Recusant Studies's Rising Scholars

History Today asked Jessie Childs 20 questions and one of them was:

Q. What’s the most exciting field in history today?

A. Recusant history. So many brilliant scholars coming up - Emilie Murphy, Liesbeth Corens, Katie McKeogh …

Here's what those three "brilliant scholars" are working on, according to their online presence:

Emilie Murphy:

Music and Catholic culture in post-Reformation Lancashire: piety, protest, and conversion in the October 2015 issue of British Catholic History from Cambridge University Press:

This essay adds to our existing understanding of what it meant to be a member of the English Catholic community during the late Elizabeth and early Stuart period by exploring Catholic musical culture in Lancashire. This was a uniquely Catholic village, which, like the majority of villages, towns and cities in early modern England, was filled with the singing of ballads. Ballads have almost exclusively been treated in scholarship as a ‘Protestant’ phenomenon and the ‘godly ballad’ associated with the very fabric of a distinctively Protestant Elizabethan and Stuart entertainment culture. By investigating the songs and ballads in two manuscript collections from the Catholic network surrounding the Blundell family this essay will show how Catholics both composed and ‘converted’ existing ballads to voice social, devotional, and political concerns. The ballads performed in Little Crosby highlight a vibrant Catholic community, where musical expression was fundamental. Performance widened the parochial religious divide, whilst enhancing Catholic integration. This essay uncovers the way Catholics used music to voice religious and exhort protest as much as prayer. Finally, by investigating the tunes and melodies preserved in the manuscripts, I demonstrate how priests serving this network used ballads as part of their missionary strategy.

Dr Liesbeth Corens:

I am an early modern historian studying the intersection between religious, cultural and social history in a cross-border perspective. My work has focused on English Catholicism as an insightful case study to analyse the Counter-Reformation. 

My first book assesses the lay English Catholic expatriate experience in terms of a broad concept of ‘confessional mobility’. I bring to light a diverse spectrum of mobility, which nuances the traditional focus on exile and its implications of stasis, isolation, and victimhood. By recognising the role of transient contact and ephemeral networks integrating mobile and stay-at-home Catholics, the significance of expatriates in shaping religious and political life in England becomes clear. 

My current project is on the ‘counter-archives’ which English Catholics started to create in the later seventeenth century. They accumulated disparate sources of their recent past in an attempt to save theirs and their ancestors’ stories from oblivion. Historians have used the individual records in these collections as direct sources for the sixteenth century, but thereby lose the context of the commemorative culture of the seventeenth. I am mainly fascinated by the practices of compiling the collections: how these were part of a vibrant devotional life, how the collections helped them to make sense of their situation as a dispersed community (uniting through their collecting activities English Catholics scattered all over England and across the Channel), and how they deliberately talked to posterity.

Here's more information about her first book which is based on her dissertation, under contract with Oxford University Press.

I can see why Jessie Childs is lauding Katie McKeogh, a D.Phil. candidate at the University of Oxford:

Thesis: Early Modern Catholic Identity and Culture in the Circle of Sir Thomas Tresham, 1580-1611

Supervisors: Susan Brigden and Alexandra Gajda

My doctoral research centres around Sir Thomas Tresham (1543-1605) and his circle between 1580-1611. My work examines his world through personal relationships, reading, book-collecting, and patronage alongside the more traditional subjects of resistance and loyalism. Through recourse to extensive family correspondence, access to his library and use of hitherto understudied manuscript sources intimately connected to Tresham and his circle, my thesis will provide a significant contribution to our understanding of gentry Catholic culture and identity in this period, as well as illuminating these immensely rich sources in their own right. It draws on scholarship by historians of the book and historians of libraries to enrich traditional historiographical methods. I have worked extensively on Tresham's personal library and a large donation of books to St. John's College, Oxford, and have also undertaken an in-depth study of Bodleian MSS Eng. Th. b. 1-2, a two folio-volume manuscript work by the layman Thomas Jollet, which has resulted in new arguments about its authorship, compilation, content, and broader significance. Through an original synthesis of these strands of Tresham's world, my thesis offers a reappraisal of this important figure and in particular his role as a leader of the loyalist cause.

More broadly, I am interested in the religious and cultural history of early modern England, and in incorporating musicology, literary criticism, biography and the history of the book into traditional historical research.

