The Transferable Power of Polemic: Antoine Arnauld’s Arrainment of the whole societie of Jesuites in Fraunce (1594) and Anti-Jesuit Sentiment in France and England
Carol Baxter
On 12 and 13 July 1594, the barrister Antoine Arnauld appeared before the Parlement de Paris on behalf of the University of Paris to argue against the Jesuits gaining teaching rights in the city. Arnauld’s speech was printed in Paris shortly afterwards as the Plaidoyé de M. Antoine Arnauld advocat en parlement, et cy devant conseiller & procureur general de la defuncte roine mere des roys: pour l’Université de Paris demanderesse, contre les Jesuites demandeurs, des 12 & 13 juillet 1594. The text was quickly translated into English and printed that same year, 1594, by the London printer Charles Yetsweirt as The Arrainment of the whole societie of Jesuites in Fraunce; holden in the honorable Court of Parlement in Paris, the 12. and 13. of July 1594. The English translation was subsequently acquired by James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh, the Church of Ireland’s leading seventeenth-century theologian and an avid book collector. It formed part of the Ussher collection donated by King Charles II in 1661 to Trinity College where it continues to be held today.1 The Arrainment is the unique example of a French text written to defend the rights of one monarch, which was translated into English possibly on the orders of a second monarch, and which was donated to Trinity College Library as the gift of a third. ______1. Bernard Meehan, ‘The Manuscript Collection of James Ussher’, in Treasures of the Library: Trinity College Dublin, ed. by Peter Fox (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy, 1986), pp. 97–110 (p. 107). I would like to thank Stephanie Breen of the Department of Early Printed Books at Trinity College Library for her assistance in identifying this translation as belonging to the Ussher collection.
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The presence of The Arrainment of the whole societie of Jesuites in Fraunce in the collection of Trinity College Library raises a number of questions which merit examination. What are the factors that could potentially render a book transferable from one culture to another? Which variables persuade a printer to have a specific book translated and printed? How significant for translation is the perception of shared interests among readers capable of spanning the barriers posed by different linguistic traditions and historical realities? Even if author, printer and reader share common interests, in what ways does a book resonate differently in a new culture from the one in which it was written? Does the change of reader inevitably transform the translated work into a fundamentally different artefact from the original publication? Do the decisions of printer and collector reflect the prejudices of the society in which they are operating or are they instead the expression of openness to another culture? This article will draw on the specific case of Antoine Arnauld’s Plaidoyé to examine issues of cross-cultural transferability, to explore what these issues reveal about the societies in which a text is written, translated and circulated. By the time that he was chosen by the University of Paris to represent it in this case over teaching rights, mentioned above, Antoine Arnauld (1560–1619) was already renowned for his oratorical skills and regularly chosen to make the formal presentations of great officers of the realm to the Parlement de Paris.2 Arnauld, born into a Huguenot family, had converted to Catholicism with his father following the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre. He deliberately aligned himself with Henri de Bourbon’s cause and expressed his support for the latter’s claim to the French throne through a series of polemical pamphlets written in the period between
______2. Alexander Sedgwick, The Travails of Conscience: The Arnauld Family and the Ancien Regime (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 19–21.
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the assassination of Henri III in 1589 and Henri IV’s coronation in 1594.3 The aim of the pamphlets was twofold: to advocate Henri de Bourbon’s right to the French crown, and to attack the attempts by Philip II of Spain and by the Jesuits to prevent Henri from ascending the French throne because of his Huguenot faith. Arnauld’s polemics reflect the vibrant polemical tradition of early modern France and, in particular, the pamphlet war waged during the years of the Holy League.4 Arnauld used his pamphlets to argue strongly in support of the divine right of the king, in defence of Gallicanism and in opposition to ultramontanism and to Spanish involvement in French affairs. Through his pamphlets, Arnauld gained a reputation as an erudite Gallican who combined a strong belief in an absolutist monarchy with an equally strong belief in the rights of the Parlement de Paris. Like Étienne Pasquier in his Catéchisme des Jésuites, Arnauld articulated an institutional vision in which the absolutist monarch was complemented by the Parlement which had a specific role in implementing particular areas of the king’s authority such as the administration of justice. 5 It is worth noting that recourse to
______3. The principal pamphlets are La Premiere Philippique. À la France (1592); La Seconde Philippique. À la France (1592); LA FLEUR De LYS. Qui est le Discours d’un françois retenu dans Paris, sur les impietez & desguisemens contenus au manifeste d’Espagne publié au mois de janvier dernier 1593 (1593) and L’ANTIESPAGNOL, et exhortation de ceux de Paris qui ne se veulent faire espagnols: à tous les françois do leur party, de se remettre en l’obeissance du Roy Henry 4. & se delivrer de sa tyrannie de Castille (1593). 4. Jeffrey K. Sawyer, Printed Poison: Pamphlet Propaganda, Faction Politics and the Public Sphere in Seventeenth-Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 26. Carlos M. N. Eire describes as ‘enormous’ the number of polemical tracts produced in France in the early modern period. Carlos M. N. Eire, ‘Early Modern Catholic Piety in Translation’, in Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Peter Burke and Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 83–100 (p. 96). 5. See Robert Descimon, ‘Chastel’s Attempted Regicide (27 December 1594) and its Subsequent Transformation into an “Affair”’, in Politics and Religion in Early Bourbon France, ed. by Alison Forrestal and Eric Nelson (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 86–110 (p. 95).
