brown’s later career indicates that he certainly did not ever want to go back to Avignon, and the fulsome dedication of his book, together with the verses of Strachan and Riccerius, indicates that Brown was angling for a comfortable job at the Scots College, perhaps as Paolini’s deputy. But what, then, was so unattractive about a chair of theology at Avignon? From the fourteenthth century till the French Revolution, Avignon was, despite occasional French incursions, an autonomous papal enclave, governed by legates. In the course of the years it had acquired a large Jewish ghetto, probably because the Jews felt themselves at least physically safer there than they did on the soil of metropolitan France. There were, however, certain disadvantages. The mediaeval, and post-Tridentine, Roman Church believed that the conversion of the Jews was one of her primary missionary duties. In the papal territories this obligation was enforced sporadically and from time to time, with varying degrees of efficiency and rigour, depending on the zeal of the reigning pontiff. Pope Gregory XIII (1572–85) was an extreme rigorist, and his bull Sancta Mater Ecclesia (September 1584) contains the most distasteful regulations for indoctrination: in every town where there was a ghetto the Jews were to attend weekly sermons, preferably in Hebrew. At Avignon this duty was performed by the Minims: one of their most successful preachers was an Englishman, J.F. de Binans (vere Debenham). The Jews in the Avignon ghetto had perforce to listen to Catholic preachers every Sabbath and on every day in Lent.20 Clement VIII was as enthusiastic as Gregory XIII for enforcing anti-Jewish measures, including the wholesale incorporation of Jewish books in the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, though such rigours were relaxed in the course of the seventeenth century. But for John Brown, therefore, a chair of theology at Avignon did not mean a life devoted to biblical scholarship, but rather one of unsavoury proselytizing. He wanted a comfortable berth in the Scots College on the Pincian Hill – but that was not to be. After the failure of his book to secure him a job in Rome, Brown’s life was unsettled, unhappy and quarrelsome and, like that of many other such priests, all too well documented. Perhaps his best time was in Paris in 1613 at the Place

19 Westminster Cathedral Archives, ‘A’ Series, Vol. XVII, ff. 83 sq. This is a copy of Bruno’s ‘Apologia’ to the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, dated June 1623, in which he recounts various episodes in his previous career. I am most grateful to Antony Allison for drawing my attention to this and other documents relating to Brown in the Westminster Cathedral Archives, and to Fr Ian Dickie for making them accessible. 20 R. Moulinas, Les Juifs du Pape en France (Paris 1981), p. 123; F. Secret, ‘Episode de la predica coattiva à Avignon au xvi siècle’, Révue des Études Juives. Historia Judaica, Vol. CXXVI (1967), pp. 422–3; and for the brilliant identification of ‘De Binans’ with Debenham, see D.M. Rogers, ‘An English Friar Minim in France’, Recusant History, Vol. X (1970), pp. 273–91.

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Royale, where he taught Hebrew to Marin Mersenne (1588–1648), the only Minim to achieve international scholarly fame.21 In 1615 Brown was at Antwerp, and claimed to have established a Minim house there with money from a Genoese merchant. Brown would have been fairly free to do as he liked because Antwerp was in Flanders outside the territorial jurisdiction of the French Minim province to which he belonged: as soon as a Minim province in Flanders was officially established in 1617, he went across the Channel to England.22 With the foundation of the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide at Rome in 1623, life became very difficult for men like Brown. One of the objects of Propaganda was to enforce some sort of discipline on missionary priests. From this date onwards the name of ‘Bruno’ recurs in the archives of Propaganda with depressing frequency. He is ordered to return to the jurisdiction of his superiors in France, and to surrender considerable sums of money which he seems to have acquired: for a Minim, as with other religious vowed to absolute poverty, the customary device was to deposit their money with a layman or a secular priest – Propaganda wanted the money deposited in the papal bank, the Mons pietatis.23 By 1627 Brown, together with another recalcitrant Scots Minim, Francis Maitland (‘Metellanus’ in the dossiers), had established himself, in defiance of Propaganda and of his superiors, as a missionary priest in Aberdeen. He was imprisoned in Scotland for a time in 1628, but by the 1630s he and Maitland were in London. This was the short-lived period of toleration for English Catholics under Charles I, and Brown attached himself to the chapel of Queen Henrietta Maria, administering the sacraments and saying Mass without proper faculties from the English Catholic bishop or from the French Minim provincial. By 1635 Propaganda had had enough: Brown and Maitland were declared apostates,24 and the papal nuncios at Paris and Brussels were ordered to get the two Minims out of England and back to France – but Brown refused to leave London. On 5 December 1639 Brown was arrested and brought before the Court of High Commission for having in his possession William Prynne’s book against Laud, A breviate of the prelates intollerable usurpations (Amsterdam 1637), but was released on 29 March 1640 on the order of the Secretary of State, Sir Francis

21 H. de Coste, La Vie du R.P. Marin Mersenne (Paris 1649), p. 14; M. Mersenne, Correspondance (Paris 1932), Vol. I, p. xxiv. 22 G.M. Roberti, Disegno Storico dell’ Ordine de Minimi (Rome 1908), Vol. II, pp. 51, 113; G. Con, Premetiae (Bologna 1621), p. 26; L. van Meerbeeck, Correspondance des Nonces Gesualdo, Morra, Sanseverino (Brussels 1937), p. 11. 23 C. Giblin, ‘The “Acta” of Propaganda Archives and the Scottish Mission 1623–70’, Innes Review, Vol. V (1954), p. 42. Westminster Cathedral Archives, ‘A’ Series, Vol. XXII, f. 501 is an autograph letter by Brown, dated 30 July 1628, relating to 120 scuti which he had deposited with the secular priest Thomas White (alias Blacklo) who was at the time procurator of the English secular clergy at Rome. 24 Giblin (note 23), p. 52. ‘Apostate’ here is a term of art, to designate a clericus affugitivus, i.e. a cleric who, after solemn and formal warnings, refused to submit to the appropriate ecclesiastical auhority; it does not necessarily mean that Brown had abandoned his religious beliefs.

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Windebank.25 In April 1641, when the reign of Charles I was crumbling, the Papal Agent at the court of Henrietta Maria, Carlo Rossetti, wrote to Cardinal Francesco Barberini (the ‘cardinal protector’ of England) with the news that Brown had surrendered himself into custody, was going to preach a recantation sermon from a Protestant pulpit and was also to make a voluntary declaration to a committee of the House of Commons.26 It was all too true. The thirty-two-page document variously described as a confession or a petition is among the State Papers in the Public Record Office (with two other copies).27 The preamble is worth quoting for the picture of scholarly vanity that it reveals: The voluntary confession of John Browne, a Romish priest, of the age of 72, a prisoner in the Gatehouse who, being twice examined by a Committee of the House of Commons, did thereupon further explicate himself for the good of the Commonwealth and ease of the House. . . . [He] is one of the most eminent of this age in these dominions, who has read divinity, mathematics and philosophy at Salamanca, Alcalá, Holland, Avignon, Rome, Venice and Genoa; has preached at Paris, in the presence of the French King, at Antwerp, Brussels, Dunkirk etc.; and who desires to inform concerning some special points for the weal of this State, which he has observed above 50 years past. There follows a long farrago of complaint about the Jesuits, about Henrietta Maria, and about Archbishop Laud and the Court of High Commission. Though the members of the parliamentary committee were eagerly seeking for material against Charles I and Laud, they realized that Brown’s ‘confession’ was of little real use to them, and they did not publish it officially. Two unofficial news pamphlets were issued, however, which contained some of the material in an abbreviated, garbled and almost incomprehensible form. In October 1641 copies were acquired by George Thomason:28 A Discovery of the proceedings of William Laud, in bringing innovations into the Church and raising up troubles in the State. Confessed by John Browne, examined by a Committee from the House of Commons. Printed and sold by Henry Walker. [BL E.172(37)]

25 Calendar of State Papers Domestic 1639–40, p. 209, and CSPD 1640–41, p. 292. 26 PRO Rossetti correspondence, Roman transcripts 9/20/154 sq. 27 CSPD 1640–41, pp. 563–4. Other copies of Brown’s confession are in BL MS Harley 1219 ff. 364 sq. and Westminster Cathedral Archives, ‘A’ Series, Vol. XXX, ff. 101 sq. At the conclusion of the document he betrays the names and addresses of several fellow Catholics. 28 Titles as given in Catalogue of the Pamphlets . . . collected by George Thomason 1640–61 (London 1908), Vol. I, pp. 34, 37. For full titles see illustrations to this article p. 186–7.

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Figure 11.2. Title page A Discovery of the proceedings of William Laud, BL E.172 (37). Source: Reproduced courtesy of the British Library Board.

and The Confession of John Browne, a Jesuite, in the Gatehouse, Wherein is discovered the late plots of the Pope against these kingdomes. Printed by Bernard Alsop. [BL E.173(I)]

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Figure 11.3 Title page The Confession of John Browne, a Jesuite, BL E.173 (1). Source: Reproduced courtesy of the British Library Board.

Bernard Alsop had obviously never heard of Minims, so Brown was called a Jesuit – in all ages, the media-men never manage to get their facts right. Brown was soon deported, and on 9 April 1642 he writes from Antwerp to the secretary of Propaganda, Monsignor Francesco Ingoli, asking for money. He says that he has been deprived of all his goods, is seventy-three years old and infirm, has worked for the Church for forty-six years of which twenty-six were in Great

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Britain and for the last four years [sic] he has been in prison in London. He would like to have back 100 scudi of the money taken from him by Propaganda. Within a year Brown had died, in the Antwerp house that he had founded, reconciled to his order and to the Church, if not quite in the odour of sanctity. But there was still a little twist in the tale. On the news of Brown’s death an Englishman, Sir Edward Widdrington of Cartington, Northumberland, reported to Rome that he was holding the not inconsiderable sum of £500 on Brown’s behalf, and he wanted to know what to do with it. Rome consulted the Paris nuncio, Cardinal Grimaldi, and it was decided to give the money to the Scots College at Paris.29 In the General Catalogue of the British Library, Brown’s works are variously catalogued under the headings Bruno, Joannes, Scotus and Browne, John, Jesuit. It is sad that a man who set such store by scholarly prestige should have been denied even the minimal fame of a correct heading in GK III. It was a case of publish and almost perish.

29 C. Giblin, ‘John Brown and John Francis Maitland, Scottish Minims’, Innes Review, Vol. VI (1955), pp. 145–8.

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12 ENGLISH COUNTERREFORMATION BOOK CULTURE *

I The recent appearance of the final volume of The Contemporary Printed Literature of the English Counter-Reformation between 1558 and 1640, an Annotated Catalogue, by A.F. Allison and D.M. Rogers, Volume II, Works in English1 (ARCR II), represents the completion of the work of two scholarly lifetimes devoted to the study of early recusant printed books. To call it merely a catalogue, or even an annotated catalogue, is to underestimate the nature of the achievement. Perhaps the best way to evaluate it is to begin by tracing the history of its development. Shortly after World War II, two Catholic bibliographers were appointed to the staffs of the two major English libraries: Allison to the British Museum (now the British Library) and Rogers to the Bodleian. Allison began publishing his bibliographical articles on recusant books in The Library in 1947, and Rogers completed his Oxford DPhil thesis, English Catholicism and the printing-press, at home and abroad 1558–1640 in 1952 – he had already been publishing on recusant books in the Downside Review before the war.2 The two men first met in 1948. The date was not fortuitous, for that was the year in which W.A. Jackson of the Houghton Library, Harvard, really got started on a completely new Short-Title Catalogue (NSTC) of English Books 1475–1640 (now completed by K.F. Pantzer in three volumes 1976–91). English recusant books presented very special problems for

* Originally published in Recusant History, Vol. XXII, no. 2, October 1994, pp. 113–22. Republished courtesy of the Catholic Record Society and Cambridge University Press. 1 Pp. xxv + 249. Published by the Scolar Press, Aldershot, 1994. 2 For Allison’s bibliography see Recusant History, October 1989, and for that of Rogers see Bodleian Library Record, Vol. XI (1985). Besides their numerous essays on specific recusant topics, they were also involved in other major undertakings broadly related to their work on ARCR. Allison published catalogues of the British Library holdings of seventeenth-century French, and Spanish and Portuguese books (1973 and 1974 respectively); English Translations from the Spanish and Portuguese to 1700 (1974); and a title-index of English books 1475–1700 (2 Vols. 1976–7). Rogers was on the editorial board of the enlarged and completely revised edition of S. Halkett and J. Laing, Dictionary of Anonymous and Pseudonymous Publications in the English Language 1475–1640 (1980).

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the NSTC, particularly in the identification of anonymous authors and translators, secret printing, and location of unique or rare copies in out-of-the-way libraries. The NSTC began increasingly to rely on Allison and Rogers for their professional expertise.3 In 1951 they launched Biographical Studies 1534–1829, which in 1957 became Recusant History.4 The seminal idea behind this was to provide a vehicle for bio-bibliographical articles to supersede Joseph Gillow’s pioneering, but seriously flawed, Bibliographical Dictionary of the English Catholics (5 Vols, London 1885–98). In the same year, 1951, they published their first collaborative work, a lengthy review in The Library of A.C. Southern’s Elizabethan Recusant Prose (1950). Southern’s book was a bio-bibliographical study of a relatively small part of recusant writings. The reviewers had much to add even to Southern’s detailed descriptions, but they could appreciate the basic principle of his methodology: you have to read a book, and understand what it is about, before you can properly describe it in bibliographical terms. In 1956 they published, as two consecutive numbers of Biographical Studies, ‘A Catalogue of Catholic books in English printed abroad or secretly in England 1558–1640’.5 This was a landmark in recusant studies. It catalogued 930 recusant books, identifying authors, translators and printers, distinguishing various editions, collating where necessary, and noting specific locations of up to twelve copies. A&R became a standard work of reference, and A&R numbers are now included in the NSTC. Then, in 1968, Rogers began the publication, with the Scolar Press of Menston (an earlier metempsychosis of the present Scolar Press of Aldershot),6 a series of volumes entitled English Recusant Literature 1558–1640, (ERL). This consisted of photo-facsimiles of all the material in A&R. Of course, where there were several editions of one work, only the most important edition was facsimiled: with that restriction, 630 titles – many of them unique and in inaccessible locations – were produced in 359 volumes. This was a considerable logistic achievement under any circumstances, and for one man, working in his spare time, it was truly remarkable. The publication of ERL has meant that scholars all over the world now have relatively easy access to the whole corpus of recusant literature in English, up to 1640, in the form in which it was originally published.7 But the English recusants did not only publish in English: to get a European hearing they published abroad in Latin, and in other European languages, and

3 K.F. Pantzer acknowledges their help in very broad terms: ‘Antony Allison and David Rogers have continually shared all new information about the main objects of their concern, recusant books, as well as a myriad of other discoveries they have come across; the latter also devised with Jackson the Indulgences section and answered harried calls for further assistance when more of these difficult items came to light’ (NSTC Vol. 1, p. xiv). 4 [Recently it has changed its name again. It is now British Catholic History. Eds]. 5 Reprinted in 1968 as a single volume by William Dawson and Sons Ltd. 6 [Which, in its turn, amalgamated since then with other publishing firms. Eds]. 7 [In the meantime ProQuest’s Early English Books Online (EEBO) has made life for scholars even easier. Eds].

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such books were excluded by the terms of reference of A&R and NSTC. Allison and Rogers therefore turned their attention to recusant books printed abroad in languages other than English.8 The rich fund of material which they encountered led them inexorably to a wholly new concept. ‘English Catholic Books 1558– 1640’ was too parochial. They now envisaged a two-volume catalogue to cover the entire English Catholic output in all languages: ‘The Contemporary printed literature of the English Counter-Reformation 1558–1640’. Hitherto the CounterReformation had been thought of as something purely continental: the new title was an assertion that there was a sufficiently substantial English Catholic book culture to justify the concept of an English Counter-Reformation. The first volume (ARCR I), which covered works in languages other than English, appeared in 1989 and has already been reviewed in RH by Dr I.A. Doyle. It lists 1,619 items and includes such disparate material as effusive complimentary verses to influential cardinals; thesis-programmes at continental universities; appeals for money; historical controversies between the Irish and Scots over the nationality of mediaeval saints; jurisdictional controversies between seculars and regulars; polemics against Lutherans and Calvinists; expositions of church-state relations; narratives of martyrs; apologetics; devotional and liturgical books for priests, nuns and laity; and solid post-Tridentine theology. It records no less than sixty editions of St Edmund Campion’s Decem Rationes, including translations into Czech, Dutch, French, German, Hungarian and Polish;9 and it goes beyond the boundaries of Europe: to Lima, Peru, for an account of Louisa de Carvajal, the heroic patroness of imprisoned recusants in England; and to Rachol, Goa, for the Canarese catechism of Thomas Stephens SJ, for forty years a missionary in the Indies. The location of copies ranges from Aarau to Zaragosa. A summary roll-call of the major headings in ARCR I reveals unfamiliar, as well as familiar, names: Cardinal Allen, many of whose English works were translated into Latin, Italian and French; John and William Barclay; John Barnes the erratic; Adam Blackwood; Joseph Creswell; Thomas Dempster; the English College, Douay; the English Catholics, which covers a very valuable collection of historical documents; Laurence Arthur Faunt, who had a remarkable output of Latin controversy, principally published at Poznan – he was a Merton man, so in the Athenae Oxonienses Anthony Wood gives him a splendid write-up, derived virtually verbatim from the Bibliotheca Scriptorum SJ; St John Fisher, translated into German, Flemish and Italian, as well as Latin; William Fitch, alias Benet of Canfield, whose Rule of Perfection was translated into Latin, French, Flemish, German, Italian and Spanish; John Floyd; John Fowler; Richard Gibbons, a remarkably varied output; John Hay; John Leslie; Hugh MacCaghwell, the Scotist; Mary Queen of Scots, a mass of historical material; Robert Parsons; Cardinal Pole; Thomas

8 Though Irish and Welsh were included in A&R and in ARCR II. 9 It is remarkable that there was only one edition in English, and that as late as 1632, and not translated by a Jesuit. See ARCR II, no. 116.

