Jnl of Ecclesiastical History, Vol. , No. , July . # Cambridge University Press DOI: .\S Printed in the United Kingdom
Catholicism, Kinship and the Public Memory of Sir Thomas More
by MICHAEL QUESTIER
Historians are now particularly aware that kinship had political and social resonances in the early modern period. Historians of English Catholicism in this same period have always stressed that a web of family networks helped to sustain the English Catholic community within its harsh post- Reformation environment. But how exactly did this happen, particularly when Catholicism in England was so diverse, and when Catholics were often deeply divided over key political and religious issues? In this essay I examine how these relationships worked for one significant kinship group, a set of people descended from or related to the Henrician Lord Chancellor, Sir Thomas More, and thus how they affected Catholicism’s political and ecclesial expressions of itself. I argue that in doing this, we can begin not only to reveal how far religious continuity depended on or was influenced by kinship, but also to describe some of the ways in which post-Reformation Catholicism was defined and perceived.
here has long been a consensus that post-Reformation Catholicism in England was something which was nurtured and sustained by Tand within Catholic families. The flame of the faith, we are told, was kept alive, during the harsh times of persecution, by those Romish families which point blank refused to conform to the religion of the Church of England. In several of them we find a continuous tradition of resistance to the introduction of Protestant ideas into the English Church from the time of the first reform measures during the reign of Henry . What became an increasingly tightly-knit and intermarrying group of gentry families was the last redoubt of the Catholicism which came to be served by the new seminary-trained clergy who appeared in England " from the s onwards. Historiographically, this has been an issue of some importance. For it
AAW l Archives of the archdiocese of Westminster; CRS l Catholic Record Society; HMC l Historical Manuscripts Commission I wish to express my thanks to Dr Peter Marshall, Professor Peter Lake and Professor Conrad Russell for commenting on a previous version of this essay, and particularly to Dr Thomas Freeman for many invaluable references and discussions on this topic. " J. C. H. Aveling, ‘Catholic households in Yorkshire –’, Northern History xvi (), –; A. Fletcher, A county community in peace and war: Sussex –, London , –. has served as a crucial explanatory mechanism to describe how Catholicism retreated, towards the end of the sixteenth century, into a minority gentrified household religion of the kind depicted by, for # example, the famous Jesuits William Weston and John Gerard. This has, indeed, become one of the central topics in our narrative of the course of the Reformation in England, as historians have tried to describe how the Catholicism which emerged in opposition to the settlement, at one time the religion of ‘the people’, became the preserve of a distinct, small, gentrified and interrelated Catholic community; and how the continuity of English Catholicism was preserved by the passing of the faith from one generation to the next within this same small number of families. Family and kinship, then, were clearly central to Catholicism’s fortunes in this period. But Alan Davidson, for one, has questioned Lawrence Stone’s dictum that the Catholic gentry simply pursued a policy of religious ‘apartheid’. Davidson observes how, the moment that the family trees of the Catholic gentry are extended beyond the immediate family, $ patterns of religious allegiance can become very complex indeed. As William Sheils has demonstrated through a longue dureTe study of Catholic families in North Yorkshire, once one has detected Catholicism within early modern family networks, there are quite a lot of questions to answer about how it was received and transmitted. His painstaking reconstruction of the Catholicism of the Egton area shows that kinship was not necessarily just a bastion behind which Catholicism could shelter. There was certainly no guarantee that all the members of the kin would share the same religion. In fact, kinship ‘was just as effective in breaking down confessional barriers within generations as it was in sustaining them % between generations’. The work of scholars such as Davidson and Sheils suggests that the ‘continuity’ of Catholic religious allegiances within ‘Catholic’ families may not have been as straightforward as historians have sometimes assumed. Yet if kinship was, as scholars such as David # William Weston, ed. P. Caraman, London ; John Gerard, ed. P. Caraman, London . $ A. Davidson, ‘Roman Catholicism in Oxfordshire from the late Elizabethan period to the Civil War c. –’, unpubl. PhD diss. Bristol , –; L. Stone, The crisis of the aristocracy –, Oxford , . It should be noted, however, that Stone’s remarks applied primarily to the ‘great’, i.e. ennobled, Catholic families. % W. Sheils, ‘Catholics and their neighbours in a rural community: Egton chapelry –’, Northern History xxxiv (), – at p. and passim. See also his ‘Household, age and gender among Jacobean Yorkshire recusants’, in M. Rowlands (ed.), Catholics of parish and town –, London . See also Ralph Houlbrooke’s overview of the workings of kinship and cousinage which stresses that simply because people were related did not guarantee that they would agree about everything or anything: ‘political alliances between kinsmen were as fragile and volatile as any other sort, and often flawed by additional suspicions and resentments’: The English family –, London , . There were quite as many forces within the family likely to break up family unity as to cement it. Cressy have argued, a dynamic early modern social institution, and if ‘affinal and consanguinal ties alike provided a basis for sympathy, linkage & and collaboration’, it may be worth asking again – how far did ‘clan solidarity’ affect Catholics’ religious opinions, and did their religious opinions contribute to their attachment to family and kin? As is well known, Margaret Spufford and other students of Dissent have tried to trace, over a long time-scale, ‘family and linear linkages’ among Protestants, even to the extent of trying to make connections between Lollardy and post-Restoration Dissent. Spufford cites the work of, among others, R. J. Acheson to argue that ‘the family played a crucial role in the perpetuating of dissenting attitudes over a number of generations, although there is clearly much research [required] before this can be ' established reasonably firmly’. It is easy to think of families which were Catholic across several generations. But simply to trace continuity of religious tradition is not the same as saying what it means. In fact, several scholars have expressed grave doubts about the methodology of the Spufford school. In particular, Patrick Collinson has opined that ‘whether family tradition, dissent in the blood, provides’ a good answer to the continuity of this form of religion ‘is a large question posed rather than fully and satisfactorily answered’ by ( Spufford and her team in the World of rural dissenters. Collinson asks, even more critically, ‘what does it actually mean to speak … of the ‘‘continued strength of the dissenting tradition’’? Was there such a ‘‘tradition’’? If blood-lines can be established … connecting Lollard surnames with Quaker surnames, known ancestors with known descendants, what does that signify?’ And, he says, in the Spuffordians’ work this is often far from clear anyway. For the Spuffordians have not always thought to trace what filled the gap between Lollardy and later Dissent and how these ) ideas were passed down within the same families. & D. Cressy, ‘Kinship and kin interaction in early modern England’, Past and Present cxiii (Nov. ), – at pp. , , . ' M. Spufford, ‘The importance of religion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’, in M. Spufford (ed.), The world of rural dissenters – , Cambridge , . The Spuffordians’ enquiries and methodology have, however, never been extended to the study of early modern Catholicism; see Sheils, ‘Catholics and their neighbours’, –; P. Collinson, ‘Critical conclusion’, in Spufford, World of the rural dissenters, . Perhaps this is simply because the Spuffordians’ principal concern is dissent in specific regions and among certain social status groups which were not, primarily, the gentry. But Collinson rightly points out that the Spuffordians’ dissenters ‘display a cross-sectional profile not much out of line with society as a whole’, and ‘almost anyone could be a dissenter’: Collinson, ‘Critical conclusion’, –. The Spuffordian themes of family tradition and dissent in the blood are of concern for more than just the history of a socially exclusive and excluded rural Protestant dissent; cf., however, Houlbrooke, The English family –, ( . Collinson, ‘Critical conclusion’, . ) Ibid. , . William Sheils notes that, even when a genealogy can be reliably constructed linking a Lollard ancestor with a dissenting descendant, there is often so much Obviously, this is in part because the Spuffordians simply do not have adequate source material to pursue the study of familial continuity from heresy to Dissent. (Spufford herself admits that it is one thing to trace, within a single family, progression from Lollardy ‘through four or five generations’ to early Baptists or Quakers, and another to explain how this * happened. ) But Collinson makes another point. If we try to track dissent genealogically over several generations, there is always a danger that we will forget that the tradition is not static. If, for example, we want to follow a line of Dissent from Lollardy to the civil war sects, at some point that line has to go through the thing we call Puritanism, and, as Collinson has stressed, that was something which could at times be regarded as "! virtually coterminous with English Protestantism. Now all of these problems are ones which are encountered when we trace post-Reformation English Catholicism across the generations during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Of course, English Catholic continuity from one generation to another is usually perceived as unilinear and unproblematical. If Catholics’ children stayed Catholic this must have been because they subscribed to the same beliefs as did their parents and, indeed, all Catholics who rejected the royal supremacy over the English Church. They must have had a high regard for papal authority and traditional sacramental theology, and have desired to hear the mass and to be confessed according to the Roman fashion. However, there were some pretty sharp divisions among sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English Catholics over quite crucial religio-political issues, and historians are equally sharply divided about what Catholicism really means during this period. The origins and groundwork of the Catholic revival in Elizabeth’s reign are often understood to be the mass of ‘conservative’ opinions among the ‘people’ who were less than "" receptive to the culturally elitist premises of the Protestant Reformation. Yet that popular conservatism is also reckoned to have intersected with the seminarist Catholicism wafted across from the continent from the s onwards. And it is to some degree unclear how the programme and imperatives of clerical engageTs like the Jesuits Edmund Campion and in between the two which does not fit the strict continuity thesis that ‘the emphasis on the family, important as it was, can be a distorting one’: ‘Beliefs and their contexts in early modern England’, this J xlviii (), – at p. . A notable exception to most of these criticisms by Collinson and others is C. Marsh, The Family of Love in English society, –, Cambridge . Particularly disappointing, however, is the complete failure of E. J. Carlson to deal with kinship issues in his Marriage and the English Reformation, * Oxford . Spufford, ‘Importance of religion’, . "! P. Collinson, ‘Towards a broader understanding of the early dissenting tradition’, in his Godly people, London , –. "" C. Haigh, ‘The continuity of Catholicism in the English Reformation’, Past and Present xciii (Nov. ), –. Robert Persons can be identified with popular conservative religious impulses. Indeed, as John Bossy has argued, it is in many ways easier to identify the coming of the seminarists as a complete break with the past, "# at least as far as Catholicism is concerned. Yet contemporary Catholics themselves talked and argued about the continuity of the ‘old religion’ and their Catholic tradition stretching back before the Reformation, passed on by each succeeding generation. And they wondered why some people in ‘Catholic’ families stayed Catholic and others did not, by turns exulting in the conversion of ‘schismatic’ children to true faith, and then lamenting ‘how few sonnes pay the statute [i.e. recusancy fines] whose "$ fathers did’ in the past.