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Gallicanism was not restricted exclusively to those supporting Henri IV, however. As Sophie Nicholls has demonstrated, polemicists defending the Catholic League also anchored their arguments in the defence of Gallican liberties.6 Arnauld’s pamphlets were explicitly intended for a French audience and, therefore, celebrate French liberties, the prowess of the French nobility and the legitimacy of the Bourbon dynasty. His polemics were part of a trend to shift the blame for the conflict over Henri’s succession onto his foreign enemies, and to transform into Spaniards those members of the Catholic League who continued to resist his right to the throne. In similar fashion, Pomponne de Bellièvre in his Avertissement sur la conversion de Henry de Bourbon IIII (1593) vastly inflated Spanish ambitions towards France so as to lessen the domestic aspect of the conflict between Henri IV and the League.7 Arnauld’s Plaidoyé, on the other hand, was ostensibly created for a narrower audience, the legal officers of the Parlement de Paris. His speech was produced for a specific legal purpose. The speech is the intervention of a barrister on behalf of his client, the plaintiff in a narrow legal case, against named respondents, the Jesuits. Nonethe- less, notwithstanding the narrow legal circumstances for which Arnauld’s text was designed, it obviously attracted the interest of Charles Yetsweirt and was considered by him to enjoy sufficient commercial potential to persuade him to have it translated into English and to print it in London. How could a text produced for such an ostensibly legal purpose have been considered commercially lucrative by an English printer? One possibility, suggested by Eric Nelson, is that Arnauld used this legal case to make the broader argument that the Jesuits should be expelled from France because they, as an institution, actively sought to undermine the laws and ______6. Sophie Nicholls, ‘Gallican Liberties and the Catholic League’, History of European Ideas, 40.7 (2014), 940–64. 7. Michael Wolfe, The Conversion of Henry IV: Politics, Power and Religious Belief in Early Modern France (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 170.
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customs of the French state and because they advocated theories of tyrannicide which threatened the life of the monarch.8 So Arnauld’s speech represented a novel and controversial argument, for that time, presenting a specific religious group, in this case the Jesuits, as a direct threat to the state. The speech quickly became notorious in Paris, being printed within days of his intervention before the Parlement and becoming a cause célèbre in Paris.9 However, an issue that might be considered controversial in one society might not necessarily gain the same level of interest in another. Which factors made this particular text so transferable to an English audience? Does the translation of Arnauld’s text reflect the operation of the concept of cultural transfer as developed by Michel Espagne and Michael Werner? Cultural transfer examines the context both of the society in which the text is written and that for which it is translated. Espagne and Werner have argued that for cultural transfer to be successful, the translated text must fulfil a certain role within the ideological system of the society for which it is translated. The material transferred represents an ideological instrument that operates, once translated, within a certain political and social reality. For Espagne and Werner, the act of translation in a certain ideological constellation is as important as the content of the work translated. Saskia Wiedner has drawn on Espagne and Werner’s work to argue that the importance of a translated text is centred on the interdependence of its content and the historical situation in which the text has been translated, as the translation becomes inscribed in the network of discourses of its time. 10 Peter Burke has argued that ______8. Eric Nelson, The Jesuits and the Monarchy: Catholic Reform and Political Authority in France (1590–1615) (Aldershot: Ashgate; Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 2005), p. 30. 9. Nelson, The Jesuits and the Monarchy, p. 36. 10. Michel Espagne and Michael Werner, ‘La Construction d’une référence culturelle allemande en France: Genèse et histoire (1750–1914)’, Annales E.S.C., 42 (1987), 969– 92; cited in Saskia S. Wiedner, ‘Melchiorre Cesarotti Fanatismo ossia Maometto profeta: tragedia di Voltaire (1742) — la traduction italienne de la tragédie voltairienne Le Fanatisme ou Mahomet le prophète (1741)’, in Cultural Transfer through
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translation inevitably involves processes of decontextualization and of recontextualization for the recipient audience. He reminds us that the choice as to which texts will be translated reflects the priorities of the recipient culture. Burke has identified two broad principles which govern decisions as to which works will be selected for translation. One principle is that a translation must address a gap in the recipient culture. The second is what he calls the principle of confirmation, according to which people in a recipient culture choose to translate works that support ideas or assumptions or prejudices already present in that culture. 11 Barry Murnane has argued, in this context, that processes of translation may be transnational in nature but that they also serve local aims.12 The decision to print an English version of the Plaidoyé illustrates the ease with which pamphlets intended for a French audience crossed national frontiers and found an English audience, notwithstanding the different political and religious situation of England. As such, it confirms Geoffrey Baldwin’s argument as to the popularity in translation of texts concerning monarchy and raison d’état in the early modern period and their success in moving across borders. Baldwin ascribes their success in permeating national boundaries to the universality of such themes given, on the one hand, the importance of the monarch in early modern Europe and the commonality, on the other, of themes relating to raison d’état, such as that of preserving a state at times of danger.13 These texts were also part of a trend of translating continental works for an English audience. Peter Burke has pointed to the popularity in England
Translation: The Circulation of Enlightened Thought in Europe by Means of Translation, ed. by Stefanie Stockhorst (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), pp. 83–102 (pp. 83, 96). 11. Peter Burke, ‘Cultures of Translations in Early Modern Europe’, in Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe, pp. 7–38 (pp. 20, 38). 12. Barry Murnane, ‘Uncanny Translations, Uncanny Productivity: Walpole, Schiller and Kahlert’, in Cultural Transfer through Translation, pp. 141–65 (p. 164). 13. Geoffrey P. Baldwin, ‘The Translation of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe’, in Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe, pp. 101–24 (pp. 114–17, 124).
