31

Catholic Writings

Robert S. Miola

Catholicism in early modern , no less than , was a ministry of the word. Catholics practised their religion in private and public prayer and protest, in words meditated, whispered, spoken, sung, written, and printed. Such words, of course, were forbidden and felonious. After King Henry VIII had broken ties with and declared himself Supreme Head of the Church in England (1536), succes- sive administrations undertook the long and complicated process of suppressing, outlawing, and eliminating Roman Catholicism. Legislation in the reign of (1558-1603) made it a crime to say or sing Mass, to administer Catholic sacraments, to speak against the state religion, and to possess or publish Catholic writing; penal- ties included heavy fines, forfeiture of goods and land, imprisonment, and execution for treason. Catholics still spoke the words of their faith in prayer. They regularly braved persecution to attend Mass in the homes of the faithful, as is abundantly clear from the surviving records of Jesuit missionaries — , Robert Southwell, John Gerard, , and William Weston, for example — as well as from many state records of arrest and trial. At the end of the sixteenth century Lady Magdalen Montague converted part of her home at Battle Abbey into a private chapel for Mass, known as 'Little Rome'. With two Acts of Parlia- ment, Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries and helped himself to church goods, lands, and buildings, but he could not eradicate the Divine Office, the monastic prayers recited at specified hours of the day. These combined with the Little Office or Hours of the Virgin Mary and other traditional prayers and hymns to supply Catholic (and sometimes Protestant) worship throughout the early modern period. This worship included powerful, affective medieval devotions, such as 'A prayer unto the wounds of Christ' and 'The Fifteen Odes of St Bridget', as well as St Thomas Aquinas's great eucharistic hymns (Lauda, Sion, Pange, lingua, Sacris solem- niis, Verbum supernum, Adoro te), which affirmed the real presence of Christ in the : 450

Verbum caro panem verum Verbo carnem efficit, Fitque sanguis Cbristi merum

[The Word-made-flesh changes true bread into his flesh by a word, and wine turns into the blood of Christ.] (Pange, lingua, )

Richard Verstegan gathered these and many other prayers together in his English Primer (1599), which achieved forty-two editions in the seventeenth century. Promi- nent here are Marian prayers (Obsecro te, for example) and hymns, including the famous antiphon Salve, regina, which begins, 'Hail holy queen, mother of mercy, our life, our sweetness and our hope, to thee do we cry poor banished children of Eve', and which the pilgrim Dante hears in the Valley of the Rulers (Purgatorio 7). Martin Luther objected to this hymn, and John Hollybush wrote a refutation that substituted Christ for Mary amidst copious scriptural reference (An Exposition upon the Song of the Blessed Virgin Mary, 1538). Despite such opposition Catholics continued to 'venerate', as opposed to 'worship', Mary, the distinction precisely maintained in the theological terms hyperdoulia and latria. Catholics prayed the Litany of Loreto, a series of invoca- tions to Mary as mother, virgin, vessel, mediatrix, and queen and, of course, they prayed the rosary, perhaps the most misunderstood Catholic devotion. Dismissed as idolatry or merely mechanical repetition, the rosary consisted of a series of prayers correlated to a string of beads; it provided ordered access to the fifteen traditional mysteries of redemption — Joyful, Sorrowful, and Glorious. Church teachings and handbooks, such as that of John Bucke (Instructions for the Use of the Beads, 1589), continually explained that the person praying the rosary was to meditate upon each mystery in sequence. Catholics also spoke the words of their faith in protest, in the officially forbidden speech of literates and illiterates alike — ballads, stories, conversations, sacrilege nar- ratives, epigrams, popular verse, remembrances of and . This heteroge- neous oral mix, part devotional, part polemical in character, sometimes simple, sometimes complex and allusive, Alison Shell has called an 'insistent background noise' in the period, one that assumed various forms and functions:

An antiquarian would have pointed to the rich anecdotal tradition surrounding ruined abbeys, which kept England's Catholic past and the depredations of the alive in the popular memory, a puritan minister in a rural parish might well have deplored the use of popish spells among his flock, while a seminary priest would have recognised the missionary usefulness of ballad-singing to drive home the anti-Protestant message and commemorate martyrs. (Shell 2007: 1)

The oral traditions surrounding ruined abbeys inform Shakespeare's lament for the 'bare, ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang' (Sonnet 73) and inspire tales or supernatural punishment for sacrilege; the lore of popish superstition and spells finds late expression in the devils and of his King Lear. 451