I
In this article I want to address some of these ideas about religious continuity and family tradition among post-Reformation Roman Catholics in England. Many Catholics were themselves all too aware of what historians have since noticed – namely that kinship ties were no guarantee of Catholic solidarity. Random sampling of the replies which students coming to the continental seminaries gave about their family background reveals startling degrees of division in religion. For instance, John Faulkner of Dorset informed the authorities at the English college in Rome in May that while he himself had been converted to Catholicism by an uncle, John Brooke, and another kinsman, Richard Faulkner, and now wanted to be a priest, his brother remained a ‘heretic’, i.e. firmly Protestant. His brother’s wife’s mother, however, was a member of a Hampshire family which had Catholic branches. Faulkner had several sisters and brothers-in-law, either Catholics or church papists [i.e. occasional conformists]; one brother-in-law had lost everything for the sake of his Catholic religion. Faulkner’s parents had apparently not always been Catholics though they died in the bosom of the Roman Church. His mother had two brothers, one a church papist and the other a ‘strong heretic’. Yet her own mother came from the Cheshire gentry "% and her kin there were ‘almost all Catholics’. The Catholic community was itself famously split by internecine strife, notably in the famous Appellant Controversy (primarily between secular
"# J. Bossy, The English Catholic community – , London , . "$ Newsletters from the archpresbyterate of George Birkhead, ed. M. C. Questier (Camden th ser. xii, ), . "% The responsa scholarum of the English college, Rome, ed. A. Kenny (CRS liv–v, –), i. –; G. Anstruther, The seminary priests, Ware–Great Wakering –, ii. . priests and Jesuits) in the last years of Elizabeth’s reign. Here, a number of disputed issues set Catholics against other Catholics, who often seem to have regarded each other as the real enemy, rather than the Elizabethan regime or the Protestants in the Church of England. These issues included the wisdom, or lack of it, of the rhetoric of the pro-Spanish English Catholic political activists. When the priest William Gifford, not a parti- san of those English Jesuits who were hand in glove with the Spaniards, complained of the hostility he had experienced from the recently deceased Sir Francis Englefield (a leading pro-Spaniard among the Catholic exiles), it was little good saying ‘itt woulde have bene some comforte to me yf he had lefte me some littell memorie, considering how neare I was to him in bloude, and nott soe farre from him in affection as some woulde have made him believe’, because it was plainly evident that the protagonists in these quarrels, many of whom were indeed related to each "& other, were often very far from each other in affection. Of course, from such stories of conflicting religious opinions in the same family, we might deduce that many people were either too sensible or too independent of mind to let their social and familial obligations dictate their sense of religious affiliation, or, vice-versa, to let any religious opinions which they held interfere with the normal course of their social existence. Yet many Catholics also believed that true religion should propagate itself through the family. As several scholars have shown, the special features of early modern gentry family networks – in particular, an intense awareness of lineage and familial relationship and cousinage – were sometimes crucial in ensuring the stimulation and survival of an ideologically active early modern Catholicism. Richard Cust has explored the connection between conservative\Catholic attitudes to religion and gentry ideas about honour and ancient lineage, showing, for example, how the Leicestershire gentleman Sir Thomas Shirley incorporated a defence of Catholicism into his heraldic compilation ‘The Catholicke Armorist’. Sandeep Kaushik has argued that Catholic gentry marital alliances where the marriage partner was chosen from a family of the same faith were a visible and public statement about the religion of those Catholic families "' that found themselves disenfranchised and barred from public office. "& The first and second diaries of the English college, Douay, ed. T. F. Knox, London , –. Englefield and Gifford were connected through the Throckmorton family of Coughton Court, Co. Warwick: S. T. Bindoff (ed.), The House of Commons – , London , ii. ; Anstruther, Seminary priests,i.. "' R. Cust, ‘Catholicism, antiquarianism and gentry honour: the writings of Sir Thomas Shirley’, Midland History xxiii (), –; S. Kaushik, ‘Sir Thomas Tresham and the Elizabethan state’, Midland History xxi (), –. A brief view of the responsa of gentry-status students at the English College, Rome, with their long recitations of the families to which they were related, suggests that their family connections were seen as an important key to their identity: Responsa scholarum, i–ii. See also Stone, The crisis of the aristocracy –, –, though cf. p. . In the work of Cust and Kaushik we see that these gentry families regarded the Catholic social and marital underpinnings of their association with each other as politically and ecclesiastically significant. Others have suggested that kinship could actually shape and fashion the kind of religion which these Catholics practised. Dennis Flynn, for example, thinks that it is possible to detect within the Catholic clan of the poet John Donne and the Jesuit Jasper Heywood a tradition of Catholic "( loyalism and moderate Catholic conformist behaviour. Elsewhere I have argued that the activism and character of northern Catholicism during the last years of the Elizabethan regime and the first years of James’s reign were intimately bound up with and promoted by a tightly-knit kin network of which the epicentre was the Neville family and affinity, which had ") spearheaded the Northern Rising of . We know, too, that the creation of seminarist Catholicism, a radical separatist movement which rejected any kind of compromise with the Established Church, was promoted in part through kinship and cousinage. Among the seminary priests who had converted to Catholicism before they first decided that they would train for the ministry, we find a significant proportion who, as we have already noted in the case of the priest John Faulkner, claimed that they had been influenced towards "* Catholicism by the persuasiveness of members of their immediate family. Some priests were converted by their parents: John Starkey became a Catholic ‘through his mother’s tears’; more sedately, John Butler converted ‘paterno consilio informatus’. Robert Griffith’s mother teamed up with the roving evangelical Jesuit priest John Gerard to convert him. Richard Tole’s schismatical condition was reproved by his brother and this led him to reconcile himself to the Church of Rome; the example of a younger sister converted Robert Drury. And so the list goes on. It might not in itself be very surprising that, in closely knit families, progress in religion should have been encouraged by affectionate relatives. But other priests said that their less immediate family persuaded them to take up the practice of an activist form of Catholicism. Edward Atslow said he was converted by a cousin. Philip Pearse was converted from Protestantism by an uncle, and so was John Ball. Thomas Durnford, a convinced Protestant, had a Jesuit uncle (though even Durnford’s father, that uncle’s brother, had no idea he was a Jesuit). The uncle, learning that Thomas was living among heretics, inveigled the youth and his family
"( D. Flynn, John Donne and the ancient Catholic nobility, Bloomington , –. ") M. Questier, ‘Practical anti-papistry during the reign of Elizabeth I’, Journal of British Studies xxxvi (), –, and ‘The politics of religious conformity and the accession of James I’, Historical Research lxxi (), –. "* Idem, ‘Clerical recruitment, conversion and Rome, c. –’, in C. Cross (ed.), Patronage and recruitment in the Tudor and early Stuart Church (Borthwick Studies in History ii, ), – at p. . with the promise of a good education into letting him take him to France and Thomas was carried off to become a Catholic. George Blackwell, the first archpriest, drew a hesitant conformist nephew of his, Henry Cliff, away from his legal training in the exchequer, where he had been placed by his very Protestant father. After Cliff had resided with Blackwell for six #! weeks, he went off to the seminary in Rome. If we look at the extended genealogies of the gentry families which provided support for these seminarists, the many instances of inter- marriage between them do suggest that kinship must, to some degree, have been an important sustaining factor in the Catholic religious project of which these seminarists were a part. The Jesuit Edmund Campion was, it appears, related in blood to Archpriest Blackwell, whose allegedly pro- Jesuit agenda for the seminary clergy notoriously caused so much bitter #" strife in the Appellant Controversy. We are entitled to speculate that the kinship structure of which Campion was a part may have contributed to and underpinned the ideological conflict among contemporary Catholics in the later sixteenth century. But proving exactly how this actually happened is another matter.
II
Clearly what we need, in order to track the progress of Catholicism through more than one generation, is some ‘issue’ which is not so broad and amorphous as to be shared in some sort by all those of a vaguely Catholic or Catholic-ish disposition. We need to focus on a topic which provoked significant discussion and debate about the substance and continuity of Catholicism among specific and clearly identifiable groups of families. For the purposes of this essay, that topic is the public memory of the Henrician Lord Chancellor, Sir Thomas More (from the time of his death up to the Civil War). We know, of course, that Sir Thomas More was a cultic figure soon ## after his execution in , and particularly among his relations. For #! Responsa scholarum,i., , , , , ; ii. , ;i., . . #" L. Campion, The family of Edmund Campion, London . ## More’s works were published during Mary’s reign by William Rastell (who had married Sir Thomas’s adopted daughter). Diarmaid MacCulloch has pointed out to me, however, how embarrassing both More and Fisher would inevitably be to the Marian regime, in which the Lord Chancellor, Stephen Gardiner, had once justified More’s execution. Further collections of his works and letters appeared in Latin in the s. His Dialogue of comfort against tribulation was published in translation in : A. F. Allison and D. M. Rogers, The contemporary printed literature of the English Counter-Reformation between and , Aldershot ,i.–; ii. , –. Nicholas Sander’s history of the Reformation helped to fashion More as a leading opponent of the ecclesiastical supremacy claimed by Henry : Rise and growth of the Anglican schism, ed. D. Lewis, London , –. He was cited as a pattern of true Christian martyrdom in Cardinal Reginald Pole’s Flynn, ‘the [More] family’s enduring sense of More’s legacy was a peculiar mixture that included a natural pride in his renown as humanist scholar and officer at the Court of Henry , overshadowed by awe and #$ understated irony about his martyrdom’. We know, also, as John Aveling comments, that the More family ‘and its admirers gradually developed a mystique: a view that Sir Thomas More was somehow the #% founder and archetype of English Catholic recusancy’, and that this happened in large part through the wider kinship network of the Lord Chancellor. In a secular priest called John Yaxley published a translation of St Francis de Sales’s spiritual classic, An introduction to a devoute life. He dedicated it to Anne Constable, the daughter of Sir William Roper of Eltham, Sir Thomas More’s great-grandson. Yaxley claimed that he dedicated it to her as a treatise likely to be most pleasing to that excellent disposition which inclineth your mind to all holie & virtuous exercises: and [as] an argument almost proper and peculiar, to the fervent zeale of Gods glorie, descending unto you, and all your worthie familie by inheritance, and naturall affection receaved from your glorious progenitour, that excellent true states-man, & learned councellour, englands honour, faithes zealous champion, and Christs constant martyr, SIR THOMAS MOORE, your great grand-father. His admirable virtues may easilie persuade any man, that you neither would nor could degenerate from so livelie a paterne: and your devout and virtuous life, doth as easilie prove you to be descended from that faire roote, by so goodly braunches as your worshipfull father and grand-father; of whome as you have taken the worthines of your bloud, so you have learned their pietie and godlines, which maketh you delight #& in nothing so much, as in the practize of devotion and Christian perfection. But how exactly was Sir Thomas’s More’s memory constructed in the century or so after ? James McConica acknowledges that there is, in
Pro ecclesiasticae unitatis defensione, Ingolstadt , and he, with John Fisher and other Henrician Catholic martyrs, figured in Richard Verstegan’s Theatrum crudelitatum haereticorum nostri temporis of .In Thomas Stapleton’s Tres Thomae, incorporating a biography of More, was published at Douai. Other biographies of him circulated widely in manuscript, notably that by his son-in-law William Roper. Four English and two Latin lives had been written before : D. Shanahan, ‘The family of St Thomas More in Essex #$ –’, Essex Recusant i(), – at p. . Flynn, John Donne, . #% J. C. H. Aveling, ‘The More family and Yorkshire’, in R. S. Sylvester and G. P. Marc’hadour, Essential articles for the study of Thomas More, Hamden, Connecticut , – at p. . Hugh Trevor-Roper, in identifying ‘Ro. Ba’, one of More’s biographers, as the Devonshire gentleman Sir Robert Bassett (More’s great-grandson), argued that ‘the family of Sir Thomas More was the most self-consciously Catholic group in England, and it made a cult of More himself’: Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans, London , –. See also Bindoff, House of Commons,i.–; P. Hasler (ed.), The House of Commons –, London ,i.–. #& An introduction to a devoute life composed in Frenche by the R. father in God, Francis Sales bishop of Geneva. And translated into English by I. Y., Douai (RSTC n), –; Allison and Rogers, Contemporary printed literature, ii. –. fact, a ‘fundamental problem’ in defining ‘the nature of the community #' which guarded the inheritance of Thomas More’. If More was so central and important a figure for English Catholics, it is strange that his family actually seems, to some historians, to have receded into the background when the seminary priests started to confront the Elizabethan regime in the later s. More is relatively little mentioned, at least publicly, in the #( s in the age of Jesuit martyrdom. As Michael Anderegg notes, until #) there was no published life of More in English. And while we have, every now and again, brief mentions of the Mores of Barnburgh, North Mimms and Leyton, the Roper in-laws at Eltham and Canterbury, and so on, these people have not generally been thought of as at the forefront of the Counter-Reformation in England. Just as commentators on the Spuffordian thesis of ‘continuity’ have noticed that there are sometimes gaps in the line from pre-Reformation heresy to later Dissent, so among these Catholics one observes, for example, that Sir Robert Bassett, the (probable) author of one of the Lives of Sir Thomas More, and himself a great-grandson of the Lord Chancellor, was born into a very Protestant family (and married the daughter of the Puritan judge Sir William #* Peryam). Let us look now at the development of the More tradition, and how contemporary Catholics, particularly those who perceived themselves as part of the More family’s extended kin network, thought of the Lord Chancellor and his political resistance to the Henrician Reformation. And let us also look at how that fed into their own Catholicism during the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. From it we may get some idea of how their religion was influenced by and transmitted through cousinage, and how Catholicism was itself defined by this process.