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between 1560 and 1660 of translations of French works. 14 H.S. Bennett has similarly argued that treatises articulating anti-Spanish sentiment were generally popular with English audiences while books dealing with the wars in France were also often profitable for printers.15 Nonetheless, the decision to print the Plaidoyé is remarkable for a number of reasons. While the polemic’s subject was explicitly French, Yetsweirt printed the text in a quintessentially English style, using black letter font which was the preferred font for texts denoting authority (i.e. religious and legal documents). 16 The text was also granted a royal privilege by Elizabeth I. It was, therefore, presented to its English audience as authoritative and as licensed by the Company of Stationers. Equally remarkable is the speed at which the English edition was published. Arnauld’s appearance before the Parlement took place on 12 and 13 July 1594. The fact that Yetsweirt had Arnauld’s text translated and printed in England within the year indicates that the English text was produced within a very tight timescale. Yetsweirt had less than six months in which to become aware of the publication of the work in French, to acquire the text, to translate it and to print it in English. This suggests that he either had access to religious or intellectual circles in Paris, or was specifically commissioned by persons who were monitoring religious or political developments in France. His position makes either hypothesis plausible. A Flemish émigré, he held an official position at Elizabeth I’s court as a ‘Clerk of the signet’ and was appointed in 1590 as a ‘Secretary for the
______14. Burke, ‘Cultures of Translations in Early Modern Europe’, p. 23. 15. H. S. Bennett, English Books and Readers 1558 to 1603: Being a Study in the History of the Book Trade in the Reign of Elizabeth I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), pp. 274–75. 16. See Sabrina Alcorn Baron, ‘Red Ink and Black Letter: Reading Early Modern Authority’, in The Reader Revealed, compiled and edited by Sabrina Alcorn Baron with Elizabeth Walsh and Susan Scola (Washington DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 2001), pp. 19–30 (pp. 25–26).
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French tongue’, that is as an official translator for the queen.17 He may, therefore, have had access to religious and political circles within France. However, since he was only an occasional printer, it seems unusual that he would have taken the decision to translate and print Arnauld’s text of his own initiative. Instead, it is likely that the English court became aware of the text through its intelligence networks in France and that a decision was taken officially to have the text translated and printed in England. Yetsweirt, as the official translator and as a printer, was the obvious choice for this task. I would suggest that he was officially commissioned to produce an English version of Arnauld’s text. It is possible that the reason why Elizabeth’s court wished the text to be made available in English was precisely because of Arnauld’s novel attack on the Jesuits as spies for Spain and as institutionally guilty of tyrannicide.18 The importance of the text as an attack on the Jesuits is evident from the subtitle chosen by Yetsweirt for his English version: Wherein is laied open to the world, that, howsoever this new Sect pretendeth matter of Religion. Yet their whole travailes, endevours, and bent, is but to set up the kingdome of Spaine, and to make him the only monarch of all the west. The French title describes the pamphlet from the point of view of its legal purpose. It indicates that the text contains Arnauld’s pleadings on behalf of his client, the University of Paris, against the Jesuits. However, the English subtitle advertises to its English readers that the aim of the pamphlet is show that the ______17.
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Jesuits are working to advance the interests of the Spanish king. The subtitle is explicit, therefore, as to the intention of the English text to present the Jesuits as treasonous agents of the Spanish king. Yetsweirt includes a preface — not present in the French version — which builds on the message of the subtitle to emphasize the active role played by the Jesuits as fomenters of treason against royal authority. The preface states that the Jesuits have, in sermons and confessions, launched attacks ‘with their venomous tongues’ ‘against the memorie of the late king, & against the Kings Majestie that now reigneth’. Moreover, the Jesuits ‘have kindled the fire of sedition in all the chiefe townes of the Realme’.19 Yetsweirt deliberately makes clear from the very start that the Jesuits will be represented in the text as agents of sedition and treason. While the references are to Jesuit attacks on Henri III and Henri IV of France and to the Jesuits’ putative role in encouraging French towns to rebel against their monarch, the potential resonances in an English context are clear. If the aim of the Jesuits is to advance the interests of the king of Spain, they will be prepared also to attack a legitimate monarch, such as Elizabeth I, and to set her people against her. The threat posed by the Jesuits to the very life of the monarch is also made explicit in the preface, which alleges that the Jesuits are guilty of attempts to murder the king. They have ‘attempted to murder the king by the hands of one Barriere’ (AJF 2), referring to Pierre Barrière’s assassination attempt on Henri IV of 27 August 1593. Recent scholarship has suggested that the Jesuits were falsely blamed for encouraging assassination attempts on Henri IV. Robert Descimon has argued, for instance, that the Jesuits were not behind Jean Chastel’s attempt on Henri in 1594, but that the polemical attacks on
______19. Antoine Arnauld, The Arrainment of the whole societie of Jesuites in Fraunce; holden in the honorable Court of Parlement in Paris, the 12. and 13. of July 1594. Wherein is laied open to the world, that, howsoever this new Sect pretendeth matter of Religion. Yet their whole travailes, endevours, and bent, is but to set up the kingdome of Spaine, and to make him the only monarch of all the West. Cum privilegio regiæe maiestatis (London: Charles Yetsweirt, 1594), p. 2, hereafter AJF in the text.
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them are emblematic of the trend to scapegoat the Jesuits for such attacks.20 However, Arnauld’s accusation that the Jesuits had encour- aged assassination attempts against a monarch is likely to have carried particular potency in England in 1594, as it came immediately in the wake of an alleged assassination attempt on Elizabeth I. Her physician, Rodrigo Lopez, had been executed in January 1594 on charges of being a Spanish agent and of having tried to poison Elizabeth.21 The preface draws on the language of witchcraft to explain the Jesuits’ apparent skill at convincing the people of their arguments. It accuses them of enchanting ‘the people (whom they had to this day bewitched with their sorceries and enchantements)’ (AJF 3). By employing the language of enchantment and witchcraft, it seeks both to play to contemporary fears as to the potency of witchcraft and to suggest that the Jesuits’ actions are diabolic in nature. What is especially dangerous is that the Jesuits are seeking to use these practices to ‘subject all Europe to the thraldome of Spaine’ (AJF 3). While the immediate threat to England posed by Spain would have receded in the aftermath of the Armada’s failure in 1588, it is likely that the notion of powerful agents working for the cause of Spain would still have inspired frissons of fear in an English audience in 1594. The preface thus sets up the essential components of a visceral representation of the Jesuits carefully designed to play on English fears. The representation is of a sect equipped with diabolic skills, ready to kill a monarch so as to subject her or his people to the servitude of Spanish rule. The tension between the respective audiences for the English preface and for Arnauld’s own original text is immediately apparent in the opening paragraphs of Arnauld’s work. The latter, intended for a French audience, begins with a patriotic sentiment regretting the damage to the greatness of the French crown occasioned by the civil ______20. Descimon, ‘Chastel’s Attempted Regicide’, p. 92. 21. Gary K. Waite, ‘Re-Imagining Religious Identity: the Moor in Dutch and English Pamphlets 1550–1620’, Renaissance Quarterly, 66.4 (2013), 1250–95 (p. 1255).
