Redrawing the Map of Early Modern English Catholicism 9781442695481

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Illustrations
1. Introduction
PART I. SIGNPOSTS
2. In Defence of Idolatry: Residual Catholic Culture and the Protestant Assault on the Sensuous in Early Modern England
3. ‘True and Perfect Relations’; or, Identifying Henry Garnet and Leticia Wigington by Their Confessions
4. Motion Rhetoric in Serial Conversion Narratives: Religion and Change in Early Modern England
PART II. POETICS
5. William Alabaster and the Palinode
6. Crashaw’s Style
7. Alchemy, Repentance, and Recusant Allegory in Robert Southwell’s Saint Peters Complaint
8. Malengin and Mercilla, Southwell and Spenser: The Poetics of Tears and the Politics of Martyrdom in The Faerie Queene, Book 5, Canto 9
PART III. COMMUNITIES
9. ‘Honest mirth & merriment’: Christmas and Catholicism in Early Modern England
10. Uncommon Prayer? Robert Southwell’s Short Rule for a Good Life and Catholic Domestic Devotion in Post-Reformation England
11. ‘To seek out some Comforts and Companions of his own kind and condition’: The Benedictine Rosary Confraternity and Chapel of Cardigan House, London
12. Obedience and Consent: Thomas White and English Catholicism, 1640–1660
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

REDRAWING THE MAP OF EARLY MODERN ENGLISH CATHOLICISM

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Redrawing the Map of Early Modern English Catholicism

Edited by Lowell Gallagher

Published by the University of Toronto Press in association with the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library

©  The Regents of the University of California 2012 www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-1-4426-4312-3

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper  with vegetable-based inks.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Redrawing the map of early modern English Catholicism / edited by Lowell Gallagher. (UCLA Clark Memorial Library series) ‘Published by the University of Toronto Press in association with the UCLA Center   for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library.’ Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4426-4312-3 1. Catholic Church – England – Doctrines – History – 16th century.  2. Catholic Church – England – Doctrines – History – 17th century.  3. English poetry – Catholic authors – History and criticism.  4. English poetry – Early modern, 1500–1700 – History and criticism.  5. Catholic Church – Customs and practices.  6. Catholics – England – History – 16th century.  7. Catholics – England – History – 17th century.  8. England – Church history – 16th century.  9. England – Church history – 17th century.    I. Gallagher, Lowell, 1953–  II. Series: UCLA Clark Memorial Library series BX1492.R46 2012   282.4209′031   C2012-900986-5

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing activities.

Contents

Acknowledgments  vii Illustrations  ix 1  Introduction  3 lowell gallagher Part I: Signposts 2  In Defence of Idolatry: Residual Catholic Culture and the Protestant Assault on the Sensuous in Early Modern England  27 arthur f. marotti 3  ‘True and Perfect Relations’; or, Identifying Henry Garnet and Leticia Wigington by Their Confessions  52 frances e. dolan 4  Motion Rhetoric in Serial Conversion Narratives: Religion and Change in Early Modern England  84 holly crawford pickett Part II: Poetics 5  William Alabaster and the Palinode  115 alison shell

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Contents

6  Crashaw’s Style  132 richard rambuss 7  Alchemy, Repentance, and Recusant Allegory in Robert Southwell’s Saint Peters Complaint  159 gary kuchar 8  Malengin and Mercilla, Southwell and Spenser: The Poetics of Tears and the Politics of Martyrdom in The Faerie Queene, Book 5, Canto 9  185 jennifer r. rust Part III: Communities 9  ‘Honest mirth & merriment’: Christmas and Catholicism in Early Modern England  213 phebe jensen 10  Uncommon Prayer? Robert Southwell’s Short Rule for a Good Life and Catholic Domestic Devotion in Post-Reformation England  245 susannah monta 11  ‘To seek out some Comforts and Companions of his own kind and condition’: The Benedictine Rosary Confraternity and Chapel of Cardigan House, London  272 anne dillon 12  Obedience and Consent: Thomas White and English Catholicism, 1640–1660  309 stefania tutino Contributors  331 Index  335

Acknowledgments

The essays in this volume were delivered as papers at a symposium held under the auspices of the UCLA William Andrews Clark Memorial Library. I wish to thank the participants for their spirited and productive contributions to the event. I am especially grateful to Peter H. Reill – former director of the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and EighteenthCentury Studies and Clark Memorial Library – for his enthusiasm and guidance in steering this project toward publication in the UCLA Center / Clark Series. For their generous contributions to the symposium and continued interest in the project I also extend thanks to Patrick Coleman, Alice Dailey, Lori Anne Ferrell, Christopher Highley, Debora Shuger, and Ulrike Strasser. Finally, a word of gratitude to Glenn Brewer for his assistance in preparing the manuscript. LG

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Illustrations

  4.1 Title page of Bacon’s Great Instauration  96   4.2 Title page of De Dominis’s Rockes of Christian Shipwracke  98 11.1 Frontispiece (detail) of the Handbook of the Benedictine Rosary Confraternity of Our Lady of Power: Jesus, Maria, Joseph; or, The devout pilgrim of the ever blessed Virgin Mary. In his holy exercises upon the sacred mysteries of Jesus, Maria, Joseph. With the charitable association for the relief of the souls departed. Published for the benefit of the pious Rosarists, by A.C. and T.V. religious monks, of the Holy Order of S. Bennet  284 11.2 The Glover chasuble  286 11.3 Reliquary donated by Henry Bedingfeld to the Benedictine Rosary Confraternity of Our Lady of Power  288 11.4 Engraving on the base of the reliquary donated by Henry Bedingfeld to the Benedictine Rosary Confraternity of Our Lady of Power  289 11.5 Detail from the base of the reliquary donated by Dom Augustine Stocker to the Benedictine Rosary Confraternity of Our Lady of Power, showing the Scourging at the Pillar, and cherub head and wings  290

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REDRAWING THE MAP OF EARLY MODERN ENGLISH CATHOLICISM

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chapter one

Introduction LOWELL GALLAGHER

This book presents an itinerary of English Catholicism in the early modern period. Imagine you are looking at an interactive map depicting the fortunes of members of the ‘old faith’ – variously called ‘Romanist,’ ‘Romish,’ and ‘papist,’ as well as ‘Catholic’ – in Reformation-era England. Maps tell stories of one kind or another and this one would be in no way different, but the embedded graphs and visual icons would yield a tangle of information not easily reducible to a single story. The machinery of an epic tale would be on display, notably through the sense of heroic antagonism animating the sequence of events invoked to mark turning points in the ascendancy of the Protestant Reformation and corresponding marginalization of observant Catholicism in England. Among the memorable stations: Henry VIII’s break with Rome in the 1530s; the brief but violent return to Rome during the reign of Mary Tudor at mid-century; the apparent displacement of traditional Marian veneration by the suave cult of Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen; the victory over the Spanish Armada in 1588; and, spectacularly, the abortive regicidal conspiracy called Gunpowder Plot (1605), which traumatized the nation even as its pre-emptive discovery supplied ample occasions for professing belief in providential care of the reformed church-state. The Gunpowder Plot helped turn the very idea of English Catholicism intermittently radioactive for decades.1 The traumatizing character of the plot derived not simply from local circumstances but also from the place it occupied in the mounting archive of conspiracy scandals and acts of treason, both real and imagined, against the reformed church-state in the latter half of the sixteenth century. Paradigmatic instances represented on our map would include the fatal misadventures of Elizabeth’s dynastic rival Mary Queen of Scots; the

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Vatican’s excommunication and delegitimization of Elizabeth I (1570); the Tudor government’s official criminalization of the Jesuit mission to England (1585); and the varying penalties formally imposed by the government on Catholic recusants (those who disobeyed the mandated rule of regular attendance at reformed church services). While the penalties (together with a host of pastoral and pedagogic incentives) were designed to produce national uniformity of confessional allegiance, the perceived need for such intervention – to say nothing of the material difficulties of systematic implementation – indicates that the prospect of visible borderlands between the remnant of English Catholicism and the culturally dominant cadre of English Protestantism harbours a deceptively clear and distinct picture of the actual contours of Catholicism in post-Reformation England. In the matter of church attendance, the problem of recusancy was only the tip of the iceberg, for both Catholic and Protestant authorities worried over a more elusive, and more troubling, type of resistance: church papists, who conformed outwardly but not in mind or heart. As Shakespeare’s Isabella remarks in the suspenseful interrogation scene at the end of Measure for Measure, ‘Thoughts are no subjects, / Intents but merely thoughts’ (5.1.453–4).2 Try putting that on a map. Isabella’s intuition of the hidden tablet of thought glancingly evokes the preserve of conscience, and in this regard the remark is not innocent. It evokes longstanding and ambivalent pastoral recognition of the strangely divided property of conscience – its simultaneously indispensable yet elusive and chameleon-like function in the ecology of Christian piety. As the publicized interrogations of suspected conspirators confirmed – not only in the case of Gunpowder Plot but in numerous treason trials in the last two decades of Elizabeth’s reign – conscience was the potentially unreliable compass of not only Christian piety but of political loyalty as well. The vexations produced by administrative efforts to discern and police the agency and scope of conscience do not constitute the last word on the subject of early modern confessional identity, but they do indicate regions hard to locate with precision on our imaginary map, for reasons that have to do only in part with the enigma Isabella names. ‘Thoughts,’ as Isabella suggests, may be a rabbit hole, but the nuanced rhythm of everyday life proves equally elusive, not because it is sequestered in the mind but because it trades openly in the distinction between the visible and the legible. Consider the regions sounded by the pulse of the everyday: the accommodation of social bonds, the choreography



Introduction

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of familial as well as neighbourly and communal relations, and the variegated performance of personal duty and habit in concert or in conflict with personal impulse. Apart from being difficult to chart, such features also point up one structural limitation (or fiction) our imaginary map shares with most maps: demarcations of margin and centre. The rhythm of practice, no less than the sheltered preserve of thought, reminds us that the scheme of margin and centre is not a static figure but instead a relational and contingent construct with borders capable of turning – sometimes unpredictably – porous. I mention this scheme because of its decisive role in shaping historiographic models for transforming received data into tellable stories, even where metaphors of maps or map-making are absent. Long before its polemical redeployment in the New Historicism, the rhetorical machinery of margin and centre powerfully, often silently, informed scholarly accounts of the literary, social, and political history of early modernity. The very notion of the literary canon mobilizes such a scheme, just as it also shores up the narrative coherence of the Whiggish and casually Weberian assumption that the ‘modern’ in early modernity is genetically linked to the triumphalist cast and secularizing inclination of Protestant reformist culture, while the ‘early’ part is correlated with Catholicism (and, by extension, the marginalized domains of superstition and magic). By no coincidence, since the eighteenth century, the study of English Catholicism has been plotted, in the main, on a binary grid that replicates the nearly perfect symmetry between the reductive polemical argument voiced in early modern ecclesial controversy and the foreshortened perspective of Whiggish historiography, which placed Catholicism on the wrong side of history.3 While reflecting powerful cultural dispositions and demonstrable traumas, the resulting views of what it meant to be Romanist (or reformed) also tend toward the myopic. Whether they are written as virtual hagiography, emphasizing the heroic and often martyrological cast to Catholic survivalism, or composed in something approaching paranoid style, reading the survivalist instinct as anomaly if not aberration, such views abbreviate the cultural impact and specifically religious entailment of manifold negotiations on both sides of the confessional divide. Recent developments in early modern church history and cultural studies have challenged the critical solvency of the scheme just described. As Arthur F. Marotti and Ken Jackson suggest, the critical turn to religion in early modern studies, advanced in the late 1980s and partly animated by the New Historicism’s vaunted ‘claim to respect alterity, otherness,

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and distance,’ has been catalyst for and beneficiary of a more supple and self-critical historicism in which the topic of English Catholicism has occupied an instrumental role.4 One arena in which the distinguishing marks of Romanist mentality seem well defined – or at least readily caricatured – may be found in the notorious post-Reformation controversies over the nature of the Eucharist, particularly insofar as these encode diverse perceptions of the ambiguous interface of sacramental and symbolic agency and of the uncertain relation between language and event. The central item in the disputed terminology – ‘real presence’ – exemplifies a critical turn within early modern religious cultures, a turn prompted not simply by opposing theological and ecclesiological motives for the dispute but by the broad implications of the Catholic magisterium’s insistence that the ‘real’ nature of sacred Eucharistic ‘presence’ escapes even as it inhabits empirical, material, or thingly dimensions of being. The sense of reality figured here differed in several regards from the tiered ontology of philosophical realism still current in Renaissance humanism. The latter legacy posited the independent existence of universals, such as Platonic forms, which could be inferred from the perception of individual objects. Counter-Reformation doctrine on the Eucharist, on the other hand, drew its inspiration in large part from the paradoxes enshrined in the orthodox theology of the Incarnation, notably the emphasis on the simultaneously human and divine personhood of Christ.5 The most decisive nuance, for the matter at hand in this volume, turns on the sheer notoriety of the controversies over the nature of the ‘real presence,’ which disseminated an intuition of the real as marked by an inherent and constitutive alterity. Put somewhat differently, the adventures of post-Reformation Catholicism in England put into circulation a correlated purchase of religion and the real as a warp in the phenomenal texture of experience, something refractive to culturally ingrained habits of perception and feeling. The disturbance at issue in the Eucharistic controversies was partly contained by the regulated cadence of devotional models and analytic procedures of theological inquiry; it left its imprint in the diffused social and political networks through which religious institutions, together with more casual expressions of religious sensibility or perception, made a cultural habitat or national identity. This imprint directs attention to the critical aptitude of religious instinct for opening onto horizons of meaningful or culturally solvent experience that do not necessarily comport with the normalizing operations of dogmatic or institutionally



Introduction

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administered religious practice. Precisely because they tend toward the counter-intuitive, however, such horizons also may prove susceptible to misrecognition – not least when approached from the secular orientation of modern critical practice. As Marotti and Jackson point out, a telling episode occurs in the New Historicism’s characteristic handling of the traces of alterity found in the archive of early modern religious experience. The encounter, as exhibited in Stephen Greenblatt’s turn to religion and specifically to Eucharistic issues, stages an ironic conversion scene, with religion’s defamiliarizing charge neutralized by being treated as one item among others in the expanding field of ‘ethnographic curiosities.’6 It bears noting, however, that early modern confessional antagonisms, though easily construed as representative of the religious spirit of the age, may themselves have been a means of misrecognizing or pre-emptively discounting religion’s critical edge. For a case in point, consider Michel de Certeau’s account, in The Mystic Fable, of the manner in which post-Reformation polemics over the ascription of ‘real presence’ to the Eucharistic sacrament provided the endgame to a tangled, centuries-long process of isolating ecclesial orthodoxy from the broad spectrum of religious experience and religiously inflected community associated in patristic thought with the mystical body, corpus mysticum, of Christ.7 The story told by de Certeau shows how one constellation of territorial religious convictions, which reached its zenith in the Reformation and Counter-Reformation debates over the Eucharist, truncated the range of what had been a foundational sense of religion’s provocative compact with the real – the intuition of the extensive reach of the corpus mysticum as the connective tissue through which manifestations of Christic embodiment (the historical body, sacramental body, and ecclesial body) were dialectically interrelated. Rival claims to sovereignty over the proper boundaries of the real in religion led to a shared misrecognition of the earlier mediating fluency of the corpus mysticum. The winnowing of the applied sense of the mystical in early modernity – its confinement to private devotion, disputed sacramental ritual, and, eventually, psychic disorder – helps frame the story of secularization as a process of disenchantment through which culturally dominant senses of the real adhere to a homogenizing instinct, a reflexive privileging of sameness and a reductive perception of what is excluded. On this account, the seemingly intractable dissension between Catholic and Protestant positions on the Eucharist may well have acquired global reach – an accidental achievement, insofar as the standoff signalled the

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encroaching impoverishment of religion’s capacity to accommodate the shadowed (or mystical) alterity in the perceptible texture of the real. But the more pertinent implication for our purposes turns on the countervailing premise: that the sheer resilience of such territorial disputes also helped preserve an untethered and undogmatic intuition of the real as internally fissured by untamed regions of alterity. The resulting interplay of crisis, misrecognition, and accommodation lent to early modern religion a strange eloquence whose cadence was rephrased by modernity’s thinkers of alterity, in disciplines such as Lacanian psychoanalysis, the radical ethics of Emmanuel Levinas, and latter stages of Derridean deconstruction.8 The procedures of critical reflection in late modern philosophical thought are heirs in this regard to the drama of early modern religion. If the drama follows the secularizing plot of disenchantment, it also anticipates late modernity’s recognition of the limits of that plot. Such recognition – what Gianni Vattimo has called the discovery that ‘demythologization has itself come to be seen as a myth’ – is less a settled achievement than a constant turning toward a difficult truth that religion bequeaths to contemporary critical discourse as its anarchic memory.9 ‘Quite simply,’ as Marotti and Jackson put it, ‘knowing or responding to the “other” is impossible and must remain an aporia that we approach and respect rather than solve.’10 The essays in the present volume test the bounds of this claim by examining the nomadic, experimental, and interstitial character of postReformation English Catholicism. The term interstitial in particular proves an apt index of the cumulative effect of the survivalist tactics deployed by English Catholics in the decades following England’s breach with Rome. The term acknowledges the continued currency of imagined, fixed parameters of identity – confessional as well as ethnic and national – together with the governing compass of margin and centre, even as it also indicates less tractable regions populated by a shifting motives and alliances – devotional, theological, social, political, and affective – that gave both texture and profile to the improvisational character of post-Reformation Catholic religiosity in England. Anne Sweeney’s recent study of the English Jesuit poet and missionary Robert Southwell captures the conundrum inhabiting the improvisational and negotiated condition of early modern English Catholicism: ‘When is a Catholic not a Catholic?’ As Sweeney points out, ‘Contemporary terminology was unable to contain the variety, range, and depth of shades of religious conformity or otherwise in late Elizabethan England.’11 This is not to say the terminology was mere boilerplate. Rather,



Introduction

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its taxonomic diffusion pointed toward uncharted and potentially ungovernable territory. The spectrum included schismatics and multiple apostates as well as the incompatible positions espoused by recusants and church papists; but the vexing question of conformity was also provoked by tensions between different clerical groups (e.g., territorial skirmishes between English seminary priests and Jesuits) and unsettled questions of authority within the gendered hierarchy of Catholic households. Further, despite the centralizing innovations and the globalizing ambition of Tridentine church administration, the heterogeneous condition of the social body of English Catholics – diaspora communities on the Continent, underground or scattered communities on English soil, some well organized, others conspicuously less so – challenged the understanding of catholicity, outside the abstracted language of dogmatic theology and controversialist argument.12 The present volume takes stock of the ingenuity with which that challenge was met. Let us return to the metaphor advanced at the outset. The cartographic conceit in this volume’s title provides the organizing scheme through which the essays are mutually integrated. For post-Reformation English Catholic cultures, the idea of the map had a peculiar resonance and broad range of application extending beyond merely figurative depictions of spatial position and relation. For starters, it bears noting that the dominant figural senses of the word map in early modern usage referred to the manifestation of an apparent quality or a condensed representation – senses indicating precisely the kind of generic labelling of confessional affiliation that the essays’ topics either complicate or challenge.13 Moreover, the wide variety of literal maps in circulation – mappae mundi, portolan charts, geometric projections – shared one trait that is uncannily relevant to the topic at hand: all entailed distortions of one kind or another, because all incorporated circumstantial and conjectural information in making a valid or functional perspective. This anamorphic quotient from the domain of cartography captures the vigilance and circumspection with which Catholics, whether individually or in groups, navigated over shifting and sometimes hazardous demarcations of ‘inside’ and ‘outside,’ proximity and distance, to a degree not found elsewhere in the broader culture. Physical exile, and the geographical dislocation it imposed, was a fact of life (sometimes a preferred option, sometimes a forced choice) for numbers of early modern English Catholics. Exile of this type, however, was also a symptom of a nexus of other, closely related kinds of motion or errancy that occurred at home – in England, in English Catholic households and communities, and in the

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intellectual life, poetic craft, and linguistic behaviour found in these spaces. The organizational scheme of the volume reflects the last topology by arranging the essays in three overlapping areas of interest: ‘Signposts,’ ‘Poetics,’ and ‘Communities.’ The first group revisits signature topics associated with post-Reformation Catholicism: idolatry, multiple apostasies, and the controversial doctrine of equivocation. The second takes a fresh look at received critical views of the specific character and place of English Catholic poetry in literary history. The third sharpens critical understanding of the degree to which the notion of community for English Catholics entailed tactical negotiations of perceived or established boundaries of confessional identity.

Signposts The opening essay, by Arthur F. Marotti, presents an overview of one of the shibboleths of post-Reformation Catholicism, the charge of idolatry. Marotti’s traversal of the topic calls attention to the ways in which the use of the term in confessional polemics elided a number of doctrinal nuances in the service of a zero-sum game designed to secure and police a strict understanding of the devotional and theological boundaries separating reformist and Romanist worlds. Marotti’s account emphasizes how the resulting standoff, on both sides of the confessional divide, housed a blind spot: mutual misrecognition of the underlying structure (as opposed to the manifest content) of idolatry, which helped fabricate a fantasy of otherness as a totality, homogeneous and unchanging. Marotti’s wide-ranging inspection of this phenomenon suggestively positions early modern incursions into the contested field of idolatry as proof-texts for some of the most powerful contemporary latemodern theoretical reflections on the question of idolatry, notably JeanLuc Marion’s provocative descriptions of the conceptual slippage whereby the problem of idolatry is translated from concern over the proper object of worship to unreflective and rigid assumptions about the nature of community and social relations.14 In effect, Marotti’s essay identifies the provocative association of post-Reformation Catholicism with idolatry as an important precursor of recent debates in Continental philosophy over the nature of the relation between religion and phenomenology. Frances E. Dolan’s essay examines another shibboleth of postReformation Catholicism: the notorious practice of equivocation, which



Introduction

11

was enmeshed in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century debates on torture and treason. Carefully weighing the argumentative tactics in the era’s central document on equivocation in the wake of Gunpowder Plot – the official account of the treason trial of the English Jesuit missionary Henry Garnet, A True and Perfect Relation (1606) – against competing contemporary accounts of the moral and political ramifications of equivocation, Dolan points up the predicament in which English Catholics caught in the juridical system found themselves: ‘What is unspeakable is not Catholic guilt but Catholic innocence.’ As Dolan’s analysis shows, the equation of Catholic speech and self-betrayal depended on a number of blind spots (akin to those noted in Marotti’s essay) and included persistent deformations of traditional figures of harmony or innocence, such as the powerfully resonant trope of marriage in philosophical, religious, rhetorical, and juridical cultures. To drive home the point, Dolan shows the discursive affinities between the Relation and a later, less wellknown text, the Confession and Execution of Leticia Wigington (1681). The Wigington archive documents the trial and execution of a woman who was convicted of one crime – murdering a young female apprentice – but whose reported defence inadvertently drew her into a web of treasonous associations with Catholics who had been executed for involvement in another crime, the notorious Popish Plot. Dolan’s comparative inspection of these documents discloses the sinuous procedure through which apparent evidence of a given speaker’s duplicity functions as a palimpsest of the culture’s aversion to conflicting views of truth. Aversion, however, also bespeaks a certain fascination, and in this capacity the documents’ ways of brooding over the bounds of truth-telling conditions encode an emergent interest in habits of interpretive activity that would later inform the practice of literary criticism. Indeed, as Dolan suggests, the era’s infamous body of equivocation trials and swarming commentaries may have helped to popularize the forensic and conjectural aspects of reading social as well as written texts and to inculcate and hone the interactive skills needed for the endeavour. Recognizing this affinity, Dolan argues, points up the particular utility of marshalling tools of literary analysis to make sense of texts (like treason trials) commonly positioned in the margins of literary production, for it is precisely such tools that help scholars understand events that were, at the time, ‘understood or produced through “dark figures” and texts that are themselves engaged in the process of what today goes by the name of literary analysis.’ The conspicuous element in this process is the role of figural language in ‘constituting the perceived threat of Catholicism and attempting, from

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various points across the confessional spectrum, to fix a true and perfect relation between confessions and identity.’ The third essay in the ‘Signposts’ section, by Holly Crawford Pickett, explicitly takes up the cartographic metaphor and shows its career as presiding trope in the writings of three members of a floating population that would be hard to identify on a census: multiple apostates, or, as Pickett calls them, ‘serial converts.’ Pickett’s candidates – William Alabaster, Marc Antonio De Dominis, and William Chillingworth – were not only notorious serial converts who moved back and forth between reformist and Romanist dispensations; all three also drew significantly on their respective interests in emergent vocabularies of exploration and natural philosophical defences of motion to justify the apparent errancy and duplicity of their shifting religious allegiance. In each case, the perceived link between religious subjectivity (or the progress of the soul) and revisionist emphases in natural philosophy on the kinetic nature of the physical world led to a ‘third option,’ a theoretical space of ecclesiastical transcendence situated outside the minefield of confessional antagonism and irreducible to the charges of hypocrisy or theatrical impersonation typically levelled against serial converts. Thus Alabaster’s scientific syncretism, reversing the Peripatetic hierarchy of rest over motion, yielded a religious cosmology consonant with developing postulates in mechanical philosophy that envisioned a universe ‘full of kinetic and untapped potential energy, populated by moving, colliding bodies and ceaseless motion.’ In a similar vein, De Dominis developed a nuanced rhetorical archive of navigational metaphors powerfully informed by his expertise in tidal theory. Pickett’s inspection of the merger of religious and scientific vocabularies in the writings of De Dominis illumines its novel character: for De Dominis, repeated conversion is a natural reaction to ‘environmental phenomena, the expected response to a series of religious “sea changes”’ in the culture at large. In effect, the idiom of De Dominis recasts alterations in religious allegiance as ‘morally neutral navigational adjustments necessitated by the changing weather conditions of the religious climate.’ Pickett’s final case study, William Chillingworth, illumines the aptitude of the concept of travel for mapping the trajectories of religious change. Chillingworth’s application of travel metaphors underscored his particular interest in cultivating a neutral and Stoic approach to religious affiliations. Like that of De Dominis and Alabaster, Chillingworth’s idiom mapped out cultural connections between navigational and scientific notions of mobility and the dynamics of religious change. In macro-historical terms, Pickett’s argument com-



Introduction

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plicates the critical inclination to read these serial converts’ idiosyncratic defences as premonitory signs of a secularizing Enlightenment sensibility. On Pickett’s account, these case studies are more interestingly positioned as indicators of the sheer scope of religious diversity and ferment in post-Reformation England. Tellingly, these serial coverts represent an important (and previously unexamined) attempt to decouple received markers of religious and spiritual experience from confessional identity by hybridizing the terms of such experience with developing scientific vocabularies.

Poetics The four essays in this section narrow the compass of analysis by focusing on specific instances of poetic craft in which the tectonic shifts observed in the first section effectively reframe the question of how the character and scope of an early modern English Catholic poetics may be described. Alison Shell’s essay returns us to one of the serial converts in Pickett’s essay, William Alabaster. Shell examines the trajectory of one particular literary form, the palinode, showing how it gained currency in the sixteenth century as a technical term for texts associated with recantation or disavowal. The notorious circumstance of Alabaster’s life – his career as multiple apostate – affords a telling occasion to observe how Alabaster’s sonnets enlist details of ‘autobiographical repentance as a fulcrum for the reversals of poetic palinode.’ Shell’s analysis demonstrates how the deeply ingrained dynamics of conversion inform Alabaster’s poetic signature and his particular investment in the rhetorical suppleness of the palinode. Recognizing this trait helps readers appreciate the complexities and contradictions in Alabaster’s poetic signature. The combination of biographical and formal criticism in Shell’s essay results in a clearer picture of the ways in which Alabaster’s palinodic strain registers not only the pain of separation and alienation from institutionalized religious identity but also sorrow at the damage done to close friendships and associations left behind, on the opposing side(s) of the confessional boundary. For Shell, the rhetorical grammar of Alabaster’s sonnets discloses with poignancy the critical function of poetic figuration as marker of the often difficult and painful transactions between social life, personal connections, and, in Alabaster’s case, mutating confessional allegiance. In broader perspective, Shell’s essay contests the unilateral assumptions undergirding the habitual denegation of Alabaster’s poetry in literary history. That habit, Shell argues, has been shored up not simply by un-

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favourable comparison to Donne’s verse but, tellingly, by the alignment of Donne’s poetic career and his ‘single journey away from Catholicism and towards the established church.’ By no coincidence, misrecognition of the particular virtues of Alabaster’s poetic craft has been abetted by reflexive suspicion of Alabaster’s intermittent Catholicism. Where Shell’s essay solicits a more nuanced appreciation of Alabaster’s place in the history of religious poetry in England, Richard Rambuss’s essay critically examines the peculiarities of Richard Crashaw’s place. Crashaw’s is caught in a double bind, with the poetry simultaneously elevated and marginalized as a supreme exponent of a supposed English Catholic and Baroque style. Like Shell, Rambuss adopts a twofold critical method, uncovering telling details of Crashaw’s personal circumstances and using them to reassess the apparently florid (read: Catholic) character of Crashaw’s poetic idiom. Rambuss brings into focus the influence of Herbert and Milton on Crashaw’s style and, conversely, illumines Crashaw’s influence on the Milton of Paradise Lost. Further, Rambuss places these poetic cross-currents in the context of the wide diffusion of Catholic devotional writing in the seventeenth-century reformist world – not least in the writings of William Crashaw, Richard’s father and a notable Protestant controversialist. Rambuss’s essay has two related aims: to secure Crashaw’s place within a supple Anglican poetics – a development closely linked to Cambridge devotional and intellectual life in the 1630s and 1640s – and to remind us of the conspicuous pliability, for those with eyes to see, of seventeenth-century devotional cultures. The latter feature encourages closer attention to the porous borderland on which devotional practice, poetic craft, and confessional identity are found. The last two essays in this section turn to an indisputably canonical figure in English Catholic poetic tradition: Robert Southwell. Each essay refines the critical optics through which the significance of Southwell’s poetic enterprise may be discerned. Gary Kuchar’s essay discloses Southwell’s encrypted and inventive use of alchemical figuration in one of his most famous poems, Saint Peters Complaint. Kuchar’s account of the poem underscores the affinity between allegorical habits of representation and alchemical allusion – a relation Southwell exploits to mirror the survivalist ambitions of Catholic recusant culture and to offer a consolatory picture of the transformative power of Catholic conversion within a socio-political context of competing demands and allegiances. Of particular interest, Kuchar notes, are the poem’s sustained allusions to the alchemical process of solve et coagula – ‘dissolution into constitutive elements and congealing into new form until finally a new being



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emerges through the conjunction of opposites.’ On this account, Southwell’s poem exhibits keen awareness of the intimate connection between repentance and the poetics of alchemy: ‘Like repentance, poetry is alchemical precisely insofar as it has the power to convert or sublime those who employ it from one level of being to another.’ Kuchar’s reading helps explain a number of the poem’s puzzling or troubling features. For example, the evident misogyny that punctuates key phases of Peter’s penitential adventure (before he turns toward a more benign view of feminine and ultimately hermaphroditic properties) becomes legible as a poetic remapping of classic alchemical uses of masculine and feminine elements that culminate in harmonious union. The misogyny of the poem is not thereby cancelled; rather, it is better understood for being secured in the specific contours of Southwell’s intellectual background. Kuchar’s essay not only clarifies the alchemical cast to Southwell’s poetic signature; it also helps resituate Southwell in literary history. Written several years before Donne’s Anniversaries and the Songs and Sonets – two often-cited landmarks in the story of English poetry’s incorporation of alchemical imagery – ‘Saint Peters Complaint should lead us to reconsider how spiritual alchemy found its way into English Renaissance literature.’ Jennifer Rust’s essay makes a strong case for the intimate connection between Southwell’s brand of Catholic resistance ideology and the strange, ambivalent strain of parody that Edmund Spenser introduces into the polemical argument of The Faerie Queene, which allegorizes several contemporary crisis points in Catholic–Protestant relations. Famously, the allegory of Mercilla’s court of justice in book 5 (published in 1596) presents a defamatory, reformist account of the trial and execution of Mary Queen of Scots. Rust’s analysis complicates the defamatory rhetoric by detailing the extent of the poem’s ambivalent representation of what happens in and around Mercilla’s court – notably, the violent treatment of the criminalized poet Malfont and the echo effects that oddly link Mercilla’s tears of pity over the condemned queen and the crocodile tears displayed earlier by Mercilla’s dangerous avatar, Samiant. Such incidents, among others, are wrought in terms highly suggestive of Spenser’s attempt to cannibalize and neutralize powerful rhetorical strategies that by 1596 had become associated with known pastoral, poetic, and, inescapably, politically charged features of Southwell’s writings. Rust’s innovative account of Spenser’s debt to Southwell follows two lines of argument. On the one hand, Spenser’s allegorical procedure assimilates Southwell’s established employment of the imagery of tears

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(e.g., Marie Magdalenes Funerall Tears) to disseminate Catholic resistance arguments. In Spenser’s poem, these very arguments are both exposed as fraudulent (in Samiant’s career) and reactivated in the service of the Elizabethan regime (Mercilla’s prudential judgment). On the other hand, the fate of the poet Malfont presents a hallucinatory coupling – a tormented poetic kinship – between Southwell, the executed poet/ traitor/martyr, and Spenser himself. As Rust points out, Spenser’s consumption and attempted consummation of Southwell’s art and poetic intention is a feature of literary history that has gone largely unrecognized. This new insight has important implications, not only for the way in which it reshapes critical understanding of a telling, if traumatized, connection between Southwell and Spenser, but also for the nuance it brings to the cultural resonance of Spenserian allegory. As Rust suggests, the allegory of the trial of Mary Stuart ‘demonstrates that the propagandistic image of this regime cannot cohere without cross-confessional citations that strive to appropriate the affective rhetoric of the enemy and the exile. Spenser’s indirect, antagonistic allusions to Southwell’s literary missionary project reveal Catholicism to be the uncanny of the Elizabethan political imaginary.’ By calling attention to the equivocal position of Catholicism in Spenser’s poem and in the Tudor regime, Rust points up the irony of Spenser’s allegorical triumphalism: the ‘Catholic uncanny,’ precisely because of its condition as uncanny, ‘may be legible only insofar as it inexorably deforms the representation of Tudor Protestant ideals, even at the very moment when such ideals appear to be overtly celebrated.’

Communities The final section addresses specific instances of the negotiatory ethos that helped early modern English Catholic communities survive as a ‘borderland,’ partially incorporated and partially misrecognized in the dominant church-state apparatus. Phebe Jensen’s essay examines the perhaps surprising trajectory of the Christmas carol in the scenario just described. The evolution of the Christmas carol and the confessionally tinged debates over the carol and other Christmastide practices illumine a significant dimension of early modern recusant life, giving further insight into ways in which late-medieval festival and devotional traditions were retooled as vehicles of Catholic resistance and also, by the midseventeenth century, quietly folded into mainstream Protestant religious culture. Rather than neutralizing the confessional aura of carols, the



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mutual appropriation just described calls attention to the several kinds of lively investment in the carol and other forms of festive mirth and holiday cheer as effective means of building and reinventing a sense of community. Depending on where one stood on the post-Reformation map of confessional allegiance, that sense could include boundary-drawing motives as well as boundary-crossing dispositions. Jensen’s map gives a nuanced picture of the sometimes conflicted attitudes toward carols and the imagined consequences of their use on both sides of the confessional divide. Jensen’s essay concludes with a careful analysis of a representative instance: the case of the sole Christmas carol in one of the landmark collections of English verse, England’s Helicon (1600). In Jensen’s words, ‘Making Catholicism visible in Protestant culture can … allow for a richer, more complex, and more accurate understanding of the religious tensions lurking, sometimes deeply obscured, beneath the unity suggested in a book like England’s Helicon. At the same time, the seamless inclusion of a recusant position on Christmas in this solidly Protestant collection suggests how Catholicism, in both subtle and obvious ways, continued to be an important, if often invisible, contributor to the Protestant literary, political, and religious culture of early modern England.’ Susannah Monta’s essay reorients a dominant trend in recent scholarship on early modern devotional culture: the emphasis on the role of communal and state-authorized prayer in the development of an officially unified ethos of religious and national identity. Monta focuses instead on the shifting calculus through which patterns of domestic devotion proved no less significant or multiform than other mechanisms of religious and national formation. As Monta shows, influential proponents of Catholic resistance such as Robert Southwell and Henry Garnet, among others, promulgated devotional guides designed to foster ‘holy secular domesticity through allusions to monastic devotion or to the devotional practices of vowed religious more generally (including Jesuits).’ This enterprise ‘forged links between past and present, native and foreign, re-inscribing an estranged religious Catholicism in the most familiar of English spaces: the home.’ In effect, the strategy ‘shaped an alternative, resistant community through allusions to a sort of light monasticism – or light life of vowed religion – designed to prevent the domestic from sliding into a Protestant state.’ But this phenomenon covers only one part of the map. The neighbouring reformist landscape, Monta points out, pursued an analogous enterprise, using (and deforming with an uneven hand) the very texts that had been composed for the recusant community. The career of Southwell’s influential Short Rule

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for Good Life is a case in point. As Monta shows, the compilers of the several ‘Protestant or Protestantizing print and manuscript editions of Southwell’s Rule labour to reconcile Catholic devotion with Protestant religious and national formation, struggling to mark the territories of Protestant and Catholic devotion.’ An unsteady vantage point also affected the disposition of Catholic writers, whose advocacy of a ‘light monasticism’ in the rhythms of Catholic domesticity foundered on the peculiar, gendered circumstance of recusant households. The crucial, dominant position of the wife and mother in these households troubled writers like Southwell and Garnet, who worried about the Catholic mission’s reliance on ‘English wives, who might prove faithful to their country rather than their God.’ Monta’s argument presents a telling reminder of how the unsettled perception of women’s authority in early modernity proved both a source of remarkable adaptability and a recurring dilemma in recusant culture. Anne Dillon’s essay examines a page from the history of one of the key elements and symbols of Catholic identity, the rosary. After giving an overview of the origins and pre-Reformation career of the rosary, Dillon tells the story of the important role of the rosary in the development of a form of devotional community known as the ‘confraternity.’ Her account focuses on the Chapel of the Confraternity of the Rosary, which had been located at Cardigan House in Lincoln’s Inn Fields during the middle years of the seventeenth century. The history of the Confraternity at Cardigan House offers an exemplary picture of how the Catholic household became a ‘sacred space’ in which the functions of church, confraternity, chapel, and chantry mingled. Inspection of archival details also shows how the rosary confraternity ‘embodied and transmitted to the Catholic communities the new Tridentine doctrine and rituals that reflected the changed emphases of the Counter-Reformation Church.’ In its Tridentine service, the rosary became ‘a catechism, a prayer book, and summary of the Gospels and so an effective instrument of catechesis,’ one that ‘restored Mary to the centre of Catholic devotion’ and disseminated a ‘standardized program of CounterReformation doctrine.’ Dillon’s meticulous study of the ceremonies and protocols of the confraternity at Cardigan House remaps the contours of confessional co-existence in seventeenth-century London. As she points out, the confraternity’s ‘opulent displays of triumphant Tridentine Catholicism’ took place in the heart of Commonwealth London, and in fact the community prospered during the years of the Protectorate. Dillon’s assessment of the curious status of the Cardigan House confraternity as



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a virtual ‘open secret’ prompts fresh insights into the unpredictable but decisive impact of social class, prosperity, and mercantile relations within the otherwise starkly divided topology of confessional allegiance. As Dillon points out, the long and successful presence of the Cardigan House confraternity in the heart of London is more than a sign and measure of an incipient ethos of religious toleration; it also reflects the ‘continuing influence, wealth, and status in society of the recusant Catholic families.’ That delicate equilibrium would hold until 1678–9, ‘when the cataclysm of the Popish Plot’ overtook the recusant population and drove the confraternity underground. The final essay presents an innovative assessment of the seventeenthcentury English Catholic political thinker Thomas White, author of the pro-republican Grounds of Obedience and Government (1655), among other philosophical ventures. The tendency in scholarship on English political thought has been to treat White’s treatise as a ‘secular piece of writing, without anything particularly Catholic in it.’ By contrast, Stefania Tutino’s essay argues that The Grounds is a ‘distinctively interesting text in the history of political thought of its time precisely because it merged the language of natural law with that of Catholic theology.’ Tutino’s examination of White’s idiosyncratic reweaving of political, religious, and scientific strands of thought comports well with other mergers (linguistic, social, and devotional) addressed elsewhere in the volume. Tutino’s main quarry is the peculiar hybridity of White’s apparent republicanism: a version of consent theory ‘steeped in Catholic theology and in White’s own version of mechanical physics.’ The critical element here is White’s particular use of traditional Catholic accounts of retributive justice, whereby ‘whatever we do or refuse in this life has an effect on the destiny of our soul after death.’ Tutino makes sense of this feature by giving a nuanced account of the debates in mid-century English political cultures over the significance of White’s arguments, both pro and con. The resulting picture isolates White’s significant departure from not only the postulates of Thomas Hobbes and John Harrington but also from conventional Catholic belief in divine intervention. As Tutino puts it, ‘White’s God does not meddle in civil affairs or even, finally, in religious matters.’ The radicalism of White’s political vision resides not simply in his idiosyncratic blending of theology and mechanist physics (White’s ‘God governeth as an Engineer,’ complained one contemporary critic), but in his unusual parsing of the theological rationale driving Catholic resistance theory, as enshrined in the works of Nicholas Sanders, Robert Persons, and Robert Bellarmine. For White, ‘a governor

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is illegitimate not when he jeopardizes the souls of his subjects, but when he fails to provide for the people’s good on earth.’ While White declared his positions to be no more than ‘abstract notions,’ one political consequence of his arguments amounted to a striking type of border-crossing: ‘de facto endorsement of Cromwell’s regime.’ Tutino’s closing remarks underscore the need for further inquiry into the powerful cross-currents of Catholic theology and political thought in the developing conceptual definition of English republicanism. More broadly, her account of White’s place in that story points the way toward ‘a more nuanced picture of the theoretical, political, and theological dimensions of midseventeenth-century English intellectual debates.’ Over the longue durée, Tutino proposes, White’s treatise may also be viewed as a provocative, anticipatory rebuttal of the notorious political theology articulated by Carl Schmitt in the twentieth century, as encoded in Schmitt’s famous definition of the sovereign as ‘he who decides on the exception’ whereby the rule of law and norm is suspended.15 To the degree that Schmitt’s theory of the transcendent and exceptional character of the sovereign draws on Hobbesian language, White’s difference from Hobbes powerfully warps the line connecting Hobbes and Schmitt. For, as Tutino points out, White’s sovereign, ‘unlike Hobbes’s, is dependent on the consent that men need to give in order to legitimize the sovereign.’ Tutino’s turn to a decisive and controversial Catholic thinker in twentieth-century political theory (Carl Schmitt) nicely dovetails with Marotti’s turn to an important Catholic thinker in contemporary religious phenomenology (Jean-Luc Marion). This is not to say that the religious legacies and ideological stakes of Schmitt’s and Marion’s respective projects disclose a shared aboriginal and resilient strain of Catholic thought in modernity. Quite the opposite. Notwithstanding its grounding in Roman law and its debt to Max Weber’s secularization thesis, Schmitt’s account of the numinous power of the sovereign’s decision to suspend the operation of juridical norms bears a telling kinship to one of the signature tenets of Counter-Reformation neo-scholasticism (and deformations of Thomist thought): belief in the irreducible distinction between supernatural and natural orders.16 Arguably, Schmitt’s line of reasoning exploits the totalizing instinct that led to the neo-Thomist ‘dichotomy between the order of pure natural reason and the dispensation of divine revelation.’17 Marion’s religious phenomenology, on the other hand, mines the rich but largely marginalized legacy of mystical thought and sacramental anthropology in Catholic tradition in order to reopen access to a critical apprehension of the real as caught up in



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a web of ‘intergivenness’ where the relation between same and other is traversed by an ‘unsubstitutable particularity’ that resists capture by the colonizing rule of dichotomy.18 The juxtaposition of Schmitt’s and Marion’s divergent repertoires calls attention to some of the ways in which twentieth-century philosophical cultures have reclaimed significant remappings of the real associated with theological and ecclesiological manoeuvres in early modern Catholicism. While no one would confuse Marion’s Catholic archive and critical utopian instincts with Schmitt’s, their counterpoise prompts recognition of the potency of the paradox to which each arena of thought subscribes. ‘Being-outside, and yet belonging’: thus Giorgio Agamben names the paradox insidiously mobilized by Schmitt’s theory of the state of exception grounded in the sovereign’s decision.19 But the same paradox, the same topological structure, also undergirds Marion’s mapping of the ‘unobjectifiable,’ and ungovernable, passage of alterity within the real.20 So, too, the essays in this volume show the extent to which the condition of ‘being-outside, and yet belonging’ informs the cohabiting domains of religion, politics, and poetics in which the resilience and mutating character of early modern English Catholicism expressed itself.

NOTES   1 A trace element of the intuition just described survives in the national holiday called Guy Fawkes Day. For an account of the complicated nexus of collective memory and historical knowledge associated with the observance of Guy Fawkes Day, see David Cressy, Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989), 141–55.   2 The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997).   3 A helpful overview of this scholarly habit is in Lorraine M. Roberts and John R. Roberts, ‘Crashavian Criticism: A Brief Interpretive History,’ in New Perspectives on the Life and Art of Richard Crashaw, ed. John R. Roberts, 1–29 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990).   4 Arthur F. Marotti and Ken Jackson, ‘The Turn to Religion in Early Modern English Studies,’ Criticism 46, no. 1 (Winter 2004): 175–6. The rapidly growing field of early modern English Catholic studies includes a number of recent publications addressing topics broached in the present volume. See, for example, Anne Dillon, The Construction of Martyrdom in the English

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Catholic Community, 1535–1603 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002); Frances E. Dolan, Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999); Stephen Hamrick, The Catholic Imaginary and the Cults of Elizabeth, 1558–1582 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2009); Christopher Highley, Catholics Writing the Nation in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Phebe Jensen, Religion and Revelry in Shakespeare’s Festive World (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Gary Kuchar, Divine Subjection: The Rhetoric of Sacramental Devotion in Early Modern England (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2005); Arthur F. Marotti, Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy: Catholic and Anti-Catholic Discourses in Early Modern England (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005); Susannah Monta, Martyrdom and Literature in Early Modern England (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Richard Rambuss, Closet Devotions (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998); Alison Shell, Oral Culture and Catholicism in Early Modern England (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Alison Shell, Catholicism, Controversy, and the English Literary Imagination (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999); and Stefania Tutino, Thomas White and the Blackloists: Between Politics and Theology during the English Civil War (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008). These publications indicate the fecundity of scholarship directed principally at specific conjugations of ‘English’ and ‘Catholic’ identities, in useful counterpoint to transnational studies such as Early Modern Catholicism: Essays in Honour of John W. O’Malley, S.J., ed. Kathleen M. Comerford and Hilmar M. Pabel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001).   5 For a detailed account of the Eucharist in the Reformation era, see Lee Palmer Wandel, The Eucharist in the Reformation: Incarnation and Liturgy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006).   6 Marotti and Jackson, ‘Turn to Religion,’ 175.   7 Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, trans. Michael B. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 83–9. A helpful account of de Certeau’s argument is in John Milbank, Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon (London: Routledge, 2003), 122–6. See also Regina Schwartz, Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism: When God Left the World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 18–26. A richly detailed account of the ferment of critical thought on the corpus mysticum in modernity is in Jennifer R. Rust, ‘Political Theologies of the Corpus Mysticum: Schmitt, Kantorowicz and de Lubac,’ in Points of Departure: Political Theology on the Scene of Early Modernity, ed. Graham Hammill and Julia Reinhard Lupton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming).



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  8 On this point see Marotti and Jackson, ‘Turn to Religion,’ 176–82.   9 Gianni Vattimo, The Transparent Society, trans. David Webb (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 39. Vattimo calls attention to the paradoxical internal logic of both Weber’s and Nietzsche’s understanding of the emancipation of reason: ‘Modern European culture is thus linked to its own religious past not only by a relation of overcoming and emancipation, but also, and inseparably, by a relation of conservation-distortion-evacuation: progress is in a sense nostalgic by nature … [but] the significance of this nostalgia only becomes apparent once the experience of demythologization is taken to its extreme. When demythologization itself is revealed as myth, myth regains legitimacy, but only within the frame of a generally “weakened” experience of truth’ (42). 10 Marotti and Jackson, ‘Turn to Religion,’ 177. For a related position, see Graham Hammill and Julia Lupton, ‘Sovereigns, Citizens, and Saints: Political Theology and Renaissance Literature,’ Religion and Literature 38 (Autumn 2006): 1–11. 11 Anne Sweeney, Robert Southwell: Snow in Arcadia; Redrawing the English Lyric Landscape (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2006), 23. A number of recent essay collections document the wide scope of the challenge Sweeney describes; see, for example, Arthur F. Marotti, ed., Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism in Early Modern English Texts (Houndmills, UK: Macmillan, 1999); and Ronald Corthell, Frances E. Dolan, Christopher Highley, and Arthur F. Marotti, eds. Catholic Culture in Early Modern England (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007). 12 For an account of the multiple aspirations and agendas of Tridentine Catholicism, see John W. O’Malley, Trent and All That: Renaming Catholicism in the Early Modern Era (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). 13 The first two extended uses of map on record in the OED appear for the first time in the last two decades of the sixteenth century: ‘A representation in abridged form; a summary or condensed account of a state of things’ (5a); ‘An embodiment or incarnation of a quality, characteristic, etc.’ (5b). A helpful treatment of the cultural penetration of the map in its various senses in early modern England is in Rhonda Lemke Sanford, Maps and Memory in Early Modern England (New York: Palgrave, 2002). 14 See, for example, Jean-Luc Marion, The Idol and Distance: Five Studies, trans. Thomas C. Carlson (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001). 15 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 5. 16 An influential account of the conceptual affinity between Schmitt’s political

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theology and Roman jurisprudence is in Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 17 Fergus Kerr, ‘French Theology: Yves Congar and Henri de Lubac,’ in The Modern Theologians: An Introduction to Christian Theology in the Twentieth Century, ed. David F. Ford, 2nd ed. (New York: Blackwell, 1997), 111. 18 Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 323, 324. See also Jean-Luc Marion, ‘Introduction: What Do We Mean by “Mystic”?’ in Mystics: Presence and Aporia, ed. Michael Kessler and Christian Sheppard, 1–7 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 19 Agamben, State of Exception, 35. 20 Marion, Being Given, 321.

PART I SIGNPOSTS

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chapter two

In Defence of Idolatry: Residual Catholic Culture and the Protestant Assault on the Sensuous in Early Modern England A R T H U R F. M A R O T T I And God spake all these words, saying, (2) I am the Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. (3) Thou shalt have no other gods before me. (4) Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: (5) Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; (6) And shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments. – Exodus 20:1–6 Both nuns and mothers worship images, But those the candles light are not as those That animate a mother’s reveries, But keep a marble or a bronze repose. And yet they too break hearts. – W.B. Yeats, ‘Among School Children’

In an Italian-American parish in which I lived for part of my youth, many of the plaster statues of saints, the Virgin, and Christ had feet worn down, mainly by the devout old women who kissed and rubbed them as part of their religious ritual behaviour. Without such touching, their religious experience was impoverished – even if, to some ways of thinking, what they were doing was practising idolatry. In attempting to change Christianity from a ‘superstitious’ cult that materialized the spiritual in its rituals, its ecclesiastical imagery, and its religious paraphernalia into a religion centred on scripture and the preached word of God – that is, on the reading and hearing of language,

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Protestantism participated in and was facilitated by a media shift initiated by the invention of moveable type, a printing revolution that led to more widespread literacy (especially, the ability to read the Bible translated into European vernaculars).1 Michel Foucault describes a paradigm shift taking place in the early modern period from a culture of iconicity to one of representation: the former entails a belief that there are essential connections between things and their representations; the latter sees representation as arbitrary.2 The Catholic/Protestant debate over the Eucharist put antagonists on either side of this change, Catholics adhering to the former and Protestants, especially in the Zwinglian explanation of the Eucharist, to the latter. As far as visual representation was concerned, the newer conception of representation meant that visual material spoke rather than embodied meanings and, therefore, minimal sensuous impact was best, lest the viewer get distracted from the didactic content of what he or she was observing. A cartoonish woodcut, then, was communicatively better than the Sistine Chapel ceiling. The new Protestant had to use his or her eyes differently from the old Catholic. In the older ecclesiastical world of visuality and spectacle (a religion, the Protestants claimed, of theatricality rather than of proper worship), the eyes responded to the visual plenitude of the church interior: Pope Gregory I famously called images ‘the books of the illiterate,’ sanctioning of the use of visual imagery in churches. Even after Gutenberg, the biblia pauperum presented biblical events and scenes in visual form. In their scripture-centred religion, Protestants, however, wanted believers to use their ears to respond primarily to the preached word, assuming that hearing facilitated learning and understanding, while seeing encouraged fantasy and illusion. There was a debate in Jacobean England between the dramatist Ben Jonson and his masque-collaborator Inigo Jones about the relative merits of hearing and seeing, and, ultimately, about the relative importance of the poet and the designer/artist in the creation of lavish court masques: Jonson put hearing above sight in the hierarchy of the senses, because he wanted his words and their recitation to be set above the costumes, sets, and choreography that were Jones’s creations.3 There was a traditional debate among those who arranged the human senses hierarchically. One version, which put sight at the top and hearing, touch, smell, and taste below, conceived of the senses in terms of increasing materiality: hearing being a more physical experience than sight in the impact of sound on the eardrum, touch involving direct physical contact, with smell and taste entailing incorporation of



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matter, the former in lighter material form. The other version, as in Ben Jonson’s dispute with Inigo Jones over the components of the masque, put hearing above sight because of its connection to language and the mind’s response to orally expressed ideas. Despite the fact that sight was essential to Bible-reading, Protestants put hearing above sight, because they conceived of the competition as one between (viewed) images and (heard) words. Sight, however, is a complex sense, because there are really different kinds of seeing – ranging from the sensuously full to the impoverished and abstract. Long ago Walter Ong suggested that one consequence of the spread of print literacy was the reordering of the relationship of the senses: he claimed that print made sight more important than it had been in a world of oral communication.4 Although print accelerated the change from oral to silent reading, some writers could still conceive of reading as an aural experience: in his rejoinder to John Jewel, Thomas Harding, for example, states, ‘Thinges that be read, when as they come to our eares, then we conveigh them over to the minde.’5 Print fostered abstraction, causing a rift between an activity such as reading and forms of immersion in the sensory plenitude of a world of sounds, smells, touch, and (colourful) scenes. But the kind of seeing involved in reading is very different from that used in looking at a stained-glass window or other forms of rich visual display. It is a seeing that is not seeing as such, not a looking at, but a looking through, or a looking that invisibly dissolves into thought. This is the kind of seeing the Protestant reformers wanted; in fact, they wanted the viewing of non-verbal objects (whether in the form of anti-Catholic cartoons, John Foxe’s illustrations in his Book of Martyrs, or the staged scenes of Protestant religious drama) to be primarily an intellectual – not a sensuous – experience. Houston Diehl argues that, in dissociating the theatre from a magic and sensuality associated with corrupt Catholic practices, English Renaissance Protestant dramatists built into their dramas a kind of anti-theatricality critical of the hybrid visual/verbal medium in which they worked.6 Similarly, in his study of illustrations in sixteenth-century English printed books, James Knapp finds an attempt to make images serve primarily an ideological (rather than aesthetic) function and then disappear, replaced by purely verbal means of representation – a change that challenged writers to do some of the work that, previously, was done by visual artists.7 For Protestants, idolatry entails primarily the wrong kind of seeing – a seeing that turns the attention not to a transcendent God but to material objects to which one becomes illicitly attached. In his Institutes of the

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Christian Religion, John Calvin levels a radical criticism of idolatry that goes back as far as Tertullian.8 He treats the Roman Catholic distinction between latria and doulia as a distinction without a difference: for him, worship and reverence (or, as he calls the latter, ‘service’) are basically the same thing.9 He takes a hard line on the second commandment, objecting to any form of representation of the divine, as well as to pictorial and sculptural representation of religious figures in church. When the intention is didactic, he does allow for visual representation of historical events. But all other visual representation he classes as ‘only fitted for amusement … the only kind which have hitherto been exhibited in churches’ (100). He considers ‘whether it is expedient that churches should contain representations of any kind, whether of events or human forms’ (101) and concludes that, since ‘for five hundred years, during which religion was in a more prosperous condition, and a purer doctrine flourished, Christian churches were completely free from visible representations’ (101), it would be best to ban them from contemporary churches. Using one-drink-makes-a-drunk reasoning, Calvin assumes that people exposed to visual imagery cannot resist the slide into full idolatry, ‘because the folly of mankind cannot moderate itself, but forthwith falls away to superstitious worship’ (101). He expresses contempt for ‘the infatuated proneness of mankind to idolatry’ (97) and, anticipating Francis Bacon’s later use of the term, calls ‘the human mind … a perpetual forge of idols’ (97). Not surprisingly, he associates visual representation with sexual sin: writing about the images of saints in Roman Catholic churches, he asks, ‘What are the pictures or statues to which they append the names of saints, but exhibitions of the most shameless luxury or obscenity? … Indeed, brothels exhibit their inmates more chastely and modestly dressed than churches do images intended to represent virgins’ (96). He is concerned, with regard to idolatry, ‘that we do not prostitute our souls to Satan, to be defiled with foul carnal lusts’ (331). Peter Lake has observed, ‘The particular threat of popery as a style of anti-religion was held to lie in the efficacy of its idolatrous religious forms in working on the soft, sensual, fleshly and corrupt elements in what was now a sadly fallen human nature.’10 Alain Besançon observes that Calvin’s desire to have an unmediated direct relationship with God produces a ‘stripped-down, empty cosmos’: ‘What changed with Calvin was not the idea of God but the idea of the world, which was de-deified. Even before the question of images was raised, it was already unclear how an element of the created world that is not the human soul, which knows the good through keen “experience,”



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could serve as support for a divine image. Heaven and earth, rather than telling of divine glory, are the deserted and neutral theater on whose stage the individual subject, if he has the gift of grace, can experience God as he declares himself through his Word.’11 Calvin’s attitude is basically rationalistic, minimalistic, anti-rhetorical, anaesthetic, and, as Peter Herman and others have explained, anti-poetic.12 Protestantism, which split the original first commandment in the Catholic numbering into two, thereby highlighting the proscription against ‘graven images,’ located idolatry at the heart of Catholicism. It used the second commandment to condemn traditional Catholic devotion to saints, and more broadly, the uses of material means in religious devotion and rituals.13 The sin of idolatry was broadened to include not just the worship of gods other than the Christian one, but also the artistic embodiment and veneration of saints and of the Virgin Mary as well as the full range of Catholic rituals, ceremonies, and ecclesiastical furniture. In effect, under the guise of opposing the materialization of the spiritual, it attacked the natural human inclination to cathect objects and other people, to charge the external world libidinally. Looking at the situation broadly, and writing as an English observer, Margaret Aston notes the large cultural change proceeding from the Protestant assault on religious images: ‘The reformers effectively disestablished imagery. A wedge of conscientious objection was driven between the visual arts and religious experience, and a deep inhibition implanted towards the more exuberant forms of church imagery – an inhibition that still separates us from southern Europe.’14 In post-Reformation England, in which many of the material features of the traditional religion were being rejected, radical Protestant iconoclasm was never, of course, the norm: for the most part, the established church occupied a middle ground between iconophobia and iconophilia.15 Despite her orders that churches continue to be purged of images, Queen Elizabeth retained the traditional religious decorations of her royal chapel.16 There were, however, waves of official and unofficial or popular iconoclasm, and the Church of England’s ‘An Homily against the Perill of Idolatrie’ is sweeping in its condemnation of church imagery.17 After surveying biblical injunctions against idolatry and the writings of early church fathers on the subject, the homily looks back to Pope Gregory I’s legitimizing the use of narrative and historical images in church for instructing the illiterate as opening the door to the idolatrous worship of painted or sculpted images, a change identified as occasioning the Great Schism between the Eastern and Western churches:

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Fyrst, men used privately stories painted in tables, clothes, and walles. Afterwards grosse and embossed images privately in theire owne houses. Then afterwards, pictures fyrst, and after them embossed images began to crepe into Churches…. Then by use it was openly mainteined that they myght be in Churches, but yet forbidden that they should be worshipped. Of which opinion was Gregorie as by the sayd Gregories Epistle to … Serenus Bishop of Massile, playnely appeareth … where he hath these wordes: ‘That thou diddest forbid Images to be worshipped, we prayse altogether, but that thou dyddst breake them, we blame. For it is one thyng to worship the picture, and another thyng by the picture of the storye, to learne what is to be worshipped. For that whiche Scripture is to them that reade, the same doth picture performe unto Idiots or the unlearned beholding, and so foorth…. If you will have images in the Churche for that instruction … I do permit that they maye be made … but avoyd by all means to worship any Image....’ Gregories authority was so great in all the West Church, that by his incouragement men set up Images in all places … but they fell all on heapes to manifest idolatrie by worshipping of them.

Whereas, following Calvin, the homily sees some legitimate role for historical or narrative art in conveying moral and religious messages, especially to an illiterate congregation, the natural proclivity of people to fetishize such images in an ecclesiastical setting makes them dangerous. Like Calvin earlier, the homily expresses contempt for the popular attachment to religious images: ‘The opinion of all the rablement of the popish Church, mayntaining Images, ought to be esteemed of small or no authoritie, for that it is no marvell that they which have from theyr childhoode ben brought up amongst Images and Idoles, and have dronke in idolatrie almost with their mothers mylke, holde with Images and Idols, and speake and write for them’ (fol. 26v). The term worship is broadly used in Protestant iconoclastic discourse. The moment that awe and attachment are a component of perception, one has crossed over into idolatrous practice. In the homily, there is a bit of reasoning about representation that, in effect, puts Renaissance portraiture out of business. In calling any image of Christ a ‘lying Image’ (fol. 44) because it cannot represent the divine aspect of the incarnate God, and in extending this logic to saints, ‘whose soules … can by no Images be presented and expressed’ (fol. 44v), the homily states that only physical bodies can be represented. To this way of thinking, as manifested, for example, in the polemical writing of Bishop John Jewel, both painters and poets are liars, since what they represent is



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not ontologically present. It is no accident that Jewel cites Plato’s banishment of poets from the ideal republic.18 One major point addressed in the early Elizabethan polemical debate between Jewel and his Catholic antagonist, Thomas Harding, is what Jewel calls ‘the adoration of Images.’19 Entering the debate on the Catholic side, Nicholas Sander offers a defence of images that demonstrates a sensitivity to the complex epistemological and psychological issues involved. In his Treatise of the Images of Christ, and of his Saints, he treats the human mind as a user of both internal and external imagery as aids to memory, thinking, and religious devotion.20 First, with regard to the memorial purposes of images he states, ‘It is lawful and commendable when the Images are made, to use them as we ought to use the remembrance of good, holie, and honorable verities’ (19).21 Second, images are symbols or representations, not the direct objects of worship: ‘Honour is geven without blame, when the partie that giveth it, doth in the faith of one God, and of one Mediatour Jesus Christ, direct his honour by the Image to the truth represented’ (22). Sander does, however, allow honour to be extended to the images themselves, in effect recognizing what happens when human beings emotionally invest objects (or persons) in the material world: ‘There is a double adoration, one proper to God, which must be geven to no Image: another is common to honourable creatures, and is in another degree extended to their similitudes and remembrances’ (56). ‘We fall downe before the Image, not as before the Godhead, but we adore him whome by the Image we remember to have bene borne, or to have suffred, and also to sitte in his Throne’ (57). In his pamphlet warfare with John Jewel, Thomas Harding counters the former’s literal-minded interpretation of human behaviour: When we kisse the Gospel booke, by that token we honour not the Parchement, Paper and Incke, wherein it is written, but the Gospel it selfe. And as Jacob, when he kissed his Sonne Josephes coate embrewed with Kiddes bloude, holding and imbrasing it in his armes, and makinge heavie moane over it, the affection of his love and sorow rested not in the Coate, but was directed to Joseph him selfe, whose infortunate Deathe (as he thought) that blouddy coate represented: So Christen men shewinge tokens of reverence, love and honour before the Image of Christe, of an Apostle, or Martyr with their inwarde recognition and devotion of their hartes, they staie not their thoughtes in the very Images, but deferre the whole to Christe, to the Apostle, and to the Martyr geving to eche one in dewe proportion that which is to be geven, putting difference betweene the Almighty Creatour,

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and the Creatures: finally rendring al Honour and Glorie to God alone, who is marvelous in his Sainctes.22

Sander’s argument for images implicitly refers to the Aristotelian epistemological axiom that ‘there is nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses’:23 It is utterly impossible, that the making of an Image (onely as it is the similitude of an other thing) should be forbidden. Otherwise God should be contrary to himselfe. For he hath so made us, that we can not learne, know, or understand any thing, without conceiving the same in some corporall Image or likeness. Our knowledge commeth by our senses, of the which our eies are the cheefe….   If then at what time I reade that Christ died, with his handes stretched and nailed upon the woode of the Crosse, I may, and necessarily must devise with my selfe an Image which sheweth so much (otherwise I can never understand that which I read) how can a wise man doubt, but that thing may be lawfully set foorth in an outward Image, which must be necessarily conceived in an internall Image? (76–7)24

The clinching argument is the incarnational one: ‘God the Fathers owne natural Image and Sonne, tooke of the Virgin Marie our naturall flesh, to the end we might not lack some corporal truth of bodie and flesh, wherin we might boldlie worship the divine substance’ (81). The senses enable emotionally charged devotion: church paintings, windows, statues, rituals and ceremonies, holy water, incense, organ music, and the like are not barriers to, but facilitators of, divine worship. The conclusion one might draw from this line is reasoning is that removing them results in cognitive and emotional impoverishment.25 Protestant writers who distrusted the imagination and objected to mental imagery demanded a kind of inner purification that, in Margaret Aston’s words, ‘could be regarded – in Luther’s term – as “death-dealing.” Part of a person had to be mortified, disciplined into non-existence…. The killing instinct that was latent in image-breaking was also present in this interior obliteration.’26 In Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, Theseus’s hostility to what he contemptuously calls ‘imagination’ is rooted in polemics against images, though ‘the idolatrous Catholic’ is not added to his list of the addle-brained: ‘The lunatic, the lover and the poet’ (5.1.7–8).27 Although it is only a subsidiary point in his argument, Sander makes a politically volatile charge when he challenges Bishop Jewel to dare to



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turn the iconoclastic impulse toward royal and aristocratic visual symbolism: It would greve any Prince (I am sure) to heare, that his Image should be broken.   And thinke you, that such contumelie may be freely done to Christ, as no prince would take at your handes? Breake (M.Jewel) if you dare the Image of the Queenes Majestie, or the Armes of the realme. Pull doune any banner or helmet, or other Ensigne, or token belonging to the honorable Knights of the Garter, or to the Knights of any worshipfull order. If they take it well, then Christ may perhaps be content to see his owne Image destroyed. (186)

As Carlos Eire has demonstrated in his political analysis of sixteenthcentury Continental iconoclasm, and as is borne out by analyses of both sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English iconoclasm, unofficial iconoclasm, in particular, carried with it a threat that could spill over into the secular realm, whose own symbols of power were, as Sander suggests, vulnerable to attack.28 If rood screens were ripped out of churches and replaced by royal symbols, those too could be trashed at some later time.29 After all, John Milton regarded monarchy as a ‘civil kinde of Idolatry’30 and, for him, anti-idolatry and political republicanism went hand-inhand. The perceived connection between aesthetic representation and idolatry was involved in the Puritan hostility in Elizabethan and early Stuart England to theatre, which one anti-theatrical polemicist called ‘the chapel of Satan.’31 Ben Jonson caricatured this religious opposition to drama in Bartholomew Fair, in which he has a mad Puritan, Zeal-of-theLand Busy, criticize the commodity fetishism of the fair itself (‘Thou art the seat of the Beast, O Smithfield, and I will leave thee. Idolatry peepeth out on every side of thee’ [3.6.43–4], he exclaims).32 This character gives his anti-theatrical passion full vent in expressing his outrage at the puppet show of the fifth act: Down with Dagon, down with Dagon; ’tis I, will no longer endure your profanations. ............................. … that idol, that heathenish idol that remains (as I may say) a beam … a beam in the eye, in the eye of the

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brethren; a very great beam, an exceeding great beam; such as are your stage-players, rhymes, and morrice-dancers. (5.5.1–2, 4–5, 8–11)

When he has a dialogue with the puppet Dionysus and criticizes him, as Puritans did actors, for not having a ‘lawful calling’ (5.5.52), the puppet says ‘idol is a lawful calling’ (5.5.55). If theatrical representation is an occasion for idolatry, Jonson seems to be saying, so be it. Interestingly, some iconoclastic writers characterized religious statues as dolls or puppets.33 Historically the definition of idolatry has been broadened far beyond its basic theological context. The term has been used not just to refer to the worship of false gods through their material representation, but also to a wide range of other kinds of attachment: to lovers, spouses, children, and relatives; to idealized human beings such as kings and great leaders; to material possessions, especially gold; generally to ‘the world’; and to any false intellectual constructs to which one irrationally adheres – the last represented by Sir Francis Bacon’s ‘idols of the mind.’ Although idolatry is basically the temporary or permanent placing of someone or something in place of God as the centre of one’s moral universe (St Augustine’s general definition of sin), there are, in practice, two kinds of idolatry: one involves material objects and people, and the other abstract or mental entities. If one looks at the various condemnations of idolatry in scripture, to say nothing of the historical interpretive elaborations of scriptural injunction, this distinction is clear. First, idolatry can be the religious worship given to ‘graven images’ (the Golden Calf of Exodus, the brazen serpent Moses was ordered by God to make then was destroyed by Hezekiah when it became an object of idolatrous worship [2 Kings 18.4], the statues of Roman or Greek gods, etc.). It also includes the use of material means in religious worship that are seen as interposed between the believer and God: church decorations such as stained glass windows, statues of the Virgin and the saints, candles, crucifixes, holy water, rosary beads, rituals such as processions, and, especially to most Protestant reformers, the Catholic Mass itself.34 In an era in which the Laudian Church restored some Catholic imagery as tasteful decor, radical iconoclasts targeted as idolatrous not only the newly installed altar rails, but even The Book of Common Prayer.35 Second, idolatry can designate an improper attachment that can be identified in more abstract terms. In one of his sermons, John Donne writes that any ‘descent of men, in the inordinate love of the Creature, may very justly seem



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to be forbidden in that Commandement, that forbids Idolatry’ (Sermons, 2.132–3).36 He writes elsewhere, ‘As many habituall sins as we embrace, so many Idols we worship’ (Sermons, 5:203). There are two issues here: the displacement of worship of and attention to God onto creatures, and the ‘inordinate’ attention to worldly things. These are really alternative versions of a rule – the second, in its notion of the ‘inordinate,’ leaves some room for cathecting things of the world (other people, one’s own creations, ideas, and ideals). Despite the Beatitudes and the command to love one’s neighbour as oneself, Christianity has been understood to require believers to direct their main attention on the otherworldly while living in the world. Asceticism and iconoclasm follow much the same logic – eradicating or minimizing those things that would distract one’s attention from God. Love-idolatry was especially troubling because it took an emotion that should be directed toward God and redirected it to a creature. In Petrarch’s Secretum, a fictional dialogue between the poet and St Augustine, the church father is made to accuse the poet of idolatrous worship of Laura: ‘She has detached your mind from the love of heavenly things and has inclined your heart to love the creature more than the Creator: and that one path alone leads, sooner than any other, to death.’37 This is consistent with St Augustine’s definition of sin. Petrarch’s Augustine goes on to say, ‘Nothing so much leads a man to forget or despise God as the love of things temporal, and most of all this passion that we call love; and to which, by the greatest of all desecrations, we even gave the name of God’ (131–2). One of Shakespeare’s sonnets to the young man begins, ‘Let not my love be call’d idolatry, / Nor my beloved as an idol show’ (Sonnet 105). In his poetry, John Donne refers to idolatry in two contexts, first as love idolatry, and second as religious idolatry. With regard to former, in two of his Holy Sonnets he refers to his own attachment to women as idolatry: … in my idolatrie I said to all my profane mistresses, Beauty, of pitty, foulnesse onely is A signe of rigour. (9–12) In my Idolatry what showres of raine Mine eyes did waste? (5–6)38

Examining the connection between ‘iconophobia’ and ‘gynophobia’

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in English Renaissance drama, Huston Diehl highlights the association made in Protestant culture between love-idolatry, sensuality, and whoredom.39 Idolatry is, in the words of many Protestant iconoclasts, ‘spiritual fornication,’ a notion forcefully embodied in the Whore of Babylon in Revelation and given dramatic heft in Spenser’s portrayal of Duessa in book 1 of The Faerie Queene. Mindful of the role of recusant wives in the domestic religious economy, in which they could assume the religious authority properly exercised by their husbands, English Protestant polemicists asserted that women were more inclined than men to idolatry and that they seduced men into the practice. In one of his sermons, John Donne implies this: There is a time to hate, and a time to love. Though the person be the same, the affection may vary…. As S. Cyprian saies … Love a woman at Church, (that is, love her comming to Church,) But … Hate, that is, forbeare women in private conversation; so, for those that hate God in the truth of his Gospell, and content themselves with an Idolatrous Religion, we love them at Church, we would be glad to see them here, and though they come not hither, wee love them so fare as that we pray for them; and we love them in our studies so far, as we may rectifie them by our labours; But wee hate them in our Convocations, where wee oppose Canons against their Doctrines, and we hate them in our Consultations, wher we make lawes to defend us from their malice, and we hate them in our bed-chambers, where they make children Idolators, and perchance make the children themselves. (Sermons, 3.382)

The Catholic woman who instructs children religiously is portrayed as a menace because she furthers idolatry.40 In the Elizabethan homily against idolatry, the historical narrative highlights the role of the Eastern empress Theodora (or Irene), who legitimated images in churches after her husband’s iconoclastic destruction of them. As an evil woman who exhumed her husband’s body to be burned for heresy, who ruled in place of her son, even beyond his minority, and who finally had him executed, she is the embodiment of the carnal female’s attraction to idolatry and a fearful instance of a woman’s illegitimate assumption of religious authority (a dangerous suggestion at a time at which Queen Elizabeth was ‘supreme governor’ of the English church). Perhaps no early modern English author was more agitated about the subject of idolatry than John Milton. Famously, Milton’s Eve, in the



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temptation scene in Paradise Lost, enacts idolatrous behaviour: when she goes away from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil after eating the fruit, she offers ‘low Reverence’ to it.41 The scene is an apt index to the poet’s longstanding concerns over the seductive power of idolatry. Throughout his career, from the time of his aversion to the Caroline counter-reform and Laudian programme of re-emphasizing ritual, ceremony, and elaborate church decorations in the interest of emphasizing the ‘beauty of holiness,’ through his pamphleteering before, during, and after the English civil wars, to the time of his publication of his three great poems (Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes), Milton was a militant anti-idolator – within both the religious context and the political one.42 He could not include Roman Catholics in the scope of imagined toleration because he believed their religion idolatrous, he could not accept Anglican ceremonial practice for the same reason, and he could not tolerate the idolization of the executed Charles I.43 When he portrayed the devil’s palace in Hell, Pandemonium, in Paradise Lost, he modelled it on that great baroque Counter-Reformation church, that seat of idolatrous Catholicism, St Peter’s: … where Pilasters round Were set, and Doric pillars overlaid With Golden Architrave; nor did there want Cornice or Frieze, with bossy Sculptures grav’n…. ............................. … Th’ascending pile Stood fixt her stately highth, and straight the doors Op’ning thir brazen folds discover wide Within, her ample spaces, o’er the smooth And level pavement. (1.713–16, 722–6)

St Peter’s is huge. It has what Milton calls ‘bossy Sculptures.’ It radiates ecclesiastical power, rather than, as, for example, in the lower church of the Basilica of St Francis in Assisi, devotional warmth and sheltering. Like some of the oversize idols of the ancient Near East, the statues are intimidating, validating the connection Milton makes repeatedly between pagan idolatry and Roman Catholicism. In the Lutheran cathedral in Helsinki, Finland, a church in which the interior is visually uncluttered by religious imagery, three very large statues are prominently placed: those of Martin Luther, Philip Melancthon, and Mikael Agricola, the last a heroic national figure who is credited with

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translating the Bible into Finnish and providing the model for written Finnish. These are not saints’ statues, but rather historically commemorative representations of great Protestant reformers.44 And yet, like most secular statues, they function as more than historical allusions: they are occasions for both intellectual and emotional attachment and bonding. They may not function, as the statues of the Virgin and Catholic saints do, as representations that encourage imaginative and devotional contact between the believer and God, but they are not just ‘dead’ things either. Visually, they call attention to themselves, just as does the preacher who is at the centre of Protestant worship: in substituting the words of scripture and of the preacher for ritual and ceremony, Protestantism does not function on some supra-sensible level, where ‘spirit’ calls to ‘spirit’ (holy or otherwise). It works through material language, through physical setting, through human presence. Idolatry was driven out of churches through either officially sanctioned or spontaneous iconoclastic violence, but it returned in new forms. Some early modern English writers took a more moderate approach to what their co-religionists might call idolatry. John Donne distinguished between a less troubling idolatry he spells with a small i from idolatry proper, which he capitalizes. He left room for the believer’s being ‘humble and devout’ (Sermons, 2.258).45 In a Paul’s Cross sermon in 1617 he questioned the Roman Catholic distinction between the kind of idolatry that takes its non-divine object as a god and that which does not. He says that Catholics ‘confess that the worship which they give to the creature is idolatry, but, not that Idolatry … forbidden in the commandment. … That they that worship any thing, in representation of God, do believe advisedly that representation to be very God’ (Sermons, 1.204). Although he is critical of Catholic sophistry, and, like Calvin, suspicious of the Catholic distinction between latria and doulia, he does open up the issue of representation and how it works. Religious images of Christ, the Virgin, saints, and so forth are representations, not realities – though an individual believer’s reverent and devout treatment of them might signal that they are perceived as other than arbitrary signs, for, as Yeats said, they have the power to ‘break hearts.’ There is a similar moderate approach to the use of devotional images in (the possibly crypto-Catholic) Sir John Harington’s epigram addressed to his wife, ‘The Author to his wife: a rule for praying’: My deare, that in your closet for deuotion, To kindle in your brest some godly motion,



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You contemplate, and oft your eyes doe fixe On some Saints picture, or the Crucifixe; ’Tis not amisse, be it of stone or mettle, It serueth in thy mind good thoughts to settle; Such images may serue thee as a booke, Whereon thou maist with godly reuerence looke, And thereby thy remembrance to acquaint, With life or death, or vertue of the Saint. Yet doe I not allow thou kneele before it, Nor would I in no wise you should adore it. For as such things well vs’d, are cleane and holy, So superstition soone may make it folly. All images are scorn’d and quite dis-honoured, If the Prototype be not solely honoured. I keepe thy picture in a golden shrine, And I esteeme it well, because ’tis thine; But let me vse thy picture ne’re so kindly, ’Twere little worth, if I vs’d thee unkindly. Sith then, my deare, our heauenly Lord aboue Vouchsafeth vnto ours to like his loue: So let vs vse his picture, that therein, Against himselfe we doe commit no sinne; Nor let vs scorne such pictures, nor deride them, Like fooles, whose zeale mistaught, cannot abide them. But pray, our hearts, by faith’s eyes be made able To see, what mortall eyes see on a Table. A man would thinke, one did deserue a mocke, Should say, Oh heauenly Father, to a stocke;   Such a one were a stocke, I straight should gather,   That would confesse a stocke to be his father.46

After articulating the Catholic distinction between latria and doulia and acknowledging the potential usefulness of images as aids to devotion, Harington cautions his wife against their idolatrous potential, a danger to which Protestants often said females were especially vulnerable – as Milton seems to suggest in the temptation of Eve in Paradise Lost. In Religio Medici Sir Thomas Browne is quite tolerant of those very features of religious practice the hotter Protestants had condemned as superstitious and idolatrous: I am, I confesse, naturally inclined to that, which misguided zeale termes

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superstition … at my devotion I love to use the civility of my knee, my hat, and hand, with all those outward and sensible motions, which may expresse or promote my invisible devotion…. At the sight of a Crosse or Crucifix I can dispence with my hat, but scarce with the thought and memory of my Saviour; I cannot laugh at but rather pity the fruitlesse journeys of Pilgrims, or contemne the miserable condition of Friers; for though misplaced in circumstance, there is something in it of devotion: I could never heare the Ave Marie Bell without an elevation, or thinke it a sufficient warrent, because they erred in one circumstance, for me to erre in all, that is in silence and dumbe contempt; whilst therefore they directed their devotions to her, I offered mine to God, and rectified the errours of their prayers by rightly ordering mine owne. At a Solemne Procession, I have wept abundantly, while my consorts, blinde with opposition and prejudice, have fallen into an accesse of scorne and laughter; There are quetionlesse both in Greek, Roman, and African Churches, solemnities, and ceremonies, whereof the wiser zeales doe make a Christian use, and stand condemned by us; not as evill in themselves, but as allurements and baits of superstition to those vulgar heads that looke asquint on the face of truth, and those unstable judgements that cannot consist in the narrow point and centre of vertue without a reele or stagger to the circumference.47

Taking a sort of comparative anthropological approach avant le lettre, Browne sees in the material practices of religion associated with Catholicism and the Orthodox Church a natural human expression of devotion: even when conceptually or doctrinally misguided, these practices have an intrinsic use for the wise believer and should not be dismissed as superstition or idolatry. Although Browne’s enchantment with the material practices and emotional fervour of traditional Catholicism did not lead, as it did for Sir Toby Mathew, to a religious and cultural conversion, it did call into question the theological and epistemological foundation of English Protestant anti-idolatry.48 I end my literary examples with one from Shakespeare, whose family background was Catholic and who imaginatively exploited in his works many of the features of the ‘old religion,’ including those singled out by Protestants for criticism as idolatrous practices. One recurrent figure in anti-idolatry and iconoclastic discourses is that the objects of idolatrous attachment are really ‘dead,’ though superstitious idolators treat them as somehow having presence and life. A world without cathexes is a dead world to those who withdraw libido from it, but there are also live people in the world who rightly and naturally invest people and objects with libidinal energy: this reality the anti-idolators condemn or ignore.



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In the scene in The Winter’s Tale in which a supposed statue of Hermione comes to life, Shakespeare deals with the unstable boundary between dead matter and living person in artistic representation. Leontes exclaims upon seeing what he thinks is a sculptural representation of his wife, ‘Oh, thus she stood, / Even with such life of majesty – warm life, / As now it coldly stands’ (5.3.34–6). The morally critical Paulina cautions him, ‘No longer shall you gaze on’t, lest your fancy / May think anon it moves’ (5.3.61–2). Then Leontes observes, ‘The fixture of her eye has motion in’t, / As we were mocked with art’ (5.3.67–8). Paulina’s and Leontes’s language evokes Catholic superstitious beliefs about statues that cry, bleed, move their eyes, or show other signs of life. After Queen Hermione descends from her pedestal as a living woman, Leontes exclaims, ‘If this be magic, let it be an art / Lawful as eating’ (5.3.110–11). As Michael O’Connell observes, taking into consideration the intended effect of this scene on the Shakespearean audience, ‘In its quasi-religious enactment, the scene realizes the worst fears … of the antitheatricalists, for it presses an audience into idolatry as it assents with Leontes to whatever reality the apparent statue may mysteriously possess.’49 Given the common association of idolatry with the story of Pygmalion’s love of a statue-turned-woman, it is clear that Shakespeare flouts Protestant orthodoxy in this scene. Awe and wonder, denigrated by Protestants in relation to Catholic superstitious practices, including devotional attachments to religious images, are imaginatively rehabilitated by being transferred into a secular context – but one that demonstrates the validity of the marvellous in human experience, religious and secular.50 In Michael O’Connell’s formulation, Shakespeare was partial to ‘an incarnational aesthetic,’ one continuous with that of medieval religious drama and of a Catholic sensibility: at issue in iconoclastic and iconophilic struggles from the eighth- and ninth-century Byzantine Empire, through disputes in the Carolingian era, to the Reformation and postReformation period is ‘the question of how God is to be experienced.’ In O’Connell’s words, ‘Is the divine to be understood as continually incarnated through sacralized elements of the human and physical world? Does the incarnation of Christ, as John of Damascus thought, so decisively transform the phenomenal world that it may provide access to the sacred? Or is it idolatrous to seek the divine in the physical, the Creator in the creature? Is the incarnation to be understood as focused in an entirely unique way on the historical period of Christ’s life and experienced primarily in language through texts that may be traced back to historical contact with him?’ (50). This brings me full circle to the old Italian-American women and the

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pious damage they did to the plaster statues. But I do not wish to end there, but rather to muddy the discussion with a theological and philosophical flight into the territory occupied jointly by both radical sceptics and mystics, that of nescience. In his discussion of the idol, the French philosopher Jean-Luc Marion responds to Nietzsche and other post-death-of-God philosophers and theologians in portraying as idolatrous not only any materialization of the spiritual, but also any conceptual fixing of a God who is wholly Other and beyond human understanding. Traditional Neoplatonic and mystical idealizations of theological nescience point in this direction. With regard to the idol Marion, citing Nietzsche, writes, In Nietzschean terms [in his Twilight of the Idols], no one can see God without God dying. For God presents his effigy in the ναός [inner sanctum] of the Temple only by concealing it in the half-obscurity of a doubt, of an imagination, and of a dream. ‘The religious imagination for a long time refuses absolutely to believe in the identity of a god and an image: the image is supposed to be the visual evidence that the numen of the divinity is, in some mysterious, not fully comprehensible way, active in this place and bound to it. The oldest image of the god is supposed to reveal and at the same time conceal the god – to intimate his presence but not expose it to view.’51

This argument could be taken as an ironic defence of the idol or of religious representation in situ. If the work it is intended to do is to suggest simultaneously the distance and the presence of the divine in a context of religious perception, even though ‘in full light … it appears as what it is … warped wood, forged metal, sculpted stone’ (29), the idol still has a valid function. Following Nietzsche, Marion moves the problem of idolatry to a rarefied philosophical sphere where any conceptualization of a God who is beyond representation (including those adhered to by fervent Protestant anti-idolaters) seems human folly. Such folly, however, makes possible both belief in the incarnate God of Christianity and the scriptures and prayers of all monotheistic religions. Worn plaster feet can be signs of contact.

NOTES   1 See Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), esp. 1:303–450.