#' J. McConica, ‘The recusant reputation of Thomas More’, in Sylvester and Marc’hadour, Essential articles, – at p. . #( Stanley Morison remarks from the incidence and style of the continental portraiture of More that, already at the end of his own century, More’s death and the circumstances of it were not remembered by a world ‘habituated to savagery’. Rather ‘it was More’s literary works that were commemorated’ and ‘outside Rome there was no interest in More’s martyrdom’. English Catholics also ‘were forgetful of More’s execution’, while the martyrdoms during the reign of Elizabeth were ‘not merely fresh in the memory of those living after but were contemporary and continuous. It was too late to give the Henrician martyrs, the Carthusians, More and Fisher their deserved rank’: The portraiture of Thomas More by Hans Holbein and after, [London] , . (I am very grateful to William Sheils for this reference.) Mark Robson, however, takes issue with Morison on this point: ‘Posthumous representations of Thomas More: critical readings’, unpubl. PhD diss. Leeds , –. #) M. Anderegg, ‘The tradition of early More biography’, in Sylvester and Marc’hadour, Essential articles, – at p. . Nicholas Harpsfield’s Life of More was not printed until : Robson, ‘Posthumous representations’, . #* Hasler, House of Commons,i.; iii. .
III
The continuity of the ‘More tradition’ was itself not entirely straight- forward. It was not always clear how the memory of More’s opposition to the Henrician state was to be identified with (and, therefore, imitated by) those who in some sense felt themselves to be good Catholics and were opposed to the introduction of Protestant ideas and practice into the English Church. On the one hand, some of the Mores carried on, with a vengeance, the illustrious ex-Lord Chancellor’s opposition to the Reformation. In – members of the More circle were involved in the Prebendaries Plot (the desperate conservative attempt to bring down $! Archbishop Cranmer). Nicholas Harpsfield, a client of More’s son-in- law, William Roper was, with Roper, central to the enforcement of the restoration of Catholicism in the diocese of Canterbury during Mary’s $" reign. And, although we do not hear a great deal about More in the s, the age of the seminary priests and the Jesuits, at some point early in that decade Thomas More of Barnburgh (Sir Thomas’s grandson) suddenly left his Yorkshire estates, moved down to his estate at Leyton in Essex, and was involved, it seems, in the polemicising and publicising attendant on the Jesuit mission to England of Edmund Campion and $# Robert Persons. At the end of the century, we find, according to Hugh Trevor-Roper, Sir Robert Bassett, by now a potentially dangerous conspirator and a $! D. MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer, New Haven , ; G. Redworth, In defence of the Church Catholic: the life of Stephen Gardiner, Oxford , . Germain Gardiner and John Larke, executed in the aftermath of the plot, mentioned Sir Thomas in their scaffold speeches: Bindoff, House of Commons, ii. . $" T. Freeman, ‘Nicholas Harpsfield and John Foxe’, in E. Shagan and M. Sena (eds), Catholics and the ‘Protestant nation’: religious politics in early modern England, Manchester forthcoming. I am very grateful to Dr Freeman for allowing me to see a draft of this paper. Harpsfield’s resistance to the new regime was celebrated, by way of a story about a public demonstration he had led in Canterbury in summer , in a tract entitled A copy of a letter, written by M. Doctor Carier beyond seas, to some particular friends in England. Whereunto are added certaine collections found in his closet … of the miserable end of such who have impugned the Catholike church, n.p. [printed secretly in England] (RSTC ), –. There is evidence that Benjamin Carier, a prebendary of Canterbury, had been converted to Catholicism in part by Dr John Langworth who was part of the Roper network in Canterbury; this would, perhaps, explain why the Harpsfield story was incorporated in this tract: Freeman, ‘Nicholas Harpsfield’; M. Questier, ‘Crypto-papism, anti-Calvinism and conversion: the enigma of Benjamin Carier’, this J xlvii (), –; AAW, series A [paginated] xii. . $# Thomas More was arrested at Greenstreet, the house where the illegal printing press was stationed for a time. The press, before it was taken to Stonor, was moved to the Southwark house of Francis Browne whose sister Lucy was married to Thomas Roper, another of Sir Thomas More’s grandsons. Charles Bassett, grandson of Margaret Roper, had come to London specifically to assist with the work of the press: Shanahan, ‘Family of St Thomas More’, Essex Recusant i. – at p. . follower of the earl of Essex, converting to Catholicism, experimenting with lunatic schemes for political insurrection, and, at the same time, writing a biography of his distinguished ancestor, Sir Thomas More. (Trevor-Roper remarks that, ‘whenever there was speculation on the succession to the Crown’, in England after the Reformation, ‘there was a revival of interest, among the recusants who hoped to profit by such a $$ change, in Sir Thomas More’. ) On the other hand, Trevor-Roper (who argued that More himself was averse to the extremes of Counter-Reformation religion, a ‘Catholic who appealed … to Protestants, who was indeed himself half-Protestant’) also claimed that More’s ‘devoted successors’, the ‘English lay recusants’, the proprietors of the More tradition, ‘clung to the image of an English, unpolitical, pre-Counter-Reformation Catholic Church’ and in Rome’s $% eyes made themselves and More thoroughly suspect. And, indeed, after c. , among the More clan, there was no consistent enthusiasm for $& More’s own stubborn oppositionist line to the royal supremacy. William $' Roper, More’s son-in-law, took the Oath of Supremacy. Aveling points out that the entire More family in Yorkshire in the s was probably $( conformist. William Dawtrey, the Sussex gentleman who was listed in as a ‘misliker’ of the religion established by law, and who married a daughter of William Roper, seems, in his later life, to have modified his $) opposition to the religious settlement. Sir Giles Alington, who married a stepdaughter of Sir Thomas, and in whose private chapel two of More’s daughters were married, adjusted easily to the Elizabethan regime; in $* he was regarded as a complete conformist. Sir William Roper of Eltham, one of More’s great-grandsons, was willing to conform when the %! recusancy statutes were enforced against him. Cresacre More’s biography of Sir Thomas, his great-grandfather, expressed deep regret that his own father’s brothers had ‘degenerated from that religion and $$ Trevor-Roper, Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans, , . $% Idem, Historical essays, London , –. $& McConica, ‘Recusant reputation’, . $' W. W. Woodden, ‘Structural patterning in William Roper’s life of More’, Moreana lxiv (), – at p. . For the Ropers’ pliability see C. Buckingham, ‘‘‘Sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought’’ (the Ropers of Eltham)’, London Recusant v(), –. It should be pointed out, however, that William and his two sons Thomas and Anthony, as well as William’s grandson William Dawtrey, Jr, were gradually harried out of their inns of court and legal posts on account of religion: R. M. Fisher, ‘Privy council coercion and religious conformity at the inns of court, –’, Recusant History xv (–), $( – at p. . Aveling, ‘More family’, . $) Hasler, House of Commons, ii. –. His conformity, though, occurred after he had remarried: R. B. Manning, Religion and society in Elizabethan Sussex, Leicester , –. $* Bindoff, House of Commons,i.–. %! PRO, E \, mem. a; E \, mem. a. Sir William’s father, Thomas Roper, had also conformed (or promised to conform) after he was arrested in : Bindoff, House of Commons, iii. . those manners, which Sir Thomas More left as it were a happie depositum %" unto his children and famelie’. Yet Cresacre More himself, though a recusant and former seminarist, took the Jacobean Oath of Allegiance in at a time when many Catholic polemicists were saying that the oath %# was a grave threat to the integrity of English Catholics’ faith. It was reported in March that Lady Roper, Sir William’s wife, was a supporter of the Benedictine monk Thomas Preston who had undertaken %$ to defend the regime’s position on the Oath of Allegiance. Thomas More, Cresacre’s brother and a seminary priest, was himself prepared to defend %% priests who were lax in the matter of the oath. And Cresacre’s son, %& Thomas, conformed completely to the Church of England in . This could be taken just as a sign that some of Sir Thomas’s relatives and descendants, the promoters of his memory, had sufficient good sense to protect themselves against the regime’s hostility with displays of moderation based on their famous ancestor’s well-known reputation for moderation. And yet the Lord Chancellor’s own ‘moderation’ was itself a highly complex quantity. He was, admittedly, cited sometimes as an example of political restraint. William Warmington, one of the Catholic clergy who openly defended the Oath of Allegiance, intimated that %' More would have taken it in obedience to royal command. But McConica has remarked that, even in his own time, More’s place among humanist reformers was ambiguous on account of his arguably un- necessary stand against royal policy in the early s. He was definitely not moderate about Lutheranism. The fact of the matter was that More’s memory was not fixed in the %" Quoted in Anderegg, ‘Tradition of early More biography’, . For an analysis of the opinions of Edward More, one of the three brothers condemned by Cresacre More, see Aveling, ‘More family’, –. %# D. Shanahan, ‘The family of St Thomas More in Essex –’, Essex Recusant iv (), – at pp. –. (Cresacre refused the oath, however, when it was offered to him in : Anderegg, ‘Tradition of early More biography’, .) %$ Newsletters, . For the connections of the More family with the Benedictines see P. Guilday, The English Catholic refugees on the continent – , London , , . %% M. Questier, ‘Loyalty, religion and state power in early modern England: English Romanism and the Jacobean oath of allegiance’, Historical Journal xl (), – at p. . %& Victoria history of the counties of England: a history of the county of Essex, ed. W. R. Powell, Oxford , vi. . %' Warmington cited More’s Supplication of soules to refute the opinion that the kingdom became subject to the Holy See during the reign of King John (a common topic in debates about the royal supremacy). Warmington also cited More on Christ’s passion to demonstrate that ‘temporall Princes’ alone had the power to wield a temporal sword: J. C. Boswell, Sir Thomas More in the English renaissance: an annotated catalogue, Binghampton , –, cf. nos , . William Sheils has suggested to me that the visual representations of More wearing the famous ‘SS’ chain of office also stressed his closeness and loyalty to the crown. For a full evaluation of the significance of the portraiture of More and his family we await Sheils’s forthcoming book on More and Fisher. public’s mind simply and only as an out-and-out opponent of the royal supremacy. Indeed his memory was available for appropriation in some surprisingly unexpected ways. Take the well-known play Sir Thomas More, written (not later than ) by among others the rabid anti-Catholic polemicist of the s, Anthony Munday. The play evinced an extraordinarily positive view of More. Anderegg suggests that, even if Munday was no more than a hack opportunist in his use of material on More, More had achieved, by the s, ‘something of folk hero status’. The play incorporates material from other sources which should have been hostile but were not, for example a sermon of October by John Aylmer, bishop of London, in which More was taken as a ‘commendable example of devotion’. This was totally at variance with the loathsome image of More found in Hall’s chronicles and John Foxe’s Acts and monuments, and repeated regularly by lesser Protestant polemicists such as William Attersall who cited More in the same breath as John Fisher, John Forest and Edmund Campion (and also William Parry, John Ballard and Anthony Babington), as all ‘devilish traitors, odious, disloyall, seditious, rebellious, unfaithful to their Prince and enimies to their %( country’. It was possible during Elizabeth’s reign, with a bit of a stretch of the imagination (considering that More had not been an enthusiastic supporter of Henry ) to take More’s history of Richard as pro-Tudor, in that Richard was there represented as a usurper. In the debate (printed in ) between the Puritan John Reynolds and the Catholic seminary priest John Hart (a spill-over from the public disputations of which Edmund Campion had been the centre-piece in ) More was cited to %) this effect. In the official version of the judicial proceedings against
