Abstract
There is tremendous talk here of Jesuits and more fables perhaps are told about them than were told of old about monsters. For as to the origin of these men, their way of life, their institute, their morals and teaching, their plans and actions, stories of all sorts are spread abroad, not only in private conversation but also in public sermons and printed books and these contradict one another and have a striking resemblance to dreams.
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Notes
L. Hicks, S. J. (ed.), Letters and Memorials of Father Robert Persons, vol. 1, Catholic Record Soc. vol. 39 (London, 1942), p. 83 (cited here-after as ‘Persons, Letters’).
See Peter Lake, ‘Anti-Popery: The Structure of a Prejudice’, in Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in Religion and Politics 1603–1642, ed. Richard Cust and Ann Hughes (London and New York, 1989), pp. 72–106. A 1689 Act of Parliament made it illegal for a Catholic or anyone married to a Catholic to ascend the throne.
See David Cressy, Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England (London, 1989);
William Haller, The Elect Nation: The Meaning and Relevance of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (New York, 1963); and
Christopher Hill, Antichrist in Seventeenth-Century England (London, 1971).
See Carol Z. Wiener, ‘The Beleaguered Isle: A Study of Elizabethan and Early Jacobean Anti-Catholicism’, Past and Present 51 (May 1971): 31–3.
Bernard Basset, The English Jesuits From Campion to Martindale (New York, 1967), p. 109, writes: ‘Of the 182 men and women executed as Catholics under Queen Elizabeth, eleven at most could be classed as Jesuits. Of these only Campion, Walpole and Southwell were Jesuit trained…. On Fr William Holt’s reckoning in 1596, six hundred priests had been sent into England in thirty-eight years. The Jesuits, after sixteen years in England, could claim, at most, twenty-five of these.’ See the recent account of the English Jesuit mission in Thomas M. McCoog, S. J., The Society of Jesus in Ireland, Scotland and England 1541–1588: ‘Our Way of Proceeding?’ (Leiden, New York, Cologne, 1996).
Thomas Bell, The Golden Balance of Tryall … . Whereunto is also annexed a Counterblast against a masked Companion, terming himself E.O…. (1603), M3v. See Victor Houliston, ‘The Fabrication of the Myth of Father Parsons’, Recusant History 22.2 (October 1994): 141–51. Persons kept the heat up over several decades, beginning with his 1580 pamphlet defending recusancy, which elicited three swift responses by Protestant antagonists. See Peter Milward, Religious Controversies of the Elizabethan Age: A Survey of Printed Sources (London, 1977), p. 52.
See McCoog, ‘“Playing the Champion”’, pp. 135–6. Richard Simpson, Edmund Campion: a Biography (London, 1867), p. 369, notes that Campion made converts during the debates, including Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel. On the four conferences, see Simpson, pp. 363–78. Persons wrote: ‘truly it can scarcely be told how much good these disputations have done and are doing every day. And if [Campion] dies for that cause they will certainly do still more good. For they are the common talk … of everybody, not only of Catholics, but of our enemies also; and always to the great honour of Fr. Campion’ (Letters, p. 119). Milward, p. 60, cites A true report of the Disputation of rather private Conference … (1583) and The three last dayes conferences had in the Tower with Edmund Campion Jesuite … (1583).
Helen C. White, Tudor Books of Saints and Martyrs (Madison, 1963), p. 212, notes that the story of Campion’s capture had already been put in print by the man who betrayed him, George Eliot, in A Very True Report of the Apprehension and Taking of that Arche Papist Edmond Campion … (1581). The rabidly anti-Catholic Anthony Munday’s A Discoverie of Edmund Campion and his Confederates … appeared shortly after the executions in January, 1582 (White, p. 215).
For a discussion of relics and their uses in folk medicine, exorcisms and other official and non-official religious practices, see Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York, 1971), pp. 26–31, 44–5, 53 and pasiam and
Robert Whiting, The Blind Devotion of the People: Popular Religion and the English Reformation (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 56–9. The anti-Catholic and anti-Puritan Samuel Harsnett’s A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures mocks the use of relics of Campion and his fellows in ritual exorcisms, especially of Campion’s thumb (in F. W. Brownlow, ed., Shakespeare, Harsnett and the Devils of Denham [Newark, London and Toronto, 1993], pp. 294–7). John Gee, The Foot out of the Snare (1624), sarcastically retails some of the stories of cures, exclaiming ‘What prodigies are these? … Are they not forgeries? that shame not to affirme, that the bones of a Traytor can raise a dead man, as did Elias his bones? or that the flesh of Campian, could performe that which was so much admired in our Saviour himselfe, when hee was amongst us …’ (pp. 43–4).