Katie McKeogh reviewed Jessie Childs' book on the Gunpowder Plot, God's Traitors for the History of Women Religious of Britain and Ireland: you may find a link here. And here's more of her publications and lectures.

Elizabeth I and Her Catholic Subjects

Jessie Childs, the author of God's Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England, had this article ("Elizabeth I's War with England's Catholics") published in the May 2014 issue of the BBC History Magazine:

In 1828, builders removing a lintel over a doorway at Rushton Hall in Northamptonshire were surprised to see an old, beautifully bound book come down with the rubble. They decided to investigate and knocked through a thick partition wall, exposing a recess, about 5 feet long and 15 inches wide. Inside, wrapped up in a large sheet, was an enormous bundle of papers and books that had once belonged to Sir Thomas Tresham, a Catholic gentleman in the reign of Elizabeth I.

There have been other discoveries in other counties: a secret room chanced upon by a boy exploring a derelict wing of Harvington Hall, near Kidderminster, in 1894; a small wax disc bearing the imprint of a cross and a lamb (an Agnus Dei), found in a box nailed to a joist by an electrician working in the attic of Lyford Grange, Berkshire, in 1959; and a ‘pedlar’s chest’ containing vestments, a chalice and a portable altar, bricked in at Samlesbury Hall, Lancashire. Each bears testimony to the resourcefulness and courage with which Catholic men and women tried to keep their faith in Protestant England.

Under Elizabeth I, Catholics grew adept at concealment. Their lifeblood – the Mass – was banned. Anyone who heard it risked a fine and prison. Hence the need for secret Mass-kits and altar-stones small enough to slip into the pocket. Their priests – essential agents of sacramental grace – were outlawed.

Reconciling anyone to Rome (and, indeed, being reconciled) was made treason. After 1585, any priest ordained abroad since 1559, and found on English soil, was automatically deemed a traitor and his lay host a felon, both punishable by death. Hence the need for priest-holes, like the one at Harvington Hall, or at Hindlip, where a feeding tube was embedded in the masonry.

Even personal devotional items like rosary beads or the Agnus Dei found at Lyford were regarded with suspicion, since a statute of 1571 had ruled that the receipt of such ‘superstitious’ items, blessed by the pope or his priests, would lead to forfeiture of lands and goods.

It is impossible to know how many Catholics there were in Elizabethan England, for few were willing to be categorised and counted. John Bossy (defining a Catholic as one who habitually, though not necessarily regularly, used the services of a priest) estimated some 40,000 in 1603, less than one per cent of the population.

Read the rest there (for as long as it's available!)

The Tudor Rose and the Wars of the Roses

From the BBC History Magazine, Dan Jones wonders if the dynastic battles called "the Wars of the Roses" were the creation of the victorious Tudor dynasty:

In England, the 14th century ended badly – with regicide. Richard II, having been deposed by his cousin, Henry Bolingbroke, was murdered in prison during the early days of 1400. The usurper Henry IV endured a troubled reign, but his son, Henry V, achieved stunning successes in the wars with France – notably the battle of Agincourt in 1415 and the treaty of Troyes in 1420, by which Henry V laid claim to the French crown for his descendants.

But in 1422 Henry V died of dysentery. His heir was a nine-month-old son, Henry VI, whose birthright – the dual monarchy – required the men around him both to pursue an expensive defensive war in France and also to keep order in an England that was fairly groaning with dukes, earls and bishops of royal blood. Disaster surely loomed.

Or did it? It is often assumed that the Wars of the Roses began simply because, by the 15th century, there were too many men of royal blood clustering around the crown, vying for power and influence over a weak-willed king. Yet if that were the case, civil war would have broken out straight after Henry V’s death. The baby king was watched over by two charismatic and extremely ‘royal’ uncles, John, Duke of Bedford, and Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester. In addition, many more adult relatives of royal descent were expecting a stake in power, including Cardinal Henry Beaufort, bishop of Winchester, who maintained a bitter feud with Gloucester.