One important manuscript from the period, moreover, preserves some Catholic ballads that reveal their polemical 'missionary usefulness' as well as the fears and hopes of Catholic singers. Winter Cold into Summer Hot catalogues the astonishing and unnatural changes brought about by the Protestant revolution:

Abstinence is Papistry, As this new error saith; Fasting, prayer, and all good works Avoid, for only faith Doth bring us all to heaven straight — A doctrine very strange, Which causeth men at liberty Of vice and sin to range. From angels honour taken is, From saints all worship due; The mother of our living God - A thing most strange yet true! — Compared is by many a Jack Unto a saffron bag, To a thing of naught, to a paltry patch, And to our vicar's hag! (British Library MS Additional 15225, fos. 33v-34)

The speaker marvels at the world turned upside down, winter cold into summer hot, at the loss of traditional religious practices for the doctrine of sola fides ('faith alone'), a doctrine that in his view promotes licence and sin. Protestant 'purification' here abolishes the proper respect due to angels, saints, and, most important, to the Blessed Virgin Mary, a long and well-beloved focus of Catholic devotion and art, now dis- honoured and scorned. The allusion to the 'saffron bag' pointedly evokes the Protes- tant argument that denied Mary's intrinsic worth and holiness, reducing her to a mere vessel for the incarnation. Hugh Latimer used the metaphor in a sermon preached at St Paul's, 18 January 1548: 'as the saffron bag that hath been full of saffron or hath had saffron in it doth ever after savour and smell of the sweet saffron that it contained, so our Blessed Lady, which conceived and bare Christ in her womb, did ever after resemble the manners and virtues of that precious babe' (A Notable Sermon, 1548, sig. Aiiii). The preservation of such ballads in manuscript reveals the complex intersection of orality with this important form of early modern publication. Protest songs and ballads appear in other handwritten anthologies, Constance Aston Fowler's book (Fowler 2000), Huntington 904, and British Library Cotton Vespasian A-25. Denied access to printing presses, Catholics naturally resorted to manuscript publication, and some of their most important documents circulated in this form: Edmund Campion's challenge to the Privy Council (known as his 'Brag'), Philip Howard's letter to Eliza- beth explaining his intended flight from England, ' Memorial for the 452

Reformation of England and his four-volume Certamen Ecclesiae Anglicanae, much of Robert Southwell's poetry and prose, Peter Mowle's grand miscellany, now at St Mary's College, Oscott. Catholics passed such handwritten works around, alone with more ephemeral productions, newsletters, broadsides, devotions, catechisms, and eye- witness accounts of persecutions and executions. Of course, many Catholic manuscripts eventually found their way into print, nor- mally through the agency of foreign presses or the twenty-one secret presses operating in England. From 1608 to 1642 the Jesuit Press at -Omer published over 300 English books. Allison and Rogers's bibliography of Catholic works printed between 1558 and 1640 identifies 932 titles in English and 1,619 in and other languages. In The Foot out of the Snare (1624) John Gee complained about the proliferation of Catholic books available in the market, listing 156 objectionable titles. The list includes medieval authors (Bede and Augustine), contemporary theologians (Bel- larmine, Richard Smith), continental writers (Granada, Canisius, Puenta), and English polemicists (More, Persons, Brereley). Gee also fulminated against Catholic histories translations of the Bible, catechisms, devotional works, prayer books, and saints' lives. As Gee's list indicates, Catholics in this period produced a large, multilingual corpus of controversial writing. Some of the most important works appeared in Latin: Erasmus' prefaces to his translation of the New Testament, Novum Instrumentum (1516); Nicholas Sander's defence of the church, De Visibili monarchia ecclesiae (1571); John Gibbons's account of English martyrs, Concertatio ecclesiae Catholicae in Anglia (1583); 's polemical masterpiece, Disputationes de Controversiis (1586—9). Many, however, wrote in English, beginning with Thomas More, who sup- ported Erasmus' translation of the Bible and excoriated Tyndale's Protestant version. In A Dialogue Concerning Heresies (1529), More argued that Tyndale's use of the word 'senior' for 'priest' devalues . Similarly, his choice of 'congregation' for 'church' democratises and diminishes the historical institution. The use of 'love' for 'charity' reduces Christian agape to a generalised emotion in order to undercut the doctrine of good works. As a controversialist, More used learning, humour, reason, and scorn to demolish the opposition. So too did Thomas Harding, another important figure who, as did many others, took up the challenge of Archbishop John Jewel (1559) to demonstrate the scriptural and historical authenticity of Roman church practices. And so, likewise, did Jane Owen, the only female Catholic polemicist in the period, whose An Antidote against Purgatory (1634) defended the doctrine of purga- tory and urged readers to avoid its pains by almsgiving and good works. She wittily includes in her diatribe the fantastic lament of a reader facing death, who laments his folly and his inattention to such worthy books as hers. Most Catholic controversial writing in the period defends church doctrine and attacks Protestant practice as heretical innovation. But a significant number of Catho- lic polemicists disagreed among themselves. A principal translator of the Bible in the period, , author of the Rheims version of the New Testament (1582), differed from Erasmus on many points: Martin reluctantly undertook his translation, warned against the potential dangers to the uneducated reader, and adopted the 453