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war in France. Arnauld opens his statement to the Parlement de Paris by asking his audience to consider the greatness that the French crown might have attained if it had not been for the ‘civil dissentions’ and for the loss of the ‘flower of so many valiant men’ (AJF 3). This is a repetition of an earlier lament in his polemic La Premiere Philippique of 1592 for the loss to France of so many courageous compatriots as a result of this war (‘tant de braves compatriotes qui nous perdons tous les jours en la defense de nostre patrie’).22 In the Arrainement, he blames the Jesuits for blowing the bellows of a fire ‘wherewith this Monarchie hath bin almost wasted and consumed’ (AJF 3). Predictably the preface, tailored as it is to an English audience, does not mention the sufferings inflicted on the French people, a theme which would have resonated more powerfully with French readers. Arnauld’s polemics are drenched in the celebration of French patriotism and it is notable that this text is the one in which this idea features least prominently. French greatness is evoked only in a reference in which Arnauld argues that the French will revere the pope as Holy Father if he recognizes the French king as his eldest son and chief king of Christendom (AJF 7). That reference occurs as part of an argument that obedience to the pope is conditional on the latter’s attitude to the French king rather than as a celebration of French greatness in its own right. Patriotism features much more prominently in his earlier polemics. In L’ANTIESPAGNOL, Arnauld celebrates the French crown as the oldest and most august of all of those on earth. 23 La Premiere Philippique and La Seconde Philippique attacking Philip II of Spain are explicitly dedicated to France. He chooses LA FLEUR DE LYS as the title for another polemic, deliberately evoking the symbol of France and of its monarchy. In L’ANTIESPAGNOL, Arnauld repeatedly celebrates the warrior-like quality of the French nobility, referring for example to
______22. Arnauld, La Premiere Philippique. À la France, p. 4. 23. Arnauld, L’ANTIESPAGNOL, pp. 12–13.
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‘ces enfans de sainct Louys, de cette race guerriere qui ne peut mourir qu’au milieu des grandes batailles’.24 Led by their king, these nobles have fought to rescue the French from becoming slaves of Spain; they are ‘ces braves Gentils-hommes, qui depuis quatre ans ont continuellement la cuirasse sur le dos, sans lesquels & la conduite de ce grand Roy, vray Alexandre François, nous serions tous miserables esclaves de l’Espagnol’.25 Another trope which is less prominent in the Arrainement than in his other texts is the celebration of the warrior-like qualities of Henri IV and of the Bourbon family. In his earlier polemics, Arnauld creates a mythology of Henri as a heroic warrior of a stature equal to the heroes of antiquity. In L’ANTIESPAGNOL, Henri is ‘cét Alexandre François’. 26 In La Premiere Philippique, ‘cest Hercule François’, ‘ce Roy indomptable’.27 In L’ANTIESPAGNOL, Arnauld goes on to celebrate the martial qualities of the Bourbons, who, he claims, have been involved in every major battle since the time of St Louis. They have cemented their claim to the throne through their readiness to spill their blood in defence of the realm: ‘[Ils] ont conservé au pris de leur sang ceste couronne.’28 However, the warrior-like abilities of Henri, of the Bourbons and of the French warrior class generally would not have been welcomed by an English audience, particularly in 1594. The text would have appeared at a turning point in the relationship between Elizabeth I and Henri IV. Elizabeth had supported Henri IV with troops in his battle against the Spanish-backed Catholic League to secure the French throne. However, his conversion to Catholicism in 1593 had altered the dynamic of that relationship, triggering English suspicions that this might change his attitude towards England. 29 ______24. Arnauld, L’ANTIESPAGNOL, pp. 8–9. 25. Arnauld, LA FLEUR DE LYS, pp. 165–84 (p. 183). 26. Arnauld, L’ANTIESPAGNOL, p. 21. 27. Arnauld, La Premiere Philippique, p. 75. 28. Arnauld, L’ANTIESPAGNOL, pp. 15-16. 29. R. B. Wernham, After the Armada: Elizabethan England and the Struggle for Western Europe 1588–1593 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 492.
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Elizabeth was also worried that Henri might seek to marry the Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia, daughter of Philip II of Spain, and thereby unify the Spanish and French thrones, potentially against England. Indeed, in late 1593, Henri had sent an emissary, La Varenne, on a secret mission to Spain to look into Spanish proposals for peace, including a possible marriage to the Infanta.30 Consequently, the text would have appeared at a time in which Elizabeth and her counsellors were engaged in considering whether or not to withdraw English troops from France, reflecting the cooling of the relationship between Elizabeth and Henri. A text extolling the military skill of Henri or of his nobility would have added to English fears at the potential potency of France as a threat to England if France were to enter an alliance with Spain. Equally, Arnauld’s attacks on the concept of female rule would not have played well to an English audience. Those opposing the Catholic League’s initiative to offer the French crown to the Infanta, based on her claim through her mother, Élisabeth de Valois, used the falsified Salic Law to argue that a woman could not assume the French throne. Predictably, Arnauld sought in his earlier polemics to combat the initiative to offer the French throne to a Spanish claimant by attacking the idea that a woman should be offered the French crown. The manner in which he undermined the Infanta’s claim was deeply misogynistic. Rather than attacking the notion of a non-French claimant assuming the French throne, he attacked female rule more broadly. Thus, in La Second Philippique, he questioned the idea that a woman should have authority over men. He denigrated the idea of female rule as rule by ‘femmelettes’.31 He also trivialized the manner in which symbols of nationhood and kingship might be used if placed in the hands of a woman. Notoriously, he asked if Philip II intended that the Infanta should believe that the oil of anointing was for dressing her hair. Equally, he asked whether Philip planned to give
