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The Venerable English College, Rome, Under Jesuit Administration, 1579–1685

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The Venerable English College, Rome, Under Jesuit Administration, 1579–1685 Chapter 13 “Established and putt in good order”: The Venerable English College, Rome, under Jesuit Administration, 1579–1685 Maurice Whitehead On November 22, 1593, during the Fifth General Congregation of the Society of Jesus, Superior General Claudio Acquaviva (1543–1615, in office 1581–1615) ordered Robert Persons (1546–1610) to write the life of the English Jesuit Ed- mund Campion (1540–81).1 Campion had been executed in London in Decem- ber 1581, nearly twelve years earlier, together with his fellow Jesuit, Alexander Briant (1556–81), and the secular priest, Ralph Sherwin (1550–81). One of the first students of the Venerable English College (hereafter vec) on its formal foundation in Rome in 1579, Sherwin had thus become the proto-martyr of the college: his execution was to be followed between 1582 and 1679 by the execu- tions of a further forty-three former students of the vec, seven of whom had become Jesuits.2 The news of the executions of 1581, and the peril in which English and Welsh Catholics were then living, whether at home or in continen- tal Europe—where they were often tracked by English government spies and secret agents—had reverberated across Europe. In 1588, five years before the Fifth General Congregation, Persons had briefly held the post of rector of the vec. By virtue of the fact that Persons had long been in correspondence with Acquaviva, and that, during his time in Rome, he had regular private meetings with Acquaviva, the superior general knew him * This chapter is an abridged version of the second Schwarzenbach Lecture delivered by the author at the Venerable English College, Rome, on May 1, 2016. 1 John Hungerford Pollen, S.J., ed., “The Memoirs of Father Robert Persons,” in Miscellanea ii, crs 2 (London: Catholic Record Society, 1906), 12. 2 The new English College in Rome was known as the Venerable English College from an early date, reflecting the antiquity of the two English pilgrim hospices, one in Trastevere and the other (and older) on the site of the present vec in the Via di Monserrato, both founded in the fourteenth century and subsequently merged into one institution—the forerunner of the present vec; see Francis Aidan Gasquet, A History of the Venerable English College, Rome: An Account of Its Origins and Work from the Earliest Times to the Present Day (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1920), 26–61. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���9 | doi:�0.��63/978900436�666_0�5 <UN> 316 Whitehead well.3 Though Acquaviva also knew that Persons would make an excellent job of his writing task, he can have had no idea that his request would take Persons many years to complete and that his text would eventually expand to incorpo- rate an account of how the administration of the fledgling vec in Rome had, in 1579, unexpectedly passed from the secular clergy to the Society of Jesus during the first year of the college’s existence. Owing to many serious distractions, including the death in Rome in 1594 of the then leader of the English and Welsh Catholic community, Cardinal William Allen (1532–94)—who had been a prime mover in the founding of the English College in Rome—it was not until August 1598, at the beginning of his second term of office as rector of the vec, that Persons was able to devote time and energy to the writing of his narrative. This encompassed not only an account of the martyrdom of Campion but also included a personal memoir in four sections, none of which were published until over three hundred years later.4 The second part of Persons’s memoir, entitled “A Storie of Domesticall Diffi- culties”, traces the struggles encountered in the setting up of the first two post- Reformation English seminaries—the English College at Douai, in 1568, and the English College in Rome. In the latter context, the memoir recounts the gradual transformation of the existing English Hospice in Rome, founded in 1362 to accommodate pilgrims from England and Wales, into the new English College. This process had begun late in 1576, when a member of the English secular clergy, Gregory Martin (c.1542–82)—a former tutor of St. John’s Col- lege, Oxford, and a former private tutor at Arundel Castle, Sussex, of Philip Howard (1557–95), the future martyr—arrived in Rome with a group of semi- narians from Douai.5 The third part of Persons’s memoir provided an account of what happened to the English mission once the new English College in Rome had passed into the administration of the Society of Jesus, and had, in his estimation, been 3 For Persons’s correspondence with Acquaviva, see Leo Hicks, S.J., ed., Letters and Memorials of Father Robert Persons, S.J.: Vol. I (1578–1588), crs 39 (London: Catholic Record Society, 1942). 4 crs 2, 12. 5 Between September 1578 and July 1580, Martin translated into English the entire Vulgate, later known as the Douay–Rheims version. The New Testament was published at Rheims in 1582, but, for financial reasons, the Old Testament was not published at Douai until 1609–10; see Thomas M. McCoog, S.J., “Martin, Gregory (c.1542–1582),” odnb; https://doi.org/10.1093/ ref:odnb/18183 (accessed May 25, 2018); and Alexandra Walsham, “Unclasping the Book? Post-Reformation English Catholicism and the Vernacular Bible,” Journal of British Studies 42 (2003): 141–167. <UN>.
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