Vulgate, father than Greek manuscripts, as his copy-text. The issue of church papistry (outward conformity to the Church of England) was also divisive. The and its most powerful spokesman in English, Robert Persons, advocated uncompro- mising refusal to attend English services, or , while others such as Alban Langdale, along with most rank-and-file English Catholics, believed that Catholics could in good conscience attend Protestant services to save their land or their lives. Radical Catholics such as Persons and Cardinal eventually called for rebellion against Elizabeth and for Spanish intervention, but most Catholics rejected such extreme measures and remained loyal to their country: witness Robert South- well's A Humble Supplication (1591), or William Watson's condemnation of Allen and Persons as traitors. Disagreement about the power of the papacy, its limits and pre- rogatives, also occasioned serious dispute in the fold. Arguing against his fellow Catholic William Barclay, Robert Bellarmine claimed that the spiritual authority of the necessarily conferred an indirect authority in matters temporal. Protestantism, of course, remained the principal target of Catholic theological and political writing, and each side proffered a different vision of history. Catholics argued that the true church descended continuously and visibly from Christ and the apostle Peter to the present Roman institution and Pope. Scripture, and the very fact of the church's existence, thus functioned as the prime guarantor of authenticity. 'Where was your church before Luther?', they repeatedly asked. Luther himself had anticipated this question by arguing that the true church began to recede into invisibility as the false Roman one appeared. Matthias Flacius provided chapter and verse of the deterio- ration over time in his massive, thirteen-volume Centuriae Magdeburgenses (1559—74). Robert Barnes and John Bale articulated this theory in England, as did John Foxe (Acts and Monuments, 1563), the most important and influential creator of Protestant English history. Foxe tells the story of the English church from its founding by Joseph of Arimathea, though its captivity to Rome, to its present emancipation under the Tudors. In this narrative England emerges as the elect nation, the place that most purely restores and embodies the vision of Christ. The proof of England's sanc- tity and of Rome's perfidy, Foxe triumphantly concludes, is the blood of her martyrs, especially those executed in the reign of the Catholic Queen Mary I (1553-8). Catholics strenuously dissented. Thomas Stapleton published a translation of the Venerable Bede's Historia (1565) to show the dedicatee Queen Elizabeth and the English 'in how many and weighty points the pretended reformers of the Church in Your Grace's dominions have departed from the pattern of that sound and Catholic faith planted first among Englishmen by holy St Augustine [of Canterbury]' (sig. *3). Bede's history proves, according to Stapleton, that England became Catholic through papal intervention, as Pope Gregory the Great (r. 590-604) had dispatched Augustine as a missionary to the Saxons. Moreover, Stapleton's preface and notes point out the authenticity of doctrines and practices lately rejected by Protestants — transubstantia- tion, auricular confession, the intercession of saints, miracles, prayers for the dead, and the primacy of the Roman See. Nicholas Sander developed this line of argument in several histories, notably in De Origine ac progressu schismatic Anglicani (On the Origin 454 and Progress of the English Schism, 1585), which joined such works as A Treatise of Treasons (1572) and Leicester's Commonwealth (1584) to expose the hidden secrets of the so-called 'Reformation'. Sander focused on the characters in the drama, those who starred in a compelling clash of saints and sinners. In his narrative the Catholic Catherine of Aragon appears as the virtuous victim of her bestial husband Henry VIII whose lust for the conniving, promiscuous, and deformed Anne Boleyn, 'the mule of the king of France', precipitated the religious changes in England. Sander's sensational account captivated many English and European readers. There were, of course, more substantive Catholic histories and rebuttals. Having meticulously assembled historical sources, Robert Persons' three-volume A Treatise of Three Conversions of England (1603—4) argues that England thrice received the faith from Rome, first from the apostles, then from Joseph of Arimathea and Pope Eleuth- erius, and finally from Augustine and Pope Gregory. The Treatise denounces Foxe's history as inaccurate and heretical, including one famous chapter that reveals 'more than one hundred and twenty lies uttered by John Foxe in less than three leaves of his Acts and Monuments' (Book 3, ch. 19). Persons turns his considerable learning and energy against Foxe's conception of martyrdom and his new , ridicul- ing the canonisation of such figures as Cowbridge, who denied Christ, Collins, whom Foxe himself declared mad, Flower, the apostate monk who wounded a priest, and Eleanor Cobham, who was condemned for witchcraft. Foxe commended such figures, along with many who held conflicting, even contradictory, religious doctrines (Waldo, Wyclif, Huss, Zisca, Lollard, Zwingli, and