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  2 Michael Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1973), 17–77.   3 See D.J. Gordon, ‘Poet and Architect: The Intellectual Setting of the Quarrel between Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones’ (1949), in The Renaissance Imagination: Essays and Lectures by D.J. Gordon, ed. Stephen Orgel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 77–101.   4 Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Routledge, 1982).   5 Text cited in Jewel’s A replie to M. Hardinges answeare by perusing whereof the discrete, and diligent reader may easily see, the weake, and unstable groundes of the Romaine religion, which of late hath beene accompted Catholique (1566), 510.   6 Huston Diehl, Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theater in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997).   7 James A. Knapp, Illustrating the Past in Early Modern England: The Representation of History in Printed Books (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003).   8 See Tertullian’s ‘On Idolatry,’ in the text of the Ante-Nicene Fathers, Christian Classics Ethereal Library, http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/anf03.iv.iv.html. Tertullian makes idolatry ‘the principal crime of the human race’ and relates all other sins to it.   9 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, 1989), 99–100, 105–6. He cites the thirtysixth canon of the Elibertine Council, which states, ‘There must be no pictures used in churches: Let nothing which is adored or worshipped be painted on walls’ (95). Further citations from the Institutes appear parenthetically in the present paragraph. 10 Peter Lake with Michael Questier, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 453. 11 Alain Besançon, The Forbidden Image: An Intellectual History of Iconoclasm, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 186–7. 12 Peter Herman, Squitter-Wits and Muse-Haters: Sidney, Spenser, Milton and Renaissance Antipoetic Sentiment (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996). 13 On the division of the commandments and the separation of the second commandment from the first by non-Lutheran Protestants, see Margaret Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, vol. 1, Laws against Images (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 371–92. Aston points out that ‘the elevation of the decalogue clause [concerning graven images] into a separate second commandment did not take place until after the new publicity given to imagery by early Reformation iconoclasts’ (379). 14 Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, 1:vii. 15 See Patrick Collinson, From Iconoclasm to Iconophobia: The Cultural Impact of

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the Second English Reformation (Reading, UK: University of Reading Press, 1986). See also Keith Thomas, ‘Art and Iconoclasm in Early Modern England,’ in Religious Politics in Post-Reformation England: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Tyacke, ed. Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 2006), 16–40. The now-classic account of the persistence of popular attachment to the material objects and practices of Catholicism is Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). The best studies of English iconoclasm are John Phillips, The Reformation of Images: Destruction of Art in England, 1535–1660 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), and Margaret Aston, England’s Iconoclasts. For an account of Continental iconoclasm and anti-idolatry, see Carlos M.N. Eire, War against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 16 She resumed the process of iconoclasm begun in Edward VI’s reign, ordering ecclesiastical officials to investigate ‘whether all the tabernacles and decorations in tabernacles, all the altars, chandeliers, reliquaries, candles, paintings, pictures, and all the other monuments of false miracles, pilgrimage, idolatry, and superstition have not been destroyed, so that there remains no trace of them on the walls, on window glass, or in any other place inside churches and houses’ (qtd in Besançon, Forbidden Image, 173). Aston observes, ‘Iconomachy may not have been the chosen path of the Supreme Governor, but it indubitably was the received teaching of a great many loyal members of the Church of England’ (England’s Iconoclasts, 1:445). 17 Modernizing u/v forms, I cite the text of the homily found in the 1623 edition (vol. 2, pp. 29–30) in the Renaissance Electronic Texts archive of Ian Lancashire: http://www.library.utoronto.ca/ute/ret/homilies/elizhom .html. 18 Jewel, A replie, 510. 19 Ibid., 496–517. The Jewel–Harding debate reprises in some sense that between Sir Thomas More and William Tyndale: the former’s Dialogue concerning Tyndale (1530) was followed by the latter’s Answer to Sir Thomas More’s Dialogue (1530). See Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, 1:173–94, for a discussion of More’s defences of images in his polemical battles with William Tyndale and others. 20 The full title of this work is A Treatise of the Images of Christ, and of his Saints: and that it is unlawfull to breake them, and lawfull to honour them (1567; rpt St Omer’s, 1625). Sander’s work was, no doubt, influenced by the newly issued decrees of the Council of Trent ‘On the invocation, veneration, and relics, of saints, and on sacred images.’ The relevant passages from the twenty-fifth session of the Council are the following:



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The holy Synod enjoins all bishops, and others who sustain the office and charge of teaching, that … they especially instruct the faithful diligently concerning the intercession and invocation of saints; the honour (paid) to relics; and the legitimate use of images: teaching them, that the saints, who reign together with Christ, offer up their own prayers to God for men; that it is good and useful suppliantly to invoke them, and to have recourse to their prayers, aid, (and) help for obtaining benefits from God, through His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, who is our alone Redeemer and Saviour; but that they think impiously, who deny that the saints, who enjoy eternal happiness in heaven, are to be invocated; or who assert either that they do not pray for men; or, that the invocation of them to pray for each of us even in particular, is idolatry; or, that it is repugnant to God; and is opposed to the honour of the one mediator of God and men, Christ Jesus; or, that it is foolish to supplicate, vocally, or mentally, those who reign in heaven. Also, that the holy bodies of holy martyrs, and of others living with Christ, which bodies were the living members of Christ, and the temple of the Holy Ghost, and which are by Him to be raised unto eternal life, and to be glorified, – are to be venerated by the faithful; through which (bodies) many benefits are bestowed by God on men; so that they who affirm that veneration and honour are not due to the relics of saints; or, that these, and other sacred monuments, are uselessly honoured by the faithful; and that the places dedicated to the memories of the saints are in vain visited with the view of obtaining their aid; are wholly to be condemned, as the Church has already long since condemned, and now also condemns them.   Moreover, that the images of Christ, of the Virgin Mother of God, and of the other saints, are to be had and retained particularly in temples, and that due honour and veneration are to be given them; not that any divinity, or virtue, is believed to be in them, on account of which they are to be worshipped; or that anything is to be asked of them; or, that trust is to be reposed in images, as was of old done by the Gentiles who placed their hope in idols; but because the honour which is shown them is referred to the prototypes which those images represent; in such wise that by the images which we kiss, and before which we uncover the head, and prostrate ourselves, we adore Christ; and we venerate the saints, whose similitude they bear; as, by the decrees of Councils, and especially of the second Synod of Nicaea, has been defined against the opponents of images.   And the bishops shall carefully teach this, that, by means of the histories of the mysteries of our Redemption, portrayed by paintings or other representations, the people is instructed, and confirmed in (the habit of)

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remembering, and continually revolving in mind the articles of faith; as also the great profit is derived from all sacred images, not only because the people are thereby admonished of the benefits and gifts bestowed upon them by Christ, but also because the miracles which God has performed by means of the saints, and their salutary examples, are set before the eyes of the faithful; that so they may give God thanks for those things; may order their own lives and manners in imitation of the saints; and may be excited to adore and love God, and to cultivate piety …   And if any abuses have crept in amongst these holy and salutary observances, the holy Synod ardently desires that they be utterly abolished; in such wise that no images, (suggestive) of false doctrine, and furnishing occasion of dangerous error to the uneducated, be set up …   Moreover, in the invocation of the saints, the veneration of relics, and the sacred use of images, every superstition shall be removed, all filthy lucre be abolished; finally, all lasciviousness be avoided; in such wise that figures shall not be painted or adorned with a beauty exciting to lust; nor the celebration of the saints, and the visitation of relics be by any perverted into revellings and drunkenness; as if festivals are celebrated to the honour of the saints by luxury and wantonness. (The canons and decrees of the sacred and oecumenical Council of Trent, ed. and trans. J. Waterworth [London: Dolman, 1848], 233–6). 21 Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, 1:457, notes that by criticizing mental imagery, the more radical Protestants were at odds with the long-term practices of the ‘art of memory.’ 22 Cited in Jewel, Replie, 513. 23 See Aristotle’s De Anima 2.4. 24 Luther also saw the need for mental imagery. He wrote, ‘God desires to have his works heard and read, especially the passion of our Lord. But it is impossible for me to hear and bear it in mind without forming mental images of it in my heart. For whether I will or not, when I hear of Christ, an image of the man hanging on a cross takes form in my heart, just as the reflection of my face naturally appears in the water when I look into it. If it is not a sin but good to have the image of Christ in my heart, why should it be a sin to have it in my eyes?’ (qtd in Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, 1:437). 25 This topic has been discussed at length in Ellen Spolsky, Word vs Image: Cognitive Hunger in Shakespeare’s England (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 26 Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, 1:460. Aston points to the difference between hard-line and moderate Protestants in their attitude toward mental imagery: ‘Radicals and conservatives divided in respectively condemning and com-



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mending the faculty of the mind’s eye. For the former … idolatry began within. Mental images were themselves suspect since they so easily falsified the Word, and produced fantasies of the divine. For the latter visualizing was as natural (and as neutral) as breathing, and nobody was to be damned for carrying pictures of God in his head’ (1:436). 27 All citations from Shakespeare are from The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd ed., ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997). 28 Eire, War against the Idols, 54–72, points out the danger posed by Andreas Karlstadt’s radical iconoclasm, one recognized by Luther, who, like Erasmus, took a more moderate position. 29 Louis Montrose, The Subject of Elizabeth: Authority, Gender, and Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 73, observes, ‘The Elizabethan government seems to have realized very quickly that the iconophobic program of religious reform could easily mutate into an attack upon the dynastic and genealogical symbols of monarchical, aristocratic, and gentry authority … [and it] had to find ways to channel and delimit popular iconoclasm and to check the unpredictable impulses and momentum of religious reform if the symbols and images through which it own authority were to remain untainted and efficacious.’ 30 This phrase from Eikonoklastes is cited in Barbara K. Lewalski, ‘Milton and Idolatry,’ Studies in English Literature 1500–1800 43, no. 1 (Winter 2003): 220. Lewalski summarizes Milton’s anti-idolatrous project: ‘Milton’s lifelong engagement with issues of idolatry called his countrymen to a far more rigorous and demanding kind of iconoclasm than the toppling of a few statues could accomplish. He portrays the process of self-liberation as both strenuous and lonely, involving a repudiation of both the social bonds forged by ecclesiastical and monarchical rituals and hierarchies, and the sacramental sense of the divine inhering somehow in the material. But for Milton the benefit of those repudiations is human liberty – first internal, then political’ (229–30). 31 Anthony Munday, The Second and Third Blast of Retreat from Plays and Theaters (1580), quoted in Lake, with Questier, Antichrist’s Lewd Hat, 450. 32 I cite the play from Ben Jonson, Bartholomew Fair, ed. E.A. Horsman (London: Methuen, 1960). 33 See Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, 1:401–4. 34 With regard to the last, see, for example, John Knox’s pamphlet, A Vindication of the Doctrine That the Sacrifice of the Mass Is Idolatry (1550). 35 See John Walter, ‘“Abolishing Superstition with Sedition”? The Politics of Popular Iconoclasm in England 1640–1642,’ Past and Present 183 (May 2004): 79–123. 36 I cite Donne’s sermons from The Sermons of John Donne, ed. George R. Potter

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and Evelyn M. Simpson, 10 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953–62). Subsequent citations are within the text. 37 Petrarch’s Secret or The Soul’s Conflict with Passion: Three Dialogues between Himself and S. Augustine, trans. William H. Draper (London: Chatto & Windus, 1911), 124; see Barbara Estrin, Laura: Uncovering Gender and Genre in Wyatt, Donne, and Marvell (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 43–5, for a discussion of this. 38 John Donne, The Divine Poems, 2nd ed., ed. Helen Gardner (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978), 10 and 13: the first citation is from the ninth sonnet in Gardner’s numbering of the Holy Sonnets in the 1633 edition of Donne’s poetry, the second from the third poem of the additional sonnets found in the 1635 edition. 39 See chapter 6 of Staging Reform, ‘Iconophobia and Gynophobia: The Stuart Love Tragedies,’ esp. 164–72. See Alison Shell’s discussion of idolatry in the poetry and drama of the age in the first chapter of Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 23–55. 40 Elsewhere, Donne writes, ‘Jewes in particular … were a Nation prone to Idolatry, and most, upon this occasion, if they mingled themselves with Women of other Nations’ (6.192). 41 I cite Milton’s poetry from Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Odyssey, 1957). 42 John Milton, Of True Religion, Haeresie, Schism, and Toleration [1673], in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Maurice Kelley (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 8:430. 43 On this point see Lewalski, ‘Milton and Idolatry,’ 213–32. 44 For a discussion of Luther’s and Melanchthon’s (ultimately failed) attempt to distinguish between legitimate commemorative uses of images and the abuse of images, see Spolsky, Word vs Image, 59–63. 45 On Donne’s taking a sort of Lutheran middle position on religious imagery, see Ernest B. Gilman, Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Reformation: Down Went Dagon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 117–48. 46 The Most Elegant and Witty Epigrams of Sir Iohn Harrington, Knight (1618), book 4, epigram 84 (M6v–M7r). For an argument that Harington was a Catholic, see Gerard Kilroy, Edmund Campion: Memory and Transcription (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005), 89–120. 47 The Prose of Sir Thomas Browne, ed. Norman J. Endicott (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967), 8–9. 48 See my discussion of Mathew in Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy: Catholic and Anti-Catholic Discourses in Early Modern England (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), 115–19.



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49 Michael O’Connell, The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm and Theater in Early-Modern England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 141. 50 Thomas argues that, in early modern England, art migrated from the religious to the secular realms: ‘Protestantism in England never meant the total rejection of Art. What it did mean was a plainer style and the increasing divorce of art from religion’ (‘Art and Iconoclasm,’ 38). 51 Jean-Luc Marion, The Idol and Distance: Five Studies, trans. Thomas C. Carlson (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001), 29, citing Nietzsche’s Human All Too Human, 2.1.22.

chapter three

‘True and Perfect Relations’; or, Identifying Henry Garnet and Leticia Wigington by Their Confessions1 FRANCES E. DOLAN

This essay is about the uneasy fit between confession and identity at two moments of heightened interest in securing a ‘true and perfect’ relation between the two: the trial of Henry Garnet, supposed confessor to the Gunpowder Plot conspirators in 1606, and the years just after the executions of the popish plot traitors in 1679. Both of the moments I shall discuss are a little after the most intense panic, when the broader consequences of crises began to manifest themselves. Although more than seventy years intervene, we can find in both 1606 and the early 1680s a concern regarding whether Catholics can or will speak the truth of their ‘confessional identities’ in a way that will be credible to others.2 Furthermore, through the recycling of titles, texts, and tropes, the later moment circles back onto the earlier one, suggesting the difficulty of resolving or moving beyond the problems entailed both in confessing one’s own identity and in identifying the truth in others’ confessions. Throughout, I am interested in how scholars, too, circle back, restaging partisan debates in their attempts to secure a stable relation between confessions and identities. At both moments, we find a double attitude toward confession that is well expressed by Lewis Owen in his Unmasking of All Popish Monks, Friers, and Jesuits (1628): ‘For in truth, there is nothing that openeth a wider gap, or way unto sinne, than Auricular Confession’ wherein ‘under pretence of confessing their [Catholics’] sinnes, they maliciously consult, how to effect and practice their sinfull purposes.’ Henry Garnet is Owen’s prime example. ‘First, he heard their Confession, then he absolved them of all their sins, and afterwards ministred the Sacrament unto them. Where you may perceive how their Sacrament of Confession (or Penance,



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as they call it) served him for a cloake to cover his treacherie, or rather a net to catch such wicked Traytors; and the other Sacrament (which they affirme to be the very body of Christ) to be as it were a Signet, wherewith he sealed their mouthes up close (like so many Firrets) from ever revealing the same.’3 In this passage, Owen tellingly uses a figure that almost immediately slips out of his control: a cloak, that obscures and thus enables treachery, becomes, somewhat confusingly, a net that enables the state to catch wicked traitors and therefore, one might imagine, a good thing. We could not find a clearer articulation of the view that what is wrong with the sacrament of confession is that it stands in the way of the state’s own ability to extract a confession. The judicial process is in competition with auricular confession, striving for the same goal of full disclosure and repentance. What stands as confessional identity in court, and in the subsequent print accounts that attempt to fix and disseminate this identity, is often marked by withholding confession or protesting innocence, that is, by attempting to resist an identity already thrust upon one. I am especially interested in the way that disciplinary personnel – the Lord Chief Justice, members of the Privy Council, and the Ordinary (or minister) of Newgate prison – rely on tropes to weld confessions and identities together. Perhaps because the resulting ligature is figurative, it often unties itself within the very text that posits it. By concentrating on the figural turn of these disciplinary personnel, I want to show that their fascination with equivocation has in part to do with their own reliance on manipulating meanings and resorting to tropes. In the end, it seems as if those who are not on trial, the winners who write the history of these trials, are the ones who feel compelled to speak in the face of (or so as to compensate for) the silence or evasion of those at the bar. And in their speech, they, like Owen above, rely on figurations that slither out of their control and ally them with the dark figures and equivocations they decry.

Torture, Confession, and Identity I shall first explore these issues through one text, A True and Perfect Relation of the Whole Proceedings against the Late Most Barbarous Traitors, Garnet a Jesuite, and his Confederats (London, 1606). Although the indefinite article concedes that there might be other relations of these proceedings, this was the official account of Garnet’s trial and execution, quickly translated into Latin, French, and Italian, and broadly distributed.4 At some points, I test this official printed account against Fr John Gerard’s critique of it

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and counter-narrative, which was written around 1607 when he was in exile, and circulated in manuscript, but was not itself printed until the nineteenth century. Gerard’s text offers a reminder that oral and written reports, manuscript and print circulation, coexisted and that even the most authoritative narratives were contested from the very start.5 The best-known text about the Gunpowder Plot is His Majesties Speach in This Last Session of Parliament (1605) also known as ‘the King’s Book,’ since it was the official government narrative of the plot and its discovery. The King’s Book is ninety-six pages long. It remains widely cited by scholars. Assembled and printed very quickly, it seems to have been published at the end of November, just weeks after the plot was first discovered; efforts were made to publish it even earlier, but new conspirators and confessions kept coming to light. For Mark Nicholls, an important historian of the Gunpowder Plot, the King’s Book documents ‘the slow, tentative way in which the investigators acquired their knowledge of the plot’; according to Nicholls, the King’s Book presented, albeit in simplified form, ‘as much as the government knew at that time.’6 In contrast, A True and Perfect Relation is extremely long – 416 pages – and belated. Henry Garnet, provincial of the English Jesuits, was captured on 27 January after an extended hunt and arraigned and tried on 28 March 1606 – almost five months after the plot was discovered and two months after the condemnations of the six major conspirators. The investigation had first turned to Garnet when Guy Fawkes, probably under torture, claimed the conspirators had met in his house. Ultimately, Garnet’s trial focused on the fact that he had known of the plot, largely through a nested confession; fellow Jesuit Oswald Tesimond sought Garnet’s advice about a confession he had heard, that of Robert Catesby. Although Garnet seems to have advised strongly against such a conspiracy, he was held accountable for not revealing what he had learned in these complexly privileged communications. What was at stake was how the sacrament of confession blocked the state’s interests and more broadly the whole question of a conflict between the pope’s authority and the sovereign’s. As a figurehead for these issues, as Peter Lake and Michael Questier write, Garnet ‘suffered the inevitable physical and representational consequences.’7 The physical consequence was a traitor’s death. A jury found Garnet guilty after a fifteen-minute deliberation. But then more than a month elapsed before his execution on 3 May 1606 in St Paul’s Churchyard. The representational consequences include elevation to saint or martyr, through John Gerard’s account of his execution, ‘the aura of spiritual wonder, indeed of miracle’ attaching to his pur-



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portedly incorruptible head, and the appearance of his face on a straw splashed with his blood;8 they also include A True and Perfect Relation, which ends with Garnet’s execution and was published as much as seven months after it.9 The text’s belatedness renders its purpose less clear. If the King’s Book rushed to place the case against the traitors before the public, A True and Perfect Relation tells a story most people probably knew. Its purpose is to elaborate on the issues at stake, although it also lays out a chronology of the plot and the prosecution’s case. The Lord Chief Justice Edward Coke, Garnet’s chief antagonist in the trial, insists that the plotted treason is unspeakable: unnameable, unprecedented, and immeasurable (D3v–D4). Yet this text keeps trying to name and speak it – circling, amplifying, accumulating. The text is crammed with long speeches, histories – not just of this plot but of the papacy, of papal deposing power, of the sacrament of confession, and of other conspiracies – and disquisitions on political theory.10 It is easy to lose track of the details of the alleged crime and the trial proceedings, even of who is talking. The text spends ninety-eight pages on earlier trials before it even gets to Garnet’s arraignment (N4). At the centre of this trial, we have the copious speech of Coke, the Earl of Northampton, and others – and the reticence of Garnet both before and after capture. The proceedings make it almost impossible for Garnet to speak. According to Fr John Gerard, Garnet was ‘so often interrupted in his own discourse, that it was misliked by divers of the standers-by; yea, the King himself, who was there in private, sent word at length to my Lord of Salisbury [Robert Cecil], he should give the prisoner leave to speak freely.’11 In part because A True and Perfect Relation amplifies the prosecution and guts the defence, the text reads as an unsettling standoff between a withholding defendant and a garrulous group of commentators. Throughout the proceedings, various participants express their extreme frustration at Garnet’s taciturnity. Northampton complains directly to Garnet, ‘I confesse that never any man in your state gave lesse hold or advantage to examiners, then you have done in the whole course of proceeding to us that were in Commission: sometime by forswearing … sometime by dissembling … sometimes by earnest expostulation: sometime by artificiall Equivocation: sometime by sophisticating true substances: sometime by adding false qualities’ (Z4). Northampton ‘confesses’ that Garnet, implicated because of what he heard in confession, is trying his patience by refusing to cooperate with his examiners in their attempt to secure his confession. The interrogator’s frustration raises the question of torture and its dubious role in securing and verifying information.

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James I issued a ‘royal directive’ on 6 November, what we might call a torture warrant, allowing the use of torture if necessary in the interrogation of Fawkes.12 We cannot know for certain whether torture was used. On the one hand, the King’s Book claims that Fawkes readily confessed and in his two or three examinations in as many days ‘the Racke [was] onely offred and shewed unto him when the maske of his Romaine fortitude did visibly begin to weare & slide off his face. And then did he begin to confesse part of the trueth, and thereafter to open the whole matter.’ In contrast, a pamphlet entitled The Araignement and Execution of the Late Traytors describes a broken Fawkes on his way to the scaffold: ‘His body being weake with torture and sicknes, he was scarse able to goe up the ladder.’13 Fawkes’s signatures infamously deteriorate in the course of the interrogation; many historians agree that Fawkes was, indeed, racked. Even Mark Nichols, who tends to be sceptical about claims that the Crown tortured Gunpowder Plot suspects, concedes that Fawkes was tortured. Nicholls uses the biographies of Gunpowder conspirators he wrote for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) to offer a systematic defence of the Jacobean state against the charge that it tortured the conspirators. In his biography of Francis Tresham, he writes, ‘Like every other prisoner, with the early exception of Guy Fawkes, Tresham was well treated in the Tower.’ In his entry on Sir Everard Digby, he remarks, ‘The truth is that after the initial panic and confusion in the days immediately after 5 November the prisoners were well looked after in the Tower, to the extent that they wondered at the motives behind their treatment.’ He describes Fawkes’s stoical endurance of interrogation as his ‘finest hour’ and, while he concedes that ‘it seems almost certain that torture of some kind had been employed,’ he also insists that ‘Fawkes alone suffered in this way.’ Although Nicholls uses his own entries to comment obliquely on others outside of his control, the writers of those entries, historians of recusancy, stake their own claims. Thomas M. McCoog’s ODNB entry on Garnet claims that he was tortured in the course of his twenty-three interrogations in six weeks; so does Philip Caraman’s biography.14 Thomas Cooper and McCoog’s entry on Edward Oldcorne states that ‘he was tortured.’ McCoog’s entry on John Gerard claims that, while imprisoned in the Tower from 1594 to 1597, ‘he was often suspended by his wrists for hours on end.’ Nicholas Owen, Garnet’s servant and a designer of priest holes (that is, a hide-builder) certainly died while in custody, either because he was tortured to death, having been weakened by a strangulated hernia, or because, as was officially claimed, he disemboweled himself.



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Michael Hodgetts’s ODNB entry on Owen states bluntly that ‘he was tortured’ and ‘he died of the torture.’ Weaving through the new ODNB, then, we find two old, competing stories about torture and the Jacobean state, distant echoes of A True and Perfect Relation, in Nicholls’s entries, and the critiques of it offered by Jesuits such as Gerard and Tesimond, in entries by McCoog, Cooper, and Hodgetts.15 Both versions are interested. Together, they restage a seventeenth-century debate in the pages of a ‘new and improved’ reference work. For what it is worth, A True and Perfect Relation insists that torture was not used against Garnet or Digby. Coke tells Digby that he should not cavil about his punishment, ‘but that hee was rather to admire the great moderation and mercie of the King, in that for so exorbitant a crime, no new torture answerable thereunto was devised to bee inflicted upon him’ (L4). The Earl of Salisbury urges Garnet to admit he has been ‘as well-attended for health or otherwise, as a nurse child’ (Y2v).16 According to this text, the prosecution cleverly avoided torture by staging a scene in which Garnet would disclose his secrets. Garnet and Edward Oldcorne, a fellow Jesuit, were placed in adjoining cells in the Tower with a small hatch in between through which they could communicate so that their conversations could be monitored.17 It’s hard to believe that the two men did not suspect that they were under surveillance or that they trusted the ‘kind’ jailor who arranged this accommodation and smuggled letters out of the prison for them (and into Coke’s hands). Fr Gerard claims that the cell had been specially built to facilitate eavesdropping and to entrap Garnet but that Garnet revealed next to nothing in these staged confidences.18 But A True and Perfect Relation presents Garnet’s speech to Oldcorne as spontaneous and revealing. According to the Earl of Salisbury, ‘Your former reservednesse, being now encouraged and urged by the spurre of opportunitie, became so confident in running beyond it selfe through the chiefe points whereof the State was most eager and desirous to take certaine notice at that time, as they that could not reape, might gleane, and many shifts & subtill traverses were overwrought by this occasion, which could not bee extracted out of your brest either by intreaty or industry’ (Bbb4v). Salisbury expresses gratitude that witnesses just happened to overhear this conversation. By so unburdening himself, Garnet spared the state the uncomfortable burden of having to torture him: ‘For thereby had the Lords some light, & proofe of matter against you, which must have bin discovered other wise by violence and coertion, a matter ordinary in other Kingdomes, though now forborne here’ (Y2v–Y3). As presented in A True and Perfect Relation,

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Salisbury manages both to boast of and lament the decision not to torture Garnet. ‘I doe confidently assure my selfe, that you would as easily have confessed your self to be author of al the Action, as the Concealer, but that his Majestie, and my Lordes were well contented to draw all from you without racking, or any such bitter torments’ (Y3). Northampton, too, finds the eavesdropping a providential corrective to the lack of torture: ‘since the Lords of the Commission forbearing torture, dealt so tenderly’ (Bbb4v). Although Coke boasts at the trial that ‘against the stroke of providence, all counter-practices are vaine’ (Coke, Ccc2), A True and Perfect Relation demonstrates repeatedly that the prosecution relied on deception and cunning practices rather than trusting to providence. It also shows that the prosecution equivocated about its use of torture.

Published by Authority From the title page on, A True and Perfect Relation addresses ‘those that were hearers’ at Garnet’s trial but might have missed important details. In the proceedings themselves, Coke asks indulgence for ‘the necessary repetition of some thinges before spoken’ and then argues that this is valuable: ‘Nay it may be thought justifiable to repeate in this case, for that in respect of the confluence & accesse of people, at the former araignment, many could not heare at that time’ (O2v–O3). So even those present in court require repetition during the proceedings, in case they have missed something, as well as the subsequent repetition provided by the printed account. The text also addresses readers who will encounter the proceedings for the first time through print or who require a more exhaustive contextualization of the trial and its issues. In a preface ‘To the Reader,’ the editor acknowledges that some may wonder why it is necessary to publish the proceedings after the sentencing and executions. In the wake of the executions, what else is there to learn? ‘Yet it is necessary, and wil be very profitable to publish somewhat concerning the same, Aswell for that there do passe from hand to hand divers uncertaine, untrue, and incoherent reports, and relations of such Evidence, as was publiquely given upon the said severall Arraignments; As also for that it is necessary for men to understand the birth & growth of the said abominable and detestable Conspiracy, and who were the principal Authors and Actors in the same’ (A2v). The text exists, then, to counter ‘uncertain, untrue, and incoherent reports’ and to offer a genealogy of treason for which there was not time in the urgency of its first discovery and prosecution.



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Yet even this attempt to set the record straight acknowledges its own provisionality. Coke’s remarks at the arraignment are presented ‘so neere to his owne words as it could be taken’ (D2); Coke’s remarks at the trial are ‘as neere to his owne words, as the same could be taken’ (O2v).19 In turn, Gerard admits the provisionality of his attempts to counter the official version. He presents Sir John Crooke’s (the King’s Sergeant’s) pleading ‘as near as it could be remembered by two or three sufficient men that were present and did carefully observe both that and all other speeches’ (227). Gerard explains that Coke ‘began his speech with a low voice, so that his words could not at the first be so distinctly heard; but it tended to this effect’ (228).20 How are we to interpret the gap between what was actually said and what could be taken or gathered or remembered? This is especially interesting with regard to the Earl of Northampton’s speech, which appears in A True and Perfect Relation in a form in which it was never delivered ‘having been enlarged upon’ (Mf). Northampton makes numerous speeches in the text: at Sir Everard Digby’s arraignment (which is presented ‘as it was taken … by T.S.’ [M]), at Garnet’s arraignment, and after Garnet’s conviction. It is this last speech that is the longest. It begins on signature Dd. By signature Xx3 Northampton has the brass to refer to something about which ‘I need not at this time say much, when much cannot be said for want of time.’ He concludes on signature Eee4, that is, 199 printed pages later. The editor of the text explains to us at some length both why he presents the speech in this enlarged form and the process by which he secured this expanded version ‘exceeding the proportion wherin it was first uttered.’ While ‘others’ have ‘overrun’ or perused the ‘maimed copy’ of their remarks and pointed out the ways in which they were wronged by it, Northampton finds the ‘fragment’ he is given to review ‘so farre short not onely of that which should have bene, but of that also which was at the arraignment delivered’ that he remedies both problems, offering a memorial reconstruction of what he thinks he said ‘as neere as his Lordship could call to minde’ as well as the ‘amplified and enriched’ version that ‘should have been.’ He leaves it to the editor to choose between the two. Mindful of the ‘egernesse’ with which a transcript of the speech ‘was desired by the Auditors after the delivery,’ the editor concludes that ‘it would better fit the motive in folio, then in decimo sexto, in the fruit then in the blossom, and the larger the better’ (Eee4r–v).21 The editor takes full responsibility for offering the expanded speech to the reader, although, as we shall see, Northampton seems to have framed the text largely as a vehicle for this speech. Garnet’s whole trial is about the

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reliability of what Catholics say on the stand, yet the authorized version of Northampton’s ‘enlarged’ concluding speech is authorized precisely because it is not what he was able to say in court. The fact that this text undoubtedly was a piece of propaganda occludes the fact that it also had a very particular author, one whose status reminds us that the Privy Council was internally divided – as were at least some of its members. In her biography of Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton, Linda Levy Peck offers a detailed explanation of his contribution to the text’s composition (or compilation), with the help of Sir Robert Cotton, who conducted research, edited, and prepared the manuscript for publication.22 Cotton was, then, the editor to whom I have referred. Northampton was a remarkable political survivor, jailed five times in the course of his life: arrested in conjunction with the attempt of his brother, the Duke of Norfolk, to wed Mary, Queen of Scots (for which Norfolk was executed in 1572); closely associated with the Earl of Essex, from whom he dissociated himself just in time to avoid complicity in his rebellion; in correspondence with Mary Stuart (of whom he had five portraits at the time of his death) and later her son James over many years; and instrumental in facilitating James’s succession. Northampton finally achieved wealth and power after that succession. He was a close ally of Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, another key player in Garnet’s prosecution, and was also an influential and active member of the Privy Council. Thus Garnet’s trial took place just as Northampton reached the pinnacle of his career after years of struggle. The trial, and indeed the whole Gunpowder Plot, posed for him an opportunity – and a threat, since Northampton was widely regarded as a Catholic, despite the fact that he consistently attended the Chapel Royal.23 Shortly before his death, in 1614, he was received back into the Catholic Church by a priest sent by the Spanish ambassador (the future count of Gondomar); this was not known at the time of his funeral but was suspected. After his death, Thomas Scot described him as ‘a miraculous example’ of the ability to hold two faiths simultaneously.24 In choosing Northampton to oversee A True and Perfect Relation, James chose someone whose position at court would reinforce the idea that those with Catholic sympathies could be successful and powerful courtiers. As the Venetian ambassador wrote in December 1606, ‘The work is highly commended by all, by the king in particular, he has ordered it to be translated into French, Latin and Italian. The fact that the author has been and still is reckoned a Catholic is expected to lend the work a greater authority.’25 Northampton himself had a stake in arguing that



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conforming Catholics could be loyal subjects. As Pauline Croft writes in the ODNB, ‘By his conspicuous support of the regime during and immediately after the plot, and by his sedulous court conformity, Northampton worked successfully to allay any fears the king might harbour about his political and religious reliability.’ In short, Northampton was a professional rhetorician, presenting the Crown’s case, in court and in print, but he also had a particular personal interest in distinguishing himself and other loyal Catholics from traitors; scapegoating Jesuits in general and Garnet in particular served his purpose as well as the Crown’s.26 Yet suspicions about Northampton’s affiliations seem to have undermined the text’s avowed purposes. As Peck details, in 1612 Northampton learned of rumours of his writing to Cardinal Bellarmine, ‘an important Roman Catholic polemicist,’ and advising him to ignore what Northampton had said in A True and Perfect Relation as written ‘only to placate the king.’ In response, Northampton brought a suit in Star Chamber, at which the defendants, court officers and gentry, confessed to having spread the rumours. Six publishers of the libel were given heavy fines and imprisoned; at Northampton’s request, five of the six were released after a month and their fines were remitted. His was thus a symbolic victory. As Alastair Bellany shows, numerous libels circulated about Northampton’s confessional allegiances from 1612 to 1614. For example, Sir Steven Proctor was tried in Star Chamber in February 1614 for alleging (among other things) that ‘Northampton and others “had suppressed and discountenanced some witnesses and proofs” during the Gunpowder Plot investigations.’27 Northampton was thus suspected of suppressing and manipulating evidence from both sides. Such suspicion set the stage for the next turn in the intertwined fortunes of his reputation and the credibility of A True and Perfect Relation. After his death, Northampton was discredited at the trials of those accused of murdering Sir Thomas Overbury. He had advanced the marriage of his great niece Frances Howard to James’s favourite and his own friend Robert Carr, against the opposition of Sir Thomas Overbury (whom Northampton had confined to the Tower) and by means of Frances’s divorce from her husband the Earl of Essex. The story of the Essex divorce and Overbury scandal is well known. But, since Northampton is not the most memorable player in that memorable cast, I wish to point out that his salacious letters goading Carr to pursue Frances were read in court during the murder trials, and condemned by Coke as ‘beastly and bawdy,’ and that, since he was safely dead, although widely rumoured to be alive and living in Rome, he was a handy person to

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blame for poisoning Overbury. His implication in the Overbury plot has shaped his subsequent reputation; according to Bellany, his reputation at the time worked to associate the Overbury plot itself with Northampton’s brand of ‘courtly, hispanophile crypto-popery.’28

Dark Figures Northampton’s involvement in the manufacture of this true and perfect account is sometimes taken as explaining everything we need to know about the text, which it cannot. While one cannot understand A True and Perfect Relation without some awareness of Northampton’s complicated status, and the text’s provenance and subsequent history, it is hard to know what to do with that awareness. Then as now, even those who distrust the text rely on it as a crucial piece of evidence. Garnet’s contemporary, Fr John Gerard, scoffed at the text as skewed. Yet, as a hunted priest himself, Gerard could hardly attend Garnet’s trial or execution.29 He relied on others present and on texts such as A True and Perfect Relation. Gerard’s own account proceeds as a detailed refutation of the text, which Gerard clearly consults throughout, comparing it against other sources, including ‘eye and ear witnesses,’ and enabling his readers to do the same. Calling the official print accounts ‘pestilent’ and ‘malicious’ books, he reads and engages them for that very reason. Sometimes he even uses them in support of his own claims. For instance, he points to other conspirators’ ‘printed examinations’ as proofs that they never accused Garnet.30 In his biography of Garnet, Philip Caraman describes the text as ‘a propaganda document,’ yet he, too, takes all of his citations of the indictment and prosecution from A True Relation, assuming it to be ‘the official account of the case for the prosecution, reported almost verbatim.’31 In the nineteenth century, David Jardine fulminated against A True and Perfect Relation’s claims to proof value: ‘The “True and Perfect Relation of the whole Proceedings,” which … has become most generally known, is certainly not deserving of the character which its title imports. It is not true, because many occurrences on the trial are willfully misrepresented; and it is not perfect, because the whole evidence, and many facts and circumstances which must have happened are omitted, and incidents are inserted which could not by possibility have taken place on the occasion. It is obviously a false and imperfect relation of the proceedings; a tale artfully garbled and misrepresented.’32 While Jardine is particularly outspoken, his assumption that misrepresentation, willfulness,



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and artfulness go together continues to inform assessments of not only this text but all the discourse produced by and about the Gunpowder Plot. To be artful is to be suspect. However much it is distrusted, A True and Perfect Relation remains a crucial piece of evidence for scholars today, just as Gerard both denounced and depended on it. Discussions of evidence regarding the Gunpowder Plot tend in the direction of saying either that some kinds of alterations in the published versions were standard practice – intended to make the narrative more cohesive and comprehensible – or that any evidence that the published accounts were shaped proves that the whole conspiracy was fabricated. Mark Nicholls, for instance, defends the process by which the published version of the King’s Book ‘replaced the original third-person account’ in Fawkes’s confession ‘with a more dramatically effective first-person narrative, incorporating the names of his confederates into Fawkes’s main confession. Some less significant parts of the original were omitted.’ For Nicholls, these changes amount to ‘alterations in style, made for the purpose of incorporating in one publishable confession all that Fawkes had to tell. Fawkes duly signed this amended version.’33 The state, then, followed a strategy similar to that used by many historians when they quote examinations, shifting them from third to first person to create a more engaging narration.34 In contrast to Nicholls, Fr Francis Edwards interprets any evidence of what he calls ‘tampering’ – missing originals, differences between originals and print versions – as evidence of conspiracy, not by the alleged traitors but by those attempting to frame them. I wonder if it is possible to stake out a reading position between the defence of ‘alterations’ as standard practice and the anguished suspicion of sinister tampering.35 Such a reading practice requires us to put pressure on Jardine’s dismissive use of the word artful. When we read these texts now, we read across a field determined, in part, by earlier efforts to winnow and shape what is available to us and in which the debate was always about how to interpret evidence – how to read faces, utterances, and documents. Garnet’s ability to speak effectively – with no appearance of art – in his own defence was, of course, disabled by the fact that a manuscript copy of a Treatise of Equivocation annotated by Garnet had been found in Sir Francis Tresham’s chambers at the Inner Chamber; Coke never seems to have realized that it was probably written by Garnet.36 As he is presented in A True and Perfect Relation, Garnet is a theorist of and apologist for equivocation – the strategy of speaking part of a truthful statement and reserving the rest in silence so as not to incriminate oneself or others – more than a practitioner

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of it. Yet Coke took the very existence of such a treatise as providing a rationale for distrusting all Catholic testimonies: ‘And surely let every good man take heede of such Jurors or witnesses, there being no faith, no bond of Religion or civilitie, no conscience of trueth in such men’ (I2v). Before such a Lord Chief Justice, it is simply impossible for Catholic witnesses to be heard as speaking the truth. Ultimately, A True and Perfect Relation suggests that what is unspeakable is not Catholic guilt but Catholic innocence.37 Margaret Ferguson argues that equivocation revealed a ‘profound gap between a subject’s inner landscape and the way that landscape might be perceived, mapped, or appropriated by another person who claimed superior authority and perhaps actually possessed superior power.’ Traversing that gap required ‘techniques of allusion to create a kind of second-order literacy.’ However maligned equivocation was, it was not easily distinguishable from familiar strategies of literary expression. In A True and Perfect Relation, as Ferguson points out, ‘Garnet defends equivocation as a verbal practice of legitimately “hiding” the (whole) truth, and insists that this practice was authorized and illustrated by Christ himself in various New Testament passages of great hermeneutic difficulty. Such passages come to be the model for what counts as a “literary” language of irony, indirection, and “dark conceit.”’38 According to Catherine Belsey, ‘Equivocation, it might be argued, is the paradigm case of all signifying practice.’39 It cannot, therefore, really be avoided. Both Catholic defendants, such as Garnet, and those who attempt to outwit and expose them, such as Coke, rely on the equivocal literacy of dark conceits, sly evasions and insinuations, and wily interpretative strategies. As Katharine Maus puts it, ‘Catholics and Protestants draw their rhetorical weapons from the same arsenal.’40 A True and Perfect Relation has often been cited as a context for more obviously literary works, especially Macbeth.41 But I argue that it offers us an entry point into a contestation in which all key players were ambivalently but busily engaged in figuration and its interpretation. In these texts, we find widespread dependence on what we might now call ‘creative writing’ and ‘literary criticism’ – even or especially among those who insist that they are speaking or writing the perfect truth – but a dependence that reveals profound unease. Trials and the print accounts of them may have helped to disseminate these skills, even as they cast doubt on them. Barbara Shapiro suggests that participation in juries depended on and developed ‘middling class’ men’s skills of evaluating verbal statements; Lorna Hutson argues that widespread ‘lay’ participation in



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forensic investigation and fact-finding shaped the development of early modern drama and ‘suspicious’ modes of engaging it. In accord with these two arguments, I suggest that trials such as Garnet’s, and readers’ ‘virtual’ participation in them via written accounts, helped to motivate and popularize sceptical reading practices and to hone the skills this kind of reading requires.42 For instance, the discovery of the plot, as narrated in the official accounts, hinged on the Monteagle letter. But this cryptic letter, perhaps written by Sir Francis Tresham, would not have prompted a discovery in just anyone.43 The letter warns the recipient not to attend Parliament: ‘For though there be no apparance of any stirre, yet I say, they shall receive a terrible Blow this Parliament, and yet they shall not see who hurts them.’44 According to the King’s Book, the Lord Admiral, and the Earls of Worcester and Northampton, determined to give this letter to the King in part because of ‘the expectation and experience they had of his Majesties fortunate Judgement in cleering and solving of obscure riddles & doubtfull mysteries.’45 James would later boast, ‘I did upon the instant interpret & apprehend some darke phrases therein, contrary to the ordinary Grammer construction of them (and in another sort then I am sure any Divine, or Lawyer in any Universitie would have taken them) to be meant by this horrible forme of blowing us up all by Powder.’46 According to the Earl of Northampton, as quoted in A True and Perfect Relation, the whole plot was thus revealed through an astonishing act of interpretation on the King’s part: The scope of some chiefe Actor in this Tragedie (more sensitive in that point of compassion as it seemes then the rest) was, to advise a Noble Gentleman (whom in respect of his approoved love and loyaltie to the King his Soveraigne, he durst not trust) by an obscure Letter (more resembling the riddle of an Oedipus then the counsel of a friend) that hee should abstaine from the place prefixed at the time determined. The darke figure of the writing, the strange maner of delivering, the smal likelihood of any cloud at that time gathering, might have mooved many men rather to have neglected, then apprehended so blinde a figure of discovery. (Bbbv–Bbb2)

Resisting the account of the letter and its deciphering in ‘the book written of the discovery of the treason,’ Fr John Gerard challenges the presumption that these figures were all that ‘darke’ or ‘blinde.’ He is not alone, he suspects, in thinking, ‘His Majesty and divers of those Council-

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lors also, who had the scanning of the letter, to be well able in shorter time and with fewer doubts to decipher a darker riddle and find out a greater secret than that matter was, after so plain a letter was delivered’ (100). While Gerard disparages the amount of skill required to crack the code of the Monteagle letter, A True and Perfect Relation presents privy councillors who are artful as well as voluble speakers. In their readings of A True and Perfect Relation Alison Shell and Arthur Marotti both attend to the Earl of Northampton’s rhetoric. Shell tries to justify his verbosity; when Catholics who aspired to separate temporal from spiritual power wrote, she explains, they ‘were well aware of the preconceptions which they were defying. This could result in protestations of loyalty and devotion to the monarch which – until one considers the weight of prejudice they were counteracting – seem hyberbolic even by the standards of the time.’ Marotti describes Northampton’s speeches as ‘polemically overblown’: ‘Unlike the more economical speeches of Coke and Salisbury, Northampton’s turgid and pedantic Ciceronian performance repeatedly waxes metaphoric,’ and ‘Northampton indulges in rhetorical overkill.’47 Especially in the expanded version of his closing speech, Northampton’s rhetoric is bloated, hyperbolic, and overheated. But, because of his amphibious and amphibolic identity, what James I once called Northampton’s ‘Asiatic style’ can seem to be somehow attached to this Catholicism; however much he castigates Garnet, he is still implicated in the slippery, dark conceits associated with the Jesuitical equivocation he condemns. But he is not alone. While Marotti distinguishes Northampton from Coke and Salisbury, they too ‘wax metaphoric.’ The two Jesuits who offer counter-narratives to A True and Perfect Relation both focus on Coke’s artfulness. Gerard remarks that ‘Mr Attorney can add and diminish like a cunning orator.’ Tesimond accuses Coke of trying to discredit Garnet before the trial by putting about ‘slanderous tales,’ ‘fables,’ and ‘mendacious and extravagant inventions’ and offering in court ‘nothing more than a few vain and airy conjectures.’48 Coke seems incapable of expressing himself without the dark and blind figures so often associated with his enemies. One of Coke’s most famous figurations appears in A True and Perfect Relation. ‘For these Jesuites, they indeede make no vow of speaking trueth, and yet even this Equivocating, and lying is a kinde of unchastitie, against which they vow and promise … The law and Sanction of Nature, hath (as it were) married the heart & tongue, by joining and knitting of them together in a certaine kinde of marriage; and therefore when there is discorde betweene them two, the speech that



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proceedes from them, is said to be conceived in Adulterie, & he that breedes such bastard children offends against Chastitie’ (T2v–T3). Coke’s figuration is both vivid and unstable. Phrases such as ‘a kinde of’ ‘as it were’ and ‘in a certain kinde of’ signal the simile that morphs into a metaphor – by the end of the passage equivocation is bastard speech conceived in adultery. The comparison is fairly straightforward and it draws on the venerable tradition of denouncing the supposedly celibate clergy for unchastity (a strategy used to disparage Garnet’s friendship with and dependence on Anne Vaux, as Arthur Marotti has discussed).49 Here Jesuits put asunder what God intends and the trial process requires be bound together. They breed bastards. Coke offers a particular example of the problems equivocation poses; this example makes the comparison to marriage even more troublesome. Sir Francis Tresham, on the brink of his death, apparently of natural causes, was ‘of charitie’ permitted to have his wife visit him ‘for his comfort.’ His wife knew that he had accused Garnet of involvement in ‘the Spanish treason.’ Fearing the spiritual consequences should he die with his betrayal of Garnet on his conscience, she urged him to recant. But his hand was so shaky that he had to dictate to his servant. After dictating that he had not seen Garnet for fourteen years, he ‘weakely and dyingly subscribed’ this paper and asked that it be given to the Earl of Salisbury. Tresham’s scrupulously authorized statement included a pointless lie, since there was considerable evidence, including from Garnet, that he and Tresham had often been together.50 Coke concludes of this episode, ‘Thus were they stayned with their owne workes, and went a whoring with their owne inventions’ (T3v). But the deathbed scene he has vividly invoked stages divided allegiances and divided bodies. Coke prepares us for this episode by describing the needful marriage of heart and tongue. But in the ensuing example, the heart is the wife’s heart – her love and concern for her husband, which Coke presents as misguided. When Tresham’s wife tries to rejoin a heart and tongue that she feels have been sundered by the pressures of the investigation, by the fear of torment and death, she needs a hand, ‘His owne hand being so feeble as that he could not write himselfe.’ In Coke’s scenario the state’s ‘charitie’ rejoins husband and wife ‘for his comfort’ but should really have kept them asunder since their deathbed reunion breeds the bastard of equivocation. In Coke’s view, marital solicitude promotes the adulterous breach between conscience and tongue, testimony and recantation. The wife’s loving intervention achieves perjury. Coke’s figuration is irresistible – at least to literary critics – and has

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been much cited, perhaps more than any other passage from A True and Perfect Relation, with the possible exception of Coke’s amazing reading of the semiotics of the treason punishment (K2r–v). Biographies of Garnet and Tresham question his motives in this deathbed equivocation. But the context that links Coke’s trope and Tresham’s lie has dropped out. This context focuses our attention on the triangle of Jesuit, wife, and husband. The wife divorces heart and tongue in Coke’s account, although she does it out of concern for the Jesuit’s survival and her husband’s salvation. And the state plays a crucial role in facilitating and then lamenting this speech that is simultaneously uxorious and adulterous. This episode in A True and Perfect Relation suggests the impossibility of escaping or controlling figuration once it has been unleashed. Coke’s use of gendered imagery – a venerable and irresistible resource for discrediting the opposition – makes this figuration even more slippery. By describing equivocation as adultery, Coke links Jesuits and women to discredit both and Catholicism more generally for throwing them together. But, like securing Northampton to write the true and perfect relation, Coke’s trope blurs the division it aspires to sharpen – between Catholics and Anglicans, marriage and adultery, dark figures and plain speaking. I wish to conclude by considering a text from the end of the seventeenth century in which a turn of phrase is taken as revealing a relation between an individual and Catholicism, a relation she herself does not claim. Here, too, attending to gender reveals both the power of figuration to impose a confessional identity and the very unstable parameters defining what counts as confessional identity at the bar, on the scaffold, and in print.

As Innocent as the Child Unborn In January 1681 someone named Elizabeth or Alice or Latice or Leticia Wigenton or Wigington or Wiggens was convicted of whipping her thirteen-year-old apprentice girl to death; she was hanged at Tyburn in September. There are several pamphlet accounts of this case, as well as mentions of it in printed reports of Old Bailey trials and in newsheets.51 The multiplicity of her names, while not wholly unusual in the period, signals the slippery evasiveness of identity not only at the bar, so to speak, but in our own attempts as researchers to track down and tie together all of the references to a particular person. I will call her Wigington, however arbitrarily, since the other scholars who have assembled her sur-



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prisingly numerous print traces do so.52 What I wish to focus on is the mystery of her confessional identity. As Randall Martin has shown, references to Wigington and to her accomplice and lodger, John Sadler, pop up in a variety of early newsheets. Many of these early newspapers were driven by partisan politics, especially in the hysteria surrounding the Popish Plot, as the prominence of Protestant in their titles might suggest. For example, Martin points out that Langley Curtiss’s True Protestant Mercury, which ran from 28 December 1680 to 25 October 1682, reported murders by men ‘if they had a political angle linked to other recent stories or if they involved Catholic figures the Mercury wished to defame’ and that murders by women, too, ‘were represented mainly in terms of associations with political and religious conflicts.’53 Yet the True Protestant Mercury and other newspapers that mention Wigington’s crime do not mention her religion. The sensationally sadistic nature of this crime might in itself have justified charting the progress of the trial, but it would also have prompted emphasis on any connection between Wigington and Catholics or Catholicism. The suggestion that Wigington had fallen in with Catholics occurs only in the fullest printed account of her crime and punishment, Confession and Execution of Leticia Wigington of Ratclif … writen by her own hand in the Goal of Newgate, two days before her death (London, 1681), also published by Curtiss. Not coincidentally, this text begins by casting doubt on Wigington’s confession, even as it presents it as ‘written by her own hand.’ We are fully satisfied, that the following Paper was written by this unhappy womans own hand, a while before her Death, and though at her Tryal for this horrid Fact, the Evidence against her, was full, clear and undeniable, yea which is more, though she was then so ingenious to confess herself really guilty thereof, having lain so many Months in Newgate, we have very great reason to judge she has been too well acquainted with that cursed crew of Popish Priests and Jesuites, who it is to be feared have debauched her with their own damnable Principles, whereby they have perswaded her to deny what she before had so fully confessed, which she does in the very words of those Jesuites who lately deservedly suffered for Treason against his Majesty, &c. who though they were tried and condemned (as well as her self) upon the clearest Evidence imaginable, yet Atheistically even with their last Breath affirmed, That they were as innocent as the Child unborn. (1)

Thus before we can read Wigington’s confession we have been told that she is ‘too well acquainted’ with priests, Jesuits, and traitors because

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of her insistence on her own innocence and particularly because of the phrase she uses to articulate her innocence. This is a phrase that Fr John Gerard had used of Garnet: ‘And so we may see in the process of the accusation, when the Attorney brought against Father Garnet all other former matter that had been forged against the martyrs in Queen Elizabeth’s time, with which (if they had been true) yet they could no more have charged Father Garnett with them in justice, than the child that was then unborn.’54 But after those convicted of treason for their involvement in the Popish Plot protested their innocence on the scaffold, this phrase accrued negative connotations, signalling the way that the sacrament of confession defeats the state’s attempt to secure confessions and blocks access to the truth. In the confession attributed to her – really a refusal to confess – Wigington repeats the phrase three times: she refers to herself as one who is ‘as innocent as concerning the Murder for which I suffer as the Child unborn’ (1); she denounces ‘the Girl that Swore against me and was the cause of my dying this Shameful Death, though as innocent as the Child unborn’ (4); she announces on the scaffold that ‘I dye as innocent of the Crime for which my Body suffers, as the Child yet unborn’ (4). Wigington’s use of the phrase ‘as innocent as the child unborn’ had a particular, gendered valence in her case. In her purported confession, Wigington explains that she pled her belly on advice she received from others in prison but that this further estranged her from her husband, whom she had not seen in two years. This account depicts Wigington as having claimed to be pregnant in order to defer execution but also as having to defend herself against the implication that she is sexually promiscuous. To defend her virtue and to appease her husband – who withdrew his financial support for her reprieve in outrage – Wigington must then insist that of course she did not have sex in Newgate and never really was pregnant. There is much of interest in this part of Wigington’s confession, I think, because it gives us a picture of a prison culture in which inmates advise new arrivals on strategies for deferring or avoiding execution and perhaps for gaining sympathy and because it reveals the role of print as an agent in as well as a record of legal processes. In this text, Wigington accuses ‘whoever they were that did make Ballads and Books upon me, after I was brought to Newgate; and raised great scandal and ignominy, and added grief to my Afflictions’ (4).55 According to this account of Wigington’s confession, then, print intervened in her story and altered its outcome. Still, in the mouth of a woman who has attempted to plead the belly –



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even if then forced to retract this plea – the claim on the scaffold that she dies as innocent ‘as the Child yet unborn’ sounds very much as if she is still claiming to be pregnant and asserting her innocence within the logic of ‘benefit of belly,’ by which it was assumed that a pregnant woman’s execution should be deferred because the quickening fetus she carries is innocent of her crime and so should not be punished. While the unborn child’s innocence might be a point of some theological dispute – since even the unborn might be tainted with original sin – the ‘privilege of the belly’ focused on crime rather than sin, assuming that the child unborn was, indeed, innocent of its mother’s crime. If we consider Wigington’s statements within the context of the secular law, then she seems to say, ‘As innocent as the fetus you would spare am I,’ and, ‘You are murdering us both, me and the child yet unborn whom I carry.’ Thus Wigington’s repeated use of this phrase might be seen as particularly appropriate to her own case: (1) because she was accused of having murdered a child; (2) because she had pled her belly (as many female felons did); and (3) because she was demanding the same kind of legal immunity that would be conferred on a fetus and staking a parallel claim to the court’s mercy. But, as I have pointed out, the printed account frames her use of this phrase in a very different context, preparing us to be critical and politicized readers of her confession and to identify that phrase not with her history of pleading the belly but with the Popish Plot traitors and their protestations of innocence that were similarly read as refusals to confess. By denying her guilt, presenting an opaque front to the court, and doing so through the repeated use of a particular phrase, she relates herself to the Popish Plot traitors. Samuel Smith, the Ordinary of Newgate, who may have been the author of this account of Wigington’s months in Newgate, had printed, two years earlier, An Account of the Behaviour of the Fourteen Late Popish Malefactors, whil’st in Newgate (London, 1679), a series of biographies and assessments of Popish Plot traitors.56 (In this same year, much of the material in A True and Perfect Relation was reprinted in The Gunpowder Treason; another account of Garnet’s trial and execution was likewise printed in the textual recycling project designed to link the Popish Plot to the Gunpowder Plot in a genealogy of Catholic treason.)57 In his account of these popish malefactors, Smith speculates that Robert Green would not confess to his crime because he ‘had received a Popish Absolution from the Guilt’ of the murder of Sir Edmudbury Godfrey ‘and so look’t upon himself as Innocent as the Child Unborn’ (Dv). Note that he does not attribute the phrase to Green but rather

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imagines how Green ‘looks upon himself.’ The text says of Lawrence Hill that he affirmed ‘in the usual Canting Language, That he was as Innocent of it, as the Child unborn’ (Ev). Smith reads the phrase as itself an equivocation, since Hill might imagine that he was as innocent as a child unborn was here present. Such a statement might actually be true for a pregnant woman. In the aftermath of the unsettlingly unsatisfying Popish Plot executions, references to the innocence of the child unborn are taken as indictments of confession and absolution, which free Catholic malefactors to assert their innocence no matter what they have done. In another example, Benjamin Harris’s newspaper Domestic Intelligence, which claimed to ‘prevent false reports,’ asserts that a priest living with a person of honour had impregnated his Lady’s chambermaid and, when she demanded marriage, consulted with another priest who advised him to swear that he had been falsely accused ‘and to add Oaths and Execrations to it, that he was as clear as the Child unborn; which when he had done, the Priest promised to absolve and pardon him for the same.’58 The simile of the unborn child appears particularly unseemly as a denial of paternity. But the issue here, as in other dismissals of this protestation at around the same time, is the charge that Catholics believe they can erase any guilt and that, if they have received absolution, they are innocent, no matter what they have done. As one anti-Catholic satire of 1680 put it, Catholicism is the perfect religion for bawds because ‘we can Whore and whore again, and Confess and fess, and obtain Pardon, and be pardoned to all intents and purposes, and go out of the World after a whole life of sinning, as Innocent as Children unborn.’59 Thus, when the confession printed as Wigington’s assigns her an identity by simile – as innocent as the child unborn – condensed into the phrase is an identity Wigington does not seem to claim for herself but one that, for the author of her account, discredits her by association. So much about her is unclear – from her name to the nature and extent of her involvement in the murder – yet the author of Confession and Execution of Leticia Wigington thinks he knows something about her because of one phrase she uses. Whose ‘canting language’ is this? Did Green, Hill, and Wigington use this phrase, so innocuous at first glance? Or did the Ordinary of Newgate put that phrase in their mouths and then use it to link and condemn them? It is impossible to know. But what is interesting to me here is that one phrase works to identify or classify each one as distinctively Catholic in his or her inability to speak the truth. Assigned a ‘confessional identity’ as inculpatory as their alleged crimes,



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they are also assumed incapable of legally useful confessions. Similarly, in a sermon printed in 1684 and ‘occasioned by’ the crimes and execution of Elizabeth Ridgeway, a serial killer who kept poison stashed in her hair and is associated with Presbyterianism, John Newton concludes his account of Ridgeway’s ‘confused tedious,’ uncertain, and contradictory confessions by reminding the reader that ‘the words of condemned Criminals are not to be rashly believed, especially where Concealment is founded upon a mistaken religious consideration: And this may reach beyond the present Subject to many, that have suffered condign [that is, deserved] punishment for their Treasons for these five years last past.’60 Obviously, he, too, is referring to the Popish Plot convicts’ notorious refusal to confess. His text demonstrates that, in the aftermath of the Popish Plot, there were repeated attempts to reassert the guilt of the traitors and the probity of their punishments, and also shows that the behaviour of the convicted promoted a hermeneutic of suspicion that subsequently informs approaches to confessions more generally.61 The author of the ‘true relation’ of Wigington’s crime and confession tells us how to read her use of this phrase. But the context of her case and the precedent of the Popish Plot traitors open up more questions than they can resolve, especially if we attempt to think them in relation to one another. It is useful to undertake a similarly suspicious reading practice, not only for the texts considered here but for databases and reference works. Early English Books Online (EEBO) offers three different copies of A True and Perfect Relation but no information about the text’s authorship, provenance, or afterlife. Thus, just as Coke castigated Garnet as the archequivocator while failing to grasp that he was the author of A Treatise of Equivocation, so Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton, both is and is not positioned as the author of A True and Perfect Relation. The Confession … of Leticia Wigington is not available on EEBO (and it is time-consuming to assemble surviving accounts of the case because of the different spellings of her name, among other impediments). Comparing the biographies of different Gunpowder Plot ‘conspirators’ in the new ODNB reveals that confessional identities of a sort still shape the spin on these figures. I have employed here two different reading strategies. I have dwelt at some length on one text – a text about evidence and itself standing in evidence. And I have tracked a phrase across texts, ignoring many of their complexities so as to focus on the resonance of that one phrase. I have attempted to synthesize the current state of knowledge about the authorship and context of A True and Perfect Relation and of The Confession … of Leticia Wigington. But I have also argued that careful attention

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to the form and texture of these texts can yield insight into events that were, at the time, understood or produced through ‘dark figures’ and texts that are themselves engaged in what today goes by the name of literary analysis. My approach acknowledges how very suspicious and artful contemporaries were as readers and as writers, and the role of their figural language in constituting the perceived threat of Catholicism and attempting, from various points across the confessional spectrum, to fix a true and perfect relation between confessions and identity, a relation that was necessarily a fabrication.

NOTES   1 I am grateful to Lowell Gallagher and Christopher Kyle for invitations that prompted me to write this essay; to Constance Furey, Lowell Gallagher, Deborah Harkness, Carmen Ortiz Henley, Amy Hollywood, Julia R. Lupton, Ellen Mackay, Kari Boyd McBride, Arthur Marotti, Linda Levy Peck, Lyndal Roper, and Laura M. Stevens for comments that shaped its arguments and direction; and to Margaret Ferguson for her sage advice on an earlier draft.   2 What constitutes a ‘true and perfect’ confession remains open to question. See Peter Brooks, Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000): ‘How do you find truth in the confessional act? Where do you look for confessional truth: what is its status? What kind of truth is it? This is the elusive question I wish to pursue’ (45). Throughout his study, Brooks points to the ways in which confessions are ‘equivocal.’ He cites Edward Coke on the development of a notion of ‘a reserved domain, concerning matters of personal conscience and belief, on which persons cannot be required to speak in proceedings that could lead to their condemnation for this belief’ (16) – but obviously Coke didn’t extend a right to mental reservation to Garnet.   3 Lewis Owen, The Unmasking of All Popish Monks, Friers, and Jesuits (London, 1628), S4r–S4v. In Garnet’s trial, it was actually John Gerard who was accused of administering Communion to the conspirators. In Jesuit Oswald Tesimond’s account, he calls this a ‘slanderous fable’ invented by Coke. See The Gunpowder Plot: The Narrative of Oswald Tesimond alias Greenway, trans. and ed. Francis Edwards, SJ (London: Folio Society, 1973), 208.   4 I quote from the British Library copy of this text, as it is available through EEBO. I will cite signature numbers parenthetically. Arthur Marotti offers a helpful introduction to the text, which he describes as ‘a masterpiece of official propaganda … which played not only during the trials to the judges,



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the jury, and the monarch overhearing the proceedings but also in print to the political nation as a whole’ (133). He discusses the text’s provenance, offers an overview of its structure and contents (133–43), and summarizes its purpose: ‘In addition to proving the guilt of those tried for their involvement in the plot, A True and Perfect Relation was designed to drive home two points: first, that the Gunpowder Plot was only one of a series of continuing Catholic assaults on English monarchs, the true religion (Protestantism), and the nation itself, and second, that Jesuits were England’s worst enemies, a diabolically crafty order of political subversives defending the papal deposing power and sanctioning regicide, the killing of heretics, the practices of lying and equivocation, and the invasion of the country by foreign powers.’ Marotti attributes material consequences to the text especially in its international distribution: ‘It was, in effect, a work that led directly to the international controversy over the subsequent Oath of Allegiance in which some of the same issues were at stake’ (142). See Arthur F. Marotti, Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy: Catholic and Anti-Catholic Discourses in Early Modern England (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005).   5 The Condition of Catholics under James I: Father Gerard’s Narrative of the Gunpowder Plot, ed. John Morris (London: Longmans, 1871). I will cite this as Gerard’s Narrative. Philip Caraman suggests a bridge between these oppositional texts. He describes the Earl of Northampton, improbably, as John Gerard’s ‘friend and Garnet’s admirer’ and suggests that he gave Gerard an account of what Garnet said in his last examination before he was tortured (Henry Garnet, 1555–1606, and the Gunpowder Plot [New York: Farrar, Straus, 1964], 372).   6 Mark Nicholls, ‘Investigating Gunpowder Plot,’ Recusant History 19, no. 2 (1988): 124–45, esp. 131, 138.   7 Peter Lake, with Michael Questier, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists, and Players in Post-Reformation England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 307. Rebecca Lemon reads Garnet’s scaffold speech as an example of how ‘even the formulaic speech produced interpretive chaos rather than upholding state power’ (89) and argues more generally that the scaffold speech was ‘a secular form of’ the now prohibited and distrusted Catholic confession (88). See Treason by Words: Literature, Law, and Rebellion in Shakespeare’s England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006).   8 Gerard claims that the execution was so crowded, ‘so many standing set up by carpenters to hire out for money, that a mere place to stand on would cost twelvepence well; and the party from whom I chiefly have many of these particulars (being a Priest of great credit and estimation) was glad to give twelvepence only to stand upon a wall. All windows were full, yea, the

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tops of houses full of people, so that it is not known the like hath been at any execution’ (Gerard, Narrative, 290). The miraculous straw inscribed with Garnet’s face is hand-drawn on the inside cover of the British Library copy of A True Relation (STC 11619). On this copy, it performs an aptly ambiguous function: for sceptics it is a contemptuous joke, confirming that the whole text is a refutation of the very idea that Garnet could be a saint or martyr; for devout Catholics, it could frame the text as itself the relic of a process by which Garnet achieves transcendence. His tiny silent face is the alpha and the omega of this tortuous process. On the straw and this drawing of it, see Julian Yates, Error, Misuse, Failure: Object Lessons from the English Renaissance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 28–62.   9 As Mark Nicholls emphasizes, there was still another phase of the plot, in the trial of the Earl of Northumberland in June 1606. See Mark Nicholls, ‘The “Wizard Earl” in Star Chamber: The Trial of the Earl of Northumberland, June 1606,’ Historical Journal 30, no. 1 (1987): 173–89; and his book, Investigating Gunpowder Plot (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991). On the aftermath of the plot, see also Lori Anne Ferrell, Government by Polemic: James I, the King’s Preachers, and the Rhetorics of Conformity, 1603– 1625 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 64–109. 10 A True and Perfect Relation is extremely self-conscious about its own status as a text and about the investigations’ reliance on texts. It was not enough that the defendants confess: in court, ‘their severall examinations (subscribed by themselves) [were] shewed particularly unto them, and acknowledged by them to be their own & true.’ Although what had been done and confessed was already sufficient, ‘yet for further satisfaction to so great a presence and audience, and their better memorie of the carriage of these Treasons, the voluntarie and free confessions of all the said several Traitors in writing subscribed with their owne proper hands, and acknowledged at the Barre by themselves to be true, were openly and distinctly read’ (K3). See Michael C. Questier, Conversion, Politics and Religion in England, 1580–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), on Garnet’s own comments about the demand at assize courts that conformists repeat their recantations (112). 11 Gerard, Narrative, 261. On interruptions of Garnet, see also 262, 264, 299. 12 Nicholls, ‘Investigating Gunpowder Plot,’ 125, 137. Nicholls argues that James and his Council refrained from torture, for the most part, because they recognized that ‘it does not necessarily produce the truth’ and they ‘desperately wanted to know the truth’ (Nicholls, Investigating Gunpowder Plot, 58). If the torture of Fawkes – like the threat of treason – is exceptional, then English law can both boast that it does not countenance torture



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and rely upon it. See Scott Michaelsen and Scott C. Shershow, ‘Does Torture Have a Future?’ boundary2 33, no. 3 (2006): 163–99. 13 His Majesties Speach in This Last Session of Parliament (London, 1605), Hv; The Araignement and Execution of the Late Traytors (London, 1606), C3v. 14 Gerard and Caraman suggest that Catesby had freed Garnet to reveal the content of his confession if Garnet were threatened with torture. So undergoing torture gave Garnet permission to break the seal of the confessional. Note that Catesby was dead by this point. Garnet’s sudden confession after months of denials raises questions about why he finally broke (Caraman, Henry Garnet, 375). In his 1991 book, Nicholls is a bit more equivocal than he appears in his Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) entries. He concedes that Garnet wrote his declaration on 9 March ‘after either being tortured or at least being threatened with torture’ (Investigating Gunpowder Plot, 65). 15 The most interesting inquiry into Elizabeth’s use of torture against Catholics, especially priests, remains Elizabeth Hanson, ‘­ Torture and Truth in Renaissance England,’ Representations 34 (Spring 1991): 53–84, which also appears as a chapter in her Discovering the Subject in Renaissance England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 24–54. For an example of a historian who acknowledges torture without being able to heed its pressure to revise his assumptions, see James Sharpe’s The Bewitching of Anne Gunter (New York: Routledge, 2000). Sharpe confidently asserts that ‘the English common law … did not countenance torture as a means of extracting confessions to establish guilt and implicate accomplices in criminal cases’ (118). Yet he also mentions in passing that the winter of 1605–6 was when ‘Guy Fawkes and the rest were racked and interrogated’ (190). 16 Compare The Araignement and Execution of the Late Traytors: ‘Papists will perhaps idlely say, it was a bloody execution, but in respect of their desert, in the blood they entended to have shedde, it was a mercifull punishment; For if Jezebel a Queen for seeking the murther of one private man, was throwne out of a window, and fedde uppon by dogs: How can these people bee thought to be cruelly used, that could entend and practise so horrible a villany, as the death of so gracious a King, Queene and Prince, so Noble Peeres, & the ruine of so flourishing a Kingdome’ (B2). 17 Alice Hogge, God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth’s Forbidden Priests and the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 363. Both A True and Perfect Relation and Gerard’s Narrative depict Garnet questioning how accurately the witnesses heard what he and Oldcorne said. There were two witnesses, who claim they took notes, omitting from their testimony anything about which they could not agree (Gerard, Narrative, 255). Nicholls

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praises ‘their conscientious and truthful efforts’ (Investigating Gunpowder Plot, 64). 18 Gerard, Narrative, 169; Caraman, Henry Garnet, 360; Tesimond, Gunpowder Plot, 187. 19 Similarly, His Majesties Speech (the King’s Book) presents James’s words ‘as neere to the life of his owne wordes, as they could bee gathered’ (A3); ‘as neere his very words as could be gathered at the instant’ (A4). 20 Gerard, Narrative, 227, 228. Indeed, Crooke’s speech as Gerard presents it makes the same points as the version presented in A True and Perfect Relation, but the wording varies. Interestingly, the Latin phrases are the same in both. Compare True and Perfect Relation, N4v–O2r, and Gerard, Narrative, 227–8. 21 In contrast, Gerard dispatches with this speech in a paragraph (Narrative, 263). 22 Linda Levy Peck, Northampton: Patronage and Policy at the Court of James I (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1982), 81–3, 111–13. While it is unclear exactly when the text was published, the Venetian ambassador writes of it in December 1606. 23 Fr John Gerard identifies Northampton as a friend of the Vaux family who intervened to help Garnet’s friend and harbourer, Anne Vaux. Marotti sums him up as ‘a politically opportunistic crypto-Catholic looking to solidify his power as Jacobean privy councilor’ (Religious Ideology, 137). Northampton practised just the kind of occasional and strategic conformity against which Garnet had argued. See Michael C. Questier, Conversion, Politics and Religion, 179–80. 24 Thomas Scot, Philomythie and Philomythologie wherein Outlandish Birds, Beasts, and Fishes are taught to speake true English plainely, 2nd ed. (London, 1616), C3r (qtd in Alastair Bellany, The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England: News Culture and the Overbury Affair [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002], 204). 25 Peck, Northampton, 112. 26 According to Alison Shell, A True and Perfect Relation ‘upheld the freedom and authority of the sovereign, and attacked the papal usurpation of temporal power and the defenders of Catholic resistance’ (Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558–1660 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999], 115). 27 Peck, Northampton, 82; Bellany, Politics of Court Scandal, 205. 28 Bellany, Politics of Court Scandal, 186. 29 Gerard laments that, because he had limited access to prisoners, ‘we could not have such means as we desire to meet and talk with those that were



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eye-witnesses of many notable accidents, which we hope to do hereafter’ (Narrative, 159). 30 Gerard, Narrative, 162, 311; see also Tesimond, Gunpowder Plot, 178. Gerard discusses what he thinks was left out and what added into the text he calls A True Report of the Imprisonment, Arraignment, and Death of the late Traitors, set forth by ‘T.W., I know not who,’ but claims that ‘yet even that which is there set down of them did confirm very many in opinion that they thought themselves clear from offence to God in the matter’ (192, 222). A True Report of the Imprisonment, the Arraignement, and Execution of the lat Traytors (London, 1606) is another printing of The Araignement and Execution of the late Traytors (London, 1606). Both have epistles to the reader by T.W. They are alike in every way except the title page. Tesimond offers a similar assessment of this text: ‘In this production all their words and actions that tended to their credit are carefully omitted. On the other hand, false inventions are multiplied to bring them and their religion into contempt, and to increase popular hatred. Notwithstanding, the pamphlet makes it clear that they were quite convinced in their own minds that they began and developed their business with the best of intentions, convinced that they offered no offence to God or conscience’ (203). Gerard comes close to authorizing ‘that first relation and discourse of all this treason’ (the King’s Book) since it did not include the ‘absurd fiction’ that Garnet (in fact, Coke claimed it was Gerard himself) heard the conspirators’ confessions and ministered Communion to them because the author was ‘of no less authority than the King himself’ and ‘was so careful of his authority and the credit of his narration’ (199; Tesimond follows this closely on his p. 210). Compared to the king, ‘Mr Attorney being not so sure a friend to truth … did not stick to allege this dream or device of his own for a true narrative’ (Gerard, Narrative, 199) – by which he seems to mean Coke’s speech as presented in A True Relation (see H4v and R4r). 31 Caraman, Henry Garnet, 394n1, n2. 32 David Jardine, Criminal Trials II: The Gunpowder Plot (London: Charles Knight, 1835), 235. 33 Nicholls, ‘Investigating Gunpowder Plot,’ 129–30. 34 Frances E. Dolan, ‘Readers, Evidence, and Interdisciplinarity,’ Shakespeare Studies 30 (2002): 26–30. 35 Nicholls dismisses the possibility that documents were forged, distorted, or destroyed:

Regarding the loss of some original documents, including, regrettably, some important depositions made by Fawkes and Winter, it is important

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Early Modern English Catholicism to remember that these documents were used at four trials, were afterwards lent to Robert Abbot so that he could draw on them for his Antilogia, were in some cases carried about by Coke in a ‘buckram bag’ for upwards of eleven years, and were thereafter stored in increasingly unsuitable conditions down to the early nineteenth century, which should leave us surprised only that so many … have survived. Documents have also disappeared which it would have been in nobody’s particular interest to destroy, and the scrappy nature of original testimony, with its underlinings and erasures, makes it only too understandable that a copy would have been more suitable for preservation as a record.

  He concludes confidently that ‘vanished testimony can be reconstructed from accounts of those most public of public trials which none of the accused saw fit to contradict.’ Nicholls, Investigating Gunpowder Plot, 217. In contrast, A.H. Dodd refers to ‘that arch-manipulator of evidence AttorneyGeneral Coke.’ A.H. Dodd, ‘The Spanish Treason, the Gunpowder Plot, and the Catholic Refugees,’ English Historical Review 53 (1938): 627–50, esp. 642. 36 This text was circulated only in manuscript. See the ODNB entry on Francis Tresham. On the widespread reliance of religious minorities, clergy, and laity, on some form of equivocation to survive, see Alexandra Walsham, Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance In England, 1500–1700 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 194–206. 37 On fear of equivocation and distrust of Catholic speech as the legacy of the Gunpowder Plot, see Marotti, Religious Ideology, 137. See also Lowell Gallagher, Medusa’s Gaze: Casuistry and Conscience in the Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991); Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 19–24; and Olga L. Valbuena, Subjects to the King’s Divorce: Equivocation, Infidelity, and Resistance in Early Modern England (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003). 38 Margaret W. Ferguson, Dido’s Daughters: Literacy, Gender, and Empire in Early Modern England and France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 265–332, esp. 268, 277, 280. 39 Catherine Belsey, Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden: The Construction of Family Values in Early Modern Culture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999), 83. 40 Maus, Inwardness, 43. Hanson describes ‘rhetorical cooperation’ between Jesuits and legal personnel (48) and the ways in which ‘the narrative of Jesuitical secret labors and the narrative of torture not only imitate each other but become, on occasion, the same story’ (52).



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41 See Ferguson’s reading of Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam in Dido’s Daughters; and, on Macbeth, Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Toil and Trouble,’ New Republic, 14 November 1994, 32–7; Rebecca Lemon, Treason by Words, 79–159; and Steven Mullaney, ‘Lying Like Truth,’ in The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 116–34. 42 Barbara J. Shapiro, A Culture of Fact: England, 1550–1720 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000). In her emphasis on the middling classes, Shapiro disagrees with Steven Shapin’s emphasis on the gentleman investigator as the privileged speaker and discerner of truths in early modern England. See Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in SeventeenthCentury England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). Deborah Harkness also argues for broader participation in the scientific (as opposed to legal) processes of finding and proving ‘facts.’ See The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). Shapiro suggests that print extended participation beyond those who actually served on juries: ‘The spate of published criminal trials, especially state trials, dating from the 1670s onward also made the evidentiary elements of the common law, criminal trial familiar to a large number of general readers and the politically interested’ (32). For Lorna Hutson’s arguments, see The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). As early as the contestations around the Gunpowder Plot, print accounts helped to enlist readers as what Shapin has called ‘virtual witnesses.’ Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 60–5. 43 This was an anonymous letter given to William Parker, Baron Monteagle, which he passed on to James. The author has never been conclusively identified but is widely suspected to have been Francis Tresham, whose sister, a recusant, was Monteagle’s wife (although Fr Francis Edwards suggests Robert Cecil, the Earl of Salisbury). In his ODNB entry on Tresham, Mark Nicholls claims that he ‘almost certainly’ wrote the letter. The letter was given to Monteagle’s servant in the street; he then interrupted a dinner party to present it to his master. ‘Instead of reading the letter himself, Lord Monteagle broke the seal and handed it to one Ward to read aloud – an extraordinary action if he was not already aware of its contents’ (S.M. Toyne, ‘Guy Fawkes and the Powder Plot,’ History Today 1 [1951]: 16–24, esp. 21). It was also a highly theatrical move. Questions have also arisen regarding the nine days that intervened between the receipt of the letter and the capture of Fawkes.

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44 His Majesties Speech, F3v. 45 Ibid., F3r. 46 Ibid., B4r. 47 Shell, Catholicism, 115; Marotti, Religious Ideology, 141. 48 Gerard, Narrative, 241n1 (this has been erased in the manuscript); Tesimond, Narrative, 181, 182. 49 Marotti, Religious Ideology, 54–5. 50 According to Gerard, ‘this was their misconstruing, not his equivocating’ (259) because Tresham meant that he had not seen him fourteen years before the Spanish treason rather than for the last fourteen years. 51 These include Confession and Execution of Leticia Wigington of Ratclif … writen by her own hand in the Goal of Newgate, two days before her death (London, 1681), and The True Relation of the Tryals At the Sessions of Oyer and Terminer (London, 1681), both available in facsimile in Randall Martin, Women and Murder in Early Modern News Pamphlets and Broadside Ballads, 1573–1697 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005). Philip D. Collington offers a helpful introduction to an excerpt from Confession and Execution of Leticia Wigington in Reading Early Modern Women: An Anthology of Texts in Manuscript and Print, 1550–1700, ed. Helen Ostovich and Elizabeth Sauer (New York: Routledge, 2004), 50–2. As he points out, Wigington’s lodger, John Sadler, rumoured to be her lover, was executed as her accomplice in the murder; Martin also emphasizes Sadler’s contested role in this brutal crime. On Sadler, see The Last Dying Speeches and Confessions of the Three Notorious Malefactors who were Executed at Tyborn, on the 4th. Of this Instant March, 1681 … John Sadler, For Whipping a Girl to Death in Ratcliff (London, 1680/1), and The Tryal and Condemnation of Several notorious Malefactors … And most remarkably of John Sadler (London, 1681). 52 For a detailed and useful overview of this case and the various print accounts of it, see Randall Martin, Women, Murder, and Equity in Early Modern England (New York: Routledge, 2008), 33–5. 53 Martin, Women, Murder, and Equity, 32–3. 54 Gerard, Narrative, 225. 55 See also The True Narrative of the Confession and Execution of the Prisoners at Kingstone-upon-Thames (London, 1681), 3. The True Protestant Mercury (23–6 February 1681), claims that ‘Eliz. Wigenton’ had been condemned but ‘Reprieved for her Belly.’ On women’s strategic exploitation of pregnancy, see Jennine Hurl-Eamon, ‘“She being bigg with child is likely to miscarry”: Pregnant Victims Prosecuting Assault in Westminster, 1685–1720,’ London Journal 24, no. 2 (1999): 18–33, esp. 26. 56 See Andrea McKenzie, ‘From True Confessions to True Reporting? The



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Decline and Fall of the Ordinary’s Account,’ London Journal 30, no. 1 (2005): 55–71. 57 It was printed as The Gunpowder-treason: with a Discourse of the Manner of its Discovery; and a Perfect Relation of the Proceedings against those Horrid Conspirators (London, 1679). This provides an extensive epistle to the reader (about fifty pages) and then cobbles together a number of texts about the plot but, as Marotti points out, leaves out the earl’s longest speech. ‘After this, the Earl of Northampton made a Learned Speech, which in it self was very copious; and the intention being to contract this Volume as much as might be, and to keep onely to matter of Fact, it was thought convenient to omit the same’ (L4). See Marotti, Religious Ideology, 192–3. Some of the material is also repackaged in The Tryal and Execution of Father Henry Garnet, Superior Provincial of the Jesuits in England (London, 1679), which follows A True and Perfect Relation pretty closely, except for the addition of the claim that Garnet was morally superior to the popish plotters because he blushed when caught in a lie. 58 Benjamin Harris, Domestick Intelligence or News Both from City and Country, 9 July 1679. Other instances of this phrase in these years include Benjamin Keach’s poem Sion in Distress, or the Groans of the Protestant Church (London, 1681; Boston, 1683), in which Justice attributes this phrase to the Whore of Babylon, telling Jehovah, ‘Thy Judgment Seat she seems to slight and scorn, / Says she’s as guiltless as the Child unborn’ (88). I am grateful to Laura Stevens for drawing my attention to this text and for her reading of it in work-inprogress. 59 A Letter from the Lady Creswell to Madam C. the Midwife (London, 1680), 2. Lady or Mother Creswell was a notorious bawd, often associated with republicanism; Madam C. is Elizabeth Cellier, a Catholic midwife who was tried and acquitted for involvement in the Meal Tub plot but then convicted for publishing an account of her trial that included her allegation that Catholic prisoners were tortured. On this text, and the complexity of its politics, see Melissa M. Mowry, The Bawdy Politic in Stuart England, 1660–1714: Political Pornography and Prostitution (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004), 44–6. 60 John Newton, The Penitent Recognition of Joseph’s Brethren: A Sermon Occasion’d by Elizabeth Ridgeway (London, 1684), 12. 61 I am thus arguing that early modern confessional antagonisms produced a virtual ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ long before what Paul Ricoeur calls the ‘school of suspicion,’ Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 32 and passim. While Ricoeur opposes faith to suspicion, in seventeenth-century England, faith bred suspicion.

chapter four

Motion Rhetoric in Serial Conversion Narratives: Religion and Change in Early Modern England H O L L Y C R AW F O R D P I C K E T T

For he that wavereth, is like a wave of the sea, tost of the winde, and caryed away. – James 1:6, Geneva Bible

As pervasive as it is, change is an exceptionally difficult concept to understand or to accept. We may never step in the same river twice, but life surely is easier both logistically and psychologically if we act as if we do.1 Religious conversion, at its most fundamental, is change, whether from ‘irreligion to religion; or from one religion to another; or from one denomination to another; or from one theological position to another; or from a second hand to first hand experience of religion.’2 A 1604 English dictionary defines the verb convert simply with the words turne, change.3 From the Latin for ‘turning towards,’ conversion always contains an element of flux. Nowhere does that fact become more troublingly evident than in the religious biographies of ‘serial’ converts, individuals who change their religious affiliations multiple times. By repeating the conversion process, serial converts highlight the fundamental discontinuities inherent in that process and the resultant challenges to the constitution of an identity in the face of those disunities. Perhaps as a result of those challenges, serial converts between Protestantism and Catholicism in late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth-century England rarely receive analysis, individually or as a group; the converts are either dismissed, as they were in their own day, as hypocritical rather than serious religious figures, or are simply overlooked, in part because they do not resolutely end up on one side or the other of conventional confessional divides.4 Dealing with figures such as William Alabaster,



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who converted four or five times, or Anthony Tyrrell, who converted as many as eight, can make analysis vexing indeed. Their contemporaries used geographic metaphors to express frustration with such converts’ constant motion: ‘Your going, to which your title prescribes not any end, nor restraynes within the compasse of any markes, what may it seeme, but a vast, uncertaine, blind, and inconsiderate wandering?’ complained John Floyd of serial convert Marc Antonio De Dominis.5 And, as the present volume’s title Redrawing the Map of Early Modern English Catholicism indicates, we are still implicitly engaged in trying to pin these figures down, to plot their coordinates. If we were in fact to try to map them, where would we place them? They rarely remain still long enough for anyone to record their positions. Always on the move, serial converts are Heisenberg’s quantum particles in a proto-Newtonian age. Most serial converts predictably tried to downplay their previous itinerancy, but a remarkable subset of converts actually worked their mobility into their own defences of their conversions. By turning in the surprising direction of natural history debates about the superiority of movement or rest, a group of ecumenically minded serial converts defended their behaviour by championing change itself. While the superiority of rest or movement may sound purely theoretical today, the question sits at the heart of an important debate in the history of natural philosophy. According to Angus Fletcher, ‘At least for the Renaissance period the general economy of motion needs to be understood as the essential problem for all theories of change.’6 Fletcher’s focus on the association between motion and change neatly associates what we might assume is a subject exclusive to the study of mechanics with moral and spiritual transformation.7 Conversion’s kinematic etymology seems relevant once again. And while only rarely acknowledged explicitly, debates about religious conversion often implicitly tackled underlying and competing presumptions about the nature of change and motion. Accordingly, this chapter charts the way emerging vocabularies of exploration, motion, and natural philosophy coloured the understanding of Protestant–Catholic conversion in early modern England between 1580 and 1640. A group of several unconventional serial converts defined their spiritual identities with scientific tropes that gained new relevance in an age of exploration and experimentation. Their rhetoric of navigation, astronomy, and physics lends a certain appearance of precision and forethought to what might otherwise seem thoughtless, even reckless, religious choices. Motion tropes thus delineate the complicated and often paradoxical position of the serial convert as both a relatively

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liberated and a conscientiously deliberative religious subject. This chapter traces the spatial definition of subjectivity in the works of several serial converts by asking how the moral valence of changing one’s religious allegiance began to have an intimate connection with questions of how bodies move through space. Ultimately, I argue that the use of motion rhetoric by a small group of serial converts registers the limitations of a binary (Protestant/Catholic) religious culture. The kinematic formulations of serial converts William Alabaster, Marc Antonio De Dominis, and William Chillingworth invite us to reconsider serial conversion – not as a wholly risible or shallow political phenomenon, but as an attempt to transcend ecclesiastical boundaries.8

Serial Conversion: Critique and Response Both Protestant and Catholic critics attacked ‘apostates’ on a number of fronts, but most criticisms were variations on the theme of insincerity. When a Protestant converted to Catholicism, for example, the first claim English Protestants were likely to make was that the convert did so for ‘temporal,’ rather than ‘spiritual,’ ends. John Nichols, writing in 1581 about his brief stint as a Catholic in the English seminary at Rome, noted the current ‘fad’ for Catholic conversion: What shall I say of the Seminarie men the most part of them all, forsooke their Countrey for want of livings, for want of maintenaunce, there are fiftie Schollers in the English Seminarie at Rome…. And for some succour sake, they outwardly faine themselves to be Papistes, but inwardly the most part of them doe see the trueth, and confesse they are in a wrong way, some of them oftentimes told me at Rome, whose names I omitted to put in writing, hoping their conversion.9

Nichols rehearses one of the most frequent attacks on converts – that they converted for ‘want of livings.’ Their only choice was to leave the church of their true faith for an ‘outwardly faine[d]’ Roman Catholicism. Nichols discounts the seriousness of such conversions, including his own recent time in the Catholic Church, by insinuating that they are hypocritical; he claims he knows many who have ‘confesse[d]’ as much to him ‘at Rome.’ The scrutiny directed at serial converts was more intense. Instead of having to contend simply with the notion that their first conversion may have been feigned, they now add to that burden of scepticism a



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second (or third, or even eighth) renunciation of their former avowedly heart-felt opinions. Robert Persons, responding to John Nichols’s recent recantation of the Catholic faith, articulates the strong scepticism recanting converts faced: ‘Then is it also likelie to be true, that a double or triple tonged man after so many recantations, will not be verie certaine in all his promises.… But why this renegation should be more credited then the former, I see no reason at all, except onely because it is the last, and so wil remayne untill he make another.’10 According to Persons’s argument, if you are a ‘twise revolted minister’ like Nichols, then you are likely to revolt again.11 How can converts convince their new community members that they are sincere now when they have been in the same position before, arguing for their sincerity while espousing opinions most would see as fundamentally incompatible with their present views? The serial convert Anthony Tyrrell once described his own predicament as a convert trying to return to the Protestant church after several defections with a striking statement: ‘If I did saie true then, I must dissemble now: and if I saie true now, I could not but write falshoode then.’12 Tyrrell cannot win. In the eyes of his critics, he is either lying in the present or he lied in the past. His remark indicates the overwhelming difficulty converts and their audiences had in conceptualizing change. Serial conversion defies the singular ideal of Christian conversion epitomized by Paul’s transformation on the road to Damascus.13 That Pauline paradigm generates the assumption that a Christian should convert once and for all; it offers the promise that transformation will be instantaneous and permanent. There was no well-developed alternative model of serial conversion that converts could hold up against that powerful narrative.14 Must Tyrrell, or any serial convert, be right or sincere only once in a lifetime? If he is telling the truth now, must he indeed have been lying before? Surprisingly few, from Tyrrell’s era to the present day, have been willing to give serial converts the benefit of that doubt. Notice that Tyrrell’s statement is declarative, even as he hopes to convince the audience of his recantation sermon otherwise. They will presume either a present or past transgression; inconsistency is synonymous with dishonesty. Critics seem to collapse the subsequently held positions into simultaneously held ones. A change of heart becomes evidence of deceit. Serial converts responded to such charges of inconsistency in one of three basic ways. Most commonly, they pled guilty to the charge of former insincerity, but insisted that their present situation was different. More rarely, they insisted that they were sincere, but simply mistaken,

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in the past. And most rarely and (for this essay) most importantly, converts battled the assumption implicit in the criticism that inconsistency was sinful. John Nichols at times opted for the first alternative by claiming in his Protestant recantation that he was never really a Catholic in the first place: ‘Thus dyd I willfully fight against Gods worde, albeit my conscience cryed within me day and night, This is not the right way to get eternall life.’15 He repeats the claim, in another 1581 work, ‘that in hypocrisie I lived as a Papist.’16 This is an approach Nichols shares with many other converts of the day: Lawrence Caddey claims, likewise, ‘I was never of that Religion that then I pretended, as God shal save me at the general day of Judgement.’17 Marc Antonio De Dominis, too, attests that he ‘affirmed … things, and many more to be true, which before I wrote them, I knew to be false and hereticall.’18 This tactic takes away the taint of the convert’s apostasy, but simultaneously admits that he is capable of hypocrisy, thus possibly undermining his current vows of sincerity. The second alternative is to remove the taint of hypocrisy, but by admitting the extent of one’s former apostasy. While minimizing the sincerity problem, this alternative emphasizes to the audience that the convert was only very recently susceptible to blind zeal and poor judgment. Anthony Tyrrell, for example, insisted that every one of his five changes (to date) was sincere. Although he now claims that he sees the error of his ways, he does not erase the ‘zeale of’ his former ‘Papistrie.’19 In fact, he claims that after his fourth conversion, just several months earlier, ‘neither feare of death, shame of the world, long imprisonment, could once alter mee, but if I had beene called unto my tryall anie time within halfe a yeere after, I had I thinke, died as obstinatlie as anie before me had doone.’20 Only God’s Providence, he claimed, could explain his unconventional and circular route in and out of Protestant and Catholic affiliation. Extended appeal to God’s Providence was surprisingly rare in the period’s recantation sermons, but, through such an appeal, Tyrrell attempted to take the burden of explanation for his many conversions off his own weary shoulders. The final choice, to which the second half of the paper will be devoted, moves the level of the argument from the evidence for and against the charges of hypocrisy to the presuppositions undergirding the charge itself. In this strategy, converts shift from directly battling the charges of hypocrisy levelled at them, to pose a more fundamental question: What is so wrong with change in the first place? John Nichols raises the contention most provocatively in his response to Robert Persons’s presumption, quoted above, that ‘a double or triple tonged man after so many recanta-



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tions, will not be verie certaine in all his promises.’ In response, Nichols answers Persons’s charge (in a letter later printed by Cardinal Allen) with an even more radical claim: ‘You thought to disgrace me exceedingly in reporting that I had twise forsaken your religion. What is that to the purpose? Why? Did the Apostles … alwaies confesse Christ? nothing lesse. For sometimes they did denie him as holie writ testifieth. What if I had denied your Religion ten times (if it were a true religion) and afterward had embraced it againe as long as I lived, would you notwithstanding have taken me for a reprobate after my death? If you were true Christians, I thinke you would not.’21 Nichols offers a powerful defence of the multiple convert here, by pushing the limits of the scenario even farther. What if he had converted ten times? Would it have made a difference to the state of his soul? The provocative question articulates one of the issues implicitly at stake in much recantation literature and, more specifically, in the use of motion rhetoric in serial conversion tracts: Why is serial conversion so blameworthy in the first place?