%( Sir Thomas More, ed. V. Gabrieli and G. Melchiori, Manchester , intro; M. A. Anderegg, ‘The book of Sir Thomas More and its sources’ Moreana xiii (), –; William Attersall, A commentarie upon the epistle of St Paule to Philemon, London , cited in Boswell, Sir Thomas More, . The play’s modern editors conjecture that it was about the godly struggle between conscience and authority, written primarily for London’s Puritan theatregoers. The reasons for More’s imprisonment and execution are left deliberately vague: Sir Thomas More, , ; see also A. Shell, Catholicism, controversy and the English literary imagination, –, Cambridge , –. Edmund Tilney, Master of the Revels, demanded changes to the play, but it was not actually banned from being performed: Robson, ‘Posthumous representations of Thomas More’, –. For the most recent work on the great range of interests covered by ‘Grub-Street’ writers such as Munday in the search for a market see A. Walsham, ‘‘‘A glose of godlines’’: Philip Stubbes, Elizabethan Grub Street and the invention of Puritanism’, in S. Wabuda and C. Litzenberger (eds), Belief and practice in Reformation England: a tribute to Patrick Collinson by his students, Aldershot , –; P. Lake with M. Questier, AntiChrist’s lewd hat: Protestants, papists and players in post-Reformation England, London . For Mark Robson’s discussion of the play’s origins and authorship see ‘Posthumous representations’, –. %) John Reynolds, The summe of the conference, London (RSTC ), cited in Boswell, Sir Thomas More, . Henry Garnet and the gunpowder conspirators in , More was noted as a loyalist, and worthy to be distinguished from the plotters’ own %* wretched example. Some seventeenth-century Protestant theological writers also did not subscribe to the image of ‘More-as-persecutor’ created by Foxe. Christopher Lever, in his very Protestant Historie of the defendors of the Catholique faith, written in , incorporated More into a deeply contingent thesis about the progress of religious reform in England since the Henrician Reformation. The rise and fall of godly rulers, the reaction against Protestantism as well as its successes, are a measure of the workings of Providence, as God’s grace interacts with man’s fallen nature. In this scheme, More, an opponent of true Protestant doctrine, is not typecast as simply an obstacle to the truth. He is a man of conscience, a conscience ill-informed but the sign of a lover of truth: ‘howsoever, he was an enemy to the truth of the Gospell, yet if we compare him to Stephen Gardiner, the comparison will make Sir Thomas More lesse evill, the other being so monstrous in his wicked practises’. More is not an enemy &! of the Reformation in the way that Gardiner is. Even in the charged religious atmosphere of the Long Parliament it was possible for Joseph Hall, in December , to distinguish between Catholic books which, for their corrupting influence, should be prevented from coming before Protestant eyes, and ones which were more laudable, &" for example biographies of More. All through the period up to ,in various polemical publications, we see strikingly different views of More evinced by a variety of writers, both Catholic and Protestant.
IV
So More’s reputation was not fixed, and, in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, was still very much up for grabs. Now I want to show how More’s memory was deliberately appropriated by a number of Catholics (mainly by a group of closely knit families, including both the Mores themselves and many who were kin to them). Of course, it is well known that the contemporary manuscript and printed biographies of Sir Thomas were putting forward, through a series of complex rhetorical %* A true and perfect relation, London (RSTC ), cited in Boswell, Sir Thomas More, . &! Christopher Lever, The historie of the defendors of the catholique faith London , (RSTC ), , –. Lever emphasises that division in religion came originally through the papal pursuit of political power over kings, and notes that papal political power was not something with which More sympathised. &" Journals of the House of Lords, iv. (for which reference I am grateful to Anthony Milton). exercises, a particular view of the great martyr’s life and example; or, as Mark Robson has it, were ‘deploying rhetorical strategies to define the &# image of More’. I want to extend this account of the perception of More in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and to show also how these acts of appropriation contributed to the formation of crucial aspects of Catholics’ political and ecclesiastical identity during the period. As we have already mentioned, at the end of the sixteenth century, some of those Catholics who had been ordained as secular priests in the continental seminaries became involved in a bitter struggle with other Catholics (usually Jesuits or Jesuit-influenced) over the way in which English Catholicism was ministered to and sustained. In the Appellant Controversy, Catholic clerics engaged not just with each other but also with the state in a series of gambits about the real meaning of secular and religious allegiance and the possibility of toleration for moderate Catholics. The Appellant Controversy was technically settled by a papal breve in late . Yet the deeper causes of the dispute were not resolved. In large part this was because some of the secular clergy felt that the Jesuits still exercised a canonically unjustified amount of influence over English Catholics. While the agenda of the anti-Jesuit secular priests was &$ often not as candid as it seemed, their stated intention, in order to redress their grievances, was to persuade the pope to restore some of the institutional structures of Catholicism in England which had been lost at the Reformation. In particular they wanted direct local Catholic episcopal rule, preferably with ordinary jurisdiction, to be established over English Catholics so that these Catholics could enjoy the benefits which the universal Church derived from episcopacy. This, of course, would involve exercising some control over the religious orders, particularly the Jesuits. A bishop would, however, foster the tradition of scholarship and godliness which was supposed to be at the heart of the seminaries which had been &% set up to train the priests. Now there seems to have been a significant intersection between the secular clergy who were behind these proposals for the reform of English Catholicism, and those who were clearly part of a self-consciously Morean group. Let me describe this briefly. The person who was at the centre of both was the secular priest whom we have already noticed in our brief account of the More family – Thomas More, one of the Lord Chancellor’s && great-grandsons. He had taken part in the Appellant dispute against the &# Robson, ‘Posthumous representations’, . Robson’s thesis (which was brought to my attention by Alison Shell) is an excellent literary deconstruction of the circulating sixteenth-century printed and manuscript biographies of More. &$ &% Bossy, The English Catholic community, –. See Newsletters, intro. && Just after the priest Thomas’s death, Cresacre More, his elder brother, noted to a mutual friend (the priest Thomas Rant), that he was the ‘cheife pillar of our family’: D. Shanahan, ‘The family of St Thomas More in Essex –’, Essex Recusant vii (), – at p. . Jesuits, and was allegedly savaged by pro-Jesuit archpriest George &' Blackwell. In he travelled to Rome with another leading secular priest, Richard Smith, to represent the seculars’ case to the pope and the Curia. They hoped that the Roman authorities would adopt and force through the reforms necessary to purge English Catholicism of its largely Jesuit-induced ills. His ecclesiastical superior, the new archpriest George Birkhead, introduced his agent to the Cardinal Vice-Protector Giovanni Garzia Millini in July as ‘Thomas Morus magni Thomae Mori martyris haeres Sacerdos pius, Reverendus, et probatae fideii’. In his name was included among those put forward by the seculars as a suitable candidate for receiving episcopal orders; he was ‘a most acceptable man, both because of his own merits and because of the most glorious memory of his great-grandfather, the famous More, who with the Cardinal elect of Rochester, first suffered an illustrious martyrdom for &( refusing the oath of supremacy’. In Bernardino Spada, the papal nuncio in Paris, noted that the secular priests had ‘sent a descendant of &) Thomas More to put forward six nominations for a new bishop’. And More’s letters of commendation on this occasion to the pope and various cardinals stressed, for example, that he was ‘haeres’ ‘non solum familiae, sed virtutum Domini Thomae Mori inclyti Ecclesiae Catholicae Romanae &* martyris’. '! In the letters which were written to More while he resided in Rome, we can see the interaction between his family circle and the more formal structures of the English secular clergy. Robert Pett, the secular clergy’s general factotum in Brussels, noted More’s relations as they passed through the town – for example in a letter to More of June where he noted how ‘your cosin [Edward] Bently is well. He was lately with me
&' John Bennett, The hope of peace, London (RSTC ), ; William Watson, A decacordon, London (RSTC ), . &( AAW, A x. . See D. Shanahan, ‘The death of Thomas More, secular priest, great- grandson of St Thomas More’, Recusant History vii (–), – at p. . Richard Smith’s biography of his and More’s patroness, the dowager Viscountess Montague, dedicated to the cardinal protector of the English nation, Edward Farnese, likewise described More as ‘great grandchild and direct heir of that famous Sir Thomas More, sometime Lord Chancellor of England and a most worthy martyr; who seeking to participate rather of the virtues than of the lands of his great grandfather, having resigned unto his younger brother a most ample patrimony, and being adorned with learning and virtues and made priest, devoted himself wholly to the conversion of his country, in which industry he hath laudably employed himself these twenty years’: An Elizabethan recusant house, ed. A. C. Southern, London , . &) A. F. Allison, ‘Richard Smith, Richelieu and the French marriage: the political context of Smith’s appointment as bishop for England in ’, Recusant History vii (), &* – at p. . AAW, A xviii. . '! This paragraph and the next rely heavily on the introduction to my recent Newsletters. about some busines from Sir William Roper. His wife is in Ingland and my Lady Roper and her daughter are lately gone. God spead them all '" well’. The secular priest Anthony Champney (a future vice-president of the seminary at Douai and future dean of the secular clergy episcopal chapter) kept a close eye, from Paris, on the progress of More’s cousins, Thomas and John Roper. (One of their friends had compared Thomas favourably to the well-known anti-Jesuit Nicholas Fitzherbert, formerly '# the secretary of Cardinal William Allen. ) In January Champney said he hoped More’s two cousins would ‘proove them selves true heyres '$ to St Thomas More’. As we glance through the letters written to Thomas More in Rome we note how other leading figures in the secular clergy’s anti-Jesuit campaign had been and were still tied in with More’s family, and were sometimes actually members of that family: William Bishop (the future bishop of Chalcedon) had kept house for the Mores in the early s and he was the priest who absolved Thomas More from his technically schismatical '% state after his family withdrew him from Eton College. The celebrated martyr, George Napper (executed in November ), whose name and courage this group of priests did so much to commemorate and promote in their letters to their agent in Rome, was himself related by marriage '& to the clergy agent Thomas More. There is a sense here of a Morean ‘party within a party’ among the priests. Thomas Doughty, a Carmelite friend of the seculars, had been for a time a servant in the Roper household. John Colleton, a leading Appellant priest who was a regular writer of letters to Thomas More while he was agent in Rome, and later was a crucial cog in the secular priests’ machinery of clerical government, '' spent the latter part of his career in the Ropers’ house at Eltham. Doughty was instrumental in fixing the election in of William Harrison as the third archpriest over the English Catholic secular clergy, somewhat to the surprise of other senior Catholic secular priests.