Calvin). Such a motley assortment of madmen, heretics, cobblers, and spinsters, Persons thunders, Foxe presumes to sub- stitute for St Barnabas, the Greek and Latin Church Fathers, and many holy martyrs and virgins. The Catholic challenge to Foxe's vision of the elect English Protestant nation came also from other quarters, particularly from Ireland. Philip O'Sullivan Beare's revision- ary history, Historiae Catholicae Iberniae Compendium (1621), for example, protested English colonialism and religious oppression in Ireland, telling the story of Elizabeth's 'tyranny' and of the various invasions from the Irish point of view. This history refutes the prevalent propagandistic narratives of English chronicle and poetry: O'Sullivan Beare's account of Lord Grey's treacherous massacre of the assembled troops at Smerwick, for example, leaves the reader little disposed to identify him with justice, as Spenser did in Book 5 of The Faerie Queene. The clash between Protestant and Catholic history engendered conflicting evalua- tions of many other figures, as heroes and villains frequently changed places. For Protestants the reviled King John found new life as an anti-papal champion; the treasonous Sir John Oldcastle, executed for his rebellion, enjoyed rehabilitation as a proto-. (Shakespeare, by the way, declined to follow the party line on both figures.) The missionary Augustine of Canterbury metamorphosed into an agent of papal contamination. Thomas Becket, long revered as a martyr for resistance to civil authority, received formal denunciation as a traitor; in 1538 government agents destroyed his shrine at Canterbury and scattered his bones. The struggle to contain 455 and control the meaning of an individual life and death rages through the Tudor period, beginning with the executions of Bishop John Fisher and Thomas More. Roper's Life of More, part biography, part apology, circulated for years as a manuscript that contradicted the official judgment of treason. Similarly, the Protestant figures whom Queen Mary I executed for heresy — Cranmer, Ridley, Latimer, and the rest - Protestants celebrated as heroic martyrs in narrative and chronicle. Such tensions in the early modern period engendered much Catholic biography, hagiography, and polemic, often with little distinction between the genres. In a well- circulated manuscript, John Mush told the story of the 'virtuous and holy martyr' Margaret Clitherow, a Yorkshire butcher's wife who had turned her home into a centre for Catholic liturgy and fellowship. Authorities condemned her to die under the weight of heavy stones. In his biography Mush presents a Catholic saint's life that answers the Protestant canonisation of Anne Askew. The execution in 1581 of Edmund Campion, the brilliant and silver-tongued Jesuit, ignited a larger firestorm of contro- versy. Campion had won notoriety for his challenge to 'avow the faith of our Catholic Church by proofs innumerable' in public debate, confident that none of the Protestants living could 'maintain their doctrine in disputation' (British Library MS Harley 422, fo. 132r-v) Alter his capture, torture, and execution, William Cecil, Lord Burlegh, felt obliged to justify the persecution in a pamphlet, The Execution of Justice in England (1583, revised 1584), which convicted Campion of treason. Catholics told a different story, however, beginning with Thomas Alfield's A True Report (1582), which depicted Campion as a martyr, recounting his virtuous demeanour, his disavowal of any sedi- tious activity, his sole concern with religious ministry, his final prayers for queen and country, and his courageous submission to God's will. At the gallows, Alfield reports, someone asked Campion if he renounced the Pope; he replied that he was a Catholic. A voice declared, 'In your Catholicism, I noted the word, all treason is contained' (Alfield, sig. C2). William Allen further developed this portrait of Campion as martyr in A True, Sincere, and Modest Defence of English Catholics (1584), as did Circignani in his fresco cycle at the Venerable English College of Rome. Living in the shadow of persecution, Catholics struggled to keep the flame of faith alive. A large literature of instruction and devotion, some old and some new, enabled their efforts. Saints' lives, many descending from the Legenda Aurea of Jacobus de Voragine (thirteenth century) proliferated. Catechisms by Laurence Vaux and Robert Bellarmine provided basic instruction in doctrine and the sacraments. The severe piety of Thomas à Kempis continued to challenge and inspire, as did the spiritual struggles of St Augustine of Hippo, recorded in the Confessions. (These texts found readers among Protestants as well as Catholics.) A sub-literature of consolation drew upon classical and Christian teaching to foster contemptus mundi and focus attention on heavenly reward. Thomas More's A Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation (1534) reminded readers that every man, woman, and child is born into the prison of this life under the sentence of death. Robert Southwell's An Epistle of Comfort (1588) recounted St Damascene's grimly moving allegory of human life: Pursued by a unicorn, a man fell into a well but saved himself by getting hold of a little tree. 456