Motion As if in response to Nichols’s provocative call to arms and against the tense backdrop of contemporary attack, a group of highly unconventional serial converts launched a new kind of counter-offensive by initiating a wholesale defence of change itself. While serial converts would be more likely to be accused of fostering division than unity, the three converts who most often employed philosophical defences of mobility in their writings also all worked to transcend or blur Catholic/Protestant boundaries. Marc Antonio De Dominis was a pioneering ecumenist; William Chillingworth was one of seventeenth-century England’s most progressive religious tolerationists, and William Alabaster was an eccentric syncretist. All three were also serial converts. Perhaps not incidentally, they all also had biographical connections to the study of natural philosophy. Through both their writings and their series of conversions, De Dominis, Chillingworth, and Alabaster reveal the limitations of the stark polarization of Catholicism and Protestantism in early modern England. By rhetorically defining religious identity vis-à-vis movement, these serial converts craft or reflect an experience characterized by in-betweenness. Unable to be in two places at once, converts instead describe an identity most at home in transit between unacceptable extremes. One could not easily check both Catholic and Protestant on the imaginary census form of seventeenth-century England. Despite the

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avid interest of James I in ecumenical movements, the English and Roman churches remained for many English subjects binary and mutually exclusive entities (at least in the first few decades of the seventeenth century), and efforts to blur the line or synthesize the opposing sides often doomed one to achieve that synthesis through successive rather than simultaneous membership in each church.22 Remarking on De Dominis’s attempt to reconcile numerous strains of ecumenism in his work, Noel Malcolm has argued that the archbishop’s ‘tripartite career (Venice-London-Rome) … express[es] in a geographical metaphor the terms of an insoluble equation.’23 The ‘insoluble equation’ facing synthetically minded thinkers was how to achieve religious synthesis in a culture that denied it to them. We may think, then, of serial converts of such a stripe as performing an unresolved dialectic. Rather than attaining membership in a universal Christian church, such converts were, instead, forced to settle for alternating membership in the two biggest rivals for that title. Critics of the converts saw things in a different light. While converts metaphorize their predicament as a movement between poles, using the language of mobility, their critics, in turn, vilify that language. Unable or unwilling to accept the validity of a mobile spiritual identity, they instead insist that converts must be insincere. In doing so, critics attempt to resolve the convert’s unresolved dialectic, not as a vacillation between two points, but as a discrepancy between surface and depth, changing the metaphor from one of motion to one of theatre or hypocrisy.24 Perhaps even more fundamentally than their theological differences, these divergent explanations reveal radically differing attitudes towards change. Around the same time that philosophers were reappraising Aristotelian attitudes towards motion, converts began to challenge the philosophical preference for rest over motion. According to A.P. Martinich, ‘Ancient Greek and medieval philosophers thought that rest was superior to motion. What was in motion was only potentially what it was striving to be by moving towards its goal, while what was at rest was fully actual and hence did not need to change.… Hobbes and other modern philosophers generally rejected this world-view. For them, if motion is not the more perfect condition, then it does not make sense to attribute better or worse to motion and rest.’25 Even before Hobbes, the resurgence of interest in classical atomism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (including by Hariot and Bacon) helped foster the new ‘mechanical philosophy.’26 Their subtle revisions of Peripatetic precepts ultimately helped put rest and motion on more equal footing. As Hobbes would eventually put it,



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‘Whether rest is nobler than motion is a ridiculous question.’27 Anticipating that Hobbesian challenge were a group of early modern serial converts who used natural philosophical defences of motion to justify their own idiosyncratic religious fluctuations.

William Alabaster William Alabaster (1568–1640) was well regarded as a neo-Latin poet and dramatist in his own day, and his English religious sonnets are now considered some of the earliest in a metaphysical style. His religious biography is complex: after receiving an MA from Trinity College, Cambridge, and accepting a living as a Protestant clergyman, he first converted to Catholicism around Easter 1597.28 He narrates that conversion in an autobiographical text now known as Alabaster’s Conversion. In 1606, while presumably still a Catholic, he nevertheless offered to spy on English Catholics overseas. After the publication of his Apparatus in Revelationem (1607), described as ‘a book of cabbalistic divinity,’ Alabaster began having trouble with the Catholic authorities. When the book was finally placed on the papal index of prohibited books in 1610, he was thrown into prison in Rome by the Inquisition; upon his release, he escaped to England and reconverted to Protestantism.29 But the story does not end there. Even after his supposed reconversion, he was treated with caution in England and kept under surveillance. While still in a London prison, ‘Alabaster repented his revolt from Rome, recanted, and declared that he would live and die a Catholic.… But it is clear that by 1613/14 he was once again a Protestant.’30 John Chamberlain, in 1614– 15, called Alabaster ‘the double or treble turncoat,’ making it clear how confusing all his conversions were, even to his compatriots.31 Modern critics have been less kind; A.L. Rowse calls him ‘the curious, the asinine William Alabaster, who went to and fro like a weathercock in his religious opinions.’32 While Chamberlain thought he converted either two or three times, by my count it is four or five, and that does not include some of his harder-to-define actions, such as offering to spy on his supposed co-religionists. Alabaster’s restless spirit led him not only between Protestant and Catholic churches but also into more esoteric religious pursuits. While he has, of the three converts examined here, perhaps the least conventional claim to the label ‘ecumenist,’ syncretic philosopher would aptly describe his unifying vision of religious traditions. The Dictionary of National Biography explains Alabaster’s seemingly eclectic interests as the place where

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‘the occult, medicine, cabbalism, and alchemy blended.’ Brother-in-law of the noted medical doctor and occultist Robert Fludd, Alabaster had an avid interest in numerological and esoteric interpretations of scripture.33 Because he was interested in the fusion of the seemingly un-fusable, Alabaster initiates our pattern of vacillation as one paradoxical response to a greater desire for unity. In his first interview with the Roman authorities upon arriving at the English College at Rome, he admits that he once had ecumenical tendencies: ‘But in my twenty-ninth year I began to recuperate somewhat from this fury [of heresy], and leapt to another opinion, so that I believed the Catholics’ and Protestants’ Church to be one, and that it did not count much for salvation which one belonged to, although the party of the Calvinists was more pristine and pure.… And now I yearned to write books about the Catholics to salvage their reputation.’34 Although he repented his opinion at the time of this interview, he returned to his eclectic ways, engaging in the esoteric interpretation of scripture in the book ultimately placed on the papal Index, Apparatus in Revelationem Jesu Christi (1607). He continued his studies of Hebraic language and thought, writing the cabbalistic Commentarius de Bestia Apocalyptica (1621) about the book of Revelation and the mystical Spiraculum tubarum (1633) about the Pentateuch.35 Motion plays a central role in William Alabaster’s explanation for his first conversion to Catholicism. By contrasting Alabaster’s kinematic images with those of his critics, we can gauge the controversy surrounding his choice to embrace religious flexibility as a spiritual ideal. Even before his repeated conversions could earn him the label of ‘the double or treble turncoat,’ however, Alabaster had articulated a philosophy of conversion that explains his subsequent changes. After his initial 1597 conversion to Catholicism, Alabaster wrote a short polemical treatise, entitled Seven Motives, explaining his reasons for the alteration,36 beginning with the following line of reasoning: ‘As the moyst and unstable bodies because they are unbounded in themselves, never cease from motion untill they bee stayed in some other body which hath stay in it selfe: so the understanding, unquiet by nature, passeth through all formes of opinions until he resolve his assent upon some principle that standeth onely upon his owne ground.’37 Alabaster employs the language of kinematics to express his belief that spiritual wandering is a requisite part of any search for spiritual peace. On the surface, his assertions seem like classic formulations of Aristotelian orthodoxy: things move until they find rest in an unmoved mover. The beauty of his argument is that by starting his analogy with that innocuous bit of orthodoxy, he is able to



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undermine its sentiments in the second half of his statement and justify his own behaviour in the process. He posits a fundamental similarity between the ‘unstable’ and ‘unbounded’ ‘bodies’ of theoretical science (whether astrological, hermetic – or both – is not entirely clear) and the human ‘understanding,’ which is ‘unquiet by nature.’ The analogy is not an incontrovertible one. In fact, Protestant cleric Roger Fenton immediately attacked the very proposition that ‘understanding’ is naturally ‘unsetled’; on the contrary, he suggested that the understanding ‘containeth a truth firm in it selfe, manifest to the light of nature shining in us.’38 If Alabaster is confused, that confusion results not from some natural human state; instead, Fenton argues that Alabaster’s ‘understanding,’ ‘discoursing at randome, is therefore unsetled’ and ‘cannot reduce those fareftcht [sic] conclusions to the first principle.’ One cannot deduce from Alabaster’s perplexity, he implies, a default human mode of general bewilderment. Another of Alabaster’s critics, William Racster, makes Alabaster’s initial passage about motion the very centrepiece of his attack upon the convert. He parodies the scientific tone of Alabaster’s opening by transforming Alabaster’s kinematic invocation of ‘moyst and unstable bodies’ into the controlling astronomical conceit of his 1598 attack, entitled A booke of the Seven Planets, or, Seven wandring Motives, of William Alablasters Wit, Retrograded or removed. The concept of the ‘wandering planet’ is an especially attractive one for representing the errant spiritual subject. In his attack, Racster implies that the ‘wandring’ nature of Alabaster’s Motives makes them eccentric and unregulated. He elaborates on this criticism in his response to Alabaster’s opening statement: ‘The rise of this first motive … expresly setteth out (though much I thinke against his will) the true causes … of all the rest of his motives: which be (as here you may see) an unstable body, an understanding unquiet, nature without grace, and opinion voide of grounde.’39 Racster’s refutation essentially performs a deconstructive close reading of Alabaster’s word choice. He cleverly asserts that Alabaster reveals his own instability, ‘though much I thinke against his will,’ through his choice of the opening metaphor of ‘unstable bodies.’ He also attempts to overturn Alabaster’s claim that the understanding is ‘unquiet by nature’ by qualifying this ‘natural state’ as ‘nature without grace.’ Implicit in their disagreement is a larger debate about both human nature and the acceptability of ‘nature’ itself. They ask, Is humanity ‘naturally’ quiet or unquiet? bounded or unbounded? restless or content? And, moreover, is that state of ‘nature’ to be accepted, or rejected as unregenerate?

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In contrast to Racster’s conventional critique of instability, Alabaster’s original motive vividly captures the chaos and energy of the (future) serial convert’s world view. His universe is full of kinetic and untapped potential energy, populated by moving, colliding bodies and ceaseless motion. Even though he imagines an eventual end to his cosmic body’s activity, when its ‘unbounded’ mass will eventually find a ‘stay,’ the movement and flexibility he imagines before that cessation sets his world view apart from that of his critics. The restlessness that characterizes Alabaster here seems to set him up for his future mutations. Alabaster’s ‘religious cosmology’ makes his subsequent changes philosophically intelligible and coherent. Science plays more than a casual role in this philosophy. Alabaster grounds his thinking about religious identity in philosophical arguments concerning the nature of motion or change in the physical universe. That move alone already represents a twist on Aristotelian analogy. For Aristotle, all physical bodies move like humans.40 Here, the opposite is the case: human desires and habits follow the logic of natural forces.

Marc Antonio De Dominis Infamous in his own day, though largely forgotten in our own, Marc Antonio De Dominis (1560–1624) gave up his position as Catholic archbishop of Spalato (present-day Split, Croatia) to join England’s Protestant Church in 1616.41 Frustrated, in part, by complex Venetian– papal struggles and hoping that King James would prove more open to his ecumenical designs, De Dominis set out for England, publishing during his time there his massive multi-volume work of theology and controversy, De republica ecclesiastica. Six years later, however, with the election of a friendlier pope, Gregory XV, De Dominis returned to Rome. In 1624, ‘he was imprisoned by the Inquisition on suspicion of having relapsed’ once more to Protestantism, and finally suffered posthumous condemnation as a heretic.42 His body and books were burned in the campo dei Fiori in Rome, and he was almost universally reviled by his English hosts as ungrateful and greedy and immortalized as the revolting and gullible ‘Fat Bishop’ in Thomas Middleton’s play Game at Chess (1624). His personal flaws notwithstanding, De Dominis undoubtedly has the clearest claim of our three converts to the classic title of ecumenist. Noel Malcolm uses the term to describe De Dominis in the title of his monograph about the cleric’s career.43 In his study, Malcolm traces how De Dominis attempted to unite the adiaphorist strain (stressing



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theological common ground) with the conciliarist tradition (advocating the loosening of church hierarchy) of ecumenism in the course of his unconventional career.44 He was broadly interested in the universality and reunification of the Orthodox, Roman, and Protestant churches, sending his major work, written while a Catholic bishop yet published by King James in England, to the patriarch of Alexandria.45 In a letter to Dudley Carleton on 7 September 1614, he maintained that he had long ‘nourished the desire … of seeing the union of all the churches of Christ’: ‘The separation of the West from the East, and of the South from the North, I could never bear with a calm mind, and I anxiously desired to recognize the cause of so numerous and so great schisms and to find whether it was possible to think of some way to bring together the wandering churches of Christ to a sure and ancient union.’46 While not discounting the common claims that De Dominis converted in part for greed and ambition, Malcolm also argues that De Dominis changed churches with the aim of finding the warmest reception for his ecumenical ideas. Patterson goes even farther, dubbing De Dominis a ‘martyr’ for his ‘ecumenical ideal’: ‘De Dominis was not a martyr for Roman Catholicism nor for Anglicanism – neither tradition, indeed, has wished to claim him – but died for an ecumenical ideal which is only now, perhaps, beginning to be understood and appreciated.’47 De Dominis’s use of ‘shipwracke’ metaphors to describe two of his conversions, one to the Church of England and the other back to Rome, suggests that his attachment to the trope surpassed his attachment to either creed. The connection between seafaring (especially shipwreck) and salvation dates back at least to the New Testament. In 1 Timothy, Paul warns his young friend that ‘some have put away [faith and a good conscience], and as concerning faith, have made shipwracke.’48 The Bedfordshire preacher Thomas Adams (1583–1652) illustrates the early modern popularity of the tradition, based on the common analogy between church and ship, in his 1615 sermon ‘The Spirituall Navigator’: ‘The most dangerous shipwrack,’ he warns his parishioners, is ‘the shipwracke of faith.’49 Remarkably, the serial convert Marc Antonio De Dominis changed his religious affiliations often enough that he eventually used the ‘shipwracke’ metaphor to describe both his own Catholicism and his own Protestantism. His critics, conversely, parodied this recurring metaphor in their attacks, using it as evidence of the selfserving and impious nature of his conversions. Not just a spiritual metaphor, navigation also loomed large at this time as a metaphor for scientific advancement. The famous frontispiece to

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Figure 4.1  Title page of Bacon’s Great Instauration (1620). Reproduced by kind permission of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.



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Francis Bacon’s Great Instauration epitomizes the view that motion can be productive and positive. The allegorical engraving depicts ‘a ship representing learning … sailing beyond the Pillars of Hercules.’50 The caption below the ship – ‘Multi pertransibunt & augebitur scientia’ – quotes the book of Daniel: ‘Many shall pass to and fro, and science shall be increased’ (Daniel 12:4).51 The image symbolizes the conflation of physical and metaphysical exploration in the seventeenth century and invokes transatlantic passage as a metaphor for the expansion of scientific knowledge. Daniel’s ‘pass[ing] to and fro,’ however, might just as easily describe the religious vacillations of a figure like De Dominis, who drew, as we shall see, so heavily on navigational rhetoric in his own writings.52 In fact, the connections among scientific discovery, navigation, and spiritual identity were surprisingly rich in De Dominis’s case. Before he became a bishop, De Dominis was an academic, teaching natural philosophy at Padua. His main fields of expertise were optics (specifically the rainbow) and tides. His scientific work on tides, Euripus seu de fluxu et refluxu maris sententia, published in Rome in 1624 but probably completed much earlier, may serve as a minor footnote in the history of tidal theory, but its title seems to assume extra significance in light of its biographical resonances, the author knowing a thing or two about both ‘flux and reflux.’53 While Bacon’s image conveys the optimism and confidence of a culture surpassing the accepted limits of human knowledge, De Dominis’s frontispiece substitutes for Bacon’s voyage a disastrous shipwreck. De Dominis makes prominent use of the tradition in The Rockes of Christian Shipwracke,54 which, written in 1618 after his conversion to the English church, serves as a spiritual ‘Sea-mappe’ for Protestants by ‘advertis[ing]’ the ‘dreadful Rocks’ of Catholicism that threaten their safety.55 Each of the book’s twelve chapters details a ‘rocke’ that might ensnare the innocent navigator (‘The Papacie,’ ‘The Masse,’ ‘Reliques,’ etc.), couching a fairly standard anti-Catholic polemic in the language of navigation.56 The preface explicitly casts Catholic conversion as the ‘spiritual Wracke of Christian soules,’ a ‘shipwrack, which swalloweth up an infinite number of you.’57 In several treatises published after his return to the Catholic Church in 1622, however, De Dominis switches the tenor, but not the vehicle, of his metaphor, recounting his abandonment of the ‘Sea Apostolike’ (pun presumably intended) in eerily familiar terms: ‘These things carryed me upon the shelfs and sands, these did beate my barke agaynst the rocks, these sharpened my wit to pestiferous thoughts, these were the cause

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Image Not Available

Figure 4.2  Title page of De Dominis’s Rockes of Christian Shipwracke (1618). Reproduced by kind permission of Harris Manchester College Library, Oxford University.



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why I fondly feigned errours of the Roman Church, wherby I might excuse my departure; these finally cast me on those extreme coastes, where I went.’58 The ‘extreme coastes’ he refers to here are both literal and metaphorical: the shores of both England and her heretical church. De Dominis again collapses his spiritual journey into his geographical one when he explains why he had to leave England and return to Italy: ‘These, and the like errours … are miserable rockes unto which such as approach made lamentable shipwracke of their faith and everlastinge salvation; and therefore I fly from them as far as I am able: and least that I should have been cast away uppon them in England, I was of necessity to depart from thence, and returne to the true Church, the port and harbour of Catholickes.’59 ‘Shipwracke,’ now defined as conversion to Protestantism, impedes a ‘returne to the true Church, the port and harbour of Catholickes.’ De Dominis’s use of the navigational metaphor elsewhere reveals (or at least asserts) philosophical reasons for his series of changes. After leaving England, De Dominis introduced a religious philosophy of adaptability that offers important insights into his navigation rhetoric – and religious profile.60 After King James wrote to him in 1622 to inquire both about the convert’s untimely departure from the English church and about his future intentions, De Dominis responded with a great deal of detachment, even agnosticism: Therefore I cannot without folly and indiscretion, either approove those things now, or reject them, or affirme any thing of them absolutely. But hypothetically I might affirme many things, were it not that nothing can be established out of an Hypotheticall proposition. For even in this kingdome, matters of the Church, and of Religion were otherwise ordered before Henry the eight, otherwise under him, otherwise under Edward the sixt, otherwise under Queene Mary, and otherwise at length under Queene Elizabeth, and this most prudent Prince, King James. So are all human things subject to mutability: we cannot saile alwayes with the same wind: but a skilfull Pilot directeth his course to the Port he desireth, by stearing his vessell, and fitting his sailes according to all winds.61

De Dominis’s answer here is astute on many levels. First, he appeals to the King’s intellectual bent by reminding him that ‘nothing can be established out of an Hypotheticall proposition,’ invoking logic’s precision to avoid the King’s suggestion of self-serving subjectivism. By then reminding the King that the country’s religious climate has changed

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significantly under every monarch since ‘Henry the eight,’ De Dominis fashions England herself as a multiple apostate. If serial conversion is blameworthy, then the dominion itself must share the blame with converts like De Dominis. Finally, De Dominis attempts to ‘naturalize’ his decision by appealing to the maritime imagery he so favoured throughout his career. By invoking natural philosophy’s principle of ‘mutability,’ De Dominis portrays repeated conversion as a reaction to environmental phenomena, the expected response to a series of religious ‘sea changes.’ By his own definition, then, De Dominis constitutes the ideal religious subject, the ‘skilfull Pilot’ who can weather any change. From a cynical perspective, this ‘when in Rome’ attitude appears no more than De Dominis’s attempt to justify self-interest in the guise of religion. But De Dominis’s appeal to physical and philosophical principles (inevitable mutability and the inconclusiveness of hypotheses) raises the possibility that De Dominis is carving out an alternative spiritual paradigm beyond or apart from sincerity. The passage’s semi-scientific rhetoric lends his statements, at the very least, a certain seductive logic. In fact, De Dominis’s own past as a scientist reveals itself here: his scientific habits of thought betray his former training. One of his most prominent critics anticipates De Dominis’s penchant for nautical imagery. The Catholic controversialist John Floyd employs a marine metaphor as the controlling conceit of his attack upon the archbishop’s first religious defection. In his 1617 Survey, Floyd organizes his attack as a series of ‘gulfes’ or seas, in which he claims De Dominis’s faith has been ‘drowned.’ The metaphor bears striking resemblance to the one De Dominis would use the next year to structure his Rockes of Christian Shipwracke. There, each chapter represents a ‘rocke’ that may wreck unsuspecting Protestants; while here, each of Floyd’s chapters constitutes a ‘gulfe’ in which unwary Catholics may drown. The ‘second Gulfe,’ ‘Wandring uncertainty about Religion,’ attacks De Dominis for abandoning Catholicism before fully committing to another church.62 Drawing upon more navigational terms like compasse in the process, Floyd elaborates upon this idea by appealing, like De Dominis, to the philosophical concept of motion, but to very different ends: ‘Motion (as Philosophers say) receaves form and shape of the end and marke wherein finally the same resteth; which being true, your going, to which your title prescribes not any end, nor restraynes within the compasse of any markes, what may it seeme, but a vast, uncertaine, blind, and inconsiderate wandering?’63 Although Floyd is writing well before De



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Dominis’s appeal to the concept of ‘mutability’ in his letter to King James, this passage reads like a counter-argument to the convert’s line of reasoning. While De Dominis argues for a kind of open-ended fluctuation through his invocation of ‘mutability,’ Floyd contends that ‘Motion (as Philosophers say)’ can ‘receave form and shape’ only if it comes to an eventual stopping point. Here Floyd asks how the position of a body in perpetual motion can be plotted. Because, ideologically, De Dominis roams ‘all over the map,’ Floyd cannot interpret his movement as a serious, religious endeavour. The convert and his critic appeal to two different theories of motion in their analyses of De Dominis’s fluctuations, revealing just how versatile the language of navigation and wandering can be. While both associate the rhetoric of motion with serial conversion, they draw vastly different conclusions about that topic, using the same metaphors. The different moral valences that De Dominis and his critic ascribe to physical principles parallel the ambiguous cultural responses to serial converts. For Floyd, De Dominis’s ‘motion’ seems too active to be anything but out of control, an immoral ‘wandering’ ‘[un]restrayn[ed] within the compasse of any markes.’ De Dominis’s rhetoric recasts his repeated conversions as the morally neutral navigational adjustments necessitated by the changing weather conditions of the religious climate. The biblical ‘waverer’ condemned by the author of James 1:6 to ‘tos[s in] the winde, and [be] caryed away’ here counters that such a dire prediction may be premature if the ‘skilfull Pilot’ can only manage to ‘fitt … his sailes according to all winds.’ Their focus upon navigation – while the specific technologies and theories mentioned are not necessarily ‘cutting edge’ – may remind audiences of the recent surge in sea exploration and, consequently, may lend a certain contemporaneity to the serial convert’s religious world view. As Bacon’s frontispiece reminds us, seafaring could metonymically stand for the expansion of scientia itself. Although he substitutes for Bacon’s successful voyage a disastrous shipwreck, De Dominis nonetheless exploits scientific tropes to explore the darker side of religious subjectivity. While modern thought tends to associate scientific rhetoric with a degree of certainty, serial converts often used the language of exploration to express deep doubts about the exact nature of religious truth. Even their rhetoric of unfettered motion often points to a deeper anxiety about the limits of human agency and the nature of predestination. The instability of the metaphors – for better or for worse – is precisely their point.

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William Chillingworth William Chillingworth (1602–44), perhaps best remembered as a member, with Hobbes, of the Great Tew circle, was one of the most complex religious figures of his day.64 While his writings are important in the history of religious toleration, Chillingworth’s own religious chronology is hard to pinpoint precisely.65 The godson of Laud, he converted to Catholicism in 1629 or 1630. He declared himself a Protestant again in 1634, but during the intervening years, when he is represented in the biography of Elizabeth Cary written by one of her daughters, his beliefs are terribly hard to categorize.66 By his own account, he attempted in those years to make a thorough and dispassionate assessment of the religious controversies of the day before recommitting himself formally to the Protestant church. He expressed adiaphorist and irenic positions in his 1637 Religion of Protestants, condemning both Catholic and Protestants for emphasizing the minor differences rather than the overwhelming similarities between their positions: ‘Take away these Wals of separation, and all will quickly be one. Take away this Persecuting, Burning, Cursing, Damning.… Require of Christians only to believe Christ, and to call no man master but him only.’67 While many converts experienced conversion as a result of (or at least in the course of) foreign travels, the serial convert William Chillingworth posits an even more theoretical connection between the concepts of travel and religious change.68 After narrating his own series of conversions (first, from ‘moderate Protestant turn’d a Papist,’ then to ‘doubting papist, and of a doubting papist, a confirm’d protestant’), Chillingworth unabashedly defends ‘all these changes’ using the metaphor of a traveller: I know a man that of a moderate Protestant turn’d a Papist, and the day that he did so, (as all things that are done are perfected some day or other,) was convicted in conscience, that his yesterdaies opinion was an error, and yet thinks hee was no schismatique for doing so, and desires to be informed by you, whether or no hee was mistaken? The same man afterwards, upon better consideration, became a doubting papist, and of a doubting papist, a confirm’d protestant. And yet this man thinks himselfe no more to blame for all these changes, then a travailer, who using all diligence to find the right way to some remote citty, where he never had been, (as the party I speak of had never been in Heaven) did yet mistake it, and after finde his error, and amend it. Nay, he stands upon his justification so farre, as to



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maintain that his alterations, not only to you, but also from you, by God’s mercy, were the most satisfactory actions to himselfe that ever he did, and the greatest victories that ever he obtained over himselfe, and his affections to those things which in this world are most precious.69

Chillingworth returns to the fundamental idea that navigation is a morally neutral concept. Like De Dominis, who claimed that ‘fitting one’s sailes according to all winds’ only makes good sense, Chillingworth feels no shame in the series of U-turns involved in his search for the right path to the true church. In fact, Chillingworth probably goes the farthest of the three serial converts in maintaining that ‘his alterations … were the most satisfactory actions to himself that ever he did.’70 Far from apologetic, Chillingworth defiantly cherishes his unconventional path. Elsewhere, Chillingworth argues for an even more essential theoretical connection between travel and salvation. He contends that, without what he calls a ‘travellers indifference,’ an individual might contaminate the purity of his search for ‘the right way to eternall happinesse’: For my desire is to goe the right way to eternall happinesse. But whether this way lye on the right hand or the left, or streight forwards; whether it be by following a living Guide, or by seeking my direction in a book, or by hearkening to the secret whisper of some privat Spirit, to me it is indifferent. And he that is otherwise affected, and has not a travellers indifference, which Epictetus requires in all that would find the truth, but much desires in respect of his ease, or pleasure, or profit, or advancement, or satisfaction of friends, or any human consideration, that one way should be true rather than another; it is oddes but he will take his desire that it should be so, for an assurance that it is so.71

The author maintains that ‘all that would find the truth’ must have a ‘travellers indifference,’ citing Epictetus’s Stoic philosophy as his support. In the teachings preserved in his Encheiridion, Epictetus counsels, ‘Take care of [the things given to you] as of a thing that is not your own, as travellers treat their inn.’72 Epictetus uses the idea of travel, similar to the Christian trope of life as a pilgrimage, to convey the ideal of Stoic detachment. Chillingworth, in turn, applies the metaphor to a Christian context, urging a Stoic approach to religious affiliations. Such an approach would help explain why Chillingworth might have been more likely than others to undergo so many religious transformations. He crafts a philosophy that posits an essential relationship between travel

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and conversion. Like the navigational and scientific imagery of De Dominis and Alabaster, Chillingworth’s choice of metaphors betrays the deep cultural connection between mobility and multiple religious changes. It is easy to imagine why such figures were so disconcerting in their religiously divided day. Elizabeth Cary’s daughter found Chillingworth’s indeterminacy utterly baffling. She cannot discern his true allegiances in her short inset biography of him: ‘Mr Chillingworth (who … by reading bec[a]me a Catholic,… returned to Oxford a Protestant (at least no Catholic), where … again becoming a Catholic or towards it, coming to London, he much frequented this house, and calling Protestants “we,” and in his clothes being like an Oxford scholar, he was secretly a Catholic, if not more secretly neither, … for in him there seemed to be a kind of impossibility of agreement between his heart and his tongue).’73 Chillingworth represents for the author the epitome of hypocrisy, embodying the ‘impossibility of agreement between … heart and … tongue.’ The author herself cannot plumb the depths of his secrecy, wondering if he is ‘secretly a Catholic,’ or even ‘more secretly neither’ Catholic nor Protestant. In the text, a reader finds parentheses within parentheses here, as if the author wants to represent graphically the layers of his indecipherability. While the Catholic Cary biographer arguably paints a biased picture of the man whom she accuses of trying to deceive her siblings into Protestant conversion, even Chillingworth’s friends found him much ‘unsettled in his thoughts.’74 Clarendon describes him as ‘wavering in religion’ with a ‘propensity to change.’75 Clarendon sees his first defection as a result of his ‘contract[ing] such an irresolution and habit of doubting, that by degrees he grew confident of nothing, and a sceptic, at least, in the greatest mysteries of faith.’76 Despite a restless spirit that would have been a fault in others, however, Clarendon ultimately gives a charitable interpretation of Chillingworth’s motives: ‘All those restless motions and fluctuations proceeded only from the warmth and jealousy of his own thoughts, in a too nice inquisition for truth.’77 Clarendon, at least, seems to accept and adopt Chillingworth’s positive attitude towards ‘restless motions and fluctuations.’ For others, like the Cary biographer, however, Chillingworth’s baffling indecipherability seemed simply deceptive rather than morally scrupulous (or, as Clarendon would have it, overly scrupulous). In fact, there is only a very fine line between the two perspectives. The mindset that allows serial converts the flexibility to follow truth where she leads can look frighteningly mutable to others. Religious mutation



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can raise fears of other kinds of inconsistency, such as lying. A serial convert’s protean qualities can obviously and easily blend into anti-theatrical fears about shape-shifting. Serial converts strike their contemporary British subjects as excessively theatrical, and their mutability is an important part of that impression. In fact, Chillingworth goes further than the others in defending even various forms of dissimulation in the search for truth. He admired Paul, Gamaliel, even the Jesuits for their adaptable religious attitudes.78 Although outside the scope of this particular essay, my argument is that serial converts reclaim and redefine a theatrical conception of spiritual identity, which is intimately related to serial converts’ rehabilitation of the concept of change itself. In other words, by bracketing the question of sincerity long enough to give these serial converts serious consideration, we ultimately discover the serious challenge converts offer that very standard of sincerity that would have been used against them. They first challenge the static definition of the self needed to establish sincerity. By changing so frequently, they potentially undermine the ability to establish the congruence between their past and present selves necessary to determine sincerity. Their second challenge is an even more radical one: questioning the need to maintain congruence between inner thoughts and outer actions.

Conclusion Alabaster, De Dominis, and Chillingworth defend their radical religious choices by drawing on a variety of tropes from the natural sciences about the movement of physical bodies. Each convert’s choice of which physical body they metaphorize proves illuminating. Alabaster draws on theoretical bodies (‘moyst and unstable bodies’) reminiscent of his dabbling in everything from hermetic and cabbalistic philosophy to medicine. De Dominis, in contrast, draws his motion rhetoric almost exclusively from the science of navigation. As a tide theorist, a frequent seafarer between Venice, London, and Rome, and an archbishop who had to contend with piracy on the Adriatic coast, De Dominis also chooses a metaphor with personal relevance. Chillingworth, finally, uses the human traveller in his theoretical musings. Drawn directly from Stoic philosophy, the allusion attests to Chillingworth’s wide learning and philosophical influences. Taken together, it is tempting to see the figures as progressive. Certainly, the case has been made that De Dominis, in the history of ecumenism, and Chillingworth, in the history of theories of religious toleration, were both ahead of their time. The dabbling and inquisitive Alabaster recalls

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the medievalist strain within the world view of early modern natural philosophers, while anticipating the Enlightenment’s search for a unifying and transcendent truth. Their reliance on natural scientific tropes again seems to send us both forward and backwards: ahead, to the Newtonian mechanics just decades away from discovery, and backwards, to the longstanding hermetic, Aristotelian, and Stoic traditions to which the converts allude. While attempts to parse out which of their references are entirely novel would probably prove speculative at best and unreliable at worst, the converts nonetheless serve as particularly instructive gauges to the changing winds of their time. Their use of natural concepts to make arguments about spiritual identity places them at a crossroads in the reassessment of Aristotle that would lead very shortly to Hobbes (one of Chillingworth’s acquaintances from the Great Tew circle). Moreover, insofar as it was dissatisfaction with the binary religious options they saw around them that led them down their unconventional courses, that dissatisfaction should be registered, not only because their desire for various forms of religious transcendence anticipates similar Enlightenment projects, but also because it is another indicator of the great religious diversity of their own times. The difficulty in mapping these figures is arguably the source of their greatest utility. We may think of these figures as approaching, in their own highly unconventional ways, a catholic, if not exclusively Catholic, conception of Christianity.

NOTES   1 The now proverbial phrase is attributed to Heraclitus. For an introduction to the complex history of the philosophical concept, see Chris Mortensen, ‘Change,’ Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, http:// plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/change/.   2 Owen Brandon, Christianity from Within: A Frank Discussion of Religion, Conversion, Evangelism, and Revival (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1965), 24; qtd Michael C. Questier, Conversion, Politics, and Religion in England, 1580– 1625, Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 58.   3 ‘Convert,’ in Robert Cawdrey, A Table Alphabeticall, conteyning and teaching the true writing, and understanding of hard usuall English wordes, borrowed from the Hebrew, Greeke, Latine, or French. &c. With the interpretation thereof by plaine English words, gathered for the benefit & helpe of Ladies, Gentlewomen, or any other unskilfull persons (London, 1604).



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  4 I keep a running list of serial converts, which currently contains fifty names of individuals active between 1580 and 1625. Most of the evidence for their religious biographies is derived from the meticulous archival history of Michael C. Questier. See especially his Conversion, Politics, and Religion and ‘English Clerical Converts to Protestantism, 1580–1596,’ Recusant History 20, no. 4 (1991): 455–77. I do not, however, base my claim for the significance of serial conversion on a quantitative analysis, but rather on their ideological significance.   5 John Floyd, A Survey of the Apostasy of Marcus Antonius de Dominis (St Omer, 1617), K4v–L1r.   6 Angus Fletcher, Time, Space, and Motion in the Age of Shakespeare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 10.   7 See also Simon Oliver, Philosophy, God, and Motion (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2005), 1: ‘We commonly think of motion as the subject of the science of physics.… However, for those philosophers and theologians prior to the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, motion tends to be presented as a more mysterious category which is not confined to spatial or local motion. Rather it may apply to moral as well as physical movements.’   8 For a study of the co-mingling of political and spiritual elements in early modern Catholic–Protestant conversion, see Questier, Conversion, Politics, and Religion in England.   9 John Nichols, John Niccols pilgrimage, whrein is displaied the lives of the proude popes, ambitious cardinals, lecherous bishops, fat bellied monkes, and hypocriticall Jesuites (London, 1581), ‘To the Indifferent Reader,’ unnumbered. 10 Robert Persons, A discoverie of J. Nicols minister, misreported a Jesuite, latelye recanted in the Tower of London ([Stonor Park], 1581), B5r. 11 Persons, Discoverie, A2r. 12 Anthony Tyrrell and William Tedder, The recantations as they were severallie pronounced by Wylliam Tedder and Anthony Tyrrell: (sometime two seminarie priests in the English Colledge in Rome, and nowe by the great mercie of almightie God converted, unto the profession of the Gospell of Jesus Christ) at Paules Crosse, the day and yeere as is mentioned in their severall tytles of theyr recantations (London, 1588), 34. 13 The story of Paul’s conversion is narrated first in Acts 9:1–9. Paul himself tells the tale twice more, in Acts 22:6–21 and Acts 26:1–23. 14 One might, in fact, argue that Augustine’s Confessions portrays Augustine as something of a serial convert, as he changes his fundamental belief system from a Ciceronian love of wisdom to Manichaeism to Neoplatonism to Catholicism. For evidence of this early modern reading of Augustine, see Nicholas Harpsfield, The Life and Death of Sir Thomas Moore, Knight, sometimes

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Lord High Chancellor of England, written in the time of Queene Marie, ed. E.V. Hitchcock (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1932), 88. 15 John Nichols, A Declaration of the Recantation of John Nichols (For the Space Almost of Two Yeeres the Popes Scholer in the English Seminarie or Colledge at Rome) Which Desireth to be Reconciled and Received as a Member into the True Church of Christ in England (London: Christopher Barker, 1581), B4r. 16 Nichols, Pilgrimage, *5v. 17 Lawrence Caddie, ‘The Satisfaction of Laurence Caddey,’ in William Allen, A true report of the late apprehension and imprisonnement of John Nichols … Whereunto is added the satisfaction of certaine, that of feare or frailtie have latly fallen in England (Rheims, 1583), 17v. 18 Marc Antonio De Dominis, The second manifesto of Marcus Antonius de Dominis, Archbishop of Spalatio [sic]: wherein … he publikely repenteth, and recanteth his former errors, and setteth downe the cause of his leaving England, and all Protestant countries, to returne to the Catholicke Romane Church (Liege, 1623), B3r. 19 Tyrrell, Recantations, 36. 20 Ibid., 33. 21 John Nichols to Cardinal William Allen, Nancy, n.d. [January 1583?], trans., repr. in William Allen, A true report of the late apprehension and imprisonnement of John Nichols (Rheims, 1583), 7v–8r. 22 W.B. Patterson, King James VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 23 Noel Malcolm, De Dominis, 1560–1624: Venetian, Anglican, Ecumenist, and Relapsed Heretic (London: Strickland & Scott, 1984), x. 24 In their preference for theatrical metaphors, such critics register a growing awareness of the epistemological problem of other minds. Because the convert’s sincerity cannot reliably be ascertained by an onlooker, the onlooker may record that inscrutability through the concept of a mask or disguise. 25 A.P. Martinich, ‘Motion,’ in A Hobbes Dictionary (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1995), 212–13. 26 Robert Hugh Kargon, Atomism in England from Hariot to Newton (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966), vii. See also Alan Gabbey, ‘New Doctrines of Motion,’ in The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, ed. Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers, 1:649–79 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 27 Qtd in Martinich, ‘Motion,’ 213. From Hobbes’s attack on White’s De Mundo (1642–3), 321. 28 Biographical information from the General Introduction of William Alabaster, The Sonnets of William Alabaster, ed. G.M. Story and Helen Gardner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959); and Francis J. Bremer, ‘Alabaster,



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William (1568–1640),’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 29 As recorded in the preface to his Ecce Sponsus venit (London, 1633), a mystical disquisition concerning the end of the world. 30 Story and Gardner, “Introduction,’ Sonnets, xx. 31 John Chamberlain to Sir Dudley Carleton, 5 January 1615, Letters of John Chamberlain, ed. Norman Egbert McClure (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1939), 1:568. 32 Alfred Leslie Rowse, The Elizabethans and America. The Trevelyan Lectures at Cambridge, 1958 (London: Macmillan, 1959), 140. 33 His mathematical skills were significant enough to ‘share … the mathematical appointment [at Magdalene College, Cambridge] in 1593–4,’ where he was ‘paid an additional sum … in view of the expenses … incurred for [his] mathematical instruments.’ Mordechai Feingold, The Mathematicians’ Apprenticeship: Science, Universities and Society in England, 1560–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 52. 34 William Alabaster, ‘Six Reponses,’ 30 November 1598, ed. and trans. Dana F. Sutton, posted 9 November 2001, The Philological Museum, http:// www.philological.bham.ac.uk/alab/trans.html. 35 For an analysis of Alabaster’s theological Latin works, see Eleanor Jean Coutts, ‘The Life and Works of William Alabaster, 1568–1640’ (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, 1956), 196–306. 36 Although Alabaster’s Seven Motives was never published on its own, two critics reprinted the motives in their own critiques of the pamphlet: John Racster, William Alablasters [sic] Seven Motives Removed and confuted; or A booke of the Seven Planets, or, Seven wandring Motives, of William Alablasters Wit, Retrograded or removed (London, 1598); and Roger Fenton, An Answere to William Alabaster his Motives (London, 1599). 37 Racster, Motives, B1r. 38 Fenton, Answere, 1. 39 Racster, Motives, B1r. 40 G.E.R. Lloyd, ‘Metaphysics Λ 8,’ Aristotle’s ‘Metaphysics’ Lambda, ed. Michael Frede and David Charles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 245–74. 41 When not otherwise indicated, biographical information is drawn from W.B. Patterson, ‘Dominis, Marco Antonio de (1560–1624), archbishop of Spalato and ecumenist,’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, http:// www.oxforddnb.com/index/7/101007788/. 42 Malcolm, De Dominis, 1. 43 The full title is De Dominis (1560–1624): Venetian, Anglican, Ecumenist, and Relapsed Heretic.

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44 Malcolm, De Dominis, ix–x. 45 Patterson, King James VI, 202, 216. De Dominis called the Eastern Church ‘the first mother of all Churches of Christ.’ Qtd in Patterson, King James VI, 216. 46 Fol. 73, SP 99/17, Public Records Office (PRO). Qtd in Patterson, King James VI, 229–230. 47 Patterson, King James VI, 258. 48 Geneva Bible, 1 Timothy 1:19. 49 Thomas Adams, The Blacke Devill or The Apostate. Together with The Wolfe Worrying the Lambs. And The Spirituall Navigator, Bound for the Holy Land (London, 1615), 36. 50 Francis Bacon, Francisci de Verulamio, Summi Angliae Cancellarii, Instauratio magna (London, 1620), frontispiece. 51 Bacon first mentions the prophecy from Daniel in Valerius Terminus (1603): ‘To interpret that place in the prophecy of Daniel where speaking of the latter times, it is said, Many shall pass to and fro and science shall be increased.’ Francis Bacon, Valerius Terminus, in The Philosophical Works of Francis Bacon, ed. with an intro. J.M. Robertson (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1905), 188. ‘Most famously,’ the prophecy ‘appears as the Latin motto … in the frontispiece of the volume of 1620 containing The Great Instauration and The New Organon.’ Perez Zagorin, Francis Bacon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 241. The 1620 frontispiece was also adapted by an engraver for the title page for a 1640 edition of Advancement of Learning (1640). See Sachiko Kusukawa, ‘Bacon’s Classification of Knowledge,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Bacon, ed. Markku Peltonen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 70. 52 De Dominis, perhaps incidentally, most likely assisted in the translation of some of Bacon’s Essays into Italian before he left Venice in 1616. Malcolm, De Dominis, 47–54. 53 See Federico Bonelli and Lucio Russo, ‘The Origin of Modern Astronomical Theories of Tides: Christogono, de Dominis, and Their Sources,’ British Journal for the History of Science 29, no. 4 (December 1996): 385–401. 54 Marco Antonio De Dominis, The rockes of Christian shipwracke (London, 1618), a2. 55 De Dominis, Rockes, b4r. 56 Ibid., b4v. 57 Ibid., a3r–v. 58 De Dominis, M. Antonius de Dominis Archbishop of Spalato, declares the cause of his returne, out of England (St Omer, 1623), 7–8. 59 Ibid., 22.



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60 He introduces the idea in a letter to King James. Richard Neile, then bishop of Durham (later archbishop of York), compiled and published the correspondence as part of his M. Ant. de D[omi]nis Arch-bishop of Spalato, his shiftings in religion. A man for many masters (London, 1624). Despite the hostile title, however, the account ‘is a relatively practical account of the debates held with the archbishop pending his return to Rome.’ Andrew Foster, ‘Neile, Richard (1562–1640),’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Washington and Lee University, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/ article/19861. 61 Richard Neile, ed., Man for many masters, 70. 62 Floyd, Survey, K4v–L1r. 63 Ibid. 64 Unless otherwise indicated, biographical information from Warren Chernaik, ‘Chillingworth, William (1602–1644),’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, http://www.oxforddnb.com/index/19/101019861/. See also Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘The Great Tew Circle,’ in Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans: Seventeenth-Century Essays, 166–230 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988). 65 Gary Remer, ‘Chillingworth: Humanism in the Seventeenth Century,’ in Humanism and the Rhetoric of Toleration, 137–68 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996). 66 The Lady Falkland: Her Life, By One of Her Daughters, repr. in Elizabeth Cary, The Tragedy of Mariam: The Fair Queen of Jewry, with The Lady Falkland: Her Life, By One of Her Daughters, ed. Barry Weller and Margaret W. Ferguson, 183–275 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 67 William Chillingworth, The Religion of Protestants, A Safe Way to Salvation (Oxford, 1637), chap. 4, para. 16, p. 198. 68 See, for example, Benjamin Carier, A copy of a letter, written by M. Doctor Carier beyond seas, to some particular friends in England ([English Secret Press], 1615), B1r; and Tobie Matthew, A True Historical Relation of the Conversion of Sir Tobie Matthew to the Holy Catholic Faith; with the Antecedents and Consequences Thereof, ed. A.H. Mathew (London: Burnes and Oates, 1904), 1–4. 69 Chillingworth, Religion of Protestants, 303–4. 70 Neile, Man for many masters, 70. 71 Chillingworth, Religion of Protestants, sec. r–v. 72 Epictetus, Encheiridion, trans. W.A. Oldfather, repr. in Ancient Philosophy, ed. Walter Kaufmann and Forrest E. Baird (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1994), 415, para. 11. 73 The Lady Falkland: Her Life, By One of Her Daughters, 226–7 (my emphasis). 74 Anthony à Wood, Athenae Oxonienses: An Exact History of all The Writers and

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Bishops who Have Had Their Education in the University of Oxford, ed. Philip Bliss (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1969), vol. 3, col. 87. 75 Edward Hyde, First Earl of Clarendon, Selections from The History of the Rebellion and The Life By Himself, ed. G. Huehns, introd. Hugh Trevor-Roper (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 42, 43. 76 Ibid., 42. 77 Ibid., 43. 78 See Holly Crawford Pickett, ‘The Drama of Serial Conversion in Renaissance England’ (PhD diss., UCLA, 2005), 100–38. William Chillingworth, ‘Remarks on the Thirty-Nine Articles,’ fol. 6, Tanner MSS 233, Bodleian Library. Qtd in Robert R. Orr, Reason and Authority: The Thought of William Chillingworth (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), 17–18.

PART II POETICS

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chapter five

William Alabaster and the Palinode ALISON SHELL

‘A palinode [is] … used of those who change their minds for the better.’1 This definition, from the Proverbs of Macarius, would have sounded familiar to writers in late-sixteenth-century England who explored the themes of repentance, recantation, and conversion. But in cases where these writings mirror or comment upon real-life denominational shifts, readers would have disagreed over whether a change was for the better. This essay explores the early career of the late Elizabethan writer William Alabaster, who underwent religious conversion at least twice, once to Catholicism and once from it, and a spate of sonnet-writing – and probably at least some of Alabaster’s surviving sonnets – can be linked to his first conversion experience. The idea of the palinode can also be mapped onto the progress of Alabaster’s writing career in its early stages, and in doing so, this essay pursues a formalist agenda up to a point. But formalism often has intensely biographical implications, and an awareness of how literary genres can model an author is nowhere more relevant than when discussing how converts behave and how they write. The term palinode, which comes from the Greek ‘to sing over again,’ refers to an ode or song where the author retracts something said in a former poem – and hence, more generally, a recantation.2 It has legendary beginnings associated with the ancient Greek poet Stesichorus, who was struck blind for writing against Helen and then recovered his sight on writing an apology – a copybook exemplar for poets in the English Renaissance, as at other times.3 The term was often invoked in connection with recantation in love poetry, particularly authors’ farewells to poetry when they forsook amatory pursuits for religious.4 As used in the

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context of religious conversion and apostasy, it became a technical term for texts associated with recantation or disavowal.5 More generally, the genre could be seen as mapping someone’s life: Andrew Perne, a serial convert to the state religion during the reigns of Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I acquired the nickname ‘Palinode.’6 As Perne’s dubbing indicates, the notion carried an intense denominational charge in the English Reformation. But the palinodic mode is used by biographers and autobiographers of conversion in all periods, whether they chronicle a shift from unbelief to belief, a change from a profane to a godly way of life, or a journey between religious denominations. Hymns too are a frequent source of poetic palinodes, showing the genre’s close relationship with sacred panegyric.7 It is often appropriate to blur the distinction between repentance, being sorry for something one has done, and recantation, disavowing something one has previously believed in. Both signal a revision process: the Retractationes written by one of the best-known converts of them all, St Augustine, have been seen as the culmination of his continuous efforts to make himself over for God’s sake.8 This hints at how the genre is founded on contradiction: like repentance in general, the religious palinode marks moral and spiritual progress, even while it appears to be backtracking. William Alabaster underwent at least two full-scale conversions, first to Catholicism and then back to the Church of England, and clearly suffered other periods of religious uncertainty. He appears to have undergone his first conversion experience in late 1596 or early 1597, at a period when he had already taken holy orders in the Church of England; this has been linked to his contact with the Catholic priest Thomas Wright.9 He wrote many sonnets during this time, as well as a pamphlet giving reasons for his conversion. Although no copy of the latter survives as such, the text of what has become known as the Seven Motives can be reconstructed from two answers to it published by John Racster and Roger Fenton – writers who appear to have known Alabaster well. Alabaster was imprisoned in Cambridge and in the Tower of London, and was visited by dignitaries of the Church of England in an attempt to reconvert him. The single best source for his life at this period is his manuscript autobiography preserved in the archives of the Venerable English College in Rome, to which he travelled on his escape from prison in England.10 A fascinating document for this and other reasons, this piece of life-writing gives the lie to any over-schematic attempts to equate the emergence of modern autobiography with the puritan sensibility. As a convert’s exploration of his psyche, the autobiography is an



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essential counterpart to the Sonnets, as well as an uncommon survival in its own right; autobiographical writing from this period is rare enough, and its first-hand accounts of a poet’s compositional practices are especially hard to parallel elsewhere. The period after that covered in the autobiography was equally eventful for Alabaster. He was soon captured by English agents on the Continent, taken back to England, and again imprisoned; he was pardoned at James I’s accession, though arrested again shortly afterwards. At this point he offered to spy on Catholic conspirators for the secretary of state, Robert Cecil – not because he had abandoned Catholicism but because, like so many other Catholic loyalists of the period, he was troubled by the association between Catholicism and political subversion. He travelled to the Continent and next attracted public notice when his treatise on cabalistical theology, Apparatus in revelationem Jesu Christi, was condemned by the Inquisition in 1610. Though the Inquisition ordered him to remain in Rome, he escaped, made his way back to England, and became reconverted to Protestantism; he was made a doctor of divinity in Cambridge and received the living of Therfield in Hertfordshire, then of Little Shelford in Cambridgeshire, continuing to write cabalistical works, and died in 1640. The religious switchbacks that structure Alabaster’s autobiography can be traced in his poetic career – sometimes explicitly addressed, at other times discernible through a process of reading the gaps. Before his first conversion he began a Virgilian epic on Queen Elizabeth’s life, Elisaeis; twelve parts were envisaged for this highly anti-Catholic work, of which only one was completed before his conversion to Catholicism,11 which inspired a burst of holy sonnets. Alabaster describes in his autobiography how his religious meditations resolved themselves into verses of love and affection, adding, ‘And thes verses and sonnetes I made not only for my owne solace, and conforte, but to stir up others also that shold reed them to soew estimation of that which I felt in my self, for which cause my desier was so extreme ardent to imparte this my happiness with others that I felt in me the trew force of that St Dionysius Ariopagita saith,… the nature of goodness is to spredd itself to many.’12 Alabaster describes how he had meetings with friends and relations on the topic, both inside and outside Cambridge, and his holy sonnets clearly played some part in these attempts to proselytize. Some mention prison as being among the trials he had to suffer; in his autobiography, when describing his imprisonment at Cambridge, he mentions how he distributed them to friends of his who came to comfort and sympathize with him:

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Those whom I suspected not before to be any waies Catholicaly enclyned would courage me to goe on constantly … whom I on the other side endevored to strenghten what I could both alleaging many sownd and unaunswerable reasons (as they seemed to me) for the Catholique Roman Church, and faith as also by delivering unto them certaine sonnets of devotion which I made in prison, wherin I shewed what inward comforte and content I fealt, (as they might also perceave by my talke), therby to animate them not to be afraide of prison or anything els for Christ[es] cause. (133)

In looking at some of Alabaster’s sonnets, this essay will show how they use autobiographical repentance as a fulcrum for the reversals of poetic palinode. This is especially well illustrated by a sonnet not collected by Alabaster’s former editors, from the flyleaf of a book in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge.13 Before thy crosse deare Crucifix I trayle Thy foe this world to the to crucifye My self will be the trie for others fayle Be thou the patterne to performe it by: Honor his head to my head I enrayle with crowne of skornes receaued for papistry Riches his hands to my hands heere I nayle with Adamantine vowe of pouertye His brest falce pleasure through my brest I wound With point of euer vowed virginitye Desires his feete to myne are prisonbound Oh yet he liues for yet I doe not dy Strike with thy crosse that he may not reuiue him and driue the nayles through me through him to driue them.

The poem begins with a metonymical, strikingly audacious use of ‘Crucifix’ to address Christ. Given that crucifixes were routinely cited as idolatrous by Protestants at this date, it comes across as a deliberately shocking Catholic statement, in which Alabaster turns his back on his former life. The speaker describes himself as being publicly scorned for ‘papistry,’ and being ‘prisonbound,’ a hint that this is as likely as any of the sonnets to date from the period just before Alabaster went to jail, or perhaps when he was in jail; there is a telling ambiguity in ‘prisonbound,’ which allows the line to be paraphrased as ‘his feet are bound imprisoningly to mine’ or ‘his feet are headed towards the imprisonment of my feet.’ But



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the poem also narrates the exemplary autobiography of any repentant sinner, wishing to make amends for his past life and to embody in himself the doctrine of the Atonement: ‘My self will be the trie for others fayle / Be thou the patterne to performe it by.’ Several critics have discussed the meditational techniques used by religious poets at this date, and the way that pictures of Christ’s Passion or other scenes from the Gospels are deliberately composed and systematically expatiated in verse.14 Working within this tradition, Alabaster wishes his readers to understand ‘honor,’ ‘riches,’ ‘falce pleasure’ and ‘desires,’ the subheadings within the meditation, as corresponding to the wounds on the body of Christ – the Crown of Thorns and the Five Wounds. But they are also applied to Alabaster’s own case: the reigning conceit of this poem is that Alabaster’s past and future selves are superimposed on each other upon the crucifix. Alabaster wants to die to the world, but the world is still part of him: ‘Oh yet he liues for yet I doe not dy.’ What could seem a weakly iterative ending has an effect more complex than might at first appear. It drives home, quite literally, how the speaker and his foe are one and the same, crystallizing a moment of recognition that is also one of repudiation. Up to that point it has been the speaker himself who has taken the initiative in crucifying his foe, but the poem ends with his appeal to Christ to help him, by performing the execution himself.15 Another sonnet foregrounds the personal cost of conversion. Lord, I have left all and myself behind, My state, my hopes, my strength, and present ease, My unprovoked studies’ sweet disease, And touch of nature and engrafted kind, Whose cleaving twist doth distant tempers bind, And gentle sense of kindness that doth praise The earnest judgements, others’ wills to please: All and myself I leave thy love to find. O strike my heart with lightning from above, That from one wound both fire and blood may spring, Fire to transelement my soul to love, And blood as oil to keep the fire burning, That fire may draw forth blood, blood extend fire, Desire possession, possession desire.16

This is an extended supplement or reply to Mark 10:29–30, where Jesus promises that everyone who has given up family or possessions for his

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sake will inherit eternal life.17 Alabaster’s stress is more on giving up his scholarly career and his friendships: the ‘touch of nature and engrafted kind, / Whose cleaving twist doth distant tempers bind.’ Like the previous sonnet, it is typical of Alabaster’s religious verse in assuming a nonexistent or extremely narrow gap between speaker and author. While there are often difficulties about interpreting sonnets and sonnet sequences autobiographically, an elaborate concern to identify a poetic persona seems misplaced where, as in Alabaster’s case, there is clear external evidence that they should be read as autobiographical comment. The question becomes not whether critics should interpret autobiographically, but how they should do so; and once one admits this, the complexities and contradictions in Alabaster’s poetic stance leap into focus. It is disingenuous to say, in the course of a highly personal sonnet, that you have left all and yourself behind. Yet the claim fosters the element of apologia that figures so prominently in Alabaster’s religious writing. The advantage of the palinode, from the point of view of biographical self-justification, is that, like any other recantation or apology, it redefines inconstancy, shows the virtue in changing one’s mind, and gives the reader privileged access to the thought processes of the person who does so. It also directly addresses and engages with two audiences: the writer’s peers, and anyone who might be expected to have opinions on his or her conversion. As already noted, the relatively small current body of Alabaster criticism is almost exclusively concerned with him as a practitioner of Ignatian meditation: valuably so, but tending in itself to foster a sense of Alabaster writing in a devotional vacuum, with God as the most important addressee and other readers merely eavesdroppers.18 Hence, identifying a palinodic strain can enable these verses to be read in the wider context of Alabaster’s social life and relationships. In the passage from Alabaster’s autobiography quoted above, he characterizes himself as writing verses during his conversion, both for his own devotional benefit and for his friends and relations to see.19 His friends and his ex-fiancée are, indeed, the primary addressees of some poems. Demonstrating how happy he is in his repentance, which might seem merely the normal Christian imperative within most meditative verse, can be seen as a semi-public recantation once this context is supplied – and also as a form of proselytizing, to sympathetic and hostile acquaintances alike. As already indicated, Alabaster’s adversaries in print, John Racster and Roger Fenton, identify themselves as ex-associates of Alabaster’s: a reminder of how many Catholic/Protestant pamphlet wars were



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intimate affairs, where published texts were only one element in a heated dispute between people who knew each other well. In this context, it is not surprising that in both the sonnets quoted above, Alabaster is keenly aware that he is straining and rupturing friendships by his conversion. John Racster replied to Alabaster’s Seven Motives in spirited fashion. In his dedication to the Earl of Essex, answering the self-posed question of why he is bothering to reply to such a weak enemy, he writes how he went to the same school and university as Alabaster: ‘Ye same master preferred us both, the same roofe, nay the same bed somtimes contained us both. Every one wherof (as it is the lot of bankerupts to drowne others in their decay) have lost somthing by his fal. The school saith, I have lost my hope of him; the University saith, I have made shipwracke of my favour in him; the colledge saith, I have cast away my maintenance upon him; the maister saith, I have preferred preferment to discredit by him; the lodging saith his roome, the bed saieth his ease was evilly bestowed.’20 Roger Fenton, the author of the other refutation of Alabaster, prefixes his work with an epistle that is much more affectionate, though no less an exercise in personal admonition, hoping that the ‘seething of your fervencie is well nigh over.’21 Both Racster and Fenton choose to attack Alabaster on the grounds that he has a wavering personality – explicitly suggested by Alabaster’s self-presentation in his first Motive, which sets at its head the question of instability: ‘As the moyst and unstable bodies because they are unbounded in themselves, never cease from motion untill they bee stayed in some other body which hath stay in it selfe: so the understanding, unquiet by nature, passeth through all formes of opinions untill he resolve his assent upon some principle that standeth onely upon his owne ground.’22 Commenting on this issue, Racster writes, ‘The rise of this first motive (whiche seemeth to me banked upon this similitude) expresly setteth out, (though much I thinke against his will) the true causes not onely of this, but also of all the rest of his motives: which be … an unstable body, an understanding unquiet, nature without grace, and opinion voide of grounde’ (B1a). His comments are perceptive on several counts, not least in observing how so much of Alabaster’s theological thinking is accomplished through similitudes. Even in an age when it was common to refute an opponent’s doctrine by tilting at his metaphor, Racster’s response to Alabaster points up the literariness of polemic to an unusual degree. This approach is illustrated by one response to Alabaster’s sixth motive, as quoted in the two printed refutations of his work. Addressing

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the doctrinal differences among Protestants, it uses an image taken from the dyeing process: ‘For as divers parcels of silke of deeper or lighter ground, dipped by the dyar in the same liquour, drinke in a severall tincture of colour according to their former varietie: So they that dive in the letter of the holy scripture according as their iudgementes are before stained with preiudice of one or other opinion; come forth again not in unity of mindes, but in the same differences as they went in, more or lesse.’23 As with so many similes in Renaissance writing, what is interesting is less the comparison itself than the slant it is given. Alabaster is not saying, like Shakespeare, that the dyer’s hand is almost subdued to what it works in.24 Focusing on the material rather than the workman, he argues that dyes can do only a limited amount to conceal the previous nature of the fabric, and hence, that individual interpretations of scripture will always be – to use his phrase – stained with prejudice. In his printed answer, John Racster picks the simile up and animadverts it: For you see in your silke the difference of the die, commeth from the diversity of the grounde. But our ground is one, our doctrin the same, and therfore no colours but one, as the church serveth them out. But if in the wearing of this silke, in the practise of this doctrine in our discipline, there seemeth in some fewe, some alteration in the skirtes, or vtmost partes: they sure bee some staines through the parties negligence, and no variety either in ground or colour (you shall see) if you see not the colours of your owne conceits.… Take al our commentaries, which bee your colours out of the scriptures die: and you shal perceive some better glosse in some, and some quicker brightnesse in others; but idem est omnium candor, the light of the truth is alike in all. (34)

Both writers are using this dye simile to discuss the process of assimilating Christian truth, but Alabaster is arguing that Protestant private judgment compromises how the dye affects the material, while Racster is refuting this. The debate emblematizes the recognition that conversion may be imperfect, that change may not be a complete suffusion but tinctured by personality; only Alabaster, however, links this to the imperfect religion of Protestantism. In another sonnet Alabaster echoes the image of colour being affected by misconceit – this time applied to stained glass rather than dye. The sonnet is presented as a specific reply, entitled ‘To his sad friend’ in the one contemporary manuscript that preserves it. Alabaster may simply be picking up on what he himself had said earlier on one or other occasion,



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either in the Motives or on the occasion he describes in his autobiography, when he quotes himself as saying, during a dispute with Lancelot Andrewes, that when a man looks through painted spectacles, ‘all seemeth to be of that colour which the spectacles that give the medium do give unto it.’ At the very least it demonstrates imaginative continuity between Alabaster’s prose and verse, but it may also have been suggested by, and therefore postdate, Racster’s animadversion of Alabaster’s earlier colouration image. Can my restraint, which worketh me delight, Work grief in you that doth me dear affect, Since passions are but prints that do respect The forms of things, which in desire do write? But as the sun beams though they be bright, Through coloured glass like colour do reflect, So doth the person’s misconceit infect: My comfort, clear in me, in you is night. (28)

Even though one is prose and one is verse, Alabaster’s poems and pamphlet Motives are a double-pronged recantation of Protestantism and adoption of Catholicism. Both mix devotional rhetoric with controversial, both would have been read by those sympathetic to Alabaster and those hostile to him, and both illustrate the impossibility of divorcing literary considerations from theological. Racster’s and Fenton’s responses to the Motives give some clue as to how the sonnets would have been read by those unsympathetic to Alabaster’s conversion, and perhaps to how he could have used his sonnets to reply. But the usual polemical practice of animadversion, turning an opponent’s words against him, would have been particularly telling in the case of someone who, like Alabaster, clearly had a reputation for instability. This is Racster’s trump card, and it is hardly surprising that he plays it up, accusing Alabaster of ‘an unstable body, an understanding unquiet, nature without grace, and opinion voide of grounde.’ The implication is that such a vacillating convert need not be taken too seriously, since he is more than likely to turn again. Still, Racster’s scornful rejoinder does take its bearings from Alabaster’s own dilation on the unquiet understanding, and both instability of conviction and mental oscillation appear to have been imaginative preoccupations of Alabaster’s from early in his career. Elisaeis, for instance, uses the character of the Henrician bishop Stephen Gardiner to present

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an anatomy of indecisiveness. Gardiner’s career has led some presentday historians, as well as some of his own contemporaries, to characterize him as an insincere timeserver, and debate about his motives still rages – particularly over whether his tract De vera obedientia, written to assert the supremacy of secular princes over the church, reflects what he actually believed or was a bid to regain favour with Henry VIII.25 Writing as a member of the Church of England, and rendering into verse Gardiner’s political machinations against the young Elizabeth I during Mary’s reign, Alabaster portrays Gardiner as a full-blown villain – with imaginative consequences that are perhaps predictable. We have privileged access to Gardiner’s mind, and rather like Milton’s Satan, he takes over what we have of the poem. Alabaster’s interest in Gardiner’s moments of indecision is well illustrated in a passage where Gardiner – having been exhorted by the Whore of Babylon to set Mary against Elizabeth – paces about in a garden in an agony of indecision. Now here, now there he paces restlessly. Now he turns aside from the bank of flowers, now from the twisting paths of grass, and he weaves various circles within circles. As when during the rule of grim winter and its icy rage, a boxwood top which boys have wound up to run from their marble-white fingers flies about in rapid circles; fed to the full and drunk with the hail of curved blows, it sleepily weaves about; the milk-white troop of boys gapes over it and laughs as they see it form wavering circles and scribe lines in the marble surface. Thus Gardiner wanders with distracted pace through the gardens. (44–5)

This scene’s figuration of internal turmoil is enhanced by the fact that it is set in a garden – a completely gratuitous backdrop unless one recognizes that Alabaster is punning on Gardiner’s name. While the wordplay is not explicit in Latin, it impinges as soon as the reader translates.26 The theme of psychomachia continues in an extended comparison of Gardiner to a spinning top and is paralleled by another episode when Mary listens to Gardiner’s proposition to remove Elizabeth and is initially undecided what to do. As the poem’s narrator says, ‘The piety in her spirit and anxiety for her kingdom pulled Mary in opposite directions,’ and he compares this to a virgin beset by an importunate wooer: ‘Her heart quarrelled doubtfully within her … though she has never been shamed in her heart by the wound of love, savage Cupid assails her with flames of desire … Now a virgin, now a woman, she feels alternating desires within her’ (48–9).



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Alabaster also gave vacillation comic treatment, in a Latin epigram describing how the Rainolds brothers, William the Protestant and John the Catholic, each converted the other to his original position. The most popular verse Alabaster ever wrote, it became a standard inclusion in commonplace books of the era, sometimes in the original and sometimes in one of its several English versions.27 The scenario is neater in the poem than it is in real life. While William Rainolds did convert from the established church to Catholicism in 1575, John Rainolds was a Catholic as a young man but gradually converted to Protestantism; but as Mordechai Feingold has argued, the poem probably refers less to any specific disputation than to the general soul-searchings experienced by the Rainolds family.28 Alabaster was fascinated by the Rainolds brothers, as a passage in his autobiography shows, and a book by William Rainolds was instrumental in his own conversion.29 Discussing this circumstance, Molly Murray has commented that ‘Alabaster insists on Rainolds’s exemplarity not just because of his character and learning … but also, and most importantly, because he is a Catholic convert.’30 Taken together, autobiography and epigram demonstrate not only Alabaster’s obsession with the process of changing one’s mind, but also his consciousness of how conversion involves the testing of personal ties. As his poem concludes, ‘What fight is this, where conquered both are glad, / Yet either, to have conquered other, sad?’31 Alabaster’s mesmerized fascination with the knock-on effects of changing one’s mind, which informs Elisaeis and his writing on the Rainolds brothers with such different results, pervades the Seven Motives and his religious sonnets as well. In these he changes from an ironically dégagé stance to one betokening an awareness of personal vulnerability, whether that indecision concerns religious allegiance or the implications of coming out as a Catholic. As he says in his incomplete sonnet ‘Captivity great liberty to the servants of God,’ ‘Unbalanced irresolution / Long time did hold my mind with even suspense, / When first how best to show my conscience … / As he who in the rain of July’s sun / Oft dips his foot and oft withdraws it thence, / Till that the brunt of cold be overgone’ (29). As this illustrates, Alabaster is typical of religious poets of this date in using water imagery – rivers, tides, and above all tears – to illustrate the fluxes of indecision and also the torrents of surrender.32 Three sorts of tears do from mine eyes distrain: The first are bitter, of compunction, The second brinish, of compassion,

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The third are sweet, which from devoutness rain, And these diversities they do obtain By difference of place from which they run. The first come from the meditation Of all my sins, which made a bitter vein, The next pass through the sea of others’ tears, And so that saltness in the taste appears, The third doth issue from Christ’s wounded side, And thence such sweetness in them doth abide. Never did contraries so well agree, For the one without the other will not be. (9)

This may seem classic meditative verse in its focus on affective devotion and its appeal to the senses. But with the line ‘The next pass through the sea of others’ tears,’ a private dialogue of repentance between sinner and God opens out into Alabaster’s public apology for hurting others. Complicated by the biographical fact that the hurt has been caused by the very act of conversion or repentance that Alabaster is describing, this is a troubling and discordant interpolation. But the sonnet needs to be resolved, and Alabaster does so by invoking the wounds of Christ and the devotional sweetness they exude: ‘Never did contraries so well agree, / For the one without the other will not be.’ While the contraries identified by Alabaster do not agree in the sense of concurring, they are all dependent on each other through him; he is the reason they exist and the point of their confluence. This ends the poem with a paradoxical flourish, yet the resolution is provisional at best. The double retractation that Alabaster wants to perform – a repentance directed towards God, an apology for hurting his neighbour – can work only if repentance is wholehearted and apology partial, implying or stating that, though he is sorry to have caused pain, the other party is still the one in the wrong. Alabaster says as much and more in a poem discussed earlier, ‘To his sad friend,’ which ends, ‘Thus in revenge I joy to see you sad, / Since you in error grieve to see me glad’ (28). This is, of course, a pious revenge with the ultimate hope of securing the other party’s conversion, but the word hints at the hurt that the mistaken concern of friends is likely to cause a convert.33 Alabaster’s consciousness that his dealings with God are being scrutinized by his social circle is apologetic in both senses and typical of the way his sonnets work. Even in those sonnets that derive most from Ignatian meditational practice, his gaze may be directed towards God, but



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he still glances in the driving mirror regularly to check on his audience. This is partly to proselytize and is also a way of performing the ultimate apology, first admitting his own pain for hurting others, then putting this in context by appealing to Christ’s Passion. George Klawitter takes Alabaster’s editors G.M. Story and Helen Gardner to task for dividing one of the longer sonnet sequences into classic meditational sonnets and more personal ones; instead, he sees meditation as giving rise to personal reflection, and vice versa.34 Extending his model, one can argue that the polarities of biblical evocation and personal reflection can be seen within Alabaster’s sonnets as well as between them. The sonnet on the Crown of Thorns, for instance, compares Christ’s mockers to mortals who cannot understand the glory of public obloquy endured for God’s sake. Alabaster asks whether Christ’s hidden triumph is to be found in the pain he suffered, and ends, ‘It may be, but my thoughts cannot attain / What pleasure ’tis to smart for others’ gain’ (14).35 While it is common enough for a writer of religious verse to admit himself incapable of plumbing the depths of divine compassion, this sonnet is unorthodox in its author’s admission that he has simply given up trying. In the context of a sonnet where he applies the ensigns of Christ’s crucifixion to his own case, stressing the element of public performance in his own Calvary, we have the spectacle of an exemplar who admits, for a brief and poignant moment, that he is unable to cope – no coincidence, perhaps, that this failure of nerve is brought on by meditation upon the idea of public ostracism, which the poem’s author might well have been experiencing first-hand at the time of writing. Employing the notion of the palinode, this essay has aimed to demonstrate Alabaster’s imaginative engagement with change, retraction, and apology. Though Alabaster’s holy sonnets have tended to be classified as inwardly directed meditative verse, they also manifest intense concern with the wider social consequences of conversion. Reading them as palinodes is a means of highlighting focus, since from its legendary beginnings the genre of palinode has had close links to the biographies of the writers who engage in it. But such an enterprise also foregrounds the difficulties that readers have sometimes had with Alabaster’s verse. The twin facts that Alabaster’s conversion was to Catholicism, and was temporary, have had implications for his literary afterlife. The implicit biographical contrast of Alabaster with Donne – perhaps in the mind of G.M. Story and Donne’s editor Helen Gardner when they wrote the dismissive introduction to their Oxford University Press edition of Alabaster’s verse – may well have worked to Alabaster’s detriment. Donne’s single jour-

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ney away from Catholicism and towards the established church makes for a cleaner and more satisfying life story than Alabaster’s, as well as tending in the right direction for an academy often deeply anti-Catholic in its unstated presuppositions.36 Yet Catholic scholars have not been particularly interested in Alabaster either, and this surely has something to do with his wavering religious identity. Falling between denominational stools, he presents a life that is harder to admire than, for instance, that of the heroic martyr-poet Robert Southwell. Perhaps, in our own time, Alabaster and other serial converts can be given a less judgemental hearing, sensitive to the pressures they faced and the conflicts they embodied. If so, bearing the palinode in mind should remind us of the special challenges faced by a poet when his changing relationship with God was played out in a public arena.

NOTES   1 The exact wording is: ‘Stesichorus sings a palinode: used of those who change their minds for the better.’ Macarius, Proverbs, 2.210, qtd in J.M. Edmonds, ed., Lyra Graeca, Loeb Classical Library (London: William Heinemann, 1924), 2:30–1.   2 See definitions of palinodia in Charlton T. Lewis, A Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), and of παλινωδεω and παλινωδία in Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek–English Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966). For a recent partial demolition of the story, see Matthew Wright, Euripides’ Escape-Tragedies: A Story of Helen, Andromeda and Iphigenia among the Taurians (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 87–109. The word was also used to mean ‘repetition’ or ‘refrain’ (Oxford English Dictionary). See also Richard Leighton Greene, ed., The Early English Carols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977), xxxii.   3 See George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy: A Critical Edition, ed. Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), 136. See also the extracts relating to the life of Stesichorus in Lyra Graeca, 22–3, 38–9, 42–3, 44–5.   4 See Patricia Phillippy, Love’s Remedies: Recantation and Renaissance Lyric Poetry (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1995).   5 See John Gibbons, Concertatio ecclesiae Catholicae, pt 3 (1594 reissue), title page and index under ‘Palinodiae lapsorum’ (British Library 697.e.13); John Colvill, The Palinod or Recantation of John Colvil (1600).   6 See Martin Marprelate [pseud.], Oh Read Over D. John Bridges (1588), 40. See



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also Perne’s biography in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB). Similarly, the priest ‘Palinode’ in the ‘May’ section of Spenser’s Shepheardes Calendar is ironically named to emphasize his backward glances towards old religious custom: see Edmund Spenser: Selected Shorted Poems, ed. Douglas Brooks-Davies (London: Longman, 1995), 80.   7 John Newton’s ‘Amazing Grace,’ emblematizing its author’s conversion from slave-trader to passionate Christian abolitionist, is a classic example from a later period.   8 Most recently translated by Sister Mary Inez Bogan (Washington DC: Catholic University Press of America, 1968).   9 For Alabaster’s biography, see ODNB. Michael Questier contextualizes the conversion episodes in Conversion, Politics and Religion in England, 1580–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 45, 55, 95, 189, 190. 10 See the edition of the autobiography in Unpublished Works by William Alabaster (1568–1640), ed. Dana F. Sutton (Salzburg: Salzburg Studies in English Literature, 1997). Sutton’s edition appears to have been completed independently of the previous edition of this manuscript by Clara Fazzari (Florence: Sedicesimo, 1983). See also Fazzari’s biography, William Alabaster: un uomo inquieto in un’epoca inquieta (Florence: Sedicesimo, 1982): and most recently, Molly Murray, ‘“Now I ame a Catholique”: William Alabaster and the Early Modern Catholic Conversion Narrative,’ in Catholic Culture in Early Modern England, ed. Ronald Corthell, Frances E. Dolan, Christopher Highley, and Arthur F. Marotti, 101–69 (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2007). See also Arthur F. Marotti, Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy: Catholic and Anti-Catholic Discourses in Early Modern England (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2005), 98–109. 11 In his autobiography Alabaster refers to Elisaeis, describing how he began to write an anti-Catholic work in Latin verse about Elizabeth’s reign, and presented the first book to the Queen, but was prevented by divine intervention from presenting the second. 12 ‘Autobiography,’ in Unpublished Works, ed. Sutton, 123. 13 Rodolphus Hospinianus, De origine, progressu, ceremoniis et ritibus festorum dierum Judaeorum, Romanorum & Turcarum (1593), Trinity College, Cambridge, K.5.65. The book may have been read and inscribed by Alabaster during the period of his Cambridge imprisonment, though it was given to the library somewhat later, by James Duport, vice-master of Trinity (1606–79). My thanks to the master and fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge, for allowing me to quote the poem, to Joanna Ball for information on Duport, and to Arnold Hunt for alerting me to the record of the sonnet in the library’s provenance index.