Yet the 1420s saw no serious unrest. Rather than fighting one another, the English nobles showed a remarkable unity of purpose at the moment of greatest royal weakness. They did not hive off into dynastic factions, but stuck together, kept the peace and attempted to preserve a normal system of royal government. Even when men came to blows, as Beaufort and Humphrey did in 1424, the violence was quickly stopped and the protagonists reprimanded. There were no roses. There was no blood. And this peace lasted a long time.

Read the rest here.

Jessie Childs reviewed Dan Jones' book-length treatment of this story, which in the U.K. edition had the title, The Hollow Crown, for The Telegraph in 2014:

The Hollow Crown is exhilarating, epic, blood-and-roses history. There are battles fought in snowstorms, beheadings, jousts, clandestine marriages, spurious genealogies, flashes of chivalry and streaks of pure malevolence. There is a “Parliament of Devils”, a “Bloody Meadow”, a “Red Gutter” and even a “Love Day”: Henry’s bizarre attempt to reconcile Beauforts and Percys with York and the Nevilles by having them process, arm in arm, through the streets of London. Jones’s material is thrilling, but it is quite a task to sift, select, structure and contextualise the information. There is fine scholarly intuition on display here and a mastery of the grand narrative; it is a supremely skilful piece of storytelling.

Jones takes the story beyond the Battle of Bosworth of 1485 and the burial of the king in the car park. Despite his victory over Richard III, Henry VII was acutely aware of the frailty of his bloodline and terrified of a Yorkist revival. The Tudor rose was one way of shoring up his position. No matter that the red rose of Lancaster was pretty much a Tudor device: it could be scribbled, retrospectively, into the old scrolls. The conjoined red and white rose gave parity and victory to the Tudors, along with a sense of an ending: “Now civil wounds are stopp’d; peace lives again,” (Richard III, act five, scene eight).

In reality, the blood of the Wars of the Roses seeped into the Tudor tapestry. Pretenders were exterminated and in 1541 Margaret Pole, the 67-year-old niece of Edward IV and Richard III, was hacked to death by an amateur executioner. Soon afterwards, one of her grandsons disappeared in the Tower of London just as her cousins, “the princes in the Tower”, had also faded from sight.

It is often wondered why Sir Thomas More did not finish his History of King Richard III. One theory is that he grew uncomfortable with the Tudor version. “These matters,” he wrote, “be kings’ games, as it were, stage plays, and for the more part played upon scaffolds.” Wise men, he added, “will meddle no further”.

Elizabeth I's War on Catholics

Jessie Childs wrote about recusant and penal laws passed against Catholics in Elizabethan England for the BBC History Magazine when her book God's Traitors was released last year:

Under Elizabeth I, Catholics grew adept at concealment. Their lifeblood – the Mass – was banned. Anyone who heard it risked a fine and prison. Hence the need for secret Mass-kits and altar-stones small enough to slip into the pocket. Their priests – essential agents of sacramental grace – were outlawed.

Reconciling anyone to Rome (and, indeed, being reconciled) was made treason. After 1585, any priest ordained abroad since 1559, and found on English soil, was automatically deemed a traitor and his lay host a felon, both punishable by death. Hence the need for priest-holes, like the one at Harvington Hall, or at Hindlip, where a feeding tube was embedded in the masonry.

Even personal devotional items like rosary beads or the Agnus Dei found at Lyford were regarded with suspicion, since a statute of 1571 had ruled that the receipt of such ‘superstitious’ items, blessed by the pope or his priests, would lead to forfeiture of lands and goods.

It is impossible to know how many Catholics there were in Elizabethan England, for few were willing to be categorised and counted. John Bossy (defining a Catholic as one who habitually, though not necessarily regularly, used the services of a priest) estimated some 40,000 in 1603, less than one per cent of the population.

This was not a homogenous group, rather a wide and wavering spectrum of experience. Many were branded ‘church papists’: they attended official services according to law, but some conformed only occasionally or partially. William Flamstead read his book during the sermon “in contempt of the word preached”, while for two decades of attendance Sir Richard Shireburn blocked his ears with wool.

Read the rest of the article on the BBC History Magazine website.