Thinking himself secure, he saw two mice, one black and one white, gnawing the roots of the tree, and underneath a terrible dragon. At his feet he saw four adders and in the branches of the tree a little bit of honey.

He, therefore, unmindful of all his dangers, not remembering that above the unicorn waited to spoil him, that beneath the fiery dragon watched to swallow him, that the tree was quickly to be gnawn asunder, that the stay of his feet was slippery and not to trust unto - not remembering, I say, all these perils, he only thought how he might come by that little bit of honey. The unicorn is death; the pit, the world; the tree, the measure and time of our life; the white and black mice, the day and the night; the stop borne up by four adders, our body framed of four brittle and contrary elements; the dragon, the devil; the honey, worldly pleasure. Who, therefore, would not think it a madness in so many dangers father to be eager of vain delight than fearful and sad with consideration of so manifold perils? (sig. F3-F3v)

To offer comfort and hope to the afflicted flock, writers described in vivid detail the heavenly joys awaiting the faithful after a successful sojourn in such a vale of tears. The ballad 'Jerusalem, my happy home', for example, depicts heaven as a place of ivory houses, golden tiles, fruit-filled orchards, gardens of flowers, nectar, ambrosia, and spices, and heavenly choirs, populated by the communion of saints in joyful worship of the Almighty. Officially denied access to church services, books, and priests, Catholics naturally turned inward, contrary to popular canards about Protestant 'inferiority' and poetics. Guidebooks by such writers as Antonio de Molina, Gaspare Loarte, and Luis de Granada formed part of a substantial literature of meditation that guided their efforts. The practice of Catholic, like Protestant, meditation entailed strict self-examination and lectio divina, the contemplation of biblical passages; it enlisted the imagination and understanding to move the heart and reform the will, to free the meditant from slavery to sin and to open the soul to the movements of grace. Prominent in this tradition is the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola (1521-2), a much-imitated teacher's manual of drills and meditations. The Exercises are designed to guide a retreatant to election, the making of a choice of life, and to perfection, the surrender of the self to God. They proceed in four stages, called 'weeks', that begin with reflec- tion on the self as a sinner saved by God, proceed to contemplation of events in Christ's life, and then focus on the crucifixion and resurrection. Robert Persons incorporated some of the Exercises in his enormously successful Christian Directory (1582), the most popular devotional work in English before 1650, achieving some forty authorised and unauthorised editions. Among the unauthorised editions stands the Protestant adapta- tion made by a Yorkshire clergyman, Edmund Bunny, who republished the book after deleting or altering references to good works, acts of penance, the Virgin Mary, and the like. Persons' powers of instruction and clarity are evident in his gloss on Ignatius' First Principle and Foundation, namely that man was created to praise, reverence, and serve God and thereby to save his soul, and that all things on earth were created to 457 serve man in this end. Our life here on earth, Persons explains, is like that of a mer- chant sent overseas by his master:

If the merchant factor, which I spake of before, after many years spent beyond the seas returning home to give accounts to his master, should yield a reckoning of so much time spent in singing, so much in dancing, so much in courting, and the like, who would not laugh at his accounts? But being further asked by his master what time he bestowed on his merchandise which he sent him for, if he should answer, none at all, nor that he ever thought or studied upon the matter, who should not think him worthy of all shame and punishment? And surely with much more shame and confusion shall they stand at the day of Judgment, who, being placed here to so great a business as is the service of Almighty God and the gaining of his eternal kingdom of heaven, have, notwithstanding, neglected the same. (sig. C3)

Early modern Catholics produced a remarkable and varied body of poetry, which, like the prose, voiced their protests, polemics, and prayers. The 'Lament for our Lady's Shrine at Walsingham' mourns the destruction of the beloved shrine as a place of pilgrimage:

Owls do screech where the sweetest hymns Lately were sung, Toads and serpents hold their dens, Where the palmers did throng. (Bodleian MS Rawlinson Poetry 219, fo. 16v)