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Preston; Nicholas Sander, whose De Origine ac Progressu Schismatis Anglicani not only had a wide influence through direct translations in French and German, but also indirectly in Italian, German and Spanish historical compilations, to say nothing of a Latin verse play by Nicolaus Vernulaeus of Gorcum;10 Robert Gregory Sayer, a moral theologian of European stature; Thomas Stapleton, likewise a European theologian; Richard Verstegan, a European publicist; and Luke Wadding. There is no longer any excuse for treating English Catholic book culture as something narrowly parochial: it was part of the mainstream of European literary culture in the broadest sense.

II The above rather lengthy introduction is necessary for a proper understanding of ARCR II: Works in English 1558–1640. It should not, repeat not, be considered as merely a revision or updating of the A&R of 1956. It is based on a wholly different concept: English Catholic book culture as part of the corpus of European CounterReformation literature; and it should be used as part of, and in relation to, ARCR I. It consists of a Foreword, describing the arrangement of the book: users are strongly advised to read the makers’ instructions. Then a list of symbols and libraries, ranging from the American Antiquarian Society in Massachusetts to Wynnstay in Denbighshire. Then a five-page list of authorities frequently referred to in the text, followed by a concordance linking A&R numbers to ARCR numbers. Then comes the catalogue, listing 932 items – only two more than A&R. This is followed by five indexes: a very useful title-index, as so many books were published anonymously; an index of printers, publishers and booksellers; an index of places of printing, from Antwerp to Würzburg, together with a list of secret presses in England; a chronological index, which provides at a glance a conspectus of the quantity of printing in any given year; and a general index of proper names which includes the names of dedicatees and of the original authors of translated works. Plus addenda and corrigenda to ARCR I as well as ARCR II. The standard features of each entry are of course author, title, format, printer, place of publication and date. Additional features are names of dedicatees; running titles – very useful when a book has lost its title-page; references to A&R, NSTC and ERL; and a very extensive list of locations. For students of patronage, the names of dedicatees are revealing. They are mostly superiors of religious houses for women, or wives of the gentry. Among the male dedicatees, Thomas Windsor, 6th Baron Windsor, is perhaps the most intriguing. He was the dedicatee of The flowers of the lives of the most renouned saints of the three kingdoms, 4° Douay 1632, by Jerome Porter OSB (most of the saints were claimed to be Benedictines), and of Anthony Batt OSB, Short treatise touching the confraternity of the scapular of St. Benedict’s order, 12° [Douay]

10 See L.A. Schuster, Henry VIII. A Neo-Latin Drama by Nicolaus Vernulaeus (Austin, TX 1963).

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1639. The Benedictine connection was presumably through his chaplain, William Claude White OSB:11 was Windsor a Benedictine confrater? He was certainly a book collector, and owned such not very recusant books as Ludovicus Lucius, Historica Jesuitica, Basel 1627 and Pietro Aretino, Coloquio de las damas [Seville] 160712 – the latter may have been acquired as a souvenir of his trip to Spain in 1623, to bring back Prince Charles after the failure of the ‘Spanish Marriage’ project. He was also the dedicatee of several non-recusant books, including William Barnes, Exact Discourse concerning snaffle-riding (1624) and Alexander Read, Chirurgicall lectures of tumours and ulcers (1635), and he was a subscriber to John Minsheu, Ductor in linguas (1617) – see further F.B. Williams, Index of Dedications . . . before 1641 (London 1962) whose indebtedness to Allison and Rogers is handsomely acknowledged. Thomas Lord Windsor will repay further study. Specific locations are given for up to fifteen copies: the existence of a further sixteen to twenty copies, and of over twenty copies, is indicated by symbols. It is sad to note the dispersal of many small collections since 1956; and also that some items previously recorded seem to have been ‘lost’, though sometimes the coincidence of a new location in America makes one wonder whether these have not been subject to the House-of-Loreto syndrome. An extensive census of copies on this sort of scale can tell us something about the history of the books. An item in a French municipal library probably indicates that it formerly belonged to a religious house in the vicinity, which was suppressed at the French Revolution. An item in the Public Record Office indicates that it was seized by the government, and should be treated as a state paper. An item in Lambeth Palace also probably indicates that it was seized: A breefe collection concerning the love of God towards mankinde, 12° Douay 1603 (no. 901), exists in only two copies, and both of these are at Lambeth. Are we then to suppose that all other copies of this edition were seized and destroyed? Not necessarily. A little duodecimo prayerbook might never have been kept in a recusant library, but could have been worn to pieces by its particular owners,13 and we should therefore be grateful to the Archbishops of Canterbury for preserving the book as part of their anti-Papist dossier. But the presence of a unique copy of a large-sized book at Lambeth might well indicate the destruction of the rest of an edition. On the other hand, we should not lay too much emphasis on actual reports of the seizure of recusant books. In her Life of Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland, her daughter asserted that most of the copies of Lady Falkland’s translation of Cardinal Du Perron’s Reply to James I (no. 127) were seized by the government as soon as they arrived in England. But over 20 copies have survived which suggests that the seizure of a consignment does not 11 See N. Birt, Obit Book of the English Benedictines (Edinburgh 1913), p. 36. 12 His own copies, with his armorial bookstamp, are in the H.L. Clements collection, Victoria and Albert Museum, and in the British Library, respectively. 13 For the discussion of an analogous problem, the survival rates of Dutch Catholic prayerbooks, see The Library, Vol. XII (1990), pp. 60–1.

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necessarily wipe out an edition. Indeed, it is noteworthy how many major recusant apologetic and historical works were acquired by explicitly Protestant libraries at the time of their appearance. Other inferences can be drawn from locations. For instance, no. 192, The generall rubriques of the breviarie, put into English. Serving for the benefit of those, who desire to learne to say their breviarie, 16° St. Omers 1617, is ‘a guide to the use of the breviary for beginners, and intended for the laity as well as the clergy’. As a sedecimo, it was of course very small and vulnerable. Only three copies have survived: from St Scholastica’s Abbey, Teignmouth (now at Downside); St Clare’s Abbey, Darlington (now at Durham University. Eds), and the English Convent, Bruges (now at Ware). The fact that the three surviving copies come from three convents of nuns, whose history goes back to the seventeenth century, is a fair indication that some, at least, of the female religious, with or without ‘O Level’ Latin, did use the Latin breviary, and did not confine themselves to the ‘Little Office’. Records of rare Catholic books in odd places prompt reconsiderations of library history. One of the three perfect copies of the first edition of the English translation of St Francis de Sales, Introduction to the devout life (1613), is to be found in the library of the schoolhouse at Innerpeffray near Crieff, Perthshire. Hitherto no Catholic connections of this library have been recorded: but it does possess a lending-register – how often was the book borrowed?14 The unique copy of George Porret OFM, A spiritual directory uniting a devoute soule unto his Lord Jesus Christ, 12° Douay 1626, is in the Church of England parish library at Swaffham, Norfolk: there is no indication in The Parochial Libraries of the Church of England (1959) that this library in fact included the books of Francis Willoughby, a recusant.15 Such random reflections should be enough to prove that the great effort involved in producing a complete census of copies for 2,551 books (ARCR I & II) is not due to some whimsy of bibliographical perfectionism: it is an essential indication of a book’s place in the world, its Sitz im Leben.16 The most striking difference from A&R lies in the arrangement. Translations are entered under the name of the translator or editor, and not under the given name of the original author, as in most catalogues.17 In this way we can see the role of individual English Catholic writers as cultural transmitters. The efflorescence of baroque spirituality, principally French, but also Spanish, Italian and to some extent German, was made available to English readers by the labours of the English recusants – one says ‘English readers’ rather than ‘English Catholic

14 See P. Kaufman, Libraries and their Users (London 1969), chapter 13. 15 See M.C. Lyons, M. A. Thesis, Loughborough University, 1986. 16 It would be helpful if the editors could, at some future date, deposit their complete records of locations in a public library. 17 There are thirty-two books of which the name of the translator is not known: these are entered separately under the name of the author; and there are twenty-five books which cannot be identified with any particular author or translator: these are entered separately under the first word of the title.

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readers’ because the literature of Protestant spirituality was so thin and impoverished that many English Protestants, especially ‘high’ Anglicans, had to have recourse to the Catholic religious classics for their devotional nourishment. The new arrangement highlights the work of the major cultural transmitters, i.e. translators: Anthony Batt OSB, for whom Counter-Reformation spirituality included pre-Reformation spirituality; Thomas Everard SJ; Henry Garnett SJ; Richard Gibbons SJ; the Hawkinses: Francis, Henry, John and Sir Thomas; John Heigham; Richard Hopkins; William Kinsman; and above all John Wilson, the unsung hero of the St Omers press, editor, compiler and printer as well as translator; and Sir Tobie Matthew – hitherto we had little idea of the sheer quantity of Sir Tobie’s literary output, permeated with ‘the billowing imagery of Latin Europe’.18 Another aspect of the new arrangement is the inclusion of headings under institutions and groups. For instance, ‘English Catholics’ covers two pleas for toleration (1603 and 1604), a declaration on the authority of the Bishop of Chalcedon (1631), and the entire range of vernacular liturgical and semi-liturgical books: the Breviary, the Jesus Psalter, the Manual and the Primer – fifty-five items altogether. Such items are here much easier to find than under the complex headings of most library catalogues. The other major difference from A&R is the concise but definitive commentary on virtually every entry. If the work is anonymous, the authorities for ascription are stated. This means a reference to an article in RH, to the publications of the CRS, or to other relevant reference works. In the case of Jesuit books, there are two especially valuable sources for ascription of authorship: the anonymous list (circa 1632) in the English College Rome (Scritture 30, 2), of thirty-nine English Jesuit writers, and the remarkable collection of sixty-eight books by English Jesuit writers formerly in the Jesuit Domus Professa at Rome and now dispersed, thirtythree volumes to the BL and the rest to the Folger – besides of course the various editions of Ribadeneira’s Bibliotheca Scriptorum SJ.19 There are references to A.C. Southern for prose works between 1559 and 1582, and to Peter Milward’s two invaluable volumes on the religious controversies of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods.20 If a book contains verse, that is stated; if the title of a book gives no idea of its contents, a succinct description of the genre is provided: e.g. no. 112 Palestina (1600), ‘an allegorical romance founded on material taken from Scripture’ – and sometimes religious romances are not as innocent as they seem, e.g. no. 586, J.P. Camus, A discourse . . . between an hermite called Nicephorus and a young lover called Tristan (1630) which is a popular roman à cléf directed against the regular clergy. The story of the discovery of unique items is sometimes

18 D. Mathew, Sir Tobie Matthew (London 1950), p. 73. 19 See Allison’s introduction to the Gregg Press reprint (1969) of the Rome 1676 edition. 20 P. Milward, Religious Controversies of the Elizabethan Age (Scolar Press 1977) and Religious Controversies of the Jacobean Age (Scolar Press 1978). G.R. Elton’s foreword to the first volume is a very generous recognition, by a major historian, of the importance of the bibliography of religious controversy.

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given. Rogers discovered no. 378 bound into his own copy of Jewel’s Replie unto M. Hardinge’s Answeare (1565): it is a single-sheet folio, also dated 1565, of a printed letter by Thomas Harding to his arch-enemy Bishop John Jewel, asking for a presentation copy of Jewel’s sermon on 27 May, so that he, Harding, could refute it: it well illustrates the sense of urgency which possessed the early Elizabethan controversialists – every moment counted, every book had to be refuted as soon as it appeared. Books that are known to have existed, but of which no copies have been found, are also listed. A fascinating example is that of Sir Herbert Croft. On becoming a Catholic late in life, he retired to St Gregory’s, Douay, and lived as a confrater in the monastery, where he died in 1622. He had had printed an edition of only eight copies of a series of letters to his wife and children, urging them to embrace Catholicism. When Anthony Wood was compiling the Athenae Oxonienses he heard of this work and arranged for Dom Edward Sheldon OSB, brother of his friend and probable informant Ralph Sheldon, to have the author’s copy sent over from Douay for his perusal. Wood described the book fully in Athenae and dutifully returned it – it is now alas lost. Another lost work (no. 800.5) is a printed edition of the poems of St Richard White (or Gwyn), Carolau V, published in 1600: the only record of its existence is a note by the Welsh bibliographer Moses Williams, in the interleaved copy of his Cofrestr (1717) now in the Bodleian. A lost edition (no. 508.5) of Edward Maihew, A paradise of prayers (1615), has been traced in a contemporary catalogue of the Frankfurt Book Fair. Another special feature is the detailed analysis of composite volumes. A good example is no. 808, The burning lampe, 24° [St Omers] 1635, a collection of spiritual texts collected and edited by John Wilson. It consists of translations of (a) three chapters from Gracian’s Lampara encendida; (b) the Contrato espiritual of Arias de Armenta; (c) St Charles Borromeo’s Protestationes faciendae in vita; (d) St Teresa’s Avisos espirituales; (e) Giustinelli’s Angelica guida; and (f) extracts from Canisius’s Opus Catechisticum. And for good measure we are referred to a modern study on the relevance of Borromeo’s work to the religion of Shakespeare’s father. Every entry in ARCR II concludes with references to A&R, NSTC and ERL. Works which were discovered too late for inclusion in ERL, and which are in out-of-the-way places, have photo-facsimiles deposited in the Bodleian, e.g. no. 914, Epitaphs, 4° Rouen 1604, ‘the only printed anthology of Catholic poetry to survive from early recusant times’: the unique copy is at Hatfield House. Every reviewer has to have something to grumble about. Firstly, it would have been easier for future readers if the names of dedicatees, and the authors of translated works, had been listed in separate indexes and taken out of the general index. Secondly, all the work on secret presses has been confined to a single page. Just as our mathematics teachers were not satisfied with the correct answers, but demanded that we should ‘show the working’, so it is not unreasonable to wish that we had more information on the assignments to particular presses. Allison and Rogers have acquired a lifetime’s expertise in the identification of recusant secret presses, and it would be a great loss if their detailed knowledge should go 196

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unrecorded. Modern photo-offset printing makes the illustration of type-faces and ornaments relatively inexpensive – is it too much to hope that a future CRS monograph might be devoted to a full history of recusant secret printing? Thirdly, the occasional users of ARCR should be warned of an apparent imprecision in the terms of reference – in a book that is usually so precise in its definitions. On p. viii of ARCR II we read: ‘authors in this volume who published other works which are not included here on grounds of subject matter or date are signalled (as in volume I) by the sign ‡ after the name, to call the reader’s attention to the fact that our catalogue listings are not necessarily co-extensive with the writer’s total output’. This definition of the double obelus (‡) does not explicitly cover two other categories: works by Catholic authors published before or after they were Catholics, and works published openly on the English market – St Robert Southwell is a case in point for books published openly, and he does get the double obelus. Some entries which ought to have qualified for the double obelus are: Benjamin Carier, for a Protestant court sermon (1606); Anthony Copley, better known to the students of English literature for Wits fittes and fancies (1595) and A Fig for Fortune (1596); Sir Kenelm Digby, who published extensively after 1640; the Douay New Testament, which was reprinted, in parallel with the Bishops’ version, by William Fulke in 1589 (NSTC 2888); John Hamilton, Archbishop of St Andrews – the editors refer to his Catechism (1552) in their commentary; Theophilus Higgons – the editors mention his Protestant writings; St Philip Howard, whose Callophisus (1581) and A fourefoulde meditation (1606) were published openly; Quintin Kennedy, whose debate with John Knox was published by the latter, and whose Two Eucharistic Tracts were published by Bishop C.H. Kuipers MHM at Nijmegen in 1964 (see also NSTC 6320 and 12968); Richard Lassels, far better known for his travel guides; Sir Tobie Matthew, for his translation into Italian of Bacon’s Essays (1617); Robert Parsons, for works published after 1640 and for Bunny’s adaptation of the Christian Exercise; and James Wadsworth the elder, whose controversy with William Bedell was published openly in 1624. But the point need not be laboured too much: the double obelus does occur against most of the relevant entries. At worst, our grumbles can be considered as pedicae asinorum.

