Brill Research Perspectives in Jesuit Studies 1.4 (2019) 1–115 brill.com/brp Pre-suppression Jesuit Activity in the British Isles and Ireland Thomas M. McCoog, S.J. Fordham University, New York, USA [email protected] Abstract The British Isles and Ireland tested the self-proclaimed adaptability and flexibility of the new Society of Jesus. A mission to Ireland highlighted the complexities and ended in failure in the early 1580s, not to be revived until 1598. The fabled Jesuit mis- sion to England in 1580 conceived in wistful optimism was baptized with blood with the execution of Edmund Campion in 1581 and the consequent political manoeuvres of Robert Persons. The Scottish mission began in December 1581. The three missions remained distinct in the pre-suppression period despite an occasional proposal for integration. The English mission was the largest, the bloodiest, the most controversial, and the only one to progress to full provincial status. The government tried to suppress it; the Benedictines tried to complement it; the vicars apostolic tried to control it; and foreign Jesuits tried to recognize it. Nonetheless, the English province forged a corpo- rate identity that even withstood the suppression. Keywords Robert Persons – Edmund Campion – Henry Garnet – Richard Blount – Christopher Holywood – William Crichton – Maryland – John Thorpe – suppression of the Society – restoration of the Society 1 Initial Contact Hagiography abhors a vacuum almost as much as nature does, and it so often completes historical lacunae. We know from the journal of Ignatius of Loyola (c.1491–1556) that he visited London on a begging tour during his student days © Thomas M. McCoog, S.J., 2019 | doi:10.1163/25897454-12340004Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 11:01:22PM via free access 2 McCoog at the University of Paris. We know too that he received a considerable sum. But we do not know where he went. Ignatius met the Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives (1492–1540) in 1529 on an alms-searching mission to Bruges. Vives recommended that Loyola expand his begging to England. Loyola crossed the channel in 1531, a tense period as King Henry VIII (1491–1547, r.1509–47) began severing his allegiance with Rome as he sought the appropriate reso- lution of his marital problems. Ignatius summarized his English experience tersely: “Once he even went to England and brought back more alms than he usually did in other years.”1 Within a few years of his death (1556), his followers Jerónimo Nadal (1507–80) and Juan Alfonso de Polanco (1517–76) had specified London as the site.2 More recently, at least one historian, Francisco de Borja Medina, S.J., has suggested that Ignatius might have visited Sandwich and Southampton because of his relations with the Castros, a mercantile family.3 Some biographers have provided a more detailed itinerary. The Victorian Stewart Rose judged Ignatius’s visiting the shrines of St. Thomas of Canterbury and of St. Edward the Confessor as “well-nigh certain” and “more certain still.” To these, Rose added a probable visit to the Charterhouse and a prescient vi- sion of the cruel martyrdoms of his followers as he passed Tyburn.4 Even the more critical historian John Hungerford Pollen, S.J. (1858–1925) suggested that Ignatius had benefited from the fabled hospitality of Sir Thomas More (1478–1535) after their imagined meeting at the Charterhouse.5 In the 1950s, Dutch Jesuit Willem A. M. Peters (1911–88) explored the possible influence of the Bridgettine monk and author Richard Whitford (d.1543?) on Ignatius and especially on the Spiritual Exercises. Peters inferred from the similarities that Ignatius therefore spent most of his English visit at Syon Monastery in 1 There are many good editions of Ignatius’s so-called autobiography. I have used Joseph N. Tylenda, S.J., ed., The Pilgrim’s Journey: The Autobiography of Ignatius of Loyola (Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1985), 87. 2 See Dionysius Fernández Zapico, S.J., and Cándido de Dalmases, S.J., eds., Fontes narrativi de S. Ignatio de Loyola et de Societatis Iesu initiis, 4 vols., Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu (henceforth MHSI), 66, 73, 85, 93 (Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 1943–65), 2:251, 556. 3 Francisco de Borja Medina, S.J., “Íñigo de Loyola y los mercaderes castellanos del Norte de Europa: La financiación de sus estudios en la Universidad de París,” Hispania sacra 51 (1999): 159–206. 4 Saint Ignatius Loyola and the Early Jesuits, 2nd ed. (London: Burns & Oates, 1891), 124–25. 