'" Ibid. ; AAW, A xii. , . Edward Bentley was mentioned in More’s will: Shanahan, ‘Family of St Thomas More’, Essex Recusant vii. . '# '$ AAW, A xii. . AAW, A xiii. . '% Newsletters, –; AAW, A x. . When Bishop returned to England in July , having been consecrated bishop of Chalcedon in Paris, the first residence he visited after landing at Dover was a house belonging to Sir William Roper: Anstruther, Seminary priests, i. . Bishop died at Bishopshall, Essex, in a house belonging to Sir Basil Brooke. Brooke’s daughter Mary married Cresacre More’s son Thomas. Brooke was a patron of the secular clergy, though he opposed Richard Smith in the jurisdictional dispute between Smith and the regulars in the later s: P. R. P. Knell, ‘The descendants of St Thomas More in Hertfordshire –’, Essex Recusant vi (), – at p. ; A. F. Allison, ‘A question of jurisdiction: Richard Smith, bishop of Chalcedon, and the Catholic laity, –’, '& ibid. xvi (), – at pp. –, . Newsletters, . '' Ibid. ; Anstruther, Seminary priests,i.–. In June a spy had reported that Colleton was at Southampton House in London with the Ropers: PRO, SP \\. Harrison’s will describes him as godfather and ‘kinsman’ to Frederick '( Bentley, the son of Edward Bentley, More’s cousin. The priest John Redman, who assisted with the printing of Richard Smith’s books, was a ') grandson of Margaret Giggs, Sir Thomas More’s adopted daughter. Another priest John Copley, who, in his capacity as secretary to the archpriest George Birkhead, drew up the secular priests’ petition to the Roman Curia for the appointment of a bishop over English Catholics, had a brother, William, who married one of Margaret Giggs’s grand- daughters. Geoffrey Pole, a Sussex Catholic and great-nephew of Cardinal Reginald Pole (Sir Thomas More’s friend and admirer), followed Smith '* and More to Rome in to support their petitioning campaign. As already noted, Cardinal Pole had promoted Sir Thomas More’s memory in his Pro ecclesiasticae unitatis defensione. And in he delivered to a London audience a biting harangue in which he reproached his auditory with the ‘marvelous example … I meane a cytesyn of yours, who was Syr Thomas Moore … for his wytt, verteu and learnynge, most estemyd of any temporal man wythyn the realme, and no lesse estemyd in other realmes for the fame for his vertues’. Sir Thomas’s constancy to the Church was a miracle of such a sort that ‘surelye a greater hathe not byn sene yn this realme, nor yn none other, many hundrede years’. By comparison, Pole (! made almost no mention of Bishop John Fisher. Geoffrey Pole had, in his youth, been placed in the household of the cardinal protector of the English nation, Edward Farnese, and the secular clergy planned to make use of his contacts in Rome. It had even been rumoured in early that (" the Spaniards would obtain a cardinal’s hat for him. In May he was to be found travelling through Brussels with Sir Robert Bassett, the (# convert-author of one of the biographies of Sir Thomas More. In a marriage was being considered between Pole’s sister Katherine and ($ More’s brother Cresacre. It is probably significant also that John Southcote, briefly secretary to the episcopal chapter set up by William
'( M. A. Tierney, Dodd’s church history of England, London –, v, pp. clxxix–clxxx; AAW, A xv. ; xvi. ; A. J. Loomie, ‘A grandniece of Thomas More: Catherine Bentley ca. –ca. ’, Moreana viii (), –; T. J. McCann, ‘Catherine Bentley, great grand-daughter of St Thomas More, and her Catholic connections in Sussex’, ibid, ') '* xi (), –. Newsletters, . Ibid. (! J. Strype, Ecclesiastical memorials, Oxford , iii, pt , , –. When, temporarily, in early Thomas Cranmer recanted his Protestant beliefs to the satisfaction of Cardinal Pole and the Marian authorities, he was given More’s Dialogue of comfort to meditate on: MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer, . Reginald Pole was also the promoter to high office of the canonist Nicholas Harpsfield, the confidant of the More–Roper circle, for whose own biography of More, William Roper’s better-known effort was written as a source. I am very grateful to Thomas Freeman for these points and references. (" (# HMC, Salisbury MSS, xvii. . Ibid. xviii. , . ($ Newsletters, . Bishop, and heavily involved during the s in the seculars’ desperate efforts to protect Richard Smith from the attacks of his enemies among the (% Jesuits and Benedictines, was part of the Roper clan. Of course, this evidence should not be taken to imply that either the sole impetus for the secular clergy’s reform project came from within a Morean group, or that only the kin of Sir Thomas More were enthusiasts for the promotion of his memory. But the fact that, among these priests, we run across so many statements about More from those who had some family link with him does strongly suggest that the issue of More’s witness to Catholic unity had taken on certain intra-Catholic political conno- tations which went far beyond merely remembering that he had been a good man, or just that they were all related to each other. A view of Thomas More’s ‘in-tray’ correspondence at Rome shows how he and his friends and family saw, promoted and exploited the image of his famous ancestor. For instance, they frequently talk about the need to obtain the original Roper manuscript biography of Sir Thomas from England, take it to the continent and have it printed. In November Anthony Champney, one of the founding members of the secular clergy’s Paris college for English Catholic clerical writers, wrote to More that ‘we would gladly begin our worke with St Thomas More and his colleague (& Bishop fisher theyre lives’, but could not obtain the life of More. In February Champney was asking More ‘to hinder yf you can the printinge of Bis[hop] Fisher his life’ because Champney wanted Fisher’s (' and More’s lives to be printed together. In June Champney wrote again to More that they were still soliciting Sir William Roper for the biography of More ‘whoe ys willinge we showld have yt but he can not gett yt out (( of Ingland’. They were also very keen to acquire the manuscript of the Historia anglicana ecclesiastica written by Nicholas Harpsfield, the client of () William Roper. Thomas Heath, a conveyer of letters for the secular (% Anstruther, Seminary priests, ii. . Southcote’s cousin, Mary Southcote, a nun at Ghent from the mid-sto went there in the company of ‘her cozen Margher. Roper’: Miscellanea XI (CRS xix, ), ; Miscellanea I (CRS i, ), . Southcote’s brother Edward married into the Seborne family of Sutton, Co. Hereford, which in the same generation had seen a daughter marry Christopher Roper who succeeded as second Baron Teynham in : Sir Edward Bysshe, A visitation of the county of Surrey, ed. G. J. (& Armitage (Harleian Society, ), . AAW, A xi. . (' AAW, A xii. . In April Champney was proposing that Thomas Martin (a priest whose letters about the lamentable state of the seminary at Douai were used to support the secular clergy’s petitions to the Roman Curia) should translate More’s English (( works into Latin: AAW, A xii. . AAW, A xii. . () There seems to have been something of a competition between the secular clergy and the Jesuits as to who should print it first. In December Champney was desperately trying to find out from the Jesuits in Brussels ‘whether this historie was not about to be printed by some of theyres’, and John Percy would say only that ‘he thought he hadd heard some thinge to that purpose’: AAW, A xii. . From May the seculars were trying to get a copy of Harpsfield from the Cassinese congregation of the English clergy in London, was in July looking for a portrait of Sir Thomas (* to send to Rome. The publication of St Francis de Sales’s Introduction to a devoute life by the secular priest John Yaxley in , dedicated to Anne Roper, Sir Thomas’s great-great-granddaughter, and its emphatic reference to his life and martyrdom as a source of virtue flooding down the generations of his family, may have been part of the seculars’ publishing )! programme as well. We find the letters to More in Rome from his various correspondents frequently talking about how the progress of Catholicism in England could be comprehended in terms of the former Lord Chancellor’s ideas and virtues. Christopher Bagshaw wrote to More in August , as the seculars were gearing up to confront the Jesuits over whether Rome should appoint an English bishop from among the secular priests, that ‘the learnedest of all the Jesuites in fraunce tolde me within these fewe dayes that to grante Byshopps in Englande [i.e. to invest one of the secular clergy in England with episcopal orders] was against all au[tho]rytye [and] religion. Your [great-] grandfather St Sir Thomas jesteth (yow )" Knowe) at him who woulde have beene byshoppe of Utopia’. Edmund Bolton, the historian, who corresponded on very friendly terms with Thomas More in said he had received a letter from him which is ‘full of the spirit of true virtue, and nobilitie, such as becommeth the starr, and )# admiration of my life, your incomparable ancestor’. Thomas Rant, a priest of the French Oratory, who came to be closely associated with the secular clergy’s reform programme in the s and s, wrote to the clergy agent in June that ‘now I doe write, what shold I take for subject matter rather, then b. St Thomas More?’, whom he referred to as his ‘Devote’. Of late, he said, ‘a desire tooke me, and reasonablye stronge,
Benedictines: AAW, A xii. , .In– they were still trying to extract it from the Cassinese, not all of whom were happy about the seculars’ more consistent support for the monks of the Spanish congregation: AAW, A xiii. ; xiv. . Champney wrote at the end of December , however, that he had just received a copy from the Benedictine Walter Robert (Vincent) Sadler, who offered it to them on condition that the seculars should pay for it to be printed (£ sterling): AAW, A xv. . But Harpsfield’s book finally appeared in from a Douai press announcing on the title page that Richard Gibbons was responsible for its publication: Allison and Rogers, Contemporary printed literature,i.. (Champney had heard a rumour, as early as November , that Gibbons was planning to print it: AAW, A xii. .) As Thomas Freeman has pointed out, Harpsfield’s book was probably seen by both sides as good propaganda for their cause. The secular priests would have liked Harpsfield’s emphasis on the continuity of Catholicism and his making episcopacy the organising principle for that continuity. The Historia focuses heavily on episcopal and apostolic succession. However, the Jesuits, it seems, liked Harpsfield’s insistence on absolute papal supremacy. Harpsfield also praised mendicant and monastic orders in the Historia. In his Dialogi sex (Antwerp ) he wrote enthusiastically about Jesuit missions to Asia and the New World. I am very grateful to (* )! Dr Freeman for this information. AAW, A xi. . See p. above. )" )# Newsletters, . AAW, A xiv. . to endeavor for his picture’ which could be hung in the Oratorians’ ‘gallerye’ in Paris alongside other famous men ‘to excite us by their )$ memorye to the Immitation of their virtues’. David Cressy has shown how, in this period, even very tenuous and distant relationships between individuals were not necessarily felt to diminish