III It has been said at the outset that ARCR (I and II) is more than a catalogue, and it is now perhaps possible to define its scope more precisely. ARCR provides a complete history of English Counter-Reformation book culture in the form of an alphabetical catalogue. All the information is there, compact and compressed, but accessible. A narrative history of English recusant literature to 1640 could now be written up from the information with which we have been provided. All the bibliographical problems have been disentangled, and the way lies open for future definitive work on the major and minor figures. With hindsight, it is 197

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easy to see how much simpler the work of previous recusant historians would have been if they had had ARCR (and ERL) at their disposal. Catholic and non-Catholic scholars have now got the essential materials for any study of the historical, literary, social, theological and, above all, international aspects of English Counter-Reformation book culture – pace David Mathew, it is not at this period a ‘minority’ culture in the sense of something peculiar, quaint or exotic. The authors of ARCR, for they are truly authors and not editors or compilers, have proved the point of their title. They have provided a new impulse, a new angle of vision, for future scholarly work and, like Kipling’s ‘Explorer’, they will be able to say to future researchers, ‘by the very cairns we builded, you will guide our steps aright’. A final word. Academic teachers often fail to realize that academic librarians have to work office hours and do not enjoy the generous vacations granted to the other inhabitants of Oxbridge and Redbrick. ARCR has been made possible by the prolonged and purposeful sacrifice of strictly limited leisure hours and, furthermore, the expenses of frequent and protracted visits to libraries throughout Europe have been borne without any financial assistance whatever. It is well to remember these things when we read that the British Academy, and ultimately the British taxpayer, has recently awarded a subsidy for yet another edition of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs.21 Verbum sapienti sat est.

21 Lambeth Palace Library Annual Review 1993, pp. 53–63. Of course we wish the future editor every success with his undertaking!

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13 REVIEW OF PAUL ARBLASTER , ANTWERP & THE WORLD Richard Verstegan and the International Culture of Catholic Reformation (Leuven University Press 2004)*

At long last we have a first class, definitive study of Richard Verstegan (c.1550– 1640) in the English language. In 1933 Edward Rombauts published Richard Verstegen [sic], een polemist der Contra-Reformatie, a substantial pioneering work of over 300 pages. Rombauts was especially good on Verstegan’s Dutch publications; his chief shortcomings were on the bibliographical side, but of course he was writing in the days before Allison and Rogers. In 1957 Anthony G. Petti presented his London MA thesis ‘A study of the life and writings of Richard Verstegan’, to be followed in 1959 by his edition of the Letters and Despatches of Richard Verstegan (CRS Vol. LII). with an introduction concentrating principally on the letters themselves. In Recusant History (Vols VII and VIII, 1963–6) Petti published a bibliography of Verstegan’s works, which was supplemented by Allison in RH, Vol. XVIII (1986). Petti was planning the publication of a life of Verstegan before his much-regretted early death. Dr Paul Arblaster generously acknowledges the work of his predecessors, but his book is very much his own. His methodology is obviously influenced by the Annales school: the book is divided into two parts, diachronic and synchronic. The first part is a straightforward chronological account of Verstegan’s life and writings, and the second part is an attempt to give a synthetic account of Verstegan’s mentalité. Of course, Verstegan’s long and varied life was anything but straightforward: to quote the blurb, ‘he worked for almost fifty years as . . . a newswriter, engraver, publisher, editor, translator, polemicist, antiquarian, cloth merchant, poet and satirist’ – and in four languages: Latin, French, English and Dutch. What is so impressive about Arblaster’s book is that every step in Verstegan’s multifarious life is related to the political, social and economic background: Arblaster’s Belesenheit in the historical literature on the Habsburg empire is remarkable. * Originally published in Recusant History, Vol. XXVII, no. 3, May 2005, pp. 457–61. Republished courtesy of the Catholic Record Society and Cambridge University Press.

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Verstegan’s grandfather arrived in London about 1510 as a Catholic refugee from the Low Countries. Verstegan studied at Christ Church, Oxford, but left without taking a degree. After serving his articles, he was made free of the Goldsmith’s Company in 1574, as a trained draughtsman and engraver. In 1582 he surreptitiously printed Thomas Alfield’s account of Campion’s martyrdom: the press was seized, and he fled to Rouen, where he met up with Fr Robert Persons SJ and his assistants George Flinton and Stephen Brinkley. Verstegan published several books in France, vividly illustrating the cruelties of the persecution of the Catholics in England – the woodcuts from one of his books were used to illustrate Persons’s De Persecutione Anglicana (Rome 1582). After a brief visit to Rome in search of a pension, Verstegan finally settled at Antwerp in 1586 as a pensioner (not always paid) of Philip II. Antwerp, the great entrepôt of the Spanish Netherlands – the centre for printing, newsgathering and commerce – was the ideal base for a man of Verstegan’s entrepreneurial spirit, and he remained there for the rest of his life. Arblaster’s remarkable choice of Antwerp & the World as the main title of his book on Verstegan is certainly defensible. From 1587 till 1606 Verstegan worked as a publishing agent, editor, proofreader and dealer in English Catholic books, the actual printing being contracted out to various Flemish printing houses. His first Antwerp publication, Theatrum crudelitatum haereticorum nostri temporis, 4o 1587, was a great success; it ran to four editions in Latin and four in French, and typifies many of his characteristic interests. Firstly, as a trained draughtsman, he was concerned with visual aids. The book depends upon gruesome composite pictures of executions, arrests and tortures: in one illustration the exigencies of space have caused ‘Little Ease’ to be located in an upper storey window, surely very unlikely. Secondly, he was concerned with martyrology, not only in England, but also in the northern Netherlands. Thirdly, he had a deep and long-lasting hatred of Calvinism. Of course, he had an eye on the Guisard market, and Lutheranism was of little interest or influence in French politics. But Calvinism deeply offended Verstegan’s generous humanity, and he ascribed to Calvinism, perhaps unfairly, all the wickedness of the Cecilian government – like Robert Burns, he had a detestation of the ‘unco guid’. For many years, Verstegan’s principal activity at Antwerp was as Fr Persons’s agent. The extant newsletters begin at the end of 1591 and run on to 1595. Perhaps they stopped on account of the Archpriest troubles; perhaps Fr Persons’s confrères thought it no longer prudent to preserve them. Verstegan’s work as Persons’s proof corrector and collaborator stopped before 1608, when English Jesuit printing was concentrated at St Omers. In 1591 Verstegan, presumably at Persons’s behest, obtained permission to read heretical books: they took the Index very seriously in those days – when Campion was in Prague he was at great pains to ensure the destruction of any heretical books he had left behind in England. It is surprising that Arblaster does not refer to the case of his near namesake, the poet William Alabaster, whose slightly dotty book, Apparatus in Revelationem lesu Christi, was delated by Verstegan to Persons, and put on the Index ‘donec corrigatur’. I have 200

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often wondered whether William Camden’s Anglica, Normannica also found its way onto the Index via Verstegan and Persons – it had been read by someone with a very intimate knowledge of English history. For Verstegan’s translation of the Primer, Arblaster is able to draw on J.M. Blom’s excellent account in CRS Monograph III (1982). The Latin version of the post-Tridentine Primer was first published at Rome in 1571. In the 1580s Allen and Persons realized the devotional importance of an English version and petitioned Gregory XIII for a licence, but Gregory died in 1585 and nothing seems to have come of it. By the 1590s Verstegan himself realized the financial possibilities of a licence for an English translation, but it was not until 1599 that he published The Primer, or Office of the blessed Virgin Marie in Latin and English. The evercanny Verstegan issued simultaneously two versions from the same setting: a ‘de luxe’ edition with metal engravings on fine paper, and a ‘standard’ edition with woodcuts, on ordinary paper. Verstegan’s version ran through five editions: rival translations came on the market after 1615, but Verstegan’s version was still published at Antwerp by Balthasar Moretus, the successor of Plantin, as late as 1658. Odes. ln imitation of the seaven penitential psalms. With sundry other poemes and ditties tending to devotion and pietie, 8o Antwerp 1601, was a spin-off from Verstegan’s translation of the Primer. It contains his most charming poem, ‘Our Blessed Ladies Lullaby’ which, as Arblaster points out, was included in the revised Westminster Hymnal. How did it get there? The 1940 Westminster Hymnal is remarkable for its inclusion of several poems by English recusants. It is not clear to me whether we owe this to Ronald Knox, David Mathew, or to W.S. Bainbridge. Perhaps the inclusion of Verstegan’s poem was due to its appearance in L.I. Guiney’s Recusant Poets (1938) – not in Arblaster’s bibliography. Arblaster compares Verstegan’s poetry with Robert Southwell’s. Verstegan certainly uses Southwell’s themes, but his forte is homely simplicity, in striking contrast to Southwell’s sophistication and complexity. The Anglo-Spanish treaty of 1604 may have had something to do with Verstegan’s change of tack from polemics and devotion to antiquarianism. His Restitution of decayed intelligence in Antiquities appeared in 1605, dedicated to James I, and several months before the Gunpowder Plot. Arblaster refers to several recent commentators, but he does not seem to have spotted British Antiquity (1950), by the distinguished archaeologist T.D. Kendrick, where the place of the Restitution in the Saxon-versus-Norman debate is put with great authority and lucidity. Verstegan prefaced his book with congratulatory verses by many of his friends and acquaintances: they included such familiar names as Richard Stanyhurst, Francis Tregian and Thomas Shelton (the translator of Don Quixote). One contributor, Johannes Rombouts, is ‘unknown’ to Arblaster. He was in fact the son of a doctor from ’s-Hertogenbosch, had served his apprenticeship under Jan Moretus. and was a proof-reader and compositor in the Officina Plantiniana – a good example of the social and intellectual level of the Plantin workmen (Leon Voet, The Golden Compasses [1972], Vol. II, pp. 178, 181, 191). Another writer of the congratulatory verses was Cornelius Kiliaan, whom Arblaster describes as ‘a lexicographer’: 201

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Kiliaan was ‘the’ lexicographer of his day. Verstegan’s etymologies rely considerably on Kiliaan’s Etymologicum Teutonicae Linguae (8o Antwerp 1599): the discussion of ‘werewolf’ (quoted by Arblaster p. 252) draws clearly on Kiliaan. The first edition of the Restitution was printed at Antwerp by Robert Bruneau (Ortelius’s printer) and shipped in sheets to England, where it was published by Norton and Bill, the King’s printers. Subsequent editions were printed and published in England in 1628, 1632, 1653, 1655 and 1673, though some copies of the 1628 edition consisted of the original sheets of 1605, bound up with a new title page: the Antwerp print-run must therefore have been considerably more than that permitted in England. The survival of many copies of almost every edition points to the popularity of the Restitution in gentry libraries, and the 1673 edition was publicly advertised in the Term Catalogues. In 1612 Verstegan was granted a licence which gave him the monopoly for the importation of undyed English cloth into Antwerp. He shared the monopoly with a consortium of refugee English Catholic merchants. Arblaster’s knowledge of Antwerp economic history introduces us to the hitherto little discussed class of recusant merchants, some of whom were very wealthy indeed. Some of their children became priests and nuns: one wonders how they got on, in their religious houses, with the children of impoverished recusant gentry. Arblaster has also discovered many other new episodes in Verstegan’s life. From about 1615 till 1617 Verstegan worked as an intelligence agent not only for Joseph Creswell SJ but also for the head of the Spanish secret service, and undertook what must have been a very risky trip to the northern Netherlands, presumably for commercial espionage. Apparently he was even offered a job by Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, the Grand Pensionary of Holland. He wisely refused it, otherwise he might have shared Oldenbarnevelt’s fate, and have been judicially murdered by the Dutch Calvinists. From 1613 Verstegan’s publications, with some notable exceptions, were chiefly in Dutch: his literary output between 1617 and 1633 was not entirely original; it consisted of adaptations of genres which had had a guaranteed success in England. Nederduytsche Epigrammen (1617, 1624 and 1641) were inspired by John Owen, whose epigrams (1606–13) were bestsellers not only in England but also on the continent – was it Verstegan who got Owen put on the Index? Isaac Casaubon’s edition of Theophrastus’s Characteres (1592, English translation 1616) started a veritable English craze for character-writing. But whereas Theophrastus was Aristotelian and ethical, the English version of the genre, typified by the manifold character-books attributed to Sir Thomas Overbury (1614 onwards), were essentially recreational literature: joco-seria or utile-dulce. Verstegan’s Characteren oft scherpsinnighe beschrijvinghe (1619 and 1622) were adaptations of the Overburian model – he knew when he was onto a good thing. Timothy Bright’s popular Treatise of Melancholy was published in 1586 and 1613, but it was probably Robert Burton’s runaway success, The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621 and seven more editions in the seventeenth century), which prompted Verstegan’s Medicamenten teghen de Melancholie (1633), though indeed he justified all his Dutch recreative literature as an antidote to melancholy. 202

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The subject of Arblaster’s Oxford DPhil thesis (1999) was ‘Current-affairs publishing in the Habsburg Netherlands 1620–1660, in comparative European perspective’. His unrivalled familiarity with early Antwerp journalism has enabled him to identify a considerable number of Verstegan’s contributions to Abraham Verhoeven’s newspaper Nieuwe Tijdinghen (1620–9). Furthermore, Verstegan’s use of the English printer Henry Jaye of Mechelen, has prompted Arblaster to look at the totality of Jaye’s output, and he attributes to Verstegan, modestly but convincingly, an anonymous contribution to De Schadt-Kiste der Philosophen ende Poeten (The Treasure Chest of the Philosophers and the Poets), Jaye’s de luxe edition of prize-winning Dutch poems. In the second, synchronic part of his book, Arblaster builds up a delicate and complex account of Verstegan’s world-picture. Starting from his study of Aristotle’s Ethics at Christ Church, and combined with the influence of Lipsius and Christian Stoicism, Verstegan embodied, in a very personal way, the Christianhumanist principles of the post-Tridentine Catholic Reformation. In polemical and devotional literature he was almost entirely dependent on Jesuit sources – he seems to have had little time for the rest of the clergy, secular or religious. To put it far more crudely than does Arblaster, Verstegan had to make a living out of his apostolic zeal, and for him the Habsburg Empire was the best of all possible worlds. Within the limitations of a review, it would be impossible to do justice to all the topics and nuances of Arblaster’s book. This account is a commentary on an arbitrary selection of a few aspects. Arblaster has done a difficult job and it will not have to be done again. By way of a postscript, one might add that he has also done an excellent article on Verstegan for the new ODNB.

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14 WILLIAM CARTER (C. 1549–84) Recusant printer, publisher, binder, stationer, scribe – and martyr*

Introduction In 1999 the Bodleian Library acquired a tract volume containing an hitherto unrecorded and unknown publication of William Carter. The item itself has been fully described by Geoffrey Groom in the Bodleian Library Record (Oct. 1999) and to celebrate the acquisition I gave a short talk to the Friends of the Bodleian Library on the subject of Carter’s career: the present article is a considerably expanded version of that talk. Much of the documentation on Carter has been available for a long time. Carter’s execution for printing a book unjustly described as treasonable was the first example cited by William Allen in 15841 in his answer to Cecil’s Execution of Justice (1583) – Allen describes Carter as ‘a poor innocent artisan’. An account of Carter’s trial has been in print since 1588 – the first printed trial of an unlicensed printer in the Elizabethan period.2 His execution is recorded by Camden and Stow in their Annals, and in all the recusant martyrologies. In the twentieth century there is a twelve-page account by J.H. Pollen SJ in Lives of the English Martyrs (London 1914) and in 1950 A.C. Southern in Elizabethan Recusant Prose (London/ Glasgow) made a pioneering attempt to establish Carter’s output of printed books. This list of Carter’s publications was substantially expanded by Allison and Rogers in their review of Southern in The Library (1951) and was consolidated in their Contemporary Printed Literature of the English Counter-Reformation (1994, ARCR II). On 22 November 1987 Carter was beatified by Pope John Paul II – and now there is a good succinct article by Dr Ian Gadd in the new ODNB. Neither Allison nor Rogers ever got round to a systematic study of Carter’s life and work. I am not an analytical bibliographer, and rely almost entirely on

* Originally published in Recusant History, Vol. XXVIII, no. 1 (May 2006), pp. 22–42. Republished courtesy of the Catholic Record Society and Cambridge University Press. 1 W. Allen, A True Sincere and Modest Defence of English Catholiques [Rouen 1584]. William Cecil, Lord Burghley will be referred to as Cecil throughout. 2 J. Gibbons & J. Fenn (eds.), Concertatio ecclesiae Catholicae in Anglia (4o Trier 1588). Facsimile reprint 1970 with preface by D.M. Rogers.

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ARCR II for the list of Carter’s publications, so in what follows the reader must judge whether a further study has been justified. In view of Carter’s multifarious activities, his work both as a printer-publisher, and as a scribe and circulator of manuscripts, has been treated separately from a straightforward account of his life.