Protest in poetry frequently sounds an elegiac note as it records the vast cultural struggles in terms personal and emotional. Toby Matthew's poem of exile, 'Upon the sight of Dover Cliffs from Calais', expresses his own pain and loss: 'Better it were for me to have been blind, / Than with sad eyes to gaze upon this shore' (Huntington MS 198 fo. 95). Chidiock Tichborne's verses, made three days before his execution, 'My prime of youth is but a frost of cares', express the poignant paradoxes of an early death:

The spring is past and yet it hath not sprung, The fruit is dead and yet the leaves are green, My youth is gone and yet I am but young, I saw the world and yet I was not seen. My thread is cut and yet it was not spun, And now I live and now my life is done. (Bodleian MS Tanner 169, fo. 79)

With a pin and candle coal for pen and ink, Francis Tregian, who spent over twenty years in prison, expressed his grief in verse epistles, 'A Letter from prison' and 'A Letter to his wife'. 458

At times protest turned to polemics of various kinds. 'A Challenge unto Foxe', perhaps by the Jesuit lay brother Thomas Pounde, mocks 'the rabble rout / Of mon- strous martyrs' in Foxe's 'brainsick book' (Public Record Office 12/157/48, fo. 105). The poem ends with Christ's speech of comfort and encouragement to the Catholics who suffer persecution. Anthony Copley attempts a more ambitious revisionary project, A Fig for Fortune (1596), which rewrites the first book of Spenser's Protestant epic, The Faerie Queene. Copley refigures the Redcrosse Knight as a Catholic quester, the evil enchantress Duessa as Doblessa, Queen Elizabeth rather than Mary, Queen of Scots. He envisions a New Jerusalem with Catholic nuns, priests, and sacraments. Climactically, the poet reverses the usual symbolism of religious controversy by con- cluding with an image of Protestantism, not Roman Catholicism, as the Whore of Babylon:

She had no altar, nor no sacrament, No ceremony, nor oblation; Her school was cavil and truthless babblement, Riot her reign, her end damnation. This was the haggard Whore of Babylon, Whose cup envenomed all that drunk thereon. (sig. K3v)

Later in the period, John Beaumont refutes those Protestants who interpreted an accident that resulted in Catholic deaths as God's judgment on the wicked. Rather, he argues, those who died during the 'Fatal Vesper' in 1623, when the roof collapsed upon worshippers, become a model for the rest of us of holy death:

Thrice happy they whom that last hour shall find, So clearly watching in such ready mind As was this blessed flock, who filled their ears With pious counsels and their eyes with tears. (MS Stowe 960, fo. 10)

Others, following ancient traditions, turned verse to prayer. After his conversion to Catholicism in 1590, Henry Constable wrote the Spiritual Sonnets, that contemplate such mysteries as the Trinity and the Eucharist, and the Virgin Mary. Richard Ver- stegan, indefatigable translator, historian, newsman, and publisher, produced an accomplished volume of Catholic poetry, Odes in Imitation of the Seven Penitential Psalms (1601). Also at the turn of the century, William Alabaster employed paradox and conceit in a series of sonnets, rich with biblical imagery and allegory. John Beaumont's Bosworth Field (1629) showed a flair for drama and metaphysical conceit as well as talent for rhyming couplets. His long manuscript poem, The Crown of Thorns, medi- tates on Christ's passion in the Baroque manner of contemporary emblematists like Henry Hawkins. Taking the circle as his central symbol, Beaumont develops analogies to circles in nature, mathematics, Scripture, and medieval philosophy. He begins the 459 fifth book by invoking the angels who move the spheres to help him 'To see my Saviour in this sphere divine, / And trace the son in his ecliptic line' (British Library MS Additional 33392, fo. 47v). A nun at Cambrai and a descendant of Thomas More, Gertrude More interspersed her prose works with a mystical poetry that expresses the soul's yearning for God:

And let our souls seek nothing else But in this joy to swim, Till we, absorbed by his sweet love, Return from whom we came, Where we shall melt into that love, Which joyeth me to name. (Spiritual Exercises, , 1658, sig. Civ)

The most accomplished Elizabethan Catholic poet is undoubtedly the Jesuit martyr Robert Southwell. Brilliant and well born, Southwell joined the in 1578 and returned to England in 1586 to minister to Catholics, including the impris- oned nobleman Philip Howard. He endured imprisonment and multiple tortures by the notorious Richard Topcliffe before his execution in 1595. His poetry circulated in manuscript and (remarkably) in several printed editions beginning in 1595, expur- gated for publication in Protestant England. Southwell combines Ignatian meditative methods with the love of ingenuity, paradox, and startling imagery that characterises the best poetry of the early seventeenth century. In 'The Burning Babe', the speaker sees a flaming child who declares:

My faultless breast the furnace is. The fuel, wounding thorns; Love is the fire and sighs the smoke, The ashes shames and scorns. The fuel Justice layeth on, And Mercy blows the coals; The metal in this furnace wrought Are men's defiled souls. ('St Peter's Complaint', 1595, sig L4v)

After the child vanishes, the speaker remembers that it is 'Christmas day'. Here Petrarchan imagery of burning, melting, and dying furnishes reflection on the incar- nation and on the power of Christ's sacrifice to burn away sin. Ben Jonson commented, 'so he had written' this poem, 'he would have been content to destroy many of his' (Jonson 1925-52: I, 137). Another poem, 'Christ's Bloody Sweat', begins with four lines, each presenting four elements in tightly controlled series:

Fat soil, full spring, sweet olive, grape of bliss That yields, that streams, that pours, that dost distil, 460

Unfilled, undrawn, unstamped, untouched of press, Dear fruit, clear brooks, fair oil, sweet wine at will. (Moeoniae, 1595, sig. C2)

Christ's bloody sweat in Gethsemane thus becomes metaphorically linked to the blood/wine of the Eucharist, just as it is in iconographic traditions, wherein angels gather the blood in chalices. The poem compares Christ to a pelican, feeding its young with its blood, and the phoenix, fabled to rise from the dead. It recalls Elijah's triumph over the priests of Baal with the help of the divine fire that consumed stones and dust (1 Kings 18:37—9). The last stanza implores the sacred fire to show its force 'on me, / That sacrifice to Christ I may return', then ends abruptly and powerfully in stark confession:

If withered wood for fuel fittest be, If stones and dust, if flesh and blood will burn, I withered am, and stony to all good, A sack of dust, a mass of flesh and blood. (British Library MS Additional 10422, fo. 13)

The poem 'St Peter's Complaint' shows the poet in a more expansive mood. Combin- ing the native complaint genre with the continental literature of tears, this poem adapts Luigi Tanzillo's Lagrime di San Pietro into 132 six-line stanzas of metaphysical conceits. First St Peter meditates on Christ's eyes:

O pools of Hesebon, the baths of grace, Where happy saints dive in sweet desires, Where saints rejoice to glass their glorious face, Whose banks make echo to the angels' choirs, An echo sweeter in the sole rebound Than angels' music in the fullest sound. (sig. C2)

Then he reflects on his own tears as he laments his triple denial of Jesus, a betrayal recounted in all the gospels (e.g. Matt. 26:69-75). In a few successive stanzas he describes his tears as distillations from the alembic of his doleful breast, the chil- dren of his grief, good effects of ill-deserving cause, showers that bring forth fruit and flowers, the unpleasant brine of a barren plant. The imagery is not merely adventitious, however, but serves a doctrinal argument. These tears are purgative and penitential, part of the sinner's payment of temporal satisfaction for sin, an illustration of the Catholic doctrine of penance, as ratified in the Council of Trent. 'By you', says Peter addressing his tears, 'my sinful debts must be defrayed' (sig. C3v). Later he recalls the examples of David bathing his bed with tears (Psalm 6:7) and Anna shedding 'inconsolable tears' for her missing son (Tobias 10:1-7, a book not accepted by Protestants as canonical) as precedents for his penance: 'Then I to 461 days and weeks, to months and years, / Do owe the hourly rent of stintless tears' (sig. C4). Officially a Catholic for only the last few years of his life (when most of his poetry was published), Richard Crashaw (1612-49) has often been dismissed as an eccentric. ('Over-ripeness is all', quipped Douglas Bush). But Crashaw distinguished himself as a translator and poet in Latin and English; he is a Baroque artist — lavish in imagery and emotion, rich in intellectual energy. Crashaw's devotion to the Virgin Mary inspires several poems, including his translation of the hymn, Stabat Mater Dolorosa. Among the poems written to honour Teresa of Ávila, 'The Flaming Heart' explores the erotic wounding and self-annihilation of mystical experience, evident in Bernini's famous sculpture in the Cornaro Chapel, Rome.

O thou undaunted daughter of desires! By all thy dower of lights and fires, By all the eagle in thee, all the dove, By all thy lives and deaths of love, By thy large draughts of intellectual day, And by thy thirst of love more large than they, By all thy brim-filled bowls of fierce desire, By thy last morning's draught of liquid fire, By the full kingdom of that final kiss That seized thy parting soul and sealed thee his, By all the heav'ns thou hast in him, Fair sister of the seraphim, By all of him we have in thee, Leave nothing of myself in me. (Carmen Deo Nostro, Paris, 1652, sigs. O1v-O2)

'The Hymn to the Name above every Name, the Name of Jesus' moves majestically from meditation of biblical texts to a vision of Last Judgement and the fate of the sinful.