______30. Wernham, After the Armada, pp. 502–05. 31. Arnauld, La Seconde Philippique, p. 6.
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the fleur de lys to her as a bouquet.32 It is likely that arguments which sought to undermine the Infanta’s claim to the throne by depicting women as interested only in adornment and as unable to understand the duties and responsibilities of queenship would have played especially negatively with Elizabeth I. A polemic denigrating female rule would have resonated very badly in a society ruled by a woman. It is not surprising, therefore, that Arnauld’s Philippiques were not immediately translated into English, even though their visceral attacks on Philip II as a tyrant should have been highly attractive to an English audience. It is notable that the issue of female rule is addressed only obliquely in the Arrainement. Arnauld mentions the Salic Law only once, saying that Cardinal Plaisance, the papal legate sent by Pope Clement VIII in 1592, had tried to subvert ‘the Salique law, the true Palladion of France, and without which, the Flower de Lys, could never have amounted to so high a degree of honour and glorie’ (AJF 8). Arnauld therefore uses the classical allusion to Palladion to evoke the idea that the safety of the realm depends on Salic Law, but does not expand the reference to an attack on the notion of female rule more broadly. The Arrainement focuses instead on an issue on which both English and French readers were likely to be in agreement, namely the danger posed by the Jesuits. He repeatedly describes them as ‘spials of Spaine’ (see, for example, AJF 25). He lists the Spanish ambassadors and agents of Spain — Mendoza, Daguillon, Diego, Divarra, Taxis and Feria — who have had ‘secret meetings and assemblies’ among the Jesuits. Arnauld makes the Jesuits seem all the more sinister by suggesting that they pursue their objectives by stealth. The idea of secrecy is repeated to great rhetorical effect. They have ‘crept into the university of Paris’ and have established themselves there by stealth (AJF 9). He equates the secret conspir- acies supposedly undertaken by the Jesuits with Catiline’s unsuccess- ______32. Arnauld, La Seconde Philippique, p. 9.
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ful attempt to overthrow the Roman republic in 63–62 BC: ‘What tongue, what voice is sufficient to expresse the secrete Counsails, the most horrible conspiracies, more daungerous then the conspiracie of Catiline, which was holden in their College in S. James Streete, and in their Church in S. Antonies streete’ (AJF 9). The impression is thus created of the enemy within, of an early modern terrorist force operating to undermine the realm and to hand it over to a hostile power. Arnauld’s rhetoric dehumanizes the Jesuits so as to render them more threatening to his audience. He refers to them as ‘huge and mightie swarmes’ (AJF 5). He stresses their rapid growth in size and in wealth to underline the scale of the threat that they pose to the French state. The idea of a rapidly growing, wealthy force is combined with the message that they are quickly infiltrating the upper echelons of the Catholic Church and are within reach of the papal crown. The message is implicit that once they control the papacy, they will also seek to control the entire Catholic Church:
[T]here are between nine and ten thousand of them, and have already founded two hundred and four score Spanish Colonies, they possesse in revenues above two thousand millions of gold, they are Lords of Erledoms and great Baronies in Spaine, and in Italy, and attained already to ye dignitie of Cardinals, readie to be made Popes. (AJF 5)
Arnauld therefore communicates the message that the Jesuits are a powerful, rich and secret force. The danger of such a powerful force is all the greater as it is focused on advancing Spanish interests. He stresses that the Jesuits’ ambition is to take away the French crown from Henri IV and to give it to Philip II just as they earlier conspired to secure the crown of Portugal for Spain: ‘then by might and maine to take away from him [Henri IV] the Crowne of France, which their desire is to subject and unite to Spaine, as they have done Portingall’ (AJF 29). He alleges that the Jesuit, Mathieu, had actually caused a
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letter to be issued by the Sixteen on 2 November 1591 giving the kingdom of France to Philip II (AJF 10–11). Arnauld presents the Jesuits as fanatical agents of a foreign monarch who are bound by oath to pray daily for the king of Spain while having no corresponding obligation to pray for the French king. Playing on the fears generated by their fanatical obedience to their superior general, Arnauld extrapolates provocatively from his description of their vow of loyalty to their superior to suggest the potential danger to France of that fanatical loyalty. If their Spanish superior were to ask them to kill the French king, he alleges, they would do so. The danger, he emphasizes, is not hypothetical, proceeding to cite examples of their involvement in specific attempts against the king’s life. Thus, he evokes Barrière’s assassination attempt and implicates the Jesuits in that attempt when posing the rhetorical question as to where the decision was taken to kill the king: ‘Was it not in the Colledge of Jesuites at Lyon, and also in the Colledge of Jesuites in Paris, that the resolution was last taken to murder the King in August 1593 [?]’ (AJF 12). The reference to the resolution ‘last taken’ reinforces the message that this attempt is one of a series of attempts on a king’s life. He further alleges that Varade, principal of the Jesuits, had encouraged Barrière’s attempt on the king’s life, ‘assuring him that he could not doe a more meritorious worke in the world, then to murder a king though he were a Catholic’ (AJF 12). The transferability to an English audience of the message as to the danger posed by Jesuits to the monarch’s life is reinforced by the use of a specifically English example. Accordingly, one of the examples used by Arnauld to prove that the Jesuits are regicides is that of William Parry, executed in 1585 following an assassination attempt on Elizabeth I. Arnauld claims that Parry had confessed prior to his execution that Benedicto Palmio, a Jesuit, had told him that it was lawful to murder kings and princes excommunicated by the pope (AJF 13). So, the Jesuits are secret and powerful agents of Spain ready to advocate the assassination of monarchs to serve their political and religious ends. Arnauld’s earlier polemic, LA FLEUR DE LYS, had