5 “The First Jesuits in England,” The Month 102 (1903): 647–52, here 647. On Pollen, see Thomas M. McCoog, S.J., “John Hungerford Pollen, S.J. (1858–1925): The Hues of History; English Martyrs and Jesuit Historiography,” in The Ministry of the Printed Word: Scholar-Priests of the Twentieth Century, ed. John Broadley and Peter Phillips (Stratton-on-the-Fosse: Downside Abbey Press, 2016), 119–43. Brill Research Perspectives in JesuitDownloaded Studies from 1.4 Brill.com09/30/2021 (2019) 1–115 11:01:22PM via free access Pre-suppression Jesuit Activity in the British Isles and Ireland 3 Isleworth, Middlesex.6 Perhaps. Maybe. But these intriguing possibilities re- main simple conjecture. We have considerably more evidence for the Society’s first venture into the British Isles. Pope Paul III (1468–1549, r.1534–49) approved the foundation of the Society of Jesus with Regimini militantis ecclesiae on September 27, 1540. Robert Wauchope (c.1500–51), former instructor of Ignatius and his early fol- lowers at the University of Paris and later archbishop of Armagh, requested two of these companions, Jean Codure (1508–41) and Alfonso Salmerón (1515– 85), for a mission to Ireland to ascertain the damage the Catholic Church had suffered under Henry (VIII), lord and not king of Ireland. Various factors delayed the expedition. Salmerón and Paschase Broët (1500–62), equipped with papal and Jesuit faculties, finally departed on September 10, 1541. Their mission is well documented and well known. The two Jesuits arrived in Edinburgh on December 31, 1541 after a crossing from Flanders so stormy that they twice sought refuge in English ports. Many at the Scottish court tried to dissuade them from continuing on to Ireland. While Broët traveled to Glasgow and western Scotland in search of more pre- cise information about Ireland, Salmerón in some unspecified manner gave the Spiritual Exercises in Edinburgh. So encouraged by what he had learned in Glasgow, the two decided to continue their mission despite the more nega- tive evaluations they had heard at court. King James V (1512–42, r.1513–42) gave them letters of introduction to Irish chieftains. The Jesuits landed in Ulster on February 23, 1542 and remained there for just over a month. They reported the pitiful state of the Irish church: many of the lords who had resisted Henry had capitulated, few Irish bishops remained loyal to Rome, most monasteries and abbeys had been destroyed. The Jesuits noted strong popular sentiment for the Roman Church but feared that it would die out without strong ecclesiastical and temporal leadership. Because hiding in caves and forests was behavior un- becoming for papal agents, the Jesuits returned to Edinburgh and had set out for Rome before the arrival of a papal brief commissioning them to look into the Catholic Church in Scotland. The Catholic Mary Tudor (1516–58, r.1553–58) succeeded to the English throne in July 1553. She repealed the Protestant legislation of her father and step-brother Edward VI (1537–53, r.1547–53) and restored Roman allegiance. She appointed Reginald, Cardinal Pole (1500–58, in office 1556–58), archbishop of Canterbury. During his time in Rome, Pole met and associated with Ignatius and other Jesuits, especially Nicolás Bobadilla (1511–90). The cardinal was a 6 “Richard Whitford and St. Ignatius’ Visit to England,” Archivum historicum Societatis Iesu (henceforth AHSI) 25 (1956): 328–50. Brill Research Perspectives in Jesuit Studies 1.4Downloaded (2019) 1–115 from Brill.com09/30/2021 11:01:22PM via free access 4 McCoog benefactor and a confidant, so Ignatius’s offer of Jesuit assistance in England was not surprising. But Pole’s refusal was. Either directly or indirectly (e.g., through Giovanni, Cardinal Morone [1509–80]), Ignatius placed his Society at Pole’s disposal. The cardinal politely and consistently declined Ignatius’s offer; he preferred instead its prayers. Periodically, scholars ponder why Pole refused Jesuit assistance. Was the cardinal annoyed by the Society’s marginalization of his friend Bobadilla? Did Pole disapprove of Jesuit ministries and counter- reformational fervor? Did they disagree theologically? Were Pole and Ignatius not as close as the Jesuit imagined? Because of the paucity of English and Irish members of the Society, did the possibility of even more Spanish clerics work- ing for Catholicism’s restoration confound Pole in that it nurtured the “Black Legend” and Catholicism’s identification with Spain?7 One Jesuit did breach the exclusion: Pedro de Ribadeneyra (1527–1611) sailed for England in the entourage of Gómez Suárez de Figueroa, first duke of Feria (c.1520–71), arriving in London in November 1558, shortly before the deaths of the queen and the cardinal.8 Ribadeneyra, ill for most of his stay, observed the religious changes introduced by the new monarch, Elizabeth I (1533–1603, r.1558–1603), and the demise of dreams of a revived Catholicism. Nonetheless, he did not think it opportune for a papal intervention, because it would destroy any lingering chance for Catholicism’s survival. He was back in Brussels by April 1, 1559. 1.1 Historiography Full accounts of the mission of Salmerón and Broët can be found in William V. Bangert, S.J., Claude Jay and Alfonso Salmerón (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1985); Louis McRedmond, To the Greater Glory: A History of the Irish Jesuits (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1991).