Longman-History Today Book of the Year 2015 Shortlist

Jessie Childs' God's Traitors made the shortlist:

God's Traitors: Terror and Faith in Elizabethan England
Jessie Childs (The Bodley Head)

The Whispers of Cities: Information Flows in Istanbul, London & Paris in the Age of William Trumbull
John-Paul Ghobrial (Oxford University Press)

Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War
Mark Harris (Canongate)

Domesday: Book of Judgement
Sally Harvey (Oxford University Press)

Queen Caroline: Cultural Politics at the Early Eighteenth-Century Court
Joanna Marschner (Yale University Press)

London Calling: Britain, the BBC World Service and the Cold War
Alban Webb (Bloomsbury)

I have not read the others, but I think it should win as book of the year!

J.J. Scarisbrick reviews God's Traitors for The Weekly Standard and comments particularly on the Vaux women and their efforts for other Catholics and the missionary priests:

Despite its rather contrived title, this is a fine book: extraordinarily learned, exciting (most of the time), and beautifully written. There is already an enormous body of writing about how English Catholicism survived the tidal wave of the Protestant Reformation under Elizabeth, but this study must have a special place therein.

It centers on one distinguished Roman Catholic dynasty: the Vaux (pronounced Vorx) family of Harrowden Hall in Northamptonshire, which, along with Huddlestones, Treshams, Catesbys, and dozens of others—many of them linked by marriage—formed the backbone of Catholic recusancy (i.e., non-conformity, from the Latin recusare: to refuse). Recently ennobled at the time of the Reformation and well connected, the Vauxes were a good choice. But, as it happens, they had already been biographed by a very distinguished historian of recusancy, Father Godfrey Anstruther, in the 1950s. His is a learned and lively book, and it should have received more recognition in this one. But this is an even better book—even more lively and learned, and a historiographical age away from its predecessor. So, yes, we needed it.

And what a story it tells: plots and counterplots, assassinations and Armadas, horrendous torture and unspeakably gruesome executions, stinking prisons, secret messages written in orange juice (invisible until heated), spies and traitors and clandestine printing presses. Hollywood could not have made it up.

I would say that Childs gave Father Anstruther his due but did her own work and research--her book makes this history more accessible and mainstream.

About those women:

It is three other women, Anne and Elizabeth Vaux, daughters of that same third baron, and Eliza, their stepsister, who steal the show. Unmarried Anne gave her all to caring for Garnet, moving with him as he bolted from one safe house to another in order to elude detection; Elizabeth, a fiery widow, was another devotee of Garnet and mother of a zealous Catholic family; Eliza, no less committed, was a particular associate of John Gerard. All three were hunted down and suffered for their faith. Anne spent time in the Tower of London, and Eliza was sent to another London jail, the Fleet. They were not the only ones. As the author explains, women played a crucial role in the story of this underground Catholicism: harboring and succoring the missionary priests, guarding Mass vestments, portable altars, missals, and relics—and, above all, catechizing their children and even their servants.

Holy women had hitherto usually been nuns or hermits. Now it was laywomen—virgins like Anne Vaux, as well as mothers and wives presiding over Catholic households—who led the way, and were even being martyred. 

Finally, Scarisbrick suggests a topic for Childs' next book:

The climax is the infamous Gunpowder Plot of November 1605—a plot as wicked as it was disastrous for the Roman Catholic cause. Childs explains vividly how it came about that a group of violent Catholic hotheads—jihadists, indeed—maddened by decades of persecution and brought to blind anger by the failure of the new monarch, James I (son of Mary Queen of Scots, whom many Catholics regarded as a martyr), to honor his promise of toleration, decided on fearful revenge. They would slaughter the king, his wife, ministers, peers, bishops, and likely many MPs in one colossal explosion as James came to the House of Lords to open the second session of his first Parliament. The plotters would then seize power for themselves.

This is a huge subject in itself. Gallons of ink have been spent on it, and there are many questions still to be answered. For example, was not the plot known to—and carefully “nursed” for his own nefarious purposes by—that arch-villain (as Catholics saw him) Robert Cecil, the king’s chief minister? Were some of the plotters double agents? Once the plot was “discovered” and its ringleaders had fled, what were they planning to do? Above all, who was the “great nobleman” who would presumably have claimed the throne—and without whom the plotters (who were “mere” gentlemen and knights) could never have rallied the necessary support?

There is another book for the gifted Jessie Childs to write.