Carter’s biography William Carter was born about 1549, the son of Robert Carter, a draper. In 1563 he was apprenticed to the printer John Cawood (of known Catholic sympathies) and came out of his articles in 1573. He then served as an amanuensis to Dr Nicholas Harpsfield for £20 p.a. and also assisted Nicholas’s brother John as a stationer and binder (BL MS Royal 8.B.xx). The Harpsfields were survivors of the Marian régime: Nicholas as Archdeacon of Canterbury and John as Archdeacon of London. They were high profile opponents of the Henrician reformation and of the Elizabethan religious settlement, and from 1558 onwards were either under house arrest or in prison. In 1575 Nicholas died and Carter inherited his extensive collection of unpublished manuscripts, an inheritance that was to play an important part in Carter’s later life. In the same year Carter began his career as an unlicensed printer in partnership with an older man, John Lyon (or Lion), also a former apprentice of Cawood. Lyon fled abroad in 1578 and Carter carried on alone in England. Between 1575 and 1580 Carter’s total printed output amounted to less than twenty books, not enough to live on. Other sources of income would have been derived from his work as a stationer and binder, and as a copyist and distributor of manuscripts, not only of the Harpsfield Nachlass but also of other material. But there was yet another possible source of income: patronage. Among the famous group of laymen who welcomed Persons and Campion on their arrival in England were George Gilbert and Stephen Brinkley.3 Gilbert was a wealthy bachelor convert, determined to devote his patrimony to the Catholic cause, and expressly to the subsidization of printing; Brinkley was an Oxford graduate, MA and LLB, translator of one of the books on Carter’s stocklist, and steward to Thomas Lord Paget of Beaudesert – it was presumably through Brinkley that Campion’s first sermon was held in Lord Paget’s ‘Great Hall’ in London. It is reasonable to assume that Gilbert and Brinkley were among Carter’s backers. As might be expected, Carter’s life was one of harassment and imprisonment. On 23 September 1578 he was committed to the Poultry Counter ‘for religion’ and discharged on 28 October of the same year. In December 1579 his press was seized, and he was committed to the Gatehouse as a ‘stationer’ where he remained till June 1581 when, with several other laymen prisoners, he was released on bond: the government was probably making a gesture of clemency in order to string along the French marriage negotiations.

3 H. Foley, Records SJ, Vol. III (1878), passim; CRS Vol. II (1906), p. 179.

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On Carter’s committal to the Gatehouse, John Aylmer, Bishop of London, had written to Cecil: Right honourable and my singular good Lord. I have found out a press of printing with one Carter, a very lewd fellow who hath been divers times before in prison for printing of lewd pamphlets. But now in search of his house, amongst other naughty papistical books, we have found one written in French entitled ‘the innocency of the Scottish Queen’, a very dangerous book, wherein he calleth her the heir apparent of this Crown. He inveigheth against the execution of the Duke of Norfolk, defendeth the rebellion in the north, and discourseth against you and the late Lord Keeper. I doubt not but that your Lordship hath seen it, nevertheless I thought good to signify thus much unto your Lordship that you may deal with the fellow (who is now near you in the Gatehouse) as to your wisdom shall seem good. I can get nothing of him, for he did deny to answer upon his oath. When your Lordship shall be at any leisure to deal in the matter, I will send to you the Wardens [of the Stationers Company] which will inform you further of any other book which is abroad wherein her Majesty too is touched and of certain other new forms of letters which he hath made and will not confess them. Thus with my humble duty unto your Lordship I take my leave from my house at London by Paul’s this 30th of December 1579. Your Lordship’s humble to command John London4 John Aylmer, Bishop of London from 1577 till 1596, was an unpleasant man, worldly, litigious, nakedly ambitious, aggressive and avaricious, and cordially disliked by many of his Protestant contemporaries. (Ollard and Crosse, two pillars of the 20th century Anglican establishment, call him ‘hot-tempered, quarrelsome and bitter-spirited’, Dictionary of English Church History [1919], p. 340.) Amongst his other activities Aylmer was ex officio ‘licenser of the press’, responsible not only for the suppression of any books inimical to the church or state, but also, in collaboration with the Stationers Company, for the destruction of unlicensed printing presses which contravened the Stationers monopoly.5 Aylmer’s letter must be read in context. He had just been reproved by Cecil for disparking the episcopal estates for his own profit, and it was rumoured that he might be translated to another bishopric. This letter was therefore to curry favour and to show that he was doing his job as a rigid enforcer of state Protestantism against Roman Catholics as well as against non-conformists. The ‘very dangerous

4 Quoted in A.C. Southern, Elizabethan Recusant Prose (London/Glasgow 1950), p. 351. Spelling and orthography have been modernized in this and subsequent quotations. 5 W.W. Greg, Licensers for the Press . . . to 1640 (Oxford 1962).

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book’ was L’Innocence de Marie Royne d’Escosse (1572) by John Leslie, Bishop of Ross, (ARCR I, 726) which was, as far as Cecil was concerned, rather old hat. Leslie had been held in the Tower for three years in connection with the Ridolfi plot and had been interrogated by Cecil himself. At all events, Cecil took no action on Aylmer’s letter.6 Carter was a free man from June 1581 till his re-arrest and committal to the Tower in July 1582. He was not inactive during this period. As we shall see later, he was certainly responsible for the manuscript account of Campion’s disputations in the Tower, and most probably also for the only authentic text of Campion’s trial; possibly also for collaboration with Richard Verstegan in the printing of Thomas Alfield’s True Reporte of the martyrdom of Campion and his companions. The Campion-Persons mission had undoubtedly stimulated government razzias against recusants, and Carter was already a marked man. In July 1582 his house in Hart Street, an almshouse of the Drapers Company, where he lived with his wife and mother, was raided by the pursuivant Richard Topcliffe and his papers and possessions seized. On 19 July ‘P.H.’, a government informer very active at this time, wrote to Sir Francis Walsingham: Right honourable, in my return from the court, at Lambeth I met with the wife of Carter who was examined in the court on Tuesday last, and demanding of her whither she was walking, she told me to the court, to speak with Lord Lumley, ‘who’ said she, ‘I would to God I had never known’. Whereupon she told me that her husband was apprehended, and had been examined at the court, and sent to the Tower. ‘And I am now going to my Lord to tell him that all that was in our house is taken away’. ‘Why’ said I, ‘what can my Lord help you in that?’ ‘Oh’ said she, ‘all the books, copes, vestments, cross, chalices and all the rest’ said she, ‘was my Lord’s, and by the means and entreaty of Mr. Smyth and Mr. Caynes or Caymes, two of my Lord’s gentlemen, my husband was so mad to take them in’, with much other talk which should be too long to trouble your honour. But if it may please your honour to cause both Smyth and Caynes to be apprehended forthwith and these being laid to their charge as confessed by Carter, and Carter’s wife to be taken, who knoweth as much as her husband, not only in this, but in all other affairs and causes concerning the dealing of the Papists. And of this I am most assured, that there is neither Jesuit, priest nor papist of any account within England but he knoweth them. I have known him myself these twenty years, and he married his wife from the Lady Carew’s, who was so oft in prison for religion. But to be short, if this be ripped to the bottom, there will be such

6 There is a printed fragment of Leslie’s Defense of the Honour of Mary Queen of Scots (1569) among the Yelverton MSS (now BL MS Add. 48027, ff. 284–91), also probably part of Carter’s papers. Aylmer’s references to ‘another book’ and to ‘other new forms of letters’ are obscure.

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matter revealed as long hath been full secret: as knoweth the Almighty, whom I beseech long to preserve your honour, in all honour and content, from London the 19th of July, P.H.7 A glance at a contemporary map of London will show that at the end of Hart Street, at the corner of Woodross Lane and Crutched Friars, is the extensive town house of John Lord Lumley. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries publishers were often used as a poste restante, and Carter had obviously been so used when Lumley was out of town. As we shall see later, Lumley was a substantial patron of Carter for the transcription of Harpsfield’s manuscripts. The whole object of P.H., as indeed of Walsingham, was to get at a crypto-Catholic grandee like Lumley, through Carter. Like Bishop Leslie, Lumley had been arrested in 1571 in connection with the Ridolfi plot, but by 1582 he was a respectable antiquarian and virtuoso. Carter was to remain in the Tower from July 1582 till his execution in January 1584; his wife Jane died in December 1582 and was buried in the parish church of St Olave,8 and in the summer of 1583 his mother Anne wrote a pathetic letter to Walsingham asking for the return of her son’s goods and books and papers and for his removal from the Tower to the Gatehouse.9 Carter was examined on the rack by a well-known team: Dr John Hammond, a civilian, who prepared the interrogatories; Robert Beale, secretary to the Privy Council and Walsingham’s brother-in-law; and Thomas Norton. To students of English literature, Thomas Norton (c. 1530–84) is known as the part author of Gorboduc; to his English contemporaries he was known as an astute parliamentarian, pursuing extreme Protestant policies; and to Father Persons SJ he was known as ‘the rackmaster’.10 As an ambitious, hardworking and highly competent lawyer he had begun his career in the reign of Edward VI as tutor to the children of Edward Seymour Duke of Somerset, and the uncompromising Protestantism of the Edwardian Reformation remained his ideal throughout his life – he had married Cranmer’s daughter (and on her death he married her cousin) and had translated Calvin’s Institutes. In 1563 he became standing counsel to the Stationers Company and drew up their statutes, and as licenser for the press worked hand in glove with Bishop Aylmer.11 In 1571 he was appointed Remembrancer to the Lord Mayor of London, and turned what had been a purely nominal office into an instrument for the control of the Council of the City of London. In the same year, as MP, he championed a treason bill for the execution of the Duke

7 CRS, Vol. V (1908), p. 30. This spy is referred to by Pollen and others as ‘P.H.W.’, but the ‘W’ is a quasi notarial squiggle. 8 Harleian Society Registers, Vol. XLVIII, p. 118. 9 CRS, Vol. V (1908), p. 39. 10 For favourable accounts see M.A.R. Graves, Thomas Norton the Parliament man (Oxford 1994) and ODNB. 11 See W.W. Greg (note 5 above).

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of Norfolk and of Mary Queen of Scots – he lived to enjoy the first but not the second. Perhaps most importantly of all, he worked closely with the Secretary of State, Sir Francis Walsingham, as a very effective instrument of Walsingham’s policies. From 1578 he was appointed commissioner to examine Catholic prisoners. (It gives the historian some satisfaction to note that when Norton himself was sent to the Tower for a few months, on the direct orders of the Queen, for his indiscreet and vehement opposition to the French marriage negotiations, he squealed like a stuck pig – he writes to his master Walsingham ‘O Sir, help me now for God’s sake.’)12 Norton’s examinations and rackings of Carter culminated in 1583. The full text of this examination is unfortunately now lost, but there is an extensive description in the catalogues of the bookseller Thomas Thorpe of 1838 and 1840: The Examination of William Carter, late Dr. Nicholas Harpsfield’s servant, and before that in service with Cawood the printer, concerning the writing of Sir Thomas More’s life, Cranmer’s life, and the Treatise relating to the marriage and divorce of King Henry VIII; also the printing of the book on Schism at his house in Holborn-bridge, whereof there were 1000 copies, in 1578, the whole of which one Cowper of Lancashire had, except for four or five copies which he kept, with other books left in his possession by Dr. Harpsfield, with a list of the said books, which were seized by the officers appointed to search his house. This description is a clear indication of the gravamen of the government case against Carter, and it is corroborated by Norton himself. He had a great penchant for drafting what today we would call ‘position papers’, and he includes his case against Carter in one of these: ‘The Plot of the treasons intended against her Majesty and the realm, drawn out of sundry examinations’ – it is endorsed by Robert Beale ‘Thomas Norton’s Chain of Treasons’.13 (Plot or Plat here means an outline or plan.) The ‘Chain’ was compiled after the arrest of Francis Throckmorton in October 1583 and before his execution in February 1584. Norton surveys the history of Catholic treason against Elizabeth: the Marian opponents of the Elizabethan religious settlement; the Rising of the North; Regnans in Excelsis; the intrigues round Bishop Leslie and the ‘Papal League’; the Ridolfi plot; William Allen and the seminaries; Sanders and the invasion of Ireland – all forming background material for the Throckmorton plot. For Norton, Harpsfield’s manuscripts were an important link in the chain of treasons: Harpsfield’s account of the history of the divorce, and of its consequences, branded Elizabeth as a bastard and a heretic, and thus legitimately liable to deposition or assassination. Carter’s possession (and dissemination) of Harpsfield’s papers was as important as his printing

12 BL MS Add. 48023, f. 57b. 13 BL MS Add. 48029 (Yelverton 33), f. 58sq.

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of Gregory Martin’s Treatise of Schism. We shall discuss the extent of Carter’s possession of manuscript material at a later stage in this article. In Walsingham’s diary for January 1584 there is the sinister memorandum ‘A letter to the Recorder [William Fleetwood] touching the bookbinder’.14 Carter was duly brought to trial on 10 January 1584. The presiding judge was Bishop John Aylmer – despite the long accepted tradition that clergy should not sit in judgement in capital cases. On the bench with him were firstly, Sir Christopher Wray, Chief Justice of the Court of Queen’s Bench, who had presided at the trial of Campion, and was later at the trials of William Parry, Anthony Babington, Mary Queen of Scots and Philip Howard; secondly, Sir Edward Anderson, Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas, renowned for his ‘evenhanded belligerence towards both Catholic and Puritan non-conformists’ (ODNB) – as Queen’s Serjeant he had conducted the prosecution of Campion; thirdly, Sir Gilbert Gerard, Master of the Rolls, who had prosecuted the Duke of Norfolk in 1572 and interrogated John Leslie Bishop of Ross, and had been on the bench at the trials of John Somerville, William Parry and William Shelley, and later at the trial of Philip Howard Earl of Arundel; fourthly, Sir John Popham, Speaker of the House of Commons and Attorney-General – according to John Aubrey ‘he was a huge, heavy, ugly man . . . he lived like a hog’;15 fifthly, William Fleetwood, Recorder of London, Serjeantat-Law and commissioner for the reformation of abuses in printing – he was a relentless and indefatigable persecutor of recusants in London; and sixthly, Robert Shute, second Baron of the Exchequer. Counsel for the prosecution was Thomas Norton. It was a formidable array for a little printer.16 Our knowledge of the trial is based on a Latin translation of an eyewitness account by a Catholic, published in the Concertatio Ecclesiae Catholicae in Anglia (Trier 1588), an anthology of texts relating to the Elizabethan martyrs, edited by John Gibbons and John Fenn.17 Both Pollen and Southern admit that some of the Latin text has defeated them, and who am I to disagree? But as we have no other detailed first-hand account of the trial of an Elizabethan printer, I have attempted to give a rather literal gist of the text. The indictment against Carter was that in 1583 [sic] he had conspired to kill the Queen, in that he had printed and published a book entitled A Treatise of schisme

14 BL MS Harley 6035, f. 48b. For Fleetwood see the excellent article by P.R. Harris, ‘William Fleetwood Recorder of the City, and Catholicism in Elizabethan London’, RH, Vol. VII, no. 3, October 1963, pp. 106–22. This reference is not included in ODNB. 15 J. Aubrey, Brief Lives (Oxford 1898), Vol. II, p. 159. 16 The full composition of the Bench has to be reconstructed from cursory references in the text. Procurator generalis, Attorney-General Popham; Scriniarius, Recorder Fleetwood; Primarius Iudex, Chief Justice of the Court of Queen’s Bench Wray; Loci Communes Iudex, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas Anderson. The reference to ‘quidam Schuttus’, i.e. without any title, adds a note of authenticity. Shute was Second Baron of the Exchequer, a technical title that had only been created in 1579, which enabled him to enter the ranks of the higher judiciary – it was evidently unknown to the author of the text of the trial. 17 See note 2, above.