the depth of association and obligation between one ‘cousin’ )% and another. William Paston, the son of Edward Paston of Appleton in Norfolk, wrote to More in September mentioning that he was willing to do More any service ‘for manny respects amongest the which the alliance betwene us as I take it is not the least to be considered being as I have heard that yow are discended from Sir Thomas More and )& soe … ame I’. The priest John Fixer wrote to the clergy agent in September imploring that he might be taken into the seculars’ inner circle. Fixer assured More that he did ‘love and esteeme yow withall in my hart’ and that affection between them might be fired by ‘that frendship which is knowne to have bin in our fathers … the two worthies of our country and there Age whose names we beere yow of Thomas Moor L Chanseler of England and I of Iohn Fisher B and Cardinal of Rochester’. He did not specifically claim to be related to the cardinal in blood, but he wrote in the margin, ‘Fisher and Fixer be all one yow knowe in Italian and Spanishe pronuntiation and in English signification they )' differ no more’. Here Fixer posits a link between physical kinship and spiritual kinship. And, indeed, it is clear from many of these examples how ideological affinity could gloss and strengthen actual kin relationship just as kinship could be appealed to in order to establish ideological unity. In other words, the establishing of kinship (sometimes, it has to be said, rather distant or, even, in William Sheils’s phrase, ‘fictive’) could in these circumstances establish a particular ecclesiastical and clerical identity which represented more than mere fellow feeling. For these priests and their friends it undoubtedly also represented a buying into structures of )( patronage and actual or hoped-for political influence. )$ Rant became the secular clergy’s agent in Rome during the s. Thomas Harlay, the provost of Cambrai, who had assisted the leading secular priests when they tried to wrest control of the Douai seminary from the pro-Jesuit Thomas Worthington in mid- , was reputed to have a picture of More: AAW, A xiii. . )% Cressy, ‘Kinship’, . )& Paston said the relationship was ‘by my mothers side which is a Berny [Margaret Berney, daughter of Sir Henry Berney of Reedham]’: AAW, A xiv. ; Sir Edward Bysshe, The visitation of Norfolk … ed. A. W. Hughes Clarke and A. Campling (Norfolk Record Society, ), ii. . More enquired what exactly his descent was from the former Lord Chancellor. Paston replied ‘I must confesse my self to be ignorant thearin only I have heard my mother speake much thearof to which side I ame descendid; and as I remember she said wee come from Mistris Margeret More daughter to Sir Th[omas]’: and thus ‘wee are a kindred to Sir William Roper’: AAW, A xv. . )' AAW, A xiii. . )( I am grateful to William Sheils for advice on this point.
V
This brief reconstruction of the way in which certain contemporaries remembered Sir Thomas More indicates how that memory was loaded with polemical significance. For the anti-Jesuit secular clergy and their patrons it was also a point of reference for explaining how Catholicism in England should be promoted and regulated. But, in order to understand how this strand of contemporary Catholicism actually functioned, we have to say a bit more about the overarching patronage and political structure which fostered this web of relationships. Although the More family often seemed to keep a low profile during this period, it had worked its way into the centre of perhaps the most important English Catholic patronage system of the day, the entourage of )) the Brownes of Cowdray, Viscounts Montague. Lucy Browne, a sister of the first Viscount Montague, had married Thomas Roper of Eltham, the son of William Roper and Sir Thomas More’s daughter Margaret. (In the second half of the seventeenth century Christopher Roper, fifth Baron Teynham, would marry a daughter of Francis Browne, third Viscount Montague.) Seemingly stray items of news appear to have found their way into the secular clergy’s letters to Rome because the Brownes were involved. For instance, the arrest of the Yorkshire gentleman Richard Cholmeley of Brandsby in for sheltering priests was relayed to Rome in part, as the writer noted, because a sister of the first Viscount Montague was in Cholmeley’s family tree, and because Cholmeley’s wife’s sister had )* married into a branch of the Browne family in Oxfordshire. When in January Edmund Bolton relayed to Thomas More the shocking news that Archbishop George Abbot had turfed the body of Sir George Browne, one of the second Viscount Montague’s uncles, out of the chancel of St Saviour’s in Southwark, he commiserated with the clergy agent *! about the treatment accorded to ‘your cosen I thinck’. The Mores and Ropers were connected by blood and marriage to other Sussex families who were close to Viscount Montague. The first viscount’s mother was Alice, daughter of Sir John Gage, chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster. As Thomas Rant pointed out, the Gage family, therefore, was *" one of several ‘who draw his [Sir Thomas More’s] blood’. Cresacre )) For the Browne family see G. E. C. [Cokayne], Complete peerage, London –, ix. –; Sir William H. St John Hope, Cowdray and Easebourne priory of the county of Sussex, London , –; A. A. Dibben, The Cowdray archives: a catalogue, Chichester , intro.; R. B. Manning, ‘Anthony Browne, st Viscount Montague: the influence in county politics of an Elizabethan Catholic nobleman’, Sussex Archaeological Collections cvi (), –. )* Newsletters, ; R. T. Spence, The privateering earl, Stroud , pp. xiv–xv. *! *" AAW, A xiv. . AAW, A xii. . More, the clergy agent’s brother, married Elizabeth, the eldest daughter *# of Thomas Gage of Firle who died in . The Brownes were kin also to the Poles. (As we have noted, the Poles, particularly Geoffrey Pole, Jr, were heavily involved in the secular clergy’s projects.) The first Viscount Montague’s father, Sir Anthony Browne, was related to Cardinal *$ Reginald Pole through his grandmother Lucy Neville. As we go further afield in reconstructing this kinship network we find, for instance, William Crispe of Ore in Kent reciting, in his will of November , lists of gentry families to which he was kin, including the Ropers, the Gages and the *% Belsons who all had marriage alliances with the Brownes. One of Crispe’s father’s first cousins had married a daughter of Thomas Roper (i.e. a sister of Sir William Roper of Eltham, and thus a grand-daughter *& of the first Viscount Montague). Anthony Roper, Sir William Roper’s eldest son, took as his third wife a daughter of Sir Henry Compton, who himself made a second marriage to a daughter of Sir George Browne, uncle to the second Viscount Montague, after the death of her first husband, Thomas Paston (the brother of William Paston whom we have *' noticed already, writing to the clergy agent in Rome). And these links and networks could undoubtedly, with more work, be expanded further. While the first Viscount Montague maintained a very respectable distance from the seminary priests (he would generally allow only Marian priests into his household), his grandson and heir, the second viscount, Anthony Maria Browne, became committed to the cause of the anti-Jesuit secular clergy. When the first viscount died in , some anti-Jesuit secular priests, including clerics such as Thomas More and Richard Smith, who were already (and continued to be) chaplains to the second viscount’s step-grandmother, were in a position to take up the patronage *# Shanahan, ‘Family of St Thomas More’, Essex Recusant iv. – at p. . The priest George Tias, whose family had been tenants of the Mores at Barnburgh in Yorkshire, was arrested in July at Bentley, one of the Gage family’s residences in Sussex: Newsletters, . *$ The Poles had a presence on the Sussex–Hampshire border since the countess of Salisbury had lived at Warblington Castle, and Reginald Pole’s younger brother, Sir Geoffrey, had acquired estates at Lordington in Sussex. *% His mother was a daughter of John Gage of Bentley: Family collections relating to the family of Crisp, st ser. London –,i.–. *& Among the Crispe family’s associates in the sixteenth century was the lawyer Cyriak Petyt, one of the plotters against Archbishop Cranmer in , a close friend of the Roper family, and a servant of Cardinal Pole at Canterbury: Bindoff, House of Commons, iii. –; cf. T. F. Mayer, ‘When Maecenas was broke: Cardinal Pole’s ‘‘spiritual’’ patronage’, Sixteenth Century Journal xxvii (), – at p. . When, in Mary’s reign, the Canterbury clergyman, John Bland (one of the accused in the plot), was prosecuted for heresy, Petyt took the lead in interrogating him: Freeman, ‘John Bland’, New Dictionary of National Biography (forthcoming), s.v. Bland. *' Hasler, House of Commons,i.; The chronicle of the English Augustinian canonesses regular of the Lateran, at St Monica’s in Louvain –, ed. A. Hamilton, London –, ii, Roper pedigree; Bysshe, Visitation of Norfolk, ii. . afforded by the sympathetic new head of the Browne family. Several of the archpriest Birkhead’s ‘assistants’ (his senior clerical advisers) lived with families which had intermarried with the Brownes, notably the Dormers of Wing in Buckinghamshire, the Lacons of Kinlet in Shropshire *( and the Constables of Burton Constable in Yorkshire. Indeed, one of the priests in this clerical coterie, John Mush, whose alias of ‘Ratcliffe’ was the maiden name of the first Viscount Montague’s first wife, daughter of the earl of Sussex, was referred to by the second Viscount Montague, in *) a letter of , as ‘my cosin Ratcliffe’. William Clifford, a friend of Cresacre More, who in was recommended as a suitable successor to Richard Smith as bearer of episcopal authority in England, was a relative (though distant) of the earl of Cumberland and could thereby claim ** kinship with the Brownes. It is not entirely clear when Montague first became committed to the cause of the secular priests who wished to bring about the far-reaching reforms among English Catholics which were aired first during the Appellant Controversy. Montague certainly did not figure prominently during that controversy. But by he had evidently decided to support their campaign. He had already staked some sort of claim to leadership among English Catholics with an inflammatory speech in parliament in June against the ‘Act for the due execution of the statutes against "!! Jesuits, Seminary priests, and Recusants’. Two days before the Gunpowder Plot broke an informer petitioned the earl of Salisbury for some action to be taken against the viscount’s entourage in London, and insisted that ‘the Viscount is of the Romish church in England held for "!" their grand captain and firm pillar’. Montague himself secured travel passes from the privy council for Smith and More to go to Rome in . He had already put his name to, perhaps even written, a notorious letter to Pope Paul demanding that "!# the Catholic clergy in England should be reformed. He certainly postured as a meek, mild and essentially detached well-wisher of the ‘old religion’. But it is fairly safe to assume that he was exerting a consider- able level of control over what these secular priests were doing.