A Catholic Colony Before Maryland

Jessie Childs writes on the OUPBlog about an idea to found a colony in the New World to provide religious freedom to English Catholics during the reign of Elizabeth I:

Over the summer of 1582 a group of English Catholic gentlemen met to hammer out their plans for a colony in North America — not Roanoke Island, Sir Walter Raleigh’s settlement of 1585, but Norumbega in present-day New England.

The scheme was promoted by two knights of the realm, Sir George Peckham and Sir Thomas Gerard, and it attracted several wealthy backers, including a gentleman from the midlands called Sir William Catesby. In the list of articles drafted in June 1582, Catesby agreed to be an Associate. In return for putting up £100 and ten men for the first voyage (forty for the next), he was promised a seignory of 10,000 acres and election to one of “the chief offices in government”. Special privileges would be extended to “encourage women to go on the voyage” and according to Bernardino de Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador in London, the settlers would “live in those parts with freedom of conscience.”

Religious liberty was important for these English Catholics because they didn’t have it at home. The Mass was banned, their priests were outlawed and, since 1571, even the possession of personal devotional items, like rosaries, was considered suspect. In November 1581, Catesby was fined 1,000 marks (£666) and imprisoned in the Fleet for allegedly harboring the Jesuit missionary priest, Edmund Campion, who was executed in December.

William Catesby's son Robert would lead the Gunpowder plotters in 1605:

Seven years later, in the reign of the next monarch James I (James VI of Scotland), William’s son Robert became what we would today call a terrorist. Frustrated, angry and “beside himself with mindless fanaticism,” he contrived to blow up the king and the House of Lords at the state opening of Parliament on 5 November 1605. “The nature of the disease,” he told his recruits, “required so sharp a remedy.” The plot was discovered and anti-popery became ever more entrenched in English culture. Only in 2013 was the constitution weeded of a clause that insisted that royal heirs who married Catholics were excluded from the line of succession.

Every 5 November, we British set off our fireworks and let our children foam with marshmallow, and we enjoy “bonfire night” as a bit of harmless fun, without really thinking about why the plotters sought their “sharp remedy” or, indeed, about the tragedy of the father’s failed American Dream, a dream for religious freedom that was twisted out of all recognition by the son.

Book Review: "God's Traitors"

Rather like Adrian Tinniswood with The Verneys: A True Story of Love, War, and Madness in Seventeenth Century England, which focused on that family's reactions to events like the English Civil War and Interregnum,  in God's Traitors: Terror & Faith in Elizabethan England Jessie Childs focuses on the Vaux family of Harrowden Hall (and connected families like the Treshams of Rushton) and how they, remaining true to their Catholic faith, responded to the ever-tightening restrictions on recusant Catholics during Elizabeth I's reign--and how much they knew about the Gunpowder Plot of 1605.

One great feature of the design of this book, which includes two insets of color images, other illustrations, a list of principal characters, and a family tree, is the map of the Midlands of England with the Catholic houses identified in each county: Staffordshire, Worcestershire, Warwickshire, Leicestershire, and Northamptonshire. Seeing the distances (if not the terrain) between the houses, I could imagine the missionary priests moving from house to house, celebrating the Sacraments, keeping ahead of the government pursuivants. I could also imagine the government pursuivants, going from house to house, hoping to catch a priest!

By telling the story of Vaux family, as each generation continues the family's faithfulness to the Catholic Church, Childs retells stories familiar to me, of St. Edmund Campion and Father Robert Persons, St. Robert Southwell, Fathers Henry Garnett and John Gerard, and other priests and martyrs, from a different angle: how the Vaux family had sheltered and assisted the priests.

As Childs describes each Vaux generation's response to recusancy, the tension and the danger mount: fines, arrests, imprisonment, debt, danger, conflict within the extended family, and death. Trying to find a way to practice his faith and yet be an Englishman proved exhausting for William the second Baron Vaux. Recusant Catholics could "either obey their Queen and consign their souls to damnation", as Childs says, "or obey the pope and surrender their bodies to temporal punishment". His son Henry and daughters Anne and Eleanor and daughter-in-law Eliza would be even more courageous, leading the underground network of safety for the missionary priests. The later generations of Vauxes--further and further separated from how the Catholic faith had once been practiced in England--grew more and more desperate as they found their choices so limiting: unable to take part in the leadership of their country, they fled to the Continent as mercenaries, like Ambrose, the black sheep of the family.