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also represented them as serpents plotting to serve Spanish interests through intrigue and conspiracy, referring to them as ‘les Jesuites vrayes colonies d’Espagnols, qui ont respandu le venin de leur conspiration sous ombre de saincteté’.33 The potential danger posed by the Jesuits is exacerbated in Arnauld’s polemic by his corresponding claims as to the ambitions harboured by Spain to gobble up France in its quest for domination of Europe. The Habsburgs wish, he claims, to expand their realm to equal the Ottomans. He alleges that Charles V and Philip II ‘embraced no smaller hope, then to make themselves monarks and emperours of the West’ (AJF 5). The threat posed by Spain is a recurrent trope in his polemics. In L’ANTIESPAGNOL, for instance, he argued that if the Spanish were to take control of France, the French would become Philip’s slaves, ‘les naturels esclaves du Castilian’. 34 In the Philippiques, Philip II was depicted as the Caligula and the Nero of Spain, a tyrant who desired the rapine of other realms.35 Arnauld’s earlier polemics had pointed to the common threat posed both to England and to France by Spain’s ambitions: ‘Il [Philip II] regarde du coin de l’œil l’Angleterre, pour avoir plus de liberté dans la mer & brider par ce moyen les cōmerces de tout le monde’.36 Arnauld thus evokes the shared fear of France and England as to the threat to their security and territorial integrity posed by Spain. The third element in the anti-Jesuit nexus is the relationship between the monarch and the papacy. Arnauld claims that the Jesuits take a vow of obedience to the pope. However, that vow is not for religious purposes but has instead an explicitly political goal: ‘their vow tendeth to the subversion of the State’ (AJF 6). He blames the Jesuits for fomenting the initiatives at the Sorbonne, such as that put forward by Jean Tanquerel, a doctor of divinity in 1561, seeking to expand the pope’s powers at the expense of the monarch and to ______33. Arnauld, LA FLEUR DE LYS, p. 170. 34. Arnauld, L’ANTIESPAGNOL, p. 8. 35. Arnauld, La Premiere Philippique, pp. 9, 41. 36. Arnauld, La Premiere Philippique p. 35.
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dispense a subject from his or her duty of obedience to the monarch, if the latter had been excommunicated (AJF 7). Arnauld highlights the danger that this posed (and potentially could pose again) to the monarch. He alleges that the Jesuits refused to give absolution to the French gentry unless they allied against Henri III once he had been excommunicated by the pope (AJF 10). It is possible to see the potency of this argument in an English context where the idea that a subject might be dispensed by the pope from his or her obedience to the monarch would be particularly pertinent when that monarch was in direct conflict with the pope. The idea that a Catholic might not have to obey a Protestant monarch would have played to prevalent fears within the English court as to the potential fidelity of Catholic subjects. Could Arnauld’s message have resonated differently in France than in England? The Plaidoyé was written at a time when Henri IV’s authority as king remained contested and when the Jesuits continued to have significant influence with his opponents in the Catholic League. The Jesuits of France were a powerful force with prominent supporters in French society. While Arnauld’s text became a talking point within religious and political circles, it was not immediately effective in turning public opinion against the Society. Eric Nelson has argued that his intervention was actually criticized initially as counter-productive by some thinkers otherwise broadly in sympathy with his erudite Gallicanism. The anti-Jesuit writer Pierre de l’Estoile, for instance, feared that Arnauld’s polemic had the potential to revive the threat of renewed religious discord.37 Moreover, Arnauld’s polem- ic did not gain royal support. In fact, Henri IV’s gens du roi worked over the summer to prevent the Parlement from ruling against the Jesuits in this case. Henri considered that a ruling against the Jesuits might potentially undermine his efforts to woo Pope Clement VIII to recognize his conversion to Catholicism and his royal title. Since the absence of papal recognition was the main factor in the continued ______37. Nelson, The Jesuits and the Monarchy, p. 36.
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resistance by the Catholic Leaguers to his rule, Henri saw such recognition as crucial to his efforts to establish peace in his realm.38 Notwithstanding the potency of Arnauld’s rhetoric, the case against the Jesuits remained stalled over the subsequent months. It is possible to argue that Arnauld’s polemic had limited impact in the short-term in France because it was not supported by the king and because it was viewed as unjustly provocative. It was Jean Chastel’s assassination attempt of 27 December 1594 against Henri which suddenly made Arnauld’s polemical message significant in France, as it appeared to confirm his argument that the Jesuits, by advocating a theory of tyrannicide, posed an actual threat to the life of the king. Nelson has argued that Arnauld’s text created a perception that the Jesuit order was implicated as an institution in threats to the monarch and in Spanish subversion of the institutions of the French state. Accordingly, Arnauld’s polemic provided the theoretical underpinning for the trial of the Jesuit order as a body corporate in December 1594 for allegedly promoting the idea that it was legitimate in certain circumstances to kill a monarch.39 While Arnauld’s text may be seen to have played a crucial role in persuading the Parlement to issue its edict of 17 January 1595 banishing the Jesuits from its jurisdiction, it would not of itself have occasioned the expulsion of the Jesuits if Chastel’s assassination attempt had not taken place. It was because Chastel’s action bore out the threat that Arnauld had identified in his polemic that his arguments suddenly became pertinent and prophetic. If Chastel’s attempt had not occurred, Arnauld’s text might have had limited impact in France, with his reputation potentially undermined for his advocacy of what would have been seen as extremist opinions. In contrast, the Arrainment appeared in a society in England in which Catholics in general, and Catholic priests in particular, continued to be regarded as traitors and were at risk of execution. The