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in which among other seditious things it was urged that Catholic matrons should kill the Queen, following the biblical example of Judith, who killed Holofernes because she refused to eat with him. Now A Treatise of schisme. Shewing that al Catholikes ought in any wise to abstain altogether from heretical conventicles by Gregory Martin, had been published by Carter in 1578 – the date 1583 in the indictment may indicate that the prosecution had only spotted the allegedly treasonable passage five years later, when Carter had already been a year in the Tower. Furthermore, as we shall see later, the Treatise did not quite fit in with the rest of Carter’s stocklist. Carter’s general policy was to eschew the printing and publishing of anything polemical, and confine himself to devotional works. It could be argued that Martin’s Treatise was exhortatory, but the designation of the Protestant church services as ‘heretical conventicles’ was certainly polemical, and the whole title of the book was provocative. Martin’s choice of the biblical analogy of Judith and Holofernes was thoughtless and foolish – he could have chosen many other less tendentious scriptural examples. His point was to encourage the Catholic women to set a good example to their menfolk, just as Judith had shown far more courage than the men in the Jewish army. So why was Carter induced to print the book? Martin had more than once complained that he was short of funds to publish his books on the continent18 (presumably all the money was going to subsidize the printing of the Rheims-Douay Bible) – so the book was published in England, where George Gilbert could provide the funds. But let us resume the trial narrative. Carter pleaded not guilty to the indictment, and Thomas Norton opened for the prosecution. Norton’s case was essentially the same as that of the ‘Chain of Treasons’. He began with Regnans in Excelsis which, he claimed, was responsible for the Rising of the North [this was of course chronologically untrue]. This policy was continued by the seminarians, mass priests and Jesuits who, hiding in corners, drew the people away from their true obedience. The architect of this was William Allen who during the past three years had sent more than 200 priests to arouse the people to tumult and sedition. Norton then turned to Carter, the apprentice of Cawood (a man infected with heresy), and subsequently the amanuensis of Dr Harpsfield, a noble traitor, whose treasonable books Carter copied. Carter also printed a book by Gregory Martin, an adherent of the Duke of Norfolk (Martin had been tutor to Norfolk’s sons). Martin had fled to the seminary at Douay, the centre of treachery and treason, where he conspired with Sir Francis Englefield, the most perfidious and celebrated traitor. Martin wrote his tractate on schism which was approved and confirmed by the hand of Dr William Allen, the notorious traitor. This book not only urged her Majesty’s subjects to take away her life, but also to withdraw themselves from divine service and from participating in the sacraments. The passage concerning Judith and Holofernes could mean nothing else but an encouragement to kill the

18 T.F. Knox (ed.), First and Second Diaries of the English College Douay (1878), pp. 318 and 319.

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Queen – here Norton quoted the recent case of John Somerville, the madman who had publicly avowed his intention to assassinate Elizabeth. Carter, said Norton, had confessed to reading the book five times over before printing it [in the ‘Chain of Treasons’ it was three times], but maintained that Holofernes stood for the Devil and not for Elizabeth. To prove that Carter must have read the book very carefully, Norton here made the interesting bibliographical point that the book was printed by what we would nowadays call half-sheet imposition and with a limited typefount – after each sheet the type had to be redistributed. Carter had printed 12,000 copies (in fact Carter had confessed to 1,200!) which had been distributed by a certain Cooper. Carter then replied. He admitted printing and publishing the Treatise, but had no intention of harming or insulting her Majesty: he had nothing to do with the Bull of Pius V (i.e. Regnans in Excelsis) or with conspiracies of Jesuits and priests. In his opinion the book had nothing to do with the religion of the members of the jury: the intention was to recall schismatics back to their Catholic obedience and worship (schismatic was the technical term for Catholics who attended Protestant services). As for the exemplum of Judith and Holofernes, he had never thought that it meant what Norton implied; he then quoted other analogous examples from the Bible: Jeroboam, Elias and Elizaeus, Osea and Amos. Holofernes was frequently quoted as a theological allegory of Cacodaemon. Furthermore, Holofernes was not a monarch, but the general of the army of Nabuchodonosor, and Judith was not his subject. Norton says he had read the book five times, but if he had read it fifty times he would have come to the same conclusion. Norton replied by referring to Carter’s speech as long and futile, and then embarked on an elaborate and repetitive interpretation of the Judith and Holofernes passage. He was interrupted by Aylmer, a man of little erudition or modesty, but outstandingly ill-tempered and shameless (‘homo parva eruditione et modestia, sed egregie improbus et protervus’). Aylmer rose to his feet (most unusual for a presiding judge) and began by disclaiming any desire to seek Carter’s life. He then proceeded to give his version of Carter’s career. First as an apprentice to John Cawood, an honest man but of suspect religion (Aylmer was more qualified than Norton in his reference to Cawood: John Cawood [1514–72], despite his Marian affiliations, had been Warden and Master of the Stationers Company under Elizabeth, and his son Gabriel was on the Livery of the Stationers at the time of Aylmer’s speech). Carter was then subsequently amanuensis to Harpsfield and copied his books, and also circulated them in manuscript. After Harpsfield’s death he printed Papist and seditious books from two presses, which were now seized – he never printed a good book. Indeed one of his books was a most pestilent defence of the actions of the Scottish Queen (this was untrue: Leslie’s book A defence of . . . Marie Queene of Scotland was printed on the continent). Aylmer then turned to Carter’s defence of the Judith and Holofernes passage, and his technical interpretation of the term schismatic. What the term really meant, said Aylmer, was that the entire Protestant communion was ‘schismatic’; the conclusion was inescapable – the book was treasonable. 212

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Carter replied very politely. He did not wish to say anything insulting to the Bishop; he did not deny printing Martin’s book nor possessing a press, and he did not shrink from death. At this the Attorney-General (Popham) interrupted to say that the book was written by a traitor (Martin), confirmed by a traitor (Allen) and dedicated to English traitors. Carter replied that it was the intention of the author, Martin, simply to persuade the English Catholics not to partake of heretical services or communion. Popham replied that Carter’s interpretation was absurd, and that the treasonable interpretation was obvious. The Recorder (Fleetwood) then intervened with the observation that he had never heard of the Devil being killed, except when he entered the herd of Gadarene swine. To which Carter replied, ‘God have mercy on me; it is clear from your speeches that nothing remains for me but the supreme penalty’. Then the Master of the Rolls (Gerard) asked him, ‘Do you approve of the book, yes or no?’, to which Carter replied that he did. The Recorder then addressed the jury, and especially the foreman, ‘Hear ye! This seditious man approves this seditious book’. Then the Chief Justice (Wray) and a certain Shute (second Baron of the Exchequer) interrogated Carter: ‘Whose head was cut off by Judith?’: he replied, ‘Holofernes’. To which they exclaimed, ‘That is good: out of your own mouth you approve of decapitation’. Then came the Chief Justice of the Common Pleas (Anderson): ‘Your wild interpretation is most futile and stupidly false, like a dream from purgatory. It is perfectly clear from your book that a heretic and schismatic should be excluded from your communion, which is both absurd and irrational’. Anderson went on in this vein, acting as both witness and prosecutor. Carter replied: Your words, my Lord, are more a sentence than a summing up and seem to have influenced the minds of the jury to condemn me. I accept whatever God sees fit for them to decide. The day will come when all shall be made clear before the Divine Judge as to me, and the jury and everyone else. At this the Recorder could no longer contain his anger and fury: ‘Come, come, my good man, you are not here to give us a sermon.’ With that the jury were sent out and returned in a quarter of an hour with a verdict of guilty. In the meantime Carter’s confession was heard by a priest who was also present. Carter was hanged, drawn and quartered the following day, 11 January 1584. The indecorous spectacle of the chief judges of the land, bandying insults with the prisoner, is probably the reason why ‘official’ versions of such trials were never published. Why was Carter brought to trial at this time and on such grounds? There are several possible reasons, none mutually exclusive. Firstly, to strike terror into the other surreptitious printers: if caught, they might not only be fined and imprisoned for unlicensed printing, but any of the books they printed might be construed as treasonable and thus subject to the death penalty. Aylmer, Norton and Fleetwood all had vested interests in the suppression of unlicensed printing. Secondly, 213

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although Martin’s Treatise, published in 1578, had not stimulated any response from the Protestant side, Persons’s Brief Discourse, why Catholics refuse to go to Church, published surreptitiously in 1580, during the Persons-Campion mission, a much more hard-hitting pamphlet on the same subject, had certainly aroused general Protestant hostility and provoked three printed replies: perhaps the Protestant establishment were getting at Persons through Carter. Thirdly, Carter’s trial and execution was the first of a series in early 1584 – Haydock, Fenn, Hemerford, Nutter and Mundyn: perhaps the establishment were clearing the decks for the Throckmorton trial. Whatever the specific reason, if indeed there was one, Carter certainly died in odium fidei.

Carter’s stocklist The following short-title list, arranged in approximate chronological order, is derived from A.F. Allison and D.M. Rogers, The Contemporary Printed Literature of the English Counter-Reformation 1558–1640, Vol. II (Aldershot 1994) ARCR. For full bibliographical details readers should consult the entries in ARCR itself. 1 1575 Thomas à Kempis [translated Richard Whitford], The Following of Christ. 8o (ARCR 803) 2 1575 Suso, Henry, Certayne sweete prayers of the glorious name of Iesus, commonly called, Iesus Mattens, with the howers therto belonging; written in Latin aboue two hundred yeres agoe. 16o in 8s (ARCR 903) 3 1575 Albin de Valsergues, Jean, A notable discourse, plainelye and truly discussing, who are the right ministers of the Catholike Church; written against Calvine and his disciples. 8o [part II contains Allen’s ‘Scroll of Articles’] (ARCR 877) 4 1576 M., I., A breefe directory, and playne way howe to say the rosary of our blessed Lady: with meditations for such as are not exercised therein. Whereunto are adioyned the prayers of S. Bryget, with others. 16o in 8s (ARCR 546) 5 1576 Canisius, Peter, SJ, Certayne devout meditations very necessary for Christian men devoutly to meditate upon morninge and eveninge, every day in the weeke: concerning Christ his lyfe and passion and the fruites thereof. 16o in 8s (ARCR 888) 6 c.1576 Loarte, Gaspare, SJ, The godlie garden of Gethsemani, furnished with holsome fruites of meditacion & prayer; upon the blessed passion of Christ our redeemer. 16o in 8s (ARCR 896) 7 c. 1577 A short and absolute order of confession. 16o in 8s (ARCR 928) 8 1578 Martin, Gregory, A treatise of schisme. Shewing, that al Catholikes ought in any wise to abstaine altogether from heretical conventicles, to witt, their prayers, sermons &c. 8o (ARCR 524) 9 c. 1578 Fisher, John, Bp. and Cardinal, A spirituall consolation . . . written to his sister Elizabeth, at such tyme as hee was prisoner in the Tower of London. 8o [together with a Good Friday sermon on the Passion] (ARCR 273) 214

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10 c. 1578 The mirror of consolation, shewing twentie fruites proceeding of tribulation: very comfortable for al suche as are in any wayes afflicted. 8o (unrecorded in ARCR or STC: only copy in Bodley described by G. Groom, Bodleian Library Record, Vol. XVI, Oct. 1999, pp. 499–502) 11 c. 1578–79 Canisius, Peter, SJ, Certayne necessarie principles of religion, which may be entituled, A catechisme conteyning all the partes of the Christian and Catholique fayth . . . now amplified and Englished by T.I. 8o [translation of Catechismus parvus, designed for adult laity] (ARCR 462) 12 1579 Loarte, Gaspare, SJ, The exercise of a Christian life. 8o [translator ‘James Sancer’, pseudonym of Stephen Brinkley] (ARCR 63) 13 1579 Loarte, Gaspare, SJ, Instructions and advertisements, how to meditate the misteries of the rosarie of the most holy virgin Mary. 8o [translated by John Fenn] (ARCR 269) 14 c. 1579 Loarte, Gaspare, SJ, The godly garden of Gethsemani. 16o in 8s [another edition of (6) above] (ARCR 897) 15 c. 1579 Certaine devout and godly petitions, commonly called, Iesus Psalter. 16o in 8s (ARCR 195) 16 1582 Alfield, Thomas, A true reporte of the death & martyrdome of M. Campion jesuite and preiste, & M. Sherwin, & M. Bryan preistes . . . Observid and written by a Catholike priest, which was present thereat. 8o [Richard Verstegan was prosecuted for printing this book, but Carter may have assisted him] (ARCR 4) In many cases the dates of Carter’s publications are approximate, but the above list is arranged more or less in chronological order – 1 to 7 in collaboration with John Lion, the remainder on his own. Even a cursory glance reveals a clear publishing policy. All the books are directed primarily at the laity and all, with the arguable exception of Martin’s Treatise of Schism are devotional, edificational and non-polemica1; furthermore, they include pre-Reformation as well as postReformation spirituality. This is very different from the policy behind Fr Persons’s ‘Greenstreet House’ press, which was aggressively polemical, clerical and determinedly up-to-the-minute. The sequence of the following comments will seek to emphasize the pre- and post-Reformation elements. A.C. Southern19 provides the best analysis and commentary on most of the items in Carter’s stocklist, and D.M. Rogers’s article ‘The English Recusants: some medieval literary links’ (RH, Vol. XXIII, 1996/7, pp. 483–507) puts Carter’s publishing policy in a more general context. Carter’s first publication (1), circa 1575 but dated 1556, is literally a ‘masterpiece’. It is a line-by-line bogus edition of Richard Whitford’s translation of the Imitatio Christi, originally published by his master, John Cawood in 1556. The whole point of making it appear to have been published in 1556, i.e. under Queen

19 See note 4, above.

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Figure 14.1 Richard Topcliffe’s notes on Gregory Martin’s Treatise of Schism (1578). Bodleian Library 8o C.95(3) Th, front flyleaf. Source: Reproduced courtesy of the Bodleian Library.

Mary, was so that it could innocently include the Fourth Book, ‘Concerning the Sacrament’, mostly omitted in the Protestant versions (the genuine 1556 edition collates A-T8; V4; A-E8 – Carter’s spurious edition collates A-T8). Another pre-Reformation text was the Iesus Mattens (2) of Henry Suso OP, an anonymous translation of the Little Office of Eternal Wisdom, part of Suso’s Horologium Sapientiae. The first English translation of Suso was in Caxton’s

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Figure 14.2 Bodleian Library 8o C.95(3) Th, sig. D. ii recto. Source: Reproduced courtesy of the Bodleian Library.

Book of Diverse Ghostly Matters (1491), and the English text of the Little Office was incorporated in the Sarum Primer of 1536. But Carter’s text represents a wholly new and contemporary translation, both of the prose and the hymn versions. A.C. Southern gives considerable coverage to this book, and amply illustrates the excellent quality of the prose and verse translation.

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Figure 14.3 Bodleian Library 8o C.95(3) Th, sig. D. ii verso. Source: Reproduced courtesy of the Bodleian Library.

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The mirror of consolation (10), recently discovered and hitherto unknown and unrecorded,20 is an edition of The rote or mirror of consolation, of which four editions were published by Wynkyn de Worde (1496–1530); this is an amplification, for the laity, of Peter of Blois’s The twelve profytes of tribulation of which three editions were published by Caxton and de Worde (1491–1530). The Jesus Psalter (15) was a popular mediaeval devotion consisting of 150 invocations of the Holy Name. It had been printed by Copland in 1529 and incorporated into several of the Sarum Primers. Then, in 1575, it was edited by John Fowler, one of the most prolific recusant publishers on the Continent. Fowler’s edition contained a second part, Godly contemplations of the unlearned, comprising 62 illustrative cuts. Carter published his edition about 1579, without the cuts, but with the false imprint and false date, ‘Antwerpiae, apud Johannem Foulerum 1575’. At the very cusp of the Henrician reformation comes St John Fisher’s A Spiritual Consolation (9), written in the Tower before his execution and addressed to his half-sister, Elizabeth White, a Dominican nun at Dartford Priory, Kent. (The book also includes Fisher’s Good Friday sermon on the Passion.) Carter must have printed it from a manuscript in Harpsfield’s papers, and Harpsfield, as Archdeacon of Canterbury, would have acquired a copy from the aged Elizabeth during his visitations in the reign of Queen Mary. These late-mediaeval meditations on death and the Passion make pretty grim reading, but Carter thought it suitable for Elizabethan Catholics awaiting execution. The old STC (1926) following A.H. Bullen,21 dates the publication of this book to 1535, the year of Fisher’s execution. No modern writers on Fisher make any comment on the true publication date of 1578, or the fact that we owe the preservation of these important works of Fisher to Harpsfield and Carter. Now let us turn to Carter’s ‘modern’ books. The word conferture is not to be found in the OED, but it was in current use in Elizabethan English.22 Members of the gentry and the aristocracy who still clung to their papist ways, perhaps out of habit or noblesse oblige, were required to reside with their local Protestant bishop, or one of his appointed chaplains, for ‘conferture about religion’ – one is tempted to use the anachronistic term brainwashing. So an up-to-date statement of Catholic faith for the laity was required, and Carter chose a translation of Albin de Valsergues (3), a current French best-seller. Frankly, it is a bit of a dud: the French flowery rhetoric sounds even worse in English translation. But what is really important in the book is the second part, or appendix, William Allen’s ‘Scroll of Articles’. It was Allen’s declared policy from the outset that the theological training of the young missioners at Douay should be practical rather than speculative,

20 See G. Groom, Bodleian Library Record, Vol XVI (Oct. 1999), pp. 499–502. 21 Catalogue of the Books in the Library of the British Museum . . . to the Year 1640, 3 vols. (1884). 22 Sir Thomas Cornwallis is a case in point: see P. McGrath & Joy Rowe, ‘The Recusancy of Sir Thomas Cornwallis’, Proc. Suffolk Inst. of Archaeology, Vol. XXVIII (1958–60), pp. 226–71.