The Vauxes are always on the edges of the conspiracies against Elizabeth I (the Ridolfi Plot, the Babington conspiracy, the Throckmorton Plot)--and thus William Vaux spent so much time answering questions, along with his brother-in-law Sir Thomas Tresham, paying fnes, enduring imprisonment and house arrest. But at the end of the book, the Gunpowder Plot attempt to blow up Parliament with King James I, his family, and all the Lords and Commons, sums up the entire struggle. Anne Vaux feared that young men she knew well like Robert Catesby were plotting something horrible and she wanted Father Henry Garnet to tell them not to go forward with their plans. Did Father Garnet do enough? did he ask the right questions? respond forcefully enough to tell Catesby and Digby et al not to pursue whatever plot they had in mind? Those were questions he asked himself while in prison and even during his questioning. Although he did not instigate the plot or encourage the plot--he knew about the Gunpowder Plot and he did not report it to the authorities, citing the seal of the confessional.

In the Epilogue, Childs continues the story of the Vauxes: the sisters Anne and Eleanor and their sister-in-law Eliza continue their good works, focused now on the children to be raised in the Catholic faith. The family endures the long Eighteenth century and then finally enjoys Emancipation and freedom. One of the best details of this after story is that the nine Baron Vaux was Father Gabriel Gilbey, O.S.B. and took his seat in the House of Lords in 1962, 403 years after the last Benedictine served in the House (I presume that could be John Feckenham, the last abbot of Westminster Abbey).

Alice Hogge in God's Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests and the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot (2005) described the lives and deaths of the missionary priests who studied abroad and returned to England, branded as traitors for their priesthood, in her build-up to the Gunpowder Plot and its aftermath. It could almost serve as the companion volume to Childs' great story of the Vaux family. By focusing on the noble Vaux family, the lay men and women who struggled to remain true to their Church and to their nation, however, Childs has given us a great story of faithfulness and endurance. I cannot recommend God's Traitors highly enough: it is well-narrated and her analysis is always balanced and insightful.

Please note that I received this review copy from the author, with the only expectation being that I would read it and review it honestly.

Elizabeth I's Persecution of Catholics and Blessed John Storey

I purchased the May issue of BBC History at our local Barnes & Noble bookstore--the only reason we go to our local B&N is for magazines (or CDs and DVDs), of course, with Eighth Day Books in town. The cover story is by Jessie Childs, based on her book God's Traitors: Terror and Faith in Elizabethan England and the article includes a sidebar on the plots that some Catholics did support to remove the queen from the throne and bring Mary, Queen of Scots or another Catholic claimant to rule in England.

But the story of Blessed John Storey also indicates that Elizabethan authorities saw plots were there were no plots. John Storey had left England, renounced his allegiance (the closest thing in the 16th century to renouncing citizenship), started a new life, and entered the service of King Philip II of Spain--there is no indication of any plotting against Elizabeth I on John Storey's part. Elizabeth's agents violated the sovereignty of another ruler to enter the Spanish Netherlands and entrap, then kidnap Storey, and bring him to England to torture, try, and execute him. In the wake of the Northern Rebellion, Elizabeth was certainly tracking down any associate of the rebel leaders, however tenuous.

Blessed John Story or Storey experienced and was involved in all the religious changes of the Tudor Dynasty during each reign: Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I. He endured imprisonment and exile, torture and execution, success and failure at the University of Oxford, in Parliament, and at Court:

John Story or Storey was born in northern England in 1504 and educated at the University of Oxford. He became a Doctor of Law and served at the President of Broadgates Hall (now Pembroke College) from 1537 to 1539.

John might have fallen away briefly from the Catholic Church or at least decided that he could accept the king’s control of the Church in England, for he did take Henry VIII’s Oath of Supremacy. After becoming a member of the House of Commons for Hindon in Wiltshire in southwest England in 1547, he seems to have reverted. (He also got married to a woman named Joan in 1547.) In 1549 he protested against the Act of Uniformity introduced in Parliament by the government of young king Edward VI. This Act promulgated Thomas Cranmer’s new Book of Common Prayer as the sole legal form of worship in England.

