“THEY ARE but WOMEN”: MARY WARD, 1585–1645 Pamela Ellis

“THEY ARE BUT WOMEN”: MARY WARD, 1585–1645 Pamela Ellis There is a certain irony in regarding Mary Ward as a religious radical. The main motivation for her activity was the desire to restore the status quo ante for the Catholic Church in England, but the means by which she chose to pursue what might almost be called a reactionary aim were seen by that Church as dangerously innovative and subversive. Her apparent conservatism led her into proposing radical ways of preserv- ing or restoring the past, and thus into con ict with the Church she was seeking to champion. As a result of her efforts, her orthodoxy and obedience were called into question by a Church seemingly trapped in conventional thinking and unable to see that obedience might require a creative response to the challenges of the Reformation, and that to cling uncritically to the ways of the past might be to lose an opportunity to shape a Catholic future for England. This paradox lies at the heart of Mary Ward’s story. In 1951 Pius XII described Mary Ward as “that incomparable woman given by Catholic England to the Church in the darkest and most blood-stained of periods”. During his visit to Britain in 1982, John Paul II called her “an extraordinary Englishwoman” and com- mended her for inspiring women today to take their place in the life of the Church. But three hundred years earlier their predecessor Urban VIII had described her life’s work as “poisonous growths”, which must be “suppressed, extinct, rooted out, destroyed and abolished”.1 Such violent language suggests a deep-seated anxiety on the part of the Catholic Church of the time. In this chapter, I will suggest that this anxiety arose from a perceived threat to traditional views of gender roles, posed by Mary’s attempt to establish a religious congregation of women who could engage in educational and other charitable work without being con ned by convent and habit. I will trace the jour- ney she made from a conventional understanding of religious life for 1 Pastoralis Romani Ponti cis (1631), quoted in Mary Wright IBVM, Mary Ward’s Institute: the Struggle for Identity (Sydney: Crossing Press, 1997), 191. 244 pamela ellis women to a radical reassessment of that life in light of the particular circumstances of Catholics in seventeenth-century England. I will then look at the hostility that her ideas aroused in certain circles and suggest that this was rooted in a negative estimation of women’s abilities and an unquestioned assumption of male superiority. I will also examine Mary’s most detailed discussion of what we might today call the gender question. This discussion is found in a series of ‘Instructions’ to her companions and is forthright in its rebuttal of any suggestion of women’s inferiority. Finally, I will look at the consequences, for her personally and for the Institute she founded, of her radical new formulation of women’s religious life. Her early experiences instilled in her a great love for the Catholic Church. Born in 1585 into a family of Catholic landowners in Yorkshire, Mary Ward was the eldest child of Marmaduke Ward of Mulwith, near Ripon, and the widowed Ursula Constable, née Wright.2 She would have been aware, growing up, of a background of persecution and heroism. Resistance to the imposition of Protestantism was strongest in the north of England, where in 1569 Catholics had risen in revolt, led by the earls of Westmorland and Northumberland.3 Members of Mary’s family were involved in various ways in keeping Catholicism alive; like other Catholic families of their class, the Wards moved house frequently to avoid nes, and Mary spent much of her childhood in other households, including that of her maternal grandmother, Ursula Wright of Ploughland, in East Yorkshire, who had spent a total of fourteen years in prison for her faith.4 (Two of Mary’s uncles, John and Christopher Wright, were involved in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 and were killed resisting arrest by government troops at Holbeach Hall in Staffordshire. Her father Marmaduke was arrested on suspicion of complicity but released after a few days.5) Such an upbringing at \ rst inspired in her a desire for martyrdom that by her mid-teens was transmuted into a longing for religious life.6 At the time, following the 2 Margaret Mary Littlehales IBVM, Mary Ward: Pilgrim and Mystic (Tunbridge Wells: Burns & Oates, 1998), 16–17. 3 Michael A. Mullet, The Catholic Reformation (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 175; Owen Chadwick, The Reformation (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990), 287. 4 Littlehales, Pilgrim and Mystic, 18. 5 Littlehales, Pilgrim and Mystic, 33. 6 Gillian Orchard IBVM, Till God Will: Mary Ward Through her Writings (London: Darton, Longman & Tod, 1985), 9..

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