Robert Persons, Of the Life and Martyrdom of Father Edmund Campian, ed. Br. H. Foley, Letters and Notices (December 1877) (n.p.: Manresa Press, 1877), p. 2. Southwell wrote to the Jesuit General, Claudio Aquaviva, in 1585 from the English College at Rome, hoping to be sent on the English mission, ‘which promises the highest hope of martyrdom’ (23 January 1585, ARSJ. Rome, Fondo Gesuitico 651/648 in Thomas M. McCoog, S. J., ‘The Letters of Robert Southwell, S. J.’, Archivum Historicum Societatis Jesu 63 [1994]: 103 — translation separately provided in typescript by Fr. McCoog, to whom I am grateful).
See J. T. Rhodes, ‘English Books of Martyrs and Saints of the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries’, Recusant History 22.1 (May 1994): 7–25 and
John Knott, Discourses of Martyrdom in English Literature, 1563–1694 (Cambridge, 1993).
Quoted in Simpson, p. 463. See the account of the sympathetic popular response to an execution of some newly converted Catholics in William Weston, The Autobiography of an Elizabethan, trans. Philip Caraman (London, New York, Toronto, 1955), pp. 154–5.
1586 letter quoted in Christopher Devlin, The Life of Robert Southwell Poet and Martyr (London, 1956), p. 139. Lord Burghley’s secret memorandum, An Antidote against Jesuitism (Petyt MSS, ser. 538, vol. 43, fols 304ff) printed in James Spedding, The Letters and Life of Francis Bacon (London, 1861), 1:47–56, discussed in Devlin, Appendix B, makes the same point.
Although those executed for their faith were popularly called ‘martyrs’ and their remains venerated like those of saints, Rome was reluctant to canonize martyr-saints in this period (see Peter Burke, ‘How to Be a Counter-Reformation Saint’, in The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy … [Cambridge, 1987], p. 56). It took until the late twentieth century for the English martyrs either to be beatified or canonized: Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel, for example, was canonized in 1970 along with 39 other English and Welsh martyrs (see Francis W. Steer, ‘St Philip Howard, Arundel and the Howard Connexion in Sussex’, in Studies in Sussex Church History, ed. M. J. Kitch [Falmer, 1981], pp. 209–22).
For an anti-Catholic ballad treating the execution of Campion, Sherwin and Bryant, see Hyder Rollins (ed.), Old English Ballads, 1553–1625 (Cambridge, 1920), p. 64: ‘A Triumph for true Subjects and a Terrour unto al Traitours …’.
Records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus, ed. Henry Foley, S. J., 7 vols (London, 1877–83), 4:129–30; citing ‘Papers relating to the English Jesuits’, BL MS Add. 21203, Plut. clii.F. This account describes a halo round Garnet’s head. John Gerard’s account of the Gunpowder Plot reports miraculous occurrences associated with Garnet’s death, including the ‘miracle of the straw’, the appearance of a miniature image of him in a speck of his blood fallen on to wheat straw during his dismemberment: in The Condition of Catholics under James I: Father Gerard’s Narrative of the Gunpowder Plot, ed. John Morris, S. J. (London, 1871), pp. 296–307. Also Philip Caraman, Henry Garnet 1555–1606 and the Gunpowder Plot (New York, 1964), pp. 443–7. The straw was debunked in Robert Pricket’s poem, The Jesuits Miracles, or new Popish Wonders … (1607), which has an engraving of it as a frontispiece. John Gee, The Foot out of the Snare (1624), p. 66, also debunks it and the claim that ‘the very sight of Garnets straw hath made (at least) five hundred in our kingdom good Catholiques’ and mocks the use of Campion’s relics for cures.