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14 Robert V. Caro, SJ, ‘William Alabaster: Rhetor, Meditator, Devotional Poet,’ 2 parts, Recusant History 19, no. 1 (1988): 62–79, and 19, no. 2 (1988): 155–70; Fazzari, William Alabaster, pt 2; Louis Martz, The Poetry of Meditation, 1st ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954); Anthony Raspa, The Emotive Image: Jesuit Poetics in the English Renaissance (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1983). Molly Murray’s important study, The Poetics of Conversion in Early Modern English Literature: Verse and Change from Donne to Dryden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), published too late to be used in this article, discusses Alabaster in chap. 1 (36–68). 15 He does so in a volta (introduction of second idea), round about line 12. 16 The Sonnets of William Alabaster, ed. G.M. Story and Helen Gardner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), 27. All subsequent quotations from Alabaster’s sonnets are taken from this edition. 17 ‘And Jesus answered and said, Verily I say unto you, There is no man that hath left house, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my sake, and the gospel’s, But he shall receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses, and brethren, and sisters, and mothers, and children, and lands, with persecutions; and in the world to come eternal life’ (Mark 10:29–30, King James Version). 18 For example, ‘Through the influence of meditation the audience was restored to rhetorical invention, but it became primarily an audience within, discoverable through introspection, rather than the public audience envisioned in traditional rhetoric … For poetry, the meditative stance and overhearing audience correspond to the dramatic quality remarked by many commentators as the salient characteristic of metaphysical poetry’ (Caro, ‘William Alabaster,’ pt 1, 77). 19 See p. 117. 20 A booke of the seven planets, or, seven wandring motives, of William Alabasters wit (1598), A3a. Transcriptions have been taken from English Short Title Catalogue (STC) 20601.5 (no. 1002:08 on the STC microfilm/EEBO). The book also appeared as William Alablasters seven motvies [sic]. Removed and confuted by John Racster, with both title pages surviving in some copies. Further study of this bibliographically complex work might be rewarding. 21 An answere to William Alablaster [sic] his motives (1599), A3. 22 Racster, A booke of the seven planets, B1a. 23 Qtd from Racster, A booke of the seven planets, 34a. 24 Sonnet 111, 6–7. Reference taken from William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988). 25 See most recently, ODNB, s.v. ‘Stephen Gardiner.’ 26 The pun can also be found in George Joye’s contemporary polemics against



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Gardiner: e.g., George Joye confuteth, Winchesters false articles (1543), fol. 24b, and The refutation of the byshop of Winchesters derke declaration of his false articles (1546), fol. 64b. 27 See Unpublished Works, ed. Sutton, item XVI; the translation is attributed to Hugh Holland. A second English translation, by ‘G.S.,’ is given on pages 84–5. However, he does not mention a third translation by Peter Heylyn, beginning, ‘In points of Faith some undetermined jars,’ printed in Cosmography (1652), 267–8. For examples in manuscript, see Margaret Crum, ed., First-Line Index of English Poetry 1500–1800 in Manuscripts of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969), vol. 1, item I1444; Stephen Parks, gen. ed., First-Line Index of English Poetry 1500–1800 in Manuscripts of the James M. and Marie-Louise Osborn Collection in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University (New Haven: Beinecke Library, 2005), item I1182; and Chicago University Library, MS 816 (unpaginated, but 13 fols. in from back cover). 28 See Feingold’s ODNB entry for John Rainolds. A theological disputation between John Rainolds and another brother, Edmund, took place in front of the Earl of Leicester in January 1585, and John Pits describes William Rainolds’s conversion as probably a knock-on effect of the Thomas Harding / John Jewel controversy: ‘De illustribus Angliae scriptoribus,’ in Relationum historicarum de rebus Anglicis (1619), 790–2 (ref. at 790). 29 ‘Autobiography,’ 116–17. 30 See Murray, ‘“Now I ame a Catholique,”’ 196–200 (quotation at 199). 31 ‘Quod genus hoc pugnae est ubi victus gudet uterque / et tamen alteruter se superasse dolet?’ Holland’s translation is quoted. 32 On tears poetry, see my Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558–1660, 56–104 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), chap. 2; and Gary Kuchar, The Poetry of Religious Sorrow in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 33 This interpretation differs from that advanced in Unpublished Works, ed. Sutton, 173. 34 ‘Alabaster’s “Ensigns” Sonnets: Calm before the Storm,’ chap. 3 in Eugene R. Cunnar and Jeffrey Johnson, eds., Discovering and (Re)Covering the 17thCentury Religious Lyric (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2001). 35 ‘Smart for others’ pain’ is an alternative reading (Sonnets of William Alabaster, ed. Story and Gardner); what I have to say is applicable in either case. 36 However, see John Carey’s more pejorative interpretation of Donne’s conversion as a careerist move: John Donne: Life, Mind and Art (London: Faber & Faber, 1981).

chapter six

Crashaw’s Style RICHARD RAMBUSS

The homosexual’s ‘classic’ pursuit of style is, among other things, his heroic way of rising to meet the fate projected on him in any case by a culture fearful of the extreme, exclusive, emptying, ecstatic character of any serious experience of Style. – D.A. Miller

‘Crashaw possesses style’ ‘Crashaw … possesses style, or he would not deserve the eminent place he holds among our poets.’ So determines Edmund Gosse, writing near the end of the nineteenth century, when Richard Crashaw’s stature as an English poet seemed to be the given that it now no longer is. Gosse further determines that we might describe what style Crashaw has ‘best in negatives’: ‘He is not so warm and real as Herrick, nor so drily intellectual as the other hymnists, nor coldly and respectably virile like Cowley.’ ‘To use an odd simile of Shelley’s,’ Gosse continues, Crashaw ‘sells us gin when the other poets offer us legs of mutton, or at all events baskets of bread and vegetables.’1 One may chuckle at the gin-house analogy, but Gosse’s negatives are rather more positive than many estimations to come of Crashaw’s style, as later critics would take to flamboyantly lambasting the poet for his ‘hysterical intensity’ and ‘meretricious emotionalism,’ for the ‘cheap glitter of his diction’ and the ‘repulsive succulence’ of his imagery.2 ‘Over-ripeness is all,’ Douglas Bush offers as a motto for Crashaw’s verse.3 Seeming to pick up where Gosse’s strange Shelleyan simile left off, Bush then cautions that with Crashaw ‘the reader who lacks a special temperament or a knowledge of



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the symbolic code may sometimes think of the dreams of a convert who has eaten rich food and slept on his back.’4 ‘Foreign in spirit and style’ is how George Walton Williams, one of Crashaw’s own modern editors, categorizes him. Even Ruth Wallerstein, among this poet’s more insistent twentieth-century champions, is obliged to concede that his verse ‘comprehends passages of the worst taste, not merely in rhetoric but in spirit, perhaps to be found in the whole range of English poetry.’5 But such offences, maintains Wallerstein, are mostly to be found in the early Crashaw, and in time he gets much better, as she argues at length in her 1935 monograph called, appropriately enough, Richard Crashaw: A Study in Style and Poetic Development. Robert Martin Adams has little patience, however, with this kind of style ‘progress narrative.’ ‘Crashaw’s taste,’ he counters, ‘developed neither toward nor away from the grotesque metaphor we consider in “bad taste”: it simply included an area of “very bad taste” within a larger area of “inoffensive taste,” and rose occasionally to something we can call “impeccable taste,” always provided our standards of taste are purely conventional.’6 Whether or not a critic appreciates Crashaw’s style, most tend to say of it: (1) that it issues from emotion, as opposed to intellection, and (2) that it is what marks Crashaw as a Roman Catholic poet – apparently even before he becomes one: that is, before he actually forsakes the English church in which he spent all but the last four or so years of his life and converts to Rome. Consider the stylistic calculus that T.S. Eliot works out on this account in one of his 1926 Trinity College Clark Lectures on metaphysical poetry: Subtract from Donne the powerful intellect, substitute a feminine for a strongly masculine nature, posit a devotional temperament rather than a theological mind, and add the influence of Italian and Spanish literature, take note of the changes in the political and ecclesiastical situation in England, and you have Crashaw.   Crashaw was a man of learning, and a man of some intellect; but he was primarily a devotional, a fervent, temperament; a Roman Catholic, he would have had more in common with Cardinal Newman than with Thomas Aquinas. The current of feeling that starts with Newman, and passes through Arnold, Ruskin, and Pater to Francis Thompson, Lionel Johnson, Aubrey Beardsley, and even in a degraded and popularised form to Oscar Wilde, had not quite dwindled away.7

There is a lot to unpack here. What are we to make, for instance, of

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Eliot’s passing mention of Wilde at the beginning of a lecture about Crashaw? That said, one also picks up on Eliot’s reiteration of Gosse’s suggestion that there is something less than respectably virile about Crashaw’s style. Mario Praz makes the point more forcefully, averring that this poet ‘is incapable of a concise style, of rendering severe and manly feelings in a few strokes.’ ‘On the contrary,’ Praz continues, Crashaw ‘makes capital out of whatever lends itself to florid divagations and to descriptions of tender and delicate emotions. Grace is not denied to him, but Strength is beyond his reach.’8 With Crashaw, ‘many readers,’ adds Austin Warren, ‘have, without stopping to analyze, felt themselves in the presence of something sick or unmanly.’ ‘Recollected, the pages of Crashaw breathe,’ he continues, ‘a cloying sweetness, a languorous perfume.’9 Frank J. Warnke puts it even more colourfully, describing with some relish how Crashaw has come to be treated as ‘a kind of sport in English literary history, an exotic Italian import like pasta or castrati.’10 Elsewhere Warnke asserts that the ‘enigmatic’ Crashaw’s ‘slightly infantile, more than slightly perverse sexuality contrasts both with Herbert’s asceticism and with Donne’s and Marvell’s mature understanding of sexual passion.’11 Having so quickly, if inevitably, come upon the issue of Crashaw’s queerness, I would like to activate that charge as a magnetic field into which just about everything further I should have to say about his style – his Style – is ineluctably to be drawn: this even as I might seem here to be brushing aside questions about sexuality and gender in pursuing the principal argument of this essay.12 It is that Crashaw is a thinking – indeed very much an intellectual – poet, and, what is more, that his writing has its own place, not only in the annals of English Catholic literature, but also – even simultaneously – in what might be thought of (to modify Barbara Kiefer Lewalski) as a certain strain of ‘Anglican’ poetics: specifically, a Cambridge poetics of the 1630s and 1640s.13 But first a rehearsal is in order of a few more of the critical clichés about Crashaw at which I here mean to take aim. ‘Sensuous rather than intellectual, [Crashaw] might have proved voluptuary, libertine, or aesthete.’ That’s Warren again.14 Rosemond Tuve cautions that ‘images like Crashaw’s have a deceptively sensuous character which promotes misreading if the intellectual process of abstracting is relaxed.’15 In contrast, David Reid writes that ‘Crashaw seems intellectually and emotionally uncomplicated,’ adding that ‘[his] art is in some ways about nothing.’16 Crashaw, reckons Herbert J.C. Grierson (another of his twentiethcentury editors), is an author who ‘does not think, he accepts.’ That trait



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disqualifies him as an authentic mystic – for ‘mysticism,’ deems Grierson, ‘implies thought.’17 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in contrast, criticizes Crashaw as ‘too apt to weary out a thought.’18 Eliot seems to be of two minds on this account. In the passage that I have cited above, he recognizes Crashaw as ‘a man of learning, and a man of some intellect.’ But a page later in the same account Eliot designates Crashaw as ‘one of those who are on the side of feeling rather than thought.’19 C.A. Patrides is more decided: ‘Where other poets think,’ he asserts, ‘Crashaw appears primarily to acclaim, to venerate, to adore; and where they are temperate, he abounds, he revels, he soars.’20 Critics, as I noted, tend to associate all this soaring feeling without thinking to Crashaw’s embrace of Roman Catholicism. ‘While Crashaw’s interest in the life of intellect is minimal,’ thus declares Robert T. Petersson, ‘his attraction to the spiritual passion of Catholic Baroque is limitless.’21 Indeed, Patrides deems Crashaw ‘[a] Catholic in spirit long before he abandoned Protestantism.’22 ‘Had [Crashaw] lived today,’ Eliot determines, ‘he could only have dwelt in Florence or in Rome.’23 This may or may not have been true when Eliot wrote, but it certainly was not so when Crashaw himself lived – at least not until the great upheaval of the English Revolution. In his single extant letter, penned while in Continental exile, Crashaw reports that even then what he most desired was to return to Cambridge, where he was a Fellow at Peterhouse, the most High Church of Cambridge colleges, and curate and catechist at Little St Mary’s, the correspondingly ‘High’ parish church next door. ‘No man then my self,’ he writes, ‘holds more high the humble scepter of such a little contentfull kingdom.’24 After having stopped a year or so in Paris, where Henrietta Maria had established her court in exile, Crashaw did eventually come to dwell in Rome. But not happily so. Impoverished and in fading health, he arrived in the city of St Peter’s in 1646 and took up residence in the English College. There he waited and waited for something to come of the letter of introduction that the Queen had written on his behalf to Pope Innocent X. In it, she describes Crashaw, ‘que J’estime beaucoup,’ as having been made a Catholic by means of his studies.25 A year went by, and only after an official complaint from Kenelm Digby, Henrietta Maria’s representative in Rome, did the new convert land a position in the service of Cardinal Giovanni Battista Pallotta. While Crashaw is said to have much admired Pallotta, he quickly ran afoul of the Italians alongside whom he served in the prelate’s retinue. Scandalized by their impiousness and ‘having the Cardinal’s ear,’ Crashaw ‘complained extremely’ of them to

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him. This is according to the account of John Bargrave, another displaced Peterhouse Fellow, who was then travelling in Italy. ‘Upon which the Italians,’ reports Bargrave, ‘fell so far out with him that the Cardinal, to secure [Crashaw’s] life, was fain to put him from his service.’26 Crashaw thus quit Rome in 1649 for the cathedral town of Loreto, where Pallotta had secured for him the office of beneficiatus, or minor canon, at the shrine of the Santa Casa, the Holy House of the Blessed Virgin. (Angels, the story goes, had flown the house centuries before from Nazareth to Italy.) On 21 August, just a few weeks after he arrived there, Crashaw died of a fever, ‘in th’ Virgin’s lap,’ as one eulogist put it.27 Abraham Cowley, a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and Crashaw’s friend, expands upon this Marian conceit in his rhapsodic elegy for the poet:   How well (blest Swan) did Fate contrive thy death; And made thee render up thy tuneful breath In thy great Mistress Arms? thou most divine And richest Off’ering of Loretto’s Shrine! Where like some holy Sacrifice t’ expire, A Fever burns thee, and Love lights the Fire. Angels (they say) brought the fam’ed Chappel there, And bore the sacred Load in Triumph through the air. ’Tis surer much they brought thee there, and They, And Thou, their charge, went singing all the way.28

Bargrave, however, offers a less Elysian account of Crashaw’s passing, noting that ‘it was doubtful whether he were not poisoned.’29

‘Taste this’ No matter how Crashaw met his end, for the critic ‘there remains the problem of style.’ So insists Richard Strier in an essay that aims to cordon off George Herbert and his Protestant poetics from any of the CounterReformation influences that so waylaid Crashaw.30 I would like to address the problem of style head on via a Crashaw poem that seems an especially egregious affront to taste. It is an epigram called ‘Our Lord in his Circumcision to his Father,’ and commentators have almost altogether avoided it, though one, Elisha Kane, deems it ‘the extreme of the grotesque and the repulsive,’ while sniffing that its ‘metaphors … are really beyond citation.’31 Pace Kane, who refuses even to cough up the poem’s title, much less quote a single word of it, I want to cite the whole bloody thing, which astonishingly takes us inside the Christ Child’s mind as he



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goes under the knife. But before I do so, let me interject that I think it likely (for all Strier’s efforts to keep these two poets quite apart) that Crashaw takes the idea of a divine internal monologue in extremis from Herbert’s ‘The Sacrifice.’ That long, intense poem itself draws upon a Good Friday ritual – the Improperia (or Christ’s ‘Reproaches’) – that is pre-Reformation in origin. Herbert here psychologizes Christ’s suffering on the cross, putting into sixty-three epigrammatic stanzas – all but one punctuated by the same dumbfounded repetitive refrain: ‘Was ever grief like mine?’ – what the traumatized Saviour feels and thinks, but does not utter aloud.32 (Herbert’s ‘The Sacrifice’ also underlies Crashaw’s most liturgical poem, his ‘Office of the Holy Cross.’) Here, then, is the remarkable soliloquy that Crashaw composes for ‘Our Lord in his Circumcision’: To thee these first fruits of my growing death (For what else is my life?) lo I bequeath. Taste this, and as thou lik’st this lesser flood Expect a sea, my heart shall make it good. Thy wrath that wades here now, ere long shall swim, The floodgate shall be set wide ope for him. Then let him drink, and drink, and do his worst, To drown the wantonness of his wild thirst. Now’s but the nonage of my pains; my fears Are yet but in their hopes, not come to years. The day of my dark woes is yet but morn, My tears but tender and my death newborn.33

We might pause for a moment to note that it was exegetically conventional to conceive of Christ’s Passion as beginning as early as his birth – or at least as soon as he is taken to the Temple to be circumcised. The chromatic final lines of Crashaw’s epigram palpably bring home the point that the circumcision is but the Crucifixion writ small: Yet may these unfledged griefs give fate some guess, These cradle-torments have their towardness. These purple buds of blooming death may be, Erst the full stature of a fatal tree. And till my riper woes to age are come, This knife may be the spear’s preludium. (lines 15–18)

In his beginning is his end.

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‘Cradle-torments’: that’s hard to top for sheer visceral effect. But the bleeding infant’s proffer in line 3 to ‘Taste this’ may just do it. And in so doing, this epigram inverts the disturbing familial inversion of Crashaw’s most notorious epigram – also in Steps to the Temple – ‘Blessed be the paps which thou hast sucked.’ This poem, allows Kane, ‘we may risk, perhaps, if only to exhibit it as a literary curiosity.’34 Suppose he had been tabled at thy teats,   Thy hunger feels not what he eats: He’ll have his teat ere long (a bloody one)   The mother then must suck the son.

But well before that, at Christ’s circumcision, the Father is first summoned – ‘Taste this’ – to table at the Son’s bleeding body. Crashaw wrote several circumcision poems, as did Robert Herrick.35 That these Cambridge poets who were also Church of England priests were drawn to this ritual event as a devotional topic is hardly surprising. Christ’s circumcision was then celebrated as a feast day in the English church, just as it long had been in the Roman church. (Now, perhaps in deference to our more squeamish contemporary religious sensibilities, 1 January, the Feast of the Circumcision, has been cut from the calendar and replaced by the Feast of the Holy Name – Jesus having received it, according to tradition, on the same day that the sacred covenant was drawn on his newborn flesh.) Lancelot Andrewes and John Donne, among other divines, also preached sermons on the subject. Even Milton (another Cambridge author) wrote an occasional poem ‘Upon the Circumcision,’ which he treats, trope-wise, much the same way that Crashaw does. That is, the Son’s circumcision has for Milton a New Testament meaning as well as an Old Testament one, prefiguring the more painful, bloodier sacrifice in time to come. He who with all heaven’s heraldry whilere Entered the world, now bleeds to give us ease; ....................................... And seals obedience first with wounding smart This day, but O ere long Huge pangs and strong Will pierce more near his heart.36

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preludium of Calvary and the posthumous thrust of the soldier’s spear into Christ’s side in John 19:34. I glance here at Milton’s ‘Upon the Circumcision’ to show that Crashaw’s epigram – for all the charges of its author’s baroque, foreign, Catholic, Continental outlandishness – has an English context. Milton’s poem, which is usually dated ca. 1633, may even have been an influence on Crashaw’s epigram, though it is not, as we have already noted via Herbert, the only one. In his ‘Life of Cowley,’ Samuel Johnson indicts the metaphysicals for their ‘perverseness of industry’ and their far-fetched conceits.37 Crashaw’s ‘Taste this,’ which now looks so utterly tasteless, could serve as a case in point. That conceit may have been fetched from farther afield than Milton. Might it, in fact, be drawn from Crashaw’s knowledge of Jewish ritual?38 The anonymous preface to Steps to the Temple (London, 1646, 1648), the volume in which ‘Our Lord in his Circumcision to his Father’ appears, lists Hebrew as one of five languages, ‘besides his mother tongue,’ in which the poet was ‘excellent.’ ‘Taste this’ evokes the practice of metzitza, a part of the circumcision rite added in the rabbinic period, in which the circumciser – putatively the boy’s father, but often with a professional mohel serving as his delegate – orally suctioned the blood from the circumcision wound. The father then must suck the son. In his Travel Journal (1580–1) Montaigne details this practice as part of a Jewish circumcision ceremony that he witnessed in Rome: ‘As soon as this glans is thus uncovered, they hastily offer some wine to the minister, who puts a little in his mouth and then goes and sucks the glans of this child, all bloody, and spits out the blood he has drawn from it, and immediately takes as much wine again, up to three times.’39 ‘The boy’s outcry,’ our observer remarks ecumenically, ‘is like that of ours when they are baptized.’ After the child’s wound is bandaged, the minister is given another glass of wine: ‘He takes a swallow of it,’ Montaigne continues, ‘and then dipping his finger in it he three times takes a drop of it with his finger to the boy’s mouth to be sucked.’40 The son then must suck the father (or his minister). The next part of the ceremony involves ‘a silver instrument ... pierced with little holes,’ which is carried by ‘another person ... to the nose, first of the minister, and then of the child, and then of the godfather’: an olfactory relay. The minister, notes Montaigne, ‘meanwhile still has his mouth all bloody.’ He further explains that the Jews ‘suppose that these are odors’ – tastes too, I’d add – ‘to confirm and enlighten minds for devotion.’ Montaigne calls circumcision ‘the most ancient religious ceremony there is among men,’ adding what a high

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honour it is among the Jews to be appointed minister for this rite. ‘They hold,’ he notes, ‘that he who has circumcised up to a certain number, ... when he is dead has this privilege, that the parts of his mouth are never eaten by worms.’41

Cambridge Is Burning Against those who would, with varying degrees of condescension, pass off Crashaw as a ‘fountain of pure emotion,’ as a poet ‘so emotional as almost always to tremble into feeling,’ I am arguing, then, that there is brainwork (and erudition) in even the most sensational of his conceits.42 A conceit is a witty figure or fantastic analogy; it’s a stretch of the imagination, a device of fancy. The word derives from the same root as concept, however, and like the latter term it also means idea or thought. What I ultimately want, then, to say about Crashaw’s poetry is not that it is rather more intellectual than emotional, but that it might be best appreciated as both. In this sense, I see Crashaw as no less a metaphysical poet than a baroque one. One might likewise let go the question – a sticking point in so much of the criticism – of whether Crashaw’s style and tastes are either excessively Roman Catholic or sufficiently Reformed.43 Judging from the verse ‘Apology’ that is coupled with his great ‘Hymn to the Name and Honor of the Admirable Saint Teresa,’ Crashaw himself apparently did not want his devotional poetics to be taken for one over the other. This work, whose full title in Carmen Deo Nostro (1652) is ‘An Apology for the Foregoing Hymn as having been writ when the author was yet among the Protestants,’ is the closest thing that we have from Crashaw to a poetic manifesto. It announces his fervent ambition to transcend all earthbound differences of languages, nations, and confessions: ‘What soul soe’er, in any language, can / Speak heav’n like hers is my soul’s countryman,’ he here exults; ‘O ’tis not Spanish, but ’tis heav’n she speaks!’44 Alison Shell usefully reminds us that the Laudianism that so deeply informs Crashaw and his Cambridge milieu ‘contained within itself the potential for experimentation with Rome’ – that is, with certain Roman Catholic devotional figures, forms, and techniques. Poetry, she further suggests, may have afforded even greater latitude on this account: ‘Within theological writing daringly Catholic doctrines might be promulgated, but always within the disciplinary confines of the Church of



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England; within poetry, however, experimentation was more generally permissible and less likely to be censured.’45 Taking his Mary Magdalene poem ‘The Weeper’ as a chief example, Shell frames her acute discussion of Crashaw’s ‘Catholic mentality’46 around the genre of tearspoetry, which she argues ‘was strongly and overtly associated with both Catholicism and conversion at the period when Crashaw was writing.’47 However, the experimental component of Crashaw’s spirituality may be even more pronounced in ‘An Apology,’ especially its opening passage: Thus have I back again to thy bright name (Fair flood of holy fires!) transfused the flame I took from reading thee, ’tis to thy wrong, I know, that in my weak and worthless song Thou here art set to shine where thy full day Scarce dawns. O pardon if I dare to say Thine own dear books are guilty. For from thence I learned to know that love is eloquence. That hopeful maxim gave me heart to try If, what to other tongues is tuned so high, Thy praise might not speak English too. (lines 1–11)

As we have already noted, the poem’s title in Carmen Deo Nostro proclaims that Crashaw came to Teresa, one of the spiritual leading lights of the Counter-Reformation, while he himself was a Protestant. His Teresa poems, then, are not only a literary experiment in translation, in whether the Spanish saint’s ‘praise might not speak English too.’ They are, more daringly, an ecstatic expression of cross-confessional piety. Shell predicates of Crashaw ‘a Catholic mentality.’ Catholic often means Roman Catholic. But the term was also understood to signify Christian universalism, and it is clear that such universalism is part of what Crashaw’s verse here tries on for size: ‘no law controls, / Our free traffic for heav’n,’ he insists; ‘we may maintain / Peace, sure, with piety, though it come from Spain.’48 Crashaw’s poem is a fairly radical expression of devotional (if not theological) ecumenism. There were, however, some grounds for it in such Cambridge High Church hothouses as Pembroke, where Crashaw was a student from 1631 to 1634 (and, before that, where Lancelot Andrewes had been Master), and, just across the street, at Peterhouse, where Crashaw accepted a Fellowship in 1635. Three years later, Joseph

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Beaumont, another Peterhouse Fellow and Crashaw’s close friend, conjured up in a Latin university oration the following vision: ‘I see her whose pen, wet with divine dew, dripped I know not what sweeter than sweetness itself, and bathed the whole heaven. Do you await the name of the heroine? It is Saint Teresa, a name unheard by you, I believe, and more familiar to angels than to our men. O with what sweetness may you breathe your last in her writing!’49 We can apply here to Beaumont what Graham Parry, in his informative recent study of The Arts of the Anglican Counter-Reformation, says of Crashaw, whose subjects appropriate ‘the riches of the Catholic Counter-Reformation … making them available to the avant-garde of English worshippers who were regaining “that ancient heat” towards God “wherewith whole showls of Martyrs once did burn,” as Herbert phrased it when he was lamenting the lack of religious ardour as a young man back in 1609.’50 Indeed, anyone familiar with Crashaw’s style will have picked up on similar sensuous motifs – dews and baths, sweetness and perfume, ecstatic death – in Beaumont’s laudatio of Teresa. ‘O how least a death would it be, in her writings to die!’ he sighs in conclusion. Crashaw improves upon these excitations, winding them up to a mysteriousness in the incantatory coda to ‘The Flaming Heart,’ another of his Teresa poems. Of this ‘sweet incendiary,’ he there intones mesmerically: By all thy dow’r of lights and fires; By all the eagle in thee, all the dove; By all thy lives and deaths of love; By all thy large draughts of intellectual day, And by thy thirsts of love more large than they; By all thy brim-filled bowls of fierce desire By thy last morning’s draught of liquid fire; By the full kingdom of that final kiss That seized thy parting soul, and sealed thee his; By all the heav’ns thou hast in him (Fair sister of the seraphim!) By all of him we have in thee; Leave nothing of my self in me. Let me so read thy life, that I Unto all life of mine may die. (lines 85, 94–108)

Five years after Beaumont’s oration, a fire was blazing in Cambridge,



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but it was not the all-consuming Teresian ‘bowls’/bowels of liquid fire that he and his co-religionist Crashaw had sought to ignite. In the spring of 1643, Cromwell’s army took control of the city. By December the iconoclast William Dowsing was hard at work, methodically stripping the college chapels and city churches of their ‘Monuments of Superstition and Idolatry.’ Dowsing’s first stop, just before Christmas, was the new Peterhouse chapel. Consecrated in 1632, it featured what Parry describes as ‘the most complete Laudian interior in Cambridge.’51 ‘Domus ô dulcissima rerum!’ (‘Sweetest house in the world!’) Crashaw calls it in one of the two Latin poems that he wrote soliciting funds for its completion.52 There is some evidence that Crashaw himself had a hand in decorating the chapel, which included the prize possession of an incense boat that had belonged to Andrewes.53 Dowsing, armed with his proof text scriptures for destroying idols, records in his journal having had a field day there: We went to Peter-house, 1643, December 21, with officers and soldiers….   We pulled down two mighty great angells with wings, and divers other angells, and the 4 Evangelists, and Peter, with his keies on the chapell door (see Ezek. viii. 36, 37 [?recte vi.3–7] and ix.6; Isa. xxvii.9 and xxx.22) and about a hundred chirubims and angels, and divers superstitious letters in gold.   … About the walls was written in lating, We praise the ever; and on some of the images was written, Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus; on others, Gloria Dei, & Gloria Patri, and Non nobis Domine others, and six angels on the windowe.54

There was yet more for the breaking at Little St Mary’s, the parish church adjacent to the Peterhouse, where Crashaw’s ‘thronged sermons’ ‘on each Sunday and Holiday … ravished more like Poems … scattering not so much Sentences [as] Exstasies.’55 Here is Dowsing again: ‘We brake downe 60 superstitious pictures, some popes and crucifixes, with God the Father sitting in a chayer and holding a globe in his hand.’56 Perhaps some of the religious art pulled down from around Crashaw’s pulpit at Little St Mary’s was hauled off to be burned publicly in the marketplace. This public bonfire of ‘Popish Idols of the University’ was lit,’ recounts the anonymously authored Querela Cantabrigiensis; or, A remonstrance by way of apologie for the banished members of the late flourishing University of Cambridge (1647), by the troops quartered in town, who fed its flames with ‘all sorts of pictures, were they but paper prints of the

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twelve Apostles’ ransacked from the Fellows’ chambers. The soldiers also broke or stole what furniture that they found there. Worse, they sold ‘away our Books at a tenth part of their value,’ complains the ‘said sufferers’ of Querela Cantabrigiensis. Things were so dire that ‘a Scholar could have small security from being stoned or affronted as he walke the streets.’57 By then, however, Crashaw, soon to be officially deprived of his Peterhouse Fellowship, had already fled his contentful little Cambridge kingdom, winding his way toward Rome.

‘They found him in the Temple’ Yet Crashaw’s poetry remains intelligible in both Anglican and Roman Catholic contexts, and this, I would say, not so much because of its utopic aim to supersede all worldly contingencies and identifications and to instead speak (like his beloved St Teresa) only heaven’s language. It is rather because this English scatterer of ecstasies is far more devotional than theological in his religious orientation. Lest I sound as if I am now echoing the critics whose views of Crashaw I here have been contesting, I should say that devotion without a theology seems nearly inconceivable to me. What I mean in claiming that Crashaw is principally a devotional writer is that – in striking contrast to his father, William Crashaw (more of him in a moment) – he was not much of a religious disputant.58 It is Richard’s general avoidance of controversy, coupled with his aspirations to a more universalist Christianity, that lends most of the poetry in Steps to the Temple so readily to repackaging as Roman Catholic. I am referring to the way in which Carmen Deo Nostro, the ‘Catholic’ collection of Crashaw’s verse, comprises poems that had all first appeared in some form or other in the 1648 expanded second edition of Steps of the Temple. The only new work here is the opening one, directed ‘To the Noblest and best of Ladies, the Countess of Denbigh. Persuading her to resolution in religion, and to render herself without further delay into the Communion of the Catholic Church.’ This carpe diem poem too is a devotional – not theological – work, one that, notwithstanding its proselytizing title, makes no case for the Roman church over the English one. Rather, its energies are directed, in typical Crashavian fashion, toward inspiring the addressee to surrender to Christ in his guise as a heavenly lover: ‘Yield then, O yield, that love may win / The fort at last, and let life in’ (lines 63–4). The Latin title and Paris imprint of Carmen Deo Nostro posthumously readdresses Crashaw’s English religious verse to an international Catholic readership – just as the title of Steps to the Temple places its author in an



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Anglican literary tradition via its reference to Herbert’s Temple. Herbert, a graduate and for a time also a Fellow of Trinity College, was closely identified with Cambridge, even after he gave up his place there to become the parson of a small country parish in Bemerton. And it was the university press that put Herbert’s poems in print in 1633, the year that he died. Beginning with The Temple’s second printing, the designation ‘Late Oratour of the University of Cambridge’ appears under Herbert’s byline on the book’s title page. Steps to the Temple correspondingly makes a point of its author’s own Cambridge pedigree, noting on its title page that Crashaw had been ‘sometimes of Pembroke Hall, and late Fellow of S. Peters Coll. in Cambridge.’ This credential, along with the volume’s allusive title, sets the stage for the proclamation to come in the book’s unsigned preface that ‘Here’s Herbert’s second, but equal’ (A3r). Crashaw, the preface continues, ‘hath retrieved poetry of late, and returned it up to its primitive use.’ ‘Primitive use’ evokes the pious practices of the early church. But here that phrase also further affiliates Crashaw with Herbert, who is described in The Temple’s own preface as ‘a companion to the primitive Saints, and a pattern or more for the age he lived in’ (¶2v). Those words were penned by Herbert’s Cambridge friend Nicholas Ferrar, to whom he had entrusted the manuscript of The Temple. Ferrar is otherwise best known as the founder of the cloistral community at Little Gidding, some thirty miles outside Cambridge in Huntingdonshire. Crashaw was among those known to ride over from the university to participate in its round-the-clock devotional programme of formal prayer, music, and a nightly vigil, the last said to be added at Herbert’s recommendation. Little Gidding is likely to be the inspiration for Crashaw’s ‘Description of a Religious Life,’ itself an influence on Eliot’s more famous work about this Anglican holy place in Four Quartets. ‘Here’s Herbert’s second, but equal.’ Steps to the Temple advances a filial claim on behalf of the volume’s author. It names Crashaw successor to Herbert – a son and heir of sorts – and his poetry a worthy inheritor of that revered poet-priest’s mantle. But even as the prefatory material of Steps to the Temple patterns itself after that of The Temple, the volume’s title also calls to mind something of Richard Crashaw’s actual father, William. Another Cambridge-educated divine (he was a graduate and former Fellow of St John’s College) and a prominent preacher and religious author in his own right, William Crashaw was for a time associated with a different Temple: the Temple Church in London. He held there the important post of preacher or lecturer to the Inner and Middle Temples when his only child, Richard, was born in 1612 or early 1613.59

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Along with his preaching, the elder Crashaw was known for such antiCatholic jeremiads as Romish Forgeries and Falsifications (1606) and The Jesuites Gospell (1610), which was posthumously reissued as The Bespotted Jesuite (1641). He determinatively set out in these works to expose the treachery and fraudulence of the post-Tridentine Roman church, while at the same time establishing a historical continuity between the religious culture of the Reformed church in England and the Catholicism of the early church fathers.60 His most popular title, Newes from Italy of a Second Moses (1608), an account of the Protestant conversion of an Italian marquess, went through multiple seventeenth-century editions. I referred earlier to a complaint made to the Pope by Kenelm Digby, Henrietta Maria’s representative in Rome, protesting that nothing had yet been done on behalf of the new convert, Richard Crashaw. This memorandum notably identifies Richard by way of his father William as ‘the learned son of a famous heretic.’61 In addition to his own polemical writings, that ‘famous heretic’ William Crashaw edited for publication by Cambridge University Press several texts by the Puritan theologian William Perkins. He also reworked select Catholic writings for a Protestant English audience, including a new edition of John Healey’s translation of Augustine’s City of God (1620) and his own translation of The Complaint or Dialogue, betwixt the Soule and the Bodie of a damned man (1613), a work then supposed to be by Bernard of Clairvaux, ‘from a nightly vision of his.’ Another important example is his Manuall for True Catholickes. A Handful or Rather a Heartfull of holy meditations and Prayers (1611), which culls confessions, meditations, and prayers from ‘the most misty times of Popery,’ presenting them in a versified, dual Latin-English edition.62 Benjamin Laney, Master of the High Church Pembroke College when Richard was there, contributed laudatory verses to its 1631 re-edition. William Crashaw’s Manuall for True Catholickes reminds us of a tradition of devotional works that are religiously pliable: catholic texts whose meanings can be made to translate across the confessional divide. The Crashaws – father and son – were, each in his own way, practitioners of that art. Preacher, Anglican controversialist, Christian antiquary, translator, editor, and poet, William Crashaw was also a devoted bibliophile. During his tenure at the Temple Church, he amassed a private library of hundreds of manuscripts and some 4,000 printed books. Most were religious works, including many by Catholic authors, among them Bernard of Clairvaux’s sermons on the Song of Songs and Catherine of Siena’s ‘Life.’ (Did the son, one wonders, first derive his taste for Continental



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Catholic writers, especially the mystics, from his father’s books?) To accommodate his burgeoning collection, William Crashaw spent £240 building (without permission) an extension to his official lodgings over part of the Temple Church. Disputes concerning his stipend led William Crashaw to leave the Temple for a better-paying parish post back home in Yorkshire, before he eventually returned to London and the vicarage of St Mary, Whitechapel. The move seemed to have necessitated selling off much of his personal library, which he offered for purchase first to the Templars and then to the Royal Library. Both declined, but he finally persuaded a fellow Johnian, Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton (Shakespeare’s early patron), to acquire the bulk of his collection on behalf of St John’s. He then prevailed upon the college to build a new library – now called the Old Library – to house the gift of books. Like Southampton, William Crashaw was enthusiastic about the colonial enterprise, an interest that he also held in common with his fellow Templars. He was an investor (as Little Gidding founder Nicholas Ferrar would be) in the Virginia Company, and his name appears in the 1609 charter as one of its incorporators. He also delivered a sermon before members of the Company in 1610, which was printed that year as A Sermon Preached in London before the right honorable the Lord Lawarre, … and the rest of the adventurers in that plantation, with the running title A New-yeeres Gift to Virginea (London, 1610).63 Moreover, the senior Crashaw used his influential London pulpit to help publicize the discovery of the Bermudas. Ministering amidst his world of books, William Crashaw enjoyed for a time at the Temple Church what he took to be ‘the most comfortable and delightfull company for a scholler, that (out of the Universities) this Kingdom yeelds.’64 Three decades later, his similarly bookish, Temple-born son Richard would sound the pleasures and comforts of academic life in like terms – just as he was about to be deprived of them and formally ejected by order of Parliament from his Peterhouse Fellowship. ‘No man then my self holds more high the humble scepter of such a little contentfull kingdom,’ he declares of it in a passage that I have already quoted from Crawshaw’s only extant letter. This letter, written in 1643, shows that Crashaw, then an unhappy refugee in Protestant Leyden, longed for nothing so much as his restoration to his little Cambridge kingdom – that, as well as, of course, ‘the hoped “Resurrection of Royalty.”’ ‘I have I assure you,’ he writes to his letter’s unnamed male addressee – perhaps John Ferrar, Nicholas’s brother; or Beaumont – ‘no desire to be absolutely and irrespectively rid of my beloved Patrimony in

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St Peter.’65 ‘But what now remaines to be don,’ he here wonders movingly, ‘with this desolate thing, this that is left of mee; what must I doe? what must I bee?’66 Crashaw obliquely raises the possibility of a Roman conversion at the letter’s end, but only by way of saying, ‘I am not at present purposed for fixing.’67 In view of Crashaw’s ardent desire to be restored to Cambridge and hence to remain within the English church, I want to return to the English contexts for his poetry, while not setting aside the Continental ones either. Not nearly enough has been made of the tributary titling of his first book of English poems after Herbert’s Temple – this least of all by Herbert scholars, who seem little inclined to acknowledge the extravagant Crashaw as part of their sainted poet’s legacy. Crashaw himself had already been seen in the city of St Peter’s by the time that the first edition of Steps to the Temple appeared in the bookstalls outside St Paul’s in London. We do not know how involved he was in the matters of its publication, nor is there evidence that calling his book after Herbert’s was Crashaw’s own idea. It could have been that of the ‘author’s friend’ who wrote the preface, or even of Humphrey Moseley, the book’s publisher. If the title is Moseley’s contrivance, he may have been put on to it by one of the works that he was herein about to publish, called ‘On Mr G. Herbert’s Book Entitled the Temple of Sacred Poems, Sent to a Gentlewoman.’ Know you fair, on what you look; Divinest love lies in this book: Expecting fire from your eyes, To kindle this his sacrifice. When your hands untie these strings, Think you have an angel by th’ wings. (lines 1–6)

The poem’s concluding lines play on the word owe – which can mean either indebted to or own – as Crashaw lays claim to Herbert’s book even as he gives it away as a gift: And though Herbert’s name do owe These devotions, fairest; know That while I lay them on the shrine Of your white hand, they are mine. (lines 15–18)

Crashaw’s gift poem is itself in part a pastiche of Herbertian poetic



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motifs, among them divine love, sacrifice, angel wings, and ‘perfumed prayer’ (line 10). Moseley did not publish Herbert, but he was responsible for, in addition to Crashaw’s Steps to the Temple, single-author editions of Abraham Cowley, Edmund Waller, James Shirley, William Cartwright, John Suckling, Thomas Carew, and John Denham. Rather than pegging Crashaw as the odd man out among the English writers of his time, we might instead see what is to be gained interpretively from reading him alongside these royalist poets, just as we should own up to him as an one of the principal inheritors, along with Henry Vaughan (another of Moseley’s authors) and Thomas Traherne, of Herbert.68 Moseley also published, less than a year before Steps to the Temple, Milton’s 1645 Poems, and I conclude my brief for reading Crashaw comparatively and contextually with his relation to this most famous of all Cambridge poets. In terms of the kinds of lyric verse that it contains – sacred ode, hymn, psalm, paraphrase, elegy – Crashaw’s Steps has more in common with Milton’s Poems than with Herbert’s Temple. The Milton and Crashaw volumes also both include English and Latin works, as well as sacred and secular verse. (In Crashaw’s book, the latter are grouped together under the heading The Delights of the Muses.) Yet even as we here discover unexpected affinities of form and subject between Crashaw and Milton – their nativity and circumcision poems; their university occasional verse; their Latin elegies on Andrewes; their Powder Day commemorations – we are also bound to feel stylistic differences. Just as no one would ever ascribe to Crashaw the plain style poetics customarily predicated of Herbert, there is probably no book to be written on ‘Crashaw’s Grand Style,’ as Christopher Ricks has done for Milton.69 Crashaw’s conceits and images tend to be far more ornate and fantastic than Milton’s, though the latter, as we have glimpsed, has his moments. That Milton – the early one – may have been an influence on Crashaw. But Crashaw also seems to have been on influence on the late Milton – and this no less than on the Milton of Paradise Lost (1667). Crashaw’s 1646 long poem Sospetto d’ Herode (The Suspicion of Herod) sets out a biblical story – that of King Herod’s slaughter of the Holy Innocents – with classical trappings. Consider its styling of a brooding Satan and the echo chamber of Milton’s hell. ‘Of sturdy adamant is [Satan’s] strong chain’ (st. 18.8) in Crashaw, and ‘In adamantine chains’ he is likewise bound in Milton (1.48). In Crashaw, Satan ‘tossed his troubled eyes’ (st. 19.3), while ‘round [he] … throws his baleful eyes’ in Milton (1.56). ‘What

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though I missed my blow? yet I struck high, / And to dare something, is some victory,’ Crashaw’s Satan encourages himself (st. 28.7–8); ‘What though the field be lost? / All is not lost’ (1.105–6), says Milton’s fallen angel, who later reflects, ‘Which if not victory is yet revenge’ (2.105). ‘Here thou art Lord alone / Boundless and absolute: hell is thine own,’ Crashaw’s Satan consoles himself (st. 34.7–8). ‘Here we may reign secure, and in my choice / To reign is worth ambition though in hell: / Better to reign in hell, than serve in heaven,’ Milton’s Satan likewise ponders in one of the most famous passages in Paradise Lost (1.261–3). And so on.70 Crashaw’s poem – a fragment, really – which I have suggested is a trace influence on Milton’s ‘Puritan’ epic, is itself a translation of the first book of a mini-biblical epic by the baroque Italian poet Marino, the imitation of whom Johnson deems to be where the metaphysical poets start to go wrong.71 The importance of Marino to the metaphysicals is another signpost to the highly transitive relations in the period between Roman Catholic and Protestant poetics. These circuits of influence and imitation also point to how redrawing the boundaries around Crashaw also means redrawing those around (among others) Herbert and Milton. For all this, Crashaw flaunts his Counter-Reformation enthusiasms like no other seventeenth-century English poet. He may, then, be too catholic to be simply ‘the other Herbert of our Church, for making Poetry,’ as his first biographer David Lloyd (echoing the claims of Steps to the Temple’s preface) pronounces him.72 At the same time, the English, specifically Cambridge, contexts of Crashaw’s poetry – of which both Herbert and Milton are, though in different ways, a part – can hardly be overemphasized. Crashaw developed his own Style, but it was fostered in his Alma Mater, even as it was fed from abroad.

NOTES   1 Edmund Gosse, ‘Richard Crashaw,’ Cornhill Magazine 47 (1883): 424–38; repr. in Seventeenth-Century Studies (London: William Heinemann, 1914). I cite from the latter; see 175, 182. The reference is to Shelley’s letter to John Gisborne, 22 October 1821, in The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964), 2:363: ‘As to real flesh and blood, you know that I do not deal in those articles; you might as well go to a gin shop for a leg of mutton as expect anything human or earthly from me.’ My essay’s epigraph comes from D.A. Miller, Jane Austen, or the Secret of Style (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 8.



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  2 Gosse, ‘Richard Crashaw,’ 157 (‘hysterical’); Percy H. Osmond, ‘Crashaw and Beaumont,’ in The Mystical Poets of the English Church (New York: Macmillan, 1919), 125 (‘meretricious’ and ‘cheap’); John M. Wallace, review of The Wit of Love: Donne, Carew, Crashaw, Marvell, by Louis L. Martz, Renaissance Quarterly 24 (1971): 282 (‘repulsive’). I have relied in part on the following useful guides to Crashaw’s colourful critical reception: John R. Roberts, Richard Crashaw: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism, 1632– 1980 (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1985); John R. Roberts, ‘Richard Crashaw: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism, 1981–2002,’ John Donne Journal 24 (2005): 1–228; and John R. Roberts and Lorraine M. Roberts, ‘Crashavian Criticism: A Brief Interpretive History,’ in New Perspectives on the Life and Art of Richard Crashaw, ed. John R. Roberts, 1–291 (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1990).   3 Douglas Bush, English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century 1600–1660, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962), 147.   4 Douglas Bush, English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century 1600–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1945), 142. (This gastronomic passage is omitted from the second edition of Bush’s book cited above.)   5 George Walton Williams, ed., The Complete Poetry of Richard Crashaw (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1970), xv; Ruth C. Wallerstein, Richard Crashaw: A Study in Style and Poetic Development (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1959), 112.   6 Robert Martin Adams, ‘Taste and Bad Taste in Metaphysical Poetry: Richard Crashaw and Dylan Thomas,’ Hudson Review 8 (1955): 70.   7 T.S. Eliot, ‘Crashaw,’ in The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry, ed. and intro. Ronald Schuchard (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 162.   8 Mario Praz, The Flaming Heart (New York: Norton, 1958), 245.   9 Austin Warren, Richard Crashaw: A Study in Baroque Sensibility (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1939), 201–2. 10 Frank J. Warnke, ‘Metaphysical Poetry and the European Context,’ in Metaphysical Poetry, ed. Malcolm Bradbury and David Palmer. Stratford-uponAvon Studies 11 (London: Arnold, 1970), 265. 11 Frank J. Warnke, European Metaphysical Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), 15. 12 For a discussion of Crashaw’s queerness in religion, gender, and the erotic, see Richard Rambuss, ‘Pleasure and Devotion: The Body of Jesus and Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric,’ in Queering the Renaissance, ed. Jonathan Goldberg, 253–79 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994). 13 See Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979). Lewalski, as I discuss

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elsewhere, excludes Crashaw from her study on the grounds that his style and sources are insufficiently English. See 12, 196–7.   I am far from alone in resisting the treatment of Crashaw’s conversion as the signal event of his life and the explanatory context for all his writing. For every critic like Robert T. Petersson, who concludes that Crashaw was ‘born in the wrong place, living there honorably, quietly, introvertedly,’ until ‘finally following his soul “home” to the continent’ (The Art of Ecstasy: Teresa, Bernini, and Crashaw [New York: Atheneum, 1970], 116), or George Parfitt, who heralds Crashaw as ‘the main English seventeenth-century Catholic poet’ (‘The Lyric,’ in English Poetry of the Seventeenth Century [London: Longman, 1985], 51), there are those like Thomas F. Healy, who bases his excellent study ‘on the premise that Crashaw’s poetry developed from the religious, intellectual, and poetic environment he lived in at Cambridge between 1641 and 1643, an environment not “foreign” to the poet’s own background or poetic development’ (Richard Crashaw [Leiden: Brill, 1986], 2). See also David Reid: ‘Crashaw’s exotic talent is often said to be unEnglish. It was, nevertheless, nurtured in an academic environment intensely involved in English religious politics. Only if we judge Anglo-Catholicism unEnglish would it follow that Crashaw’s religion was imported from the Continental Counter-Reformation’ (The Metaphysical Poets [Essex: Longman, 2000], 142). John N. Wall is even more antagonistic to those who account for Crashaw’s devotional and artistic sensibilities principally in terms of Continental Counter-Reformation spirituality. See his strongly argued essay: ‘Crashaw, Catholicism, and Englishness: Defining Religious Identity,’ in Renaissance Papers 2004, ed. Christopher Cobb and M. Thomas Hester, 107–26 (Durham: Boydell and Brewer, 2004). ‘Nor,’ writes Wall, ‘is it at all clear that, no matter how hard Crashaw might have tried to become Catholic, he really succeeded’ (121). ‘In fact,’ Wall further asserts, ‘the poetry he wrote after conversion contains elements that seem remarkably “English,” suggesting that Crashaw’s religious formation in an English context formed his brief experience of Catholicism rather than the other way around’ (108).   Though they supply a much-needed corrective to Lewalski et al., Healy’s, Reid’s, and Wall’s anglicizing readings of Crashaw concurrently seem to me to underplay the poet’s Catholicism, which is ever on the verge of being in excess of the ‘Anglo-Catholicism’ of his time. Moreover, in the end Crashaw takes a step that his Laudian compeers – Joseph Beaumont, Abraham Cowley, and the Master of Peterhouse John Cosin – don’t, which is to convert to Rome. With respect to the question of Crashaw’s style – that is, whether to take it as Catholic or High Church, whether as foreign or English enough – this essay, it will become clear in these pages, wants to have its cake and eat



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it too. This is to say that the last thing one should care to do with Crashaw is to restore him his place in the canons of English literature and religion by discounting any of the powerfully expressive otherness – indeed, strangeness – of his voice, a voice that remains distinctive no matter what contexts for it one supplies. 14 Warren, Richard Crashaw, 61. 15 Rosemond Tuve, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery: Renaissance Poetic and Twentieth-Century Critics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947), 131n18. 16 Reid, Metaphysical Poets, 142, 145. See also 144: ‘Unlike Donne’s paradoxes, Crashaw’s rarely have an intellectual point.’ 17 Herbert J.C. Grierson, ‘Humanism and the Churches,’ in Cross Currents in English Literature of the XVIIth Century (London: Chatto & Windus, 1929), 182. 18 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Notes on Crashaw’ [ca. 1807], in Coleridge’s Miscellaneous Criticism, ed. Thomas Middleton Raysor (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936), 279. 19 Eliot, ‘Crashaw,’ 163. 20 C.A. Patrides, Figures in a Renaissance Context, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989), 148. 21 Petersson, Art of Ecstasy, 124. 22 Patrides, Figures, 147. 23 Eliot, ‘Crashaw,’ 178. 24 Both a facsimile and a transcription of Crashaw’s letter are available in The Poems English, Latin and Greek of Richard Crashaw, 2nd ed., ed. L.C. Martin (Oxford: Clarendon, 1957), xxvii–xxxi. (I will return to this letter below.) 25 See ibid., xxxiiii. 26 John Bargrave, ‘Joann. Baptista Tit. S. Petri ad Vincula S.R.E. Pr’br. Card. Pallotus Picenus. XIX Novemb. MDCXXIX,’ printed in Pope Alexander the Seventh and the College of Cardinals, with a Catalogue of Dr Bargrave’s Museum, ed. James Craigie Robertson, Camden Society (Westminster: Nichols, 1867), 92:37. 27 See Thomas Carre’s ‘Crashaw the Anagram: He was Car,’ one of the two prefatory poems that he contributes as editor to Crashaw’s posthumous Carmen Deo Nostro (Paris, 1652): ‘Thus dying did he live, yet lived to die / In th’ Virgin’s lap, to whom he did apply / His virgin thoughts and words, and thence was styled / By foes, the chaplain of the Virgin mild’ (lines 35–8). (I have here modernized spelling and typography.) 28 Cowley, ‘On the Death of Mr Crashaw,’ lines 37–46, in Abraham Cowley:

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Poems, ed. A.R. Waller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1905). Cowley’s elegy then turns into an apology for Crashaw’s conversion to Rome: ‘Pardon, my Mother Church, if I consent / That Angels led him when from thee he went, / For even in Error sure no Danger is / When joyn’d with so much Piety as His’ (lines 47–50). In a suitably Crashavian move, Cowley allows devotion to trump theology. 29 Bargrave, Pope Alexander the Seventh, 37. 30 Richard Strier, ‘Herbert and Tears,’ English Literary History 46 (1979): 239. See also Strier’s ‘Changing the Object: Herbert and Excess,’ George Herbert Journal 2 (1978): 24–37, in which he likewise takes to task Louis Martz’s claim in The Poetry of Meditation, rev. ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), 202, that ‘there is more in common between Herbert and Crashaw than is ordinarily conceded.’ 31 Elisha K. Kane, Gongorism and the Golden Age: A Study in Exuberance and Unrestraint in the Arts (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1928), 151. 32 Herbert, ‘The Sacrifice,’ in The Works of George Herbert, ed. F.E. Hutchinson, 26–34 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1941). (The single variant of the refrain comes in the poem’s final lines: ‘Onely let others say, when I am dead, / Never was grief like mine’ [lines 251–2].) 33 Crashaw, ‘Our Lord in his Circumcision to his Father,’ in Steps to the Temple (London, 1646, 1648), lines 1–12. I have modernized spelling and typography in Crashaw’s verse throughout. Line numbers of individual poems are provided parenthetically, except when the poem is cited in full. This discussion of Crashaw’s circumcision poetry and its contexts reprises in part my treatment of it in Richard Rambuss, ‘Milton’s Purple Poetry,’ in Milton through the Centuries, ed. Gábor Ittzés and Miklós Péti (Budapest: Károli Gáspár Reformatus Egyetem, 2011). 34 Kane, Gongorism and the Golden Age, 151. 35 See Crashaw’s ‘An Hymn for the Circumcision Day of our Lord,’ in Steps to the Temple, which is revised and retitled in Carmen Deo Nostro as ‘New Year’s Day.’ Crashaw’s Epigrammatum Sacrorum Liber (Cambridge, 1634) offers three Latin epigrams on this sacred subject: ‘Christus circumcisus ad Patrem,’ ‘In sanguinem circumcisionis Dominicae,’ and ‘Luc. 2. Christus infans Patri sistitur in templo.’ Martin’s Poems … of Richard Crashaw includes another Latin circumcision epigram – ‘Ah ferus, ah culter!’ – taken from a manuscript. As for Herrick, see ‘The New-yeeres Gift, or Circumcisions Song,’ ‘Another New-yeeres Gift, or Song for the Circumcision,’ and ‘To his Saviour. The New yeers gift,’ printed among his ‘Noble Numbers’ in Hesperides (London, 1648). On Christ’s circumcision as a topos in seventeenth-century English poetry, see



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Jim Ellis, ‘The Wit of Circumcision, the Circumcision of Wit,’ in The Wit of Seventeenth-Century Poetry, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth, 62–77 (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1995). 36 John Milton, ‘Upon the Circumcision,’ in John Milton: The Major Works, ed. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), lines 10–11, 25–8. 37 Samuel Johnson, ‘Cowley,’ in Johnson’s Lives of the Poets: A Selection, ed. J.P. Hardy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), 12–13. 38 I am indebted to Martin Elsky for putting me on to this point. 39 Montaigne, Travel Journal, in The Complete Works of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967), 944–6. 40 Ibid., 946. 41 Ibid., 945. 42 Arthur Clutton-Brock, ‘The Fantastic School of English Poetry,’ in The Cambridge Modern History, ed. A.W. Ward et al. (London: Macmillan, 1906), 4:772 (‘fountain’); The Complete Works of Richard Crashaw (1872–3), ed. Alexander B. Grosart, The Fuller Worthies Library (New York: AMS Press, 1983), 2:lxx (‘so emotional’). 43 This is also the point of a well-argued essay by Clifford Davidson on ‘The Anglican Setting of Richard Crashaw’s Devotional Verse,’ Ben Jonson Journal 8 (2001): 259–76; see esp. 260–2. 44 Crashaw, ‘An Apology for the Foregoing Hymn,’ lines 21–3. I discuss Crashaw’s transnational, trans-confessional devotional poetics at greater length in a companion piece to this essay: see Richard Rambuss, ‘Ecstasy and the Cosmopolitan Soul,’ in Ut Pictura Meditatio: The Meditative Image in Northern Art, ed. Ralph Dekoninck, Walter S. Melion, and Agnes GuideroniBurlé (forthcoming). 45 Alison Shell, Catholicism, Controversy, and the English Literary Imagination, 1558–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 95. On Crashaw’s literary experimentalism, see Yvor Winters, In Defense of Reason (Denver: Swallow, 1947), 131–3: ‘He is experimental in the ways in which he pushes metaphor beyond the bounds of custom and frequently even of reason. Crashaw is noted for his experiments: the large amount of poetry in which the traditional predominates and the experimental is under full control is too seldom appreciated.’ 46 Shell, Catholicism, 93. 47 Ibid., 57. 48 ‘An Apology,’ lines 18–20. Lowell Gallagher argues a similar case in his sparkling essay on ‘Crashaw and Religious Bias in the Literary Canon,’ in Early Modern English Poetry: A Critical Companion, ed. Patrick Cheney,

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Andrew Hadfield, and Garrett A. Sullivan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007): ‘If the history of critical reception of Crashaw teaches us anything, it is that one of the distinct challenges of reading Crashaw’s poetry comes from observing its migratory flight between fixed and fluid notions of confessional identity, poetic craft, and literary reputation’ (280). Crashaw, Gallagher further explains, ‘wrote poems whose subject matter and technical range defy restrictive notions of what it might mean to be at once English and Protestant: Marian devotions, Eucharistic songs, imitations of innovative Spanish and Italian poets, suave meditations on biblical saints (Mary Magdalene), as well as modern – and Catholic – ones (Teresa of Avila)’ (281). 49 Cited and translated in Warren, Richard Crashaw, 43–4. A.O. Reesink’s article ‘Joseph Beaumont’s Unpublished Oration, Peterhouse, Cambridge, 1638’ (LIAS: Journal of Early Modern Intellectual Culture and Its Sources 24 [1997]: 197–211) reproduces the entire speech in Latin, which Reesink suggests may have been a kind of commencement address (199). 50 Graham Parry, The Arts of the Anglican Counter-Reformation: Glory, Laud and Honour (Suffolk: Boydell, 2006), 143. 51 Ibid., 77. 52 Crashaw, ‘Vovita Domus Petrensis Pro Domo Dei,’ line 13. See also his ‘Ejusdem In caeterorum Operum difficili Parturitione Gemitus.’ Both poems are added to the expanded 1648 re-edition of Steps to the Temple. 53 See Martin, Poems … of Richard Crashaw,’ xxii–xxiii. Parry reports the detail about Andrewes’s incense boat in The Arts of the Anglican Counter-Reformation, 77. 54 The Journal of William Dowsing: Iconoclasm in East Anglia during the English Civil War, ed. Trevor Cooper (Suffolk: Boydell, 2001), 155–6. See also Julie Spraggon, Puritan Iconoclasm during the English Civil War (Suffolk: Boydell, 2003), esp. chap. 7, ‘Iconoclasm at the Universities.’ 55 David Lloyd, Memoires of the Lives, Actions, Sufferings & Deaths of Those Noble, Reverend, and Excellent Personages, That Suffered … [for] The Protestant Religion, And … Allegiance to their Soveraigne, In our late Interstine Wars, … (London, 1668), 619. 56 Journal of William Dowsing, 192. 57 Querela Cantabrigiensis or, A Remonstrance by way of Apologie, For the banished Members of the late flourishing University of Cambridge by some of the said sufferers (England, 1647), 13. John Barwick, a fellow of St John’s, is presumed to have been one of its authors. 58 There are, however, some notable exceptions, among them Crashaw’s antianti-ceremonialist ‘On a Treatise of Charity.’ Reprinted in revised form in



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Steps to the Temple, this poem was first published as a dedicatory piece in Robert Shelford’s controversial Five Pious and Learned Discourses (Cambridge, 1635), a work strongly Arminian in its emphasis on love (including proper ceremonial comportment during worship) in conjunction with faith. See Healy, Richard Crashaw, 66–75, for a nuanced account of Crashaw’s views on religious practice. 59 Although he does not mention Richard’s Templar father William, Umberto Eco picks up on the Crashaw Temple association in his mind-bending seriocomic novel Foucault’s Pendulum (Orlando: Harcourt, 1989). There ‘Richard Crashaw’ appears as a middle term in an arcanal riff that ricochets from Rosicrucianism to cinema: ‘I would wake up in the middle of the night,’ reports the novel’s narrator, ‘with the realization, for example, that René des Cartes could make R.C. and that he has been overenergetic in seeking and then denying having found the Rosicrucians…. And who had celebrated the enchantment of the Gothic? René de Chateaubriand. And who, in Bacon’s time, wrote Steps to the Temple? Richard Crashaw. And what about Ranieri de’ Calzabigi, René Char, Raymond Chandler? And Rick of Casablanca?’ (450). 60 See P.J. Wallis’s William Crashawe: The Sheffield Puritan (n.p., 1963), and ‘The Library of William Crashawe,’ Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 2 (1956): 212–28. 61 See The Poems … of Richard Crashaw, ed. Martin, xxxiv–xxxv. 62 William Crashaw, A Manuall for True Catholickes (London, 1611), 81. 63 See William Crashaw’s preface to Alexander Whitaker’s Good Newes from Virginia (London, 1613). See also Joseph Quincy Adams’s introduction to his facsimile edition of Silvester Jourdain’s A Discovery of the Barmudas (1610) (New York: Scholars’s Facsimiles and Reprints, 1940), ix–x. 64 William Crashaw, Romish Forgeries and Falsifications (London, 1606), cited from his prefatory address to the ‘whole Societies of the two Temples,’ sig. ¶ 3. 65 Poems … of Richard Crashaw, ed. Martin, xxix. 66 Ibid., xxx. 67 Ibid., xxxi. 68 Moseley is lauded in a prefatory poem to his edition of Comedies, TragiComedies, with other Poems, by Mr William Cartwright (London, 1651) by John Leigh for bringing to light the ‘high Atchievements’ of ‘Wits who best knew how to write,’ as ‘times approach wherein Wit will be dear’ (sig.*1–*1v). Arthur Marotti comments, ‘In the midst of the austere Commonwealth/ Protectorate period, Moseley served to preserve the courtly and Royalist aesthetic’ (Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric [Ithaca: Cor-

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nell University Press, 1995], 260). The publication in England of Crashaw’s works, I am suggesting, should be seen as part of that aesthetic endeavour. 69 Christopher B. Ricks, Milton’s Grand Style (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963). 70 Though mostly now forgotten, the question of Milton’s borrowings from Crashaw was fairly widely noted and debated in earlier criticism. See Austin Warren, ‘The Reputation of Crashaw in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,’ Studies in Philology 31 (1934): 385–407, and Roberts, An Annotated Bibliography … 1632–1980, 29, 33–40, passim. 71 Johnson, ‘Cowley,’ in Lives of the Poets, 14. 72 Lloyd, Memoires, 619.

chapter seven

Alchemy, Repentance, and Recusant Allegory in Robert Southwell’s Saint Peters Complaint GARY KUCHAR

Although Saint Peters Complaint is one of Robert Southwell’s most wellknown and widely discussed poems, in one sense it represents uncharted territory: readers have not yet observed that it unfolds as a sustained alchemical allegory. ‘The burning Babe’ is generally recognized as presenting the conceptually simple, if poetically effective, alchemical conceit that Jesus is the alembic-furnace or fornax tribulationis in which penitent hearts undergo purification, but the numerous and surprisingly involved alchemical allusions structuring Saint Peters Complaint have not received comparable attention.1 The basic conceit of the poem is that Peter is transmuted by Christ’s grace in a way that parallels how the sun’s rays were thought in medieval lapidary lore to refine and convert base minerals into purer substances. From the poem’s prefatory letter to its concluding prayer for grace, Southwell depicts Peter’s repentance according to the various stages involved in the alchemical transformation of a base rock (or petrus) into a refined substance akin to the philosopher’s stone. By tracking the alchemical dimensions of Saint Peters Complaint we will arrive at a much fuller understanding of its major images, allusions, and overall structure, opening up many formal, thematic, and intertextual features that have remained entirely unexplained or only partially understood. The basic analogy structuring the poem rests on the idea that both alchemy and penitence entail a process of refining transmutation that unfolds through discrete stages. Such interpretations of the alchemical opus as analogous to spiritual transformation are doctrinally inoffensive insofar as they rest upon biblical passages in which the refining of precious metals is compared with the testing or proving of the soul, as in Proverbs 17:3: ‘The fining pot is for silver, and the furnace for gold: but

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the Lord trieth the hearts.’2 Southwell’s alchemical analogy presupposes that, like the transformation of formless matter into the philosopher’s stone (a highly purified substance that transforms objects into gold), Peter is transformed from a sinful betrayer of Christ into the saintly rock of the church. By undergoing spiritual refinement that is analogous to alchemical purification, Peter is set to become a significant part of the church’s spiritual ‘compound,’ its salvific combination of Christological and apostolic powers. What is more, the language of alchemical transmutation provides a way of revealing and concealing the poem’s distinctly recusant concerns. As an essentially allegorical mode of representation, alchemical allusion encourages readers to identify occult meanings, including, in this case, references to the experience of Catholics in Elizabethan England and to Catholic doctrine more generally. Consequently, Southwell’s use of alchemy in the poem is an intriguing example of Annabel Patterson’s thesis that in early modern literature ambiguity is ‘a creative and necessary instrument, a social and cultural force of considerable consequence.’ Indeed, Southwell’s Saint Peters Complaint would seem to confirm Patterson’s bold assertion that ‘literature in the early modern period was conceived in part as the way around censorship.’3 A close reading of the poem’s alchemical allusions also significantly challenges current understanding of the poem’s, and thus of Southwell’s, conception of what repentance is. To begin with, the poem’s alchemical dimensions suggest that repentance entails the spiritual assimilation of male and female principles or mysterium coniunctionis that is often construed as the goal of the alchemical opus.4 In this respect, the reading that follows offers some new contexts for understanding Peter’s misogynist remarks early in the poem and the gender politics involved in the use of biblical allusions throughout. Perhaps most importantly, recognizing the alchemical allusions in Saint Peters Complaint will demand that we revise Stanton J. Linden’s influential thesis that Donne and Herbert are the first English poets to employ religious alchemy in a complex and sustained way. Written at least a decade before Donne’s Anniversaries and several years before the Songs and Sonets, Southwell’s Saint Peters Complaint should lead us to reconsider how spiritual alchemy found its way into English Renaissance literature, just as it should inspire us to rethink how literary applications of alchemy functioned within the literature of religious minorities long before nonconforming Protestants adapted it to the very different context of civil war England in the later seventeenth century.5



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Ultimately, Saint Peters Complaint assimilates the alchemical vision of much late Elizabethan poetry into the demands of post-Tridentine penance.6 For Southwell, in other words, what is at stake in the poem’s alchemical structure is the transformative power of poetry itself.

‘The Author to the Reader’ Nancy Pollard Brown has offered the most influential account of the poem’s structure, arguing that the stages of Peter’s repentance correspond to the post-Tridentine sacrament of penance: contrition, confession, the desire to make satisfaction, and the reception of absolution. According to Brown, ‘the structure of the sacrament gives the poem both a unity of form and a profound meaning.’7 Yet the poem’s structure is richer and its spiritual vision more complex than Brown recognized. After all, the penitential process Peter undergoes is systematically figured through the alchemical process of solve et coagula, of dissolution into constitutive elements and congealing into new form. Through this process of uniting opposites, a new being emerges.8 Although references to this alchemical process are initiated in the prefatory letter to the reader, they are made unusually explicit following the apostrophe to Christ’s eyes (lines 325–450) about halfway through the poem. By beginning with this explicit allusion to alchemy, we can better see how earlier and more implicit allusions lead to this shift from Peter’s apparent despair to his avowed compunction, from questioning complaints to a penitential imperative expressing the desire to do satisfaction: Still in the limbeck of thy dolefull breast, These bitter fruites that from thy sinnes do grow: For fuel, selfe accusing thoughtes be best, Use feare, as fire, the coales let penance blow. And seeke none other quintessence but teares, That eyes may shed what entred at thine eares. (457–62)9

A crucial turning point in Peter’s conversion from sinner to saint, this stanza is an unusually explicit example of the poem’s systematic engagement with the idea that the alchemical transmutation of base minerals into a pure quintessence is analogous to the spiritual refining of a sinner’s soul through repentance. This shift is announced by the way the stanza, unlike almost all previous ones, is not characterized by questions,

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complaints, or wondrous stupor, but by an imperative – one that finds Peter playing the metaphorical roles of alchemical vessel (or alembic), of alchemist, and of the object being transmuted to its quintessence, in this case the pure substance of penitential tears. The alchemical dimensions involved in this shift from the passive vessel of the Son’s transmuting rays to an alchemical actor partially responsible for the production of quintessential tears are initiated in the opening stanza to ‘The Author to the Reader.’ Southwell warns readers in the prefatory letter, ‘Muse not to see some mud in cleerest brooke, / They once were brittle mould, that now are Saintes’ (3–4). These lines initiate the recurring image of Peter as brittle, as possessed by what is later referred to as a ‘crasie love’ or easily fractured desire (199). Given that Peter is a ‘brittle mould,’ his repentance will involve him becoming more solid by ‘plunging’ his ‘soule in [the] congealed streams’ (402) of his tears. This depiction of Peter as brittle and in need of congealing initiates his process of solve et coagula, which continues throughout the poem. George Ripley, the major English proponent of alchemy in the Middle Ages, describes how ‘Dissolution on the one side corporal / causeth congelation on the other side spiritual.’10 The process of dissolution and coagulation involves converting a solid body into a fluid substance and then transmuting the fluid substance into a dry and more purified solid body. The structure of Peter’s repentance follows this pattern, as the brittle sinner must melt into tears that ‘thicken in the brimmes of cloudy eies’ (14), thereby rendering him the saintly rock of the church. Southwell thus warns his readers to expect a genuine and complete transformation from sinner to saint, from the base mud of unformed matter to the rarefied stone of alchemical magic, rather than simply to see some mild stains of sin within an inherently saintly person.11 The miraculous nature of this transformation is figured throughout the poem by rendering the ‘brittle mould’ of Peter’s soul as both the object being transmuted (the rock or petrus) and the vessel in which the transmutation occurs (the alembic). That Peter is both vessel and substance is intimated by the reference to the alchemical mould or ‘container into which molten metal is cast in a foundry.’12 As Abraham observes, the use of the term mould in this alchemical sense helps explain why ‘the work of the alchemical opus is sometimes compared to the making of bread – the kneading of the dough or paste (the purified “body” of the Stone’s matter), the adding of the leaven (the ferment or “soul” of the Stone) and then the pouring of the paste into a mould to create



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a new being.’13 Southwell develops this association by having Peter complain that the ‘leaven of the old [are] seasoning the yonger’ (240) and berate himself for not proving or rising as bread and saints should do: ‘Gyant, in talke: like dwarfe, in triall quail’d: / Excelling none, but in untruth and pride. / Such distance is betwene high wordes and deedes: / In proofe the greatest vaunter seldome speedes’ (63–6).14 Peter’s anxiety that he is in ‘trial quail’d’ denotes not only that he is declining or failing as the result of a loss of heart, but it also intimates, through the dramatic irony of alchemical allusion, that he is slowly beginning to ‘coagulate,’ as implied by the alternative meaning of quail’d.15 When the alchemical dimensions of the poem are recognized, it becomes clear that, in his very sorrow over the denial of Christ, Peter is beginning to regenerate in ways that he does not yet recognize – he is becoming something more spiritually refined and thus more substantial than before. The double meaning of the word quail’d is thus one of the first examples of how alchemical allusion signals the importance of dramatic irony to the poem, where the reader is encouraged to see Peter saying more than he knows about the future of his spiritual destiny. Perhaps the most interesting reference to alchemy in the prefatory letter occurs in stanza 3, when Southwell complains that ‘Still finest wits are stilling Venus Rose / In Paynim toyes the sweetest vaines are spent’ (16–17). The styling of Venus’s rose in pagan poetry is figured here as a distilling of what in alchemical terms is the impure stone. As the seventeenth-century Paracelsian Martin Ruland writes in his Lexicon of Alchemy, Venus is ‘The Impure Stone, The Matter.’ Similarly, Salmon’s Dictionaire Hermetique describes Venus as ‘the Prostitute of the philosophers.’16 Southwell is thus suggesting that by turning from poems about Venus to poems about Peter, he is shifting attention from matter to spirit, from the false stone of paganism to the true rock of the church. Moreover, Southwell is also implicitly noting a shift from the androgynous Adonis to the hermaphroditic Christ, who is, as Southwell says towards the end of the poem, ‘Father in care, mother in tender hart’ (755). While this alchemical reading suggests that there are reasons internal to the poem for an allusion to Venus, it does not preclude the possibility that Southwell is alluding to Spenser’s or Shakespeare’s depictions of the Goddess of Love. On the contrary, the alchemical dimension of Southwell’s reference offers further reason to consider the relations among these poems, especially the relations between Southwell’s and Shakespeare’s poems. Without resolving the question of who is responding to whom, we can say with some certainty that Southwell’s prefatory

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letter figures the alchemical power of poetry in the opposite way to Shakespeare’s usage in his epyllion. To start with, the third stanza of the prefatory letter shows Southwell figuring poetry as a form of spiritual alchemy in a way that recalls the ending of ‘A vale of teares’: ‘Let former faults be fuell of the fire, / For griefe in Limbecke of thy heart to still / Thy pensive thoughts, and dumps of thy desire, / And vapoure teares up to thy eies at will. / Let teares to tunes, and paines to plaints be prest’ (69–73). Like repentance, poetry is alchemical precisely insofar as it is thought to have the power to convert those who employ it from one level of being to another. By figuring poetry as spiritually alchemical, Southwell is revising a tradition going back at least as far as John Skelton – a tradition that is echoed in such works as Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, ‘the heavenly quintessence they still from their immortal flowers,’ Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, where the poet is called an alchemist, and Venus and Adonis, which, as Peggy Munoz Simonds argues, is about the alchemical power of poetry.17 Simonds states her case boldly, arguing that Shakespeare’s ‘primary interest in writing the poem was … to demonstrate that poetry itself was like alchemy and could also produce the Elixir or the universal medicine to cure human suffering, most of which was caused by love.’18 Although Simonds’s interpretation is not especially attentive to irony, she effectively demonstrates how the poem’s investments in the curative powers of poetry are developed through Shakespeare’s handling of the commonplace associations between the Adonis myth and alchemy. Simonds shows that by the end of the poem Shakespeare establishes an essentially Ovidian view of poetry’s therapeutic powers, one more or less summarized in Ovid’s Remedia: ‘may your laurel protect me, help poet and healer / Alike, since the labours of both are your concern.’19 It is precisely this Ovidian version of poetry’s alchemical powers that Southwell counters in the ‘Author to the Reader.’ Where Ovid and Shakespeare present poetry as inherently curative, Southwell presents verse as a secondary vehicle of Christ’s spiritually therapeutic powers – thus granting more power to God than to Apollo. What remains constant between Shakespeare’s Ovidianism and Southwell’s lachrymal verse, however, is the analogy between alchemy and poetry as potent agents of psychologically refining change.

Into a ‘maine of tears’ The guiding analogy between alchemy and repentance structuring



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Southwell’s poem informs Peter’s opening apostrophe to the Soul, where he initiates the process of solve et coagula by casting himself into a ‘maine of tears’ (1). From an alchemical standpoint, the sea of tears refers to the purifying bath in which his soul can ‘Give vent unto the vapours of thy brest, / That thicken in the brimmes of cloudy eies: / Where sinne was hatchd, let teares now wash the nest’ (13–15). Being launched into a maine of tears implies the alchemical process of setting an object into the mercurial water, the calcifying ‘sea’ that is sometimes referred to as the ‘Water of life.’20 As Abraham explains, this process initiates the alchemical dissolution of impure matter: ‘As the mercurial water, the “sea” represents the solvent of the metal or matter for the Stone. The Sophic Hydrolith says that the dissolution of this matter in the cycle of solve et coagula occurs “by means of the sweet universal … marine water.” … Plate 7 in Salomon Trismosin’s Splendor Solis and Emblem 31 in Michael Maier’s Atalanta fugens both depict the alchemical king (the raw matter of the Stone) being marinated in sea water before he is rescued and taken to dry land (signifying the coagula).’21 Southwell’s poem thus opens as an alchemical variation on the epic convention of comparing the beginning of a story with the setting off of a ship, as in The Odyssey’s ‘Launch out on his story Muse, daughter of Zeus.’22 Alchemical imagery helps account for the recurring figure of penitent tears as a sea in which Peter’s Soul is purified and transmuted: ‘All weeping eies resigne your teares to me: A sea will scantly rince my ordurde soule / Huge horrours in high tides must drowned bee’ (43–5).23 Such imagery also helps explain why Peter insists on being stranded in the water of his tears just as the raw matter of the Stone must be marinated in an alchemical bath: ‘Shun not the shelfe of most deserved shame: / Sticke in the sandes of agonizing dread’ (7–9). It further explains how the imagery of separation alludes to the alchemical process of self-dissolution, while at the same time encoding a pro-Catholic sentiment about where true sin lies: ‘Flie not from forreine evils, flie from thy hart: / Worse then the worst of evils is that thou art’ (11–12). The opening sequence of the poem thus equates penitential tears with the purifying bath of the mercurial sea, the latter of which is associated in the poem and in alchemical tradition with baptism. Stanza 3 cinches this association through Peter’s plaintive cry, ‘Baptize thy spotted soule in weeping dewe’ (18). This imperative activates associations between the alchemical process of ablution and the sanctifying force of baptism as a sacrament. Abraham explains this relation, noting that the ‘eighth emblem of The Rosary of the Philosophers shows the mercurial water as

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rain or dew descending onto the dead bodies lying in a coffin below and cleansing them of their impurities. The ablution is equivalent to the metaphysical purification of sins by baptism.’24 Such impurities are often referred to in alchemical discourse as spots that are associated with the ‘stain … of original sin, the breaking of divine law, the turning away by humankind from goodwill into self-will.’25 That both ablution and repentance are associated with rebirth helps explain why Southwell introduces the hatching and bird imagery so central to alchemical symbolism at this point: ‘Where sinne was hatchd, let teares now wash the nest’ (15). The allusion to the hatching of sin evokes the commonplace idea that the oval alchemical vessel is an ‘egg’ in which new beings are born.26 The allusion suggests that Peter hatched sin and so now must wash the nest with quintessential tears so that a new birth can occur. Peter is thus figured early in the poem as the egg or vessel in which he himself is transformed, a transformation whose various stages will be symbolized by a series of birds including hens, swans, and, of course, cocks. The next reference to alchemy in the poem further suggests some of the ways such symbolism reveals how the poem operates as an allegory of recusant experience in England, even while it conceals topical references through the relative obscurity of hermetic symbolism: The mother sea from overflowing deepes, Sendes foorth her issue by divided vaines Yet back her ofspring to their mother creepes, To pay their purest streames with added gaines. But I that dronke the drops of heavenly flood: Bemyred the giver with returning mud. (103–8)

The primary meaning here is that Peter fails to offer rejuvenating tears, even though he drank the heavenly flood of Christ’s presence, thus differentiating him from the water that replenishes the mother sea by returning to it. Read in terms of recusant allegory, the stanza seems to contrast those, like Southwell, who return to the motherland after a departure in order to renew the Catholic cause from those who do not serve the cause, offering ungrateful mud instead of graceful works. That the stanza encourages such a topical allegory is verified by the alchemical image of incest it evokes in the image of the children creeping back to their mother. Such an image appears in sixteenth-century edition of Ripley’s ‘Cantilena,’ which shows the alchemical king, or symbol of the stone, crawling under his mother’s skirt. As Abraham explains, this



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symbol of incest symbolizes a union that is ‘forbidden by society, by the outer world’ and is thus ‘used to indicate a union that must be performed secretly, within the soul.’27 Southwell signals the occult nature of the union between individual Catholics and the mother church by alluding to this image of socially forbidden but spiritually essential union. Southwell thus relies on a general knowledge of the kind of alchemical symbology Ruland addresses when he states, ‘There is no term more frequent in use among the philosophers than is the word Marriage. They say that the Sun and Moon must be joined in marriage with Beza, the Mother with the Son, the Brother with the Sister, and all these expressions have reference exclusively to the union between the Fixed and the Volatile, which takes place in the Vase [alembic] by the intermediation of Fire.’28 The following stanza develops the hermetic dimensions of the poem’s recusant allegory by alluding to the description of the alchemical opus as a harvest because of the use of manure and dung in many chemical processes: Is this the harvest of his sowing toile? Did Christ manure thy hart to breed him bryars? Or doth it neede this unaccustomde soyle with hellish doung to fertile heavens desires? No: no: the Marle that perjuries do yeeld, May spoyle a good, not fat a barraine field. (109–14)

As Abraham indicates, alchemy is sometimes ‘compared to the “art” of agriculture, especially the cultivation, harvesting, and winnowing of grain.’29 And as Ruland explains, the process of putrefaction occurs through the operation of a ‘warm digestion of dung, or of the [mercurical] bath.’30 In this stanza, then, Christ is both the alchemist and the putrefying substance of manure – a force that is threatened by the ‘Marle’ or the loose and unconsolidated earthy deposit that yields ‘perjuries.’ This imagery suggests a contrast between the quickening dissolution of Christ and the life-spoiling separation of perjuring ‘Marle’ – an image that evokes the controversies over Catholics having to take an oath of allegiance to the Crown, which Southwell addresses in A Humble Supplication to Her Majesty (1591). This topical association appears again two stanzas later when Peter declares, ‘My othes, were stones: my cruell toung the sling: / My God, the marke: at which my spight did fling’ (125–6). At this early stage in the poem the predominant images are of descent,

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suggesting that Peter is metaphorically at the nigredo stage of dissolution – a stage often symbolized in alchemy through the figure of Jonah.31 During this initial stage the ‘old outmoded state of being is killed, putrefied and dissolved … in order that it may be renovated and reborn in a new form.’32 Southwell signals that Peter’s Jonah-like descent is metaphorical and spiritual when he alludes to the minor prophet with reference to the passage in Matthew 14 where the apostle walks upon the waves with Christ: Why did the yeelding sea like marble way Support a wretch more wavering then the waves? Whome doubt did plunge, why did the water stay, Unkind, in kindnesse; murthering, while it saves? O that this toung had then bene fishes food, And I devour’d before this cursing moode. (139–44)

The allusion to Jonah here appears to be another instance of dramatic irony, where Peter’s desire for oblivion reveals an emerging but still undeveloped awareness that he will come to share Jonah’s associations in patristic thought with ‘the efficacy of repentance and the greatness of God’s mercy.’33 While the meaning of Jonah as ‘dove’ led St Jerome to associate him with the Holy Spirit, Southwell’s allusion links Jonah to Peter whose name means, as line 121 of the poem indicates, ‘son of a dove.’34 Peter is thus to emerge as the spiritual son of Jonah. In alchemical symbology, Jonah’s descent into the fish signifies the terrifying dissolution of the nigredo stage that precedes the triumphant rise into the albedo stage often signified by the swan. As Carl Jung explains, the goal of Jonah’s ‘night sea journey is equivalent to the lapis angularis or cornerstone,’ a term further suggestive of Peter in his relation to Christ.35 Abraham defines the cornerstone as ‘one of the central images of Christianity which has been given an alchemical interpretation. Christ the Cornerstone or filius macrocosmi was identified with the all-healing philosopher’s stone which could cast out all corruption and confer immortality. Basil Valentine wrote: “I promised to communicate to you a knowledge of our Corner Stone, or Rock, of the process by which it is prepared, and of the substance from which it was already derived by those ancient Sages.”’36 As the rock of the church, Peter is implicitly figured as participating in and helping to shape the ‘cornerstone’ – though he is still in the process of realizing this through repentance and grace. If Peter is indeed undergoing the nigredo stage, separating and dissolv-



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ing into his constitutive elements, then we would expect him to be at a point where the masculine and feminine dimensions of his person are at odds. As the mid-sixteenth-century alchemical treatise Rosarium Philosophorum makes clear, the alchemical process involves uniting male and female principles into a hermaphroditic union – forming the kind of figure Southwell presents when he describes Christ towards the end of the poem as ‘Father in care, mother in tender hart’ (755). The Rosarium figures this union of opposites or coniunctio in figure 17 of its sequence, where a fully clothed and winged hermaphroditic union of king and queen stand with wings spread, symbolizing the near-completion of the opus.37 It should not be surprising, then, to find a spiritually fragmented Peter initiating a stream of combatively gendered remarks as he recalls how his betrayal of Christ was inspired by a question from a maiden: There surges, depthes, and seas unfirme by kinde, Rough gustes, and distance both from ship and shoare, Were titles to excuse my staggering minde, Stout feete might falter on that liquid floare. But here, no seas, no blastes, nor billowes were, A puffe of womans wind bred all my feare. (145–50)

This outburst initiates a series of standard misogynist clichés, images, and allusions. More interestingly, it shows Peter beginning to identify himself as a demonic, sinful woman giving birth to treason: ‘What in my thoughtes begat this ougly childe, / That could through rented soule thus fiercely creepe? / O viper feare, their death by whome thou livest, / All good thy ruynes wrecke, all evels thou givest’ (159–62). This image of treasonous birth, which Milton will develop (for opposite religiopolitical ends) when he figures the equivocating Satan as birthing Sin through this head, shows Peter as needing to transform from a spiritually demonic woman into a spiritually graceful one. At this, the nigredo stage of his descent, however, Peter remains focused on how a ‘maidens easie breath / Did blow me down, and blast my soule to death’ (167–8). The tension between Peter’s masculine and feminine polarities is further expressed, and will eventually be resolved, through biblical allusions to women and through alchemically inflected bird and animal imagery. Furthering his descent, Peter bewails how Fidelitie was flowne, when feare was hatched, Incompatible brood in vertues nest:

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Courage can lesse with cowardise be matched, Prowisse nor love lodgde in devided brest. O Adams child cast by a silly Eve, Heire to thy fathers foyles, and borne to greeve. (175–80)

The image of the ‘incompatible brood’ may suggest a reference to the cockatrice or basilisk, a ‘fabulous reptile supposedly hatched by a serpent from a cock’s egg,’ which in alchemy can symbolize, among many other things, an opposition of male and female principles. Abraham cites Basset Jones to make this point. According to Jones, the basilisk’s eyes are a ‘signe that the Cock hath trodd the Henn.’38 Southwell further signals Peter’s separation of male and female principles by alluding to failed biblical couples: ‘My vauntes did seeme hatcht under Sampsons lockes, / Yet womans wordes did give me murdring knockes’ (197–8). This tension between male and female principles reaches its apex at the moment it is expressed in the alchemical symbology Jones uses to figure the opposition of Sol and Luna, or male and female elements: O milde revenger of aspiring pride, Thou canst dismount high thoughtes to low effectes: Thou madst a cocke me for my fault to chide, My lofty boastes this lowly bird correctes. Well might a cocke correct me with a crow: Whome hennish cackling first did overthrow. (271–6)

As Abraham explains, the early stages of the alchemical opus, where the union of male and female principles is not fully completed, ‘is presented as the quarrelling copulation of beasts and birds, such as hen and cock.’39 Some alchemical emblems show a bird about to devour another bird, symbolizing the recurring and repeated process of dissolution and coagulation.40 While others, such as emblem 30 of Maier’s Atalanta fugiens, emphasize the need for reciprocity between these principles through its motto, which reads, ‘The sun needs the moon, like the cock needs the hen.’41 In Southwell’s poem, this image demarcates the point where Peter becomes aware of the tensions within him that need to be resolved, even as the alchemical symbol may express a decisively Catholic complaint that Elizabethan hen has overthrown Catholic cock. This tension between cock and hen, which symbolizes the desire for coniunctio, is occasioned by the third crow of the cock – itself a rich alchemical and biblical symbol:



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O wakefull bird, proclaymer of the day, Whose piersing note doth daunt the Lyons rage: Thy crowing did myself to me bewray, My frightes, and brutish heates it did asswage. But O, in this alone unhappy cocke: That thou to count my foyles wert made the clocke. (259–64)

As D.C. Allen has demonstrated in his erudite reading of Vaughan’s ‘Cock Crowing,’ the cock was understood from the patristic period onward as a ‘personified analogy of the priest, a divinely inspired man who has a special understanding of God’s ways and whose duty, as that of the cock, is not only to bring light to men but to warn those who sleep in darkness of the imminent coming of God.’42 Southwell evokes this symbolic meaning by having Peter recognize himself in the bird’s cry as he slowly begins to learn of his future destiny as chief priest: ‘Thy crowing did my selfe to me bewray’ (261). Waking from his spiritual slumber, Peter begins to turn from the descent of the nigredo stage into a new stage of ascent. Eventually, this turn will result in a marked shift of Peter’s relation to the feminine. Peter thus ceases blaming his sin on the Delilahs and Eves of biblical history and begins identifying with spiritually positive women, including David’s mother Anna and the two Marys of Bethany: ‘Inconsolable teares if Anna shed, / Who in her sonne her solace had forgone, / Then I to daies, and weekes, to monthes and yeares, / Do owe the howrely rent of stintlesse teares’ (489–92). Following this reference to Anna as a fellow mourner, Peter identifies with Hagar as a fellow exile: ‘Poore Agar from her phere enforc’d to flye, / … now bequeath thy teares to me’ (529, 535). Just as exile is a common theme in recusant literature, so too the themes of contemplation and action as symbolized by the Marys of Bethany routinely appear: ‘O sister Nymphes the sweet renowmed paire … let your praiers perfume that sweetned place’ (589, 593). This marked shift in Peter’s attitude towards the feminine reaches its climax in his prayer to a hermaphroditic Christ, who is ‘Force of the feeble, nurse of Infant loves, / Guide to the wandring foote, light of the blind, / … Father in care, mother in tender hart’ (752–3, 755). Just as the final emblem of the Rosarium Philosophorum shows the hermaphroditic union resulting in a resurrection to new life symbolized by Christ’s ascent from the tomb, so Peter’s repentance is figured through a conversion from misogynistic opposition with the feminine to desired union with it through Christ.