Alas, what will they do When stubborn rocks shall bow, And hills hang down their heav'n-saluting heads To seek for humble beds Of dust, where in the bashful shades of night, Next to their own low nothing they may lie, And couch before the dazzling light of their dread majesty. (sig. Bi)

The lyricism and power of the verse mark Crashaw as the most distinguished Catholic poet of the early seventeenth century. Catholic writings provide a context that redefines the culture and literature of early modern England. Voices that have long been dismissed or silenced challenge 462

the regnant myths of religious 'Reformation' and the providential emergence of an elect (and unbloody) English nation. Figures such as Edmund Campion, Thomas Stapleton, Robert Persons, Margaret Clitherow, Nicholas Sander, Philip O'Sullivan Beare, Robert Southwell, and Richard Crashaw claim their due place in our histo- ries and handbooks. Attention to such Catholic voices, moreover, offers new per- spectives on familiar figures — the elegant Poet Laureate , for example, who profited from the ruthless colonisation of the Catholic Irish and who celebrated the victory apocalyptically in his Protestant epic. William Shakespeare's representations of Catholicism in the plays have recently sparked fruitful re- evaluation. John Donne kept pictures of the Virgin Mary in the deanery and wrote poetry that reflected his early Catholicism and that contradicted his sermons. According to his own testimony, Ben Jonson spent his most productive years in the forbidden religion. John Milton's Areopagitica, revered uncritically for too long as an enlightened call for freedom of speech, advocates the extirpation of popery and rehearses noisome prejudices against Jews and Turks. Catholic writings in manuscript and print constitute a new world of early modern discourse that instructs and delights even as it unsettles comfortable assumptions and received judgements.

REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING

Allison, A. F. and D. M. Rogers (1989). The Con- Marotti, A. F. (ed.) (1999). Catholicism and Anti- temporary Printed Literature of the English Counter- Catholicism in Early Modern English Texts. Reformation between 1558 and 1640: An Annotated Houndmills: Macmillan. Catalogue, 2 vols. Aldershot: Scolar Press. Marotti, A. F. (2005). Religious Ideology and Cul- Catholic Record Society. This group publishes mono- tural Fantasy. South Bend: University of Notre graphs, occasional publications, records, and the Dame Press. journal Recusant History. Milward, P. (1977). Religious Controversies of the Dillon, A. (2002). The Construction of Martyrdom Elizabethan Age: A Survey of Printed Sources. in the English Catholic Community, 1535—1602. London: Scolar Press. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Milward, P. (1978). Religious Controversies of the Duffy, E. (1992). The Stripping of the Altars. New Jacobean Age: A Survey of Printed Sources. London: Haven: Yale University Press. Scolar Press. Fowler, Constance Aston (2000). The Verse Miscel- Miola, R. S. (ed.) (2007). Early Modern Catholicism: lany of Constance Aston Fowler: A Diplomatic An Anthology of Primary Sources. : Oxford Edition, ed. D. Aldrich-Watson. Tempe: Arizona University Press. Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Monta, S. B. (2005). Martyrdom and Literature in Guiney, L. I. (1938). Recusant Poets. London: Sheed Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge & Ward. University Press. Highley, C. (2008). Catholics Writing the Nation in O'Malley, J. W. (1993). The First Jesuits. Cam- Early Modern Britain and Ireland. Oxford: Oxford bridge, MA: Harvard University Press. University Press. O'Malley, J. W. (2000). Trent and All That. Cam- Jonson, B. (1925-52). The Works, ed. C. H. bridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Herford, P. Simpson, and E. Simpson, 11 vols. Pelikan, J. (1996). Mary Through the Centuries. New Oxford: Clarendon Press. Haven: Yale University Press. 463

Pollen, J. H., ed. (1908). Unpublished Documents Shell, A. (2007). Oral Culture and Catholicism in relating to the English Martyrs, 1584-1603. Early Modern England. Cambridge University London: J. Whitehead. Press. Questier, M. C. (1996). Conversion, Politics, and Walsham, A. (1993). Church Papists. Woodbridge: Religion in England, 1580-1625. Cambridge: Boydell Press. Cambridge University Press. Walsham, A. (2000). ' "Domme Preachers?"'. Past Shell, A. (1999). Catholicism, Controversy, and the and Present, 168, 72-138. English Literary Imagination, 1558-1660. Cam- bridge University Press.