______38. Nelson, The Jesuits and the Monarchy, pp. 38–39. 39. Nelson, The Jesuits and the Monarchy, pp. 48, 52.
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execution of Catholics continued throughout the 1590s, with fifty- three priests executed between 1590 and Elizabeth’s death in 1603.40 Arnauld’s text appeared shortly after the execution in summer 1594 of a Jesuit priest, Father John Cornelius, who had led a Catholic community at Chideock Castle in Dorset from 1590 until his arrest.41 Furthermore, Elizabeth remained deeply concerned during this period as to the potential danger posed by subversive sectarians and by Catholic plots.42 Arnauld’s anti-Jesuit discourse fitted well with the suspicions within Elizabeth’s court that the Jesuits were Spanish agents and that they posed a direct threat to the realm. However, such fears were completely disproportionate since the number of Jesuits operating in England was very low throughout the 1590s, although individual Jesuits tended to enjoy a high profile. There were only fourteen Jesuits in England in 1598, for instance, although it would appear that they were better organized than the several hundred secular priests operating in the country.43 Nonetheless, the Jesuits’ involvement in the conspiracies of the 1580s to place Mary, Queen of Scots on the English throne had contributed to the myth of the ‘evil’ Jesuit and, it might be argued, to the perception within the English court that they constituted a threat to the monarch.44 Moreover, the Jesuits continued to be prepared to attack Elizabeth’s regime directly in the 1590s, most notoriously in the Philopater published in 1592 from his exile in Spain by Robert Persons, founder of the English Jesuit mission. In the Philopater, Persons had accused Elizabeth’s government of tyranny ______40. Patrick McGrath, Papists and Puritans under Elizabeth I (London: Blandford Press, 1967), pp. 255–56. 41. Elizabeth Patton, ‘From Community to Convent: The Collective Spiritual Life of Post- Reformation Englishwomen in Dorothy Arundell’s Biography of John Cornelius’, in The English Convents in Exile, 1600-1800: Communities, Culture and Identity, ed. by Caroline Bowden and James E. Kelly (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 19–31 (p. 20). 42. Waite, ‘Re-Imagining Religious Identity’, p. 1255. 43. Arnold Pritchard, Catholic Loyalism in Elizabethan England (London: Scolar Press, 1979), p. 181. 44. Thomas M. McCoog, The Society of Jesus in Ireland, Scotland and England 1551– 1588: ‘Our Way of Proceeding?’ (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996), pp. 6–7.
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and had cited as barbarous and heretical the actions of her judges, magistrates, prosecutors and executioners. He had singled out William Cecil in particular for strong criticism as an opportunist whose anti-Catholic policies were motivated by personal ambition.45 Persons had followed the Philopater with a short pamphlet, Newes from Spayne and Holland, in which he announced his intention to address the issue of the succession in a forthcoming publication which subsequently appeared in 1595 as A Conference about the Next Succession.46 The Philopater is known to have triggered considerable anger in Elizabeth’s court against the Jesuits. By raising the issue of the succession, Persons would have reminded the sixty-one-year-old Elizabeth of her mortality and evoked an issue about which she remained highly sensitive. So the Arrainment would have appeared at a time in which there was increased hostility within the English establishment towards the Jesuits despite the order being in a much more precarious and marginal position in England than in France. While it is impossible to assess the significance of the Arrainment in stoking anti-Jesuit fears, it certainly confirmed the prejudices of its English readers against the Jesuits as potential traitors to England. It fitted well with a climate conducive to the persecution and execution of Jesuits. Indeed the Arrainment must have appeared close to the arrest of the Jesuit Henry Walpole in late 1594. It is interesting, in this context, that Walpole and fellow Jesuit Robert Southwell were executed shortly after its appearance, in February and April 1595 respectively, although it is unknown whether the magistrates determining their cases were aware of the Arrainment. 47 That England of the late 1590s was viewed as particularly dangerous by Jesuits is confirmed in the actions of the
______45. Victor Houliston, Catholic Resistance in Elizabethan England: Robert Persons’ Jesuit Polemic, 1580–1610 (Aldershot: Ashgate; Rome, Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 2007), pp. 62, 69. 46. Houliston, Catholic Resistance in Elizabethan England, p. 72. 47. Francis Edwards, The Jesuits in England: From 1580 to the Present Day (Tunbridge Wells: Burns & Oates, 1985), p. 22.
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Spanish missionary and religious writer Luisa de Carvajal. Carvajal took a vow in 1598 to seek martyrdom in England, having been influenced by stories of martyrdom and persecution in England, particularly of Jesuits, which circulated in the Jesuit circles with which she was associated. 48 Diego de Yepes, later bishop of Tarazona, also published in 1599 his Historia particular de la persecucion de Inglaterra, an account of the sufferings of English Catholics which included accounts of recent martyrdoms, including that of Cornelius as recounted by Dorothy Arundell.49 A more direct linkage can be established between the key themes of the Arrainment and the increasing suspicion within elements of the English Catholic community towards the Jesuits. The Arrainment appeared at a crucial time in terms of the attitude of English Catholics to the Society. Following the death in 1594 of William Allen, the exiled cardinal who had been strongly pro-Spain, English Catholics grew increasingly uncomfortable with the perceived alignment of English Catholic and Spanish interests. Divisions developed between the Jesuits and the secular clergy who viewed the Society’s activities as a conspiracy on the part of the former to seize control of English Catholicism and to manipulate it in the interests of an anti-national, pro-Spanish position. Patrick McGrath argues that Cardinal Allen and Robert Persons were blind to the nationalism of English Catholics who would rather put up with persecution than see Catholicism restored in England by the Spanish king. 50 The rhetoric of those arguing in favour of a distinctively English Catholic identity has much in common with that of the Arrainment. That rhetoric also characterized the Jesuits as an incredibly powerful and secret society acting against all that was good in the church and state. Christopher Bagshaw, for instance, criticized ______48. Elizabeth Rhodes, ‘Luisa de Carvajal’s Counter-Reformation Journey to Selfhood (1566–1614)’, Renaissance Quarterly, 51.3 (1998), 887–911 (pp. 895–96). 49. Patton, ‘From Community to Convent’, p. 21. 50. McGrath, Papists and Puritans under Elizabeth I, pp. 271, 82–83. Robert Persons used his exile in Spain to lobby Philip II in favour of a second Armada in the 1590s.