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The Glorious Sun Plays the Alchemist The spiritual conjunction of opposites prayed for by Peter near the end of the poem occurs once he has undergone several important alchemical stages. The most important of these, both spiritually and poetically, occurs during the apostrophe to Christ’s eyes. From an alchemical standpoint, this scene is built on the same analogy as a sequence in Guido Guinizelli’s Al cor gentil ripara sempre amore, which begins: ‘Love’s fire is kindled in the gentle heart, / As virtue is within the precious stone’ (vertute in pietra prezïosa).43 As Maurice Valenzy explains, ‘To illustrate the working of love upon its proper object, Guinizelli drew upon a familiar fact in the lapidary lore of the time. Certain stones, after being refined alchemically by the rays of the sun, derived their special virtue from being exposed to the radiation of the appropriate star: “after the sun has drawn out through his strength what is vile in it, the star gives it worth and power. Thus to the heart which is made by nature candid, pure, and gentle, woman like a star brings love.”’ In Guinizelli’s dolce stil nuovo poem, the ‘radiant woman ignites that love which is latent in the heart refined by nature.’44 As is typical of Southwell, the apostrophe to Christ’s eyes translates this secular adaptation of alchemical lore to spiritual purposes.45 This shift from human to divine love is explicitly signalled in the stanzas leading up to the apostrophe to Christ’s eyes when Peter meditates on how ‘The blaze of beauties beames allured [David’s, Salomon’s, and Sampson’s] looks’ (307). This passage develops Peter’s earlier complaint about those who ‘Devote your fabling wits to lovers layes’ rather than Christ’s love’ (34). Christ’s role in this sequence alludes to the commonplace idea that the sun refines natural properties, as in Shakespeare’s King John – a play that shows distinct signs of having been influenced by Southwell: ‘the glorious sun … plays the alchemist, / Turning with splendour of his precious eye, / The meagre cloddy earth to glittering gold.’46 Southwell’s Christ thus performs the opus solis, an alchemical process Albertus explains when he suggests that ‘whatever nature produces by the heat of the sun and stars, art also produces by the heat of fire, provided the fire is tempered so as not to be stronger than the self-moving formative power in the metals; for there is a celestial power mixed with it in the beginning, which may be deflected towards one result or another by the help of art. For the celestial power is widespread, and its effects are determined by the powers of whatever it acts upon in mixtures.’47 The importance of mixtures to the opus solis helps account for the stanza that concludes



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the apostrophe to Christ’s eyes: ‘What mixtures these sweet elements do yeeld, / Let happy worldlings of those worlds expound, / But simples are by compounds farre exceld … / And if a banished wretch gesse not amisse: / All but one compound framde of perfect blisse’ (415–17, 419– 20). Christ’s eyes thus form the alchemical compound or tincture that helps transmute Peter from sinful petrus to rock of the church. The association of Christ as the alchemist and the tincture is established in the preceding two stanzas through the microcosm-macrocosm figure, which is commonly used to denote the philosopher’s stone, because the stone is believed to be created through a repetition of God’s creating of the world: O gracious spheres, where love the Center is … O little worldes, the summes of all the best … Where fire, a love that next to heaven doth rest, Ayre, light of life, that no distemper marres: The water, grace, whose seas, whose springs, whose showres Cloth natures earth, with everlasting flowers. (403, 409, 411–14)

The four elements are brought together symbolically in Christ’s eyes, producing a compound or tincture that helps replenish Peter. The pattern here follows a movement that is similar to what George Ripley calls the wheel of elements: of these elements make thou rotacion, And into water thine earth turne first of all, Then of thy water make ayre … And ayre make fier, then Maister I will the call Of all our secrets great and small: The whelle of Elements then caust thou turne about.

Like the philosopher’s stone, Christ’s eyes unify all differences into themselves – becoming a lesser world of the macrocosm.48 The alchemical symbology becomes no less explicit in the following stanza, when Peter feels himself to be like a salamander out of the sustaining fire: ‘Poore saint, from heaven, from fire, cold Salamander’ (422). Often appearing in alchemical emblems, the salamander who lives in fire is ‘a symbol of the fiery masculine seed of metals, sulphur, the hot, dry, active male principle of the opus; the red stone or elixir, the magical philosopher’s stone which as the power to convert base metal to gold

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and cure all disease and imperfection.’49 This reference to the alchemical salamander living out of its proper element, suggesting a state of spiritual exile and disjunction of gendered polarities, soon gives way to an opposing alchemical image, that of the virgins milke: ‘O Turtle twins all bath’d in virgins milke, / Upon the margin of full flowing bankes’ (433–4). The virgin’s milk refers here to both Mary’s lactations, which sometimes were said to have salvific power, perhaps because milk was viewed in Galenic theory as refined blood, and to the transforming mercurial waters of the alchemical bath. As Abraham explains, the virgin’s milk ‘is a name for the mercurial water which is used to feed the infant Stone so that it may grow to maturity. In Symbola aureae mensae, Michael Maier wrote that “The Stone should be fed, just as a child, with the milk of a Virgin.”’50 Abraham also notes that the virgin’s milk was needed ‘for the union of Sol and Luna at the chemical wedding,’ thus suggesting that the image forms part of Peter’s conjunction of opposing genders. A reference to a swan at line 451 signals the moment Peter moves from the nigredo or descent stage of the opus to the albedo or white ascent stage – a shift that sees Peter beginning to make satisfaction for his sins: ‘Like solest Swan that swimmes in silent deepe … / Sigh out thy plaints, and sole in secreat weepe’ (451, 453). The swan, Abraham explains, ‘is one of a series of hermetic birds which represent the different phases and colours of the matter in the alembic during the opus.’51 As Ruland writes, ‘When the Stone … has arrived at the perfect White Stage … or Swan, then all the philosophers say that this is a time of joy.’52 The association of swan with joy indicates that is another moment when alchemy signals a certain dramatic irony as Peter’s intense grief reveals to readers, if not yet to himself, that Christ’s mercy is working within him.

Uroboros Probably the most poetically intriguing adaptation of alchemy in the poem occurs at the point when Peter paradoxically confounds himself through an anatomy of sin. At this point, Peter spiritually dies so as to be reborn – a process signalled in the tension between the poetic form and penitential content: My sight was vaild till I my selfe confounded, Then did I see the dissenchanted charmes. Then could I cut th’anotomy of sinne, And search with Linxes eyes what lay within …



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My eye, reades mournefull lessons to my hart, My hart, doth to my thought the griefes expound, My thought, the same doth to my tounge impart, My tounge, the message in the eares doth sound. My eares, backe to my hart their sorrowes send: Thus circkling griefes runne round without an end. (663–6, 673–8)

The circular structure of this anatomy constitutes the most striking example of how alchemical symbolism produces dramatic irony. Although Peter feels himself to be trapped in a round of sin, the very figure in which he speaks forms one of the most ancient and central of alchemical symbols – the uroboros or serpent who eats his own tail. The alchemical associations of the uroboros suggest that the very form in which Peter speaks reveals that he is being regenerated, even if he does not yet fully realize it. Abraham’s explanation of this symbol helps us see, among other things, that Peter is in the process of being made into the image of Christ who dies in order that others may be reborn. The uroboros symbolizes the magical transforming arcanum which both slays and is slain, resurrects and is resurrected during the process of the opus. The uroboros is at the same time its own vessel (or womb) and its own contents (or product). In biting its own tail the uroboros makes a complete circle, aptly symbolizing the circular nature of the transformative process, the rotation of the elements, the opus circulatorium. Nicolas Flamel wrote in his Exposition: ‘These are the serpents and Dragons which the ancient Aegyptians have painted in a Circle, the head biting the tayle, to signify that they proceeded from one and the same things, and that it alone was sufficient in the turning and circulation thereof, it made it selfe perfect.’53

George Herbert’s ‘Sinnes round’ suggests that he appears to have grasped the alchemical dimensions of Southwell’s anatomy of sin sequence. Written in the same sixain pattern as Saint Peters Complaint, which is more common in narrative than lyric verse, ‘Sinnes round’ deploys the same circular poetic structure, even including an explicit alchemical symbol: Sorrie I am, my God, sorrie I am, That my offences course it in a ring.

My thoughts are working like a busie flame, Untill their cockatrice they hatch and bring:

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And when they once have perfected their draughts, My words take fire from my inflamed thoughts. (1–6)54

As I noted earlier, the cockatrice or basilisk is a mythic creature hatched by a serpent from a cock’s egg and is able to kill any living thing by looking at it. As Laurence A. Breiner has demonstrated in relation to Herbert’s poem, the cockatrice also served as an alchemical symbol of the uroboros – a symbol closely associated in patristic thought with the serpent of Genesis.55 For Herbert, the beast serves as a symbol of sin’s destructively transmutating powers; it is a metaphor for the narcissistic in-turning of the helpless sinner who is caught up in an insincere confession that betrays his need for God’s descending grace. According to Breiner, Herbert’s use of the uroboros image suggests that ‘Sinnes round’ is anti-alchemical, that it is critical of the hermetic tradition. Yet what Breiner overlooks, I think, is that Herbert is alluding to the idea that the uroboros can signify ‘unredeemed Nature or unformed materia.’56 Viewed this way, ‘Sinnes round’ shows a speaker in need of Christ’s elixir, of nature in need of grace. In Southwell’s poem such need is being answered because of Peter’s penitence rather than because of grace’s irresistibility as in Herbert’s Temple. And thus for Southwell, the uroboros intimates Peter’s process of rebirth rather than simply his ‘unredeemed Nature.’ Indeed, Peter’s helplessness in the anatomy of sin sequence is more apparent than real, as the very form of his speech implies that Christ’s grace is working with his sincere desire for forgiveness. Thus if ‘Sinnes round’ admiringly echoes Southwell’s alchemical poetics, it does so while also emphasizing a different theology of grace. Peter’s turn from alienation to communion is signalled moments after the uroboros sequence when he plays the role of gardener and scion, further indicating the importance of his own action in the operation of salvation: ‘Rent from the roote, that sweetest fruit did give, / I scorne to graffe in stock of meaner sap. / No juice can joy me but of Jesse flower, / Whose heavenly roote hath true reviving power’ (697–700). While Peter’s tears were figured as the quintessence earlier, he now embraces the real elixir, the sap of the Jesse flower or Christ’s blood. Though here again, the reader recognizes the full meaning of Peter’s reference, even when the apostle doesn’t.57 In the poem’s recusant allegory, Peter may also be critiquing church papists or converts to Protestantism who graft themselves to a rootless Anglican church that offers ‘mean sap’ rather than the literal blood of Christ, which is offered in the Catholic mass. That the juice of the Jesse flower is the quintessence of the poem’s



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alchemical opus is verified by Ruland’s observation that the word sap ‘is derived from a Greek term which signifies the art of melting. Whence we have sap or juice, and chemistry becomes the art of making or extracting sap.’ Simonds cites this passage from Ruland in order to explicate the alchemical dimensions behind the ending of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, where Venus ‘crops the stalk, and in the breach appears / Green-dropping sap, which she compares to tears.’ In Simonds’s overly optimistic reading of the poem’s ending, Adonis’s sap ‘evokes the notion of a regeneration of the entire world through poetry.’58 Although the poem’s ending is more ironic than her reading suggests, Simonds’s analysis helps us see that the competition between Southwell’s and Shakespeare’s respective poetic visions is argued along alchemical lines.59

Conclusion If Southwell’s alchemical poetics has remained relatively invisible to modern readers, it appears not to have been so to seventeenth-century interpreters. In 1656, the royalist poet and anti-sectarian writer John Collop published a poem titled ‘Jesuite’ that turns Southwell’s alchemical figures against him. Punning on Southwell’s name, Collop inveighs against the young poet’s tendency to ‘subtilize’ or equivocate while putting one of Southwell’s most famous phrases in the service of anti-Jesuit satire. In ‘The Author to his loving Cosen’ Southwell encouraged poets to sacralize secular verse or, as he puts it, ‘to weave a new webbe in their own loome’ (1). Collop turns this figure against Southwell, while satirizing the alchemical features of his verse traced above: See, see the subtile texture of each line! The Spider spins her curious web lesse fine. Th’ Spider infusing poison, thus takes th’ Fly, While in her web she weaves her destiny. Beware of th’ Net which from a Spider came; Nor for the light of heav’n mistake hells flame: Like sacred bellows they the soul may blow, Whether to make it to Contrition glow, And zealous fervor, or to subtilize, And make’t to flames of Contemplation rise. But ah! with soul on Contemplations wing, Most deal as boyes with birds do in a string; Draw down on seeds of errour for to feed,

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Or by officious handling make to bleed. A spark of heav’n devotion may inspire; Contentious flames are kindled at hells fire.60

Falling just short of actually naming Southwell, the poem makes clear that the Jesuit’s verse and his historical memory remained vital up to the mid-seventeenth century. Serving as the vehicle for anti-sectarian sentiment, Southwell appears to the pro-Laudian Collop as an emblem of socially disruptive zealousness. Collop’s description of the ‘subtile texture’ of Southwell’s verse suggests that he recognized and disapproved of how the Jesuit wove recusant allegory into his poetry. As we have seen, Southwell used alchemical figures to represent and simultaneously obscure the oppressions suffered by the Catholic minority. More interesting from a literary standpoint, alchemy forms a crucial part of Southwell’s use of dramatic irony: Peter’s experience of repentance involves him in a providential narrative that is unknown to him but is legible to readers, just as it shows him developing a deeper knowledge of his mortal limitations as he is thrown ahead of himself in ways that become visible to him only retrospectively. Alchemical symbology also helps unify the poem’s sequencing of images: its patterning of bird, animal, water, harvesting, sunlight, and chemical imagery. Perhaps most surprisingly, it shows Southwell taking pains to figure Peter’s repentance as involving a conjunction of male and female principles into himself. Ultimately, then, it becomes clear that Southwell’s poem incorporates the alchemical dimensions of late Elizabethan poetry into the strictures of post-Tridentine penance.61 The preceding interpretation also raises some broader questions about the place of alchemy in Elizabethan Catholic poetry that need further inquiry. Is Southwell’s use of alchemy as a way of revealing and concealing a recusant allegory characteristic of late Elizabethan Catholic literature? For instance, does Southwell’s alchemical language have a meaningful relationship to the coded prophecies of the Catholic conspirator Anthony Babington, two of whose prophecies begin, ‘When the cock in the north has buylded his neste’ and ‘A serpent shall arrise owt of the North ungraciously to conquer England’?62 Does such language function allegorically in other Southwell poems or prose works, aside from ‘A Vale of Tears,’ ‘The Burning Babe,’ and Saint Peters Complaint? To what extent are Herbert’s, Donne’s, and Marvell’s uses of religious alchemy responses to Southwell’s deployment of the discourse? Do



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Protestant writers seek, in any way, to demystify Southwell’s pursuit of an incarnational poetic in which analogy is presented as having the power to signify the union of human and divine orders? Do they contest Southwell’s commitment to the power of alchemical allegory to represent and perhaps even inspire, that is incarnate, spiritual transmutation? Or do they embrace Southwell as an ally in the process of sacralizing poetry with less concern for confessional politics than Collop? At stake in such questions is the role that alchemy plays in early modern sacramental poetics generally. However we answer these questions, we should now add the use of religious alchemy to the other ways in which Southwell is known to have influenced seventeenth-century English religious poetry, further verifying that he is the first devotional poet of major influence in the English Renaissance.

NOTES   1 For a discussion of the conceit organizing ‘The burning Babe,’ see Peter Daly, ‘Southwell’s “Burning Babe” and the Emblematic Practice,’ Wascana Review 3, no. 2 (1968), 29–45. As the title of Daly’s article indicates, his focus is on the relation between emblem traditions and Southwell’s imagery. Though any discussion of early modern alchemy necessarily intersects with emblem studies, I argue that Saint Peters Complaint is engaged with poetic applications of alchemy in a way that extends beyond what is available in popular emblem books. In his 1974 article ‘The Breaking of the Alembic: Patterns of Alchemical Imagery in English Renaissance Poetry,’ Wascana Review 9 (1974), 105–13, Stanton J. Linden identified the alchemical allusion at lines 457–62 of Saint Peters Complaint. However, as the present essay shows, Linden significantly underestimates the richness of Southwell’s alchemical poetics. He also, I think, downplays Southwell’s influence on subsequent poets, particularly Herbert. This downplaying of Southwell’s influence is evinced by the exclusion of Southwell from Linden’s book-length study of alchemy, Darke Hierogliphicks: Alchemy in English Literature from Chaucer to the Restoration (Lexington: University of Kentucky, 1996).   2 Robert Schuler (297) cites this and other related biblical passages to the same ends in ‘Some Spiritual Alchemies of Seventeenth-Century England,’ Journal of the History of Ideas 41, no. 2 (1980): 293–318. While alchemy was certainly not part of the official system of Jesuit education, its study was undertaken by various Jesuits – most notably Athanasius Kircher. See Martha

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Baldwin, ‘Alchemy and the Society of Jesus in the Seventeenth Century: Strange Bedfellows?’ Ambix 40, no. 2 (1993): 41–64.   3 Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 11 and 63.   4 See, for example, George Ripley, The Compound of Alchemy (London, 1591), The Rosary of the Philosophers (1550), ed. Adam McLean (Edinburgh: Magnum Opus Hermetic Sourceworks, 1980), and Emblem XXX of Michael Maier’s Atalanta Fugiens (1617). Something like the basic alchemical analogy structuring Southwell’s poem is expressed in the chapter on separation from Ripley’s hermetic poem – a text that made the symbolic language of alchemy available to all literate Elizabethans: ‘Of this Separation I finde a like figure, / Thus spoken by the Prophet in the Psalmodie, / God brought out of a stone a flood of water pure, / And out of the hardest rock oyle abundantly’ (D3r).   5 For Linden’s argument about the beginnings of religious alchemy in English Renaissance literature see, Darke Hierogliphicks, chapter 6. For a discussion of alchemy and seventeenth-century religious politics, see Schuler, ‘Some Spiritual Alchemies of Seventeenth-Century England.’ For discussions of Southwell’s poetry and prose as coded recusant allegory, see Sadia Abbas, ‘Polemic and Paradox in Robert Southwell’s Lyric Poems,’ Criticism 45, no. 4 (2003): 453–82; F.W. Brownlow, Robert Southwell (New York: Twayne, 1996), 43; and Ann Sweeney, Robert Southwell: Snow in Arcadia; Redrawing the English Lyric Landscape, 1586–95 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006). Roberta Albrecht, The Virgin Mary as Alchemical and Lullian Reference in Donne (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 2005), argues that Donne uses alchemical allusion to cloak references to distinctly Catholic modes of belief in the sermons. While I find much of her reading unpersuasive, I have arrived at a similar conclusion regarding Southwell’s poem, which sustains a more hospitable locus for the Catholic/alchemical nexus.   6 The basic process of solve et coagula becomes figured in varying ways in virtually all alchemical works. Ripley, for example, cites twelve stages: Calcination, Dissolution, Separation, Conjunction, Purification, Congelation, Cibation, Sublimation, Fermentation, Exaltation, Multiplication, and Projection. Ben Jonson parodies many of these terms in The Alchemist (London, 1612).   7 Nancy Pollard Brown, ‘The Structure of Southwell’s “Saint Peter’s Complaint,”’ Modern Language Review 51 (1966): 3–11. The quote is from page 11.



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  8 See Lyndy Abraham, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 187. I draw heavily on Abraham’s dictionary throughout this essay.   9 All references to Southwell’s poetry are from The Poems of Robert Southwell S.J., ed. James H. McDonald and Nancy Pollard Brown (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), and are given in the text by line numbers. 10 Ripley, Compound, D2. 11 The solve et coagula analogy organizing Saint Peters Complaint constitutes one of the many points at which alchemical symbols converge with early modern emblem practice. This basic pattern would later inform, for example, Francis Quarles’s Emblemes. See Michael Bath, Speaking Pictures: English Emblem Books and Renaissance Culture (London: Longman, 1994), 214. 12 Abraham, Dictionary, 131. 13 Ibid. See also, Ripley, Compound, I1r. 14 Albertus Magnus demonstrates the association between the alchemical opus and baking bread when he writes, ‘Elixir is the Arabic name and fermentum is the Latin: because just as bread is leavened and raised through good yeast, so the matter of metals may be transmuted through these four spirits into white and red, but especially through mercury, because it is the source and origin of all metals.’ Cited on pages 139–40 in Peggy Munoz Simonds, ‘“Love is a spirit all compact of fire”: Alchemical Coniunctio in Venus and Adonis,’ in Emblems and Allegory, ed. Alison Adams and Stanton J. Lindon, 133–156 (Glasgow: Galsgow Emblem Studies, 1998). 15 Oxford English Dictionary, 3.1. 16 Cited in Abraham, Dictionary, 209. 17 I draw these references on poetry and alchemy from Simonds, ‘Alchemical Coniunctio,’ 134 and 137. The relations between Southwell’s Saint Peters Complaint and Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis has long been an intriguing question. For a recent take on this relation and a wider bibliography on the topic, see Richard Wilson, ‘A Bloody Question: The Politics of Venus and Adonis,’ Religion and the Arts 5, no. 3 (2001): 297–316. Although my reading does not presume that Southwell is responding to Shakespeare, indeed chronology would suggest that the reverse is more plausible; it does suggest that a conversation is taking place between the two and that this conversation is unfolding through the discourse of alchemy. For a sceptical view of any relation between these poems that is still relevant, see Mario Praz, ‘Robert Southwell’s “Saint Peter’s Complaint” and Its Italian Source,’ Modern Language Review 19, no. 3 (1924): 273–290.

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18 Simonds, ‘“Love is a spirit,”’ 134. 19 Cited in ibid., 156. 20 See Abraham, Dictionary, 179. 21 Ibid. 22 Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fagles (Penguin: New York, 1996), 77; bk 1, line 11. 23 Also see lines 85, 103, 139–50. 24 Abraham, Dictionary, 1. 25 Ibid., 189. 26 See, for example, Ripley, Compound, D3, and Maier, Atalanta, Emblem VIII. See also the image of the egg vessel in Abraham, Dictionary, 67. 27 Abraham, Dictionary, 107. See also Ripley, Compound: ‘There we them turne from thing to thing again, / Into their mother the water when they goe: Which principle unknowen, thou labourest in vaine’ (H1), and Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1989), 329–33. 28 Cited in Simonds, ‘“Love is a spirit,”’ 141. 29 Abraham, Dictionary, 95. See Maier, Atalanta, Emblem VI. 30 Martinus Rulandus, A Lexicon of Alchemy or Alchemical Dictionary, trans. A.E. Waite (London: Westminister, 1893; London: John Watkins, 1964), 265. This basic idea could be gleaned from the chapter on putrefaction in Ripley, Compound, F1r and F3. 31 See, for example, the images reproduced in Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, 333, 335, 337. 32 Abraham, Dictionary, 135. 33 A Dictionary of Biblical Tradition in English Literature, ed. David Lyle Jeffrey (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1992), 409. The entry identifies the following patristic references: St Clement of Rome, Epistle to the Corinthians, 7; Tertullian, Adv. Marc. 2.17; 5.4; St John Chrysostom, Ep. 1.15 34 Ibid. 35 Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, 335. 36 Abraham, Dictionary, 47. 37 Mclean reproduces the sequence’s images on page 127 of his edition. See note 2 for reference. Just to be clear, I am not suggesting that the poem tells us anything about Southwell’s or anyone else’s conjectured unconscious inclinations or motives. I intend my reading to map traces of historically available alchemical patterns of thought in the poem. My reading is not grounded in Jungian principles but rather in the syntax of alchemy. 38 Abraham, Dictionary, 16–17. Ripley cites the basilisk as a symbol of the Elixir in Compound, C1r. 39 Abraham, Dictionary, 43.



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40 See the images reproduced in Abraham, Marvell and Alchemy, 112, 310. 41 Cited in Abraham, Dictionary, 43. 42 D.C. Allen, ‘“Cock-Crowing” and the Tradition,’ English Literary History 21, no. 2 (1954): 94–106, 98. 43 Guido Guinizelli, ‘Canzone Al cor gentil ripara sempre amore,’ in An Anthology of Italian Poems 13th–19th Century, selected and trans. Lorna De’ Lucchi (New York: Biblo and Tannen, 1967), 31. 44 Maurice Valency, In Praise of Love: An Introduction to the Love-Poetry of the Renaissance (New York: Octagon Books, 1975), 242–3. 45 The conversion of Petrarchan and Ovidian verse to religious purposes is a recurring theme of Southwell’s writing. See, for example, his poem ‘Lewd Love Is Loss.’ 46 Cited in Abraham, Dictionary, 194–5. For Southwell’s place in King John, see John Klause, ‘New Sources for Shakespeare’s King John: The Writings of Robert Southwell,’ Studies in Philology 98, no. 4 (2001): 401–27. 47 Albertus Magnus, Book of Minerals, trans. Dorothy Wyckoff (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), 178–9. 48 Ripley, Compound, C4r. For a discussion of the micro-macro figure in alchemy, see Abraham, Dictionary, 129–30. See also Ripley, Compound, B2. 49 Abraham, Dictionary, 176. See also Maier, Atalanta, Emblem XIV, and Linden, Darke Hieroglyphicks, 188. 50 Abraham, Dictionary, 211. 51 Ibid., 196. 52 Ruland, Lexicon, 5. 53 Abraham, Dictionary, 207. See Maier, Atalanta, Emblem XIV. 54 The English Poems of George Herbert, ed. Helen Wilcox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 55 Laurence A. Breiner, ‘Herbert’s Cockatrice,’ Modern Philology 77, no. 1 (1979): 10–17. 56 Titus Burckhardt, Alchemy: Science of the Cosmos, Science of the Soul, trans. William Stoddart (Louisville, Kentucky: Fons Vitae, 1997), 65. 57 Crashaw’s ‘The Weeper,’ which is an extended response to the apostrophe of Christ’s eyes in Saint Peters Complaint, also shows signs of having been influenced by the alchemical dimensions of Southwell’s poem. 58 Simonds, ‘“Love is a spirit,”’ 154–5, 155. 59 Simonds notes other alchemical features of Shakespeare’s poem that suggest a more sustained comparison of alchemical elements in Saint Peters Complaint and Venus and Adonis might yield promising results. 60 The Poems of John Collop, ed. Conrad Hilberry (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1962), 46.

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61 This reading does not exhaust the poem’s alchemical elements. For example, I have said very little about the recurring theme of testing and proving, and nothing about heat and cold imagery. 62 Cited in Alison Shell, Oral Culture and Catholicism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 65.

chapter eight

Malengin and Mercilla, Southwell and Spenser: The Poetics of Tears and the Politics of Martyrdom in The Faerie Queene, Book 5, Canto 9 JENNIFER R. RUST

In 1595, after years of confinement and torture, and at the end of a meticulously managed show trial engineered by the Elizabethan state, the Jesuit missionary and poet Robert Southwell was sentenced to the fate typically reserved for traitors in sixteenth-century England: ‘that he should be carried to Newgate whence he came, and from thence to be drawn to Tyburn upon a hurdle, and there to be hanged and cut down alive; his bowels to be burned before his face; his head to be stricken off; his body to be quartered and disposed at her majesty’s pleasure.’1 Southwell’s sentence was carried out that same year, one year prior to the publication of the last three books of Spenser’s Faerie Queene in 1596. In book 5, canto 9 of The Faerie Queene, we find a scene reminiscent of Southwell’s sentence in the stanza describing the demise of Malengin, an allegorical figure for treacherous ‘Guyle,’ at the hands of Talus, Arthegall’s iron agent of justice: But when as [Malengin] would to a snake againe   Haue turn’d himselfe, [Talus] with his yron flayle   Gan driue at him, with so huge might and maine,   That all his bones, as small as sandy grayle   He broke, and did his bowels disentrayle;   Crying in vaine for helpe, when helpe was past.   So did deceipt the selfe deceiuer fayle,   There they him left a carrion outcast; For beasts and foules to feede vpon for their repast. (5.9.19.1–9)2

Malengin is drawn and quartered, disembowelled, his dismembered body left exposed without burial rites. In itself, the resemblance between

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Southwell’s sentence and Malengin’s demise is not necessarily remarkable; both represent the standard punishment for those convicted of treason in the era.3 I will argue, however, that the resemblance between these two deaths is ultimately more than coincidental insofar as book 5, canto 9 assembles an allegorical constellation that both cites and contests Southwell’s poetic and political legacy as a Catholic missionary in post-Reformation England. The connection between this canto of The Faerie Queene and the figure of Southwell has not been recognized previously, a gap that testifies to the relative neglect of early modern Catholic literature in the English critical tradition. My argument aligns with other recent efforts to show that Southwell’s distinctive Catholic poetics did indeed have a significant impact on canonical Protestant literature of the period.4 Furthermore, recognizing Spenser’s simultaneous debt to and antagonism toward Southwell deepens our understanding of how the later books of The Faerie Queene engage the religious and political complexities of 1590s England. The ghost of Southwell appears not only in Malengin’s grisly end but also in the numerous details that link him to the figure of the Jesuit missionary. Provocatively, allusions to Southwell’s literary career emerge in the motif of the weeping woman that intrudes at several key moments in the canto and in the image of the dismembered ‘Poet bad’ at the threshold of Mercilla’s palace. The weeping woman in this canto implicitly refers to Southwell’s literary effort to construct the weeping Mary Magdalene as a model of consolation for English Catholics in Marie Magdalens Funerall Teares (first published in 1591; second edition, 1594), a prose poem that extends eighteen verses from the Gospel of John into a narrative of over twenty thousand words.5 Spenser agonistically revises Southwell’s Counter-Reformation conceit by casting the weeping woman as a figure of deceit rather than religious devotion in Samiant’s false tears at the opening of canto 9. The parodic figure of the weeping woman invites the reader to find Southwell’s martyrdom figured in the spectacle of the dismembered poet later in the same canto. The appearance of the martyred poet is not simply a recapitulation of the triumphalist Tudor Protestant narrative so often seen to suffuse book 5; it is also a scene tinged with ambiguity to the extent that Spenser’s Speaker partially identifies with the unhappy fate of the poet who remains suspended between traitor and martyr. However, the weeping woman is the final image in the canto, punctuating the poem’s allegory of the trial of Mary Queen of Scots. Here the tears are shed by the weeping Mercilla-Elizabeth who interrupts Duessa-Mary’s trial. Illuminating the affiliation between the



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tears of Spenser’s Mercilla and the tears of Southwell’s Magdalene reveals how this canto appropriates and distorts the poetics of a religious antagonist to suppress the legacy of Mary Stuart as a Catholic martyr and to articulate a distinctly ambivalent vision of Elizabeth as a sacred ruler.

Malengin: Parasite and Parody (5.9.1–20) Efforts to read Malengin as a figure within the historical allegory of book 5 have resulted in two strains of interpretation: Malengin appears to represent either a barbarous Irish rebel or a deviant missionary priest.6 Evidence for the latter reading is generally more persuasive. Malengin resides on the margins of Mercilla’s palace, but yet within its domain, close enough to suggest an internal, rather than external, threat. In particular, as previous critics have noted, his ‘priest hole’ represents a threat perceived to compromise the English realm from within.7 The ‘priest hole,’ a curious artefact of the religious strife of the sixteenth century, is the secret passage or space constructed in the homes of Catholic gentry for renegade priests to evade the search and seizure operations of the pursuivants of the Elizabethan regime. In the text of The Faerie Queene, Malengin’s ‘hole’ is significant enough to warrant its own separate stanza: Through these his slights he many doth confound, And eke the rocke, in which he wonts to dwell, Is wondrous strong, and hewen farre vnder ground A dreadfull depth, how deepe no man can tell; But some doe say, it goeth downe to hell. And all within, it full of wyndings is, And hidden wayes, that scarse an hound by smell Can follow out those false footsteps of his, Ne none can backe returne, that once are gone amis. (5.9.6.1–9)

Malengin’s ‘dreadfull depth’ deforms the allegorical landscape by introducing into it an unfathomable spatial dimension. The ‘rocke in which’ Malengin ‘dwell[s]’ is both hollow and impenetrable, unfolding into an abyssal labyrinth ‘full of wyndings’ and ‘hidden wayes.’ Julian Yates’s commentary on the ‘parasitism’ of the priest hole and the persistence of Catholicism in Tudor England more generally can further elucidate what is at stake in Malengin’s lair. According to Yates, the priest hole is a significant landmark in the ‘symbolic “geography”’ of England where the struggle between the authority of the Protestant state and the un-

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derground Catholic opposition played out: ‘This “geography” constitutes both the imagined space of recusancy in early modern England and the very real terrain of Catholic resistance.’8 The priest hole subsists at a juncture between real and imaginary resistance, a parasitic interpenetration made even more threatening insofar as it burrows into the interstices of the state itself, ‘siphoning’ its resources for contrary ends.9 Spenser’s text hyperbolizes the parasitic threat represented by Malengin’s lair; this bottomless dwelling is quite literally a ‘vanishing point.’10 Like the priest holes of early modern England, it marks both a disappearing body and an interpretive limit. In The Faerie Queene, Malengin’s hole marks a site of instability in the allegorical landscape, a warp in the tapestry of the book of ‘Justice,’ a ‘blind spot.’ It represents a rupture that confuses clear boundaries, always potentially distorting the space in which it is inscribed. Once he emerges from this hole, Malengin’s shape-shifting tactics and their disorienting effects register the pervasive anxiety produced by the fluid confessional and political allegiances of late-sixteenth-century England. In addition to his ‘priest hole,’ previous arguments for Malengin as a general representation of the Jesuit missionary in England have focused on his supposedly Jesuitical proficiency with ‘guilefull words’ (5.9.12.5), the details of his ‘vncouth vestiment’ (10.7), and his ‘yron hooke’ and net ‘vsd to fish for fooles’ (11.2–8) as emblematic of his status as a ‘false fisher’ of men.11 Protestant polemicists portrayed the English Catholic as intrinsically duplicitous, a Janus-faced creature: the subversive ‘church papist’ (outwardly conforming, but secretly Catholic Englishman) threatening the integrity of the Church of England from within, and the crafty Jesuit missionary invading the realm from without. Spenser’s epic attempts to neutralize such anxieties by plucking the priest from the hole and making him visible through the vividly imagined punitive action cited at the opening of this essay. The condition of possibility for this violently rendered visibility is a show of weeping that amounts to a parody of Southwell’s most prominent contribution to sixteenth-century English literature: introducing into English the Continental Counter-Reformation trope of the weeping woman as an emblem of penitent devotion.12 As Southwell introduces a Counter-Reformation Continental ‘baroque’ devotional genre into the English literary scene, he adapts it to articulate the crisis of native English Catholics. In Marie Magdalens Funerall Teares, the Magdalene weeping before the empty tomb of Christ, a lost body for two-thirds of the work, becomes emblematic of English



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Catholic community, itself mourning a lost body insofar as it had become bereft of regular access to the sacraments that had constituted the corpus mysticum of the pre-Reformation church. In this context, the weeping Magdalene is an image intended to console this harried community, cut off from communion with the larger body of the church.13 She represents both a mirror for their grief and a hope for future reconciliation with the true Catholic Church. This reconciliation is figured in her eventual recognition and reunion with the resurrected Christ, whom she discovers even in the midst of her tears. The context of religious persecution is tangible in the exchange between the Speaker of the prose poem and the Magdalene herself on the question of the legitimacy of her tears. The Speaker – who wavers between narrating Mary’s weeping and directly addressing her, moving constantly between third and second person – suggests early in the text that there is something transgressive about her display of sorrow for the lost body of Christ: ‘For if thou and he are one, for which soever thou weepest it is all one, and therefore sith for him thou mayst not weep, forbeare all weeping, least it should offend.’14 The Speaker argues that the very unity of the Magdalene and Christ renders Mary’s tears a violation of the strict letter of Christ’s prohibition against weeping; the spectacle of her tears is thus potentially offensive to God. The Magdalene responds to this logic by defending her mournfulness as a matter of conscience, adopting legalistic rhetoric to defend her expression of grief. Her response recasts the Speaker’s warning as a perverse reflection of the restrictive religious climate of Elizabethan England: Yea but (sayst thou) to barre me from weeping, is to abridge me of libertie, and restraint of libertie is a penaltie, and every penaltie supposeth some offence: but an offence it is not to weepe for my selfe, for hee would neuer command it, if it were not lawfull to do it. The fault must be, in being one with him, that maketh the weeping for my selfe, a weeping also for him. And if this be a fault, I will neuer amend it, and let them that thinke it so, doe penance for it, for my part, sith I haue lost my myrth, I will make much of my sorrow, & sith I haue no joy but in teares, I may lawfully shed them.15

The Magdalene associates her tears with ‘libertie’ and ‘lawful[ness],’ a rhetorical move that adds a political charge to her mournful devotion.16 The exchange casts Mary’s weeping as a form of affective resistance to the climate of religious persecution in sixteenth-century England. If the absent body of Christ for whom the Magdalene weeps allegorizes the lost

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body of English Catholicism, then the penitent piety of her tears represents an implicit rebuke to the reformed English church. This threat to the ideology of the Tudor regime would have been most tangible in the immediate context of the 1590s and would have called out for a polemical response from Elizabeth’s most adept literary apologists; I will argue that Spenser supplies this response in canto 9. Spenser’s canto 9 responds to a larger trend of English imitations of Southwell’s literature of tears in the last decade of the sixteenth century. As Alison Shell has shown, Southwell’s text inspired a genre of tears literature that extended beyond the realm of committed or converted Catholics; the emotional force, confessional ambiguity, and scriptural basis of the genre encouraged its appropriation by Protestant writers as well.17 Nonetheless, the roots of the genre in Counter-Reformation devotion also occasioned attacks from more rigid Protestant polemicists who saw a literary model ‘tainted by popery.’18 In the context of a more secularized literary polemic, Gabriel Harvey appears to dismiss the genre, or at least Thomas Nashe’s attempt to work in it in Christs Teares Over Jerusalem (1593): ‘Now [Nashe] hath a little mused upon the Funerall Teares of Mary Magdalen; and is egged-on to try the suppleness of his Patheticall veine, in weeping the compassionatest and divinest Teares, that ever heavenly Eye rained upon Earth; Jesu, what a new worke of Supererogation have they atcheived?’19 Shell notes that Harvey’s attack associates the ‘poetry of tears with crocodile insincerity.’20 Insofar as the ‘they’ in the last phrase of Harvey’s remark may be taken to refer to the writers as much as the tears they enumerate, I would add that Harvey assimilates Southwell and Nashe as practitioners of ‘supererogation,’ a Catholic practice redolent of ‘arrogance and impiety’ according to official English Protestantism, defined as the theological error of doing ‘voluntary works besides, over and beyond God’s commandments’ by the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England (1571).21 Harvey’s theologically charged critique anticipates some modern critics who have found an over-worked baroque sensibility in the genre inspired by Southwell’s work. Harvey was, of course, Spenser’s close friend as well as Nashe’s literary antagonist, and we may assume that the critical opinion articulated here was not irrelevant to the author of The Faerie Queene. Indeed, in tracing Southwell’s subtle influence on the shape of English devotional lyric, Shell finds Spenser to be a key player in a more agonistic reception of Southwell’s poetic work. In Shell’s reading, Spenser’s Foure Hymnes (1596) implicitly responds to the devotional poetic project that Southwell articulates as a critique of secular love



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poetry in the preface to Saint Peters Complaynt: ‘In paynim toyes the sweetest vaines are spent: / To Christian workes, few have their tallents lent’ (17–18).22 Marie Magdalens Funerall Teares develops this critique by applying the language of Petrarchan praise to the absent Christ. Southwell seeks to re-inscribe the spiritualizing trajectory of Petrarchan erotic praise back into the religious context from which it was derived. The ‘Epistle Dedicatorie’ of the Funerall Teares attacks the representation of love in erotic verse as misdirected; while ‘passion, and especially this of love, is … the Idol to which both tongues and pennes doe sacrifice their ill bestowed labours,’ Southwell desires ‘to draw this floud of affections into the right chanel.’23 Portraying Mary’s passionate love for Christ thus represents an effort to ‘chanel’ a wayward love toward an appropriately sacred object (the body of Christ). In this sense, the prose poem makes an effort to realign the essential project of a sonnet sequence such as Spenser’s Amoretti.24 If we accept Shell’s analysis, Spenser would have been engaged in this literary struggle with Southwell around the same time that he was composing book 5 of The Faerie Queene, which appears in print in the same year as Foure Hymnes (1596). Spenser’s potential intervention in the literature of tears in The Faerie Queene has not previously been recognized. While Shell is correct that, in the narrower sense, Spenser never wrote in the genre of tears,25 I argue that he does allude to it, in brief parodic moments, in the allegory of book 5, canto 9. In the instance that I shall discuss here, Samiant, Mercilla’s maid, poses as the weeping Magdalene in an overtly deceitful way to lure Malengin from his lair. Samiant’s dissimulative weeping in front of Malengin’s cave or ‘den’ represents a parodic reiteration of Southwell’s Magdalene weeping in front of Christ’s tomb. As we have seen, Southwell originally deploys Mary’s grief as an emblem of Catholic suffering, in which the missing body of Christ figures the absent body of the English church: ‘For she sought, and as yet found not, and therefore stoode at the Tombe weeping for it, being now altogether giue[n] to mourning and driuen to miserie.’26 Spenser’s stanza recasts this weeping as a fitting snare to lure the wily parasite priest. Samiant conspires with Arthegall and Arthur to set the trap for Malengin in terms evocative of Southwell’s prose poem: So both agreed, to send that mayd afore, Where she might sit nigh to the den alone, Wayling, and raysing pittifull vprore, As if she did some great calamitie deplore. (5.9.8.6–9)

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The irony of the episode is heightened if Malengin does indeed allude to Southwell specifically, as well as his priestly profession more generally. Malengin as a type of Southwell is ensnared by his own conceit in his encounter with Samiant, who mimics the central image of his influential prose poem. This allusion is emphasized when the image is repeated in the next stanza, as the Speaker draws attention to Samiant’s ‘abiected’ posture: The Damzell straight went, as she was directed, Vnto the rocke, and there upon the soyle Hauing her selfe in wretched wize abiected, Gan weepe and wayle, as if great griefe had her affected. (5.9.6–9)

Samiant assumes a penitential pose to disguise the entrapment scheme. Her weeping here is a merely physical gesture that conceals, rather than reveals, her inner state. Even on the surface level of the allegory, she operates in the zone of contingent dissimulation previously identified as Malengin’s own peculiar terrain.27 Samiant’s ‘wretched wize’ performance successfully simulates a state of ‘grief’ appropriate to a devotional figure like the Magdalene; she thus turns the affective power of the imagery of tears against the figure of its primary English inventor. Southwell’s notoriety as a Jesuit agent with literary talent made him a particular target of the Elizabethan authorities and ensured that his trial and execution would become a spectacle designed to reinforce the legitimacy of the Tudor state.28 If Southwell as Malengin dissolves in Samiant’s crocodile tears, he rematerializes in the tableau of statesanctioned violence that frames the appearance of the mutilated poet, Mal Bon Font.29 At this switching-point in the canto, Spenser’s text addresses itself to the instability between martyr and traitor that was a flashpoint in post-Reformation polemics.30 In the 1580s and 1590s, martyrdom was politically contested territory where confessional antagonists sought the advantage of a powerful source of spiritual authority to reinforce claims to political legitimacy. Previous critics have discerned an intrinsic link between Malengin and the punished poet in the next section of canto 9, although none have observed that, in staging this sequence, Spenser’s text, perhaps inadvertently, follows the script that Southwell himself sought to perform.31 In her recent study of Southwell, Anne Sweeney observes, ‘Southwell’s doubled physical appearance as gentleman and priest, and his disappearance into cellars and holes, as much as his ultimate bodily dismemberment, are rejections of the idea



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of the ruly, static, containable body demanded (and legislated for) by the Tudor state in which he lived.’32 Spenser’s Malengin and Mal Bon Font represent distinct moments encompassed within Southwell’s larger subversive performance as a fugitive Jesuit in Elizabethan England. By transmuting Malengin’s dismembered body into Mal Bon Font’s martyrological display, Spenser’s text allows Southwell to evade the pure category of traitor and approach a semblance of martyrdom. Together, these allegorical figures gesture toward a fragmented representation of Southwell’s fate as well as a general concern with the fate of any poet who may happen to find himself on the wrong side of the theologicopolitical cross-currents of the era. Indeed, Spenser had good reason to imagine that he himself could be subjected to a similar ordeal. In 1596, James VI of Scotland (the future James I of England) complained to the English government about this very canto in Spenser’s work, specifically the allegory of the trial of his mother, Mary Stuart, at the end. James ‘desire[d] that Edward [sic] Spenser for his fault be duly tried and punished.’ In light of James’s accusation, Andrew Hadfield observes, ‘Spenser’s description of the fate of Mal/Bonfont could have been his own, had he lived on into James’s reign.’33 If Spenser potentially identifies with Mal Bon Font’s plight, then this canto also marks the possibility that its author could experience the same persecution as Southwell, a possibility that complicates the seemingly straightforward antagonism implied by the canto’s initial Malengin episode.

Mal Bon Font: Southwell under Erasure (5.9.21–6) Malengin’s end and the dismemberment of the poet on the threshold of Mercilla’s palace figure the potential of martyrdom within the larger spectacle of sovereign power. Although Spenser’s text seems overtly to endorse the official Elizabethan narrative that cast the missionary priest as traitor rather than martyr in the Malengin episode, the figure of the martyr ambivalently appears at the entrance to Mercilla’s palace. Malengin is resurrected as Mal Bon Font, only to be crucified immediately as a warning not only to co-religionists but also to literary artists in general: There as they entred at the Scriene, they saw Some one, whose tongue was for his trespasse vyle Nayld to a post, adiudged so by law: For that therewith he falsely did reuyle,

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And foule blaspheme that Queene for forged guyle, Both with bold speaches, which he blazed had, And with lewd poems, which he did compyle; For the bold title of a Poet bad He on himselfe had ta’en, and rayling rymes had sprad. Thus there he stood, whilst high ouer his head, There written was the purport of his sin, In cyphers strange, that few could rightly read, BON FONT: but bon that once had written bin, Was raced out, and Mal was now put in. So now Malfont was plainly to be red; Eyther for th’euill, which he did therein, Or that he likened was to a welhed Of euill words, and wicked sclaunders by him shed. (5.9.25–6)

Malfont (formerly known as BON FONT) recapitulates several key characteristics of Malengin. In Mal Bon Font’s discourse, the ‘forged guyle’ associated in the previous episode with Malengin’s machinations (and also, implicitly, those of Samiant and her allies, Arthur and Arthegall), is displaced onto the Queen herself, the object of blame and ‘blasphem[y],’ although again the syntax is ambiguous, as it also potentially attributes the ‘forged guyle’ to the poet’s motivation for ‘blaspheme.’ ‘Bold speaches’ and ‘lewd poems’ are explicitly identified as the genres in which the penalized poet works. These are also genres that roughly correspond to Southwell’s own literary output, which consisted not only of devotional poetry implicitly critical of the spiritual state of post-Reformation England but also a politically charged prose Supplication addressed to the Queen.34 Like Malengin, the ‘selfe deceiuer’ (20.7) undone by the image of his own deceptive rhetoric, Mal Bon Font is cast as having reflexively acquired his title: ‘He on himselfe had ta’en’ the ‘bold title of a Poet bad’ (25.8–9). The text seems to disavow sympathy for both Malengin and the renegade poet insofar as both are presented as willfully rebelling, choosing their fates by constructing counternarratives, such as Mal Bon Font’s offensive literary works or Malengin’s deceptive ‘iugling,’ that threaten to overwhelm the larger narrative of ‘justice’ represented by the constellation of Arthegall, Arthur, and Mercilla. The next stanza (26), however, complicates the polemical thrust of the previous stanza. The script posted above Mal Bon Font’s tormented



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body situates the ‘poet bad’ in a martyrological context. The account of the ‘poet bad’ shifts into a portrayal of the poet martyr, affixed, Christlike, with a mocking superscript. The palimpsest of the poet’s ‘raced’ and overwritten superscript calls attention to the indeterminate ethical valence of the spectacle and signals some ambivalence on the part of the Speaker. By delineating the scene in this way, Spenser’s text only partially condemns the censured Poet and even implies a certain sympathetic horror at his fate. The palimpsestic vision of Mal overwriting Bon emblematically alludes to Southwell as a literary figure in the process of being ‘raced’ out of English national discourse. This scene of martyrdom depicts also what Spenser’s text does to Southwell’s poetic model (the poetry of tears) on levels of both form and content. While this canto presents an allegory of the ongoing theologico-political struggle between the Elizabethan state and Jesuit missionaries over claims to legitimate martyrdom and spiritual authority, it also, in the displacement and re-collection that occurs between the Malengin and Malfont episodes, presents an allegory of the operation of Spenser’s text itself vis-à-vis the half-legible figure of Southwell. This complex allegorical elision of Southwell’s legacy continues in a different form in the central episode of the canto – the trial of Duessa. In this final episode, Spenser’s text strives to blot out the allegation that Mary Stuart is a Catholic martyr, a victim of the English Protestant state. Insofar as Southwell’s work sought to forward precisely such allegations on Mary’s behalf, Spenser’s text again seeks to overwrite it. However, Spenser also borrows Southwell’s trope of tears to develop an allegory of his own sovereign – Mary’s antagonist, Elizabeth, figured as Mercilla in the canto – in terms that convey ambivalence about the English queen’s status as a divinely ordained monarch.

The Trial of Duessa: Mercilla’s ‘Funerall Teares’ and the Elision of Martyrdom (5.9.36–5.10.1–4) Spenser and Southwell produce inverse images of Mary Queen of Scots as traitor and martyr. The images of Mary conveyed in both book 1 and book 5 of The Faerie Queene effectively reverse Southwell’s own poetic effort to frame Mary allegorically as a Catholic martyr. The trial of Duessa that properly begins at 5.9.36 has already been preceded by numerous other fantasmatic representations of Mary’s execution circulating since 1587, including book 1 of The Faerie Queene (1590) as well as Southwell’s own verses memorializing Mary in the year of her execution. While the

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trial in book 5 is a more transparent allegory of the Mary Queen of Scots trial, the earlier scene of judgment, the stripping of Duessa in book 1, does appear to present a distorted but still discernible version of Mary Stuart’s execution.35 The stripping of Duessa cites Mary’s death scene by incorporating notorious details of the execution circulated by Elizabethan authorities. Closer to the event itself, in the 1590 Faerie Queene, Spenser superimposes his allegorical representation of Duessa as the Red Whore of Babylon, the most vivid polemical image of the Roman church in the English Protestant imagination, onto the specific execution scene of Mary Queen of Scots, which had unfolded three years previously in 1587. In book 5, Mercilla, as judge and double for Elizabeth, substitutes for Una, who occupies an analogous position in 1.8. While in each context Duessa substitutes for both Roman Whore and Mary, Queen of Scots, Mercilla will perform a greater show of mercy, although, in contrast to Una, her sovereign character is more sceptically presented. Certain details of the stripping of Duessa, imagined in Faerie Queene 1.8 as a metaphorical execution, echo narratives of the beheading of Mary Stuart that circulated in the late sixteenth century. In a letter narrating the execution written by Robert Wingfield, an agent of Cecil, the details of Mary’s stripping in preparation for the executioner’s block and the revelation of her wig and aged condition after the beheading appear to interfere with her effort to perform the role of Catholic martyr.36 Wingfield describes the instant immediately after the botched beheading in vivid detail: ‘The executioners lifted up the head, and bade God save the Queen. Then her dressing of lawn fell from her head, which appeared grey as if she had been threescore and ten years old, polled very short.’37 The moment is shocking insofar as it punctures the myth of Mary as a fatally beautiful and seductive woman. On another level, perhaps more useful to Protestant polemicists, the revelation of Mary’s shaved head underneath the wig can function as an effective metaphor for their frequent claims about the false shows of the Roman church. The lack of integrity of Mary’s body may easily be extended or imputed to the lack of integrity of her church, itself so often imagined along the lines of an organic body. Book 1 of the Faerie Queene is, of course, a text well known for striking precisely this theme insistently.38 The text of book 1, canto 8 inserts the scandalous historical details of Mary’s execution into an allegorical framework that depicts a wider Manichean conflict between true and false churches. Spenser’s own scene of stripping and degradation exaggerates the more grotesque details of Mary’s execution in the letter’s narrative, for Una’s command



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reveals not simply an aging woman, but an inhuman monster mockingly described in a contreblazon that casts the stripped Duessa as the absolute inversion of ideal female beauty: Her crafty head was altogether bald, And as in hate of honorable eld, Was ouergrowne with scurfe and filthy scald; Her teeth out of her rotten gummes were feld, And her sowre breath abhominably smeld; Her dried dugs, lyke bladders lacking wind, Hong downe, and filthy matter from them weld; Her wrizled skin as rough, as maple rind, So scabby was, that would have loathd all womankind (1.8.47.1–9)

Duessa ‘robd of roiall robes’ (1.8.46.2) shares with the decapitated Mary of Wingfield’s narrative a ‘crafty head’ that turns out to be ‘altogether bald,’ a mark of her now startlingly evident status as ‘eld.’ The stanza subsequently goes beyond details drawn from Wingfield’s letter to imagine the particulars of this elderly body in hyperbolically grotesque detail. Nonetheless, the image of Mary’s demise woven into the allegorical stripping of Duessa and the purportedly realistic details contained in the narrative of her execution share a common goal: to quench any legitimate claim to martyrdom by limiting the potential valuation of the martyred body, representing it as aged or monstrous, imperfect in some fundamental sense and removed from any part of grace. Southwell undertakes precisely the kind of literary effort to celebrate Mary Stuart as a martyr that Spenser’s allegory seeks to circumvent. Southwell directly engages with the figure of Mary in ‘Decease, Release (Dum Morior Orior),’ a poem dated shortly after Mary’s execution in 1587.39 To celebrate Mary Stuart as a Catholic martyr, Southwell also depersonalizes her by framing her fate in a formal emblematic pattern: The pounded spice both tast and sent doth please In fading smoke the force doth incense shewe  The perisht kernell springeth with encrease  The lopped tree doth best and soonest growe.  Gods spice I was and pounding was my due  In fadinge breath my incense savored best 

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Death was the meane my kyrnell to renewe  By loppinge shott I upp to heavenly rest  Some thinges more perfect are in their decaye  Like sparke that going out gives clerest light  Such was my happ whose dolefull dying daye  Beganne my joy and termed fortunes spite.  Alive a Queene now dead I am a Sainte  Once M. calld my name nowe Martyr is  From earthly raigne debarred by restraint  In liew whereof I raigne in heavenly blisse  My life my griefe my death hath wrought my joye  My frendes my foyle my foes my Weale procur’d  My speedy death hath shortned longe annoye  And losse of life an endles life assur’d  My Skaffold was the bedd where ease I found  The blocke a pillow of Eternall reste  My hedman cast me in a blisfull swounde  His axe cutt off my cares from combred breste  Rue not my death rejoyce at my repose  It was no death to me but to my woe  The bud was opened to lett out the Rose  The cheynes unloo’sd to lett the captive goe  A prince by birth, a prisoner by mishappe  From Crowne to crosse from throne to thrall I fell  My right my ruthe my titles wrought my trappe  My weale my woe my worldly heaven my hell.  By death from prisoner to a prince enhanc’d  From Crosse to Crowne from thrall to throne againe  My ruth my right my trapp my stile advaunc’d  From woe to weale from hell to heavenly raigne.40

The poem immediately assimilates Mary to a series of impersonal commonplace emblems evidently inspired by her own embroidery work.41



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The poem’s argument for Mary’s martyrdom undertakes a series of chiastic reversals; the careful formal constructions of one stanza are equally carefully deconstructed in the next. The argument proceeds through a cascade of paradoxes, culminating in the interchange of ‘losse of life’ for ‘endles life.’ The last two stanzas fixate in particular on undoing the earthly political circumstances of Mary’s plight, reversing the movement from ‘prince’ to ‘prisoner.’ Southwell plays on the sense of ‘cross’ in early modern English as ‘trouble’ or ‘adversity’ as well as crucifix, to cast Mary’s execution as an imitatio Christi.42 In the crossings of the final two stanzas, the body of ‘M[ary]’ as ‘Martyr’ vanishes at the intersection of two contradictory trajectories. This vanishing is also, however, an elevation into an ideal, spiritual body, the culmination of the Christian paradox of incarnation implied by the poem’s myriad chiastic figures. In the midst of the nearly symmetrical composition and decomposition of Mary’s double identity as monarch and saint, one fleeting asymmetry stands out: the shift from ‘title’ to ‘stile.’ Between ‘My right my ruth my titles wrought my trapp’ and ‘My ruth my right my trapp my stile advaunc’d,’ the earthly ‘trapp’ exchanges places with ‘title’ of the political world. In the final stanza, it is the worldly political ‘trapp’ that ‘advaunc[es]’ Mary’s ‘stile’ to a ‘heavenly raigne.’ The substitution of ‘stile’ for ‘title’ may not represent a significant semantic shift insofar as ‘stile’ or ‘style’ may refer to a sovereign title as easily as a fashion, mode of discourse, or literary expression.43 Nonetheless, the stanza clusters this ‘stile’ with all of the other worldly accoutrements of sovereignty and its downfall, as though Mary’s ‘title’ were also always a ‘stile,’ a means or mode of expression for advancing the significance of her death via a legitimate claim to martyrdom. Southwell’s poem itself attempts to convert Mary’s death to a literary ‘stile’ that implicitly accuses the Elizabethan regime of religious and political persecution. In this regard, the poem approximates the definition of the crime attributed to Mal Bon Font in the previous episode. Such a ‘stile’ would dwell on the relics of the martyr’s memory, disseminating even more effectively the power of the martyr’s voice and body represented in lyric poetry. It is unclear whether Spenser would have been aware of Southwell’s particular poetic assertion of Mary’s martyrdom, but certainly the possibility of such a martyrological portrait was an ongoing concern for Elizabethan authorities, who sought to limit the contagion of her beheaded body and its accoutrements. In so doing, they also sought to control the potential for Mary’s death to be translated into martyrological narratives. In Wingfield’s narrative of the execution, Mary herself appears to

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raise the possibility of this martyrological transformation when she asks that certain of her servants be allowed to witness the execution, so ‘that their eyes and hearts may see and witness how patiently their queen and mistress would endure her execution, and so make relation when they came into their country, that she died a true constant Catholic to her religion.’44 Mary’s request for co-religionist witnesses implicitly highlights the propaganda value of sympathetic accounts in the turbulent world of late-sixteenth-century European religious politics. The resistance to this request by English authorities, first articulated by the Earl of Kent, focuses on the material relics of martyrdom as a primary concern: ‘“For if such an access might be allowed, they would not stick to put some superstitious trumpery in practice, and if it were but dipping their handkerchiefs in Your Grace’s blood, whereof it were very unmeet for us to give allowance.”’45 Elizabeth’s agents directly express an anxiety about the power of the Queen’s blood, mixed with the ‘superstitious trumpery’ of the Roman church, to transform ordinary handkerchiefs into objects of devotion. Indirectly, their concerns may extend to the narrative power that the witnesses could marshal; indeed the material relic and the martyr narrative would potentially reinforce each other, one extending and authenticating the other. The English resistance to Mary’s request and the protracted negotiations that follow in the letter illustrate a potentially serious negative side effect of the Mary Stuart execution for the Elizabethan regime: its potential to make the rival queen even stronger after a death that may become the image of a martyrdom through the circulation of relics and tales. Whether Spenser attempts to pre-empt or counter the Southwellian representation of Mary as Catholic martyr, like the executioners of the will of the Elizabethan state, he seeks to contain the imaginative contagion of the martyred sovereign body. In contrast to the representation of the monstrous stripped Duessa of book 1 of 1590, the 1596 Faerie Queene pursues a more ambivalent strategy that nonetheless seeks to void claims for Mary’s martyr status. Duessa returns as A Ladie of great countenance and place, But that she it with foul abuse did marre; Yet did appeare rare beautie in her face, But blotted with condition vile and base, That all her other honour did obscure, And titles of nobilities deface:



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Yet in that wretched semblant, she did sure The peoples great compassion vnto her allure. (5.9.38.2–9)

In this equivocal stanza, Duessa appears humanized, almost sympathetic, but also disempowered, abstracted. The alternating rhythm of ‘but’ and ‘yet’ curiously echoes the rhetorical pattern of Southwell’s paean to Mary, but it works to opposite effect, countering her ‘beautie’ with ‘blot[s],’ pulling Mary away from possible martyrdom by emphasizing her irredeemable fallenness. Jayne Lewis notes that this stanza casts Duessa-Mary’s face as kind of overwritten ‘text,’ emphasizing its ‘palimpsestic quality.’46 This portrayal of Duessa as palimpsest reveals her affinity with the palimpsestically denominated Mal Bon Font in the previous section of the canto; both can appear only as martyrs under erasure. Despite the admixture of positive and negative details in the stanza, its ultimate effect is to highlight the inauthenticity of the rival queen; as Lewis observes, in this stanza, ‘like Mary’s own Protestant subjects of old, Spenser seeks to escape her sentimental orbit by falsifying her, reducing her to a “semblant” and enchantress.’47 In this sense, the stanza sets the stage for the eventual blunt denial of the status of martyr as such to the ‘wretched corse’ (5.10.4.9) of Mary-Duessa. The marked ambivalence of the portrayal of Duessa in book 5, however, also attaches itself to the representation of her sovereign adversary and judge, particularly in the spectacle of grief that closes the canto. Mercilla, an updated version of book 1’s Una, appears as a more cryptic allegorical figure, seemingly indecisive and disingenuous. The most conspicuous example of the canto’s ambivalent representation of Mercilla occurs in the depiction of her ‘perling’ tears. At the end of the trial, and canto 9 overall, Mercilla weeps. As suggested earlier, Mercilla’s tears at this point recapitulate the opening struggle of deception between Samiant and Malengin.48 The echo of Samiant’s weeping is most pertinent in this context. The language in the final stanza of canto 9, even more strongly than the stanzas of the initial episode, paradoxically evokes the trope of the weeping Magdalene: But she, whose Princely breast was touched nere With piteous ruth of her so wretched plight, Though plaine she saw by all, that she did heare, That she of death was guiltie found by right, Yet would not let iust vengeance on her light;

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But rather let in stead thereof to fall Few perling drops from her faire lampes of light; The which she couering with her purple pall Would haue the passion hid, and vp arose withall. (5.9.50)

The second half of the stanza, which addresses the Queen’s resistance to the purportedly ‘plaine’ course of justice demanded by the verdict, deploys a Southwellian rhetoric of tears not only to critique the Queen’s merciful posturing as dissimulative but also to enable this Queen to occupy the intercessory role traditionally claimed by the saint or martyr in the old religion.49 The duplicity of Mercilla’s tears mirrors a double agenda in Spenser’s verse. The twisted syntax of the speaker’s announcement of the verdict – ‘she of death was guiltie found by right’ – suggests some doubt that the verdict is achieved in a ‘right’ straightforward way, implying deviance and deception in the operation of the Queen’s justice. While the stanza emphasizes the ‘opacity’ of Mercilla’s tears and, by extension, her conscience, as Lowell Gallagher observes, it does not present us with ‘tears like pearls’ as a ‘finished product’ but rather ‘the process (tears becoming pearls; transparency turning into opacity).’50 It is in this processive phenomenology of tears that this moment of Spenser’s text appears in closest proximity to Southwell’s Funerall Teares. For Southwell’s text, as well, focuses on tears as a processive phenomenon. Mary’s tears oscillate between transparency and opacity, just as Southwell’s prose wavers between obscurity and revelation. In the narration of the Magdalene’s weeping, moments of misrecognition alternate with points of hyper-lucidity. The key example of this dynamic occurs in the climactic moment when the Magdalene’s tears interfere with her recognition of the risen Christ: ‘But there is such a shower of teares between thee and him, and thy eyes are so dimmed with weeping for him, that thogh thou seest the shape of a man, yet thou canst not discern him.’51 Here, as in Spenser’s final stanza, tears work to occlude access to an essential truth. However, in Southwell’s text, it is the weeping figure herself, the Magdalene, who experiences the occlusion, rather than the observer of the scene of weeping. While they represent a moment of profound obscurity, the Magdalene’s tears ultimately function as a prelude to a crucial revelation. Spenser’s text precisely inverts this trajectory; Mercilla’s tears insistently block any insight into her motivations or true spiritual or emotional state on the part of those observing her performance of grief. The vexed figure of the martyr, the extended subtext of canto 9,



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emerges in this final moment as it does earlier in the images of Malengin’s demise and Malfont’s crucifixion. Here, however, it is Mercilla herself, the exemplar of justice, who seeks to claim an aura of sanctity akin to that associated with martyrdom.52 While the tears that immediately precede Mercilla’s surreptitious ‘passion’ link her performance to the Counter-Reformation devotional genre of the literature of tears, they also refer the spectacle of Mercilla as dissimulative intercessor back to the initial scene of deceit that parodies this genre in the canto: Samiant’s weeping before Malengin’s cave. Insofar as Mercilla’s weeping restages the affective rhetoric pioneered in English verse by Southwell, this spectacle draws attention to a site where the rhetoric of the Catholic priest otherwise identified as a traitor and invasive enemy has been ironically incorporated into the propaganda of the Tudor Protestant state. If, as Gallagher suggests, Mercilla’s tears enact ‘an explicitly defined strategy of concealment,’53 then this concealment draws upon a prior dialectic of illumination and occlusion articulated in Southwell’s Magdalene prose poem. The debt to Southwell encrypted in Mercilla’s weeping introduces a figurative excess into the canto that extends beyond the allegorical economy of Spenser’s epic. The last word on Duessa in the next canto is nearly an afterthought, an almost casual reference to her status as a ‘wretched corse,’ a remainder seemingly excluded from any martyrology. This remainder nonetheless provokes a show of affective excess when Mercilla appears to express ‘more then needfull naturall remorse’ as she yields ‘the last honour to [Duessa’s] wretched corse’ (5.10.4.8– 9). On one level, the spectacle of Mercilla’s hyperbolic ‘remorse’ casts her in the role of an ineffectual intercessor. This extravagant display of grieving also inadvertently functions as a reminder of the cancelled possibility of Mary’s martyrdom. However, the final goal of Mercilla’s show of ‘remorse’ appears largely self-serving insofar as it represents an effort to immunize the Queen from blame for the demise of her rival. The larger arc of Spenser’s text itself replicates the multiple layers of Mercilla’s affective strategy. Book 5, canto 9 of The Faerie Queene explicitly cites Southwell’s devotional genre, the poetry of tears, in an effort to appropriate the spiritual rhetoric of a religious antagonist to reinforce a myth of Tudor sacred sovereignty (albeit not without a potentially critical edge), while simultaneously attempting to efface or overpower the very source of this rhetoric. Nonetheless, to the extent that Spenser acts as a literary agent of the Tudor regime, his allegory of the trial of Mary Stuart demonstrates that the propagandistic image of this regime cannot

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cohere without cross-confessional citations that appropriate the affective rhetoric of the enemy and the exile. Spenser’s indirect, antagonistic allusions to Southwell’s literary missionary project reveal Catholicism to be the uncanny of the Elizabethan political imaginary. The Catholic uncanny inflecting Spenser’s text may appear barely discernible from the perspective of the twenty-first-century reader whose expectations of the text have been formed by generations of readings focused on the dominance of a Protestant narrative – an interpretive apparatus that may seem more overwhelmingly triumphant in retrospect than in Spenser’s own moment. As we have seen, the Catholic uncanny may be legible only insofar as it inexorably deforms the representation of Tudor Protestant ideals, even at the very moment when such ideals appear to be overtly celebrated.

NOTES   1 Qtd in F.W. Brownlow, Robert Southwell, Twayne’s English Authors Series no. 516 (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996), 20.   2 All quotations from The Faerie Queene are taken from A.C. Hamilton’s edition (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2001).   3 See John D. Staines, ‘Elizabeth, Mercilla, and the Rhetoric of Propaganda in Spenser’s Faerie Queene,’ Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31, no. 2 (2001): 283–311. According to Staines’s account, ‘Malengin receives the fate of traitors: Talus “did his bowels disentrayle” and “him left a carrion outcast,” just as the executioner quartered the traitors’ bodies and publicly displayed them as signs of the horror of their crime and their punishment’ (288). Lowell Gallagher also notes this similarity, in Medusa’s Gaze: Casuistry and Conscience in the Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 225.   4 See, for example, Gary Kuchar, The Poetry of Religious Sorrow in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 31–76.   5 Brownlow, Robert Southwell, 39.   6 For the ‘Irish’ reading, see Hamilton’s note on 5.9.5 (569), and the ‘Malengin’ entry in The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. A.C. Hamilton (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 450, which connects Spenser’s depiction of the ‘villaine’ in the Faerie Queene to Spenser’s account of Irish rebels in A Viewe of the Present State of Ireland. For arguments that Malengin represents the type of the ‘guilefull’ Jesuit, see Elizabeth Heale, ‘Spenser’s Malengine,



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Missionary Priests, and the Means of Justice,’ Review of English Studies n.s. 41, no. 162 (1990): 171–84. Cyndia Clegg also reads Malengin as a ‘generalized allegory of the Catholic mission to England’ (‘Justice and Censorship in Book V of Spenser’s Faerie Queene,’ Studies in Philology 95, no. 3 [1998]: 253–4).   7 Heale argues that this hole is significant on several different levels: ‘Malengine’s hole, like the Jesuits’, is both real and metaphorical, a diabolical priest-hole and a false labyrinth of sophistry and equivocation’ (‘Spenser’s Malengine,’ 176). Clegg also claims ‘Malengin’s abode bears strong resemblance to a “priest-hole”’ (‘Justice and Censorship,’ 25).   8 Julian Yates, Error, Misuse, Failure: Object Lessons from the English Renaissance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 155.   9 Ibid., 144. 10 Ibid. 11 For commentary linking these details to polemical accounts of Jesuit missionaries, see Heale, ‘Spenser’s Malengine,’ 251–2, and Clegg, ‘Justice and Censorship,’ 175. Staines also links Malengin’s ‘charmes’ (5.9.13.1) to Protestant apprehension of ‘the enticing, bewitching magic of Catholic rituals’ (‘Elizabeth, Mercilla, and Rhetoric,’ 287). 12 For an early account of Southwell’s translation and adaptation of postTridentine Italian sources in the Funerall Teares, see Pierre Janelle, Robert Southwell, the Writer: A Study in Religious Inspiration (Mamaroneck, NY: Appel, 1971), 184–97. Louis Martz’s classic study, The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), analyses the impact of the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises on Southwell’s literary development; on Southwell’s Funerall Teares, see 199– 201. Scott Pilarz, SJ, also discusses the impact of the Spiritual Exercises on the Funerall Teares in Robert Southwell and the Mission of Literature, 1561–1595: Writing Reconciliation (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004), 173–4. 13 Anne Sweeney situates Southwell’s work in relation to the sacramental deprivation of the late Elizabethan Catholic community: ‘Southwell’s English Catholic readers supplied the extra context of Magdalen’s tears from their own experience: they knew that she was also crying for the loss of Christ’s body from the Roman Catholic Mass’ (Robert Southwell: Snow in Arcadia; Redrawing the English Lyric Landscape, 1586–95 [Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2006], 141). Gary Kuchar similarly argues that ‘Southwell’s representation of Magdalene addresses and seeks to mitigate the recusant experience of religious/social paralysis’ (‘Gender and Recusant Melancholia in Robert Southwell’s Mary Magdalene’s Funeral Tears,’ in Catholic Culture

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in Early Modern England, ed. Ronald Corthell, Frances E. Dolan, Christopher Highley, and Arthur F. Marotti [Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2007], 136). 14 Robert Southwell, Marie Magdalens Funerall Teares, 2nd ed. (London: Printed by A[dam] I[slip] for G[abriel] C[awood], 1594), 16, Early English Books Online, http://eebo.chadwyck.com/. 15 Ibid. 16 Sweeney reads Mary’s stance at this moment in the text as evocative of the passivity of the ‘English Catholic nostalgia’ that Southwell sought to address in his literary mission (Robert Southwell, 142). My reading discerns a more militant Magdalene in this exchange, who insists, in the face of hostile interpretations, on the integrity of her tears as the expression of a valid spiritual sentiment. 17 Alison Shell, Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 77–88. 18 Ibid., 85. 19 Quoted in ibid., 84. 20 Ibid. 21 Gerald Bray, ed., Documents of the English Reformation (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994), 292. 22 Robert Southwell, Collected Poems, ed. Peter Davidson and Anne Sweeney (Manchester, UK: Carcanet, 2007), 63. Martz discusses Southwell’s ‘campaign to convert poetry of profane love to poetry of divine love’ (Poetry of Meditation, 183–5). For an analysis of the Spenser-Southwell agon, see Shell, Catholicism, Controversy, 72–7. 23 Southwell, Funerall Teares, 1594 edition, A3. Kuchar discusses Southwell’s adaptation of Petrarchanism in this passage and the Funerall Teares in general (‘Gender and Recusant Melancholia,’ 152–3n6). 24 See Amoretti, Sonnet XXII 22 (William A. Oram, Einar Bjorvand, Ronald Bond, Thomas H. Cain, Alexander Dunlop, and Richard Schell, eds., The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989]) for an example of the genre to which Southwell might strenuously object insofar as it grafts imagery of the old religion (the preReformation observance of Lent) to an articulation of erotic desire. In the process, the besotted lover reveals the idolatry of the old religion:

This holy season fit to fast and pray, Men to devotion ought to be inclynd: therefore, I lykwise on so holy day, for my sweet Saynt some service fit will find. (1–4)



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25 Shell, Catholicism, Controversy, 76. 26 Southwell, Funerall Teares, 7. 27 Staines observes as well the compulsive use of ‘as if’ in these stanzas: ‘Appearances in this canto are contingent, conditional’ (‘Elizabeth, Mercilla, and Rhetoric,’ 296). 28 For an account of Southwell’s pursuit by Topcliffe, Elizabeth’s chief pursuivant, and his subsequent torture, trial and execution, see Pilarz, Robert Southwell, xii. 29 This typographical rendering of the name of the executed poet is particular to my argument; I seek to represent in this way the palimpsestic indeterminacy of the name that Spenser’s text narrates. 30 On this struggle in the celebrated 1581 case of the executed Jesuit Edmund Campion, see Alice Dailey, ‘Making Edmund Campion: Treason, Martyrdom and the Structure of Transcendence,’ Religion and Literature 38, no. 3 (2006): 65–84. Dailey argues that ‘Campion’s death becomes a drama whose genre is under contention. The state seeks to perform the script of a treason trial and execution, while Campion insists that the operative script is that of a religious persecution – a martyrdom’ (78). Also see Staines’s discussion of the larger traitor versus martyr problem posed by the Jesuit missionary as a context for Faerie Queene 5.9 (‘Elizabeth, Mercilla, and Rhetoric,’ 286–8). 31 Clegg attempts to identify the executed poet with another Catholic recusant author, Stephen Vallenger (‘Justice and Censorship,’ 256) but seems unaware of the possible relevance of the Southwell case. 32 Sweeney, Robert Southwell, 272. 33 Andrew Hadfield, ‘Duessa’s Trial and Elizabeth’s Error: Judging Elizabeth in Spenser’s Faerie Queene,’ in The Myth of Elizabeth, ed. Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman (Houndsmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 65–6. Jonathan Goldberg offers a similar analysis: ‘In the very canto to which James objected, the poet Bonfont is brought before the court and has his name “raced out” … so that he appears as Malfont instead. The substitute name represents the poet’s submission to the truth vested in the authoritative figure of the ruler, Mercilla, and it translates a social reality, that the poet’s words are at the sovereign’s command’ (James I and the Politics of Literature [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983], 1). 34 The full title is An Humble Supplication to Her Maiestie, dated around 1591. See discussions of this prose work in Sweeney, Robert Southwell, 254–5, and Brownlow, Robert Southwell, 64–72. 35 See the entry on ‘Mary, Queen of Scots’ in The Spenser Encyclopedia for a discussion of the ways the historical Mary may enter into the allegory of

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Duessa in book 1, 458. Traditionally, Mary Stuart has not been associated with the Duessa of book 1 until the reading of Duessa’s letter in the final canto (1.12). Hadfield discusses John Dixon’s 1590s marginal gloss of 1.12.26, which interprets the message from Duessa that interrupts the betrothal of Redcross and Una as ‘a fiction of a challenge by Q. of S: that religion maintained by her to be the truth’ (qtd in Hadfield, ‘Duessa’s Trial,’ 68). However, to my knowledge, no one has yet claimed, as I do here, that the particulars of Mary’s execution are woven into the scene of Duessa’s stripping in 1.8. 36 Jayne Elizabeth Lewis analyses the Wingfield narrative as a ‘classic example of the propaganda against Mary Stuart that engulfed the British Isles during the reign of her cousin once-removed Elizabeth Tudor’ (Queen of Scots: Romance and Nation [London: Routledge, 1998], 13–15). 37 Robert Wingfield, ‘Narrative of the Execution of the Queen of Scots, In a Letter to the Right Honorable Sir William Cecil (1587),’ Norton Anthology of English Literature, vol. B, The Sixteenth Century and the Early Seventeenth Century, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, M. H. Abrams, Barbara K. Lewalski, George M. Logan, and Katharine Eisaman Maus, 8th ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), 683. 38 See John King, Spenser’s Poetry and the Reformation Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990) for the standard account of Faerie Queene, book 1, as Protestant polemic, and Claire McEachern, The Poetics of English Nationhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) for a more sophisticated account of the gender politics of book 1 that nonetheless remains largely reliant on Protestant polemical literature. 39 See Davidson and Sweeney’s note on this poem in Southwell, Collected Poems, 159, and Susannah Brietz Monta’s discussion in Martyrdom and Literature in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 127–8. 40 The text quoted here follows the version reprinted in Southwell, Collected Poems, 41–2. 41 See note in Southwell, Collected Poems, 159. 42 Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., 1989, s.v. ‘Cross, n. 10.b.’ 43 Ibid., s.v. ‘Style, n. 18.a.’ 44 Wingfield, ‘Narrative of the Execution,’ 683. 45 Ibid., 683. 46 Lewis, Mary Queen of Scots, 55–6. 47 Ibid., 56. 48 As Gallagher argues, Mercilla occupies the role of both adversaries by the end of 5.9: ‘The canto closes … with the implication that the regimes of



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Mercilla and Malengin … do not reside in disparate spheres but constitute the alternately concealing and revealing phases of an equivocal text’ (Medusa’s Gaze, 247). Hadfield also suggests that Mercilla’s emotional state blurs the distinction between herself and her rival, indicating a possible larger critique of the capacity of women to function as effective rulers: ‘Mercilla/Elizabeth is guilty of pandering to what she has in common with Mary – her gender – rather than establishing their religious and political differences’ (‘Duessa’s Trial,’ 64). 49 See Robin Headlam Wells for the argument that Mercilla, as an avatar of Elizabeth, mimics the role of the Virgin Mary as ‘protecting intercessor’ (Spenser’s Faerie Queene and the Cult of Elizabeth [London: Croom Helm, 1983], 125). 50 Gallagher, Medusa’s Gaze, 246. 51 Southwell, Funerall Teares, 50. 52 As Gallagher observes, the final line of canto 9, which represents Mercilla’s desire to ‘haue the passion hid,’ demands two contradictory readings at the same time: ‘The passion to be hidden could be read as Mercilla’s indecorous outburst of emotion. Or it could be read as the spectacle of Duessa’s final suffering (to some lights her martyrdom) in which Mercilla must perform not as the victim but as the minister of death’ (Medusa’s Gaze, 245). 53 Ibid.