*( Newsletters, . See The Douay college diaries: third, fourth and fifth – , with the Rheims report, –, i, ed. E. H. Burton and T. L. Williams (CRS x, ), –, for William Bishop’s resort to the house of Lady Mary Dormer in London after his return to *) England in . AAW, A viii, no. . ** Chronicle, –; Anstruther, Seminary priests, ii. ; AAW, Anglia VIII, no. . "!! Bodleian Library, Oxford, Theological b. , fos r–r, a transcript of which was very kindly supplied to me by Margaret Sena; Tierney, Dodd’s church history of England, "!" iv. ; PRO, SP \\. HMC, Salisbury MSS, xvii. –. "!# Newsletters, ; Letters of Thomas Fitzherbert, –, ed. L. J. Hicks (CRS xli, ), –. Relying on the authority which the Brownes conferred on them, these secular priests exploited the Lord Chancellor’s memory in order to define important aspects of early seventeenth-century Catholicism in the face both of the Protestant state and of Catholics who were unsympathetic to their cause. As we know from the standard nineteenth- "!$ century narratives of the conflicts between the secular priests and the Jesuits at this time, the secular priests who were most actively involved in promoting their programme of ecclesiastical reform had quite a task to persuade Rome that they could be relied on to be sound and orthodox supporters of papal prerogative. (The English Jesuits, they suspected with some justification, were constantly sending messages to Rome that they were not sound and orthodox in this regard.) But they also wanted to persuade King James and his privy council in London that they were not fanatical supporters of the papal deposing power, i.e. that they were sufficiently unlike the Jesuits to be granted some measure of toleration. Sir Thomas More’s particular virtue in this respect was that he, as contemporaries well knew, had never been a papalist (or at least a high papalist). The Assertio which Henry produced against Luther had its discussion of the extent of papal power toned down by More. In his Dialogue concerning heresies More passes over, as Richard Marius points out, ‘in as much silence as he can muster’ the place of the papacy in "!% Reformation controversy. He was clearly distinguishable from other opponents of the royal supremacy who were blatant in their support for papal authority. But Sir Thomas also had, of course, a European reputation as a zealous opponent of heresy. These aspects of More’s reputation could be manipulated in order to characterise a particular style of Catholicism and churchmanship in early seventeenth-century England. Within the familiar outlines of More’s own history it was possible to exploit the balance between the well-known elements of political moderation, reserve about the political power of the papacy, personal witness to Catholic unity and a strong opposition to heretical Protestant doctrine. More’s reputation as a martyr was a vehicle for "!& holding these characteristics in an easily publicisable balance. He made "!$ See, especially, Tierney, Dodd’s church history of England, iii, iv. "!% R. Marius, Thomas More, London , –, ; cf. P. Sheldrake, ‘Authority and consensus in Thomas More’s doctrine of the Church’, Heythrop Journal xx (), – at pp. –, ; cf. J. M. Headley, ‘Thomas More and Luther’s revolt’, Archiv fuW r Reformationsgeschichte ix (), – at pp. –. This was not something which More’s promoters had always emphasised. Stapleton’s biography of More, as McConica points out, had suppressed More’s admission at his trial that he had never placed the pope’s authority above that of a general council of the Church: McConica, ‘The recusant reputation’, . (I am grateful to Professor Jack Scarisbrick for a discussion on this point.) "!& More, the clergy agent, and his friend Richard Smith sought not just to publish the Roper and Harpsfield manuscripts, but, it seems, were actually trying to manipulate and a good polemical instrument to fashion an image of churchmanship for the English secular priests to adopt as they tried to balance the demands of the Curia in Rome and the Protestant regime in London. So, while there could be no doubt about Sir Thomas’s hostility to Protestantism, the accounts of his conflict with Henry could also stress "!' his apparent moderation. He had fought heresy in the service of the "!( crown, i.e. against Luther; and he had manoeuvred astutely over the business of the Nun of Kent. He had gone a long way to accommodate himself to the Boleyn marriage. In that he was a member of the ‘Aragonese’ party he was not one of its outspoken members. More had never copied Fisher’s ‘increasingly vehement and public opposition to the divorce’ nor, unlike Fisher, did he ‘make himself the willing agent of "!) treason’. It was clear from his published works that his resistance and death were preceded by often agonised reflection. More was not, at least in his final conflict with Henry, a zealot or a fanatic. This would have been crystal clear to anyone who read the circulating manuscript and printed biographical accounts of him. In the Jacobean period Bishop Lancelot Andrewes denied that More had died for defending unthinkingly "!* the cause of the papacy. It was well known, also, that Sir Thomas’s eschewal of an aggressive papalism was linked to a belief in the power of general councils of the Church. More had expressed his opinion that a general council should rule authoritatively on the place which the papacy should occupy in the Church. As Marius points out, More always argued that a general council fashion an entire Catholic martyrological tradition. Daniel Shanahan has shown that the primitive martyrology in the Westminster Cathedral Archives, B series (two lists of martyrs), was compiled c. by More. In a letter at the end of the lists More refers to his great-grandfather Sir Thomas: ‘Thomas More secular priest, –’, Essex Recusant vii (), – at pp. –. Richard Smith in the s was still trying to gather sources for a Catholic martyrology. The biography of Sir Thomas published by Cresacre More, to which Thomas, his brother, may have contributed, was being written at about the same time (c. –) as the seculars were trying to publish Roper and Harpsfield: Anderegg, ‘Tradition of early More biography’, –, ; Allison and Rogers, Contemporary printed literature,i.–. "!' Peter Marshall has emphasised to me, however, that one should beware conflating the representation of More’s moderation in later accounts of him with his actual position in the s; he was, after all, the only lay Catholic in England to refuse the Oath of Succession. "!( As Mark Robson points out, More argues in his Dialogue concerning heresies that persecution of heresy is necessary ‘for the preservation of order within the realm’: ‘Posthumous representations’, . "!) Marius, Thomas More, –, ; M. Dowling, Fisher of men: a life of John Fisher, – , London , ch. vii; J. Guy, The public career of Sir Thomas More, London , , , , . "!* Lancelot Andrewes, Tortura torti, London (RSTC ), cited in Boswell, Sir Thomas More, no. . ""! could not err, ‘a claim he never once made for the papacy’. As W. B. Patterson has recently shown, the idea of a general council salving the wounds in Christendom was a persistent feature of James ’s public pronouncements on religion. And this was something on which the secular priests sometimes commented in their newsletters to Rome. (James proclaimed that he would stop speculating about whether the pope was AntiChrist if a general council could be convened to sort out the divisions """ in western Christendom. ) Thus the secular priests exploited the complexities of More’s memory to stress their opposition to Protestant heresy and also to emphasise that their attacks on heresy were not corrupted by the unwise political engagements of those English Catholics whom they characterised as Jesuited. Here the anti-Jesuit and loyalist second Viscount Montague was a successor of Sir Thomas. In he too refused an ungodly oath, the Jacobean oath of allegiance, with fortitude, a fortitude which his priests reported in their newsletters to Rome and which was passed on, in translation, to the cardinal protectors. For this refusal Montague suffered too (in Montague’s case, however, a large fine) which suffering he, like More, underwent ""# while still professing his allegiance to his king. There was perhaps also a sense in which Sir Thomas More’s wider perception of the Church and how it should be governed was extremely attractive to this fraction of English Catholicism during the early seventeenth century. As More’s account (in the Dialogue concerning heresies) of the Richard Hunne affair showed, he was thoroughly clericalist. He might not defend the papacy but he would defend the clergy at all costs, and the rights of the Church in England, the Church of which these ""$ defenders of More’s memory claimed to be the continuation. Indeed, in Anthony Copley (whose brother John became a priest-chaplain to Lord Montague, and whose brother William married the grand-daughter of Sir Thomas More’s adopted daughter Margaret Giggs) cited Sir Thomas More as a defender of the clergy against their enemies. In reply to the vicious attacks of Richard Verstegan on the character and good name of the secular priest William Watson, Copley wrote ‘what thinke you when such a vermin as this [Verstegan], shall dare offer such indignitie to holy Priesthood [i.e. in attacking Watson], then which what higher dignitie have ye in the Church of God?’. Copley insisted that ‘Were Sir Thomas Moore alive, I am sure he would herein take my part, who so Catholickly reverberated Luthers grosse termes against the ""! Marius, Thomas More, . More was cited to this effect by a papist turned Protestant, the former recusant Henry Yaxley of Bowthorpe in Norfolk: Morbus et antidotus, London , cited in Boswell, Sir Thomas More, no. . """ W. B. Patterson, James VI and I and the reunion of Christendom, Cambridge , ""# ch. ii and passim; Newsletters, . Newsletters, . ""$ Marius, Thomas More, . annointed person of King Henrie upon the Apostata himselfe; … and much more (no doubt) would he have bene rough with the outrager of a Priest’. Why, asked Copley, should he not do the same ‘who (I thanke God) avow my selfe no lesse Catholicke, though nothing neare so good a Catholike as that good Knight? Why (I say) should not I by his example ""% have also a pen to employ in a Priests defence, aswell as he?’ As Seymour Baker House has emphasised, Sir Thomas More’s published works criticised low standards among the parochial clergy. His solution, however, was not simply to weed out pluralism (which, it appears, he was prepared to tolerate, all things being equal). Rather, he thought that ‘only men of the highest quality ought to be ordained’. Their education and training were what would determine how well they would serve their cures. In Utopia and other works he opined that priests should be ordained only when there were suitable livings vacant to which they might be presented. As House puts it, ‘the erosion of respect for the holy office [of the priest] was the price paid for too many men in ""& orders’. Though they nowhere make specific mention of it in their newsletters and correspondence, there are some striking parallels between Sir Thomas’s opinions on this issue (though in themselves hardly unique) and those of the anti-Jesuit secular clergy. One of the seculars’ most important and repeated polemical lines was that the English mission suffered from an overproduction of priests in the (Jesuit-controlled or Jesuit-influenced) seminaries. With too brief a training and inadequate learning, such men returned to England and dismayed the Catholic gentry through their ignorance and incompetence. The Jesuits seemed to think that there was endless demand for priests in the English mission field when, in fact, there was not. One of the petitions which Smith and More carried with them when they went to Rome in was that the number of missioners coming into England should be limited. This petition, technically concerned just with the administrative details of the training and distribution of priests, expressed an approach to the mission and the ‘conversion of England’ which could be seen as radically at odds with the more overtly evangelical and confrontational style which was associated with the Jesuit mission. Sir Thomas More might therefore be seen as a ""' point of reference for the seculars’ anti-Jesuit polemic in this respect.