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and directed towards a laity ill-equipped to confront a triumphalist Protestantism. The ‘Scroll of Articles’ was something like what in modern management-speak we might call ‘bullet points’. Dr Richard Bristow, Allen’s principal lecturer at Douay, had elaborated the ‘Scroll’ into 48 numbered points (referred to at Campion’s trial as ‘Bristow’s Motives’), published at Antwerp in 1574. Unfortunately the English consignment was seized by the government. So Allen’s ‘Scroll’ was printed in England by Carter as a hasty improvisation, and as an attempt to repair some of the damage. For nearly two decades the Catholic laity had been deprived of the physical objects of popular piety: crucifixes, agnus deis, and of course rosary beads. Allen had been concerned that such things should be smuggled into England. A Brief directory to say the rosary (4) was an attempt to revive a lost practice of meditation. In his preface the editor, ‘I.M.’, purportedly writing from Bruges, tells his sister that while he was writing out the meditations to send her a copy, his cousin and friend I. Noil came along and said he would print them together with some other material. One does not have to be much of a cryptographer to realize that ‘I. Noil’ is John Lion, Carter’s partner. The whole preface is simply a mystification. J.H. Pollen SJ found a John Mitchell among the Carthusians at Bruges, to fit the ‘I.M.’, but this identification is of dubious value. The additional material included extracts from the Speculum Vitae Christi attributed to St Bonaventure, translated by Nicholas Love, and printed by Caxton and Wynkyn de Worde; and also the ‘Fifteen Oes’, attributed to St Bridget of Sweden, printed by Caxton (1491) and included in several of the Sarum Primers. So within the covers of a single volume we have ‘modern’ devotional literature combined with traditional well-tried preReformation material. Carter’s ‘modern’ writers included two Jesuits. Of Peter Canisius a small volume of meditations in 1576 (5) and the Catechism c. 1578–9 (11). Laurence Vaux’s Catechism (ostensibly for children rather than adults) had first appeared in 1568, and there were subsequent editions in 1574 and 1580, but it was not until the 1583 edition that it circulated widely in England – so Carter’s edition of Canisius answered a real need. The other Jesuit author was Gaspare Loarte.23 Carter published two editions of The godlie garden of Gethsemani (6) and (14); a book of meditations on the rosary (13) translated by John Fenn; and (12) The exercise of a Christian life, translated by Stephen Brinkley under the alias of James Sancer. (James Sancer is an Anglicization of Diego Sanchez, the name of a worthy Spanish Jesuit canonist whom Brinkley had met in Rome.)24 There is a considerable stylistic improvement in the second edition of 1584, issued by Persons’s press at 23 There is no article on Loarte in either the Catholic Encyclopaedia or the New Catholic Encyclopaedia. J.F. Gilmont, Les écrits spirituels des premiers Jesuites: inventaire commenté (Rome 1961), pp. 260–8 is useful. There is an extensive article in the Dictionnaire de Spiritualité, Vol. IX (Paris 1976) by Manuel Ruiz Jurado. 24 F. Edwards (ed.), The Elizabethan Jesuits (Phillimore 1981), pp. 153, 375.

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Rouen: did Persons himself take a hand? – the work certainly influenced his Book of Christian exercise (Rouen 1582). Brinkley’s preface to the first edition of his translation of Loarte’s Exercise of a Christian life is entirely devoted to praise of the Jesuits. The presence in Carter’s stocklist of two of the early Jesuit publicists, Canisius and Loarte, was part of a deliberate policy – Carter was the harbinger of the Jesuit mission of 1580. It has been suggested that Carter may have assisted Richard Verstegan in the printing and publishing of (16), Alfield’s eye-witness account of Campion’s execution. The book was printed in February 1582, when Carter was out of prison and, as we shall see shortly, it fits in with his concern with manuscripts of Campion’s disputations and trial. Format, or size, is an important feature of Carter’s stocklist. He never published a quarto, let alone a folio, and his octavos were all of the smallest size (average printed area 12 x 7.5 cms). But seven out of fifteen of his publications are 16° in 8s, i.e. virtually miniature books (average printed area 6 x 8 cms). They were not for library shelves, but for concealment in the turnup of a cuff. A short and absolute order of confession (7), for instance, could be concealed between the pages of, say, an Elizabethan jest-book.

Carter’s scriptorium In 1604 the irrepressible and heroically verbose Thomas Pounde presented King James I with a dossier of religious polemic originally written in the days of Queen Elizabeth. He had had copies made ‘in a hand as fair written as well known to numbers of witnesses, namely of one William Carter, who was executed for the Catholic cause’.25 This establishes Carter as a professional scribe, concerned with the circulation of polemical and contentious material. The chief source of Carter’s manuscript material was the Harpsfield Nachlass, and of that the first and most obvious was Harpsfield’s Life of Thomas More, of which there are eight extant manuscripts. In the extremely elaborate and conscientious prolegomena to her edition for the Early English Text Society (1932), Elsie V. Hitchcock takes as her copy text MS Emmanuel College Cambridge 76. It had been seized by Richard Topcliffe on 13 April 1582 in the study of Thomas More of Barnborough (grandson of St Thomas More) who was living in the house of Francis Waferer26 at ‘Greenstreet’. By careful collation Hitchcock establishes that this was a copy, made by Carter as Harpsfield’s amanuensis, and that the significant corrections in other copies derive from this copy text. So far so good. But in

25 Bodley MS Rawl. D.320. I am indebted for this reference to Dr Stefania Tutino’s article in RH, Vol. XXVII, May 2004. For Thomas Pounde see H. Foley, Records SJ, Vol. III (1878), pp. 567–657. 26 Francis Waferer later became a priest: G. Anstruther, The Seminary Priests, Vol. I (Ware 1968), p. 368.

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accounting for the corrections derived from this text, Hitchcock’s otherwise very sober analysis veers off into the realms of fantasy: Carter, Harpsfield’s amanuensis, was travelling about the country, lurking in the houses of Papist gentry, and carrying with him autograph manuscripts of Harpsfield, hoping for an occasion when he might be able to print them. He may well have shown a copy to his host, and his host may well have replied, ‘I have a copy of that myself, but it is so corrupt that in many places I can’t make sense of it’. Carter would correct his host’s copy from the autograph he carried about with him. The idea of Carter ‘lurking’ in Papist gentry houses, hoping to get Harpsfield’s Life of More printed, and casually correcting his host’s copies, is flatly contradictory to what we have established as his publishing policy. He had no intention of printing and publishing a work of that nature. He was running a scriptorium for the sale of polemical, contentious historical works. He was not only himself a scribe, but would employ other copyists and correct their work from his master copy – of course, once he had sold one of his productions, he had no control over the making of further copies from it. Ubi Harpsfield ibi Roper. Harpsfield’s Life of More draws so heavily on William Roper’s Life, that it is reasonable to assume that a copy of Roper would also have been in the Harpsfield Nachlass. There are thirteen extant manuscripts of Roper’s Life: Hitchcock takes BL MS Harley 6254 as the copy text for her EETS edition (1935), though it has not the provenance or textual authority of MS Emmanuel 76. As we have seen in the account of Carter’s biography, John Lord Lumley was Carter’s patron and near neighbour. Sears Jayne’s The Lumley Library (1956) enables us to trace many of Carter’s transcripts of the Harpsfield Nachlass. Lumley commissioned multiple copies of Harpsfield’s ‘Historia Ecclesiastica Anglicana’: BL MS Royal 13.c.IX; BL MS Stowe 106; Lambeth Palace MS 53–4 – these are all in characteristic Lumley bindings. There is also another copy of the text in BL MS Arundel 73–4. In Lambeth MS 140 there are Harpsfield’s ‘Historia Wicleviana’ and ‘Life of Christ’, also in Lumley bindings. It is not clear whether Lumley actually presented these manuscripts as a douceur to the Archbishop of Canterbury, or whether they were ‘borrowed’ after Lumley’s library became part of the Royal Library in 1609. Lumley also owned John Harpsfield’s copy of Ruusbroec’s Opera Omnia (printed Cologne 1552) now at Lambeth, and John Harpsfield’s MS Greek translation of Virgil’s Aeneid Bk I, now BL MS Royal 16.c.VIII – he presumably acquired both of these from Carter. There are two MSS of indubitable Carter provenance now in the Bibliothèque Nationale: Nicholas Harpsfield’s ‘Treatise on the Pretended Divorce’ (Bib. Nat. MS Lat. 6051) and ‘Cranmer’s Recantacyons’ (Bib. Nat. MS Lat. 6056), both

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endorsed ‘Found in my house William Carter 17 July 1582’.27 The Bib. Nat. MS on the Divorce was used by the very astute Oratorian Joachim Le Grand in his book against Gilbert Burnet, Histoire du Divorce d’Henri VIII (Paris 1688).28 The MS of ‘Cranmer’s Recantacyons’ is an account of Cranmer’s last days at Oxford, and was edited by James Gairdner for the Philobiblon Society Miscellany, Vol. XV (1877). Gairdner rejects Nicholas Harpsfield as the author, because there is a reference in the third person to ‘Harpsfeldus theologiae doctor’. But Nicholas was a doctor of canon law, and it was his brother John who was a doctor of theology and present at Oxford during Cranmer’s last days: who better to know the difference between the doctorates than Nicholas himself – he was writing up his brother’s eye-witness account. These two Bib. Nat. texts were first spotted by Lord Acton; his pioneering article on Harpsfield, written on the notepaper of the Athenaeum Club, first appeared in the Academy 20 June 1876. Acton refers to Harpsfield as an ‘Erasmian’, which Harpsfield most certainly was not. The question remains, how did these two Harpsfield MSS, owned by Carter, get into the Bib. Nat. between the catalogue of 1624 and that of 1682? The answer is probably via Colbert, who had a keen eye for English historica1 MSS. He had an agent in England, a Mr Frazier, and also on occasion used the services of the French ambassador in London.29 But Carter was not only involved in the circulation of Harpsfield’s MSS. In the period of his freedom between June 1581 and July 1582 he was certainly involved in the transcription and circulation of the authentic accounts of Campion’s disputations in the Tower in August and September 1581.30 BL MS Harley 422 includes transcripts of the disputations, seized by Richard Topcliffe at Carter’s house in July 1582. Topcliffe gave (or sold) the MSS to John Foxe, ‘the martyrologist’; John Strype acquired them from Foxe and in 1709 sold them to Humfrey Wanley, the Harleian librarian. (C.E. Wright, Fontes Harleiani [1972] traces the provenance back to Foxe, but discreetly omits to mention either Carter or Topcliffe.) Aylmer, Norton and Beale were opposed in principle to the whole idea of the disputations;31 for some of the disputations no proper records were kept on the Protestant side and the Government originally had no intention of publishing an ‘official’ version. But Carter’s manuscript ‘Catholic’ version had circulated so

27 Other copies of the Treatise on the Divorce are at BL MS Add. 33737; BL MS Arundel 51; MS Yelverton 72 (now BL); New College Oxford MS 311. There are modern editions by N. Pocock (1878) and Charles Bémont (Paris 1917). 28 For Le Grand see Niceron, Mémoires (Paris 1734), Vol. XXVI. 29 P. Clement (ed.), Lettres de Colbert (1861–82), Vol. VII, pp. 124, 134–5, 178; C. Jolly (ed.), Les Bibliothèques sous l’Ancien Régime 1530–1787 (Paris 1986), pp. 162, 178 (note 96). 30 Carter’s texts are printed by J.V. Holleran in A Jesuit Challenge (Fordham U.P. 1999). 31 Strype, Annals, Vol. II, pt. 2, pp. 360–4; Strype, Parker, Vol. III, pp. 212–4; T. Wright (ed.), Queen Elizabeth and Her Times (London 1838), Vol. II, p. 155; HMC 12 Rep. App. IV letter of Beale to Earl of Rutland 18 Sept. 1581.

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widely that two years later an ‘official’ version was published ‘by order of the Council’, by Christopher Barker, the Queen’s Printer and a protégé of Sir Francis Walsingham. It was perforce a scissors-and-paste job, cobbled together from the notes of the Protestant protagonists and Carter’s version. As for Campion’s trial, no ‘official’ contemporary version was ever published. The only printed text is in T.B. Howell’s State Trials Vol. I (1809) cols 1049–73, and this is derived from BL MS Sloane 1132,32 which is clearly several stages away from an original MS, and was owned by a Samuel Randal in 1671. Richard Simpson in his Edmund Campion: A biography (London 1896) must have used the Sloane MS as well as the 1809 printed version, though he makes no mention of his sources, and subsequent writers have never even gone behind Simpson. What no one so far has bothered to do is to discuss the provenance and authenticity of the text. An examination of the internal evidence makes clear that it was written by an eyewitness, and a Catholic eyewitness at that. The ‘I’ form appears in col. 1069: ‘the prisoners took exception to another of the witnesses, which of them I know not’. In general, all the evidence of the prosecution witnesses is given in indirect speech and in compressed and summary form; the speeches of the accused, on the other hand, are given in full direct speech. The narrator is concerned with the emotional state of the accused, e.g. their reaction to the speech of Anderson for the prosecution: ‘this speech, very vehemently pronounced with a grim and austere countenance, dismayed them all . . . only Campion bore it out best, and yet somewhat amazed demanded of Mr. Anderson whether he came as an orator to accuse them, or as a pleader to give in evidence’ (col. 1053). Then follows a speech by Campion, with all the devices of Ciceronian oratory, clearly verbatim and so vivid that it comes at you straight off the page (col. 1053). In order to undermine Campion’s moral credibility as a priest, the prosecution made much of the fact that Campion went about disguised in ‘a velvet hat and a feather, a buff leather jerkin, velvet venetians’ – venetians were very gaudily coloured hose. Campion replies that he regrets having had to wear such flashy clothes and ‘I therefore now do penance as you see me’. Our narrator then adds ‘He was newly shaven, in a rug gown [i.e. a gown of very rough cloth] and a great black night-cap covering half his face’ (cols 1059–60). This completely demolishes the prosecutor’s point and creates a wholly sympathetic picture of Campion as a tragic figure. More examples from internal evidence could be adduced, but these should be sufficient to establish that the only extant manuscript narrative of the trial of Campion and his companions is a Catholic one; perhaps it is so obvious that previous writers have taken it for granted – but they have never bothered to say so. Now if the manuscript is from a Catholic source, and Carter certainly copied the

32 In the quotations from State Trials given below I have corrected the text from Sloane 1132. There is another copy, in a better hand but probably less authentic, at BL MS Harley 6265.

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manuscripts of Campion’s disputations in the Tower, of August and September 1581, is it not reasonable to assume that he may have copied the manuscript of Campion’s trial in November of the same year?33

Conclusion The purpose of this study has been neither pious hagiography nor nostalgic antiquarianism. It could not have been begun without the technical expertise of Allison and Rogers in the field of bibliography, in establishing Carter’s printed stocklist; and of Sears Jayne, in the field of library history, in establishing the existence of Carter’s manuscript scriptorium. Starting from those facts it has been possible to produce a picture of a little man, a jobbing printer and a jobbing scribe, with a clear and definite policy: a policy that was counter-cultural and counter-political. In the vital half decade 1575–80, he provided the English Catholic laity with a spiritual library that combined the best of the traditional mediaeval classics with the latest post-Tridentine practical devotion. And from his scriptorium he provided them with the materials for the true story of More, Fisher and the Henrician reformation; for the true story of Cranmer’s last days; and for the true story of Campion and the first Jesuit mission. He had arrayed against him the most powerful clique of the protestant-puritan establishment – Walsingham, Aylmer, Norton and Beale – to say nothing of Topcliffe. The modern historian also owes a debt to Carter. It is hard to imagine the absence of such texts as Fisher’s meditations in the Tower, Roper’s and Harpsfield’s lives of More and Campion’s trial. ‘A poor innocent artisan’, on an uncertain income of twenty pounds a year, William Carter has made his mark on history.

33 Fr Henry More SJ had a copy of this MS when he was writing his Latin history of the English Jesuit province (1660): he refers to it as ‘Actio Westmonasteriensis’.