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PART III COMMUNITIES

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chapter nine

‘Honest mirth & merriment’: Christmas and Catholicism in Early Modern England PHEBE JENSEN

In the absence of an institutional Catholic Church in England after the Reformation, lay piety loomed particularly large in the English recusant community’s efforts to sustain a sense of religious identity and culture. Though scholars of early modern Catholicism once disagreed about whether early modern Catholic culture was characterized by the survival of late medieval traditions or the influence of missionary priests, recent work on both English and Continental Catholicism has shown that it was in fact defined by complex interactions between the two, as the traditions of the past and the spiritual directives of the Counter-Reformation merged, clashed, and converged.1 Such compromises were further complicated when it came to popular attachments to superstitious and festive traditions that had been discredited by Tridentine reforms yet continued to be both culturally and devotionally important to England’s splintered and beleaguered Catholic religious community.2 The process whereby older religious traditions and Counter-Reformation religious values came together to fashion a particularly English Catholic culture can be illustrated in evolving popular practices surrounding the Twelve Days of Christmas, and especially in the developing fortunes of the Christmas carol.3 After experiencing a golden age in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the Christmas carol declined precipitously at the Reformation. As Frank McKay has noted, ‘The chief evidence for the survival of the Carol in the seventeenth century seems to be found in certain Catholic collections that circulated among the English recusants and in which poems called carols occur.’4 The richest of these collections survive from three recusant households: the Shann Family of Methley, Yorkshire, the Blundells of Little Crosby, Lancashire, and the Fairfaxes of Warwickshire, in manuscripts dating from approxi-

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mately 1611 to the 1650s.5 The carols in these collections bear the imprint of Counter-Reformation spiritual imperatives, but they also attempt to recreate older English Christmas traditions, specifically in reviving (and revising) generic characteristics of the late medieval English carol. Solidly grounded in earlier carolling traditions that can be established by surviving mid-sixteenth-century printed carols, the seventeenth-century Catholic carol also reflects larger strategies of popular devotion through which, as Anne Dillon describes the work of the Jesuits, priests sought ‘to defend, promote, and make pragmatic use’ of religious practices in the process of ‘regenerating them as symbols of loyalty.’6 By providing a window into the shadowy world of recusant gentry households, the carol collections in these early modern commonplace books confirm what McKay, John Bossy, Chris Durston, and the polemical material attacking and defending Christmas in popular seventeenthcentury literature all note: the special appeal of Christmas to early modern English Catholics.7 At the same time, and somewhat paradoxically, the celebration of Christmas, like other popular devotional rituals of English Catholics, was in many ways all but indistinguishable from mainstream English Protestant practices. This fact, clearly illustrated by the appeal to a Protestant audience of printed devotional and literary works by Catholic writers such as Robert Southwell, Luis de Granada, and (with Edmund Bunny’s intervention) even Robert Persons, is also evident in the subtle similarities and differences between Catholic and Protestant celebrations of Christmas.8 Tracing confessionally tinged debates over the season and the evolution of the Christmas carol illuminates one corner of early modern English recusant life, but it also further demonstrates how Catholicism not only conflicted with, but also informed, mainstream Protestant religious culture in the century after the English Reformation. The early modern Catholic attachment to Christmas evolved in the context of the Protestant reform of popular religious practices associated with the liturgical calendar and ensuing debates among Protestants about the proper celebration of Christmas. In the mid-sixteenth century the reform of the traditional year, itself part of a larger effort to dismantle the edifice of late medieval Catholic ritual observance, had drastically reduced the number of holy days acknowledged in the official calendar, largely by limiting them to commemorations of events in the life of Jesus, his disciples, and the four evangelists, and reducing to three the traditional six Marian holidays.9 These reforms sought to eradicate the worship of the saints, refocus religious observance on the Bible and the life



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of Christ, and separate the profane – especially raucous holy day traditions – from the sacred. Given these goals, the Christmas season was relatively easy to adapt to Protestant religious culture. As Ronald Hutton has argued, its traditions continued with few changes at the Reformation.10 With the neat excision of Thomas à Becket from the calendar on 29 December (accomplished by a 1538 Henrican proclamation) the Twelve Days commemorated the birth of Christ, the nativities of Saint Stephen and the evangelist Saint John on 26 and 27 December, Holy Innocents on the 28th, the Circumcision on New Year’s Day, and the visit of the wise men on the Epiphany.11 In England, Christmas continued to be celebrated robustly after the reign of Henry VIII, and traditional Christmas hospitality was practised by Protestants throughout this period. At royal courts, great houses, and rural parishes, Christmas in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was marked with traditional pastimes such as wassailing, pageantry and games, plays, dicing, carding, dancing, singing, present exchanges on New Year’s Day, and above all, feasting, with roasts, mince pies, and plum puddings prominently featured.12 Although English Protestants and the Church of England sought to reform, not abolish, the celebration of the Twelve Days, other religious reformers had deeper reservations about the observance of Christ’s nativity. Those reservations were starkly expressed in Scotland beginning in the 1560s, when the reformed Kirk abolished all feast days on the grounds that they were invented by ‘the Papists.’13 The ruling was reiterated and strengthened over the next hundred years, making Scotland’s laws on church festivals the most extreme in Protestant Europe. Carolling was one of the Christmas activities singled out for the Scottish reformer’s ire. As Hutton notes, ‘In 1588 the Haddington presbytery forbade the singing of carols,’ and five years later a zealous minister from another part of the country ‘equated this pastime with fornication.’14 In Aberdeen in 1574 more than a dozen women were tried for ‘plaing, dansin, and singin of fylthe carroles on Yeull Day at evin,’ and in 1599 a larger group was prosecuted for singing Christmas carols in Elgin.15 The Scottish example meant that the extremists’ antipathy to Christmas was evident from mid-century on, though neither mainstream English Protestants, nor English Puritans until the seventeenth century, shared the Kirk’s radical stance on holy days in general or Christmas in particular. The court of Elizabeth I took up the Edwardian tradition of extensive Christmas entertainment, and in the 1590s the Crown began to defend the season by encouraging the English gentry to return to county seats and practise traditional Christmas hosting and hospitality.16

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King James, who clashed with the Kirk during both his Scottish and English reigns, celebrated Christmas lavishly once he ascended the English throne, and sought to reinstitute Christmas and other feast days in Scotland during his portentous visit there in 1617 – a trip that resulted, in some ways directly, in efforts to encourage traditional festive practices in England with the publication of the Book of Sports in 1618.17 In the middle years of the Jacobean reign, the King also made efforts to enforce traditional hosting at Christmas, issuing a series of proclamations and speeches in Parliament on the subject.18 This royal effort produced defences of Christmas in the late Jacobean and early Caroline period, including Ben Jonson’s ‘Christmas his Masque’ of 1616.19 It is perhaps King James’s views that are channelled through the character of Christmas in Jonson’s masque, who claims he is ‘no dangerous person…. and though I come out of Popes-head-alley, as good a Protestant, as any in my Parish.’ Jonson’s masque, like later defences of Christmas by John Taylor and others, acknowledges the popular identification of Christmas with popery, even as it denies that association.20 Through the Elizabethan and Jacobean reigns, English Puritans did not express the extreme dislike of Christmas enacted into law in Scotland; indeed, Puritan-inclined gentry such as Richard Stonley and the Barringtons of Essex were among notable Christmas hosts in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods.21 But when the Puritans gained power in England in the 1640s, the reformed antipathy towards Christmas – and all the other feasts of the traditional ecclesiastical year – found full expression.22 In 1643, godly Londoners kept their shops open on 25 December to register their dislike of Christmas, and some members of Parliament appeared to conduct government business on that day. A pamphlet war on the subject ensued and continued long after January 1645, when Parliament officially outlawed the celebration of all feast days except Sundays. The prohibition of Christmas was only one aspect of a larger attack on the traditional ecclesiastical calendar, but it was probably the one most fervently opposed. As Durston has shown, the reasons for banning Christmas provided in printed scholarly debates on the subject were that neither the date nor the traditional celebrations of the nativity had biblical sanction; that 25 December had been originally superimposed on the pagan celebration of the midwinter solstice; that like all holiday celebrations, it encouraged excess and licentiousness instead of piety and biblical study; and finally, as all of these claims implicitly suggested, it was a popish invention. The alleged popery of the holiday, and the special Catholic attachment to the season, were stressed



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in popular pamphlet representations of the subject in the 1640s. In the dialogue pamphlet The Arraignment, Conviction, and Imprisoning, of Christmas: On St Thomas day last (1645), a ‘Crier’ describes where Christmas could have been found in earlier years: If you had gone to the Queens Chappel, you might have found him standing against the wall, and the Papists weeping, and beating themselves before him, and kissing his hoary head with superstitious teares, in a theater exceeding all the playes of the red Bull, the Fortune, or the Cockpit.23

Christmas is now, however, ‘constrained to remaine in the Popish quarters,’ where he will stay while the Puritans remain in power: ‘Well, if ever the Catholiques or Bishops rule again in England, they will set the Church dores open on Christmas day, and we shall have Masse at the High Altar, as was used when the day was first instituted.’24 The association between Christmas and Catholicism is also acknowledged, though, as in Jonson’s masque, only to be refuted, in Women will Have their Will; or, Give Christmas his Due, a dialogue ‘betweene M[is]t[r]is Custome, a Victuallers Wife neere Cripplegate, and M[is]t[r]is New-come, a Captains Wife, living in Reformation Alley, near Destruction-Street.’25 Mrs Custom, who is not Catholic, insists on the need to maintain the English traditions of Christmas hospitality, while the godly Mrs New-come (the butt of the pamphlet’s satire) refers to the ‘Superstitious and Idolatrous feasting’ involved in the celebration of ‘this Romish Beast Christmas.’26 As Women will Have their Will suggests, the Puritan abolition of Christmas only highlights the depth of Protestant attachment to the season, for not only were there widespread objections to its prohibition, but Christmas was immediately and permanently restored in 1660, though it continued to be prohibited for many years in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.27 Even for mainstream Protestants, however, some elements of the traditional English Christmas needed to be adapted in order to distance beloved holiday practices from the taint of late medieval festive revelry. That process is particularly clear in the decline of the Christmas carol, a genre that, in its pre-Reformation form, was not entirely conformable to Protestant religious sensibilities.28 There are very few carols that date from the century following the Henrician Reformation, and older carols suddenly stop appearing frequently in print and manuscript around the middle of the sixteenth century. As Greene notes, ‘In spite of continual loose references to “old carols” it is no common thing to find a carol of established early date in any modern source, oral, written, or printed’;

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Greene found that only four of the almost five hundred pre-1550 carols gathered in his Early English Carols ‘survived in actual use’ after 1600.29 Christmas carols are scarce in Elizabethan as well as Jacobean commonplace books, and the dearth of printed carols is even more notable. The Stationer’s Register includes entries for three separate collections of Christmas carols from the 1560s – a decade during which, as Hutton and Eamon Duffy have shown, the reform of the ritual year was reinstituted relatively gradually after a Marian intermission.30 There is also A booke of Carolles, which may or may not have been Christmas carols, entered in the Stationer’s Register to John Wolfe in 1587. There were a few songs called carols printed in collections during the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, including one in A Paradise of Daintie Devises, one in England’s Helicon, a few appended to Taylor’s Complaint of Christmas, and a few published in broadside in the early seventeenth century.31 There are more original Protestant carols extant from the Caroline period, including the ten Convivial Carols in Robert Herrick’s Hesperides, and Christmas was celebrated lavishly with music at the exiled court of Charles I in Oxford, but that pattern itself suggests a greater comfort with carolling in the ceremonialist atmosphere of the Laudian period.32 Given the ephemeral nature of the genre, it is possible that other printed and manuscript carols existed that have left no trace. Nevertheless, it seems significant that after 1570 there is no surviving record of any collections of carols specifically designed for Christmas until 1642, when Good and New, Fresh and True, Christmas Carols Newly Imprinted was published in the rather different context of the controversy over Christmas set off by Puritan efforts to abolish its celebration.33 This absence of carol collections can help explain, perhaps, the question that Summer (the season) puts to Christmas in Thomas Nashe’s Summer’s Last Will and Testament: Christmas, how chaunce thou com’st not as the rest, Accompanied with some musique, or some song? A merry Carroll would have grac’t thee well, Thy ancestors have us’d it heretofore.34

Since positive Elizabethan and Jacobean representations of Christmas continue to refer to the practice of carolling at the season, clearly Protestants were singing something at Christmas; no less an authority than Lancelot Andrewes, in a nativity sermon preached before the King in 1619, described Christmas as ‘Glorious in all places, as well at home with carols, as in the Church with anthems.’35 But as Greene notes, the



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paucity of print carols from the period, and especially the sudden lack of the rich manuscript carol collections popular in the fifteenth and early sixteenth century, suggests that whatever they were singing, it was not traditional carols. The Christmas ‘carols’ Andrewes refers to may have been more like the ‘anthems’ or hymns in church – a kinship potentially suggested by Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, who laments that ‘the human mortals want their winter cheer: / No night is now with hymn or carol blest’ (2.1.101–2).36 It is also possible that the songs considered appropriate for Christmas carols were those most favoured by English Protestants: metrical versions of the Psalms. This possibility is strongly suggested by William Slatyer’s odd 1631 volume, Psalmes, or Songs of Sion: Turned into the language, and set to the tunes of a strange Land … Intended for Christmas Carols, a book that implicitly rejects the appropriateness of traditional carols on the nativity, the annunciation, Saints Stephen and John, mince pies, Christmas puddings, and other seasonal excesses, by substituting Old Testament psalms that, of course, avoid the subject of both the nativity and English Christmas customs altogether.37 The conceptual problems the traditional late medieval carol posed to Protestant religious culture can be inferred from Slatyer’s collection, but they are more strongly and specifically suggested by the carols included in the last extant collections of Christmas carols printed in the mid-sixteenth century. These survive in a volume now at the Huntington Library, comprising the first eight leaves of Edmund Kele’s Christmas carolles newly Imprinted, published between 1542 and 1546, which was at some point (perhaps in the eighteenth century) bound together with fragments from four other carol collections contemporaneous with Kele’s collection.38 Printed, then, in the transitional period of the late Henrician reign, the carols in this volume register their connection to pre-Reformation holy day celebrations, and indeed, many actually appeared earlier in late-fifteenth and early-sixteenth-century manuscript carol collections.39 For this reason, the collection can both establish the older traditional aspects of the genre to which, as we shall see, later English recusant carol composers will return, and demonstrate why the traditional carol underwent a precipitous decline at the Reformation. The clearest way in which these carols register their origins in late medieval popular religion is the inclusion of Latin tags that adopt and manipulate phrases from the Latin Mass and other late medieval religious services – services that were, of course, still being performed in the 1540s, on the eve of the dramatic changes of Cranmer’s 1549 prayer book. One example is ‘Gebit, gebit, gebit, gebit,’ a macaronic reworking

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of phrases from the Christmas Day services from the Sarum Missal, as in this excerpt: Notum fecit Dominus: By the byll one knoweth a gose   In ciuitate David. Aparuit Esau; A red gowne is not blew   In ciuitate David.40

‘Notum fecit Dominus’ is, as Greene notes, ‘a response in the service for Nones on Christmas Day’; ‘Aparuit Esau’ is a reference to the Lauds and Sext Christmas Day service, taken from Titus, and although ‘In ciuitate David’ is a phrase that occurs frequently in the Bible and the Latin Mass, it is here taken from the nativity story in Luke.41 The pleasure of this nonsense carol – and its only actual connection to Christmas – is provided by a familiarity with the Latin Christmas service that ended in England in 1549, and, after a brief Marian restoration, soon became permanently obsolete in English churches. Other carols in the collection similarly manipulate knowledge of the Latin Mass, including ‘Psallemus cantantes,’ which translates passages of the Office for St John’s Day, and most extensively, ‘Salve, regina, mater misericordie,’ a loose translation of the Salve Regina antiphon that was part of services for the Blessed Virgin Mary; the carol’s refrain, ‘Salve, regina, mater misericordie; Uita, dulcedo, et spes nostra, salue,’ is taken directly from the antiphon for that service.42 ‘Salue regina’ also exemplifies a second major pre-Reformation characteristic of these mid-Tudor carols: their intense focus on the experience of the Virgin. In addition to ‘Salue regina,’ there are two annunciation carols in the collection (‘Nowell, nowell, nowell, nowell’ and ‘Hayl, Mary, ful of grace’) and three carols depicting Mary’s grief after the Crucifixion (‘O my hert is woo,’ ‘[Alo]ne, alone, alone, alone,’ and ‘Gaudeamus synge we’), as well as many other references to the ‘blessed Lady’ throughout the carols; the carols to Saint John, for example, tend to stress his care for Christ’s grieving mother after the Crucifixion.43 The Catholicism of the material on Mary does not directly correlate with the chosen subject matter, since Mary continued to be revered as the mother of God in both Continental and English Protestantism after the Reformation; the difference appears rather through emphasis and inflection, as Mary’s experience is so lovingly and intently lingered over in



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this material. As Beth Krietzer has recently shown, for Luther and early generations of Lutheran preachers the Virgin Mary remained spiritually and theologically central, and Luther himself took pains to insist on the orthodoxy of his thinking on Mary, insisting, for example, on his belief in the virgin birth.44 But among the elements of late medieval Marian worship that Luther and his followers adamantly rejected, the most important was ‘the idea that Mary and other saints could serve as intercessors or mediators with God.’45 That salvational role is clearly ascribed to Mary in some of the Kele collection carols. For example, the carol ‘De circumcisione domini’ ends ‘Most gloryous lady, we the pray / That bereth the crowne of chastyte, / Brynge us to the blysse that lasteth aye.’46 In praying directly to the Virgin, this carol ignores the basic Protestant shift in the understanding of Mary’s role in salvation. In a larger sense, the Kele collection as a whole may reflect the continued Lutheran attachment to the Virgin Mary, as well as the vestigial Catholicism of lateHenrician English Protestantism, but that attachment would be less compatible with the later Calvinist orientation of the Elizabethan church. The third way in which the Kele collection registers late medieval traditions in the celebration of Christmas involves an even greyer area than the focus on the Virgin Mary: the intersection of the sacred and the profane. The late medieval carol was written, extensively if not primarily, by friars, priests, and monks; the Franciscans in particular were especially identified with the genre in the fifteenth century.47 And though there is no reason to ascribe the bawdier productions often included in such collections to churchmen’s pens, it is certainly the case that in late medieval manuscript carol collections, bawdiness and piety amiably co-exist. As its editor notes, some of the drinking songs in Balliol MS 354 – an outstanding late-fifteenth-century collection of carols – ‘breathe … the air of the convent-cellar [and] the old English tavern.’48 Bawdy drinking songs comprised one subcategory of the medieval carol genre, and that mingling of secular and sacred is repeated in the Kele collection. For example, the second fragment of that volume begins with one of the two carols describing Mary’s lament after the Crucifixion, ‘Alone, alone, alone alone,’ and ends with three religious songs: ‘De circumcisione domini,’ ‘Be we mery in this feste,’ a song that rehearses the nativity story from the annunciation through the adoration of the shepherds, and the annunciation carol, ‘Nowell, nowell, nowell, nowell!’ Sandwiched between these songs are four carols. The first describes ‘a mayde of brentan ars,’ who is ‘Layde ... upon a sacke’ by a miller whose ‘mylstones hanged bothe by a vyce,’ and whose entertainment she enjoys

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enough that afterwards ‘This mayd to myll ofte dyd resorte / And of her game made no reporte, / But to her it was full great conforte.’49 The next poem manipulates the sacred and secular within itself; its refrain, ‘Inducas, inducas, / Intemptationibus,’ is formed by deleting the ‘non’ from the Pater Noster. It depicts a friar and a nun, telling how the former began the nunne to grope; Inducas, [inducas,] It was a morsel for the Pope,   In temptationibus.50

The other two carols in this section of the manuscript are ‘Gebit, gebit, gebit, gebit,’ which as we have seen, is a farcical rewriting of the Latin Christmas services, and an innocuous nonsense carol, ‘My lady went to Canterbury,’ which has no discernible connection with the Christmas season, except potentially as a drinking song.51 In this context, Kele’s carols represented a level of tolerance for the intersection of the sacred and the profane that was incompatible with English reform in the second half of the sixteenth century; though reforming Catholics had, as Lawrence Clopper has shown, excoriated ‘lay festive behavior’ for centuries, and the sixteenth-century Catholic Counter-Reformation was to embark on a very similar campaign of reforms, the Reformation ushered in a systematic effort to detach the profane from the holy, and especially to remove the church’s imprimatur from raucous activities associated with celebration of the liturgical year.52 Taken together, then, the Kele collection demonstrates the ways in which the early and mid-sixteenth-century English Christmas carol was potentially inappropriate for an emerging Protestant popular religious culture. First, as we have seen, the meaning of these carols was in many cases predicated on a familiarity with late medieval divine services in Latin. As Greene notes, two hundred of the five hundred carols in Early English Carols include Latin phrases, ‘for the most part in the idiom of the church.’53 The Latinity of the English Christmas carol, coupled with its sometimes secular subject matter, demonstrates another potentially troubling characteristic of the genre: the connection it traced between the clerical and the folk, the religious and the popular, the secular and the sacred. This was an aspect of late medieval popular religious culture targeted particularly by Protestant Reformers, as it would be by the Catholic Counter-Reformation later in the century. Finally, the genre was unsuitable – perhaps increasingly as the English church became



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Calvinistic in the course of the sixteenth century – for a religious movement that sought to demote the traditional role of the saints, and especially the Virgin Mary. Even for those Protestants who embraced Christmas, then, some aspects of the traditional celebration of the holiday needed revision in the light of the changes of the Reformation. The meaning of Christmas also began to change for English Catholics in the sixteenth century, though in very different ways. As many scholars have argued, Catholics did not have the same ambivalence toward the celebration of the season that we have seen in Protestant disputes over the potential popery of Christmas. The traditional household celebration of the season continued to be enthusiastically observed by Catholics who, as Felicity Heal has written, had no ‘scruples about indiscriminate charity or about the traditional cycle of feast and fast to overcome.’54 Patterns of holiday hosting by Catholic gentry bear out John Bossy’s observation that ‘the festal instinct’ was strong among recusants, and that Christmas was a particularly important holy day in the traditional calendar.55 For example, the Petre family of Essex entertained extensively in the season, hosting both other recusant gentry and the local poor and Protestant neighbours, and making a special effort to be at home in order to fulfil ‘their Christmas duties to the neighbourhood’; in the later Jacobean period Sir John Yorke of Nidderdale regularly arranged plays during holidays, especially Christmas and Easter, inviting his recusant neighbours as well as servants, and the households of the Astons of Staffordshire and the Walmesleys and Hoghtons of Lancashire were also noted for holiday hospitality.56 By embracing the negative Protestant associations of Christmas with popery, the recusant celebration of the season seems to have become one of many ways in which Catholics defined themselves as a religious community in the polemical context of their outlawed religion, and the emerging spiritual context of the Counter-Reformation. The new meanings of the English Catholic Christmas can be illuminated in the seventeenth-century Christmas carols surviving in recusant manuscript sources. These carols did not need to express uniquely Catholic theological positions in order to take on recusant meaning – a fact that goes a long way toward explaining why Christmas carols have not usually been particularly associated with early modern Catholicism. Both the non-denominational characteristic of early modern carols transcribed by Catholics, and the ability of the songs to take on ideological meanings in certain contexts, can be illustrated by the journey of one modest carol, ‘Reioice, Reioice with hart and voice,’ through both

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Protestant and Catholic print and manuscript sources. The carol is religiously innocuous. It begins with a brief mention of Mary – ‘From Virgin’s wombe this day to vs did springe / the precious seede that onelie saued manne’ – but it does not linger on either Mary or the Holy Family, consisting primarily of generalized observations about Christ’s redemption of mankind.57 The lack of particular devotional demarcations is suggested by its provenance: the carol was first published in The Paradise of Dainty Devises in 1578, where it is ascribed to Francis Kindlemarsh, a Protestant friend of George Gascoigne. At some point in the last decades of the sixteenth century it was transcribed in a Catholic Elizabethan commonplace book,58 which includes, for example, ‘A songe of foure Preists that sufred death at Lancaster to the tune of Daintie come thou to me,’ as well as that recusant ballad favourite, ‘Jerusalem My Happie Home.’59 In 1589, William Byrd set the carol to music in Songs of Sundrie Natures – a collection that, like most of Byrd’s work, had mainstream appeal, even though it was written by a Catholic who eventually retired to the country to work on his Gradualia.60 Finally, the carol was included in a book published in Rouen in 1604, Epitaphs, the first, upon the death of … Marie, late Queene of Scots, where it is one of two Christmas carols that appear in the midst of Southwell and Walpole poems, including memorials not only to the Queen of Scots but to the executed priests Nicholas Garlick, Robert Ludlam, and Richard Simpson.61 What the travels of this small carol suggest, then, is not that carolling became an exclusively Catholic enterprise with the Reformation. But carols could become markers of religious identity and political opposition, partly as a result of their reproduction in charged political and aesthetic contexts, such as the songs of Byrd or the Rouen publication, and especially given the deep Catholic attachment to Christmas that apparently increased with the vicissitudes of recusant life after the Reformation. Though many of the carols surviving in recusant sources from the seventeenth century are, like ‘Reioice, Reioice,’ doctrinally innocuous, others suggest how Christmas celebrations in general, and carolling in particular, took on changed meanings in response to the evolving circumstances of English Catholics. The very inclusion of carols in some of these manuscripts suggests that carolling could be one aspect of a family’s larger effort at cultural and religious self-definition. The carols in the Shann manuscript book, for example, seem part of the manuscript’s larger effort to provide an accounting of the family’s material status and social character in the early seventeenth century. Compiled mostly by Richard Shann between 1611 and 1632, the book includes



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long lists of property transactions concerning the Shann estates in Methley; an account of the seating in Methley Church (notable both for the segregation of the sexes and the many entries for Shann family men left blank, possibly suggesting recusancy); detailed accounts of interesting local weather; notations of baptisms, marriages, and burials between 1544 and 1632; and many other miscellaneous domestic details, such as a list of the herbs in the Shann family’s garden in 1615. The fifteen songs transcribed near the end of the manuscript under the heading ‘Certaine pretie songes hereafter followinge drawn together by Richard Shanne 1611’ seem to be another element in the manuscript’s larger family profiling, expressing a different dimension of the family’s material and cultural identity noted in other ways by the records of births, marriages, deaths, and property transactions.62 The songs appear to have been meant for performance or communal singing; music is provided for most, and elsewhere the manuscript hints at the importance of collective festivity to this family, for there is also a description of ‘A verie fine Historie of Stage Plaie called “Cannimore and Lionley”’ that ‘was Ackted by xvith men & boyes upon Monday, Twesdaie, Wednesdaie, and Thursdaie in whit-sonne weeke,’ ‘in A Barne … hard by the parsonage, wher unto resorted A multitude of people to se the same.’63 The performance of this play in Whitsun week, during a period de-emphasized by the English Protestant calendar – for which only Monday and Tuesday of that week remained holy days – further suggests the importance of traditional calendrical observances by this Catholic family. The songs in the Shann manuscript include the Catholic ballad ‘Jerusalem, my happie home,’ two Christmas carols, and another song that explicitly states the ideological appeal of Christmas to Catholics. ‘A songe bewailinge the tyme of Christmas, so much decayed in England’ squarely places blame for the decline in seasonal hospitality – decried, as we have seen, by James I and other Protestants as well – at the feet of the heretics, and specifically attributes it to the Protestant abandonment of a theology of works. This view is expressed as the narrator, Christmas himself, attacks both the ‘Protestant’ and the ‘Puritan’ for neglecting him: Go to the Protestant, hele protest, hele protest, hele protest,   He will protest and bouldlie boaste; And to the Puritine, he is so hote, he is so hote, he is so hote,   He is so hote he will burne the Roast; The Catholike good deedes will not scorne, Nor will not see pore Christmas for-lorne.64

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The Puritan’s zeal is wittily imagined here as the direct cause of the destruction of Christmas cheer, as his hotness figuratively burns the traditional Christmas roast. The ‘protest[s]’ of the Protestant alluded to in these lines involve disingenuous cries of penury, belied by extravagant town living in which the work of the country is squandered on the luxuries of the city by, for example, Protestant ladies who ‘on [their] back were that for [their] weede / That woulde both me and manie other feede.’65 That line and others represent conventional lamentations, voiced by Protestants of the period as well, for the decline of traditional Christmas hospitality, but this Catholic writer goes further, to find the source of those vanished traditions in a Catholic theology of works. Unlike Corin’s parsimonious master in As You Like It, the kind Catholic imagined by this ballad-writer indeed seeks to ‘find the way to heaven / By doing deeds of hospitality’ (2.4.79–80), practising compassion for ‘pore Christmas’ as one of the ‘good deedes’ through which he will achieve salvation.66 The two carols included in the collection do not have the kind of polemical message included in the ‘song bewailing the time of Christmas,’ but because they appear in its context and recall elements of the late medieval carol, the nostalgia of those carols takes on ideological dimensions. The first carol, ‘Come love we God,’ is said to have been ‘maid by Sir Richard Shanne priest’ – almost certainly not the same Richard Shann as the manuscript’s compiler, though the identity of this priest is not otherwise known.67 Because the authorship of this carol is ascribed to a priest, the manuscript identifies the practice of carolling with the church, as in the fifteenth and early sixteenth century. This carol also repeats the macaronic generic characteristic of so many late medieval carols, though the Latin accentual verses do not come from the Roman liturgy. The other carol in the collection, ‘We happy hirdesmen,’ is old-fashioned in a different sense, as it participates in a wider tradition of late medieval shepherd carols. The editors of The New Oxford Book of Carols speculate that the song was ‘perhaps written for a shepherd scene in a play’ – a possibility made slightly more credible by the existence of the stage play ‘Cannimore and Lionley’ in the same manuscript book.68 Again, as with ‘Rejoice, rejoice,’ ‘We happie herdsmen’ expresses no inherently Catholic ideas, and it is transcribed in the 1630s into the commonplace book of Thomas Smith, who was later to become the bishop of Carlisle. Both carols in the Shann manuscript have ideological meaning not by their inherent message, but by their context: their composition by a priest, their proximity to more obviously polemical songs such as



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‘Jerusalem my happie home’ and the ‘songe bewailinge the tyme of Christmas,’ and their apparent use in the communal household celebrations of a family defining itself against the Protestant mainstream. Similar strategies are evident in the ‘Great Hodge Podge,’ the commonplace book of the Blundells of Little Crosby, substantially compiled by William Blundell during the 1620s and 1630s, with additions made by Blundell’s descendents, including his grandson William Blundell. In the Elizabethan period the house at Little Crosby had been a central gathering place for Catholics and missionary priests who celebrated mass and provided religious instruction there, and it seems probable, as Margaret Sena has suggested, that the book provided material for celebrations on feast days for not only the immediate household but also the wider Lancastrian Catholic community.69 But unlike the Shann manuscript, where the Christmas carols appeared in the context of accounts of local property, weather, and family history, Blundell’s commonplace book puts the half-dozen carols it includes into a more pointed, polemical framework. The book includes an account of Blundell’s own imprisonment for priest-harbouring in the 1590s, a long ‘Short treatise’ on the Catholic faith, and songs and ballads, many of them authored by Blundell himself, which, in Sena’s words, ‘borrowed … heavily from the arguments, positions, and conflictual language employed by contemporary Catholic polemicists.’70 These songs attack the English government for persecution of Catholics and decry the heresies of Luther and other ‘schismatics.’ Also included are ballads such as ‘In meditation where I sat’ and ‘The time was yet,’ which appear in other Catholic manuscript books, suggesting their use as part of the lingua franca of recusant politics. The Christmas carols in the ‘Great Hodge Podge,’ both those authored by Blundell and those copied from other sources, return to traditions of earlier English carols, even while adapting those traditions to express the conditions of early-seventeenth-century recusancy. The manuscript includes two annunciation carols, two songs on Christmas Day, one on the Epiphany, one on the Purification, and a song about the Virgin’s lament at the Crucifixion – the last a standard subject for carols, as we have seen in the Kele collection.71 Blundell’s carols mark their participation in a form of Catholicism defined by the recusant predicament in several ways. Blundell’s compositions adapt the spiritual writings of the renowned Counter-Reformation theologian and preacher Luis de Granada, in ‘Verses translated oute of Latin into English taken owte of Granado his sermons upon Christmas day,’ and ‘An other translated out of latin verse into Englishe by the saide W: B: wch Latine verses are in

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Granado his sermons made of the birthe of Christe uppon Christmas Day.’72 De Granada’s works had been translated into English and were, like Southwell’s poems, popular among Protestants as well as Catholics, and these two simple carols contain no exclusively Catholic theological messages. But several of Granada’s more pointedly Catholic writings were also printed in English, at Louvain in 1599 and St Omer’s in 1632, and he could be claimed, as Blundell certainly seems to do, as a Catholic spiritual leader. In mining Granada’s sermons for his Christmas carol, Blundell translates an important vein of post-Tridentine spiritual instruction into a popular form that then co-exists in the manuscript with material that more directly recalls the older carolling form. Examples of the latter include an ‘ould Christmas carol’ (one of the two on the Annunciation), as well as another carol, ‘Mervaille not Josephe though Mary be with Child,’ that appears earlier in a fifteenth-century manuscript (Additional Manuscript 20,059, British Library).73 The older carols in this collection take on new meaning in the larger context of the collection, and at least one of the carols, on the Purification, makes a pointed political argument for the spiritual need for proscribed Catholic rituals. Though Candlemas remained a holiday in the Elizabethan liturgical calendar, at the Reformation it had been reoriented as a feast of Christ, not Mary, and the hallowing of candles was prohibited.74 The carol on the Purification in the ‘Great Hodge Podge’ ends with the speaker praying to be allowed to carry on the traditional celebration of the holiday: Grant that thy presentation (Lorde) Each yeare I may solemnize well Whylst in thy Churche devout I stande Wth hallowed Candle in my hand.75

Motifs standard in late medieval Purification carols are here rewritten to express a polemical lament for the prohibition of a traditional Catholic ritual by Protestant reformers. The final and most extensive surviving collection of carols with recusant appeal is Bodleian Library manuscript English poetry b.5, compiled in the mid-1650s during the period in which the celebration of Christmas had been abolished by the Commonwealth Parliament. The over twenty carols in this collection appear alongside prose and poetry that are, as Cedric Brown has noted, ‘almost exclusively Catholic,’ including thirty-two poems by Southwell, two poems on Campion (including the Henry Walpole account of the executions of Campion, Sherwin,



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and Briant), hymns, songs, poems on the ‘blessed sacrament,’ many poems to the Virgin Mary, two poems to Saint Winifred, and an excerpt from Henry Hawkins’s Parthenia Sacra (1633), a ‘meditational emblem book’ designed for a Jesuit audience.76 As Gerard Kilroy and Deborah Aldrich-Watson have confirmed, the manuscript is primarily in the hand of Gertrude Aston Thimmelby, sister of Constance Aston Fowler, and a member by birth of one of the leading recusant families of Staffordshire.77 Though the hand is Thimmelby’s, the book records events in the family of John Fairfax of Warwickshire, who, as Kilroy has discovered, travelled in the same circles as Thimmelby’s in-laws.78 Thimmelby was intimately involved enough with the Fairfax family to register important family events such as the birth and death of a Fairfax son in 1654.79 The circumstances of the creation of the Fairfax manuscript and of Thimmelby’s relationship to the family are obscure, but the manuscript is clearly designed, like those from the Shann and Blundell families, to aid in communal celebrations, in this case almost entirely at Christmas. Tunes are indicated for many of the songs and carols, and the book’s odd physical shape – it is 395 millimetres tall and 150 wide – seems, as McKay has noted, designed to make oral presentation easier, as the lines are especially short and easy to follow, and the necessity for page-turning minimized.80 Thimmelby was perhaps bringing to Warwickshire some of the Aston Christmas traditions that included both music and dancing during the twelve days of the season.81 As with the Shann and Blundell manuscripts, the Fairfax collection puts the old-fashioned celebration of Christmas in the context of post-Tridentine spirituality and recusant polemics. This context is expressed both implicitly by the structure of the volume as a whole, and directly by one song, ‘At our house at home,’ that like the Shann manuscript’s ‘song bewailing the time of Christmas, so much decayed in England,’ associates the decay of holiday cheer with Protestantism. The allegorical situation of the poem is established in its first lines: This house is England’s ile Of late renowned by fame But now by errours guile Is fallen out of frame And I the church the goodwife Am Which makes this wofull mone And Jesus christ is my good man Which now is gone from home.82

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In the poem’s first half the wife, the Catholic Church, describes in detail the ‘vices’ that in the absence of her husband ‘makes me ye church to mourne’ – vices that represent the seven deadly sins, so that the poem uses literary anachronism in order to argue for the superiority of the old faith.83 In the poem’s second half the speaker is the wife’s ‘good man,’ Jesus Christ, who promises to return and replace sins with the seven cardinal virtues, so gluttony will be replaced with ‘fasting’ and lechery with chastity, as well as anger with meekness or humility, and envy with friendship. Most importantly, Jesus Christ promises to restore the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love: No good that then is there but I will bring with mee faith, hope, and love, so deare And hospitalitie that rich and poore shall have content where charitie shall dwell where honest mirth & merriment shall carping care expel.84

As in the Shann ballad, ‘honest mirth & merriment’ is seen as an extension of ‘charity’ and true religion encouraged by a theology of works. In the rest of the Fairfax manuscript, Christmas cheer is represented within the theological framework provided by ‘Att my house at home,’ so that mirth and Christmas excess are components of the Catholic practice of proper Christian charity. The religious carols are intermixed with songs that celebrate mirth as an important expression of the religious values of Christmas, especially the obligation of the rich to entertain the poor, and masters to entertain servants. In ‘Welcome to Christmas,’ the speaker assures listeners that ‘my master and my dame / are well provided,’ and that ‘my dame will spare no cost / hang pinching ’tis naught’: for we shall have good cheere good Ale and good strong beere you are all welcome here to merry Christmas.85

This and many other carols lovingly catalogue the gastronomic and festive joys of the season, ‘rost porke And beefe,’ ‘capons, duckes & geese,’ ‘brave mince pyes,’ ‘rosted lamb and veale,’ and ‘spiced ale,’ as well as



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wassailing, singing and dancing, dicing and cards.86 These activities preserve traditions that, while not inherently religious, are given devotional significance by virtue of their context in the larger celebration of Christ’s birth. Indeed, one speaker eagerly anticipating ‘merry good pastime’ on Twelfth Night defines revelry as part of cultural preservation: ‘a king of the wassell / this night we must chouse / or else the old custome / we carelessly loose.’87 The organization of the carols in this manuscript also reiterates the overt message of ‘At our house at home.’ The carols are concentrated in a middle section and are preceded by a conventional warning against letting festive revelry overwhelm religious feeling: All you that Are to mirth Inclin’d consider well and barre in mind what our Good God hath for us done in sending us his beloved sonne … Let all your songs And praises bee unto his heavenly maiestie and evermore Amongst your mirth remember christ our Saviours birth.88

Immediately following this poem, and before a long section of traditional Christmas carols, three Southwell poems are inserted, two especially appropriate for Christmas: ‘Behold a silly tender Babe,’ and ‘As I in hoarie Winters night’ (better known as ‘The Burning Babe,’ a poem whose last line is, ‘That it was Christmas day’) along with ‘Let fickle fortune run his blindest race.’89 This organization enforces the warning of ‘All ye that are to mirth inclined’ by re-contextualizing the celebration of Christ’s nativity in the poetry of a Jesuit martyred for his beliefs. Indeed, the carols resonate with the more obviously polemical material that appears elsewhere in it, the carols on Saint Stephen, for example, echoing the martyrdoms represented in later ballads about Campion and other early modern Catholic martyrs.90 The traditionalism of the carols that follow the Southwell poems, even those that seem more focused on gastronomic than eternal joys, becomes, in this larger context, an assertion of the value of true Catholic ‘honest mirth & merriment,’ which has both religious and political dimensions. The carols return to late medieval traditions not only in their content; they are heavily focused, as is the rest of the volume, on

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the Virgin Mary. They also recreate the pattern of religious and secular observation constructed in the Kele collection and earlier manuscript carol books. The songs here are grouped mostly to track the progression of holidays during the Twelve Days of Christmas. From page fiftyseven to sixty-one, for example, there are two carols on Christmas Day, followed by ‘A caroll for St Steephan,’ ‘A caroll for St John,’ ‘a caroll on the holy Innocents,’ ‘A caroll for twelfe day,’ and finally, ‘A caroll for candlemas day.’ The same sequence immediately begins again, with carols on the nativity, St Stephen, St John, Holy Innocents, ‘new yeares Day,’ and finally two carols ‘for twelfe day.’91 The traditional subjects are treated conventionally, with a strong focus on the Virgin, as the human story of the nativity, not the theological significance of the incarnation, is stressed. The manuscript’s theological message and focus on Mary is one piece of a larger pattern of evidence of Jesuit involvement in the Bodleian manuscript English poetry b.5. Cedric Brown has argued convincingly for this involvement, though because the hand is that of Thimmelby, that influence must have been indirect. Indeed, the manuscript demonstrates how Catholic teachings were channelled through educated laity, including recusant gentry women who could take on the role of informal spiritual leaders of socially diverse communities.92 Thimmelby’s involvement with this manuscript provides a clear example of Frances E. Dolan’s assertion that Catholic women throughout this period ‘continued to engage actively in literary culture as readers, teachers, and writers.’93 What Thimmelby shares with this family is not only the devotional guides, polemical material, and the martyrological literature that, as Dillon and Arthur Marotti have shown, was so important for the recusant community’s self-identification, but also material for the celebration of traditional festivity, suggesting the importance of popular religious practices of the liturgical year to the ongoing survival of these particular English Catholics.94 The Christmas carols transcribed into Catholic household manuscript books provide insight into the strategies of adaptation used by early modern Catholics as the Reformation began to be measured first in decades, and eventually in centuries. These strategies involved combining traditional lay customs with clerical guidance, whether the latter was direct – the composition of carols by ‘Richard Shanne priest,’ – or indirect – the reworking of a de Granada sermon into a song for Christmas. In the absence of an established church, popular religious practices associated



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with Christmas seem to have taken on greater theological and polemical meaning as the seventeenth century progressed. Perhaps inevitably, there were throughout this period tensions over the continuance of popular traditions targeted for reforms in a postTridentine Catholic world. It seems that members of the English Catholic mission did not themselves agree on the degree to which festive mirth that included gaming, hobbyhorses, and other secular pastimes should be encouraged. Conflict over holy day festivity surfaced in disagreements between Jesuit and secular priests imprisoned at Wisbech Castle in the 1590s – disagreements that evolved into the later, more far-reaching Appellant controversy. The altercations began as a clash between different cultural orientations of two groups, one led by the Jesuit William Weston, and the other by the secular priests Christopher Bagshaw and Thomas Bluet.95 In a 1601 Appellant pamphlet, Bagshaw attacked Weston’s sanctimonious piety at Wisbech, asserting that the Jesuit ‘lifted up his countenance, as if a new spirit had bin put into him, and tooke upon him to controll, and finde fault with this and that: (as the comming into the Hall of a Hobby-horse in Christmas) affirming that he would no longer tolerate these and those so grosse abuses, but would have them reformed.’96 Whether a specific hobbyhorse was actually a flashpoint in the controversy or whether Bagshaw uses it here simply as a rhetorical flourish, it is significant that a symbol of traditional holiday revelry is used to illustrate a cultural division that in this case fell along the secular/Jesuit divide. There is other evidence of this divide, such as the debate over play-attending between the archpriest William Harrison and the secular priest Thomas Leak in 1618.97 But at the same time, Jesuits were devoted to the holy and festive celebration of the liturgical year, embraced the theatre for its pedagogical and polemical usefulness, and above all, were adept, as John O’Malley has shown, at accommodating popular traditions dear to the laity in efforts at conversion and pastoral care.98 Brown’s convincing argument for the Jesuit influence on the Fairfax family manuscript suggests support by the Society of Jesus for holy day festivity that merged the hobbyhorse with the veneration of the Virgin. Whatever Southwell himself might have thought of his religious poems’ inclusion amongst celebrations of dicing and dancing, it seems that by the mid-seventeenth century, if not before, priests were encouraging ‘honest mirth & merriment’ as one important foundation for a continuing Catholic community.

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Understanding the way in which Christmas celebrations took on new polemical or devotional meaning in a recusant context illuminates one corner of the shadowy world of early modern Catholicism, but it should also shift our understanding of mainstream Protestant celebrations of the season, just as recent scholarship of early modern Catholicism has, in a broader sense, modified our sense of early modern English Protestantism. The need for such a shift can be illustrated by a contribution made by the recusant Edmund Bolton to England’s Helicon, ‘The Sheepheards Song: A Caroll or Himne for Christmas,’ and the analysis Louis Montrose has provided of that poem. First published in 1600, England’s Helicon gathered together examples of pastoral poetry focused on the celebration of Elizabeth as a ‘Queene of shepheardes’ in the tradition of The Shepheardes Calender’s April eclogue.99 In an influential analysis of the Spenserian politics of pastoral, Montrose uses Bolton’s poem to support the claim that ‘the pastoral imagery of the nativity and ministry of Christ may occasionally infuse the landscape of Elizabethan pastorals with an aura of religious mystery.’100 But in light of Bolton’s recusancy and the significance of Christmas for early modern English Catholics, the carol can be seen to carry a more ideologically complex meaning. As the only Christmas carol in the collection, Bolton’s poem rewrites Elizabethan pastoral tropes in order to replace the May queen, Elizabeth, with Christ, ‘the worlds great Sheepheard,’ the ‘blessed Babe,’ the ‘Infant full of power,’ ‘the mirthful May, / Which winter cannot marre.’101 By establishing the Christ child as an alternative May lord, Bolton’s carol provides powerful competition for the authority of Elizabeth, celebrated as a May queen by Spenser and many of the poets represented in England’s Helicon; indeed, in this reading, the true ‘May’ is one that the winter of Catholicism’s prohibition in England – supported, of course, by that figurative May queen, Elizabeth I – cannot destroy or ‘marre.’ In this way, Bolton’s Christmas carol does not so much contribute to the Elizabethan pastoral myth, as resist it. The carol performs the same function that Christmas celebrations in general, and carols in particular, assumed for Catholics after the Reformation: establishing an oppositional Catholic political, religious, and cultural identity. The oppositional nature of Bolton’s carol is of course deeply submerged, as there is nothing inherently offensive in its celebration of the Christian Saviour. In this sense, Montrose’s analysis rings true: even as the poem opposes Elizabethan political power it also, at the same time, if somewhat paradoxically, contributes an ‘aura of religious mystery’ to the larger celebration of Elizabeth. But acknowledging Bolton’s



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recusancy, and understanding the place of Christmas in early modern Catholic culture, allows us to see that ‘aura’ as an encrypted yet functionally Catholic element in Protestant culture – certainly in England’s Helicon, perhaps in the larger discourse of Elizabethan political pastoralism, and perhaps in early modern England more widely. Making Catholicism visible in Protestant culture can, then, allow for a richer, more complex, and more nuanced understanding of the religious tensions lurking, sometimes deeply obscured, beneath the unity suggested in a book like England’s Helicon. At the same time, the seamless inclusion of a recusant position on Christmas in this solidly Protestant collection suggests how Catholicism, in both subtle and obvious ways, continued to be an important, if often invisible, participant in the Protestant literary, political, and religious culture of early modern England.

NOTES   1 For an overview of the debates between Christopher Haigh and John Bossy over ‘survivalism’ and ‘seminarism,’ see Alexandra Walsham, ‘Translating Trent? English Catholicism and the Counter Reformation,’ Historical Research 78 (2005): 288–310; and Ethan Shagan, ‘Introduction: English Catholic History in Context,’ in Catholics and the ‘Protestant Nation,’ ed. Ethan Shagan, 1–21 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005). See also John Bossy, The English Catholic Community, 1570–1850 (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1975); and Christopher Haigh, ‘The Fall of a Church or the Rise of a Sect? Post-Reformation Catholicism in England,’ Historical Journal 21 (1978): 181–86; Haigh, ‘The Continuity of Catholicism in the English Reformation,’ in English Reformation Revised, ed. Haigh, 176–208; and Haigh, Reformation and Resistance in Tudor Lancashire (Cambridge University Press, 1975). Haigh’s and Bossy’s work on recusancy has remained foundational for the field of early modern English Catholic studies, and they have themselves moved beyond the terms of this debate; see Haigh’s review article analysing ‘Catholic Strategies of Evasion and Co-existence’ (483), ‘Catholicism in Early Modern England: Bossy and Beyond,’ Historical Journal 45, no. 2 (2002): 481–94. Important recent work on English Catholicism that explores the melding of post-Tridentine and late medieval devotional practices includes Lisa McLain, Lest We Be Damned: Practical Innovation and Lived Experience among Catholics in Protestant England, 1559–1642 (New York: Routledge, 2003); Anne Dillon, ‘Praying by Number: The Confraternity of the Rosary and the English Catholic Community, c. 1580–1700,’ History 88 (2003): 451–471; and Alexandra

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Walsham, ‘Miracles and the Counter-Reformation Mission to England,’ Historical Journal 46 (2003): 779–815.   2 On Continental Counter-Reformation efforts to reform popular religion, see Peter Burke, ‘Popular Piety,’ in Catholicism in Early Modern History: A Guide to Research, ed. John W. O’Malley, SJ (Ann Arbor: Edwards Brothers, 1988), 113–32; and the more extended overview in Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York: New York University Press, 1978), 207–34; Philip T. Hoffman, Church and Community in the Diocese of Lyon, 1500–1789 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984); Craig Harline, ‘Official Religion–Popular Religion in Recent Historiography of the Catholic Reformation,’ Archiv für Reformationsgeschichite 81 (1990): 239–62; and Bob Scribner, ‘Introduction,’ in Popular Religion in Germany and Central Europe, 1400–1800, ed. Bob Scribner and Trevor Johnson, 1–15 (New York: St Martin’s, 1996). For a more sustained argument about the importance of traditional festivity to early modern Catholicism, see my Religion and Revelry in Shakespeare’s Festive World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).   3 On the late-fifteenth- and early-sixteenth-century carol, see Richard L. Greene, The Early English Carols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977); and Edward Bliss Reed, ed., Christmas Carols Printed in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1932). Greene’s generic definition of the carol as any song with a burden has had the unintended effect of limiting work on the post-Reformation carol, since later songs called ‘carols’ tend less frequently to be constructed around the burden.   4 Frank McKay, ‘Survival of the Carol in the 17th Century,’ Anglia 100 (1982): 36–48, esp. 36; see also on the decline, Richard L. Greene, ‘The Traditional Survival of Two Medieval Carols,’ ELH 7 (1940): 223–38. I make a more sustained argument about the importance of traditional festivity to early modern Catholicism in Religion and Revelry in Shakespeare’s Festive World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 23–63.   5 Additional MS 38,599, British Library; DDB1 Acc 6121, Lancashire Records Office; MS English poetry b.5, Bodleian Library. There are also several carols in Cotton Vespasian A-25, a sixteenth-century commonplace book with ‘recusant origins’ (xiv) partially edited by Peter J. Seng, as Tudor Songs and Ballads from MS Cotton Vespasian A-25 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978); see 9–10, 11–12, 13–14, 72–4, 110–11.   6 Dillon, ‘Praying by Number,’ 456.   7 McKay, ‘Survival,’ 36–7; Bossy, English Catholic Community, 110–21; Chris Durston, ‘Lords of Misrule: The Puritan War on Christmas, 1642–60,’ History Today 35 (1985): 7–14.   8 Among the most influential recent work outlining the continuities between



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aspects of Catholic and Protestant culture, see Arthur Marotti, Religious Ideology & Cultural Fantasy: Catholic and Anti-Catholic Discourses in Early Modern England (South Bend, IN: Notre Dame, 2005); Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Michael Questier, Conversion, Politics and Religion in England, 1580–1624 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Alison Shell, Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); and Alexandra Walsham, Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity, and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 1993).   9 For a full overview of these developments, see Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), esp. 69–110. On the continuity of Christmas traditions at the Reformation, see Ronald Hutton, The Stations of the Sun (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 18–25 and 28–9. 10 Hutton, Stations, 25. 11 Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin, eds., Tudor Royal Proclamations (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964–9), 1:270. 12 Hutton, Rise and Fall, 5–15 and 177–80; and Hutton, Stations, 9–24 and 28–9. 13 The following account of the Scottish prohibition of Christmas is taken from Ian B. Cowan, The Scottish Reformation (New York: St Martin’s, 1982), 155–7; and Hutton, Stations, 25–8. 14 Hutton, Stations, 26. 15 Aberdeen Ecclesiastical Records, 1:18; and Elgin Records, 2:76; qtd in Cowan, Scottish Reformation, 156. 16 On the different reasons for encouraging traditional provincial Christmas hospitality, including the perceived need for defence against possible foreign invasion, a desire ‘to contain the growth of London’ (118), interest in strengthening provincial government, and support for poor relief, see Felicity Heal, Hospitality in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), 118–20. 17 The Book of Sports is the modern term commonly used for the declaration first issued in 1617 for Lancashire, and subsequently published with revisions as The Kings Maiesties Declaration to His Subiects, Concerning Lawfull Sports to Be Used (London, 1618). On the Book of Sports controversy, and the role of the Scottish visit in its creation, see Hutton, Rise and Fall, 168–9; Leah Marcus, The Politics of Mirth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 24–5 and 106–13; Kenneth Parker, The English Sabbath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 139–60; and L. Racaut, ‘The “Book of

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Sports” and Sabbatarian Legislation in Lancashire, 1579–1616,’ Northern History 33 (1997): 73–87. 18 On the Jacobean celebration and defence of Christmas, see Hutton, Rise and Fall, 177–80, and Heal, Hospitality, 119–20. 19 In that speech the King decried the decay of traditional hosting at Christmas and encouraged the gentry to return to country seats for the season; subsequently, for three years in the 1620s, the King ‘forced the gentry to leave London for their country seats in a whirlwind of confusion’ (Heal, Hospitality, 119). 20 C.H. Herford Percy and Evelyn Simpson, eds., The Works of Ben Jonson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1941), 7:273. Jonson, an erstwhile Catholic convert, held views on traditional festivity that are famously complex and conflicted; for a discussion of these, see Marcus, Politics of Mirth, especially chapters 2–4, and on Jonson’s Christmas masque specifically, 76–85. See also John Taylor, The Complaint of Christmas and the Teares of Twelfetyde (London, 1631), as well as the anonymous pamphlets The Arraignment, Conviction, and Imprisoning, of Christmas: On St Thomas day last (London, 1646) and Women will Have their Will, or, Give Christmas his Due (London, 1649), discussed below. 21 Heal, Hospitality, 174–5; Hutton, Rise and Fall, 178–9; and Hutton, Stations, 29. 22 This account of the Puritan prohibition of Christmas and surrounding controversies is drawn from Durston, ‘Lords of Misrule,’ 8–14; Hutton, Rise and Fall, 206–13; and Hutton, Stations, 29–31. 23 The Arraignment, Conviction, and Imprisoning, of Christmas, 3. 24 Ibid., 6. 25 Anon., Women will Have their Will, title page. 26 Ibid., 14, 10. 27 Stephen W. Nissenbaum, Christmas in Early New England, 1620–1802: Puritanism, Popular Culture, & the Printed Word (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll, 1997), 80–9. 28 Hutton claims that ‘Christmas carols … remained in constant use’ in the post-Reformation period (Stations, 22), but the carols he refers to in support of that claim, most printed in the Roxburghe Ballads, are actually from the eighteenth century, with a few dating from the Restoration; J. Woodfall Ebsworth, ed., The Roxburghe Ballads (London, 1893) 7:771–98. 29 Greene, ‘Traditional Survival,’ 224. 30 Cresetenmas Carroles, entered to Rowlande Hall in 1562–3; and in 1569–70, crestenmas Carrowlles, entered to Rychard Jones, and christenmas carrolles entered to James Roberts. On these collections, see Reid, Christmas Carols, xviii–xixn.



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31 Francis Kindlemarsh, ‘Reioyce, reioyce, with hart and voice,’ in Richard Edwards, The paradise of daintie devises (London, 1585), Biiv–Biiir; Edmund Bolton, ‘The Sheepheard’s Song: A Caroll or Himne for Christmas,’ in En-gland’s Helicon, ed. Hugh MacDonald, 135–6 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962); John Taylor, ‘Reioyce, reioyce, this day is come,’ and ‘To wipe away our sinnes great summes,’ in Complaint of Christmas, 26–[28]. See also ‘Two pleasant Ditties, one of the Birth, the other of the Passion of Christ’ (London, 1628), songs reprinted in 1658 with different woodcuts as ‘An excellent new Ballad of the Birth and Passion of our Saviour Child’ (London, 1658). See below for further discussion of the Paradise and England’s Helicon carols. 32 See David Pinto, ‘The True Christmas: Carols at the Court of Charles I,’ in William Lawes, 1602–1645, ed. Andrew Ashbee, 97–120 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998). Pinto notes about Christmas at the Caroline court in exile that because ‘the Twelve Days of Christmas had not kept the significance they had held for the pre-Reformation church … musical settings from the whole Elizabethan to the Jacobean periods are neither many nor extended’ (106). See also the bibliography of sources in Greene, which identifies very few post-Reformation sixteenth-century manuscript sources for carols (Early English Carols, 297–341). 33 Good and New, Fresh and True, Christmas Carols Newly Imprinted (London, 1632). 34 Thomas Nash, A pleasant comedie, called Summers last will and testament (London, 1600), H2r. In Nash’s work, Christmas is a skinflint who denounces Christmas hospitality and the old traditions of the season, including caroling; Summer accuses him of ‘Avarice’ and chastises him for not realizing ‘It is the honor of Nobility, / To keepe high days and solemne festivals’ (H3v). 35 Lancelot Andrewes, The Works of Lancelot Andrewes (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1841), 1:221; repr., New York: AMS Press, 1967. 36 Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Harold F. Brookes (London: Thomson Learning, 1979). Other nostalgic references to caroling appear, for example, in the work of Nicholas Breton, who writes in Fantasticks serving for a perpetuall prognostication (London, 1626), ‘It is now Christmas, and not a Cup of drinke must passé without a Caroll’ (D2r). 37 The book cannot by itself prove the use of psalms as carols, however, since it was ill-received by the High Commission, who called up Slatyer (a Church of England priest and one-time chaplain to Anne of Denmark) and banned the book. (It was, however, reissued in 1642.) The book’s offence seems to have been the juxtaposition of popular tunes and psalms, so that, for example, ‘Q. Dido, or Ia. Shore’ is paired with Psalm 6, ‘Thine ire Lord.’

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On the centrality of psalm-singing to Elizabethan and Jacobean worship, see Hannibal Hamlin, Psalm Culture and Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2004). 38 Reed, Christmas Carols, xxxvii–lvi. 39 Of the twenty-four carols in the Kele collection, eight appear in earlier carol collections, including MS 354, Balliol College Library, Oxford (early sixteenth century); MS Ee.1.12, Cambridge University Library (ca 1492–4); MS English poetry E.1, Bodleian Library (ca 1460–90); MS Sloane 2593, British Library (ca 1450); and T.C.O. 3.58, Trinity College, Cambridge (first half of fifteenth century). On these manuscripts and approximate datings, see Greene, English Carols, 340–1; and Reed, Christmas Carols, 93–5. 40 Greene, English Carols, #474; Christmas carrolles, 22–3. Direct quotations from Kele collection carols are to Greene’s edited texts; citations note the number Greene assigns each carol. I also provide page numbers from Christmas carrolles as assigned by Reed in his facsimile edition – page numbers that are distinct from the page numbers for Reed’s notes and introductory material, which are indicated, in an effort to avoid confusion, under the title of the volume as a whole, Christmas Carols Printed in the Sixteenth Century. 41 Greene, English Carols, 506; Christmas carolles, 79–80. 42 ‘Psallemus cantantes,’ Christmas carrolles, 10–11; ‘Salve Regina,’ in Greene, English Carols, #213; and Christmas carrolles, 44. See also the notes to these carols in Reed, Christmas Carols Printed in the Sixteenth Century, 74–6 and 89. Other examples of carols that replicate aspects of the Latin Mass include ‘De Circumcisione domini’ (Greene, English Carols, #119; Christmas carolles, 23–5), a carol that quotes the antiphon for Christmas Day; and ‘Jesu Christe, Fili Dei viui, mise[rere no]bis’ (Greene, English Carols, #278; Christmas carolles, 47–8). 43 ‘Nowell, nowell,’ Greene, English Carols, #256; Christmas carrolles, 26–8; ‘Hayl, Mary, ful of grace,’ Greene, English Carols, #235c; Christmas carrolles 43 (stanzas 2–6); ‘O my hert is woo,’ Greene, English Carols, #163b; Christmas Carolles, 14–16; ‘[Alo]ne, alone, alone alone,’ Greene, English Carols, #164; Christmas carolles, 17–18; ‘Gaudeamus synge we,’ Greene, English Carols, #157a; Christmas carolles, 31–2. 44 Beth Krietzer, Reforming Mary: Changing Images of the Virgin Mary in Lutheran Sermons of the Sixteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 6 and 134–6. 45 Krietzer, Reforming Mary, 135. 46 Greene, English Carols, #199; Christmas carolles, 23–5. 47 On the Franciscians and the carol, see Greene, English Carols, cl–clvii. The church’s role in the origin and development of the Christmas carol has



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been debated. Greene, adapting an argument also made by E.K. Chambers and F. Sidgwick in Early English Lyrics (London, 1907), suggests that they began in the form of popular folk songs that the church appropriated and infused with proper theological lessons: ‘The English religious carol … far from being the spontaneous product of the popular joy at the Christmas season which sentimentalizing writers would like to make of it, is rather one weapon of the Church in her long struggle with the survivals of paganism and the fondness of her people for unedifying entertainment’ (clix). Reed, in disagreement, suggests that the English carol evolved as had the French noel, with clerics improvising elements of divine service into new forms that allowed for larger lay participation in the celebration of the season (Christmas Carols Printed in the Sixteenth Century, xvi–xxiii). In either case, certainly the church was involved in the production of carols by the late fifteenth century. 48 Roman Dyboski, ed., Songs, Carols, and Other Miscellaneous Poems from the Balliol Ms. 354 (London: Early English Text Society, 1907), xxvi. 49 ‘Synge dyllum, dyllum, dyllum, dyllum!,’ Greene, English Carols, #460; Christmas carolles, 18–19. 50 Greene, English Carols, #461; Christmas carolles, 19–20. Though this song may have acquired anti-Catholic meaning in the 1540s, it originally appeared in an earlier manuscript, Cambridge University Ms. Addit. 7350, dating from the turn of the sixteenth century, and so in its original context must have been anti-clerical satire. On this carol see Rossell Hope Robbins, ‘The Bradshaw Carols,’ PMLA 81 (1966): 308–10. 51 ‘My lady went to Canterbury,’ or ‘My harte of golde as true as stele,’ Greene, English Carols, #473; Christmas carolles, 20–2. 52 Lawrence Clopper, Drama, Play and Game (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); see especially Clopper’s reading of the Tretise of Miraclis Pleyinge (63–107) as an attack not on medieval drama, but on extra-liturgical festivity. 53 Greene, Christmas Carols, lxxxi. 54 Heal, Hospitality, 169. 55 Bossy, English Catholic Community, 116. 56 Heal, Hospitality, 170–2. The Walmesleys’ Christmas hosting was mostly of local amateur performances; as Peter Greenfield notes, ‘Only three or four of the 83 visits by itinerant professional companies between 1612 and 1639 are recorded as happening during the Christmas season’ (‘Festive Drama at Christmas in Aristocratic Households,’ in Festive Drama, ed. Meg Twycross [Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1996], 35). This characteristic further suggests that the function of Christmas festivities was to solidify the bonds of local

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community. On York, see Christopher Howard, Sir John Yorke of Nidderdale (London: Sheed and Ward, 1939), 21–6. 57 Hyder E. Rollins, Old English Ballads, 1553–1625, Chiefly from Manuscripts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920), 238–9. 58 Additional Manuscript 15,225, British Library. 59 Ibid., 31r–33r and 36v–37v; the ‘Jerusalem’ carol is also reprinted in Rollins, Old English Ballads, 163–9. 60 The carol is song XXXV in Byrd, Songs of Sundrie Natures (London, 1589), Ev. 61 A.F. Allison and D.M. Rogers, eds., The Contemporary Printed Literature of the English Counter-Reformation between 1558 and 1640 (Cambridge: Scolar, 1994), 2:186–7. 62 Additional Manuscript 38,599, 133r, British Library. The songs are edited by Hyder E. Rollins, most in ‘Ballads from Additional MS. 38,599,’ PMLA 38 (1923): 133–52; and the rest in Rollins, Old English Ballads, 372–75. 63 Rollins, ‘Ballads from Additional MS. 38,599,’ 133. 64 Rollins, Old English Ballads, 373–4. 65 Ibid., 374. 66 Shakespeare, As You Like It, Juliet Dusinberre, ed. (London: Thomson Learning, 2006). 67 It seems unlikely this Richard Shanne was a surviving Marian priest, given the song’s date (1611), and as there are no references to him among Jesuit records, it is possible he was an Elizabethan or Jacobean secular. 68 Hugh Keyte and Andrew Parrrott, eds., The New Oxford Book of Carols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 125; on shepherd carols, see 123; and Dyboski, Songs, xx. 69 Margaret Sena, ‘William Blundell and the Networks of Catholic Dissent in Post-Reformation England,’ in Communities in Early Modern England: Networks, Place, Rhetoric, ed. Alexandra Shepard and Phil Withington, 54–75 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), esp. 63. See Sena on the participation of the ‘Great Hodge Podge’ in a larger Catholic manuscript network. 70 Ibid., 60. 71 For other examples see Greene, English Carols, 105–10. 72 DDB1 Acc 6121, 127v and 128r, Lancashire Records Office. 73 DDB1 Acc 6121, 155v and 156r, Lancashire Records Office. The latter is printed from Additional Manuscript 20,059, British Library, in Greene, English Carols, 260. 74 Hutton, Stations, 141–2. 75 DDB1 Acc 6121, 127v, Lancashire Records Office. 76 Cedric Brown, ‘Recusant Community and Jesuit Mission in Parliament Days:



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Bodleian MS Eng. poet. b.5,’ Yearbook of English Studies 33 (2003): 290–315, esp. 305. See also, on the manuscript, Frank M. McKay, ‘A SeventeenthCentury Collection of Religious Poetry: Bodleian Manuscript Eng. poet. b.5.’ Bodleian Library Record 8 (1970): 185–91; and Gerard Kilroy, Edmund Campion: Memory and Transcription (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005), 77–80. 77 Deborah Aldrich-Watson, A Verse Miscellany of Constance Aston Fowler: A Diplomatic Edition (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2000), lx–lxi; Kilroy, Edmund Campion, 77–80. 78 As Kilroy has discovered, Thimmelby’s marriage took her from her family seat in Staffordshire into the Catholic circles of Worcestershire and Warwickshire, and so into proximity with the John Fairfax family. I am grateful to Kilroy for sharing these discoveries with me from unpublished material, and to Aldrich-Watson for sharing with me additional ideas about how Thimmelby may have come to be involved with MS English poetry b.5, Bodelian Library. 79 The manuscript indicates that Thimmelby was living in some proximity to the Fairfax family at the time of its transcription, as she notes family births and deaths, including the following: ‘Anno Dom 1654. August the 18th, betweene nine & tenne of the clock att night, was John Fairfax the sonne of Thomas and Isabell Fairefax borne, & the 20th day of the same moneth was the sayd John Baptized, & ye 26 day of ye same moneth, he changed this life’ (89). 80 McKay, ‘Seventeenth-Century Collection,’ 185; Brown, ‘Recusant Community,’ 307. 81 As a surviving letter from 1636 recounts, at Christmas a guest was invited to the Astons ‘to dance, and there was all my Lord of Esicke’s museick, and then, according to our owld fashion, did we daince all our owld dainces over and over againe’ (qtd in McKay, ‘Survival,’ 37. 82 MS English poetry b.5, 102. See also Alison Shell’s analysis of a shorter version of this poem in Catholicism, Controversy, and the English Literary Imagination,163–4. 83 MS English poetry b.5, 103. 84 Ibid., 104. 85 Ibid., 56. 86 Ibid., 102. 87 MS English poetry b.6, 60. For a Protestant carol that promotes Christmas hospitality as a social, not religious good, see ‘A pleasant Countrey new Ditty: Merrily shewing how To drive the cold Winter away’ (London, 1625). 88 MS English poetry b.5, 50. The origins of this carol, which became popular in the nineteenth century, are unclear.

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  89 Ibid., 51–3.   90 Carols for Saint Stephen’s day appear on pages 58, 63, and 64.   91 MS English poetry b.5, 57–67.   92 Brown, ‘Recusant Community,’ esp. 300–8.   93 Frances E. Dolan, ‘Reading, Work, and Catholic Women’s Biographies,’ ELH 33 (2003): 328–57, esp. 330.   94 Marotti, Religious Ideology & Cultural Fantasy, 66–94; Anne Dillon, The Construction of Martyrdom in the English Catholic Community, 1535–1603 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003), 72–113.   95 On the Archpriest controversy, see Peter Holmes, Resistance and Compromise: The Political Thought of the English Catholics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 186–204; Patrick McGrath, Papists and Puritans under Elizabeth I (London: Blandford, 1967), 253–98; and Arnold Pritchard, Catholic Loyalism in Elizabethan England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), 120–74.   96 Christopher Bagshaw, A True Relation of the faction begun at Wisbich … ([London], 1601), repr. in Thomas Graves Law, A Historical Sketch of the Conficts between Jesuits and Seculars in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth (London, 1889), 18. For an overview of this conflict, see McGrath, Papists and Puritans, 278–9.   97 The debate is preserved in MS V.a.244, Folger Library; see on this manuscript I.J. Semper, ‘The Jacobean Theater through the Eyes of Catholic Clerics,’ Shakespeare Quarterly 3, no. 1 (1952): 45–51.   98 John O’Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 266–7.   99 Louis Montrose, ‘“Eliza, Queene of shepheardes,” and the Pastoral of Power,’ ELH 10 (1980): 153–82, esp. 161. 100 Ibid., 161. 101 Macdonald, England’s Helicon, 135–6.

chapter ten

Uncommon Prayer? Robert Southwell’s Short Rule for a Good Life and Catholic Domestic Devotion in Post-Reformation England S U S A N N A H M O N TA

Are early modern English Catholic devotional practices and texts uncommon? That is, are they both unusual and comparatively private, outside the parameters of the national and nationalizing liturgy found in the Book of Common Prayer, both too narrow and too foreign to appeal to broad reading and publishing communities, beyond the parameters of Englishness itself? From the perspective of those who drafted Elizabethan recusancy legislation, Catholics who refused participation in the rites of the BCP were quite literally uncommon, and dangerously so: they were outside the newly drawn political and religious boundaries of the nation.1 In some modern scholarship, a less pointed but still distorting view of Catholic devotion persists. Ethan Shagan has rightly criticized the tendency to concentrate on the private devotional life of Catholics, a concentration that, Shagan argues, risks leaving much Catholic literature outside the literary and historiographical mainstream.2 Yet the supposed privacy of Catholic devotion should itself be called into question, for many Catholic devotional writers have rather pointed claims to make about public and political identities. Catholic devotion is not uncommon – not, that is, anti-communal – as much Catholic devotional writing and descriptions of individual devotional practice aim at the formation and demarcation of Catholic communities in precise opposition to Protestant ones.3 With my title, then, I mean to query the commonalities forged by Catholic devotional writers. Much recent work on the Book of Common Prayer has focused on the prayerbook’s importance for the constitution of Reformation England as such. Rosendale argues that ‘the uniform English Prayerbook enabled a new sense of similarity and community, a “very comfortable” sense of uniform “Christian conversation” among all

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English subjects, and a nationally common denominator of public religious experience,’4 even as the prayerbook also negotiates what Rosendale calls the individualizing tendencies of English Protestantism.5 In many ways Catholic writers also strive to create a sense of community and similarity in new and much altered circumstances, making even household Catholic devotion broadly consequent by using common devotional practices to reconstitute and define what exactly the ‘Catholic community’ might be or look like. The biographer of the Catholic patroness Magdalen Browne, Viscountess Montague, praises her devotional practices (including alms giving and the providing of her home as a safe space for the Mass) precisely because through her actions ‘a visible church or company of Catholics is assembled and conserved.’ The biographer’s language implies the institutional challenges facing post-Reformation English Catholic communities. The group she assembles is either a ‘church’ or a ‘company,’ and the mere act of assembly is given the status of preservation. Her devotional activities, while limited largely to her home, also serve to domesticate Catholicism by making its practices both visible and viable in her native land, so much so that her biographer proudly notes that her house was called, even by ‘heretics,’ ‘Little Rome.’6 How then might we read Catholic devotion without rendering it simply as the increasingly privatized remainder left after the BCP’s powerful formative effects? In what ways might Catholic writers have attempted to preserve and adapt their own forms of prayer and devotion (beyond the increasingly difficult task of sustaining the Mass itself) in order to constitute and demarcate English Catholic communities? And why did so many of those forms, created or deployed within the Catholic community for purposes of religious distinction, cross into the Protestant devotional mainstream? Indeed, despite the attempts of English Catholic writers to fashion devotional communities that are distinct from those of their Protestant neighbours, much early modern Catholic devotional writing moved rather easily into Protestant print and manuscript circulation. We might well ask what counts as ‘foreign’ Catholic devotion in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries when, in an England on hostile footing with Spain, translations of a Spanish Catholic devotional writer – Luis de Granada – are best-sellers. Translators like Richard Hopkins sought to use Luis’s writings to bring his country back into the Catholic fold and to nourish Catholics living under Elizabethan penal laws.7 Yet much to the irritation of Catholic translators eager to reinvigorate and expand



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Catholic communities through Luis’s impassioned devotions, multiple translations of his works issued not only from Continental Catholic presses but also from public English ones, even from the press of the notorious Puritan Robert Waldegrave.8 In the hands of Luis’s translators and in Waldegrave’s printing activities we can find evidence of just how common Catholic devotion could be. In what follows, I explore the communal consequences of Catholic domestic devotion and the cross-confessional reading communities many Catholic devotional texts seem to have enjoyed. I first consider a range of biographical, devotional, and poetic texts that imagine domestic spaces dedicated to Catholic devotion and its community-defining consequences. The English Catholic community was of course neither singular nor uniform, and recent scholarship has taught us much about divisions within English Catholicism. In the first set of texts I discuss, writers interested in promoting strict recusancy use references to monastic piety, religious vows, or regularized devotion to demarcate and validate Catholic domestic piety for particular religious and political ends. In these texts’ renderings of domestic spaces through the language of other forms of common prayer, the home is translated into a space for the cohesion of strictly separated Catholic communities.9 I will then consider more broadly what domestic devotion meant to recusant Catholics in particular, who both praised England’s new, domestic holy houses devoted to Catholic prayer and worried about the potential dangers of domestic religious practice and dependence. This material will contextualize my discussion of the boundary-crossings of one of the most popular English Catholic guides to domestic piety and regular prayer, Robert Southwell’s Short Rule for a Good Life. This text’s circulation in print and manuscript, between and across various Protestant and Catholic reading communities, suggests both the difficulty of isolating a recusant Catholic devotional readership – the ostensible purpose of the text – and the rather common status of Catholic devotional literature and practices.

Holy Houses in Post-Reformation England A certain self-consciousness about communal boundaries marks depictions of holy houses – domestic and monastic – in the work of English Catholic writers. Nostalgia for the past and a fierce desire to conserve Catholic traditions co-exist alongside recognition that that past is rapidly being erased from their native land. The Chronicle of St Monica’s is a history of the first exile English convent; it contains a number of anecdotal

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biographies of early modern women. One of these is the story of Frances Burrows’s religious calling, rendered in terms suggesting a mystical experience. Despite having never seen a nun in her native land, Burrows heard talk of a nun living abroad and ‘got … a great love unto that kind of life, although she could not imagine what it was to be a nun.’10 As she reached the threshold of adulthood, her ‘great love’ and imprecise imagination culminated in a vision mediating the absence of male and female religious in England. One evening while at dinner at a friend’s house, Burrows heard a knock on the garden door. Answering it, she saw a man dressed all in white. Though he spoke to her, she could not understand him; nevertheless, she brought him food to eat. After he had eaten, he departed, and she followed him for a while before returning to the house. Burrows asked neighbours whether they had seen him, but they had not. The mysterious vision – striking in its corporeality, for like the resurrected Christ in Luke 24:43 and John 21:15 the man eats – is decoded only after she settles on a religious vocation. Living in exile in Louvain before taking her final vows, she sees an Augustinian friar in church one day. Augustinian friars dress in white. At the time of her mystical encounter, living in a Protestant England divorced, the chronicler implies, both from its orthodox Catholic past and current Catholic practice, Burrows cannot understand the signification of the man’s dress or his words (which are not, presumably, spoken in English). The vision is both a ghost from England’s past and a visitation from a foreign place, a trace of a way of life unknown to young English Catholics. It marks the religious life as at least temporarily opaque even to Burrows, and associates vowed religious life with a foreign tongue. Still, this trace spurs her insufficient imagination of religious life towards actual commitment; it remedies the absence of religious role models in England with a mystical, if imperfectly understood, supplement. In the Burrows story, monasticism is figured as simultaneously in England’s past and foreign: there are no Catholic monasteries in latesixteenth-century England. Yet the irruption of a representative from one sort of holy community – the Augustinian friars – into another – a domestic home safe, apparently, for a marked Catholic like Burrows – is symptomatic of a larger tendency in early modern English Catholic writing: a tendency to represent holy secular domesticity through allusions to monastic devotion or to the devotional practices of vowed religious more generally (including Jesuits). Writers thus forged links between past and present, native and foreign, re-inscribing an estranged religious Catholicism in the most familiar of English spaces: the home. I am con-



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cerned here not with extensions of the book of hours tradition, whereby householders structure their devotions after a simplified form of the divine office, but with the ways post-Elizabethan Settlement Catholics used the language of the religious life to draw analogies between English Catholic domesticity and regular devotion, as well as between the religious figure’s strict separation from the world and the English recusant Catholic’s strict separation from the rituals of Protestant worship and the regime those rituals supported. These analogies work, then, not to suggest direct or mere likeness, but to characterize domestic piety in ways easily recognizable to Catholic readers and to deploy that piety in specific intra- and extra-Catholic struggles to define the nature of a ‘Catholic’ community. English Catholics share with English Protestants an interest in structuring the home as a site of religious devotion and formation. As Mary Patterson has recently argued, numerous Protestant best-sellers advised readers on routinizing domestic devotion, and Mary Trull’s research has identified a number of secularized ‘orders’ designed for the smooth running of substantial households.11 For many English Catholic writers, allusions to the ordering of domestic devotion mark devotional boundaries through a reclaimed if more narrowly centred common prayer, for the devotion of vowed religious mediates precisely between the individual and the communal. The devotion of religious traditionally was both a model of devotion firmly separated from the world and worthy of imitation, albeit imperfect, by those living a secular life. Finally, devoted religious lived under obedience: they were to follow the guidance of their superiors even as they served as role models for others. These three characteristics proved particularly useful for English Catholic writers, given the circumstances in which English Catholics found themselves. As increasingly tough Elizabethan treason legislation pushed the Mass underground and, after 1585, declared Catholic priests on English soil de facto traitors, some Catholics, the easiest for us to spot today, determined on a course of strict recusancy. Others, like Burrows, chose to leave their native land for safer haven; still others conformed – either loudly, proclaiming that they did so only to satisfy the Queen, or quietly, as so-called church-papists. The Catholic biographers and hagiographers I discuss tend to use allusions to monastic or regular devotion to emphasize the sort of separation and distinction characterizing strict recusancy, demarcating firm boundaries between the Catholic and the worldly (or Protestant). These allusions are especially marked in texts written for or about Catholic women. The reasons for this are in part practi-

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cal. As many scholars have noted, Catholic missionary priests needed access to domestic spaces for shelter and for the concealment of the materials necessary to conduct Mass.12 They needed, then, the cooperation of wives and widows in particular, and saw women’s devotion as key to the sustenance of the Catholic faith in England. What is less well recognized is the anxiety this dependence could create within the Catholic community itself. Writers who allude to regular or monastic devotion in characterizations of domestic piety usually emphasize women’s obedience to their spiritual guides, an obedience both pious and capable of mitigating the anxiety of radical dependence. Analogies between domestic and religious devotion were also useful in Catholic writers’ efforts to demarcate Catholic piety as firmly distinct from worldliness or Protestant religion (often, for these writers, collapsed together). Finally, insofar as the devotion of religious traditionally served as a model for others, Catholic writers who figure domestic spaces through the language of monasticism or regular devotion, through rhetorics of separation from the world and of insistent and paradoxically defiant obedience, also construct domestic piety and devotion as having significant public consequences for the Catholic community at large. For instance, in a biography of Anne Dacre Howard, Countess of Arundel and principle patron of Robert Southwell, her anonymous priest-biographer praises the vow of chastity she takes after Philip Howard’s death, a vow made ‘with the advice and assent of those … haveing direction of her soul’ and renewed ‘several times every year, according to the custome of some religious people.’13 Her vow is honoured by her biographer as the vow of a religious would be. It also has broader consequences: because of this vow, the countess rejects the wooing of various Protestant courtiers and preserves her home as a locus for Catholic worship and practice. In his Autobiography the Jesuit priest John Gerard records his dealings with several wives and widows who sought to lead ‘a more perfect life,’ including the recent widow Elizabeth Vaux, who made a series of significant decisions: First of all, then, she decided to stay a widow. As she could not give God her virginity, she would offer Him a chaste life. She would practise poverty, in the sense that she would put all she possessed or came to possess at the service of God and His servants…. Lastly and before all else, she would be obedient. She would carry out what she was told to do as perfectly as if she had made a vow … She was ready to set up house wherever and in whatever way I judged best for our needs.14



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Vaux cannot be Mary the contemplative, so she’ll be Martha the labourer. She makes decisions for poverty, chastity, and obedience that of necessity must fall short of a vow. Nevertheless, her decisions suggest that she wishes to perfect her life by imitating the religious calling so far as she may, establishing a new sort of holy house for the sheltering of priests. The decisions she makes are parallel to those a Jesuit like Gerard would make; beyond the usual three religious vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience is a suggestion of the unique fourth vow Jesuits took to be wholly at the disposal of the pope for missionary work, as she here places herself and her home into Gerard’s hands for his missionary efforts. The political implications of the obedience Vaux undertakes become clear when played against competing translations of a well-known late medieval devotional text, the Imitatio Christi. A Henrician Catholic translation of the text by Richard Whitford was first printed in London in 1531, with a last edition printed as late as 1575. In book 1, chapter 9, entitled ‘Of meke subjection and obedyence and that we shall gladly folowe the counseyle of other,’ Whitford follows his Latin original in extending the model of the obedient religious to the circumstances of a secular reader, subject to the spiritual guidance of a priest: ‘It is a great thynge to be obedient to lyve under a prelate.’15 In 1580, Thomas Rogers published his Protestantizing translation of the Imitatio, rendering the relationship between prelates and inferiors as one between rulers and subjects. Rogers’s opening sentence concerns living as ‘subjects,’ rather than in a ‘state of obedience,’ as in Whitford’s text; his readers are to obey their ‘superiors’ rather than a ‘prelate.’ Most significantly, Rogers’s chapter is annotated throughout with biblical passages emphasizing obedience to earthly, political authorities (such as 1 Peter 2:13–14), annotations completely absent from Whitford’s translation.16 As Rogers replaces Whitford’s dominant monastic image with that of a kingdom, the monastic virtue of obedience and submission of one’s will and differing opinions to a superior for the sake of virtuous peace becomes a willing suppression of religious difference in favour of a more peaceful national union.17 Vaux’s promise to obey priests is a promise to refuse the politically pacified monastery Rogers envisions as a model for the English nationstate. As Gerard seems well aware, the execution of Vaux’s private promises will help protect a recusant community formed in accordance with the Jesuit vision of England as a missionary territory, one with an embattled Catholic populace strictly separated in its devotional and liturgical practices from what Gerard would have seen as England’s heretical national church. Her promises also mitigate his dependence on her with

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her commitment to obey him as he vowed to obey the pope. As Gerard’s autobiography suggests, Catholic writers conceived of a domesticity sharply divorced from the processes of Protestant nation-formation precisely as the cornerstone of a recusant Catholic community, firmly under the direction of a missionary priest charged with recalling England to the old faith. In his ambitious study of home and state in early modern English drama, Richard Helgerson theorizes the home as a feminized space repeatedly threatened by sexual predators who represent state intrusion; the negotiation of these confrontations are, he argues, a key site of early modern state formation.18 Drawing upon hagiographical traditions, English Catholic writing stages similar confrontations, using them not as a site for negotiating state formation but for inscribing a domestic space whose claims to the loyalty of its inhabitants supercede the claims of the state. What Helgerson calls the affective superiority of the domestic home – responsible for the alternative formation, by as early as the midseventeenth century, of a domestic space that supercedes the civic in its claim on personal loyalties – may thus owe a debt to Catholic as well as to Protestant, Puritan, or radical writers. In the preface to the Jesuit Henry Garnet’s Treatise on Christian Renunciation, a controversial text published on his secret London press, practising the virtue of ‘renunciation’ is a way to resist state intrusions as stalwartly as the purest virgin. Garnet insists that the ‘virtue of renunciation’ is not limited to ‘Monkes, Ermittes, Freers, and other religious persons,’ but is a responsibility bearing on all Catholics.19 With the English Catholic situation clearly in mind, Garnet associates renunciation with strict recusancy and legitimates wives’ disobedience to their husbands in religious matters by likening that disobedience to the separation from the world and the pursuit of perfection undertaken by vowed religious.20 A manuscript prayerbook dated to the mid-seventeenth century and likely prepared for a member of the Digby family includes a passage on renunciation (attributed to Aquinas) that agrees with Garnet, insisting that ‘perfection doth not consist essensually in actuall povertie or in the three vowes, but in the following of Christ.’21 The prayerbook’s hagiographic selections make a similar argument. An entry on St Macharius records his comments on encountering two holy married women, whose progress towards perfection he regards as more advanced than his own; he tells them, ‘In verie truth, the matter consist not in being a virgin, nor in being a wife, nor in being a Monke, nor in being a secular; but it is a holie will that God regardeth in all estats.’22 As the Digby prayerbook



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indicates, the representation of Catholic holy houses located on the English side of the Channel meant rendering the domestic piety of Catholic wives as on par with religious devotion, representing the religious on English soil through direct analogy with Catholic domesticity. These statements that wives ought to take their religious duties and commitments as seriously as would a vowed religious may help us query what ‘private’ devotion might mean with respect to English Catholicism. Targoff’s recent account of the BCP argues that private and individualistic Catholic devotion was encouraged in the early and mid-sixteenth century, and that practices such as bidding beads in the pews or reading books of hours during Mass were preferred as private prayer, and compromised or precluded full participation in the larger, official liturgies of the church. If we look at Catholic writers’ devotional work, however, we are cautioned that the lines between private and public are not necessarily so sharply drawn.23 Catholic devotional writers usually claim that private or individual habits of prayer are also intrinsically corporate, that is, about the formation of holy communities, and ultimately about nothing less than the proper – and ordinary – reformation of the nation. In this they are not so far from Thomas Cranmer after all. The communal import of domestic devotion is apparent in the manuscript biography of the martyr Margaret Clitherow; the wife of a butcher in York and mother of three children, she was one of three Elizabethan women judicially executed for sheltering priests. Her confessor and biographer, the priest John Mush, laments the loss of churches, abbeys, religious persons, and Catholic religious practices from England; he implies that Clitherow’s determination ‘that God might be served in her house’ responds to that loss.24 Discussions of Clitherow’s devotional activities fill the first half of the biography. Mush praises the regularity of Clitherow’s prayers, pilgrimages, confessions, and Mass-hearing. He records that she wished to become a religious should the opportunity arise: ‘I have heard her saie, that if it pleaseth God soe to dispose & set her at libertie from the world, she would, with all her hart, take upon her some religious habit, whereby she might ever serve God under Obedience: And to this end (not knowing what God would doe with her) she had learned to saie Our Ladies Mattins, etc. in latine.’25 Wendy Wall has brilliantly analysed the place of language learning in English homes, arguing that English boys were moved from the vernacular instruction of their mothers to Latin grammar school as an initiation into a ‘civic masculinity’ both dependent upon and distanced from English-language domesticity.26 In Mush’s text, we have a neat inversion of this: Latin functions

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within domestic space to mark a woman’s devotional rejection of the civic realm. Mush often renders Clitherow’s devotions, verbal and otherwise, as private in the sense of solitary. Yet for Mush it is clear that private devotion is not to be linked with individualism, for his praise of her virtues was to have specific effects within York’s Catholic community, indeed to call it into being as a community by encouraging others towards the daring, even provocative recusant Catholicism this happy housewife practised.27 Chastising ‘emulous’ Catholics not willing to run the risks Clitherow did, he refers to her work on behalf of that Catholic community as the labours of their ‘common mother’ – a phrase suggesting her maternal care and guidance over a religious community, an extension of her holy household.28 In the root of the word emulous are contained both of Mush’s primary aims: to scold those Catholics who criticized her because they were jealous (from Latin aemulus), and to urge all Catholics to emulate her (a secondary meaning of aemulus). Clitherow clearly did inspire imitators, such as the would-be martyr Jane Wiseman. The St Monica’s chronicler claims that Wiseman and her husband together ran their household ‘like a monastery’ and records that Wiseman explicitly imitates Clitherow’s behaviour at her aborted trial.29 The importance of Clitherow’s domestic devotion to English Catholic communities is also evident in her life’s early print history. In printed versions of Clitherow’s life, which circulated on the Continent, the domestic holiness so marked in Mush’s text is entirely absent. In the 1594 edition of the fullest martyrology of English Catholics, the Concertatio Ecclesia Catholicae in Anglia, only her execution and her husband’s grief are described, and Richard Verstegan’s Theatrum Crudelitatem Haereticorum Nostri Temporis points simply to her final fate (she was pressed to death), using a sensational illustration as anti-Protestant propaganda.30 A 1619 printing of her life, issued from a Continental press and dedicated to her daughter Anne (by that time a religious at St Monica’s) includes only the second half of Mush’s text, the portion focused on her trial and martyrdom.31 Outside the immediate English context, Clitherow’s role is that of martyr. Within Mush’s original manuscript, however, the emphasis is firmly on what he calls her ‘first martyrdome of a virtuous life.’ The etymology of ‘martyr’ as ‘witness’ is evocative here: her ‘first martyrdome’ bears witness to individual devotion under the careful supervision of a missionary priest and is to inspire an imitative community simultaneously pious and defiant, and, most importantly, as clearly demarcated as the community of literal martyrs Clitherow would



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eventually join. The dedication to a 1654 manuscript transcription of Mush’s life of Clitherow indicates the importance of her life and death for defining an English Catholic community: ‘Greater Love hath noe man than this, that a man yeeld his life for his friends. Jo xv.xiii.’32 Despite Catholic writers’ celebrations of domestic devotion as foundational for communal assembly, demarcation, and preservation, there is evidence to suggest that all was not quiet on the domestic front: some Catholic writers also worried about relying so heavily on wives’ devotion.33 Throughout Mush’s text, he defends Clitherow’s flagrant disobedience of familial and civic authorities by insisting on her absolute obedience to him as her confessor, and by subjugating himself to her at the end of his text, now that she has, from his point of view, achieved a glory he can only wish for himself: that of martyrdom.34 It is clear from both Mush’s rhetoric and his descriptions of her house that he was completely dependent upon her protection and shelter; his insistence on her obedience to him while she lived mitigates that dependence somewhat. Likewise, Richard Smith’s biography of Magdalen Browne includes a chapter on her complete obedience to her confessor, and the anonymous Jesuit biographer of Anne Howard makes similar claims. Alongside Catholic priest-biographers’ insistence on pious wives’ obedience to priests we might read the poetry of the Jesuit martyrsaint Robert Southwell, in which images of domesticity sometimes suggest mixed feelings about Catholic communities’ reliance on domestic spaces, and on women’s fidelity in particular. In Frances Dolan’s important work on Protestant fears about Catholic wives and queens, the Catholic wife, penetrated spiritually if not also carnally by a dominating priest, threatens to overwhelm the Protestant husband and intrude a threatening Catholicity into the English home.35 Southwell’s lyric ‘At home in heaven’ indicates that fears about the seductiveness of Catholic wives did not prey on the minds of excitable Protestant polemicists alone. In ‘At home in heaven,’ Southwell juxtaposes the heavenly home with a domestic one and urges loyalty to the divine. He writes that it is the ‘Faire soule’ that lured God into the earthly home of the incarnation: ‘Thy ghostly beautie offred force to God, / It cheyn’d him in the lynkes of tender love. / It woon his will with man to make abode: / It stai’d his Sword, and did his wrath remove.’ In this poem, as Alison Shell has remarked, the union of God and soul is likened to the union of husband and wife;36 the poem updates a common reading of the eroticism of the Song of Songs, suggesting that the soul/wife ought to be wholly faithful to God as a wife should be to her husband. The poem’s overlay

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of spiritual and married domesticities also suggests a political reading acknowledging the value of wives’ loyalty to the old faith in England. If we permit that more politicized reading, then some of Southwell’s language also hints at unease about this reliance on women. For instance, in describing the allure of the soul Southwell likens it to an infamous seductress: ‘This lull’d our heavenly Sampson fast asleepe, / And laid him in our feeble natures lapp.’ The beauty of the soul is Delilah’s, that of the betrayer whose loyalty to her ethnic community over her husband led eventually to the typological Samson’s self-sacrifice. While the image draws on a common typological reading of the Samson-Delilah episode, in Southwell’s hands the image may include a hint of fear about the Catholic mission’s reliance on English wives, who might prove faithful to their country rather than their God, who might obey Thomas Rogers’s reformed monastery of the kingdom rather than the devotional separation urged by many missionary priests. Countering the soul’s potentially dangerous seductiveness, Southwell’s poem urges her to remain faithful in her love to God, a faithfulness rendered in terms of staying home, secluded, domestic: ‘O soule do not thy noble thoughtes abase / To lose thy loves in any mortall wight: / Content thy eye at home with native grace, / Sith God him selfe is ravisht with thy sight. / If on thy beautie God enamored bee: / Base is thy love of any lesse then hee.’ The language of devotion is the language of being at home – at a native home – in heaven; such dedication minimizes the risk of entrusting the faith to domestic Delilahs. Indeed, the fear of being like a betraying wife works to push readers, both male and female, towards the absolute spiritual fidelity that Southwell’s poetry usually imagines as occurring in relatively secluded, isolated spaces: vales, valleys, the crown of the conscience, the human heart. John Donne famously urges Christ to ‘Betray, kind husband, thy spouse,’ to open her to ‘most men,’ a shocking conflation of religious fidelity with sexual betrayal that may resonate with and respond to the English Catholic situation. For Donne, a corporate identity – the church – may be formed only by repeated spousal betrayals; for Southwell, the corporate identity of English Catholics is dependent on absolute domestic fidelity.