Raphael Holinshed, The First and Second Volumes of the Chronicles of England … (1587), p. 1329. (I cite the Huntington Library copy, which contains pages [1328–31] excised from most other copies of the edition.) On the ‘castrations’ of the 1587 Holinshed, see Annabel Patterson, Reading Holinshed’s Chronicles (Chicago and London, 1994), pp. 234–9, 253–63. In his 17 November 1580 letter to the Rector of the English College at Rome, Persons not only mentions the Spanish invasion force sent to Ireland, the influence of the Catholic Lord d’Aubigny over James VI of Scotland and Spain’s conquest of Portugal, but also the collapse of the French marriage negotiations: ‘suspicion as to the good faith of the French after the rejection of the marriage proposals’ in conjunction with ‘the coming of the Jesuits to this island’ (Letters, p. 57) troubled the authorities. In a letter of 14 June 1581 to Pope Gregory XIII, Persons explicitly connects the French party’s leaving London with the fate of English Catholics: ‘To-day the French representatives left London: it is commonly thought that nothing was accomplished …. We are in daily expectation of a new and bitter storm of persecution’ (ibid., p. 66). Cf. McCoog, The Society of Jesus, p. 156.
On Catholic martyrologies from the time of Campion’s execution, see White, pp. 217–39 and Thomas H. Clancy, S. J., Papist Pamphleteers: The Allen-Persons Party and the Political Thought of the Counter-Reformation in England, 1572–1615 (Chicago, 1964), pp. 126–42. Michael E. Williams, ‘Campion and the English Continental Seminaries’, in The Reckoned Expense, ed. McCoog, pp. 285–99, discusses the use of Catholic martyrologies as fund-raisers for English Continental seminaries. I am grateful to Fr. McCoog for letting me see this essay in manuscript.
This work was originally published in Latin, then translated into French (Milward, p. 65). Milward points out the ‘literature of consolation’ that grew out of this included Southwell’s Epistle of Comfort. For the centrality of consolation for Jesuits and its special meaning see John W. O’Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambridge, MA and London, 1993), pp. 19–20.
On the suppression of relics in the English Reformation, see Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580 (New Haven, CT and London, 1992), pp. 384–5, 390, 407–15 and passim and Whiting, pp. 72–74. Duffy notes (p. 47) that ‘A major feast of England’s most important saint, Thomas Becket, [was] the translation of his relics …’ For a good discussion of Becket’s shrine and how ‘the metaphorics of the relic were transformed’, see Clark Hulse, ‘Dead Man’s Treasure: The Cult of Thomas More’, in The Production of Renaissance Culture, ed. David Lee Miller, Sharon O’Dair and Harold Weber (Ithaca, NY and London, 1994), pp. 190–225. The rediscovery in 1578 of the Roman catacombs with their rich treasure of relics of early Christian saints and martyrs created fresh interest in relics.
See James H. McDonald, The Poems and Prose Writings of Robert Southwell, S. J.: A Bibliographical Study (Oxford, 1937). The printing of this work may have been allowed in order to foment further dissension between the Jesuits and the anti-Jesuit Catholics during the ‘Appellant Controversy’ prompted by the appointment of George Blackwell as ‘Archpriest’ for England (White, p. 257). See Garnet’s letter to Persons (5 May 1602) in which he indicates he tried to prevent the publication because it might ‘breed new troubles’ and further anti-Jesuit hostility among the more accommodationist Catholics (Stonyhurst Coll.P.547).
See Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London and New York, 1982).
Areopagitica, in John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York, 1957), p. 720.
Samuel Daniel, Poems and A Defence of Ryme, ed. Arthur Colby Sprague (Chicago, 1930), p. 9.
See Hughey, 1: 106–11 and 2: 57–66 and Edward Doughtie (ed.), Liber Lilliati: Elizabethan Verse and Song (Bodleian MS Rawlinson Poetry 148) (Newark, London and Toronto, 1985), p. 83. Harington’s opinion was reported by his son, Sir John Harington of Kelston (Hughey, 2: 63).
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Marotti, A.F. (1997). Southwell’s Remains: Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism in Early Modern England. In: Brown, C.C., Marotti, A.F. (eds) Texts and Cultural Change in Early Modern England. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25994-6_3
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