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the Jesuits in A Sparing Discovery of our English Jesuits for working to persuade English Catholics that the Spanish king and Catholicism were linked and that it was necessary to put all of Europe into his hands.51 Such themes echo the concerns that reverberate throughout the Arrainment. It is possible that Arnauld’s text was particularly persuasive, being written by a French Catholic, in distancing English Catholics from the Jesuits. It is interesting that Bagshaw led a serious dispute against the Jesuits at Wisbech prison for recusants in December 1594 over attempts by the Jesuit William Weston to insti- tute a more austere regime there.52 Was the Arrainment a potential factor in the dispute? It is not known whether Bagshaw was aware of the Arrainment, whether it increased hostility to Jesuits, or indeed whether it was a factor in the December dispute. However, it is notable that the preface to a subsequent translation of Arnauld’s Le Franc Discours was explicitly addressed to English Catholics and sought to convince them that their interests and those of the Jesuits were not synonymous. 53 This suggests that English printers saw a potential market among English Catholics for Arnauld’s texts attacking the Jesuits. Antoine Arnauld’s Plaidoyé is a historically significant text, acknowledged as having contributed to the expulsion of the Jesuits from France. By depicting Jesuits as secret agents of a hostile state ready to undermine the French state and to kill its monarch so as to advance Spanish interests, Arnauld successfully created a polemical trope in which ‘Jesuit’ became synonymous with subversion. By ignoring the religious imperative driving the Jesuits’ actions, Arnauld robbed the Society of its religious legitimacy. By divorcing the Jesuits from the religious context of their battle for the rights of ______51. Pritchard, Catholic Loyalism in Elizabethan England, pp. 177–78. 52. Edwards, The Jesuits in England, pp. 24–25. 53. Antoine Arnauld, Le Franc Discours. A Discourse, presented of late to the French king, in aunswer of sundry requests made unto him, for the restoring of the Jesuits into Fraunce, as well as by theyr friends abroad, & at home, as by themselves in divers petitionarie bookes. Written in French this present yeere, 1602 and faithfully Englished (1602).
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Catholics to maintain their beliefs and to live in societies headed by Catholic monarchs, Arnauld effectively rendered religious aims subservient to those of the state. For Arnauld, the interests of the state took primacy over those of religious groups, and religious belief was bounded by the obligation to honour the monarch and to obey his or her will. Arnauld communicated a message that would have been very useful within an English context for a number of reasons. On the one hand, it demonized the Jesuits by raising the spectre of them as secret agents of Spain ready to spill the blood of the monarch for religious objectives. At the same time, it denied any legitimacy to initiatives to overthrow a monarch for religious ends. It reminded subjects, regardless of their beliefs, of their continuing obligation to obey the monarch. It advocated as its model the Catholic subject ready to reject ultramontanism and the papacy if they intruded on the subject’s duty to the sovereign. The Arrainment provided ideological justification for the persecution and execution of Jesuits as agents provocateurs and as inherent threats to the state. A Jesuit was a threat simply by virtue of his membership of the Society of Jesus, regardless of whether or not the individual had been involved in conspiracies against the queen. The Arrainment confirms the transferability from one society to another of a text which confirmed the prejudices of the culture for which it was translated. On the other hand, it undoubtedly resonated differently in England and France. In England, the Jesuits were a small persecuted group to which the monarch was personally hostile. In France, they remained a powerful group, ultimately considered by Henri IV as sufficiently useful to warrant their recall. Arnauld’s text reflected the fears of a Gallican lawyer seeking to defend the fragile institutions of his country following decades of civil war. His text was extreme precisely because he feared what he perceived to be a serious threat by a powerful group against a vulnerable monarch. He was not seeking to impose the might of a state against a vulnerable group. However in England, where the situation was reversed (in other words where the monarch was powerful and the Jesuits were
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vulnerable), his text may have provided justification for the persecution of already hounded men. The Arrainment confirms that a fundamentally different text is created by the process of translation, because a text’s reception is crucially shaped by the differing historical and geographic under- standings which its new readers bring to it. The translated text operates dynamically in a way that may be independent of its author’s intentions or indeed of the understandings underpinning the original text. As such it confirms Stefanie Stockhorst’s argument that translation involves more than simply a change of language. A cultural change of reference takes place which reflects the significant transformation that occurs in the course of the de- and re-contextual- ization of the text in translation.54 The Arrainment demonstrates that a translated text may be translated because it accords with the prejudices of the society for which it has been translated and may then have a different afterlife and significance within that society, following publication, as its content will resonate differently depend- ing on the context and understandings of that society. The Arrainment was a cross-cultural actor in the evolution of anti-Jesuit prejudice in the 1590s in England as well as in France. As such, it confirms the potency of polemic and its capacity to transcend borders and languages when it insinuates itself into the fears of its time.
Trinity College Dublin
______54. Stefanie Stockhorst, ‘Introduction. Cultural Transfer through Translation: A Current Perspective in Enlightenment Studies’, in Cultural Transfer through Translation, pp. 7– 26 (p. 23).