Domesticating Southwell’s Short Rule Southwell’s location of spiritual fidelity in a secluded, domestic piety is also evident in his Short Rule for Good Life, a guide to daily devotion designed for busy Catholic householders. To this point, I have suggested



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that some writers who wished to promote strict recusancy – Garnet, Mush, Gerard – used monastic or religious analogies to characterize, value, and ultimately order the domestic piety, devotion, and work of English wives, and that the insistence on the virtue of obedience and the figuring of marital fidelity as spiritual loyalty both reveal and attempt to mitigate Catholic communities’ dependence upon wives and domestic spaces. Southwell’s Rule extends the tendency to characterize faithful domestic devotion through drawing upon the model of the religious life, but it also proved to be a popular border-crosser, becoming a widely used manual of devotion for Protestant readers as well. Indeed, if any Catholic writer may lay claim to popular status in Elizabethan England, Southwell may do so. Editions of his poetry and prose sold widely, issuing from Protestant and Catholic presses, in England and abroad, and the Rule is no exception: at least seven Catholic and three Protestant printed editions survive.37 A number of post-print manuscript copies survive as well, which yield important information about the text’s early readerships and reception. Somewhat ironically, then, a text that advises clear religious distinctions blurs those distinctions in its manuscript and print circulations.38 The Rule is a pastoral text that accommodates regular devotional practices to the demands of running a busy Elizabethan household, a Counter-Reformation extension of earlier Catholic adaptations of religious models for household devotion. The Rule contains general Christian principles by which to organize one’s life, the implications of those principles for one’s daily behaviour, and an overview of an ideal day for a secular person. The text proposes, for instance, ‘An Order How to Spend Every Day,’ with advice about hours of rising, hours and methods for prayer, daily examinations of conscience, and even virtuous ways of eating; there are suggested variations for holy days and guidance on confession and receiving the Eucharist. The Rule contains advice on the rearing of children that perhaps Frances Burrows’s parents followed: ‘I most tell them [children] often of the abbies, & the vertue of the olde monkes, & fryers, and other preists, & religious men & women, & on the truth, & honestye of the old tyme & the iniquitie of ours.’39 Southwell’s work comprises nostalgia for the religious habits of the good old days, an infusion of Tridentine-era spirituality, and a healthy dose of pragmatism as he adapts a new Rule for married Catholics practising their faith without regular access to the liturgy or priests. Scholars have remarked that Southwell’s text owes a debt to Loyola’s Exercises.40 This is clear especially in the sections on temptation and

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on ‘Considerations to Settle the Mind in the Course of Virtue.’ Other sections trace other debts: ‘An Order How to Spend Every Day’ draws heavily on Gaspar Loarte’s The Exercise of a Christian Life.41 Yet in Garnet’s editions, printed on his illegal press, the Rule contains a preface in which Garnet frames the Rule not with Loyola or Loarte but with St Benedict, author of the first monastic rule: When that great servant of God Saint Bennet had in most fervent and devout prayers yeelded up his holy soule unto GOD: two of his religious followers (as reporteth Saint Gregorye) being ignorant altogether of his death, although in places farre distant, had the like vision. They sawe out of their godly Fathers Celle directlye towardes the East, a most beautyefull waye, adorned with gorgeous tapestrye, and shining with a multitude of innumerable lampes, to proceed even unto heaven, at the toppe whereof there standinge a notable person in a venerable habite, and demanding of them whose way it was which they beheld, they answered they knew not, but hee incontinently said unto them these words, Haec est via qua dilectus Domino coelum Benedictus ascendit. This is the waye by which Gods welbeloved servante Benedict went up into heaven: meaning thereby (as S. Bernard noteth) the holy rule of a religious life, instituted and practised by the same Saint, by which not he alone was passed as by a most ready and pleasant way to heaven but whosoever of his followers would travaile by the same, should with like security arive to the end of a most happie journey. The Author of this little booke (gentle Reader) I nothing doubt, but is very well knowne unto thee, as also for his learning, piety, zeal, charity, fortitude, and other rare and singular qualities, but specially, for his precious death, he is renowned in the world abroade: neither needeth there any extraordinary vision: but the sounde and certaine Doctrine of the Catholic Church, is sufficient to perswade, that he is a most glorious Saint in heaven: he being such a one, as hath confessed a good confession before many witnesses, and made (as S. John saith) his garments white, with the bloud of the immaculate Lambe. But because thou shouldest not bee ignorant of the way by which this valiant Champion of Christ arrived unto so happy a countrey, hee himselfe hath left behind him for thy benefit ... the description of this most gainfull voyage to heaven, bedecked with the most precious ornaments of all Christian vertues, and with the most pleasant & comfortable brightnesse of notable rules of spirituall life: every one of which may bee as it were a lanterne unto thy feete, and a continuall light unto thy steps.42

Written shortly after Southwell’s martyrdom, the preface establishes twin



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ways to heaven. Benedict’s way – the ‘rule of a religious life’ – is presented as part of the inheritance of the Catholic Church. But Garnet’s preface then adduces Southwell’s work as an alternative Rule, providing another path to heaven for those unable to adopt the ‘rule of a religious life.’ Southwell’s way needs only comparatively quotidian forms of validation: the faithful witness of his martyrdom, the sure reward of heaven attendant upon his death, the sanctity of biblical warrant (see Psalms 119:105). The title page to Garnet’s edition reinforces the parallel to Benedict as it cites Psalm 26 (incorrectly marked as Psalm 118): ‘Set me down, O Lord, a law in thy way.’43 Following this Rule, readers follow a new Benedict, despite their immersion in household duties. Yet Garnet’s printed edition of Southwell’s text also indicates Garnet’s slight unease with the text as it came into his hand. While Garnet praises the Rule as a viable alternative (pun intended) to Benedict’s path, he also suggests in his preface that readers should not interpret the word must in the text as if they were actually living under a vow, as though they were ‘bound to the performance of anything there expressed, but only that those actions do belong unto the exercise of perfection, without any farther bond than either the laws of God or of Holy Church do impose.’44 They should not, in other words, interpret Southwell’s ‘must’ as though they were actually living under a vow. While in Garnet’s edition the title of the work is Short Rule, suggesting an association with monastic regulatory documents, the running title within his edition reads ‘rules,’ in the plural, perhaps again indicating some unease with any implication that the text might function as a formal rule for its readers. Garnet’s pastoral intervention indicates both the appeal a sort of light monasticism might have for English Catholic readers and a concern that the possible rigidity of such a model might cause considerable spiritual frustration and even error.45 Perhaps reflecting the unusual ecclesiastical status of Catholic communities in England, the work itself worries about the horizons of its own authority. Recent scholarship on English Catholics has reaffirmed long-standing observations about the important role books played in the English Catholic community.46 But we still know relatively little about how exactly these books were used, and what sorts of religious authority the printed word could legitimately claim. The Rule’s print history and content together suggest that even within Catholic circles such questions were not easily resolved. Within the Rule are hesitations and qualifications similar to those found in Garnet’s preface.47 In characteristic firstperson voicing, Southwell writes,

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I muste sett downe with myeselfe some certayne order, in spendinge mye tyme, allottinge to everye hower in the daye some certayne thinge to bee donne in the same, so neare as possiblye I maye, or at the leaste to have some tymes in the morninge eveninge or after none certyanlye devoted to some good exercise, which I muste (though not by vow) yet after a sorte bind mye self unto, when things of greater waight do not call me from them. Allsoe to keepe due tymes of ryesinge, meales, & goeinge to bedd, & all other ordinarie things, the observation whereof is most necessarie for a regular, & vertuous order of life.48

The space between a formal vow and the binding of oneself ‘after a sort’ is precisely the space missionary priests had to negotiate as they sought to ensure the continuing fidelity of a religious community dependent upon domestic devotion for its survival. This passage invites us to consider the kinds of guidance a text might give a Catholic community of readers, and the forms of authority a text might or might not assume, given the relative scarcity of priests and the legal prohibition of Catholic sacramentary practice. Southwell’s work does not claim for itself the status or authority of a monastic rule, but it does seek to bind its readers ‘after a sort’ to ‘a regular, & vertuous order of life.’ The text also shares with those I discussed above an emphasis on demarcation: the piety the Short Rule prescribes is to be directed both inward and outward, to coordinate external ‘signs’ or ‘badges’ with inward belief. Catholic devotion as practised by Southwell’s readers is to produce unmistakable external evidence of religious loyalty. When giving Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, the guide teaches the exercitant how to interpret his (the Exercises were at this point given only to men) experiences and thoughts. In Southwell’s text, the author asks the practitioner to become self-reading, self-monitoring: to read herself for signs of Christian ‘affections’ and then to show the world indications of her loyalty: ‘I beeinge a Christian not onely my fayth and all mye actions proper thereunto ought to be different from the fayth and actions of infidels: But even mye vearye ordinarye actions of eatinge drinkinge, playeinge, workeinge, & such like ought to have a marke & bagge [badge] of Christianity.’49 While Southwell’s work is not one of controversy, the broader purpose of his readers’ devotion in the context of English recusancy informs the text’s advice. Readers are to think of life as ‘perpetuall warefare’ against both ‘gods enemyes, & myne.’50 His section on ‘how we ought to arm our minds against temptations that happen when we seek earnestly to serve God’ imagines vividly the temptation to avoid persecu-



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tion and reminds his readers that suffering indicates God’s love: ‘“For whom he loveth, he chastiseth,” and proveth like gold in the furnace.’51 The text’s purpose seems clear: to foster a devotional passion conducive to strict recusancy, an affective ‘sign’ that one is willing to suffer rather than compromise. There is evidence to suggest that women readers were the initial audience for this focus on recusant devotion. According to her biographer, Anne Howard, Countess of Arundel was the reader for whom Southwell’s Rule was first written, and there is a Catholic manuscript tradition suggesting that the Rule was thought particularly appropriate for women.52 Several manuscript copies of the work exist, with striking variations.53 Two of these copies seem to have been made especially for Catholic wives. In 1600, one ‘R.C.’ made a copy of the text followed by a preparation for confession targeting women; the text contains, for example, a form for confessing attraction to men other than one’s husband: ‘I have hed many uncleane thoughts, touchinge others then my husband, which I doute I have not so soone expelled as I ought.’54 In a second manuscript copy of the Rule, now held at Durham Cathedral, there is a table of contents in which this confession is included, though the order for confession was ripped out after the table of contents was organized.55 Most interestingly, in R.C.’s copy the text and the preparation for confession are followed by a copy of another important work – the latter part of Mush’s ‘Life of Margarit Clitherow,’ containing her imprisonment, interrogations, aborted trial, and martyrdom. R.C.’s manuscript pieces together an early modern Catholic ideal, first presenting a devotional guide for a wife and then a model of the public martyr’s glory this domestic devotion could yield. This intersecting moment in the histories of Southwell’s Rule and Mush’s ‘Life of Margarit Clitherow’ indicates some Catholic readers’ interest in embracing an alternative Rule for devout Catholic wives, a devotional structure capable of demarcating a firmly separate Catholic religious culture. Yet despite its ostensible purposes, the Rule also became popular, in slightly altered form, with Protestant readers. For those readers, the text’s basic devotional advice and suggestions seem to have obviated its goal of promoting lay Catholic devotion capable of inspiring staunch recusancy. It was first printed by an English commercial press in 1620 in William Barrett’s collected edition of Southwell’s works.56 Barrett’s edition replaces Garnet’s preface with a new preface containing advice on godliness. Yet all but the first sentence of this preface is adapted from a letter Southwell wrote to his father urging him to embrace strict

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recusancy, a letter first printed with the Short Rule in Garnet’s illegal edition of 1597. The preface itself, then, shows that illegal Catholic texts could and did move into Protestant editorial hands. The preface’s new first sentence indicates why readers might be interested in Southwell’s work: it notes the ‘uniformity to be propounded in ayming at the true course of vertue.’ The reference to this uniformity may be a defence for the publication of a text not previously printed legally in England. That proposed ‘uniformity’ in the quest for virtue both resembles the BCP’s desire for liturgical uniformity and contrasts ironically with the ‘signs and badges’ Southwell wants his reader to show of a dedicated, clearly demarcated Catholicism. In the Barrett edition’s changes we can trace the boundaries and limitations of a uniform devotion by discerning which areas of Catholic piety were marked as uncommon – by virtue of their excision – and acceptable – by virtue of their maintenance. Predictably, Barrett’s edition expunges many markers of Catholic theology and devotional practice. It removes all indications of saints’ intercessory prayer, maintaining references to saints only as models for good living; it insistently renames the ‘pater noster’ as ‘the Lord’s prayer’; and it removes all mention of Mary. The chapter ‘Of my duty to my superiors’ is cut entirely, as is other material on confession, holy days, and corporal punishments.57 Barrett’s edition cuts most references to meditation, especially visual meditation, and for several of Southwell’s closing prayers new material is substituted that better accommodates Puritan preoccupations (for example, material appears on distinguishing three sorts of men: the open wicked, hypocrites, and the godly).58 In the section entitled ‘Of my duty to my self’ the text maintains the implication that readers must bind themselves after a sort, ‘though not by vow’ – here that phrase reads more as a dismissal rather than a valuation of the religious life – and replaces the phrase ‘order of life,’ which perhaps smacks too much of monasticism, with ‘kind of life.’59 Yet other changes are less consistent with what we might expect. For instance, Barrett’s edition cuts a reference to ‘free will’ in the first chapter but maintains a volitional theology in the sections entitled ‘Rules following of this [the first] foundation’ and ‘the sixth affection.’60 The text generally cuts the distinction between mortal and venial sins, yet maintains that distinction in ‘the second affection’ and in two sections of material that Southwell took from a Catholic translation of Luis de Granada’s work, sections entitled ‘What good a soule loseth by mortall sinne’ and ‘What misery the soule gaineth by mortall sinne.’61 The Barrett edition, then, revises Southwell’s text heavily at some



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points while allowing a few markers of Catholic belief to stand. The Durham manuscript discussed above, from which the order for confession has been removed, went through a rather crude editorial expunging of its own. A previous, presumably Catholic, owner seems to have copied the entire text with the order for confession, as is evident from a table of contents included at the end of the manuscript. A later, presumably Protestant reader wished to retain the text itself but cut out of the commonplace book into which it is copied the more obvious markers of its Catholic provenance. The order for confession has been removed, though the excisor left just enough material in the binding and in the table of contents for the removal to be perceptible to a modern researcher. That later owner also removed the pages that would have contained Southwell’s suggestions for devotion to saints and his ‘Another exercise of devotion,’ a Loyolan exercise involving the imaginative placement of different saints in different household rooms.62 Curiously enough, within the pages that remain, containing the bulk of Southwell’s work, the later owner allowed markers of Catholic piety to stand, including references to the ‘Ave’ and suggestions in the sixth chapter for making confession in the absence of a ‘ghostlie father,’ a ‘godlie thinge’ though not ‘a sacramente.’ Some Protestant readers were even more accommodating. The provenance of a manuscript copy held at the Folger, for instance, suggests the treatise’s ability to cross and recross confessional lines. The treatise seems to have been copied by a Catholic scribe from another copy amended by a Protestant.63 The Catholic scribe seems either unaware of or unconcerned about the changes made to his copy-text by the Protestant copyist, who had lightly edited the text to purge some Catholic associations, though what is surprising is what remains. The Protestant copyist struck distinctions between mortal and venial sins sometimes – but not always; Catholic references to the accumulation of merit are retained in some places and expunged in others. The copyist cut the passage about praising monks, friars, and abbeys but made no changes to the passage on choosing a religious superior, a ‘father’ to whom one owes absolute obedience (the English church at this time used the title ‘Sir’ for priests). Even Homer nods; maybe this copyist did, too – or perhaps he or she was unclear about what exactly counted as Catholic devotion. Another even more devotionally hybridized copy survives in a commonplace book in which Southwell’s text is preceded by excerpts from John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, rabidly anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish propaganda, and a Latin parody poem on the Catholic Eucharist.64 Yet the

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manuscript’s copy of the Rule makes no Protestantizing changes. The first section, containing the Foxean material, is written in a hand different from that of the Southwellian material and in a separate gathering, though the Southwell copyist must have seen the Foxean material, as commendatory sonnets for the Rule begin on the final page of the first section. The terminus for this commonplace book is 1597, as the ages of the ‘Sky’ family in that year are listed on one of the final leaves. The ‘Sky’ family is that of William Skinner, a staunch Catholic.65 This odd combination of material was given to Gonville and Caius College by William Moore, who attended Caius College from 1606 to 1613 and was Cambridge University librarian from 1653 to 1659. Moore seems to have remained faithful to the Church of England through the years of the Protectorate; he wished to be buried in Caius College, but its master would not permit his burial there ‘by the liturgy’ of the Church of England.66 How Moore acquired the manuscript is unknown, though the catalogue of his collections reveals his interest in the preservation of monastic manuscripts in particular.67 Perhaps the Rule seemed a natural extension of that interest. Brown has suggested that the first, Foxean section was ‘bound in to mislead a searcher.’68 While it is certainly possible that the Foxean material was included as a blind, the commonplace book may also bear witness to intra-familial or intra-communal crossings: the Catholic copyist had to come into possession of the extensive Foxean material, already copied, before beginning work. As the Folger manuscript suggests, such confessional crossing is not uncommon in the period. The manuscript, then, bears witness both to the Catholic community’s interest in Southwell’s text, including Catholics like William Skinner, and to the crossing of devotional and polemical material between Catholic and Protestant communities, perhaps prior to the copying of the Rule and certainly after, as the material passed into Moore’s hands. These manuscript editions of Southwell’s Rule, if we may so term them, reveal that drawing religious distinctions through devotional practice, as Catholic authors favouring recusancy laboured to do, could be complicated by cross-confessional similarities in and perhaps confusions over devotional habits and preferences. The afterlives of Southwell’s Rule blur the boundaries of ‘Catholic’ devotion even as the text itself, along with other Catholic material on domestic piety, bears witness to English Catholic efforts at demarcating precisely those boundaries. Is English Catholic domestic devotion, then, uncommon? I have suggested that in at least three senses it is not. Writers interested in pro-



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moting recusant Catholicism shaped an alternative, resistant community through allusions to a sort of light monasticism – or light life of vowed religion – designed to prevent the domestic from sliding into a Protestant state. Writers like Southwell longed for the good old days when England held Catholicism in common, updating holy houses for current circumstances while worrying over the reliance of those holy households on women’s fidelity. Finally, the compilers of the Protestant or Protestantizing print and manuscript editions of Southwell’s Rule labour to reconcile Catholic devotion with Protestant religious and national formation, struggling to mark the territories of Protestant and Catholic devotion. In their work to mark and cross borders, those promoting recusant Catholicism and those reading Southwell from the unsteady vantage point of Protestant piety together demonstrate that those religious borders are not necessarily any more clear-cut than the wavering lines supposedly dividing private from communal prayer. The texts I trace here offer a cautionary reminder that confessional authenticity cannot be easily coded to dogmatic or controversial utterance; indeed the repeated insistence in both Protestant and Catholic texts on devotion’s role in forging communal boundaries points to both the difficulty and the importance of establishing devotional distinctiveness in the wake of the Reformation.

NOTES   1 On the powerful nationalizing effects of the liturgy found in the Book of Common Prayer, see Timothy Rosendale, Liturgy and Literature in the Making of Protestant England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).   2 Ethan Shagan, ‘Introduction,’ in Catholics and the ‘Protestant Nation’: Religious Politics and Identity in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 16.   3 Erica Longfellow has recently queried what ‘private’ might mean with respect to Protestant devotional practices, arguing that for Puritans like Nehemiah Wallington and Puritan-leaning ministers like William Gouge there is a fundamental continuity between individual and communal devotion and prayer (‘Public, Private, and the Household in Early SeventeenthCentury England,’ Journal of British Studies 45, no. 2 [2006]: 313–34). Here, I suggest that English Catholic writers posited such a continuity as well, though modified by the added difficulties that anti-Catholic legislation presented. Longfellow makes the point that in the early seventeenth century

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‘private’ could often be pejorative and that there was little sense that what was private should be protected from public access or should be valued as is the case in later, Lockean senses of ‘privacy.’ One goal of this article is to consider what sorts of value Catholic communities placed on domestic prayer and practice, a value that both stems from connections between individual and communal devotional practice and seeks to establish a space protected from state interference. In that latter sense, we might speculate that Catholic discourse about domestic piety contributes to the development of the sense of privacy as something to be valued and protected. See also my later discussion of Catholic writers with respect to Richard Helgerson’s work on the household and the state.   4 Rosendale, Liturgy and Literature, 37.   5 Ibid.; see also Ramie Targoff, Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001) for a powerful argument about the importance of communal prayer and practice for early modern religious identity. Daniel R. Gibbons’s recent dissertation on poetry and the BCP stresses more than do either Targoff or Rosendale the possible multiplicities of prayerful responses to the BCP’s liturgy (‘Conflicts of Devotion: Liturgy, Poetry, and Community in Elizabethan and Jacobean England’ [PhD diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2009).   6 Richard Smith, An Elizabethan Recusant House, Comprising the Life of the Lady Magdalen Viscountess Montague, trans. Cuthbert Fursdon in 1627, ed. A.C. Southern (London: Sands, 1954), 39, 43.   7 See Hopkins’s dedicatory epistle to Luis’s Of Prayer, and Meditation (Paris, 1582).   8 For more on Waldegrave’s publication of Catholic authors, including Robert Southwell, see Susannah Monta, ‘Martyrdom in Print in Early Modern England: The Case of Robert Waldegrave,’ in More Than a Memory: The Discourse of Martyrdom and the Construction of Christian Identity in the History of Christianity, ed. Johan Leemans, 271–94 (Leuven: Peeters, 2005).   9 Scholars such as Frances Dolan (Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture [Ithaca; Cornell University Press], 1999) and Arthur F. Marotti (‘Alienating Catholics in Early Modern England: Recusant Women, Jesuits, and Ideological Fantasies,’ in Catholicism and AntiCatholicism in Early Modern English Texts, ed. Marotti, 1–34 [New York: St Martin’s, 1999]) have concentrated on the role of gender in the construction and demonizing of Catholicism. Here, I examine the implications of gender for the ways Catholics themselves imagined and worried over domestic devotional communities.



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10 See The Chronicle of the English Augustinian Canonesses Regular of the Lateran, at St Monica’s in Louvain, ed. Dom Adam Hamilton, OSB [London: Sands, 1906], 1:166–8. Frances Burrows is the Catholic version of the famous Foxean martyr Rose Allin. Both were famous for a childhood exploit: Allin for challenging Catholic searchers, Burrows for preventing pursuivants from entering a house until two priests inside had time to hide (see Chronicle, 114–15; and John Foxe, Actes and Monuments [London, 1583], 2006–7). 11 Mary Patterson, Domesticating the Reformation: Protestant Best-Sellers, Private Devotion, and the Revolution of English Piety (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2007); Mary Trull has shared with me several as-yet-unpublished conference papers, for which I am very grateful. 12 On the role of Catholic women in the mission, see John Bossy, The English Catholic Community, 1570–1850 (London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 1975), 152–60; and John J. Larocca, ‘Popery and Pounds: The Effect of the Jesuit Mission on Penal Legislation,’ in The Reckoned Expense: Edmund Campion and the Early English Jesuits (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 1996), 260. Though married women were initially under less pressure from recusancy laws, they still worried Protestant writers; see Dolan, Whores of Babylon, and Marotti, ‘Alienating Catholics,’ on this point. 13 ‘The Life of the Right Honourable & Virtuouse Lady, the Lady Anne Late Countesse of Arundell & Surrey,’ 29–30, Arundel Castle Archives. 14 John Gerard, The Autobiography of a Hunted Priest, trans. Philip Caraman (New York: Pellegrini and Cudahy, 1952), 147–8. Gerard tells a story of another woman, the wife of Sir Everard Digby, who desires to make similar decisions: ‘She had it in mind, in the event of her husband’s death, to devote her life to good works, and observe perpetual chastity and exact obedience. Regarding her property – and it was considerable, for she had no chidren – she would devote it all to good causes under my direction’ (167; her husband soon recovered from his illness). 15 Richard Whitford, A boke newely translated out of Laten in to Englysshe, called the folowynge of Cryste (London, 1531), fol. ix. 16 Of the Imitation of Christ, trans. Thomas Roger (1580), 16–17. 17 On English editions of the Imitatio Christi, see Elizabeth K. Hudson, ‘English Protestants and the Imitatio Christi, 1580–1620,’ Sixteenth-Century Journal 19 (1988): 541–58. On the Imitatio Christi and larger problems of imitatio in early modern rhetoric and poetics, see Nandra Perry, ‘Imitatio and Identity: Thomas Rogers, Philip Sidney, and the Protestant Self,’ ELH 35 (2005): 365–406. 18 Richard Helgerson, Adulterous Alliances: Home, State, and History in Early

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Modern European Drama and Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 19 Henry Garnet, A Treatise of Christian Renunciation (London, 1593), 8. 20 It should be noted that Garnet also spends an alarming amount of space discussing how husbands may extricate themselves from marriages to wrongly believing wives. 21 MS V.a.473, 96, Folger Library. 22 Ibid., 102. 23 See Targoff, Common Prayer, chaps 1 and 2. For a carefully nuanced argument about the complexities of lay literacy and literate practices with respect to Latin liturgy, see Katherine Zieman, Singing the New Song: Literacy and Liturgy in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). 24 John Mush, ‘The life and Death of Mistris Margarit Clitherow,’ 6, 43, Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Bar Convent (York). All references to Mush’s biography are to this manuscript copy. 25 Ibid., 53. 26 Wendy Wall, Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 27 See Peter Lake and Michael Questier’s excellent article on the Yorkshire Catholic politics in which this ‘Life’ is embroiled (‘Margaret Clitherow, Catholic Nonconformity, Martyrology, and the Politics of Religious Change in Elizabethan England,’ Past and Present 185, no. 1 [2004]: 43–90). They offer a correction to Megan Matchinske’s reading of Clitherow’s activities as largely private (Megan Matchinske, Writing, Gender, and State in Early Modern England: Identity Formation and the Female Subject [Cambridge: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998], chap. 2). 28 Mush, ‘The life and Death of Mistris Margarit Clitherow,’ 68, 29. 29 Chronicle of … St Monica’s, 1:80, 82; like Clitherow, Wiseman refused to plead at her trial. 30 Concertatio Ecclesiae Catholicae in Anglia, 410v; Richard Verstegan, Theatrum (Antwerp, 1587), K3. 31 An abstract of the life … of Mistres Margaret Clitherowe (Mackline, 1619; repr. Ilkley: Scolar Press, 1979). 32 Mush, ‘The life and Death of Mistris Margarit Clitherow,’ 1. 33 Gary Kuchar has discussed the suppression of the teaching that Mary seduced God into the Incarnation as another instance evincing fears of the feminine; see his Divine Subjection: The Rhetoric of Sacramental Devotion in Early Modern England (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2005). 34 On the politics of Clitherow’s flagrant disobedience of civic authorities, see Lake and Questier, ‘Margaret Clitherow.’



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35 Frances Dolan, Whores of Babylon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999). 36 Alison Shell, Catholicism, Controversy, and the English Literary Imagination, 1558–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 71. 37 The Catholic editions include those printed abroad (three, at Douai), on Garnet’s illegal press (at least three, through 1605?), and one more edition in 1622 at St Omer. The three Protestant editions were printed in 1620, 1630, and 1636. On these editions, see Nancy Pollard Brown, Two Letters and Short Rules of a Good Life (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1973), xlviii. 38 Lisa McClain discusses the Short Rule’s advice that readers turn their homes into sacred spaces in Lest We Be Damned: Practical Innovation and Lived Experience among English Catholics in Protestant England, 1559–1642 (New York: Routledge, 2004), 57–8; she argues more broadly that Catholics attempted to separate themselves and their devotional lives from the officially Protestant society around them. My work builds on hers to suggest that from the perspective of reception history such separation was often frustrated by the wide popularity of Catholic devotional texts. 39 ‘A shorte rule of good life,’ MS 218/233, 172, Gonville and Caius, Cambridge. The textual history of this work is vexed, to say the least. I cite Gonville and Caius 218/233, the manuscript copy Nancy Pollard Brown has deemed ‘most authoritative’ (‘Robert Southwell: The Mission of the Written Word,’ in The Reckoned Expense: Edmund Campion and the Early English Jesuits, ed. Thomas M. McCoog, SJ [Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 1996], 209) – though without further explanation. As will become evident below, I am more interested in what this manuscript tells us about the reception history of Southwell’s text than about whether or not it is an authoritative text. If the Gonville and Caius manuscript differs significantly from others I have consulted, I note the difference; in this case, York Additional Manuscript 151 adds ‘and devotion’ prior to ‘of the old tyme’ (19v). 40 See, for example, Scott Pilarz’s discussion of the Rule in Robert Southwell and the Mission of Literature, 1561–1595: Writing Reconciliation (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004), 101–15. As the Exercises could be given only to men, Nancy Pollard Brown has rightly noted Southwell’s expansion of Loyola’s reach to women readers, and indeed the work seems to have been first intended for a woman, the Countess of Arundel, Southwell’s special patroness, who protected him and made possible his early publications. See Brown’s introduction to Two Letters. 41 See Brown, Two Letters, 114; the title of Loarte’s work is from Stephen Brinkley’s 1579 translation. 42 A short rule of good life: To direct the devout Christian, in a regular, and orderly course (London, 1602–5?), A3r–A4r. I cite Garnet’s third edition, the edition widely available through Early English Books Online.

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43 The verse appears also at the beginning of the text in MS 218/233, Gonville and Caius. 44 Ibid., A6v. 45 Brown has noted (in Two Letters, liv, and ‘Robert Southwell,’ 209) that the editor of the printed text, most likely Garnet, seems to have softened the text in a few places; while the title page indicates that the text is ‘Newly set forth according to the Author’s direction before his death,’ the changes made are likely not authoritative. 46 See McClain, Lest We Be Damned; Alison Shell’s Oral Culture and Catholicism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) complements this work with its emphasis on Catholicism and orality. 47 While we may never know whether these are Southwell’s work or evidence of Garnet’s editorial hand, I follow Nancy Pollard Brown, whose work on the Dublin manuscript of the Rule indicates Garnet’s general respect for what Southwell wrote (introduction, Two Letters). 48 Gonville and Caius, 147–8. 49 Ibid., 133. 50 Ibid., 123, 124. 51 The biblical verses alluded to here (Hebrews 12:6, Proverbs 3:12, Isaiah 48:10) also figure as leitmotifs in Southwell’s Epistle of Comfort (London, 1587). 52 The mid-nineteenth-century printing of Howard’s life did not include a crucial chapter on her relationship with Southwell; that chapter was edited and published by C. A. Newdigate in Month 157 (1931): 246–54. The reference to the Short Rule appears on 250. 53 It is unclear in several cases whether these copies are pre- or post-print. Here, I am concerned with what these manuscript copies tell us about the reception of Southwell’s work rather than establishing a genealogy for them. 54 ‘A Shorte Rule of good lyfe,’ Additional Manuscript 151, 44r–v, York Minster. 55 ‘A shorte rule of good lyfe,’ Hunter Manuscript 108, Durham Cathedral. I differ from Nancy Pollard Brown’s assessment that this manuscript shows ‘textual changes’ removing references to women readers in particular (‘Robert Southwell: The Mission of the Written Word,’ 209), as it is clear from the table of contents and from material remaining in the binding of the manuscript that the preparation for confession suited to women was an original part of the manuscript. 56 The Rule is included in St Peters Complaint. Mary Madgalenes tears with other workes (London, 1620).



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57 Barrett’s edition maintains in the section entitled ‘Rules in sicknesse’ the injunction that ‘As in health I ought to be obedient to my superiours,’ which reads to me like Thomas Rogers’s secularization of superiors in his translation of the Imitatio Christi. 58 Sig. Aa3r. Only on sig. Y3r is a reference to visual meditation maintained; otherwise, the edition removes this marker of Loyolan piety. 59 Ibid., sigs. X4v, X5r. 60 Ibid., sigs. V1r, V1v–V2r, V10v–V11v. 61 As Brown notes (Two Letters, 119), this material’s ultimate source is Richard Hopkins’s translation of Luis’s A memorial of a Christian life, second treatise, G7v–G8v. 62 The excision is clear from the next sentence following the missing page, a sentence from the penultimate paragraph of that exercise. Lisa McClain discusses the sacralizing of household space through Southwell’s ‘Another exercise of devotion’ (Lest We Be Damned, 58). 63 My assessment here follows that of Brown in her ‘Textual Introduction’ to Two Letters. 64 MS 218/233, Gonville and Caius. 65 Nancy Pollard Brown, ‘Paperchase: The Dissemination of Catholic Texts in Elizabethan England,’ in English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700, ed. Peter Beale and Jeremy Griffiths (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 1:134–5. 66 Julian Roberts, ‘Moore, William, bapt. 1590, d 1659, librarian, collector of manuscripts,’ ODNB. 67 For the catalogue of his library, see MS Dd.iv.35, Cambridge University Library. 68 Brown, ‘Paperchase,’ 134.

chapter eleven

‘To seek out some Comforts and Companions of his own kind and condition’: The Benedictine Rosary Confraternity and Chapel of Cardigan House, London ANNE DILLON

In June 1780, London was in turmoil. Lord Gordon’s anti-Catholic Protestant Association, seeking the repeal of the Catholic Relief Act of 1778, had whipped up mobs who were roaming the city in search of Catholics.1 On Friday, 2 June, they ransacked the private chapel of the Sardinian ambassador in Duke Street near Lincoln’s Inn Fields and razed it before moving on to the chapel of the Bavarian embassy in Warwick Street.2 The Benedictine sisters from Dunkirk, newly settled at Hammersmith, hastily packed up all their altar plate and entrusted it to a neighbour, who buried it in his garden until the danger passed.3 In the days following, further looting and destruction of Catholic houses ensued, and at six o’clock on the evening of 7 June, a large group reached the premises of the Langdale Distillery at 26 Holborn. This was a flourishing company owned by the Catholic James Langdale. It occupied two sets of buildings between Holborn and Field Lane, having been moved there from its original site at 81 Holborn in the previous year.4 The rabble had been told that there was a Catholic chapel in the house although, given the quantity of spirits on the premises, it is difficult to know whether it was the chapel that was the attraction or the vast quantities of gin stored in the cellars, approximately 120,000 gallons valued at £38,000. No resistance was offered and the buildings were broken into and fired. The consequences were terrible. The vats ignited and the fire quickly spread to surrounding buildings while men, women, and even children tried desperately to rescue what they could of the loot as it burned. They tried to drink it as it poured away, and as it went up in



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flames so did they. Many lives were lost and a total of twenty-one neighbouring houses destroyed. Langdale eventually received a total compensation £18,974 in February 1782 and the distillery was rebuilt in 1784.5 Sometime in 1822, Marmaduke Langdale, James’s son and now owner of the business, removed from the company vault a large box that had been lying there for as long as anyone could remember. When he opened it he found a most unlikely gathering of objects to be found in the cellar of a distillery; a collection of altar plate, including silver and silver gilt monstrances and reliquaries, together with an embroidered chasuble dating from the early Henrician period. The enclosed note read, ‘This belongs to the South Province.’ Subsequent research showed that all these artefacts had once belonged to the Chapel of the Confraternity of the Rosary established at Cardigan House in Lincoln’s Inn Fields during the middle years of the seventeenth century. The house, the London home of the Earl of Cardigan, was, by 1822, no longer standing; it had been destroyed by fire in 1725. The confraternity that met in the chapel had been founded around 1650 by the English Benedictines of the Southern province, and its possessions appear to have been left with, or passed on to, the Langdale family for safe keeping sometime after the Gordon Riots. Moreover, there was a direct link between this group of Benedictines and the Langdales. Marmaduke’s sister, Mary, born in 1574, had married John Lorymer of Perthir in Monmouthshire. John’s brother was Dom Michael Anselm Lorymer, procurator for the Southern province from 1802 to 1826.6 Marmaduke passed on the box and its contents to Father Lorymer, who returned them to the Benedictine community at Downside Abbey in Somerset, England, where they remain, a direct, physical link with a flourishing, spiritually and socially self– confident group of seventeenth-century Catholic recusants.7 This chapter examines the Cardigan House rosary confraternity and its chapel. Its artefacts provide us with evidence of how the confraternity was organized, how its chapel looked and, crucially, the names of some of its members because two of these pieces are engraved with the names of their donors. We have also the handbooks of the confraternity written by Arthur Crowther and Vincent Sadler, the two English Benedictine missionary priests who between them directed it for over twenty-five years.

Virgo Potens – Virgin Most Powerful The confraternity was founded and dedicated to Our Lady of Power by

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Dom Anselm Crowther, sometime between 1650 and 1655, and flourished until the time of the Popish Plot, 1678–81, when it was suspended.8 The dedication is an unusual one that appears to have been intended to resonate with a politically and socially disenfranchised Catholic community. We made choice of this Title as the most glorious, of this Quality as most capable to call, invite, and encourage all people to fly to her patronage of this Name which only pronounced cannot choose but afford present comfort; wherefore in all your dangers, difficulties, and distresses, think upon your Mother of Power … calling upon her you despair not, thinking upon her you erre not; she holding you fall not, she protecting you fear not, she guiding you faint not etc. How properly then (O children of Mary!) do we entitle our Mother Powerful, since (saies our learned and devout doctor Damian) the Almightie hath so highlie privileged her with all Power in heaven and Earth?9

It is not known exactly where it was first sited but it soon found a permanent home at Cardigan House situated on the south side of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Said to be ‘a pretty house,’ it was the London home of Sir Robert Brudenell (1607–1703), the son of Sir Thomas Brudenell (1578–1663) of Deene Park in Northamptonshire who was created Earl of Cardigan by Charles II in 1661 for his services to Charles I during his imprisonment after the Civil War.10 Robert, who succeeded his father as second earl in 1663, had impeccable recusant catholic connections. His mother, Mary, was the daughter of Sir Thomas Tresham (1545–1605) of Rushton, Northamptonshire, the designer and builder of the famous Triangular Lodge, the architectural expression of his Catholic belief.11 Robert’s uncle was Francis Tresham, a conspirator in the Gunpowder Plot, and his grandmother was a Throckmorton. Robert, in turn, married into the extensive inter-related Yorkshire recusant clans of Dormers, Constables, Scropes, Lawsons, and Savages; his second wife was Lady Anne Savage, daughter of Thomas Savage, first Viscount Savage of Rocksavage. One of Robert’s descendents, James Brudenell, was the seventh earl, who led the Charge of the Light Brigade at the battle of Balaclava. Arthur Crowther, in religion Dom Anselm, was born in 1588 into a recusant Catholic family in Montgomeryshire in Wales.12 He entered the Jesuit-run English Seminary of St Alban’s at Valladolid in 1606 at the age of eighteen.13 Three years later he left to join the newly re-established English Benedictine congregation at Douai in Flanders. Phillipe



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de Cavarel, abbot of St Vaast, Arras, provided a home in his own monastery for this small group of monks, and in March 1607 the bishop of Arras gave them licence to set up a canonical foundation.14 It was here that Crowther received the Benedictine habit on 15 April 1609. In 1611, de Cavarel began to build a new college for the education of his own monks, and he reserved a part of it for the English Benedictines, endowing it with an annual pension of 2,000 florins. The community received the formal Deed of Foundation on 28 September 1619 and presented their Letter of Acceptance on 12 October of the same year.15 At a ceremony during High Mass on 20 October 1619, the president of the English Benedictine congregation, Leander Jones, formally presented this acceptance deed to Philip de Cavarel, together with the candle that it had been agreed should be the perpetual yearly revenue. Addressing de Caveral at the ceremony, Jones told him that the Benedictine missionaries were to be ‘torches and lights to souls in England … by true preaching of the faith and the fullness of regular life.’16 And a part of such ‘true preaching’ of the faith was achieved, as we shall see, through the creation of rosary confraternities for the laity. Crowther was professed at St Gregory’s in 1611 and he spent most of his missionary life in London. He was a friend and close associate of another English Benedictine missionary, Thomas Vincent Sadler of the English Benedictine Monastery of St. Laurence’s in Dieulouard, France. Crowther was the first dean of the Cardigan House confraternity and held the position until his death in London in May 1666, when Sadler succeeded him. Sadler, in turn, held the post until his own death at Dieulouard in 1681.17 All rosary confraternities were founded by permission of the Dominican general on condition that they adhered to its regulations. However, certain allowances were made for the English Catholics. For example, the Dominicans insisted that the confraternity should be attached to a Dominican convent or church in order to gain the associated indulgences. In England this was amended to allow for its attachment to either a chapel dedicated to the rosary or a specific altar within a chapel.18 Accordingly, Anselm Crowther, having first obtained letters patent from Baptista Marina, the general of the Dominicans, established the rosary chapel at Cardigan House and then obtained permission from Pope Innocent X for the erection of the confraternity altar, which was then dedicated to Our Lady of Power. The Dominican rules also stipulated that it should be presided over by a priest approved by the Dominicans. Crowther was so approved and fulfilled the necessary priestly functions of saying Mass and administering the sacraments and scrutinizing those who applied for

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membership. Robert Brudenell, the presiding layman was its prefect, and he and Crowther chose the other lay officers of the association to help to manage the secular affairs of the confraternity. Brudenell was prefect from the confraternity’s inception until its dissolution, and in housing the chapel and the priests he took considerable risks at a time when Catholics and their priests were subject to the penal laws. This was a man who had grown up under the influence of his father and maternal grandfather Thomas Tresham. Tresham was determined to preserve the composite memory of the recusant community and had made a careful collection of vast numbers of manuscripts that recorded first-hand impressions of the most important events that had occurred in the community, including accounts of trials and martyrdom, together with a large library of Catholic texts, which were made available either as loans or gifts to other Catholics.19 Thomas Brudenell was devoted to his wife’s father and even installed stained glass windows designed by Tresham at Deene Park.20 Crowther and Sadler wrote and printed, probably on a private press at Cardigan House, the first edition of the confraternity handbook in 1657.21 They dedicated it to the Virgin but made a second dedication to Brudenell ‘under whose wings’ the book had received ‘its birth, growth and accomplishment.’ They also thanked him ‘for the many signall favours … conferred upon us, and upon this holy confraternity of the sacred Rosary.’22 He was the single most important benefactor of the confraternity, not least because he housed the chapel in his own home in the heart of London during the Commonwealth and allowed its members constant access to it. Later in the text, Brudenell in his own address to the members of the confraternity refers to himself as ‘Prefect of the Arch-Confraternitie of the Rosarie, in the oratory of the ever blessed Virgin Mary Mother of Power in the City of Amsterdam.’ The phrase suggests that Amsterdam was a pseudonym for Cardigan House.23

Regina Sanctissimi Rosarii – Queen of the Most Holy Rosary: The Confraternity in Context The influence of membership of the confraternity of the rosary permeated every aspect of the devotional life and training of missionary priests, both secular and regular, and had done so since the foundation of the seminaries. The Jesuits, as the Dominicans before them, had long recognized the effectiveness of the use of the rosary in teaching the basics of the faith to the un-baptised in the mission field and in maintaining the



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faith of Catholics who, like those in England at this time, might have only irregular access to a priest. The rosary devotion has an ancient provenance. In its very earliest form, the prayer known as the Hail Mary, or the Ave Maria, was recited 150 times, in imitation of the 150 psalms of David, and so it was often called the Psalter of Our Lady, or the Marian Psalter. The simplicity and ease with which the devotion could be performed led to its becoming a lay substitute for the Liturgy of the Hours during the Middle Ages.24 By the eleventh century the strings of beads associated with the rosary were a common and cherished aid to prayer. For example, when Lady Godiva, wife of Leofric Earl of Mercia, died ca. 1041 she bequeathed her rosary to the Benedictine abbey that she and her husband had founded. It was described in her will as ‘a circlet of gems that she had threaded on a string, in order that by fingering them one by one as she successively recited her prayers she might not fall short of the exact number.’25 She left instructions that it was to be hung about a statue of the Virgin, like a necklace. The Dominicans traditionally ascribed the institution of the rosary devotion to their founder St Dominic (1170–1221), who, according to legend, was said to have received instructions in the form and practice of the devotion from the Virgin herself. But the prayer pattern of the devotion dates from well before St Dominic’s time, and in fact the more elaborate form of the Psalter only gradually began to emerge in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century to take the form that is known and used today. The first stage in this development was the devotion devised by the Carthusian, Dominic of Prussia (1384–1460), a member of the Charterhouse of Trier. He composed a series of fifty phrases, each of which was added in turn to the concluding words of the early form of the Hail Mary recited in the psalter. Each of these phrases recalled a scene from the life of Christ, beginning with the Annunciation and ending with the Ascension, and each scene in turn functioned as a focus for meditation while the prayer was being recited. It proved to be an ideal prayer format for the laity. Then in 1470, shortly after the death of Dominic the Carthusian, the Dominican Alan de Rupe, a member of the congregation in Lille, having read a copy of the Carthusian rosary, drew up his own version of the prayer, the one we use today. Naturally Alan too claimed to have been authorized by the Virgin Mary. In this legend Mary was said to have appeared to Alan in a vision in which she told him to revive and preach her

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own traditional prayer, the Marian Psalter of 150 Hail Marys, but – and this is the crucial point – to preach it within the context of the rosary confraternity, both of which, Alan told his followers, stretching the story to its limits, had been first instituted during the Virgin’s own lifetime.26 The form and practice of the psalter, which Alan taught, was very similar to the earliest thirteenth-century psalter. The 150 Hail Marys were divided into three sets of fifty.27 Each set of fifty, or chaplet, was then further subdivided into five groups of ten, and each group of ten separated by a Pater Noster. This gave a total of fifteen Our Fathers altogether, which were understood to commemorate Christ’s passion.28 Each chaplet or rosary with its five decades is devoted to a meditation on a specific aspect of the life of Christ and his mother. The first is dedicated to the Incarnation, the second to the Passion and death of Christ, and the third to the Resurrection, Ascension, and Assumption of the Virgin. Each individual decade in each group is associated with a specific event in that narrative and is called a mystery. There are therefore five mysteries in each of the three parts. The five mysteries dedicated to the Incarnation are called the Joyful Mysteries, those dedicated to the Passion and Death are called the Sorrowful Mysteries, and those dedicated to the Resurrection and Ascension and the Assumption of the Virgin are called the Glorious Mysteries. The three chaplets or rosaries made up the complete psalter. Alan subsequently founded a rosary confraternity for the laity in Douai, called the Confraternity of the Psalter of the Glorious Virgin Mary. Four years later, in September 1474, under his guidance, his fellow Dominican Jacob Sprenger founded the famous rosary confraternity of Cologne.29 The Cologne foundation received papal approval in 1476, and by 1488, as a result of intensive preaching of the rosary to the laity by the Observant Dominicans, many similar confraternities had been founded throughout northern France and the Low Countries, and some in Italy and Spain. Each confraternity was independent, flexible, and open to everyone. Women, excluded from many other guilds and confraternities, were welcomed. There were no vows to make, no fees to pay, and the only requirement was that all members should sign a membership roll and give their name and marital status and say whether they were religious or laypersons. There was no set time or place for saying the rosary and no penalties for failing to say it. It was, like all confraternities, an association of mutual charity and spiritual safety for the living and the dead. Its only obligation of membership was to say one rosary every day. In return, every member shared in all the spiritual merits ac-



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cumulated by all the members throughout the world and continued to receive them even after death. The dead too could be enrolled posthumously and immediately receive the benefits of membership. Merely enrolling someone who had died and then saying a rosary for him or her ensured that person an immediate plenary indulgence. In England there had been a widespread and vigorous devotion to the Virgin before the Reformation.30 The Royal Injunction of 1538, however, attacked the underlying principle of this practice, which was deemed to derogate from the honour due to Christ alone, while the form of prayer used in the rosary was condemned as being nothing more than an apparently mindless repetition of prayers. Consequently, public devotion to the Virgin, apart from the brief interval of Queen Mary’s reign (1553–8), had been effectively proscribed from 1538 onwards.31 But, in spite of this official censure, the rosary continued to be a cherished devotion, although the rosary confraternity seems not to have been as well established in England as it was on the Continent.32 During the post-Reformation period an intensive programme of revival and reform of the confraternity took place in the light of Counter-Reformation initiatives and teaching. Since the twelfth century, the creation of lay confraternities had been an important part of the response by the clergy to the threat of heresy. During the Reformation, a similar strategy was employed with particular emphasis on the formation, correction, and defence of belief. The Council of Trent now demanded that the aims of all confraternities should be re-evaluated and renewed to emphasize the sacred aspects of fellowship rather than those of the social.33 The result was that the reformed confraternities came under close clerical scrutiny and control, particularly by the Jesuits who established relationships with existing confraternities and promoted the foundation of new ones. But Ignatius Loyola always refused to compromise the essential mobility of members of the Society, and did not allow them to accept offices in the confraternities. Jesuit policy was to foster and encourage control of the confraternities by the laity but to maintain close clerical guidance. Consequently the spiritual ethos of the renewed confraternities, including the rosary confraternity, reflected that of the Society, with frequent reception of the sacraments of the Eucharist and Penance, daily meditation, works of charity, care of the poor, regular catechesis, and care of the imprisoned and condemned. In England by the 1590s Catholics were a minority group. Their faith was proscribed and their church was an underground church. Mass was said whenever a priest was available and wherever people could gather

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in safety, such as in the houses of the Catholic aristocracy and the gentry, in remote farmhouses, or in secret Mass centres in towns. Ironically, some of the safest were the most public and included the prisons, certain foreign embassies, and, until 1644, the Chapel Royal at Somerset House.34 The English Catholic Church was the people who gathered in these places, and the household itself became the sacred space within which the religious rites, rituals, and festivals were celebrated; it served as church, confraternity chapel, and chantry. In establishing the confraternity the missionaries were able to establish unifying patterns of lay piety and provide for religious ceremonies in the absence of priests, while encouraging Catholic separation and recusancy. The Jesuits drew on their already considerable and successful experience of the use of the rosary confraternity as a missionary tool in other countries and similarly repackaged the devotion for the English Catholics. They did not, however, simply appropriate the rosary from the Dominicans; they were always meticulous in applying for permission from the Dominican general in Rome to found confraternities. They then shaped and structured them to suit the particular mission field. These new rosary confraternities were different from their pre-Reformation precursors. They now embodied and transmitted to the Catholic communities the new Tridentine doctrine and rituals, which reflected the changed emphases of the Counter-Reformation Church. One of the most striking of these was the image of the Virgin, which, following the victory at Lepanto in 1571, had mutated from the gentle, compassionate mother of pre-Reformation times to the triumphant Virgin who, with sword in hand, had led a spiritual army into battle against the heretic. Henry Garnet’s book, The Societie of the Rosary, printed in England around 1593 on his own secret press, became the manual of the English confraternity. And it is clear that this was the template for the handbook written by Crowther and Sadler. But, while the form of the early Jesuit confraternities can be discerned in that of Cardigan House, the social profile of its membership differed. In the final decade of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, Garnet and his fellow Jesuits and the Jesuit-trained seculars had been concerned to reach the most vulnerable Catholics, whom Garnet called ‘the simpler sorte … they which most please our Lady and in which she most delighteth.’35 These were the middling sort and the poor, those who, unless they lived in or near a Catholic household with a resident priest or had access to a Mass centre with regular visits from a missionary, would not have had



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regular contact with a priest. They were the people most likely to be lost to Protestantism. In the absence of regular Mass and the sacraments, it would have been essential to provide regular catechesis and the opportunity to participate in some kind of shared ritual. They therefore provided this group with an apparently familiar devotion within the prescribed context of the Society of the Rosary. Each mystery of the rosary was carefully explained to the newly enrolled member, who was then given a simple Ignatian technique of composition of place to recall and meditate on each scene. The rosary, in this way, became a straightforward and accessible programme of Tridentine teaching on the theology of the Incarnation and Mary’s place in it. It became a catechism, a prayer book and summary of the Gospels, and so an effective instrument of catechesis, one that restored Mary to the centre of Catholic devotion. With a competent lay person in charge of each confraternity cell, the missionary priests could move on, having established an efficient and effective self-administered spiritual community, which they could supervise from a distance through the rubrics of the confraternity. In this way, they disseminated a standardized programme of Counter-Reformation doctrine and provided a context for members to come together for mutual support and community prayer. Some confraternities were established in aristocratic and gentry households where there was a resident priest, such as those at Standish Hall in Lancashire, Ugbrooke Park in Devon, Battle Abbey in Sussex, and Dorothy Lawson’s household at St Anthony’s on the banks of the Tyne above Newcastle.36 Dorothy herself organized and administered the confraternity and recruited to it her children, household, tenants, and neighbours. It was essentially a simple, domestic confraternity, and its social profile would have been close to that outlined by Garnet in his handbook. No one was to be excluded, he said, echoing Erasmus’s Paraclesis: ‘neither the husband man in the fields, nor the travailer in his jorney, nor the labourer with his toiling, not the simple by his unskilfulnes, not the woman by her sex, nor the married by their estate, not the yong by their ignorance, not the aged by their impotencie, nor the sicke by their infirmitie, nor the poore for want of abilitie, nor the blind for want of sight, yea the Religious themselves of both sexes, att all times, and in all places, when they might want either books, or other ordinary helps of spirite.’37 The Cardigan House confraternity, by contrast, was a domestic confraternity only insofar as the chapel was located in the private space of Robert Brudenell’s house. His family, servants, and children would have

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been members, but this was essentially a city-based confraternity, one intended for London Catholics, and also, as we shall see, for gentry Catholics who lived in the country and attended the confraternity meetings at Cardigan House when they were in town. The list in Garnet’s handbook of those for whom it was intended had subtly changed in the Crowther and Sadler version. The summary of Garnet’s passage in Societie of the Rosary noted above, now reads, ‘It is of that generality, that no person is excluded from its participation; not the Husbandman in the fields, not the Tradesman in his shop, not the Traveller in his journey, Not the Unlearned for his ignorance, not the Woman by her Sex, not the Married by their state, not the Younglings by their simplicitie, not the Aged by their impotencie, not the Sick by their infirmatie.’38 Garnet had included the labourer and the unskilled, while the Benedictines omit them, together with the poor and the blind, but not as an oversight: the lowest social group is not represented as perhaps it would have been in that organized by Dorothy Lawson or Lady Montague. But they do include a group not mentioned by Garnet that clearly had become important in London: ‘the tradesman in his shop,’ that is representatives of the rising middle class, many of whom lived in the vicinity of Cardigan House.39 However, keeping within the general rubrics and spirit of the confraternity, Crowther does add at the end of this passage ‘nor any devout and faithful Christian by any calling or condition whatsoever’ was to be excluded.40 In his address to his fellow rosarists, Robert Brudenell went further. He was clear about the social group from which the members would be drawn: his own kind. ‘Because man is a sociable creature,’ he told them, ‘he seeks out companions of his own kind and condition, to the end he may solace himself in their society.’41 He meant, of course, Catholics of his own kind and condition, and, judging by the names of the donors on the chapel plate, he succeeded. Representatives of some of the most important Catholic recusant gentry families were members of the Cardigan House rosary confraternity, several of whom donated valuable items for use in the chapel, including the Bedingfelds of Oxburgh Hall in Norfolk and the family of Benedict Hall of High Meadows, Gloucestershire, as well as members of the Brudenell family and their dependants. These families lived of necessity a retired life in the country but they came up to London regularly to attend to business, and they appear to have used Cardigan House as a Mass centre while they were in town and were members of the confraternity. It may also have acquired some of the former affiliates of Queen Henrietta Maria’s confraternity at Somerset



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House, but Crowther’s inclusion of the rising middle class of tradesmen and merchants in its membership suggests that it also served the permanent Catholic population in the neighbourhood. Cardigan House chapel was the place where all these Catholics regularly met their friends and members of their own extended families and where they celebrated their Catholic rites and rituals. The confraternity was the focus for this community association.

Sedes Sapientiae – Seat of Wisdom: The Confraternity Handbook The handbook allows us to see the organization of the confraternity, the duties and obligations of its members, and the detail of its ceremonies. Two editions were published – the first in 1657 and the second in 1663.42 The first is densely detailed, opening with a clear attribution of the devotion. Members are instructed that, although St Benedict’s devotion to the Psalter of Our Lady has ensured that it has become the bedrock of Benedictine devotion, St Dominic is the ‘the Author of the Rosary,’ and the images of both saints are included in the engraved frontispiece used in both editions (see figure 11.1). This deliberate statement was perhaps a condition of the permission given by the Dominican master general. The book’s dedication to the Virgin is followed by an address to Robert Brudenell acknowledging his benefaction. An exegesis of the theology of the Virgin and her role in salvation follows in language so baroque that the writers seem to revel in the opportunity to indulge in flamboyant prose at a time of unadorned religious practice and social life. In one of its quieter passages the Virgin is as described as ‘the unextinguishable Lamp, the unfading Flower, the divinely woven Purple, the Royall vestment, the Imperial Diadem, the Throne of the Divinity,’43 while the confraternity is ‘the heliotrope of this Sun, the Paragon of this Garden, the Darling and Minion of this Mother.’44 The second edition is a more accessible, abridged one. The frontispiece of this edition is illustrated in figure 11.1, and shows, on the right, the images of St Dominic and St Benedict. Produced in 1663 in the first flush of the Restoration, it is dedicated to the new queen, Catherine of Braganza (1638–1705), whose engraved portrait and coat of arms on the left in the frontispiece (figure 11.1) reflect the change in circumstances of the English Catholic community.45 The sense of relief that that they once again have a Catholic queen is palpable in the dedication as, seeking to identify themselves more closely with her than the Protestant subjects of her husband on the basis of their shared faith, they ask for her

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Figure 11.1  Frontispiece (detail) of the Handbook of the Benedictine Rosary Confraternity of Our Lady of Power: Jesus, Maria, Joseph; or, The devout pilgrim of the ever blessed Virgin Mary. In his holy exercises upon the sacred mysteries of Jesus, Maria, Joseph. With the charitable association for the relief of the souls departed. Published for the benefit of the pious Rosarists, by A.C. and T.V. religious monks, of the Holy Order of S. Bennet (Amsterdam, 1663). Shelfmark C.53.i.22, British Library. By permission of the British Library.

protection: ‘We conceive ourselves to stand more engaged to your Majesty, than many others; in regard that our very substance depends (after God) in a peculiar manner upon your Patronage and Protection.’46 They commend the Queen to the confraternity as one devoted to the rosary and ‘a Pattern worthy your imitation.’47 The Queen, a great granddaughter of the Jesuit general, Francis Borgia, created a considerable Catholic presence in London. In 1665, Father Philip Howard, vicargeneral of the English Dominicans, became her almoner and principal chaplain, and in this same year she established a rosary confraternity among her household members at St James.48 There was at this point every hope of alleviation of the financial and legal pressures on Catholics. The confraternity’s ceremonies are meticulously detailed in the handbook, so we know how they were conducted. But we also have some idea



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of how they looked, because among Fr Sadler’s effects at his death in 1681, three years after the suspension of the confraternity, was a partial inventory of the possessions of the Rosary chapel, entitled ‘A particular of the most considerable things belonging to the Rosary Altar at Cardigan House, London.’ This list tells us much about the chapel and the confraternity services and identifies some of the members. The rubric demanded a chapel, or at least an altar, dedicated to the rosary with a picture or figure of the Virgin, together with images depicting the mysteries of the rosary. From Sadler’s inventory we know that the Cardigan House chapel had a wooden statue of the Blessed Virgin holding the Christ Child: ‘A wooden statua of Our Bl. Lady & Savr, which usually was dressed in silken clothes when set upon the altar.’ It had two large silver statues of St Bennet and St Joseph, a large silver cross and a silver crucifix, six silver candlesticks, a silver lamp, and two large silver flowerpots, a chalice, a pastoral staff, and several pictures. Sadler also listed vestments including ‘2 or 3 suits of church stuff.’49 One of these was the Glover chasuble, which was recovered from the box at the distillery (see figure 11.2). Dating from 1510–35, it is of red and green silk and has applied gloves in white silk, each of which has the letters P and R embroidered in silver gilt to form the word P [Glove]R. On the cross orphreys is an inscription, which translates as ‘pray for the soul of your servant P [Glove)R.’ The PR may refer to the person for whom it was made or the benefactor who paid for it, and there is perhaps a link with the Glovers’ Company.50 It is not possible to say how the chasuble came to Cardigan House, but Sadler noted that many of the other artefacts had been donated by members of the confraternity, whom he described as ‘great persons of the first quality of the realm.’ And when we examine the extant items we find that they were given by well-known recusant families. The reliquary inscribed ‘The Guift of mrs Anne Hall to Our Blessed Lady of Powre’ was probably donated by Anne Wintour, wife of Benedict Hall of High Meadows, Gloucestershire. Anne Hall was the daughter of Sir John Wintour of Lydney, Gloucestershire. She had married Benedict Hall, a member of an old recusant family, of High Meadows, in the same county. On the death of her husband she retired to the Benedictine Convent in Cambrai, where her daughters were members of the community. She died there, aged seventy-nine, on 20 March 1676.51 The reliquary, now converted into a monstrance, has six engravings around its base. These include images of St Benedict and St Scholastica and one that depicts the Virgin as Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows whose

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Figure 11.2  The Glover chasuble, in the holdings of Downside Abbey, Stratton-on-the-Fosse, Bath. Source: Dillon 2008. Published by permission of the Abbot of Downside.



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heart is pierced by seven swords. The Feast of Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows was kept on 15 September, and the object of devotion was the sorrow of Mary during the Passion and death of Christ. A further important contemporary image is seen on the base of this reliquary, that of Our Lady of Victories, in which the Virgin holds the Christ child on her left arm while with her right hand she holds up a sword, the whole surrounded by the rosary. A Pietà and a Resurrection scene complete the engraved images. A pair of reliquaries was given by Henry Bedingfield of Oxburgh, Norfolk, a member of another well-known recusant family52 (see figure 11.3). The cylindrical tops are recent additions but the bases and stems are original. As we see from the inscription on the underside(see figure 11.4), they were ‘The Guift of Mr Henry Beding [Bedingfeld]: to our B. Lady of Power.’ In addition, a layman, John Lingen, donated £400, to be paid to the chapel in tranches of £24 per annum.53 As can be gathered from the expense involved in commissioning these reliquaries for the chapel, the confraternity’s most prized possessions were its relics. One of these, a relic of the crown of thorns, was reputed to have come from Glastonbury Abbey, brought there, according to legend, by Joseph of Arimathea. It had been donated to the English Benedictines of St Gregory’s at Douai by Peter Warnford, a secular priest who had once tried his vocation with the order.54 Another, said to be a relic of the true cross, was believed to have belonged to Mary Tudor and to have been saved from her chapel at her death by the last Benedictine abbot of Westminster, John Feckenham, clerk of the Chapel to the Queen. Both relics were displayed in the two silver gilt reliquaries donated by Dom Augustine Stocker, who had been professed at St Gregory’s in 1621.55 He had also donated the relic of the crown of thorns. These were displayed on the altar and carried in processions. All these objects, symbols of the confraternity’s Benedictine associations, were donated, as the inscriptions on Mrs Hall’s reliquary and on that donated by Henry Bedingfeld tell us, to Our Lady of Power. The reliquary that displayed the relic of the crown of thorns was sent by Fr Lorymer early in 1823, the year following its recovery at the distillery, to a Mr Marshal, jeweller of Cannon Street, St Georges in East London, to be converted for use as a monstrance by the Benedictines of Downside Abbey, in their new chapel, which was opened 10 July 1823. Its base is of silver gilt, with four images embossed around the base: the Crucifixion with the Virgin and St John, the Mocking of Jesus, the Scourging at the Pillar, and the Holy Family.56 The quarters are separated by cherub

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Figure 11.3  Reliquary donated by Henry Bedingfeld to the confraternity of Our Lady of Power, in the holdings of Downside Abbey, Stratton-on-the-Fosse, Bath. Source: Dillon 2008. Published by permission of the Abbot of Downside.



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Figure 11.4  Engraving on the base of the reliquary donated by Henry Bedingfeld to the Benedictine Rosary Confraternity of Our Lady of Power, in the holdings of Downside Abbey, Stratton-on-the-Fosse, Bath. Source: Dillon 2008. Published by permission of the Abbot of Downside.

heads with wings above and below and the stem of the reliquary is encircled by an engraved crown of thorns. In the scene depicting the Holy Family, the child Jesus is shown walking between Mary and Joseph, with the figure of the Holy Spirit as a dove above the group. This image is identical to the engraved image in the frontispiece of both confraternity handbooks, where it is shown displayed above an altar surrounded by a rosary and flanked by statues of St Benedict and St Dominick, both of whom carry rosaries (see figure 11.1). The scene on the base of the reliquary may have been copied from the frontispiece; however, since the altar is so carefully represented in the frontispiece, it may be that the latter was an engraved representation of the altar of the rosary chapel at Cardigan House. And so what we see now on the base of the reliquary and in the frontispiece is a contemporary representation of the chapel’s rosary altar of Our Lady of Power. The Cardigan House lay confrères saw themselves in this image of the Holy Family; it signalled the raison d’être of confraternity itself, the spiri-

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Figure 11.5  Detail from the base of the reliquary donated by Dom Augustine Stocker to the Benedictine Rosary Confraternity of Our Lady of Power, showing the Scourging at the Pillar, and cherub heads and wings, in the holdings of Downside Abbey, Stratton-on-the-Fosse, Bath. Source: Dillon 2008. Published by permission of the Abbot of Downside.

tual well-being of all their family members, living and dead. This community aspect of the association is emphasized in subtle ways throughout the handbook. For example, if members forgot to say the minimum daily rosary or failed to attend chapel, they were encouraged to return to the practice of devotion and to the meetings. Such lapses were seen simply as human weakness, and there was no need for a member to be cast out from the spiritual fellowship as punishment. Rather, a sense of encouragement permeates the handbook, with the confraternity presented as a tolerant and safe haven such as would be found in a loving family. As well as serving a devotional function, the confraternity crucially



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served a para-liturgical one as well, and these artefacts were symbols of their shared community life expressed in and through their religious rituals. While private visits to the rosary altar were encouraged and carried indulgences, the formal confraternity services during which these objects were used and displayed provided opulent ceremony and ritual that helped to reinforce corporate consciousness and maintain a Catholic recusant identity. It provided an intense aesthetic and spiritual experience at a time when London was said to be feeling the full effects of Puritan rule.57 And using the handbook and Fr Sadler’s inventory we can now reconstruct, albeit tentatively, some of the ceremonies of the confraternity.

Janua Caeli – Gate of Heaven: The Rite of Initiation Admission to a rosary confraternity in England took place only after careful scrutiny of the candidate by the dean, prefect, and officers. The danger of infiltration by Protestant spies was thought to be real.58 There was no charge for membership; no potential member was to be turned away for lack of funds, but any gift or donation for the altar itself, for the dean of the confraternity, or to help the poorer members was welcomed. Any who were admitted became part of the rosary confraternity’s worldwide community and were entitled to share in all its spiritual advantages. This opportunity also applied to those who were enrolled after death, so long as someone undertook for them the simple obligatory devotions and duties. Members were to pray the whole Psalter of Our Lady: the five Joyful, the five Sorrowful, and the five Glorious Mysteries every week, either in one prayer session or in three separate sessions, ideally in the confraternity chapel. The Creed was said at the beginning and the end of each part. If for some reason members were unable to perform this minimum requirement, perhaps because of illness, another could pray it for them. However, the use of proxies was discouraged, they were warned: ‘’Tis dangerous to trust a Procurator, when we traffick for Paradise.’59 Once accepted, a candidate was admitted in a special ceremony conducted by the dean. First the candidate’s name was written in the confraternity’s register book using pens kept exclusively for that purpose. These pens were hallowed objects, tied with white ribbons and carried with ceremony on cushions during the service. Great importance was attached to these ritual objects or sacramentals in a community starved of its symbols. The candidate then knelt before the altar holding a special

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rosary candle and new rosary beads. Each was asked to commit to the demands of membership and was warned that it was not sufficient ‘to have your names enrolled in the Rosary Catalogue, and to be eternally associated to this sacred Confraternity, but you must seriously resolve upon an honest, honourable, holy life and conversation.’ Each was urged to ‘endeavour to surpass such others as pretend not to this height, holiness and happiness.’60 Each was expected, in other words, not simply to live an exemplary life but to be seen to be more advanced spiritually than those outside the confraternity. Each became, in other words, a member of a spiritual elite. Having petitioned the Virgin for admission, ‘to receive and admit me into the number of your devout Clients, as one dedicated to your perpetual service,’ the candidate was received by the dean on behalf of the confraternity and admitted to all its spiritual benefits.61 The priest, wearing a stole, then took the rosary beads and blessed them, using the prescribed prayers in Latin, and sprinkled them with holy water. Having been received and enrolled and having confessed, received communion, recited ‘a third part of the Rosary,’ and prayed for the peace and tranquillity of the Church, the new entrant gained a plenary indulgence and remission of all sins and became a full member of the confraternity.62 In receiving the candidate, the priest said, ‘I do admit you to a participation of all the spirituall Benefits, which (by the merits of Jesus Christ) the Brothers and Sisters of the sacred Rosarie do commonlie enjoy.’63 There is less emphasis here on the charitable demands that Garnet’s handbook had placed upon members. Dorothy Lawson’s response had been earnest and public.64 Here, there is a more self-conscious spiritual concern, with the stress on ‘a total reformation of your whole outward and inward man.’65 This approach was further emphasized by Crowther and Sadler by appending to both editions of the handbook a translation of Martin Couvreur’s The devotion of bondage, originally published at Saint-Omer in 1626,66 and here was titled ‘Maria or the Devotion called: The Bondage of the blessed Virgin.’67 This devotion had a significant following at the time, and its inclusion indicates that it was encouraged among the members of the confraternity, although it may have been intended for a smaller elite group, an inner cell. Its members acknowledged the Virgin as second only to God in the heavenly hierarchy, possessing ‘soveraign Power, and Dominion (next after God) over myself and all Creatures.’ They pledged themselves to her as ‘not only your loyal subject and servant, but even your real vassal and Bondslave,’68 and wore an iron or brass chain around the waist, arm, or neck as a



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badge of their ‘professed Bondage’ and as a sign of their devotion.69 In a special ceremony the chain was blessed by the priest and given to the initiate to be worn on the feasts of the Virgin, in particular the Annunciation and the Assumption, and on every Saturday while saying a series of prescribed prayers, including the rosary, and undertaking certain devotional exercises. Numerous indulgences were attached to these practices. But the devotion was eventually condemned for its excesses, and in July 1673, the Holy Office suppressed any confraternity practising it. Yet in spite of its promotion of such hothouse spirituality and the self-image of spiritual elitism, the confraternity, a company of social equals, appears to have been a mutually materially supportive and beneficial one, whose fulfilment of the charitable imperative was realized through its concern for the welfare of its members and their families.

Rosa Mystica – Mystical Rose The name of the rosary devotion derives from the Latin rosarium or ‘rose garden,’ and flowers have always been important in its spiritual imagery. The handbook describes the devotion as ‘a spirituall Posie made up of Mysticall flowers, which we present to the Virgin Mary, as a sweet smelling garland to adorn her sacred head,’ which suggests in material terms that the statue of the Virgin on the confraternity altar wore a circlet of flowers.70 The floral imagery extended into the physical appearance of the chapel and prescribes particular flowers to dress the chapel for the different mysteries on different days: green flowers on Mondays and Thursdays when the Joyful Mysteries were recited, red flowers for the Sorrowful Mysteries on Tuesdays and Fridays, and blue flowers for the Glorious Mysteries on Wednesdays, Saturdays, and Sundays.71 Presumably this practice extended to the home as well, where most members would have fulfilled their confraternity prayer obligations. The floral metaphor is applied even to the parts of the rosary itself. Just ‘as the Rose-Bush consists of Leaves, Prickles, Flowers; so this our Rosary is composed of Joyfull, Dolorous, and Glorious Mysteries. The Joyfull correspond to the Leaves; the Dolorous resemble the prickles, the Glorious sympathize with the Flowers.’72 Flowers, particularly roses, became sacramentals in the rituals. After blessing the beads of the new entrants, the priest performed the ceremony of the blessing of the roses and distributed them to all the members present, not just the newly admitted. The remainder were placed on the altar, presumably in the silver vases included in Sadler’s inventory.73

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Candles also played an important role in confraternity ritual. Blessed by the dean in a ceremony at the rosary altar, they too were sacramentals particularly important at death and specifically blessed for this purpose.74 At the point of death, the dying were encouraged to hold the candle as they acknowledged their sins in saying the Confiteor. If they were too ill to do so, someone could be deputed to say it for them. The priest then held his hand over their head and gave absolution. Holding the rosary candle ensured the plenary indulgence.75

Refugium Peccatorum – Refuge of Sinners: Indulgences The importance of indulgences to a community in which there were few priests cannot be overestimated. The possibility of sudden death was a terrifying reality. To die suddenly, deprived of the sacramental ministry of a priest, meant that there would be no possibility of receiving final absolution.76 The confrères prayed to the Blessed Virgin to intercede with her Son to spare them from such an end, but at the same time they believed that they could insure themselves spiritually against the possible consequences if something should happen to them. If they died with an indulgence or indulgences in the spiritual bank account, they believed they might avoid Purgatory. Members could obtain a plenary indulgence every day simply by saying the rosary, on condition that they had received the sacrament of Penance or intended to do so at the first opportunity.77 A priest could obtain the indulgence by saying the Mass of the Rosary, and a lay person could gain the same indulgence either by asking the priest to say the Mass, or simply attending the Mass. If no priest was available, the indulgence could be gained by visiting five altars and saying five Paters and five Aves before each one, but this might have been difficult to achieve in London during the Interregnum. However, the handbook offered an easy alternative, which was to say twenty-five Paters and twenty-five Aves before one of the altars.78 The handbook lists the ways through which confraternity members might gain the all-important indulgence on their deathbed. If, on the day of death, they had confessed and communicated, then they obtained a plenary indulgence. Simply saying either orally or mentally the words ‘Jesus, Maria,’ or saying the name of Jesus, gained a plenary indulgence. For those so near to death that they could not fulfil these minimal conditions, simply holding a blessed rosary candle in their hand, as described above, ensured a plenary indulgence. In all these cases of indulgences gained on the day of death, the dying had to have said a third part of the



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rosary at least once during their membership in the confraternity chapel or in a place where they had had a view of the rosary altar.79 Members’ obligations to those who had died were stringent, as the title of the 1663 edition indicated: ‘With the Charitable association for the Relief of the Souls departed.’80 The fourth rule states that not only the living but also the dead – ‘to wit the souls in Purgatory’ – may be received and enrolled in the confraternity and receive all the spiritual benefits that living members receive. Members needed to perform only the requirements for procuring a plenary indulgence and then apply it to the deceased.81 Underpinning this stipulation, indeed underpinning the whole concept of the confraternity itself, was the teaching on the communion of saints and its shared spiritual merits. As the handbook told them, ‘The merits of all the Saints, are common to all faithfull Christians; that is there is a communication between the Church Militant upon Earth, the Church suffering in Purgatory and the Church Triumphant in heaven … that the least of them all (supposing he is capable of merit and in good state, whereof grace is the root and foundation) hath a title, and may claim a share in all the spirituall goods, and consequently in all the treasures of merits and good works heaped up from the Worlds first Origin to this present.’82 The rubrics also stipulated that the dean, the prefect, and the officers of the association were to ensure that on the eves of the four principal feasts of the Virgin – her Nativity, the Annunciation, the Assumption, and the Purification – there was an anniversary mass for the souls of all deceased members. The living were expected to attend and pray for them at the rosary altar, so that ‘they may expect the same piety from their surviving Brethren for themselves after their own decease.’ If it was not possible for these anniversaries to be kept in the rosary chapel, members were urged to keep the anniversaries in their own homes. Attendance carried a plenary indulgence that could be applied to the souls of the dead.83

Causa Nostrae Laetitiae – Cause of Our Joy: Processions Concern for life after death concentrated the minds of the confrères, but their senses were delighted by the sights, sounds, and scents of the chapel and its rituals. The flowers, the music, the chanting of the litanies, the blaze of the candles, the glitter of the silver, the sheen of the vestments, and the Virgin’s dress ensured that the rosary chapel provided a supreme aesthetic experience, none more so than on the feast days of the Virgin, which were the pivot of the confraternity’s liturgical life.84

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There were thirteen main feast days in the year, which all members were expected to celebrate at the rosary altar.85 The most important was, naturally, the Feast of the Holy Rosary. There were other commemorations: the Friday before Palm Sunday was the feast in commemoration of the Virgin’s Sorrow, the Saturday after the Ascension commemorated the Virgin’s Joy, and the last Sunday in August was the Recollection of all the Feasts of the Virgin. The Sunday within the octave of the nativity of the Virgin was also kept, as were all feasts that commemorated the events in the life of Jesus and Mary recalled in the fifteen mysteries of the rosary. On these days and on the first Sunday of the month and on every Saturday, the day dedicated to the Virgin, all members were required to go to Confession and receive Communion. They attended the Mass of the Rosary at the confraternity altar, and then after evensong they again gathered in the chapel and walked to the altar in a solemn procession86 heavy with symbolism. As the handbook explained, ‘The word Procession signifies literally a passing forward from one place to another: Allegorically, a progresse from vertu to vertu: Tropologically, our Peregrination upon earth: Analogically, our tendencie towards heaven.’87 Their procession, it continued, imitated the egression of the Israelites from Egypt. The cross represented Moses who freed them from slavery, the candles signified the pillar of fire that went before them, the statues of the saints and the relics signified the Ark of the Covenant, the priest vested in a cope represented Aaron, the high priest, and the prelate with his crozier represented Moses, once more, with his rod. The confrères sprinkled with holy water represented the Israelites sprinkled with blood. Arrival at the altar represented their reaching the Promised Land.88 Such a comparison reveals how the Catholic community perceived itself in Commonwealth England, in exile in their own country under heretical rule. Reading the prescribed rubric for the organization of the processions in conjunction with Sadler’s inventory affords a glimpse of how the processions looked and sounded. The silver vases were placed on the altar and filled with roses or other appropriate flowers. The silver candlesticks were also on the altar with blessed rosary candles burning in them. When the procession formed and moved off, the silver cross was carried at the head – a symbol of exorcism showing that all members of the confraternity placed their confidence in the merits of Christ’s Passion, while the devil, already conquered by the cross, was defeated by it once again.89 The dean, wearing the vestments, including the Glover chasuble, and carrying the pastoral staff came next. Officers of the con-



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fraternity followed, holding up the reliquaries within which were displayed the relics – a sign of their belief in the communion of saints and their power of intercession.90 This was a daring and subversive theological statement to make, especially with such an ornate, musical flourish, in the middle of Puritan London during the Commonwealth. Even though it was carried out behind closed doors in the private household space of Cardigan House, the fact that it was carried out at all, and with such regularity for several years, suggests that it was known about and the authorities simply turned a blind eye to it. This point is discussed in detail below. The statue of the Virgin dressed in the silk was escorted by members carrying lighted rosary candles. The practice of processing the image of the Virgin was an old one, the rubric explains, by which the heretics and image-haters were confounded. But it was intended above all to be an act of prayer for the conversion of heretics and in particular for the conversion of England.91 The silver statues of St Joseph and St Benedict came next, carried at shoulder height. Then all other members of the confraternity followed, carrying their beads and lighted rosary candles. As they processed they recited or sang the Litanies of Our Lady of the Rosary. Then when the procession finally reached the altar they recited the rosary and said the prayers for the Feast and prayed for the conversion of England.92 Queen Henrietta Maria had often held such processions in her garden, even going so far as to process barefoot to the site of the gallows at Tyburn, where she and her ladies knelt and said the rosary in honour of the Catholic martyrs who had been executed there.93 It is likely, therefore, that some of the processions at Cardigan House also took place in the garden. More indulgences were attached to these occasions, to encourage attendance. Gregory XIII had allowed those who were unable to be present at the ceremony for a legitimate reason to receive the same indulgences, provided they had received the sacraments of Penance and the Eucharist and recited the rosary. These regular ritual celebrations were the focal point of the of the confraternity’s liturgical life. In a period said to have been deprived of ornament, ritual, music, and display, especially in religious life occasions such as these, triumphant celebrations of Tridentine Catholicism among family and friends would have satisfied both spiritual and aesthetic needs and helped to forge enduring community ties of loyalty. But, as noted above, these opulent displays were taking place in the heart of Commonwealth London. Indeed, the confraternity prospered during the years of

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the Protectorate, and members met every Saturday and Sunday and on the numerous feast days of the Virgin. These frequent comings and goings from Cardigan House must have been monitored, but no action was taken against them. This raises the question of religious toleration, a subject currently under scrutiny, most notably by Perez Zagorin, Alexandra Walsham, and John Coffey, among others.94 John Coffey has suggested that in London at this time radical views of toleration were popular among the godly, particularly in the Sectarian congregation, and he argues that ‘a substantial number of Baptists, radical Independents, and Levellers insisted that the New Testament paradigm required the church to be a purely voluntary, non-coercive community in the midst of a pluralistic society governed by a “merely civil” state.’95 The vitality of the Cardigan House confraternity during the Commonwealth would suggest that it benefited from a local community and government that held such views, and there are other reasons that may also have played a part. Oliver Cromwell was committed to the principle of liberty of conscience, and although he did not endorse the concept of unlimited toleration, he did, for pragmatic reasons, tend to turn a blind eye towards Catholic worship. He also sought an alliance with France, a Catholic country with a Protestant minority. Cromwell was eager to secure liberty of conscience for Continental Protestants and saw that he was unlikely to succeed unless he showed at least some mildness to England’s Catholic minority. Whatever the reason, the Cardigan House confraternity was allowed to continue in spite of occasional nervousness of the Protectorate about what it took to be an increase in Catholic numbers and conversions. In June 1657, an Act of Parliament was passed stipulating that suspected Catholics who refused to take an oath of abjuration against the pope were to be adjudged recusants and to forfeit two-thirds of their estates. But the law was never seriously enforced and on the whole Catholics appear to have been less at risk in the 1650s than in the 1640s.96 Established deep within the private domestic space of Cardigan House, the confraternity appears to have suffered on only one occasion, when the chapel was raided by parliamentary men, who arrived during a service, probably the Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament, and took away the ciborium, together with some of the consecrated hosts. But members of the confraternity appear to have had influence, because the confiscated goods were returned immediately. The Catholic account of the incident was a conventional narration; it was said that a terrible calamity had overtaken the person who had perpetrated the sacrilege and, in con-



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sequence, was so frightened that he ensured that the ciborium and hosts were returned to their rightful place in the chapel.97 The confraternity chapel at Somerset House was less fortunate. When Henrietta Maria returned at the Restoration, she found that it had been wrecked, the altar smashed, its images destroyed, and there was evidence that it had been used for Protestant services.