""% Anthony Copley, Another letter of Mr. A. C. to his dis-Iesuited kinseman, concerning the appeale, state, Iesuites, London (RSTC ), –. Another of Copley’s books, Afig for fortune of , was dedicated to the second Viscount Montague: T. J. McCann, ‘‘‘The known style of dedication is flattery’’: Anthony Browne, nd Viscount Montague of Cowdray and his Sussex flatterers’, Recusant History xix (), – at p. ; Newsletters, . ""& S. B. House, ‘Sir Thomas More as church patron’, this J xl (), – ""' at pp. –. Newsletters, intro. More controversially still, Sir Thomas had not been an unthinking devotee of the religious orders. He had made unflattering comments about the religious in his Utopia, describing friars as vagrants (though of course he was known to be an enthusiast for the more austere religious ""( orders). In the Jacobean period Protestants were still remarking on this fact: for example, in Daniel Price’s Recusants conversion of More is "") cited as a source to prove that monks’ prayers are valueless. And others noted that Sir Thomas’s aspersions on the integrity of some religious had been left out of the published editions of his works. In John Day reprinted an epistle which More had written concerning the quarrel between a friar and a parish priest in Coventry, into which quarrel he had been briefly drawn. To a Protestant reader it would have been the friar’s ignorance and superstitious attitude to intercessory prayer which would have been most remarkable. (The roving Franciscan preacher had been telling people in the parish that ‘he that should pray the whole Psalter of the Blessed Virgin quite over every Day, could never be damned’.) But Sir Thomas’s caustic asides about the friar were at least as much directed against the friar’s inserting himself into and disrupting a parish for his own benefit, as a result of the tolerance of the parish priest who played along with the friar for a time because he did not see what harm it could do. Nevertheless, ‘the Short, and the Long was this, the Fryar easily perswaded those that were willing ynough to beleeve, that their Pastor [when the worm finally turned and the parish priest condemned the friar’s ""* opinions] was a Foole, yea and a Wicked Man to [o]’. It is possible that More’s clericalism, expressed in the passage about the priest and the friar in Coventry, struck a chord with many secular priests who saw the Jesuits as behaving towards them much as the friar did to the parish priest. Of course, one should not go so far as to imply that the Jesuits came to "#! look on More unfavourably. However, it seems clear that some of the secular clergy discerned that there were ideological tensions even in the early hagiographical and martyrological accounts of the former Lord Chancellor and that, in the peculiar circumstances of the late sixteenth
""( "") Marius, Thomas More, . Cited in Boswell, Sir Thomas More, no. . ""* John Day, Days descant on Davids psalmes, London (RSTC ), cited in Boswell, Sir Thomas More, no. . See also Lambeth Palace Library, , pp. – (William Sancroft’s transcript of this passage). "#! Sir Thomas More is mentioned in several of the polemical works of Robert Persons, and eulogised in his unpublished Certamen ecclesiae anglicanae (see J. Simons, Robert Persons S. J. certamen ecclesiae anglicanae, publ. PhD diss. Nijmegen , passim). The pro-Jesuit Thomas Worthington, it seems, had a portrait of Sir Thomas: M. Comblen-Sonkes and C. van den Bergen-Pantens, MemorieW n van Anthonio de Succa, Brussels , ii, fo. r–v (for which reference I am very grateful to Paul Arblaster). There is no evidence that the members of the More family who became Jesuits were in any sense rejecting a family tradition, and the Teynham branch of the Roper family was served in the early seventeenth century by Jesuits: HMC, Salisbury MSS, xxi. . and early seventeenth centuries, these could be manipulated and played with to considerable polemical effect and advantage.
VI
During this period, then, it was an almost banal contemporary commonplace with some commentators that religion and blood re- lationship were inseparable. The Jesuit Robert Persons had ‘more than once … noticed the way in which fidelity and faithlessness ran in "#" families’. And this has been the underlying assumption running through almost all the significant studies of the progress of post- Reformation English Roman Catholicism. Theses on Catholic recusancy, frequently very technically accomplished pieces of work, have, methodo- logically, been targeted at groups of (mainly gentry) families whose fortitude and continuance in the faith could be gauged simply by seeing whether each succeeding generation continued to refuse to obey the Act of Uniformity and attend church or chapel as required by law. (The function of the clergy was, therefore, merely to provide sacramental sustenance for this emotional commitment to the ‘old faith’.) Un- doubtedly many Catholic families did adhere consistently to their faith across the generations. But any kind of deviance away from this putative norm was, for historians who subscribed to this model of recusant Catholicism, almost inexplicable. This dumbed-down view of Catholic kinship tends to prevent enquiry into the ways that Catholics defined and redefined their dissenting status and religion in England. The political and social malleability of Catholicism of the kind starting to be explored and opened up by scholars such as Alexandra Walsham (in her study of church papistry) is virtually impossible to pursue within the topic of "## ‘Catholic history’ as it has been practised conventionally. As Peter Lake has argued, however, at some point in our description of English religious culture between the Reformation and the Civil War it is necessary to account for change, and, moreover, contemporary per- ceptions of change: ‘depending on their initially contingent but increasingly structural relationships with events, different ideological fractions, groups and individuals told themselves and others different stories about where they were and how they got there’, a process which "#" R. Simpson, Edmund Campion: a biography, nd edn, London , . "## A. Walsham, Church papists, London , and ‘The parochial roots of Laudianism revisited: Catholics, anti-Calvinists and ‘‘parish Anglicans’’ in early Stuart England’, this J xlix (), –. Lawrence Stone wisely warns against the ‘Namierite’ tendency of assuming that the motivation of those we study can be reduced down to ‘family connexions’, no more in the end than a self-fulfilling prophecy which ‘fails to take cognizance of changes of structure’ and especially ‘changes of ideology’: Crisis of the aristocracy, –. generated most of the contemporary words which we still use to describe the religious divisions of the period – inter alia Protestantism, Puritanism "#$ and Catholicism as well. The narratives woven around Sir Thomas More comprise one of the great Catholic stories of the English Reformation, the telling and retelling of which generated a particular view of what Catholicism in England was and should be like. In the claims to kinship by people who saw themselves within the More family circle we see one of the means by which contemporary Catholics could describe their religious identity, explain their oppositional status and character and justify their conflict with the state and other Catholics. In the Morean circle, with its newsletters, publishing programme, patronage and clerical ethos, we can see a section of the Catholic community fairly buzzing with an awareness of the political and polemical significance of their version of the recent past and how it might be appropriated for a variety of purposes. How much, we might ask, does this tell us about what happened to English Catholicism more generally after the Reformation? For we might appear to be talking about only a small fraction of an already small social group, namely the gentry. As is well known, Christopher Haigh has accused John Bossy of writing ‘misleading history’ by concentrating on the gentry in his book, The English Catholic community – , and of erroneously making ‘the role of the gentry central to the emergence of … [the Catholic] community’ because he used ‘sources produced by catholics, the priestly biographies, Jesuit annual letters, seminary records "#% and the papers of catholic families’. Haigh also claimed that a focus on the gentry concealed the real origins of the continuity of English Catholicism, a Catholicism which hardly changed or developed at all: the differences ‘are less significant’, he says, ‘than the fact that so many of the families which held to [Robert] Parkyn’s religion in the s held to "#& [Robert] Parson’s [sic] religion in the s’. If Catholicism declined it was only because the gentry had in fact monopolised the services of a snobbish and lazy though increasingly genteel seigneurial Catholic clergy who then abandoned the main body of English Catholicism, closely if not exclusively identified in Haigh’s work with ‘the people’, to the Church of "#' England and some kind of outwardly conformist religious behaviour. This, however, is a somewhat misleading account both of Bossy’s work and, by extension, of the nature of the post-Reformation Catholic community and of the way that community functioned, developed and "#$ P. Lake, ‘Religious identities in Shakespeare’s England’, in D. Kastan (ed.), A companion to Shakespeare, Oxford , – at p. . "#% C. Haigh, ‘The fall of a Church or the rise of a sect? Post-Reformation Catholicism "#& in England’, Historical Journal xxi (), – at pp. –. Ibid. . "#' Idem, ‘Continuity of Catholicism’, –, and ‘Revisionism, the Reformation and the history of English Catholicism’, this J xxxvi (), – at p. . changed. Bossy argued not that Catholicism in England was created ex nihilo after by and among the gentry alone, but that, after , the "#( character of English Catholicism changed radically. This happened not because the gentry took on and monopolised seminarist chaplains as if they were some kind of religious fashion accessory, but because some of these gentry, in association with the clergy, were involved in a series of campaigns to appropriate a religious and ideological high ground in the face of the Protestant state, to shape and exploit the way in which Catholicism in England was managed and governed, and also, if possible, to achieve, eventually, some kind of concordat with the state – a fearful political development as far as many Protestants were concerned. To conclude, as Haigh does, that the religion of post-Reformation Catholicism has its origins primarily in the patterns of conservative resistance of the s is to underplay the significance of swathes of evidence (contained in gentry papers, correspondence, clerical bio- graphies and so on), evidence which, as used by Bossy, is an essential key in analysing what went on in the chrysalis of the Catholic community of this period. Bossy was taken to task for not wishing to ‘study a catholicism which is a vague body of opinion: his catholicism must be a precise, countable phenomenon’. However, in establishing precisely how Catholic identity was fashioned out of a series of political and polemical gambits, undertaken by actual members of the Catholic gentry and their clergy, not some imprecise uncountable conservatism lurking in a shadowland of ill-defined resistance and partial conformity to the Act of Uniformity, we can start to reconstruct a world which cannot be discerned solely or even mainly when viewed (exclusively) from the recusant rolls, church court records and the lamentations of supposedly unsuccessful Puritan evangelisers. The fashioning of this identity took place as Catholics of various different hues and persuasions talked about what it meant to be a Catholic in England at this time, and how it was possible to be both a good Catholic and a good Englishman. In particular they discussed how the Catholicism which had emerged in opposition to the Tudors’ state- sponsored Protestantism had been carried down to their own time. But this continuity was neither automatic or obvious. In fact, the problem for those who, like the secular priests we have studied here, insisted that they represented a continuum with the Catholic past, was that the continuities which they experienced and would have liked to assert to justify that claim as well as to arrogate ecclesiastical authority to themselves, cut little ice with many English Catholics and precious little with the regime. The formation of a tradition concerning More was part of this intensely
"#( Bossy, English Catholic community,pt. political process. As Mark Robson states, perhaps the crucial leitmotif of the biographies of More circulated by and among these priests and other Catholics was that More represented the continuity of the Catholic faith; "#) but this was a leitmotif which was hardly unproblematical. This, then, is the purpose of trying to locate English Catholic culture and tradition within an identifiable and extensive kinship network. By doing so, we can see prominent strands of contemporary Catholicism neither as a simple adherence to a few conservative theological doctrines nor just as a social phenomenon created by a series of ideologically passive marriage alliances. What I have suggested here is that family tradition perpetuating Catholicism was not only and merely a matter of ‘dissent in the blood’. It was shaped heavily by outside forces, and interacted with them. Here family continuity is an integral part of the process of political story-telling and identity formation. This suggests that some current orthodoxies about the nature of early modern English Catholicism may have to be surrendered, particularly those which see English Romanism retreating into a form of pacific social exclusivity simply through the mechanism of the family and inter-marriage. I suspect that research could be undertaken on networks similar to the one I have explored here. If this were to be done, perhaps the political history of early modern English Catholicism would start to be fleshed out and rewritten, and, more important, could be reintegrated into the mainstream historical narratives of the period.
"#) Robson, ‘Posthumous representations’, .