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INDEX

Abbot, George 88 Abercrombie, N. 159 Acton, John Dalberg, Lord Acton 85–6, 223 Agretti, Claudio 64n66, 69–71, 76, 80 Agrippa, H.C. 143 Airoldi, Carlo Francesco 66, 72, 74–6, 80 Alabaster, William 200 Alberigi, Mgr 63 Albin de Valsergues, Jean 219 Albion, Gordon 90n10 Albizzi, Franceso, Cardinal 52, 63, 65, 166n12, 167, 172 Alcott, Bronson Amos 142–3, 146, 154 Aldobrandini, Ippolito (Clemens VIII) 181 Alexander VII, Pope (Fabio Chigi), Pope 52–5, 60, 166, 168 Alfield, Thomas 200, 207, 221 Allen, William, Cardinal 48, 191, 201, 204, 209, 211, 213, 219–20 Allison, A.F. 157–60, 189–99, 204, 225 Alsop, Bernard 187 Altieri, Emilio, Cardinal (Clement X) 72 Alvarez, Balthazar 114, 116 Alvarez de Paz, Diego 107, 128 Anderson, Edward 210, 213, 224 Anderson, Lionel 100n18 Andrewes, Lancelot 154n121 Angela of Foligno 132 Anstey, T.C. 1 Anstruther, Godfrey 45, 160 Arblaster, Paul 199–203 Arbuthnot, John 132 Aretino, Pietro 193 Arias de Armenta, Alvaro 196 Aristotle 143, 203 Arnold, Gottfried 122, 125, 141 Arnolds, the 27

Ars Cogitandi 118 Aubigny, Ludovic Stuart 54, 58–60, 62, 76, 79, 172 Aubrey, John 210 Augier, Stephan 182 Augustine, Saint 119, 132, 150 Austin, John 8n12 Aveling, J.H. 158 Aylmer, John 206, 207n6, 208, 210, 212–13, 223, 225 Azzolino, Decio, Cardinal 65, 172 Babbitt, Irving 154 Babington, Anthony 210 Bacon, Francis 197 Bacon, Robert 108–10, 122–3, 128 Bainbridge, W.S. 201 Baines, Peter 38–9 Baker, Augustine 102–56 Baker, Thomas 133 Baldeschi, Federico 65, 69, 72–8, 80–1 Ballard, George 135–6 Baltimore, Cecilius Calvert, Lord 63 Barbanson, Constantine 113 Barber, Edward 109 Barberini, Antonio, Cardinal 61, 81, 166 Barberini, Carlo, Cardinal 161, 163–4, 166 Barberini, Franceso 53, 65–6, 68–72, 79, 84, 87–8, 166, 172, 185 Barberini, Maffeo, Cardinal (Urban VIII) 183 Barclay, John 191 Barclay, Robert 113–14 Barclay, William 191 Bargellini, Niccolo Pietro 57, 64–5 Barker, Christopher 223 Barlow, Thomas 10, 11, 13, 17 Barnes, John 191

226

INDEX

Barnes, William 193 Baronius, Caesar 178 Bateman, Anthony 111 Bates, William 139n81 Batt, Anthony 192, 195 Battista, Giovanni 72, 166–7 Baxter, Richard 110, 113 Beale, Robert 208–9, 223, 225 Beaumont, John 136n73 Bedell, William 197 Bedford, Sybille 154 Bedloe, William 18–19 Bellings, Richard 58–9, 80 Belloc, Hilaire 31 Belloc Lowndes, Marie Adelaide 151 Benedict, Saint 120 Benedictines 4, 39, 59, 93–4, 96–7, 99, 103–4, 111, 114, 117, 192–3 Benezet, Anthony 108 Bennet, Henry, Lord Arlington 60, 75n127, 161–77 Bentham, Jeremy 22 Bentley, Mary 107 Bentley, Richard 134 Berington, Joseph 42, 54, 86–91 Berkeley, John, Baron Berkeley of Stratton 75 Bernard of Clairvaux 105 Bernières de Louvigny, Jean 107 Bickerton, Jane 163 Binans, J.F. (Debenham) 183 Bishop, William 49 Blackborrow, Mr 110 Blacklo see White, Thomas (alias Blacklo) Blackwell, George 66 Blackwood, Adam 191 Blosius 107, 118, 120, 128, 146 Boehm, A.W. 108n14, 129 Boehme, Jacob 107, 110, 112, 115, 119, 126, 132, 133n63, 135–41, 143 Bolingbroke, Henry Saint-John 121 Bonaventure 105, 150, 220 Bongaerts, T. 160 Borromeo, Charles 196 Bossuet, Jacques Bénigne 154 Bossy, J. 157, 160 Boswell, Henry 89n6 Bourignon, Antoinette 123–4, 130, 132–3, 143 Bowler, H. 158 Bramhall, John 154n121 Bray, Thomas 130 Brémond, Henri 153

Brett, Arthur 90 Bridgit of Sweden 119, 143, 220 Bright, Timothy 202 Brinkley, Stephen 200, 205, 220–1 Bristow, Richard 220 Bromley, Thomas 136 Brooke, Henry 136–9 Brooke, Thomas Digby 136 Brougham, Henry 22 Brown, John 178–88 Brownson, Orestes 146 Bruneau, Robert 202 Buckingham, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham 32, 75n127, 80 Bunny, Edmund 197 Bunyan, John 111–12, 125 Burke, Edmund 27 Burnet, Gilbert 115–18, 223 Burton, Robert 202 Butler, Charles 34–5, 42, 159 Butler, Cuthbert 14n24 Butler, Joseph 135 Byrom, John 134–5, 139, 143 Byron, George Gordon 22 Cajetan, Cardinal (Tommaso de Vio) 180 Calamy, Edmund 106 Camden, William 103, 201, 204 Campbell, Alexander 144 Campion, Edmund 38, 191, 200, 205, 207, 210, 214, 220–1, 223–5 Camus, Jean-Pierre 115, 195 Canfield, Benet of 102–56, 136, 153, 191 Canisius, Petrus 196, 220–1 Canning, George 22 Capuchins 103, 146 Carier, Benjamin 197 Carmelites 94, 113, 141 Caron, Redmond 42 Carre, Thomas 51, 53, 57, 64n64, 65 Carter, Anne 208 Carter, Jane 207–8 Carter, Robert 205 Carter, William 204–25 Carthusians 103, 117, 220 Carvajal, Louisa de 191 Cary, Elizabeth, Lady Falkland 193 Cary, Henry, Viscount Falkland 99 Cary, Lucius, Viscount Falkland 103 Casaubon, Isaac 178, 202 Cassian 105, 116, 120, 132 Castellio, Sebastian 106 Castelvetro, Giacomo 182

227

INDEX

Castlemaine see Palmer, Roger, Earl of Castlemaine Castlereagh, Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh 43 Catherina of Genoa 136, 149n104 Catherina of Siena 119, 136 Catherine of Braganza, Queen 77, 93, 95 Catholic Archives Society 157 Catholic Emancipation Act 1, 27–9, 33, 36 Catholic Record Society 2, 157 Catholic Truth Society 31 Cawood, John 205, 209, 211–12, 215 Caxton, William 216–17, 220 Caynes, Mr 207 Cecil, William, Baron Burghley 45, 204, 206–7 Celada, Diego de 180 Cerri, Urban 78, 81 Chambers, Robert 150 Chapman, John 152–3 Chapter secular clergy 43, 49–82, 83, 95–6, 98, 158 Charles I, King 84, 86, 88–90, 167, 184–5, 193 Charles II, King 2, 6, 8n12, 12, 50–1, 53, 58, 60, 62, 67–8, 75, 78, 96, 109, 163–4, 169–71, 174–6 Chaucer, Geoffrey 92 Chesterton, Gilbert Keith 23 Cheyne, George 108n14, 132–3, 135 Chigi, Fabio (Alexander VII) 51n9, 57, 65, 166, 168 Chigi, Flavio, Cardinal 172 Chillingworth, William 99, 104 Ciotti, G.B. 182 Clancy, T. 159 Clarendon, Edward Hyde, Lord 44–5, 57, 59, 79–80, 95, 104, 166, 176 Clement VII, Pope (Giulio de Medici) 168 Clement VIII, Pope (Ippolito Aldobrandini) 168, 181, 183 Clement IX, Pope (Giacomo Rospigliosi) 61, 64, 71, 172 Clement X, Pope (Emilio Altieri) 166 Clifford, Thomas, Baron Clifford of Chudleigh 40, 64n64, 75 Clifford, William 51–3 Climachus 105 Cobbett, William 31–7 Colbert, Jean Baptiste 75, 223 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 27–31, 37, 114 Colledge, Edmund 102 Collett, John 110–11

Collingridge, Peter Barnardine 38–42, 45–6 Colonna, Prospero, Cardinal 166 Colosini, G.B. 182 Condé, Henri de Bourbon, Prince of Condé 168 Confucius 143 Congregation of Propaganda Fide 2, 3, 52–4, 57, 63–4, 66–74, 76, 78, 80–1, 161, 173–4, 183n19, 184, 187–8; Congregation for English Affairs 55, 65, 68, 72–4, 81; Congregation for Irish Affairs 167 Conn, George 88 Consalvi, Ercole, Cardinal 34, 43–4, 46 Conway, Anne 110 Cooke, Thomas 129, 130–1 Coombes, William 32 Copland, Robert 219 Copley, Anthony 197 Corbet, John 108 Corker, Edward 93 Corker, Francis 92n3, 93 Corker, James Maurus 4, 13–16, 92–4, 97–101 Cornwallis, Thomas 219 Cosimo de Medici 68, 73 Cottington, Francis 89n5 Cotton, Robert 93, 103–4n4 Courtney, Edward 88 Courtney, Thomas 53 Cowper (Cooper) of Lancashire 209, 211 Cranmer, Thomas 209, 222, 225 Crashaw, Richard 143 Cressy, Serenus (Hugh Paulin) 75, 80, 99, 100n17, 102–65, 176 Creswell, Joseph 191, 202 Croft, Herbert 196 Cromwell, Oliver 50, 53, 58n45, 78, 95 Cromwell, Richard 163 Crosse, Gordon 206 Cunningham, James 130–2 Cusa, Nicholas of 106, 108, 113 Dallas, R.C. 47 Daniel, Edward 52 Dante Alighieri 149–50 Darbyshire, Robert 103 Darcy, Oliver 59 Davenport, Christopher (Santa Clara OFM) 80, 89, 176 Deacon, Thomas 135 Declaration of indulgence 75

228

INDEX

Deichmann, Heinrich Johann 126, 129–30 Dempster, Thomas 191 Digby, George 58 Digby, Kenelm 52, 57, 83n2, 84–5, 100, 143, 197 Dionysius (Denis) the Areopagite 105, 107, 116, 120–1, 136 Dionysius (Denis van Rijckel) the Carthusian 105 Dockery, J.B. 38–41, 45, 47 Dodd, Charles 7, 54 Dodwell, Henry 126 Dominicans 59, 94 Donne, John 125 Doolittle, Hilda 151 Dorset, Charles Sackville, Earl of Dorset 100n18 Douglass, John 41, 46 Dowson, Ernest 151 Doyle, I.A. 191 Doyle, James, Bishop of Kildare 34 Drexelius, Hieremias 115 Dryden, John 13, 92, 94, 96–101 Du Cange, Charles de Fresne, Sieur Du Cange 181n11 Duffy, E. 158–9 Dugdale, William 97 Dunigan and Kirker, publishers 145, 147n97 Dunn, Joseph 32 Du Perron, Jacques Davy 193 Durantus, Gonsalvus 119 Eaton, John 145n89 Eccleston, Thomas of 38 Eckhart 108, 141, 150 Edward VI, King 99 Eliot, T.S. 110, 148, 151–2, 154–5 Elizabeth I, Queen 86, 91, 99, 206, 209–12 Ellis, Humphrey 55–6, 58–9, 62, 63, 65–6 Ellis, Philip 97 Elton, G.R. 195 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 115, 142, 145–6, 154 Englefield, Francis 211 English College Douay 16, 50–1, 61–2, 65–7, 71, 77, 79, 85, 159–60, 164–5, 191, 211, 219–20 English College Rome 53, 63, 167, 195 Essex, Arthur Capel, Earl of Essex 75 Evangelista, Joannes 141 Evenett, H.O. 160 Everard, Dunstan 96 Everard, John 107–8, 128, 130, 153

Everard, Thomas 195 Exclusion Crisis 100 Faber, E.W. 147 Faithhorne, William 112 Falkener, John 55 Falkland see Cary, Elizabeth, Lady Falkland; Cary, Henry, Viscount Falkland; Cary, Lucius, Viscount Falkland 103 Farrell, Mr 24–5 Faunt, Laurence Arthur 191 Fénelon 123, 143 Fenn, James 214 Fenn, John 210, 220 Fenton, John 182 Ferrar, Nicholas 110–11 Ficino, Marsilio 115, 121 Fiennes, William 109 Filomarino, Asciano, Cardinal 166 Fisher, John, Cardinal 15, 181, 219, 225 Fitch, William see Canfield, Benet of Fitton, Peter 50, 52–3, 89n6 Fleetwood, William 210, 213 Fletcher, J.W. 138n80 Flinton, George 200 Floyd, John 191 Foote, Daniel 107 Forbes, Thomas 71–8, 81 Fouqué, Friedrich de la Motte 147 Fowler, John 191, 219 Fox, George 122 Foxe, John 223 Franciscans 38–41, 59, 94, 180 Francis de Sales 107, 118, 125, 128, 132, 194 Francis of Assisi 120, 125 Francis of Paola 180 Francke, A.H. 129 Frankenberg, Abraham von 110 Fransoni, J.P., Cardinal 34 Frazier, Mr 223 Frederick IV of Denmark, King 129 Freher, Dionysius Andreas 126–7, 130, 139–40 Frost, Bede 152–3 Fulke, William 197 Furly, Benjamin 107, 108n15, 122–4, 126, 135 Gabrieli, Giulio, Cardinal 167 Gadd, Ian 204 Gage, Francis 55–60, 62–3, 78

229

INDEX

Gage, George 50 Gairdner, James 223 Garden, George 130–3 Garden, James 130 Gardner, Helen 154 Garnett, Henry 195 Gascoigne, Francis 105 Gazil de la Benedière, Michel 162 Gell, Robert 110, 128, 130 George I, King 134 George III, King 91 George of Denmark, Prince 129 Gerard, Gilbert 210, 213 Gerard, John 38 Gertrude of Hackeborn 119 Gibbons, John 210 Gibbons, Richard 191, 195 Gibson, William 46 Gichtel, Johann Georg 139 Gilbert, George 205, 211 Gillow, Joseph 190 Giustinelli, Pietro 196 Godden, Thomas 62 Godwin, William 26 Gough, Stephen 51, 64n64 Gracian, Balthasar 196 Graham, Lucius 92n3 Granville, Denis 118 Grattan, Henry 14 Greaves, James Pierrepont 141, 143–5 Gregory XIII, Pope 183, 201 Grene, Martin 58 Grenville, Thomas 163n7 Grenville, William, Lord Grenville 22, 32, 41, 45 Grimaldi, Girolamo, Cardinal 188 Groom, Geoffrey 204 Guiney, L.I. 201 Gunpowder Plot 6, 8, 44, 86, 201 Guyon, Jeanne-Marie 108n14, 124, 132–3, 136–8, 143 Halifax, George Savile, Marquis of Halifax 75n127 Hamilton, John 197 Hammond, John 208 Harding, Thomas 196 Hare, Julius 27 Hargreave Parker, George 145n89 Harley, Robert, Earl of Oxford 133 Harpius (Hendrik Herp) 105–6, 113, 116, 120, 125

Harpsfield, John 205, 222–3 Harpsfield, Nicholas 205, 208–9, 211, 219, 221–3, 225 Harrington, Mark 50 Harris, P.R. 159 Harth, Philip 96 Hartley, David 132 Havard, Vincent 39 Hawkins, Francis 195 Hawkins, Henry 195 Hawkins, John 195 Hawkins, Thomas 195 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 145, 147 Hay, John 191 Hay, M.V. 176 Haydock, George 214 Hearne, Thomas 135 Hecker, Isaac Thomas 145–7 Heigham, John 195 Helmont, Jan Baptiste van 143 Hemerford, Thomas 214 Henderson, G.D. 130 Henrietta Maria, Queen 52–3, 79, 84, 88, 184–5 Henry IV, King of France 168 Henry VIII, King 86, 99, 168, 209 Henry Duke of Gloucester 84n3 Herbert, Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury 89 Herbert, George 143, 155n123 Hermes Trismegistus 108, 115, 121 Hewlett, Maurice 151 Heylyn, Peter 99 Hickes, George 133 Hicks, Leo 159 Higgons, Theophilus 197 Hilarione, Abbate 63 Hildegard of Bingen 150 Hilton, Walter 100, 102–56 Hippisley, John Coxe 46 Hitchcock, Elsie V. 221–2 Hobbes, Thomas 95, 154n121 Holden, Henry 44, 50–1, 53, 57–8, 83, 85, 95–6 Holland, Elizabeth Vassall Fox, Lady Holland 22 Holofernes 211–13 Holt, Alexander 60–72, 74, 76, 79–81 Holt, T.G. 160 Homer 149 Hopkins, Richard 195 Howard, Bernard, Duke of Norfolk 46

230

INDEX

Howard, Henry, Duke of Norfolk 60, 64, 161–77 Howard, Henry Frederick, Earl of Arundel 162 Howard, Philip OP 49, 60, 64–9, 71–8, 83, 176 Howard, Philip, Saint, Earl of Arundel 197, 208–10 Howard, Thomas, Duke of Norfolk 162, 206, 210–11 Howard, Thomas, Earl of Arundel 162–3 Howard, William, Viscount Stafford 13, 88, 91n12, 94, 100n18 Huddleston, John 96 Hügel, Friedrich von 149, 151, 153–5 Hughes, Philip 81 Huxley, Aldous 103, 140, 148, 152–4 Ignatius à Capua 182 Ignatius of Loyola 120, 125, 135n71 Ingoli, Francesco 187 Innocent X, Pope 52, 166 Innocent XI, Pope (Benedetto Odescalchi) 81 Irish Catholics 24–7, 29, 33, 35, 41–4, 68, 80, 84, 91 Irish Remonstrance 59, 80 Jackson, W.A. 189 Jamblichus 121 James I (VI), King 86, 91, 178, 181, 201, 221 James II, King 7, 13, 74, 93, 96, 169 Jaye, Henry 203 Jayne, Sears 222, 225 Jeffrey, Francis 147 Jesuit College Liège 16, 84 Jesuits 2, 4, 6, 8, 9, 16–19, 33, 44–8, 50, 52, 58–9, 70, 72–3, 83–4, 86–91n12, 93–6, 98, 101, 105, 107, 117, 126–7, 141, 160–1, 176, 181–3, 185, 195, 200, 203, 211–12, 220–1, 225 Jewel, John 196 Jews, the 183 Johannes à Jesu Maria 115 John of Avila 113 John of the Cross 125, 128, 131–2, 136, 146–7, 150, 154 John Paul II, Pope 204 Johnson, Samuel 132 Johnston, Henry Joseph 97 Johnston, Nathaniel 97