Sedes Sapientiae – Seat of Wisdom: Conclusion The confraternity included some of the oldest recusant families, many of whom still retained land, wealth, and property, as their gifts to the chapel show. They were mutually supportive – socially and spiritually – and their survival in the face of political upheaval and against the background of the penal laws was proof of such mutual care and protection. Its membership also reflected its location in the Brudenell house in Lincoln’s Inn’s Fields, and included members of the rising middle class, one of whom took and kept in safe keeping its most valuable possessions at a dangerous time. This was a self-confident, financially successful Catholic community, and in spite of the fact that its members were barred from holding public office, they were loyal subjects who prayed for the King and for the Queen at their meetings.98 Socially it afforded and encouraged a conduit of information, contact, and influence, and no doubt promoted recusant marriages. The confraternity’s appeal lay, as Brudenell suggested, in the advantages of associating with one’s own kind. In these days of fluctuating oppression and persecution, ostracism from public life, and financial penalties, to be members of an association whose members had in common a faith whose practice had resulted in these disadvantages gave a sense of belonging not only to this small society but to the larger, worldwide Catholic community. And, as we have seen, the confraternity did not merely survive; it flourished as its members endowed it financially and with gifts of expensive altar plate and vestments. Spiritually it instructed its members in the history, meaning, and practice of the prayers that form the rosary devotion and in so doing presented a simple exegesis of the doctrines of the church, revised by the Council of Trent, and a technique of meditation on the Immaculate Conception, the theology of the Incarnation and Redemption, and the Virgin’s place within it. It offered an abundance of indulgences and provided ceremony and liturgy in which all members participated. It provided a private sheltered cell of devotion that, although hidden from view, influenced the public and visible life of London and the country

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elite. And it afforded its members all the benefits, spiritual and material, that the rosary confraternities had traditionally provided since their foundation. The constellation of elements mobilized by the confraternity – devotional rhythms, affective habits, social negotiations, and the abiding sense of intimacy with an unseen confessional community, resident in the past or the afterlife – also reminds us of what the demographic accent to the metaphor of the ‘map’ of English Catholicism discounts: the sense of religious community as a living, adaptive organism. Its long and successful presence in the heart of London is a sign and measure of religious toleration there and reflects the continuing influence, wealth, and status in the society of the recusant Catholic families – as the swift return of the monstrance shows – until 1678–9, when the cataclysm of the Popish Plot overtook them. This signalled the end, not only for the confraternity, but also for the immediate prospects of the Catholic community. The confraternity was suspended, its records destroyed, and its precious artefacts removed to a place of safety. The confraternity of Our Lady of Power disappeared from view as public feeling turned against the Catholic community and a previously sympathetic monarch was forced to concede his power to protect it.99 But the confraternity was pragmatic: it went to ground and continued in the spiritual life of its members and their families and in the treasured objets of its Rosary Chapel, which survived the fires of the Gordon riots and the frost of forgetfulness. The protection of these relics and the material remains of this vibrant spiritual community by the Langdales, and their restoration to the confraternity’s Benedictine founders now at Downside Abbey, has ensured the survival of the tangible memory of the beliefs and religious practices of this distinct group of seventeenth-century English Catholics and our continuing celebration of them.100

NOTES I am grateful to the Right Reverend Dom Aidan Bellenger, Abbot of Downside, for allowing me to examine and photograph the contents of the archive of the Cardigan House Rosary Confraternity now at Downside Abbey.   1 18 George III, c. 60.   2 The Sardinian embassy occupied the former town house of the Countess of Bath, who had established a chapel there in 1648. It had been identified as



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a Mass centre as early as 1676. See J.H. Hatting, Catholic London Missions from the Reformation to the year 1850 (London, 1903).   3 Hammersmith Old and New (London, 1878), vol. 6, chap. 39.   4 James was a member of a cadet branch of the family descended from the Catholic Marmaduke Langdale, who was knighted by Charles I in 1628 and fought on the royalist side during the civil wars. He spent the 1650s abroad, close to the exiled Charles II, and was made Lord Langdale in 1658. The family continued Catholic and married into northern recusant families.   5 London in 1780, the Story of a Great Fire. E.F. Langdale’s Essence Distillery, 72 & 73, Hatton Garden, London, EC (London, 1888); Gordon F.E. Rudé, ‘The Gordon Riots: A Study of the Rioters and Their Victims,’ Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th s., 6 (1956): 93–114. By 1794 James’s son, Marmaduke, had joined his father and the company was registered in their joint names, but in the following year it was in Marmaduke’s sole name. The company was recorded in Directory of London and Westminster and the Borough of Southwark trading as ‘Marmaduke and Thomas Langdale, Distillers,’ registered at 26, Holborn. See also Kent’s Directory for the Year 1794: Cities of London and Westminster, and Borough of Southwark; and see H. Ince Anderton, ‘Langdale’s Distillery, Holborn,’ Notes and Queries 166 (1934): 192–3. The fourth Lord Langdale was Marmaduke’s godfather. In 1823, Marmaduke took John Anderson into partnership, and by 1828 the business was registered as ‘John Anderson & Co.’ The distillery continued to trade and finally closed in 1954, having been owned since 1890 by James Buchanan. See Hugh Connolly, ‘The Benedictine Chapel of the Rosary in London (circa 1650–1681),’ Downside Review, n.s. 33 (1943): 320–9; Hugh Connolly, ‘Relics and Plate from the Benedictine Chapel of the Rosary (c. 1650–1681),’ Downside Review, n.s. 33 (1943): 591.   6 He lived at 39 Gloucester Street, Queen’s Square, London.   7 The English Benedictines of St Gregory’s, Douai, were expelled from their monastery by the Revolution in 1795 and escaped to England. They eventually settled at Downside in Somerset, in 1814.   8 Hugh Connolly argues that the date was 1652–4 (‘Benedictine Chapel,’ 321).   9 Jesus, Maria, Joseph, or, The devout pilgrim of the ever blessed Virgin Mary, in His holy exercises, affections, and elevations. Upon the sacred mysteries of Jesus, Maria, Joseph. Published for the benefit of the pious rosarists, by A.C. and T.V. religious monks of the holy order of S. Bennet (Amsterdam, 1657), ‘Robert Brudenell’s address to the confraternity,’ 16–20. See also Jesus, Maria, Joseph: or, The devout pilgrim of the ever blessed Virgin Mary. In his holy exercises upon the sacred

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mysteries of Jesus, Maria, Joseph. With the charitable association for the relief of the souls departed. Published for the benefit of the pious Rosarists, by A.C. and T.V. religious monks, of the Holy Order of S. Bennet (Amsterdam [s.n.], 1663), ‘Concerning the title of our Blessed Lady of Power,’ unpaginated. 10 W. Stow, Remarks on London: being an Exact Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster, Borough of Southwark … (London, 1722); Thomas Babington Macaulay, The History of England from the Accession of James 1, chap. 3, ‘State of England in 1685’ (London: Longman, 1848), describes the centre of Lincoln’s Inn Fields as ‘an open space where the rabble congregated every evening, within a few yards of Cardigan House and Winchester House, to hear mountebanks harangue, to see bears dance, and to set dogs at oxen. Rubbish was shot in every part of the area. Horses were exercised there. The beggars were as noisy and importunate as in the worst governed cities of the Continent.’ 11 He also built Lyveden New Bield, near Oundle. 12 George Oliver, Collections Illustrating the History of the Catholic Religion in the Counties of Cornwall, Devon, Somerset, Wiltshire, and Gloucester (London, 1857), 510–11. 13 David Lunn, The English Benedictines: From Reformation to Revolution (London: Burns and Oates, 1980), 237. 14 Ibid., 73. 15 Maurus Lunn, ‘The Patronal Title of St Gregory’s at Douai,’ Downside Review 87 (1969): 278–81. The college, sometimes referred to as the College of St Vedast at Douai, was placed under the patronage of the Blessed Virgin, Saints Peter and Paul, St Benedict, St Vedast, and St Gregory. The English part of the college was dedicated to St Gregory. 16 Aiden Gasquet, ‘Solemn Acceptance of Abbot Caveral’s Foundation of St Gregory’s,’ Downside Review 17 (1989): 63. 17 Sadler was born in 1604 and was received into the church by his Benedictine uncle, Dom Walter Sadler. He entered the order at Dieulward and was professed in 1622. He spent most of his life on the English mission, serving as chaplain to the Sheldons of Weston and the Tichbornes in Hampshire. He worked also for many years in London. He collaborated with Crowther on several spiritual texts, including the handbooks of the confraternity, and he served as dean of the rosary chapel. He died at Dieulward on 19 January 1680–1. See Oliver, 523. 18 Henry Garnett, The Societie of the Rosary (n.p.d. [1593–4]), 44–6. Anthoney F. Allison and D.M. Rogers, The Contemporary Printed Literature of the English Counter-Reformation between 1558 and 1640: An Annotated Catalogue. Vol. 2 (Brookfield, VT: Scolar, 1994), 319 (ARCR II, 319); A Short-Title Catalogue



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of Books Printed in England, Scotland, and Ireland, and of English Books Printed Abroad 1475–1640, 2nd ed., ed. W.A. Jackson, F.S. Ferguson, and K.F. Pantzer (London: Bibliographic Society, 1986, 1976–91) (STC 11617.4). 19 Nicholas Barker and David Quentin, eds., The Library of Thomas Tresham and Thomas Brudenell (London: Roxburghe Club, 2006). 20 Sandeep Kaushik, ‘Resistance, Loyalty and Recusant Politics: Sir Thomas Tresham and the Elizabethan State,’ Midland History 21 (1996): 37–72; Gerard Kilroy, Edmund Campion, Memory and Transcription (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2005), 14. 21 See note 9 for bibliographic details. 22 Jesus, Maria, Joseph (1657), b2v. 23 ‘Robert Brudenell’s address to the confraternity,’ Jesus, Maria, Joseph (1657), 1. See the discussion in Connolly, ‘The Benedictine Chapel,’ 320–3, on the location of ‘Amsterdam.’ 24 Anne Winston-Allen, Stories of the Rose: The Making of the Rosary in the Middle Ages (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997); Jan Rhodes, ‘The Rosary in Sixteenth-Century England,’ Mount Carmel 31 (1983): 180–91; 32 (1984): 4–17; Herbert Thurston, ‘Our Popular Devotions II: The Rosary,’ Month 96 (1900): 403–18, 513–27, 620–37; Month 97 (1901): 67–79, 172–88, 286–304; Herbert Thurston, ‘Alanus de Rupe and His Indulgence of 60,000 Years,’ Month 100 (1902): 281–99; Herbert Thurston, ‘The Name of the Rosary,’ Month 111 (1908): 519–29, 610–23; Herbert Thurston, ‘Notes on Familiar Prayers: I; The Origins of the Hail Mary,’ Month 121 (1913): 162–76; Herbert Thurston, Familiar Prayers: Their Origins and History (London: Burns and Oates, 1953); E.U. Wilkins, The Rose-Garden Game (London, Gollancz, 1969); Helen C. White, ‘Some Continuing Traditions in English Devotional Literature,’ Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 57 (1942): 966–80; Louis L. Martz, The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954); Anne Dillon, ‘Praying by Number; The Confraternity of the Rosary and the English Catholic Community, c. 1580– 1700,’ History 88 (July 2003): 451–71; Anne Dillon, ‘Public Liturgy Made Private: The Rosary Confraternity in the Life of a Recusant Household,’ in Triumphs of the Defeated: Early Modern Festivals and Messages of Legitimacy, Wolfenbütteler Forschungen, Bd. 116, ed. Jill Bepler and Peter Davidson, 245–70 (Wiesbaden: Harrossowitz in Kommission, 2007). 25 William of Malmesbury, Gesta pontificum Anglorum, ed. and trans. R.M. Thomson and M. Winterbottom. Oxford Medieval Texts. (Oxford University Press Oxford, 2007), 1:311. 26 Thurston, ‘Alanus de Rupe,’ 290–1.

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27 Thurston, ‘Our Popular Devotions,’ 513. 28 Winston–Allen, Stories of the Rose, 65–80. See also the work of Mary Carruthers, who discusses the use of number in memory and as an organizing strategy for prayer. Mary J. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 29 The story of St Dominic’s vision of receiving the rosary from the Virgin appeared first in Alanus de Rupe’s writings, and the legend appears to date from this time. Herbert Thurston has suggested that Alanus had perhaps misread the account in Dominic of Prussia’s autobiographical ‘Liber experientiarum,’ 1458, in which he told of a fellow Carthusian who claimed to have seen the Virgin reciting the Psalter, and confused it with a reference to Saint Dominic, the founder of the Dominican order. Thurston, ‘Our Popular Devotions II: The Rosary,’ Month 96 (1900): 517, 526–7; and Thurston, ‘Our Popular Devotions,’ Month 97 (1901): 67–79, 287. 30 In fact the cult of the Virgin came a close second to that of Christ himself. Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, Traditional Religion in England 1400– 1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 256. 31 The Reformation removed one of the most well-loved devotions for the laity: the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin. 32 There is evidence for the use of both the Carthusian and the Dominican form of the rosary at this time. There may well have been a rosary confraternity at Eton where, Herbert Thurston notes, the statutes dating from 1440 required the scholars to recite daily ‘the complete Psalter of the Blessed Virgin, consisting of a Credo, 15 Paters and 150 Ave Marias.’ Thurston, ‘Our Popular Devotions,’ Month 96 (1900): 522. There is also some evidence that names of English people were registered in the Cologne confraternity, suggesting, in turn, that there were no specifically English confraternities at this time (The Plumpton Correspondence, ed. Thomas Stapleton, Camden Society o.s. 4 [London, 1839], 50). 33 See discussion in, for example, Christopher Black, ‘Confraternities and the Parish in the Context of Italian Catholic Reform,’ in Confraternities and Catholic Reform in Italy, France, and Spain, Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies 44, ed. John Donnelly and Michael Maher, 1–26 (Kirksville, MO: Thomas Jefferson University Press, 1999); see the discussions in Nicholas Terpstra, ‘Confraternities and Public Charity: Modes of Civic Welfare in Early Modern Italy,’ in Donnelly and Maher, 97–120; Lance Lazar, ‘Bringing God to the People: Jesuit Confraternities in Italy in the Mid-Sixteenth Century,’ Confraternitas 7, no. 1 (1996): 11–13; ‘Belief, Devotion, and Memory in Early Modern Italian Confraternities,’ Confraternitas 15, no. 1 (2004): 3–33;



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Nicholas Terpstra, ed., The Politics of Ritual Kinship: Confraternities and the Social Order in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), esp. 1–8. 34 Queen Henrietta Maria’s chapel, where she established her own rosary confraternity. 35 Garnet, Societie of the Rosary, 10. 36 William Palmes, The Life of Mrs Dorothy Lawson, of St Anthony’s, near Newcastleupon-Tyne, in Northumberland, ed. G.B. Richardson (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1851); see Dillon, Public Liturgy Made Private. 37 Garnet, Societie of the Rosary, 35–6. 38 Jesus, Maria, Joseph (1663), a2v–a3r. 39 Compare Garnet, Societie of the Rosary, 3–4. 40 Jesus, Maria, Joseph (1663), a3r. 41 ‘Robert Brudenell’s address to the confraternity,’ Jesus, Maria, Joseph (1657), 3. 42 See note 9 for details. Crowther and Sadler also composed and printed several related texts of instruction and devotion intended specifically for the confraternity. See entries in Thomas Clancy, English Catholic Books 1641– 1700: A Bibliography (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1974), nos. 280–7. 43 ‘Dedication,’ Jesus, Maria, Joseph (1657), unpaginated. 44 Ibid., unpaginated address ‘To the right honourable our noble patron.’ 45 The British Library holds the copy presented by the confraternity to Catherine of Braganza. In addition to the Queen’s engraved image in the frontispiece, its gold-tooled morocco binding has her coat of arms stamped on the back. BL Shelfmark: C.53.i.22. 46 Jesus, Maria, Joseph (1663), ‘The epistle dedicatory,’ A2v. 47 Jesus, Maria, Joseph (1663), ‘An advice to the Devout Rosarists,’ unpaginated. 48 By 1669, the Dominicans had published its handbook, The method of saying the Rosary of our Blessed Lady as it was ordered by Pope Pius the fifth, of the Holy Order of Preachers. And as it is said in Her Majesties Chapell at S. James (London, 1669). 49 Connolly, ‘Relics and Plate,’ 590. 50 Marion Kite has examined the chasuble, now at Downside, and this is taken from her description for the community. I am grateful to Right Reverend Dom Aidan Bellenger, Abbot of Downside, for his discussion about this and for allowing me to quote from it. 51 Connolly, ‘Relics and Plate,’ 604. 52 Ibid., 606. 53 Ibid., 590. 54 Lunn, English Benedictines, 129.

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55 Connolly, ‘Relics and Plate,’ 600. 56 The embossed scenes differ slightly in its partner reliquary, which had contained the relic of the Holy Cross. Here Christ is shown seated in the mockery scene. and there are three men standing around him, while the scene of the Carrying of the Cross replaces the Scourging at the Pillar. See Connolly, ‘Relics and Plate,’ 588–9. 57 Or was it? Was this depiction of Cromwell’s England a cautionary, retrospective re-fashioning at the time of the Restoration? I am grateful to Professor Brian Cummings and Justine Williams for their insights on this point. 58 Jesus, Maria, Joseph (1663), sec. 3, 19. 59 Ibid., 12. 60 Ibid., 19–20. 61 Ibid., 22. 62 Jesus, Maria, Joseph (1657), 95–6. 63 Jesus, Maria, Joseph (1663), 23. 64 Dillon, ‘Public Liturgy Made Private,’ 267–8. 65 Jesus, Maria, Joseph (1663), 20. 66 Martin Couvreur, The devotion of bondage. Or an easy practice of perfectly consecrating ourselves to the service of the B. Virgin. trans. (n.p., 1634) ARCR II, 813. STC 6798. ERL 134. 67 Jesus, Maria, Joseph (1663), 162. 68 Ibid., 171–2. 69 Ibid., 172. 70 Ibid., 70. 71 Jesus, Maria, Joseph (1657), 71. 72 Ibid., 74. 73 Jesus, Maria, Joseph (1663), 27. 74 Ibid., ‘The Blessing of the Wax Candles for the Brothers and Sisters of the holy Rosary, to hold in their hands, at the hour of Death,’ 27–30. 75 Jesus, Maria, Joseph (1663), ‘The general absolution,’ 30. 76 It is unsurprising that the confraternity flourished at this time when the danger of sudden death was a constant threat, a Puritan government was followed by the Great Plague of 1665, and the Fire of 1666. The Catholics saw these calamities as the physical manifestation of God’s anger for the country’s heresy. 77 Garnet’s text The Societie of the Rosary had promoted the confraternity on its promise of the abundant indulgences to be obtained from membership of the confraternity. The promise implicit in the Crowther-Sadler handbook follows that of Garnet. 78 Jesus, Maria, Joseph (1657), 104–5.



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79 Ibid., 96–7. 80 Jesus, Maria, Joseph (1663). 81 Ibid., 11. 82 Jesus, Maria, Joseph (1657), 26–7. 83 Jesus, Maria, Joseph (1663), 14–15. 84 The first edition of the handbook provided a detailed ‘Marian Kalendar’ with the history of each feast day, but the second simplified this, making it more accessible. Jesus, Maria, Joseph (1657), ‘A Marian Kalendar,’ unpaginated; Jesus, Maria, Joseph (1663), ‘The festivities of our Blessed Lady,’ unpaginated. 85 They were: 22 January, the Feast of the Espousal of Mary to St Joseph; 2 February, the Purification; 25 March, the Annunciation; 13 May, in Rome, the dedication of the Church of the Blessed Virgin and the Martyrs in Rome in 609, previously the Pantheon; 18 June, the Feast of the Commemoration of the Psalter of the Sacred Virgin Mary; 2 July, the Feast of the Visitation; 5 August, the dedication of the Church of Our Blessed Lady of Nives; 15 August, the Assumption; 8 September, the nativity of the Virgin; 7 October, the Feast of the Holy Rosary, the feast instituted by Pope Gregory XIII as the commemoration of Holy Mary of Victory, to commemorate the defeat of the Turks at the Battle of Lepanto, now kept on the first Sunday of October; 21 November, the Presentation of Our Lady; 8 December, the Immaculate Conception; 18 December, the Feast of the Expectation of Our Lady. 86 Jesus, Maria, Joseph (1663), ‘General rules of the Rosary,’ 13. 87 Jesus, Maria, Joseph (1657), ‘Of the pious use of Processions,’ 136. 88 Ibid. 89 Jesus, Maria, Joseph (1663), D3r–v. 90 Ibid., D3v. 91 Jesus, Maria, Joseph (1663), D3v. 92 Jesus, Maria, Joseph (1657), 141–60. 93 Thomas Birch, The court and times of Charles the First: illustrated by authentic and confidential letters, from various public and private collections; including memoirs of the mission in England of the Capuchin Friars in the service of Queen Henrietta Maria by Father Cyprien de Gamache, ed. Robert F. Williams (London, 1848) 2:432–3. 94 Perez Zagorin, How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); Alexandra Walsham, Charitable Hatred, Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500–1700 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006); and John Coffey, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England 1558–1689 (Harlow: Longman, 2000). 95 John Coffey, ‘Puritanism and Liberty Revisited: The Case for Toleration in

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the English Revolution,’ Historical Journal 41, no. 4 (1998): 961. See also Blair Worden, ‘Toleration and the Cromwellian Protectorate,’ in Persecution and Toleration, ed. W.J. Shiels, The Ecclesiastical History Society Studies in Church History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), 21:199–233.   96 C.H. Firth and R.S. Rait, eds., ‘June 1657: An Act for convicting, discovering and repressing of Popish Recusants,’ in Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642–1660 (London, 1911), 1170–80.   97 Ralph Benet Weldon, ‘Chronological Notes from Memorials’ (1706), 193, MS 830, Downside Abbey Archives, cited in Connolly, ‘Benedictine Chapel of the Rosary,’ 324n1.   98 Jesus, Maria, Joseph (1663), 196–7.   99 Robert Brudenell died in 1703 and Cardigan House burned down in 1725. See 12 George 1, c. 19: sale of the site of Cardigan House in Great Lincoln’s Inn Fields (Middlesex) lately demolished by fire, and settlement of lands of greater value in Yorkshire to the same uses; Survey of London, 3, The Parish of St Giles-in-the-Fields, part 1 (London, 1912), 48–56. Robert’s heir, George Brudenell (1685–1732), married the Protestant heiress Elizabeth Bruce and renounced Catholicism. 100 The reliquary donated by Anne Hall was used to display the relic of St Gregory on the high altar at Downside. The two silver gilt reliquaries containing relics of the English martyrs were placed on the altar of Oliver Plunkett, the last Catholic martyr to die in England. His death 1 July 1681 occurred within months of the suspension of the confraternity. Connolly, ‘Relics and Plate,’ 604–5.

chapter twelve

Obedience and Consent: Thomas White and English Catholicism, 1640–1660 S T E FA N I A T U T I N O

This chapter examines some of the theoretical issues raised by Thomas White, alias Blacklo, a Catholic theologian, natural philosopher, and political theorist, who wrote supporting the case of the Independents and later of the Lord Protector. Born in 1593 into a wealthy Catholic family in southeast England, in the 1610s White went ‘beyond the seas’ for his education: in 1616 he arrived at Douai, where he was ordained as a priest and there remained as a professor. Among his students was Henry Holden, who later became a close political and religious collaborator of his. White travelled extensively throughout Europe (in particular to Paris, where he became an active member of a distinguished scientific community that included Marin Mersenne, Sir Kenelm Digby, Pascal, Gassendi, and Thomas Hobbes) and frequently visited England, where he died in 1676.1 White justified his support of Cromwell on the basis of a peculiarly Catholic version of consent theory, which will be the specific topic of this essay. Understanding his elaboration, I argue, gives insight into the complexity of the theological and political issues that agitated England between 1640 and 1660. Also, and perhaps more interestingly, White’s case is indicative of a larger trend in the study of early modern British Catholicism, and one I have pursued elsewhere, that complicates the received view of Catholicism as a foreign entity in the religious, political, and intellectual history of England. In fact, the elaborations of certain members of the English Catholic Church contributed greatly to shape many of the issues that we tend to see as quintessentially ‘English,’ and, to an extent, as quintessentially ‘Protestant.’ White’s thought and political activities took place in a delicate moment for the history of the English Catholic Church. From the 1630s to

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the end of the seventeenth century the English Catholic Church was facing a violent conflict within the institution of the English Chapter, which remained the highest authority after the departure, in 1631, of Richard Smith, bishop of Chalcedon.2 In the absence of a central authority, the Chapter split into two factions: Thomas White was the leader of the first, while George Leyburn was the most prominent member of the other. As John Bossy explains, the division was centred upon White’s theological and ecclesiological stances, even if it indeed corresponded to an opposite political position: White supported Cromwell, while Leyburn was a committed Royalist.3 White’s theology, mainly expressed and systematized in a series of works published in the 1650s, aimed to create a ‘rational’ Catholicism at the centre of which was the principle of tradition as a reasonable way to test the truth of its doctrines against the materialist philosophers of the time and the Protestant Church. The centrality of this principle implied the need for the Catholic Church to eliminate doctrines whose origin or mode of transmission was dubious.4 Among the most controversial corollaries to this theory was the negation of the doctrine of papal infallibility.5 White, however, was also a natural philosopher, and his natural philosophy was a central component of both his theology and his political thought. Roughly put, White’s natural philosophy was a novel and, from many points of view, controversial mixture of Aristotelianism and the new scientific method recently defended and redefined by Galileo. In the treatise De Mundo, published in 1642,6 and in the Institutionum Peripateticarum … pars theorica, written four years later,7 White maintained that the world could be understood only in a mechanist way. White, however, embedded his mechanist views into a modified Aristotelian framework, which furnished a bulwark against both epistemological scepticism and the anti-religious consequences that an extreme mechanist theory would have led to. White saw no contradiction between his natural philosophy and his theology; indeed, he thought that they complemented each other perfectly. According to his natural philosophy, the universe worked in a mathematical way and could be understood in a mechanist context. Theology, on the contrary, was the realm of the incorporeal, which physics could not and should not interpret.8 Both, however, were necessary to build an all-encompassing system of thought that guaranteed mathematical and metaphysical certainty.



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White’s theological and philosophical thought ran parallel to his political involvement with the cause of the Commonwealth. For the purpose of the structure of this essay, I would like to distinguish between two phases in White’s political activities: pragmatic and theoretical. As for the former, in 1647 Thomas White and Henry Holden, together with some other theologians and intellectuals including Peter Fitton and Sir Kenelm Digby, tried to strike a deal with the Independents. In particular, the ‘Blackloists’ – as they became known after White’s alias – proposed an oath that the English Catholics had to swear in exchange for toleration. Their oath framed and introduced a drastic ecclesiological change. More specifically, it was proposed that the English Catholics were to be governed by ‘six or eyght Bishops more or lesse, by whom they may be governed in matters of Religion & conscience.’ These bishops were to be ordained by the Parliament, and ‘the Pope can have no Power over them to the preiudice of the state.’ The bishops, moreover, had to ‘acknowledge the Pope the first Bishop, & head of the Church; but not receive any of his commands without the leave of the state.’9 The Blackloists’ proposal, however, was never discussed at Parliament. As John Bossy points out, White’s plan represented an attempt to ‘effectively … sever the connection between the envisaged Catholic Church and the Pope.’10 In Bossy’s view, the fact that Holden and White were addressing the Independents is but a ‘superficial’ modification of the Catholic loyalist tradition, since they were not the only Catholics who tried to come to terms with the new regime in the confused period of 1645–7.11 In my view, White’s movement towards the Independents is not that superficial. In fact, White did not cease to support the Commonwealth after the Regicide, as other pro-Independent Catholics had done. More specifically, White supported the Protectorate, and this endorsement aligned with a coherent political theory. This feature defines the second, more interesting, phase of his political activities: the theoretical one. In 1655, he published a treatise entitled The Grounds of Obedience and Government,12 in which he openly endorsed Cromwell’s regime on the basis of a peculiar version of Catholic, theologically based consent theory. After a dedicatory epistle to Kenelm Digby, the text begins with a quotation from Xenophon’s Cyropaedia on the difference between governing men and governing beasts, and on the reasons why ‘few men are so intelligent as to be fit to govern men,’ while every man is capable of governing an animal. For White, the reason why men are difficult to govern is because ‘the nature of man is inclined to have its owne will.’

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Unlike beasts, therefore, since man is a ‘rationall creature,’ he must be able to understand what is good for him in order to perform it; thus he must be free to attain this knowledge and behave accordingly.13 In practice, however, things do not work quite this way. The inclination for attaining the common good is ‘so naturall in us, yet Nature is not able to make it perfect in most both persons and actions,’ because not everybody understands perfectly ‘the nature of all things necessary to their owne private conditions.’14 In order to supplement this deficiency, however, men are furnished by nature with the inclination to make a free and reasonable choice to delegate the understanding of ‘all things necessary to their owne private conditions’ to selected members of the community.15 Before examining what exactly White meant as the common good, or one’s ‘owne truest interest’ that the government is meant to protect, let us explore the foundation of White’s notion of men as naturally free and rational creatures. The freedom of will that men enjoy as rational creatures is grounded upon a peculiar understanding of obedience, which is the crucial argument of White’s text. White writes that ‘it is a fallacious principle, though maintained by many, that obedience is … the greatest sacrifice we can offer to God, to renounce our own will, because our will is the chiefest good we have.’16 By contrast, the kind of obedience by which, for White, ‘Common-wealths and Communities subsist’ is one that does not require men to renounce their will, because their freedom of will is a manifestation of their nature as rational beings, which is ‘that by which we are the image of God.’ Therefore, this specific virtue has to do less with ‘being obedient’ than with ‘contract[ing] and perform[ing] their part of the bargaine faithfully and truly,’ or keeping one’s side of a mutually beneficial contract; in brief, this virtue is not obedience but ‘fidelity,’ as White puts it.17 When it comes to governing men, White specifies, the ‘good’ that the people receive in exchange for their ‘fidelity’ is twofold. First, government allows men to live ‘in quiet and content’ by avoiding contention.18 Second, just as it is natural for man to live in peace, at the same time ‘many commodities are necessary to a multitude, which are to be furnished by common consent,’ and, since ‘these businesses cannot be carried on by the whole body of the community,’ men need to entrust somebody to take care of providing all that ‘they esteem necessary or conducing to their happinesse.’19 In other words, men, being rational creatures, need to be loyal – not ‘obedient’ – to their governors, not because they have renounced their will, but because they believe that doing



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what their governors tell them to do will result in their own good, which by themselves they could not achieve. Perez Zagorin, in his survey on the English political thought during the Revolution, has briefly examined White’s treatise and judged it to be a secular piece of writing, without anything particularly Catholic in it.20 By contrast, I argue that The Grounds is a distinctively interesting text in the history of political thought of its time precisely because it merged the language of natural law with that of Catholic theology. Consider, in this light, the root of White’s notion of ‘fidelity,’ which is the theoretical key point in White’s reasoning. The concept is theological, and, more specifically, it derives from the Catholic neo-Thomist doctrine according to which government comes from God’s law: God governs men by granting them rationality and freewill. These attributes are not only the most important qualities of mankind, in that they make men indeed similar to their creator; they are also the perquisites for creating the consent by which men agree to be governed. Theology – and, in particular, Catholic theology – is not only the origin of government, but it also has a central role at the end of it, so to speak. When considering the question of why a man should renounce his own life for the sake of the commonwealth, White observes that some thinkers, including Aristotle, refer to the notion of a ‘common good,’ but for White such an appeal is not enough: ‘to cry “the common good” is a meere deceit and flattery of words, unlesse wee can shew that the common good is as great to us as wee make it sound.’21 Even if we agree, White states, that what is good for the commonwealth is good for the subject – and we all should agree to that, since the good of the commonwealth is the reason why Nature provided men with the rational ability to organize themselves in society, according to the Ciceronian maxim used as the epigraph to White’s text, ‘Salus populi suprema lex’ – still a question remains. Since the loss of one’s life is the greatest loss that a man can incur, pace all the followers of Epicurus who teach ‘that there is no harme in death, nor pain after it,’ ‘upon what motive must he [a man] consent’ to losing his life? All the reasons usually alleged in this case, White argues, are to be discarded as ‘answers … for some hare-brained fool-hardy flashes or doating oratours … Fame is a slender recompence, when the fruit of it (which chiefly consists in being respected in company, and having a power amongst his associates) is once passed. The good of his wife and children, that may rejoice a dying man, but if there rest nothing after death, it is a comfort which soon expires, being indeed nothing but a

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flash.’22 White’s conclusion is, therefore, ‘that there is no good to bee expected here equivalent to the hazard of death, and consequently, none can bee rationally valiant, who sets not his hopes upon the next world.’23 From the point of view of the government, since ‘it is … evident that there is another life to bee expected,’ the logical consequence is that ‘it imports good government to plant deeply in the breast of the subjects a rationall apprehension of it,’ that is, of the expectation of ‘a profit and recompence in the next life.’24 In sum, the only solid reason for a subject to willingly offer to the commonwealth the ultimate sacrifice of his own life is a religious one. Catholicism enters the argument here, not because White wanted the Catholic religion to be the one confession ‘deeply planted in the breast of the subjects’: the ‘rational apprehension’ of the existence of an afterlife was more than sufficient in this respect. Rather, the entirety of White’s theory is organically linked to the Catholic notion of retributive justice – the notion that whatever we do or refuse to do in this life has an effect on the destiny of our soul after death. White is well aware that his political theory has to be considered against the background of existing Catholic political thought, and he is also well aware of his own originality in this respect. When discussing other Catholic political theorists, White explicitly rejects those who support the view that authority is per se iure divino. Some of the Catholic divines, White writes, teach that ‘God, by nature, is high Lord and Master of all; That whoever is in power receiveth his right from him; That Obedience consists in doing the will of his who commandeth.’25 Those divines who hold the aforementioned notion of absolute authority, White says, ‘imagine God commandeth it by expresse and direct words, and doeth it by an immediate position of the things said to be done; whereas in nature the commands are nothing but the naturall light God hath bestowed on mankinde.’ Therefore God exercises his authority by giving things ‘direction and motion … as truly as the wight of a Jack turnes the meat upon the spit, and the spring of a Watch makes the clock of it strike.’26 It is important to notice at this point the influence of White’s scientific theory on his political thought, starting with White’s use of the metaphor of the clock, which both Digby and Descartes had used and became a common trope during the scientific revolution.27 Just as the physical world was composed of atoms, whose movements and compositions could be explained by a mechanical theory of nature precisely because God willed it this way, by the same token men can and ought to exercise their free will in the realm of politics. In other words, to borrow one



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of White’s formulations, God’s government was as ‘sweet’ towards the atoms composing matter as towards men organizing themselves in society and choosing the ones in charge of ruling it. The relevance of White’s natural science for his political philosophy is also clearly visible for the other, minor, work that he wrote on government and governors. This is a part of a chapter, which remained a manuscript, entitled ‘The Supernumerary Chapter. That without Virtue Officers wil not bee Vigilant,’ which White probably wrote for Kenelm Digby, who was thinking of writing his own political treatise, which he never finished.28 The general thesis of the chapter was supposed to be a demonstration that ‘vigilancy in human action is not the least if not the greatest vertue, specially in offices of care and danger.’29 By ‘vigilancy’ White means the ability of a governor to assiduously implement and sustain a certain ‘moderate’ action, such as husbanding one’s resources and avoiding prodigality, as opposed to the ‘Heroick,’ one-time achievement, such as a military conquest. After cataloguing examples of vigilant rulers, the Catholic author explains that there is a scientifically demonstrable reason of the efficacy of being vigilant in peace and war and this can be seen if we consider the issue of density in matter.30 Since matter is distinguished by different degrees of rarity and density, White explains, motion must be considered as a function of it, and the results of motion are in proportion to the density of the body moved.31 In other words, when we hit a dense body, the motion produced is a ‘sharp’ one, while when we hit a rare body, the motion propagates over the lessdense (rarefied) substance, thus prompting a slower and less dramatic motion. The different kind of motion in these two different kinds of bodies does not depend on the actual strength of the motion, but on the different composition of the bodies: in the first case the body appears to move more quickly and more violently only because it is dense. By contrast, in the second case the motion needs to be measured according to the time for which the body keeps moving, not the velocity or strength with which it moves, which depends on the composition of the body itself and has nothing to do with the strength of the force applied. The conclusion of this explanation is that ‘it is as wel an Heroick action to maintaine a lesser Action long, as a greater for a short while. Nay if there bee a great proportion betwixt the quality and the degree of the two works the moderate work may exceed the greater by the recompense of the time which it endureth. My conclusion is, that a constant Vigilancy though it seemes but a moderate Action, yet by the length of it becomes a Heroick work.’32

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White’s doctrine is a version of consent theory steeped in Catholic theology and in White’s own version of mechanical physics. An important corollary of White’s theory is his elaboration of the right of the subjects to rebel against their governor. The very nature of government, White writes, implies the right of resistance.33 But since, by definition, governing consists ‘in the power of commanding, that is, of having no resistance,’ it is obvious that the clash between the governor and his resisting subjects ‘by consequence … draweth along the concussion of the whole state.’ Therefore, White advises, the right of resistance should not be exercised except for one single reason. Given that men choose to be governed in order to better attain the common good, whenever the governor appears to be fighting against the good of the people, instead of providing for it, then the supreme magistrate does not act as such anymore but as ‘a Brigand and robber instead of a defender,’ and, White says, ‘This is, therefore, the ground of the peoples opposition, and onely circumstance to justifie their breaking their oath and promise.’34 To be sure, theories of resistance to an illegitimate king are by no means new in English Catholic political thought. From Nicholas Sander and the Jesuit Robert Persons to Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, an important set of Catholic theologians had argued that since authority over souls was far more important than that over bodies, whenever a heretic governor jeopardized the salvation of the soul, Catholics had the right and the duty to rebel against him and depose him.35 It was precisely the theory of potestas papalis in temporalibus, directa or indirecta, that these theologians endorsed. For White, on the contrary, a governor is illegitimate not when he jeopardizes the souls of his subjects, but when he fails to provide for the people’s good on earth.36 And it is precisely for the sake of this earthly common good that a government should encourage ‘a rationall apprehension’ of the afterlife. Resisting an illegitimate sovereign – in this latter sense – was possible because by failing to accomplish his task the sovereign nullified the ‘contract’ with his people, who had agreed to obey him only insofar as obedience could grant them their good. In this respect, then, White’s views on the right of resistance appear to be an original and truly contractual variation of some of the propositions elaborated by the Jesuit Juan de Mariana at the end of the sixteenth century, which argued for the legitimacy, in certain specific cases, of regicide.37 Another extremely important consequence of White’s doctrine is its application to the political situation in England in the 1650s. Although White had declared that he intended to ‘deliver the abstract notions



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onely: leaving to the prudence of particulars, to draw such consequences, as every ones circumstances shall make necessary and evident unto him by the short hints I give,’38 the political ‘consequence’ of his ‘abstract notions’ was a de facto endorsement of Cromwell’s regime. For White, the distinction between lawful and unlawful dispossession of a governor was moot, since ‘it were better for the common good to stay as they are, then to venture the restoring of him, because of the publick hazard.’39 There is a difference, in fact, between the good of the people and the good of the dispossessed King and his family: the former concern must always prevail over the latter. And if indeed the dispossessed King is truly a supreme governor, he will be the first one to renounce his right to the throne for the good of the people. But what about the new governor? When can he be said to be truly legitimate? As White writes, some ‘have sought by terme of years to decide the difficulty.’ For instance, Urban VIII, ‘an intelligent and generous Prince and well versed in politick Government,’ had established a rule according to which ‘after five yeers quiet possession of an estate, the Church was not bound to take notice whether the title were lawfull or no.’40 For White, on the contrary, it was necessary to ‘proceed upon other principles, that is, the forelaid and main basis of our discourse, that the common good ought to bee the rule of the Magistrates title, and the subjects obedience.’ According to this basis, then, ‘when ever (considering all things) the common good is cleerly on the possessors side, then the dispossessed hath no claime.’41 It is evident, then, that in The Grounds White was declaring Oliver Cromwell as a legitimate new governor because he acted in the best interest of the people, which, according to the nature of mankind, is the essence of government. In this respect, White’s contract-based political theory contains some rather interesting, and uniquely Catholic, elements of the secular de facto-ist arguments of thinkers such as Anthony Asham and Thomas Hobbes.42 White’s political theory, deeply linked with his mechanist natural philosophy, is a theologically based Catholic consent theory. The link between White’s political theory, theology, and natural philosophy and that of other theorists – Hobbes in primis – has been recognized by a number of people, both in the seventeenth and in the twentieth centuries.43 After the Restoration, in fact, numerous pamphlets lumped together Hobbes’s and White’s works as two examples of the pernicious doctrines that had brought about the destruction of both the Commonwealth and the church. The first, hardly surprising, argument used to link Hobbes and White

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is based upon the interpretation of both as anti-monarchical, and, consequently, anti-Christian. A good example of this argument can be found in Roger Coke’s Justice Vindicated, in which Thomas White, Thomas Hobbes, and Hugo Grotius are linked together as Coke’s polemical targets.44 What do the three theorists have in common? Coke writes, ‘They all say, that by Nature all men are in a like equal condition, and out of society, until by voluntary pacts and acts of their will they shall have formed themselves into society. I say, that men are by Nature born into society and subordination.’45 God, in other words, ‘made Adam a universal Monarch,’ therefore monarchy is the only ‘natural’ and Christian form of government. Coke derives his principle from a modified version of Aristotelian epistemology: Coke maintains that no knowledge is possible by experience, but only by deduction from immutable axioms.46 In the case of government, the immutable principle on which it is based is ‘the Law of Nature,’ which is ‘engraven in the minds of all men.’ Because of this ‘Law of Nature’ men feel the need of living in society, and of organizing themselves into a hierarchical order. Since the Laws of Nature descend directly from God, Coke writes, they ‘are principles, necessary, and immutable by all the Men in the World; yet are they not principles, necessary, or immutable by God; but he might, if it had pleased him, made something else the Law of Nature, or otherwise revealed himself in the Scripture. So Humane Laws must be prime, necessary, and immutable by Subjects, or their conforming, or not confirming their actions to them, could not be just or unjust.’47 This excludes any possible action on the part of mankind, whose rational character consists precisely in following this axiom. In fact, as Coke adds, ‘All the Confusions which have lately hapned in Christendom, were not caused from any want of understanding of the Laws of God or Man, but from the perverse wills of Men, who would not be restrained from their wickedness, neither by the Laws of God or Man.’48 Coke’s interpretation of the nature of mankind and its application to political theory constitutes the bulk of his arguments against White’s Treatise. White, for Coke, had misunderstood the notion of ‘rational creature’ applied to men: being ‘rational’ means abiding by the Laws of Nature. Consequently, the notion of obedience cannot be conditional; and it is immoral and pernicious to convince subjects otherwise, for they do not need to know and indeed should not worry about discovering whether what their governor does is good for them.49 Coke’s conclusion is that government is ‘natural,’ that is to say, it ‘proceed[s] immediately from God … and therefore this Government is superior to the Wills or



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Reason of the People, and cannot be by them dissolved; but the resisting of it is a violence upon Nature, and not only Irrational, and Immoral and unjust.’50 Given Coke’s perspective, he was not interested in discussing White’s de facto-ist arguments – or Hobbes’s, for that matter. In fact, Coke examined only the first fourteen grounds of White’s treatise, leaving the rest for others to discuss. And others did discuss them. An interesting text that addresses the last part of White’s treatise is a pamphlet entitled Evangelium Armatum, published anonymously in London in 1663 and reprinted in 1682. Its author was William Assheton, a Protestant divine and preacher, and chaplain to James Duke of Ormond.51 Assheton starts by explaining that the great political disorder during the Civil Wars stemmed from the lack of a ‘true Piety,’ which was substituted by ‘the shew and pretence of Piety.’52 In order to provide his readers with examples of this kind of religious impiety that had caused the destruction of the political order, Assheton presents a ‘short collection of the Sayings and Doctrines of the great Leaders and Abetters of the Presbyterian Reformation.’53 If these people are the first line, Assheton adds, there is also a ‘rear of this spiritual Brigade.’54 The rear is constituted by the ‘Papists and the Hobbians,’ and among the Papists Assheton chooses Thomas White, because, despite having the ‘reputation of being moderate’ and anti-Jesuit, he is nonetheless a ‘pestilent asserter’ of doctrines aimed at deposing legitimates sovereigns. But what are the characteristics that Assheton recognized as common between Hobbes, ‘the great Propagator of the Kingdom of Darkness,’ and Thomas White, the ‘most moderate’ of the Papists? The one element that Assheton decided to underline is precisely the de facto-ist arguments we have already noted in examining The Grounds. The passages quoted in the Evangelium Armatum from The Grounds, Leviathan, and De Cive are those that concern the necessity to obey a new governor, rather than attempt to restore the previous one.55 Not only the content of White’s and Hobbes’s works but also the ‘circumstance of their writing & Publication,’ Assheton writes, clarify their real aim: ‘a publick disswasion of the People to endeavour the restauration of his Majesty.’56 Both Coke and Assheton, albeit with different arguments, accused the doctrines of Thomas White and of Thomas Hobbes of being anti-monarchical and therefore anti-Christian. The same analogy between White and Hobbes was made in a positive sense. For instance, John Austin, a supporter of the Blackloist cause, in 1651 and in 1653 published two

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pamphlets praising Cromwell and his allegedly friendly attitude towards the English Catholics; in both works Austin uses (and misuses) Hobbes’s Leviathan as an example of a theory arguing for toleration towards the English Catholic Church with the same arguments that the Blackloists had used.57 But to what extent could the religious and theological dimension of White’s text be used to link him with other theorists, rather than to single him out? And what role did his Catholic mixture of contractualism and de facto-ist arguments play within the context of English republicanism? As far as religion is concerned, Richard Baxter, in the Holy Commonwealth, offered an interesting theory of how the religious element in White’s doctrine distinguished it from not only Hobbes’s but also from Harrington’s. Roughly put, the commonwealth envisioned by Baxter was holy for two reasons. First, the commonwealth was to be based on, and legitimized by, theological principles. Second, it was holy insofar as it was constituted by holy people. Baxter included Hobbes and Harrington among the enemies of such a commonwealth, because they did not propose a ‘holy’ commonwealth in the first sense, since their political theory, which for Coke minimized the role of the Christian religion and church in the commonwealth, ‘tendeth not to secure us a Righteous Government.’58 Catholics were also enemies, in the second sense, because they were not ‘holy’ people; indeed, they were the people of the Antichrist. Papists, Baxter wrote, are of three kinds.59 The first are the ‘bold’ supporters of the theory of directa potestas. The second group, whose chief figure is Bellarmine, proposes the theory of indirecta postestas, although the two groups, Baxter wrote, are essentially the same. The third group, a ‘more moderate’ one, constitutes the French Gallicans and the politiques – William Barclay among them. Although they ‘depose the Pope from his usurped Soveraignty over the Laity,’ they still ‘leave him as the sole Judge of the Clergy.’ Since the clergy have a central role in Baxter’s commonwealth, in reality they too introduce a form of papal authority into the Commonwealth: in Baxter’s words, ‘Though it be about Clergy-men, surely it is a Civil Government.’ For these reasons, no Papist should be tolerated in the Commonwealth. Where does White stand? Baxter discussed White’s opinion in the third chapter of his Holy Commonwealth, which addresses the question of ‘the constitution of Gods Kingdome,’ and is, in Baxter’s opinion, ‘the foundation of all my following discourse.’60 The reason why the doctrine of Thomas White threatens the constitution of Baxter’s commonwealth



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is precisely the link between theology and mechanist physics, or, in Baxter’s apt expression, the notion that ‘God governeth as an Engeneer.’61 Unlike Hobbes and Harrington, government for White has a pivotal theological component – but in a mechanist context. Unlike the other sorts of Papists, however, White’s God does not meddle in civil affairs or even, finally, in religious matters. This feature makes White’s doctrine different from either Hobbes’s or Harrington’s, and at the same time more threatening than both. Baxter therefore identified White’s political theory as a distinctively Catholic consent theory: Catholic theology was for Baxter a rather strange kind of theology and was so because White made use of theological arguments to speak the language of natural law in a ‘mechanical’ context. Baxter, moreover, thought that White’s theory was a distinctively theological consent theory, and in Baxter’s opinion the theological dimension differentiated White from Hobbes and Harrington. If the first of Baxter’s views highlighted an extremely important feature of the doctrine expressed in The Grounds, the second indicates that Baxter might have missed something important. But if Baxter was not willing to recognize any theological elements in Harrington, he was surely not alone. The significance of the religious element in the historiography on English republican thought has mainly been ignored by those scholars who use the concept of classical republicanism as the only defining ‘language’ and ‘programme’ of English republicanism.62 However, the importance of the language of religion in the history of English republicanism and English political thought is being given much attention by contemporary scholarship. First of all, much work has been done on the ecclesiological perspective to be found in the theories of many republican thinkers. As far as Harrington is concerned, Jonathan Scott and Mark Goldie, among others, have argued that, far from being a work of republican opposition to Cromwell’s regime, Oceana has to be read as a ‘model’ for an ‘immortal commonwealth.’ Within this project, the religious element has a crucial role, and it took the shape of a kind of national church whose relationship with the secular government had to be based on an Erastian model that closely resembled the one that the Blackloists proposed for the English Catholic Church in 1647–8.63 The same Erastianism, as Jeffrey Collins has argued, was at the core of Hobbes’s model of the relationship between church and state, and that very element explains, in Collins’s opinion, the close link between Hobbes and White.64 When it comes to Erastianism, however, there are theological and

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political distinctions that we should take into account. An Erastian position on the relationship between church and state is not specific enough if we want to link White’s formulations to other republican writings; in fact, it is not sufficient to understand the core of White’s political theory either. While there are surely some Erastian elements in certain structural aspects of the Blackloist ecclesiology – notably, the suggestion made by Holden and White that the bishops in charge of the English Catholic Church should have been chosen by Parliament, rather than the pope – the role that Catholic theology played in White’s political theory is much deeper than any version of Erastianism could ever have allowed for, since for White the very root of his natural-law arguments was a theological one. In other words, White would have welcomed Parliament’s role of authority in ecclesiological matters, especially because that would have meant drastically limiting the pope’s; for him, however, there was no doubt that the grounds of obedience and government were theological. If Erastianism is helpful only to a certain extent if we want to understand the role of White in the English republican debate, Erastianism further becomes a problematic notion to the extent that it leads to overstating the similarity between White and Hobbes. As Anthony Brown has argued, if Erastianism correctly describes Hobbes’s theory of the relation between church and state, the same cannot be said for Thomas White. Hobbes’s Erastianism, in fact, implied that the only thing that individuals cannot hand over to the sovereign’s control is the right to life itself. In other words, when push comes to shove, religion, too, is under the sovereign’s control. For White, on the other hand, the governor does not control religion, but state and church are separate jurisdictions: one begins where the other ends, in the dualistic tradition of Marsilius from Padua.65 Once again, for Hobbes the origin of government is ‘the foresight of their [i.e., men’s] own preservation, and of a more contented life thereby; that is to say, of getting themselves out from that miserable condition of Warre, which is necessarily consequent (as hath been shewn) to the naturall Passions of men.’66 For White, by contrast, what is ‘so naturall in us’ is the inclination to the common good, because God in his wisdom furnished men with both that inclination and the freewill necessary for men to consent to choose a governor who can lead them to that common good. This does not mean that Baxter was necessarily right and that Hobbes, White, and Harrington were creatures of completely different species. It means, rather, that further work remains to be done on the religious aspects of English republican writings and on the role of natural law



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theories as a bridge between republicanism and theological arguments. Jonathan Scott has recently argued that ‘natural law theory and republican theory may be considered as different genres and of different scope but they are not inherently incompatible.’67 Through the inclusion of natural law into the conceptual definition of English republicanism, the religious and theological elements acquire a central role: as Scott has insisted, ‘Far from being mutually exclusive, classical republicanism and natural law theory shared an appeal to the faculty of human reason which was Greek in origin, but frequently in the early modern period Christian in application.’68 In other words, the religio-theological dimension becomes a truly integral part of republican theories. If we consider that the theological dimension of natural law theories is indeed important to understand English republican writings, then White does have a place in this story. With respect to Thomas Hobbes, a number of scholars have also started to analyse the religious – and not simply the ecclesiological – elements of his political thought, a necessary step to understand the historical significance of his relation to Catholic thinkers in England and France.69 From a more theoretical perspective, moreover, the question of the relationship between White and Hobbes assumes distinctive relevance if we look at it through the lens of Carl Schmitt’s notion of ‘political theology’ and his reflections on its historical developments. Schmitt’s famous assertion that ‘all significant concepts of the modern theory of state are secularized theological concepts’70 is a description of both Schmitt’s ‘political metaphysics’ and of his interpretation of the development of the theories of state as consistently confronting the theological aspects of sovereignty, or the political aspects of theology.71 When describing in historical terms the ways in which politics and theology interacted at a theoretical level, Schmitt saw a progressive abandoning of the personal dimension of sovereignty in favour of a rationalistic and ‘scientific’ theory that aimed at ‘banish[ing] the miracle from the world.’72 For Schmitt the turning point occurred in the Enlightenment, and the outcome was the modern constitutional state with the emphasis on ‘liberal normativism’ as a way of theorizing politics. In this story Schmitt reserved a central role to Thomas Hobbes’s theory of state: for Schmitt, Hobbes’s sovereignty was personal – that is, transcendent with respect to the system of law – and in this sense Hobbes became for Schmitt ‘the classical representative of the decisionist type [of juristic thought].’73 At the same time, Hobbes’s theory was also ‘abstract,’ that is, concerned with establishing the principles of govern-

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ment as a system, following the model of natural philosophy and, more specifically in Hobbes’s case, that of geometry. The reason why Hobbes was able to maintain this tension, Schmitt wrote, is that in Hobbes’s times ‘juristic thought ... had not yet become so overpowered by the natural sciences.’74 According to Schmitt, such overpowering by the natural sciences would have been completed later on, with the Enlightenment, which conceived of political theory as analogous to medicine and mathematics rather than to theology. Now, if we agree with Schmitt and interpret Hobbes as a sort of bulwark of personal/transcendent sovereignty against the scientific way of looking at politics at a time in which the scientific method was about to impose itself as a model for proper thinking – political and otherwise – then Thomas White appears to be engaged in the same intellectual enterprise, although his concept of sovereignty was less personal and transcendent, while being more theological, than Hobbes’s. In other words, Thomas White’s theory of sovereignty with respect to Hobbes’s is less a political theology as such than a political theory with more theology in it. Obviously, by this I do not mean that White’s theory of sovereignty was a secularized political theory – in the previous pages I have argued precisely for its theological and Catholic character. Rather, I suggest that if the theological dimension of a political theory, in the Schmittian sense, is the transcendent aspect of the sovereign, then White’s sovereign, unlike Hobbes’s, is dependent on the consent that men need to give in order to legitimize the sovereign. Indeed, I would like to re-emphasize that in both Hobbes’s and White’s cases we cannot exclude theology from their political thought, as both Hobbes and White were concerned with rethinking the relationship between theology and natural science – or freedom and necessity – and its role in elaborating a political theory. However, Hobbes’s commonwealth, while being truly Erastian, was also truly theological to the extent that the legitimacy of its sovereign derived from an indisputably transcendent character. In White’s commonwealth, by contrast, the church enjoyed autonomy within the state, but while the theoretical grounds of obedience and government merged theology and natural law, the legitimacy of the sovereign was never transcendent with respect to the subjects’ consent, since the latter came from the rationality and freewill given by God to mankind. Or, to put it differently, while the legitimacy of Hobbes’s sovereign is like that of God, White’s sovereign is a sort of indirect by-product of the freedom given by God to men, and as such he is not ‘absolute,’ but rather subject to his subjects’ decision.



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These reflections do not presuppose a Schmittian analysis of White, nor do they rely on Schmitt’s interpretation of Hobbes. I simply wish to suggest that analysing the properly theological aspects of Hobbes’s political theory and English republican writings from both a historical and theoretical perspective can offer important insights into the history of seventeenth-century British political thought. In this context, taking the role of Thomas White’s political theory and theology into account can provide an important contribution to this long-range intellectual enterprise. Indeed, while White’s political theory is interesting for a number of reasons – not least for the complications it introduces into the Schmittian, decisionistic reading of political theology – I believe that one of the most important of those reasons is that the Catholic philosopher represents an incredibly useful lens through which it is possible to offer a more nuanced picture of the theoretical, political, and theological dimensions of mid-seventeenth-century English intellectual debates. The exclusion of Thomas White by mainstream historiography on these themes is, to a certain extent, the result of the exclusion of the political and intellectual role of the English Catholic Church from the history of early modern England. I would like to suggest that reversing the trend and taking the Catholic elaboration into consideration could contribute greatly to our understanding of this history.

NOTES   1 The most recent biography of White is the work of Beverley C. Southgate, ‘Covetous of truth’: The Life and Work of Thomas White, 1593–1676 (Dordrecht: Kluwert, 1993). I explore the political role played by the Blackloists in more detail in Thomas White and the Blackloists: Between Politics and Theology during the English Civil War (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008).   2 See T.A. Birrell, ‘English Catholics without a Bishop, 1655–1672,’ Recusant History 4, no. 4 (1958): 142–78; and John Bossy, The English Catholic Community 1570–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 49–74.   3 See Bossy, English Catholic Community, 60. For a different view on the actual impact of White’s theories in the context of English secular clergy, see R.I. Bradley SJ, ‘Blacklo and the Counter-Reformation: An Inquiry into the Strange Death of Catholic England,’ in From the Renaissance to the CounterReformation: Essays in Honor of Garrett Mattingly, ed. Charles H. Carter, 348–70 (New York: Random House, 1965).   4 See White, Sonus Buccinae (Paris, 1654). On this theme, see also Ruth A.

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Jordan, ‘The Blackloists 1640–1668: Ecclesiastical, Theological and Intellectual Authority in English Catholic Polemic’ (PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 1999); and Susan Rosa, ‘Seventeenth-Century Catholic Polemic and the Rise of Cultural Rationalism: An Example from the Empire,’ Journal of the History of Ideas 17, no. 1 (1996): 87–107.   5 See White, Sonus Buccinae; and White, Tabulae Suffragiales (London, 1655). These two issues discussed in White’s treatises constituted an important part of the theological view of the Blackloists: see, for instance, Henry Holden’s Divinae Fidei Analysis (Paris, 1652), dedicatory epistle to the Reader (unfol.), and 223; and Kenelm Digby, A Discourse concerning infallibility in Religion (Amsterdam, 1652), 195–6.   6 White’s treatise was carefully read by Thomas Hobbes, who wrote a treatise in reply to the Catholics, which remained unpublished until 1973: see Jean Jacquot and Harold W. Jones, eds., Thomas Hobbes: Critique du ‘De Mundo’ de Thomas White (Paris: J. Vrin, 1973); and the English translation by Harold W. Jones, Thomas Hobbes: Thomas White’s ‘De Mundo Examined’ (London: Bradford University Press, 1976). On the implications of the debate over White’s De Mundo on Hobbes’s theory of desire and on his explication of the reasons why men decide to move from a state of war to a state of peace, see Noel Malcolm, ‘Hobbes and Spinoza,’ in Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 30.   7 On the significance of the Institutionum, published in Latin in 1646 and later translated into English (1656), see John Henry, ‘Atomism and Eschatology: Catholicism and Natural Philosophy in the Interregnum,’ British Journal for the History of Science 15, no. 3 (1982): 223.   8 Southgate, ‘Covetous of truth,’ 104. On the link between theology and natural philosophy in White and Digby, see also Henry, ‘Atomism and Eschatology.’   9 The text of the Oath can be found, among other documents related to the Blackloists, in a collection published by Robert Pugh – a secular priest, ex-Jesuit, who deeply opposed the second-generation Blackloist leadership over the English Chapter – under the title Blacklo’s Cabal, n.p. [Douai] 1680 (2nd ed., the first appears to be lost), 36. 10 Bossy, English Catholic Community, 66. 11 I have discussed these issues more in depth in ‘The Catholic Church and the English Civil War: The Case of Thomas White,’ Journal of Ecclesiastical History 58, no. 2 (2007): 232–55. 12 Thomas White, The Grounds of Obedience and Government (London, 1655). On the problems related to the date of the first edition, see Southgate, ‘Thomas White’s Grounds of Obedience and Government: A Note on the Dating of the First Edition,’ Notes and Queries 28 (1981): 208–9.



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13 White, Grounds, 2–3. 14 Ibid., 9–10. 15 Ibid., 3. 16 Ibid., 22–3. 17 Ibid., 27–8. 18 Ibid., 45. 19 Ibid., 46. 20 Perez Zagorin, A History of Political Thought in the English Revolution (Bristol: Thoemmes, 1997), 90–1. 21 White, Grounds, 71. 22 Ibid., 72–3. 23 Ibid., 75. 24 Ibid., 75–6. 25 Ibid., 158–9. 26 Ibid., 161–2. For an analysis of the ‘mechanist’ component of Harrington’s Oceana, see Jonathan Scott, ‘The Rapture of Motion: James Harrington’s Republicanism,’ in Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain, ed. Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner, 139–63 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 27 See Digby, Two Treatises, in the one of which the nature of bodies, in the other the nature of man’s soul is looked into: in way of discovery of the immortality of reasonable souls (Paris, 1644), 227; and Descartes, Principia Philosophiae, in Descartes, Oeuvres, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1897–1913), 9:332. On the significance of the clock metaphor in seventeenth-century natural philosophy, see Laurens Laudan, ‘The Clock Metaphor and Probabilism: The Impact of Descartes on English Methodological Thought, 1650–65,’ Annals of Science 22 (1966): 73–104. 28 The manuscript chapter can be found in Additional Manuscripts 41846, 180r–81v, British Library, London,. The document is undated. 29 Ibid., 180r. 30 Ibid., 180v. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 White, Grounds, 109. 34 Ibid., 122–4. 35 See Nicholas Sander, De Visibili Monarchia Ecclesiae Libri Octo (Louvain, 1571), 56–78; R. Doleman [Robert Persons], A Conference about the next succession to the Crowne of Ingland (n.p., 1594), 72–4 and 203–14; Robert Bellarmine, Controversia de Summo Pontifice, in Bellarmine, Controversiae (Venice, 1603), 2:486–902. On the significance of Bellarmine’s doctrine of

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potestas papalis in temporalibus in the context of the debate over the Oath of Allegiance, see J.V. Gifford, ‘The Controversy over the Oath of Allegiance of 1606’ (D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford, 1971); Johann P. Sommerville, ‘Jacobean Political Thought and the Controversy over the Oath of Allegiance’ (PhD diss., University of Cambridge 1981); Sommerville, ‘From Suarez to Filmer: A Reappraisal,’ Historical Journal 25, no. 3 (1982): 525–40. On the doctrine of the potestas papalis in temporalibus, see Harro Höpfl, Jesuit Political Thought: The Society of Jesus and the State, c. 1540–1630 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 339; see also Stefania Tutino, Empire of Souls: Robert Bellarmine and the Christian Commonwealth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 36 White refuses to specify what exactly this means: he writes that damages to a private family or to a part of the commonwealth or a relatively light inconvenience, such as the imposition of a new tax, are not enough to justify resistance, and then he adds, ‘Nor doe I pretend, by these instances, to set any rule for enfranchising the subject; more then this, When evidently the tyranny of the Governour is greater than the mischiefe hazarded … for, this and this onely is the finall cause measuring all attempt, What is best for the People’ (Grounds, 110–15; White’s emphasis). 37 See Höpfl, Jesuit Political Thought, 239; Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 2:345–8; Sommerville, ‘From Suarez to Filmer.’ 38 White, Grounds, Dedicatory Epistle to Sir Kenelm Digby, unpaginated. 39 Ibid., 135. 40 Ibid., 151–2. 41 Ibid., 152. 42 See Quentin Skinner, ‘Conquest and Consent: Thomas Hobbes and the Engagement Controversy,’ in The Interregnum: The Quest for Settlement, 1646– 1660, ed. G.E. Aylmer, 79–98 (London: Macmillan 1972). 43 Quentin Skinner, ‘The Ideological Context of Hobbes’s Political Thought,’ Historical Journal 9, no. 3 (1966): 286–317; Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 1572–1651 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 320–2. 44 Roger Coke, Justice Vindicated from the false fucus put upon it, by Thomas White Gent., Thomas Hobbs, and Hugo Grotius. As also elemets of Power & Subjection; Wherein is demonstrated the Cause of all Humane, Christian, and Legal Society and as a previous Introduction to these, is shewed, The Method by which Men must necessarily attain Arts & Sciences (London, 1660). Coke’s arguments against White have been briefly analysed by Southgate, in ‘“That Damned Booke,”’ 247–8. 45 Coke, Justice Vindicated, 53.



Obedience and Consent

329

46 Ibid., 1–17. 47 Ibid., 17–18. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid., 3. 50 Ibid., 22–3. 51 See Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, s.v., ‘Assheton, William.’ 52 Evangelium Armatum (London, 1663), ‘Preface to the Reader,’ Ar–v. 53 Ibid., unpaginated. 54 Ibid., unpaginated. 55 Ibid., 53–9. 56 Ibid., 58. 57 For an analysis of Austin’s texts and of their treatment of Hobbes and White, see Jeffrey R. Collins, ‘Thomas Hobbes and the Blackloist Conspiracy of 1649,’ Historical Journal 45, no. 2 (2002): 305–31. 58 Richard Baxter, A Holy Commonwealth (London, 1659), 224. 59 Ibid., 311–22. 60 Ibid., 18–49. 61 Ibid., 21. The same concept of White’s being aberrant – in this sense – with respect to the other papists is expressed by Baxter in his A Key for Catholics (London, 1659); see his dedicatory epistle ‘To his Highness Richard Lord Protector of the Common-Wealth of England, Scotland and Ireland,’ unpaginated. 62 See John G.A. Pocock, ed., The Political Works of James Harrington (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 15. See also the discussion of Pocock’s definition in Jonathan Scott, ‘What Were Commonwealth Principles?’ Historical Journal 47, no. 3 (2004): 593–5. 63 Mark Goldie, ‘The Civil Religion of James Harrington,’ in The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe, ed. Anthony Pagden, 197–222 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1987); Jonathan Scott, Commonwealth Principles: Republican Writing of the English Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 284–93. 64 Jeffrey R. Collins, The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 114. 65 Anthony J. Brown, ‘Anglo-Irish Gallicanism, c. 1635–1685’ (PhD diss., University of Cambridge 2004), 85. 66 Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 117. 67 Kund Haakonssen, ‘Republicanism,’ in A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy, ed. Robert E. Goodin and Philip Pettit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 571. On the relationship between natural law theories and

330

Early Modern English Catholicism

republicanism, see also Scott, England’s Troubles: Seventeenth-Century English Political Instability in European Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 317 and ff; and Id., ‘Classical Republicanism in SeventeenthCentury England and the Netherlands,’ in Republicanism. A shared European Heritage, ed. Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner, 1:61–81 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 68 Scott, ‘What Were Commonwealth Principles,’ 593. 69 An example of such investigation of the religious dimension of Hobbes’s thought is Tuck, ‘The Civil Religion of Thomas Hobbes,’ in Phillipson and Skinner, Political Discourse, 120–38. On the religious elements in Thomas Hobbes’s philosophy, see also A.P. Martinich, The Two Gods of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes on Religion and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Quentin Skinner, ‘The Ideological Context of Hobbes’s Political Thought’; Stephen A. State, ‘Text and Context: Skinner, Hobbes and Theistic Natural Law,’ Historical Journal 28, no. 1 (1985): 27–50. 70 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 36–7. 71 See Andrew Norris, ‘Carl Schmitt’s Political Metaphysics: On the Secularization of the “Outermost Sphere,”’ Theory and Event 4, no. 1 (2000), https:// muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v004/4.1norris.html. I would like to thank Kirstie McClure and Andrew Norris for a number of conversations on Schmitt and Hobbes, from which I have learned a great deal. 72 Schmitt, Political Theology, 36–7. 73 Ibid., 33. 74 Ibid., 34.

Contributors

Anne Dillon is a member of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, and Honorary Research Fellow in the University of Exeter. She is the author of The Construction of Martyrdom in the English Catholic Community, 1535– 1603 (2002). Her most recent book, Michelangelo and the English Martyrs, is forthcoming from Ashgate in 2012. She is editor of Recusant History. Frances E. Dolan is professor of English at the University of California, Davis. She is the author of Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England, 1550–1700 (1994), Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture (1999), and Marriage and Violence: The Early Modern Legacy (2008). She has published numerous articles on early modern Catholicism and anti-Catholicism in collections and journals, including essays on Catholic women’s biographies (in English Literary Renaissance), why nuns are found funny (in the Huntington Library Quarterly), the gendering of Catholic space (in the Journal of Interdisciplinary History), attempts to blame Catholics for the Great Fire of London (in the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies), the association of witchcraft with Catholicism (in differences), and Catholicism as the undead (in The Impact of Feminism in English Renaissance Studies, ed. Dympna Callaghan). Her fourth book, True Relations: Reading, Literature, and Evidence in Seventeenth-Century England, is forthcoming from the University of Pennsylvania Press. Lowell Gallagher is associate professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Medusa’s Gaze: Casuistry and Conscience in the Renaissance (1991), co-editor, with Frederick S. Roden

332

Contributors

and Patricia J. Smith, of Catholic Figures, Queer Narratives (2006), and coeditor, with Shankar Raman, of Knowing Shakespeare: Senses, Embodiment, and Cognition (2010). He is completing a book on the uses of Lot’s wife in patristic and early modern texts and postmodern philosophy. Phebe Jensen is professor of English at Utah State University and the author of Religion and Revelry in Shakespeare’s Festive World (2009). Her current project is on time-reckoning in early modern England. Gary Kuchar is associate professor at the University of Victoria. He is the author of Divine Subjection: The Rhetoric of Sacramental Devotion in Early Modern England (2005), and The Poetry of Religious Sorrow in Early Modern England (2008). He has published articles in such journals as Modern Philology and English Literary Renaissance. His contribution to this volume was supported by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Arthur F. Marotti is Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at Wayne State University in Detroit. He is a specialist in English sixteenthand seventeenth-century literature and culture and has published three scholarly monographs in this field: John Donne, Coterie Poet (1986), Manuscript, Print and the English Renaissance Lyric (1995), and Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy: Catholic and Anti-Catholic Discourses in Early Modern England (2005). In addition, he has edited or co-edited eight collections of scholarly essays and has written numerous book chapters and articles. His ongoing research is in English manuscript poetry collections of the early modern era and early modern English Catholic literature and culture. He co-edited (with Ken Jackson) a recent collection of essays, Shakespeare and Religion: Early Modern and Postmodern Perspectives (2011). Susannah Monta is John Cardinal O’Hara, CSC, and Glynn Family Honors Associate Professor of English and editor of Religion and Literature at the University of Notre Dame. Her book Martyrdom and Literature in Early Modern England (2005) won the Book of the Year award from the MLAaffiliated Conference on Christianity and Literature. With Margaret W. Ferguson, she edited Teaching Early Modern English Prose (2010) and is preparing an edition of Anthony Copley’s A Fig for Fortune (1596), the first published response to Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, for Manchester University Press. Her current project, Sacred Echoes: Repetitive Prayer in Reformation-Era Poetics, examines the devotional and aesthetic



Contributors

333

uses of repetition in early modern prayer, poetry, and rhetoric. She has published articles on topics such as history plays, early modern women writers and patronesses, martyrology, hagiography, devotional poetry and prose, and providential narratives. Holly Crawford Pickett is associate professor of English at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. Her work on early modern English religion and drama has appeared in Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 and in several edited volumes. She is completing a book manuscript entitled The Drama of Serial Conversion in Early Modern England. Richard Rambuss is professor of English at Brown University. He is the author of Closet Devotions (1998) and Spenser’s Secret Career (1993), as well as essays on a wide range of early modern English authors and topics. His new critical edition of Richard Crashaw’s English poetry is forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press. Jennifer R. Rust is an assistant professor of English at Saint Louis University. Her research focuses on early modern English literature from the mid-sixteenth century to the civil wars of the seventeenth century. Additional research interests include Catholicism and martyrology in early modern England, political theology, and literary theory. She has published articles on Shakespeare and Spenser, and her translation (with David Pan of the University of California, Irvine) of Carl Schmitt’s Hamlet oder Hecuba: Der Einbruch der Zeit in das Spiel (Hamlet or Hecuba: The intrusion of the time into the play) was published in 2009. Her current book project traces the vicissitudes of the medieval concept of the corpus mysticum in political, theological, and literary discourses in postReformation England. Alison Shell teaches in the Department of English, University College London. She was formerly in the Department of English at Durham University and is the author of Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558–1660 (1999), and Oral Culture and Catholicism in Early Modern England (2007). Her most recent book is Shakespeare and Religion (2010). Stefania Tutino teaches in the departments of History and Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is interested in the intellectual, cultural, and political significance of Catholicism

334

Contributors

in early modern Europe. Her publications include Law and Conscience: Catholicism in Early Modern England, 1570–1625 (2007), Thomas White and the Blackloists (2008), and Empire of Souls: Robert Bellarmine and the Christian Commonwealth (2010).

Index

Page numbers in bold refer to illustrations. Abbot, Robert, 80n35 Abraham, Lyndy, 162, 165, 166–7, 168, 170, 174, 175 Adams, Robert Martin, 133 Adams, Thomas, 95 Agamben, Giorgio, 21 Agricola, Mikael, 39–40 Alabaster, William, 12, 13–14, 84, 86, 89, 91–4, 104, 105–6, 115, 116–28; kinematics of, 85–6, 92–4; Alabas­ ter’s Conversion, 91; Apparatus in Revelationem, 91, 92; Commentarius de Bestia Apocalyptica, 92; Seven Motives, 92, 109n36; Spiraculum tubarum, 92; Elisaeis, 117, 123–4, 125, 129n11 albedo, 168, 174 alchemy, 15, 92, 159–79, 179n1, 181n17, 182n37 allegory, 15–16, 159, 166–7, 176–9, 186–8, 191–2, 193–7, 203–4, 207– 8n35. See also Spenser, Edmund: The Faerie Queene alterity, 5–8, 21 Aquinas, St Thomas, 133, 252

Aristotle, 34, 90, 92, 94, 106, 310, 313, 318 Arnold, Matthew, 133 Aston, Margaret, 31, 34, 46n16, 48n26 Augustine, 36, 37, 116; City of God, 146; Confessions, 107n14; Retrac­ tiones, 116 aurality, 27–9 Bacon, Francis, 30, 36, 90, 110n51; Great Instauration, 96, 97, 101 Bargrave, John, 136 Baxter, Richard: Holy Commonwealth, 320–1 Beardsley, Aubrey, 133 Beaumont, Joseph, 141–3, 147, 152n13 Bedingfield, Henry, 287 Bellany, Alastair, 61, 62 Bellarmine, Robert, 19, 61, 316, 320 Belsey, Catherine, 64 Benedictine Rosary Confraternity of Our Lady of Power: Bedingfield reliquary, 285–7, 288, 289; Handbook, 273, 276, 280–5, 284, 289–91, 292–6; Stocker reliquary, 290 Besançon, Alan, 30

336 Book of Common Prayer (BCP), 36, 245–6, 253, 262 Book of Martyrs (Fox), 29, 263–4 Book of Sports, 216, 237–8n17 Bossy, John, 214, 223, 310, 311 Brooks, Peter, 74n2 Brown, Nancy Pollard, 161, 269n40 Browne, Sir Thomas: Religio Medici, 41–2 Bush, Douglas, 132–3 Caddey, Lawrence, 88 Calvin, John, 30–1, 32, 40, 92, 221, 222–3; Institutes of the Christian Reli­ gion, 29–30 Caraman, Philip, 56, 62 Cardigan House, 18–19, 273, 274–6, 280, 281–3, 284–5, 289, 297–8, 302n10, 308n99 Carew, Thomas, 149 Cartwright, William, 149 Cary, Elizabeth, 102, 104 Catesby, Robert, 54, 77n14 Cecil, Robert (Earl of Salisbury), 55, 60, 117, 196 Chamberlain, John, 91 Chapel of the Confraternity of the Rosary. See rosary, confraternity of Chillingworth, William, 12, 86, 89, 102–6; Religion of Protestants, 102 Christ, 6, 27, 64, 89, 95, 102, 118–19, 144, 159–60, 163–4, 166–9, 199, 215, 228, 229–30, 231, 234, 252, 256, 258, 279, 285, 287, 292; Annunciation, 277; body of, 7, 53; Ascension, 277; circumcision of, 137–9; Crown of Thorns, 119, 127, 287, 289; eyes of, 161, 172–4; Five Wounds, 119, 126–7; hermaphroditism of, 163, 171; images of, 32,

Index 33–5, 40, 46–48n20, 175–6; incarnation of, 43; Passion, 119, 127, 137, 278, 287, 296; Resurrection, 188–91, 202, 248 Christmas carol, 16–17, 213–35, 236n3, 239n37, 240–1n47 Cicero, 66, 107n14, 313 Coke, Edward, 55, 57, 58–9, 61, 63–4, 66–8, 73, 74n2, 80n35 Coke, Roger: Justice Vindicated, 318–20 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 135 Confession and Execution of Leticia Wig­ ington. See Wigington, Leticia confessional identity, 4, 10, 13, 14, 53, 68–73 conscience, 4, 67–8, 74n2, 88, 95, 102, 125–6, 189–90, 202, 256, 257, 298 Cooper, Thomas, 56 corpus mysticum, 7, 189. See also Christ, body of Council of Trent, 46–8n20, 279, 299 Counter-Reformation, 6–7, 18, 20, 39, 136, 141, 142, 150, 152n13, 186, 188–90, 203, 213–14, 222–3, 227, 257, 279, 280–1 Couvreur, Martin: The devotion of bond­ age, 292 Cowley, Abraham, 132, 136, 139, 149 Crashaw, Richard, 14, 132–50, 152– 3n13; ‘An Apology,’ 140–1; Carmen Deo Nostro, 140, 141, 144; ‘The Flaming Heart,’ 142–3; and queerness, 134; Sospetto d’Herode, 149; Steps to the Temple, 138, 139, 144–5, 148, 149, 150 Croft, Pauline, 61 Cromwell, Oliver, 20, 143, 298, 306n57, 309, 310, 311, 317, 320, 321



Index

Curtiss, Langley: True Protestant Mer­ cury, 69 de Certeau, Michel: The Mystic Fable, 7 de Dominis, Marc Antonio, 12, 85, 86, 88, 89–90, 94–5, 97, 99–101, 103, 104, 105; Euripus seu de fluxu et refluxu maris sentential, 97; The Rockes of Christian Shipwracke, 97, 98, 99–101 de Granada, Luis, 214, 227–8, 232, 246, 262 Denham, John, 149 Derrida, Jacques, 8 Descartes, René, 157n59, 314 Diehl, Houston, 29, 38 Digby, Sir Kenelm, 135, 146, 309, 311, 314, 315 Dillon, Anne, 18–19, 214, 232 Dolan, Frances E., 10–11, 232, 255 domesticity, 17–18, 38, 246–61, 264–5, 266n3, 281–2, 298 Donne, John, 14, 36–8, 40, 127–8, 133, 134, 138, 160, 178, 256; Anni­ versaries, 15, 160; Holy Sonnets, 37–8; Sermons, 36–7, 38, 40; Songs and Son­ nets, 15, 160 Dowsing, William, 143 Duffy, Eamon, 218 Durston, Chris, 214, 216 Eco, Umberto: Foucault’s Pendulum, 157n59 ecumenism, 85, 89–90, 91, 92, 94–5, 105 Edward VI, 46n16, 116 Edwards, Fr Francis, 63 Eire, Carlos, 35 Eliot, T.S., 133–4, 135, 145

337

Elizabeth I, 3, 4, 8, 16, 70, 99, 116, 117, 124, 129n11, 160–1, 170, 178, 186–7, 189–90, 196, 199–200, 204, 221, 224, 227, 245, 246, 249, 257, 280; and Christmas, 215, 216, 218, 228, 234–5; and idolatry debate, 33, 35, 38; and Jesuits, 185, 192–3, 195; royal chapel of, 31. See also Alabaster, William: Elisaeis England’s Helicon, 17, 218, 234, 235 Epictetus, 103; Encheiridion, 103 equivocation, 10–11, 53, 55, 63–4, 66–8, 72, 73, 75n4 Eucharist, 6–8, 28, 257, 263, 279, 297 Fawkes, Guy, 21n1, 54, 56, 77n15 Fenton, Roger, 93, 116, 120, 121, 123 Ferguson, Margaret, 64 Fletcher, Angus, 85 Floyd, John, 85; Survey, 100 Fludd, Robert, 92 Foucault, Michel, 28 Gallagher, Lowell, 155–6n48, 202 Gamaliel, 105 Gardiner, Stephen, 123–4; De vera obedientia, 124 Gardner, Helen, 127 Garnet, Henry, 11, 17, 18, 52–68, 70, 71, 73, 74n2, 75n5, 75n7, 76n8, 77n14, 77–8n17, 79n30, 252, 257, 258–9, 261–2, 270n45, 280, 281, 282; Societie of the Rosary, 280, 282; Treatise on Christian Renunciation, 252 Gerard, Fr John, 53–4, 55, 56, 57, 59, 62, 63, 65–6, 70, 77n30, 250–2, 257 Glover chasuble, 273, 285, 286, 296, 305n50 Gosse, Edmund, 132, 134

338

Index

‘Great Hodge Podge’ (Blundell), 227–8 Great Schism, 31 Greenblatt, Stephen, 7 Gregory I, 28, 31 Gregory XV, 94 Grierson, Herbert J.C., 134–5 Guinizelli, Guido, 172 Gunpowder Plot, 3, 4, 11, 52, 54, 56, 60–3, 71, 73, 75n4, 76–7n12, 274 Hall, Anne, 287, 308n100 Harding, Thomas, 29, 33–4 Harington, Sir John: ‘The Author to his Wife: a rule for praying,’ 40–1 Harrington, James, 19, 320, 321, 322 Harris, Benjamin: Domestic Intelligence, 72 Heal, Felicity, 223 Henrietta Maria, 135, 146, 282, 297, 299 Henry VIII, 3, 124, 215 Herbert, George, 14, 134, 136–7, 139, 142, 145, 148–50, 160, 176, 178, 179n1; ‘Sinnes round,’ 175–6; The Temple, 145, 148, 149, 176 Herman, Peter, 31 Herrick, Robert, 132, 138; Hesperides, 218 Hill, Lawrence, 72 Hobbes, Thomas, 19, 20, 90–1, 102, 106, 309, 317–25 Hodgetts, Michael, 57 ‘An Homily against the Perill of Idolatrie,’ 31–2, 38 Howard, Henry (Earl of Northampton), 60, 73 humanism, 6 Hutson, Lorna, 64 Hutton, Ronald, 215, 218

Hyde, Edward (First Earl of Clarendon), 104 iconoclasm, 31–2, 35–8, 40, 42, 43, 46n16, 49n29, 143 idolatry, 10, 27, 29–31, 35–44, 46n16, 46–8n20, 48–9n26, 206n24 Ignatius Loyola: Spiritual Exercises, 260 Innocent X, 135, 275 Jackson, Ken, 5, 7, 8 James I, 56, 66, 90, 117, 193, 225 Jardine, David, 62–3 Jensen, Phebe, 16–17 Jesuits (Society of Jesus), 4, 8, 9, 11, 17, 52–4, 57, 61, 66–8, 69, 75n4, 80n40, 105, 146, 177–8, 179n2, 185, 186, 188, 192–3, 195, 214, 229, 231–3, 248, 250–2, 255, 274, 276–7, 279–80, 284, 316, 319 Jewel, John, 29 Johnson, Lionel, 133 Johnson, Samuel, 139 Jones, Basset, 170 Jones, Inigo, 28–9 Jonson, Ben, 28–9; Bartholomew Fair, 35–6; ‘Christmas his Masque,’ 216 Joseph of Arimathea, 287 Jung, Carl, 168 Kele, Edmund, 221, 222, 227, 232; Christmas carolles newly Imprinted, 218, 219 King James, 94, 95, 99–100, 101, 216 King’s Book, 54–6, 63, 79n30. See also Gunpowder Plot Klawitter, George, 127 Knapp, James, 29 Krietzer, Beth, 221 Kuchar, Gary, 14–15



Index

Lacan, Jacques, 8 Lake, Peter, 30, 154 Laney, Benjamin, 146 Lemon, Rebecca, 75 Levinas, Emmanuel, 8 Lewalski, Barbara K., 49n30, 134 Linden, Stanton J., 151–3n13 Lloyd, David, 150 Longfellow, Erica, 265n3 Luther, Martin, 34, 39, 48n24, 221, 227 Magdalene, Mary, 141, 156n48, 186, 187, 188–90, 191–2, 201–2, 203, 206n16 Magnus, Albertus, 181n4 Maier, Michael: Atalanta fugens, 165, 170 Malcolm, Noel, 90, 94–5 map, 3–5, 9–10, 17, 23n13, 300; borders of, 4, 5, 14, 16, 20, 257, 265; margin and centre of, 5, 8, 11; as navigation metaphor, 12–13, 85–6, 95–105; portolan, 9 Marino, 150 Marion, Jean-Luc, 10, 20–1, 44 Marlowe, Christopher: Tamburlaine, 164 Marotti, Arthur F., 5, 7, 8, 10, 11, 20, 66, 67, 74–5n4, 232 Martin, Randall, 69 Martinich, A.P., 90 Marvell, Andrew, 134, 178 Mary I, 116 Mary Queen of Scots, 3, 15, 60, 186– 7, 195–204, 207–8n35, 224. See also Spenser, Edmund: The Faerie Queene Mathew, Sir Toby, 42 Maus, Katharine Eisaman, 64 McCoog, Thomas M., 56–7

339

Melancthon, Philip, 39 Middleton, Thomas: Game at Chess, 94 Milton, John, 14, 35, 38–9, 49n30, 138–9, 150; Paradise Lost, 14, 39, 41, 124, 149–50, 169; Poems, 149; ‘Upon the Circumcision,’ 138–9 modernity, 5, 7–8, 18, 20 Monta, Susanna, 17–18 Montaigne, Michel de: Travel Journal, 139–40 Monteagle letter: 65–6 Montrose, Louis, 49n29, 234 Moseley, Humphrey, 148 Murray, Molly, 125 Mush, John, 253–5, 257, 261; ‘Life of Margaret Clitherow,’ 253–5, 261 Nashe, Thomas: Summer’s Last Will and Testament, 218 national identity, 6, 17–18, 245–65 New Historicism, 5–6, 7 Newton, John, 73 Newtonian physics, 85, 106 Nicholls, Mark, 54, 63, 81n43 Nichols, John, 86, 87, 88–9 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 23n9, 44 nigredo, 168–9, 171, 174 O’Connell, Michael, 43 The Odyssey, 165 Oldcorne, Edward, 56, 57 Ong, Walter, 29 Overbury, Sir Thomas, 61–2 Ovid, 164 Owen, Louis: Unmasking of All Popish Monks, Friers, and Jesuits, 52 Owen, Nicholas, 56 palinode, 13, 115–16, 118, 120, 127– 8; definition of, 115–16

340

Index

Pallotta, Giovanni Battista, 135–6 papism, 4, 9, 77n16, 86, 88, 102–3, 118, 176, 188, 215, 217, 249, 319–21 Parry, Graham, 142 Pater, Walter, 133 Patrides, C.A., 135 Patterson, Annabel, 160 Paul, 87, 95, 105 Peck, Linda Levy, 60 Peripatetic school, 12, 90, 310 Perne, Andrew, 116 Persons, Robert, 19, 87, 88–9, 214, 316 Peter, 15, 143, 145, 147–8. See also Southwell, Robert: Saint Peters Com­ plaint Petersson, Robert T., 135, 152n13 Petrarch: Secretum, 37 Pickett, Holly Crawford, 12–13 Plato, 6, 33, 44, 107n14 Popish Plot, 11, 19, 52, 69–70, 71, 72, 73, 83n57, 274, 300 Praz, Mario, 134 presence, 6–7, 40, 42, 44, 166 Proctor, Sir Steven, 61 Questier, Michael, 54 Racster, John, 93–4, 116, 120, 121, 122, 123; A booke of the Seven Planets, 93 Rainolds, John, 125 Rainolds, William, 125 Rambuss, Richard, 14 Reid, David, 134, 152n13 republicanism, 19–20, 35, 83n59, 320–5 Ricks, Christopher, 149 Ricoeur, Paul, 83n61

Ridgeway, Elizabeth, 73 Ripley, George, 162, 166, 173 Rogers, Thomas: Imitatio, 251 Romanism, 5, 6, 10, 12 rosary, 18, 36, 278, 279, 289, 290–7, 299; confraternity of, 18, 273, 275–7, 278, 279–85, 287, 291, 300, 304n32; history of, 277–8. See also Benedictine Rosary Confraternity of Our Lady of Power; Cardigan House Rowse, A.L., 91 Ruland, Martin: Lexicon of Alchemy, 163 Ruskin, John, 133 Rust, Jennifer, 15–16 Sadler, Thomas Vincent, 273, 275, 276, 280, 282, 285, 291, 292, 293, 296 St Peter’s Cathedral, 39 Sander, Nicholas, 19, 33, 316; Trea­ tise of the Images of Christ and of his Saints, 33, 46n20 Schmitt, Carl, 20–1, 323–5 secularization, 5, 7, 8, 13, 20, 190, 249, 323–4 Shakespeare, William, 37–8, 42, 43, 122, 147, 163–4, 181n17; As You Like It, 226; King John, 172; Mac­ beth, 64; Measure for Measure, 4–5; A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 34, 219; Venus and Adonis, 177, 181n17; The Winter’s Tale, 43 Shann, Richard, 224, 225, 226, 232 Shapiro, Barbara, 64 Shell, Alison, 13–14, 66, 140–1, 190–1, 255 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 132 Shirley, James, 149



Index

Simonds, Peggy Munoz, 164 Skelton, John, 164 Skinner, William, 264 Slatyer, William: Psalmes, or Songs of Sion, 219 Smith, Samuel: An Account of the Be­ haviour of the Fourteen Late Popish Malefactors, whil’st in Newgate, 71 Southwell, Robert, 14–16, 17–18, 128, 159–79, 179n1, 181n17, 185–8, 190–204, 205n13, 214, 224, 228, 231, 233, 247, 250, 255–65, 269n40; ‘At Home in Heaven,’ 255–6; ‘The Burning Babe,’ 178; ‘Decease, Release (Dum Morior Orior),’ 197–8; A Humble Supplication to Her Majesty, 167–8; Marie Magdalenes Funerall Teares, 16, 186–7, 188–9, 191, 202; Saint Peters Complaint, 14–15, 159–84, 191; Short Rule for Good Life, 17–18, 247, 256–65; ‘A Vale of Tears,’ 178 Spenser, Edmund, 15, 16, 163, 186, 190, 191, 193, 195, 199, 200, 234; Amoretti, 191, 206–7n24; The Faerie Queene, 15, 38, 185–91, 192–204; Foure Hymnes, 190–1 Stesichorus, 115 Stoicism, 12, 56, 103–4, 105–6 Stonley, Richard, 216 Story, G.M., 127 Strier, Richard, 136–7 Suckling, John, 149 Sweeney, Anne, 8, 192–3, 205n13, 206n16 Tertullian, 30 Tesimond, Oswald, 54, 57, 66, 74n3, 79n30 Thomism, 20, 313

341

Thompson, Francis, 133 torture, 54, 55–8, 185 treason, 3–4, 11, 55, 58, 65–73, 76n10, 76–7n12, 79n30, 169, 186, 207n30, 249. See also Gunpowder Plot; Popish Plot; A True and Perfect Relation Tresham, Francis, 56, 63, 65, 67, 81n43, 274 Tridentine doctrine, 9, 18, 213, 257, 280, 281, 297 Trismosin, Salomon: Splendor Solis, 165 A True and Perfect Relation, 11, 53–68, 71, 73, 75n4, 76n10, 77n17, 78n26, 83n57 Tudor, Mary, 3, 4, 16, 186; regime of, 187, 190, 192–3, 203–4, 220 Tutino, Stefania, 19–20 Tuve, Rosemond, 134 Tyrrell, Anthony, 85, 87, 88 uroboros, 175–6 Valentine, Basil, 168 Vattimo, Gianni, 8, 23n9 Vaughan, Henry, 149; ‘Cock Crowing,’ 171 Virgin Mary, 31, 220–1, 223, 227, 229, 232, 233, 276, 277–8, 279, 280, 283–7, 292–9, 304n29 visuality, 28–30, 32–3 Waldegrave, Robert, 247 Waller, Edmund, 149 Wallerstein, Ruth, 133 Warnke, Frank J., 134 Warren, Austin, 134 Weber, Max, 5, 20, 23n9 Whigs, 5 White, Thomas, 19, 309–25; Grounds of Obedience and Government, 19,

342

Index

311–12; natural philosophy of, 310, 311–15, 317–24 Wigington, Leticia, 11, 68–73 Wilde, Oscar, 133, 134 Williams, George Walton, 133 Wright, Thomas, 116

Wriothesley, Henry (Earl of Southampton), 147 Yates, Julian, 187 Zwinglianism, 28