Jolly, Alexander 133 Jones, John 89 Joseph de Paris, Père 153 Judith 211–13 Juliana of Norwich 100, 102–56 Kabir 151 Keith, James 133 Ken, Thomas 134 Kendrick, T.D. 201 Kennedy, Quinton 197 Kent, Joseph 81 Kiliaan, Cornelius 201–2 Kinsman, William 195 Kirchberger, Clara 111 Knowles, Davis 102 Knox, John 197 Knox, Ronald 201 Kortholt, Christian 130n59 Kuipers, C.H. 197 Lafayette 26 Lambert, John 163 Lamy (Antoine Le Maistre) 143 Lane, Charles 142–3, 146–7 Langcake, Thomas 136 Lassels, Richard 54–5, 197 Laud, William 88, 114, 184–5 Law, William 132, 133n63, 134, 136–40, 143, 153 Lawless, John 26 Lawrence, D.H. 151, 154n119 Leade, Jane 126, 136 Lee, Francis 126–8, 130, 133–4, 139–40 Lee, Stephen 55 Le Grand, Joachim 223 Leighton, Ellis 114 Leighton, Robert 108n14, 114–15 Le Neve, Peter 135n71 Leo XII, Pope 33–4 Leslie, John 191, 207–10, 212 Leslie, Walter, Count Leslie 163 Leslie, William 3, 56–7, 60, 63–8, 70–1, 73, 78, 80, 161–77, 163 Lestrange, Roger 94 Leyburne, George 50–2, 54, 57–8, 61, 62–73, 76, 78–80, 85, 89, 164 Leyburne, John 49, 54, 61–2, 64, 67–9, 71, 79, 81 Lingard, J. 31, 42 Lipsius, Justus 203 Loarte, Gaspare 220–1

231

INDEX

Locke, John 24, 100n19, 122 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth 145 Loomie, A.J. 160 Louis de Granada 113 Louis XIV, King of France 2, 75 Love, Nicholas 220 Lucius, Ludovicus 193 Ludolph, H.W. 129 Lull, Raymond 113 Lumley, John, Lord 207–8, 222 Lumley, Richard, Viscount Lumley 68 Lunn, D. 160 Lutton, Edward 65, 67, 79 Lye, Thomas 106 Lyon (Lion), John 205, 215, 220 Macarius of Egypt 136 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 19, 22 McCaghwell, Hugh 191 McCann, T. 158 McEvilly, D. 158 McGrath, P. 158 Machen, Arthur 151 Maculani, Vincenzo, Cardinal 166n11 Maidalchini, Donna Olympia 167 Maidalchini, Francesco, Cardinal 167 Maihew, Edward 196 Maitland, Francis 184 Maitland, Samuel Roffey 91 Maldonatus, Joannes 178 Malebranche, Nicolas 134, 143 Mangelli, Andrea 51 Manly, Robert 62 Marescotti, Galeazzo 172–3 Margaret of Valois, Queen 168 Marsh, James 115n26 Martin, Gregory 210–11, 213–14 Martz, Louis 159 Mary of Modena, Queen 93 Mary, Queen of Scots 191, 206, 208, 210–12 Masius, Andreas 178 Massey, Richard Middleton 133, 135 Massy, Edward 109 Mathew, David 198, 201 Matthew, Tobie 195, 197 Maurice, F.D. 27 Mazarin, Jules, Cardinal 168 Meal Tub Plot 11 Mechtild of Magdeburg 119 Mersenne, Marin 184 Metternich, Wolf von 132–3

Metzler, J. 177 Milburn, D. 160 Milner, John 31–2, 40–8 Milward, Peter 195 Minims 178–9, 181, 183–4, 187 Minsheu, John 193 Mitchell, John 220 Molinos, Miguel de 108n14, 116, 132, 136, 143, 150 Monck, George 163 Montagu, Walter 51, 53–5, 61–4, 66, 79–80, 84–5 Monterey, Zuniga, Count de 75n127 More, Gertrude 102–56 More, Henry 110, 112, 143 More, Henry SJ 225n33 More, Thomas 15, 158, 209, 221, 225 Moretus, Balthasar 201 Moretus, Jan 201 Morris, David 93, 96 Mundyn, John 214 Muskett, George 89 Myddleton, Hugh 111 Myddleton, Thomas 111 Neercassel, Johannes van 73 Newman, Henry 129 Newman, John Henry 1, 2, 30–1, 147, 150n108, 158 Nicholls, William 118–19 Niclas, Hendrik 119 Norris, John 143 North, Roger 133 Norton and Bill, printers 202 Norton, Thomas 208–13, 223, 225 Novalis (G. von Hardenberg) 143, 147 Nutter, Robert 214 Oates, Titus 6, 9, 13, 18–19, 94, 96, 100 Oath of Allegiance 5–9, 14, 15, 18, 42, 44, 50, 57–8, 78–9, 83, 86–9, 97 Oath of Supremacy 57 Ockley, Simon 133 O’Connell, Daniel 1, 26, 29, 30–1, 32n41, 35–7 O’Conor, Charles 42 Odescalchi, Benedetto, Cardinal (Innocent XI) 166 Ogden, C.K. 138 Oldenbarnevelt, Johan van 202 Ollard, S.L. 206 Oratorians 181

232

INDEX

Ormonde, James Butler, Earl of Ormonde 75, 80, 84 Ortelius, Abraham 202 Osborn, J.M. 100n19 Overbury, Thomas 202 Owen, John 202 Owen, Robert 144 Oxford Movement 1, 48 Pacca, Bartolomeo, Cardinal 43 Paine, Tom 26 Pallotta, Guglielmo, Cardinal 166, 167n13 Pallu, François 162, 176 Palma, Hugo de 110, 122 Palmer, Roger, Earl of Castlemaine 4, 7–13, 15, 16 Palmerston, Henry Temple, Viscount Palmerston 22 Palmes, Gregory Bernard 56n35 Pantzer, K.F. 189, 190n3 Panzani, Gregorio 70, 86–91 Paolini, Bernardino 181–3 Parish, William 107 Parry, William 210 Pastor, Ludwig von 168 Patmore, Coventry 150 Patrick Campbell, Mrs 148 Patrick, Simon 111, 133 Paul V, Pope 6 Paulists 146, 147n97 Peel, Robert 35 Pendrick, Robert 53–4, 63, 65, 68 Penn, William 108 Penruddock, John 91n12 Pererius, Benedictus 178 Perkins, Christopher 6, 9 Persons (Parsons), Robert 48, 160, 191, 197, 200–1, 205, 207–8, 214–15, 220–1 Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich 142 Peter of Blois 219 Petti, Anthony G. 199 Philip II, King of Spain 200 Philip, Robert 88, 90 Phillips, John 18–19 Pickering, Thomas 100n18 Pico della Mirandola 121 Pineda, Juan de 178 Pitt, William 45 Pius V, Pope 15, 212 Plantin, Christopher 201 Plantin, Laurence 51–3 Plato 143

Plotinus 112, 115, 121 Plowden, Charles 47 Plowden, Robert 47 Plumtre, E.H. 134 Plunket, Oliver 12n18, 75–6 Plütschau, Heinrich 129 Poinz, John 59 Poiret, Pierre 122–8, 130, 132–5, 139, 141, 143 Pole, Reginald, Cardinal 191 Pollen, J.H. 204, 210, 220 Pope, Alexander 132 Popham, John 210, 213 Popish Plot 4–20, 44, 83, 84, 93–4, 96, 100, 176 Pordage, John 125, 136 Porret, George 194 Porter, Jerome 192 Portuguese Marriage Treaty 13 Pound, Ezra 151 Pounde, Thomas 221 Poynter, William 39–41, 43–5 Poyser, E.M. 158 Praz, Mario 159 Preston, Thomas 42, 88–9, 191–2 Pritchard, Leander 135Proclus 121, 143 Progers, Thomas 54 Pro Juarez, Miguel Agustin 9n13 Prothero, George 151 Prynne, William 184 Pugh, Robert 51, 57, 83–91, 96 Pulton, William (alias Sacarville) 64n67, 65, 68, 71–2, 79 Pythagoras 143 Randal, Samuel 224 Randall, Giles 106, 108, 115, 122 Rawlinson, Richard 127n49, 133 Rawlinson, Thomas 133 Rawlinson, William 110 Read, Alexander 193 Redemptorists 146 Reform Bill 36 Rhodes, Dennis 178 Ribadeneira, Pedro de 195 Riccerius, Mutius 181, 183 Ricci, Bartholomew 107, 118 Rich, Robert 109–10 Richard of St Victor 115 Richards, Ignatius Edward 39 Richardson, Samuel 132 Ridolfi Plot 207–9

233

INDEX

Rinuccini, Giovanni Battista 84 Ripley, George 146 Roach, Richard 127–30 Robins, John 108n16 Rodriguez, Alfonso 107, 115 Rogers, D.M. 157–60, 189–98, 199, 204, 215, 225 Romanelli, Giovanni Francesco 164 Rombauts, Edward 199 Rombouts, Johannes 201 Romuald, Saint 120 Ronalds, F.S. 6 Roper, William 222, 225 Rospigliosi, Giacomo, Cardinal (Clement IX) 65, 166 Rossetti, Carlo, Cardinal 167, 185 Rowlands, M. 159 Russell, John 29 Russell, Richard 64n64 Ruusbroec 105–7, 116, 120, 128, 141, 146, 150, 222 Rye House Plot 100 Sailer, Joseph 124–5 St Bartholemew’s Day Massacre 8 Saint-Martin, Louis Claude de 139 Salusbury, John 107 Sanchez, Diego 220 Sander(s), Nicholas 192, 209 Santa Clara see Davenport, Christopher (Santa Clara OFM) Sayer, Robert Gregory 192 Scarlatti, Abbate 81 Scots College Douay 161 Scots College Paris 114, 188 Scots College Rome 161, 181–3 Scott, Edward 47 Scott, Geoffrey 92n1 Scott, Walter 22 Scougall, Henry 117 Scupoli, Lorenzo 125 Secret Treaty of Dover 2, 75 Seget, Thomas 182 Selden, John 103 Sergeant, John 45, 51–9, 61–2, 64, 67, 78–9, 83, 85, 96, 143 Serres, Jean de 115 Seymour, Edward, Duke of Somerset 208 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury 5, 96, 100, 122 Sharrock, William 46 Sheldon, Edward 196

Sheldon, Ralph 68, 196 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 25–7, 37 Shelley, William 210 Shelton, Thomas 201 Shepherd, Thomas 67, 79 Sherburne, Edward 100n19 Shute, Robert 210, 213 Sidney, Algernon 53n22, 107, 122 Silvertop, George 46, 48 Simpson, Richard 224 Sinclair, May 151, 154 Singleton, John 63–5, 79 Sitwell, Gerard 102 Sloane, Hans 107 Smith, John 111–12 Smith, Richard, Bishop of Calcedon 49–51, 59, 61, 67, 73–4, 85, 89, 195 Smith, Richard, bookseller 100 Smith, Sidney 21–4, 26, 37 Smyth, Mr 207 Somerset, Anne 163 Somerset, Edward, Marquis of Worcester 163 Somerset, Thomas Viscount Somerset 63 Somerville, John 210–11 Southcott, Joanna 143 Southcott, John (alias Lovell) 89 Southern, A.C. 190, 195, 204, 210, 215, 217 Southwell, Robert 197, 201 Spada, Giovanni Battista, Cardinal 172 SPCK 128n54, 129–30 Spelman, Henry 103 Spencer, Ignatius 30 Spinoza, Baruch de 123, 143 Stafford-Jerningham, Henry 150 Stanyhurst, Richard 201 Stapleton, Thomas 192 Stephens, Thomas 191 Sterry, Peter 143 Stillingfleet, Edward 99, 111, 119–21 Stock, Simon 120 Stone, Marmaduke 45 Stonyhurst 44–8 Stow, John 204 Strachan, George 182–3 Strauss, David Friedrich 142 Strype, John 223 Surin, Jean Joseph 146 Suso, Henry 105, 116, 120, 125, 146–7, 216 Swedenborg, Emanuel 141n84, 142 Sykes, Christopher 45

234

INDEX

Valdes, Fernando de 113 Vaux, Laurence 220 Vecchii, Girolamo de 57, 64–5, 80 Verhoeven, Abraham 203 Vernulaeus, Nicolaus 192 Verstegan, Richard 192, 199–203, 207, 221 Victorines 150 Visscher, Lothar 126

Symons, Arthur 151 Synge, John H. 142 Tagore, Rabindranath 151, 153 Talbot, Peter 69, 75, 80 Tauler 105, 107–8, 112, 116–17, 136–7, 141, 146 Taylor, Henry 51–3, 79 Taylor, Jeremy 110, 125, 137 Taylor, Thomas 143 Temple, William 164, 175 Teresa of Avila 105–7, 115–18, 146, 150, 196 Tersteegen, Gerhard 125 Test Act 8 Theophrastus 202 Thomas à Jesu 113, 115 Thomas à Kempis 105, 112, 116, 127n48, 137, 141 Thomas Lord Paget of Beaudesert 205 Thomason, George 109, 185 Thoreau, Henry David 142–3, 146 Thorpe, Thomas 209 Throckmorton, Francis 209, 214 Throckmorton, John Courtenay 87 Thurloe, John 93 Ticknor and Fields, firm of 145 Tierney, Mark Aloysius 59n47, 165 Topcliffe, Richard 207, 221, 223, 225 Torre, James de la 51–3 Touchet, George 99 Townsend Warner, Sylvia 151 Tranquebar 128–30 Trappes-Lomax, Basil Charles 159 Trappists 141 Tregian, Francis 201 Trévaux, Jerôme, Abbé 41 Tristam, Fr SJ 46 Troy, John 41–2 Tulloch, Alexander 132–3 Turberville, Henry 51 Turner, Francis 115 Tyrell, George 150 Tyrer, F. 160 Uffenbach, Zacharias Conrad von 107, 108n15, 122 Underhill, Evelyn 140, 150–1, 153–4 Urban VIII, Pope (Maffeo Barberini) 84n5, 88–9, 166 Vade, James 18, 19 Vaillant, Paul 132

Wadding, Luke 192 Wadsworth, James 197 Waferer, Francis 221 Waite, A.E. 149–50 Wake, William 94n5 Wakeman, George 13 Waley, Arthur 138 Walmesley, Charles 32 Walsh, Peter 42, 44–5, 59, 80 Walsingham, Francis 207–10, 224–5 Walton, Christopher 134, 136, 138–41, 153 Wanley, Humfrey 223 Waple, Edward 128 Warburton, William 135 Ward, C.E. 100n19 Warner, John 2, 4, 16–19, 83–4 Warrack, Grace 148, 150n109 Watkins, John M. 150 Watson, Thomas 85 Watson, William 45 Watts, Alan 153 Weld, family of 47 Weldon, Ralph Benedict 92, 96n12 Wendell Holmes, Oliver 145 Wesley, John 135–8, 141 Wesleys, the 134n69, 135 Wetstein, firm of 133 Wetstein, John Henry 122, 126 Whitbread, Thomas 16 White, Elizabeth 219 White, Richard 196 White, Thomas (alias Blacklo) 8n12, 49–51, 54, 57–8, 62, 66, 76, 79, 83, 85, 95–6, 184n23 White, William Claude 193 Whitford, Richard 128, 215 Widdrington, Edward 188 Williams, Charles 151–2, 154 Williams, Daniel 139 Williams, F.B. 193 Williams, J.A. 158 Williams, M.E. 160

235

INDEX

Williams, Moses 196 Williamson, Hugh Ross 154n121 Williamson, Joseph 60, 80, 161, 175 Willoughby, Francis 194 Wilson, Edmund 144n88 Wilson, John 195–6 Wiltgen, R. 177 Windebank, Francis 87–90, 184–5 Windsor, Thomas 192–3 Winter, John 58 Wodrow, Robert 115 Wolf, J.C. 123

Wood, Anthony 191, 196 Woolfs, the 138 Worthington, John 112–13 Wray, Christopher 210, 213 Wright, Henry G. 142 Wynkyn de Worde 219–20 Yeats, W.B. 148–50 York, Anne Hyde, Duchess of York 99 Ziegenbalg, Bartholomäus 128n54, 129 Zinzendorf, Nikolaus von 135

236