This law was controversial in Parliament and John Storey spoke against it—and against the boy king. Because he cried out “Woe unto thee, O land, when thy king is a child,” the House of Commons imprisoned him.

Eventually, House of Commons released John Storey; he and his family went into exile in Louvain in the Low Countries under the rule of Spain, now in Belgium. There he joined the faculty at the University of Louvain and the community of English Catholic exiles, including William Rastell, Thomas More’s nephew and publisher.

In August of 1533, Storey and his family returned to England after Edward VI died and Mary, Henry VIII and Katherine of Aragon’s Catholic daughter succeeded to the throne in spite of the attempt to supplant her by the Protestant Lady Jane Grey. Story went back to Oxford as Regius Professor of Law but then took on important duties in the revived Catholic Church, serving as Chancellor for the dioceses of London and Oxford, and Dean of the Arches, the ecclesiastical court of the Archbishop of Canterbury. In his role as Chancellor for the Bishop of London, Edmund Bonner, he took part in heresy trials. He also served as proctor or representative for Queen Mary I at the trial of Thomas Cranmer in Oxford and joined efforts to control the publication of heretical books in several dioceses.

When Mary I and Reginald Pole, Archbishop of Canterbury, died on November 17, 1558, Storey, like other Catholics in England, waited to see what direction Elizabeth I would take in religion. Her first Parliament began to introduce bills leading to the establishment of the Church of England, and John Storey found himself under attack for his opposition and for his work during Mary I’s reign. In May of 1560 he was arrested and imprisoned in the Fleet, from which he escaped briefly, being recaptured and taken to Marshalsea Prison in April or May of 1562. He escaped from Marshalsea before he could be confronted with the taking of Elizabeth I’s Oath of Supremacy and fled again to Louvain, leaving everything he owned behind in England. His family joined him in exile again and the Duke of Alba offered him financial assistance and a position as a customs official. John Storey renounced his allegiance to Elizabeth I and placed himself in the service of Philip II of Spain, ruling in the Spanish Netherlands. He remained there for seven years.

English agents used his position as customs agent to capture Storey and return him to England. William Cecil, Elizabeth I’s Secretary of State set a trap by having spies pose as refugees from England seeking Spanish protection in the Netherlands. Storey went aboard a ship in Antwerp to search it and the ship sailed to Yarmouth where he was placed under arrest. In London he was tortured and held there from August of 1570 until his trial on May 26, 1571 in Westminster Hall.

St. Edmund Campion attended this trial at which Storey protested that he was a subject of the King of Spain and therefore not accountable to English treason laws. Accused of plotting the death of Elizabeth I, he refused to plead. The only evidence against him was his association with the Norton family who had been part of the Northern Rebellion of 1569, when Catholics rose up against Elizabeth’s religious policies. On April 27, 1570 Pope Pius V had excommunicated Queen Elizabeth in the Bull, Regnans in Excelsis, which also released her subjects from any allegiance to her. Certainly a former English subject, living in exile under the protection of one of England’s enemies did not stand a chance against the presumption of his guilt. The fact that he had opposed religious changes in Parliament during two reigns and participated in heresy trials in another compounded his danger. The verdict was a foregone conclusion and Storey was sentenced to be hung, drawn, and quartered.

St. Edmund Campion’s presence at this trial confirmed him in his reversion to Catholicism as he was on his way to join the English exiles in Douai to study for the priesthood. Evidently he did not witness John Storey’s execution on June 1, 1571 at Tyburn in London. Even though Story was 70 years old, the execution was carried out as brutally as possible—and he was posthumously mocked in pamphlets for having cried out in agony.

Philip II arranged for his widow and family to receive a pension—and his son John became a priest. The elder John Storey was beatified in 1886 by Pope Leo XIII. Blessed John Storey offers a great example--his willingness to stand up for the Catholic faith in spite of repeated imprisonment and exile, culminating in his final capture, torture, trial and execution. The fact that his example influenced one of the greatest of the Elizabethan era martyrs, St. Edmund Campion, demonstrates what a model of faithfulness and fortitude he was and is.

Books, Books, Books! Three in Queue

I have three great books lined up for Summer reading. I've started the first one, Romantic Catholics: France's Postrevolutionary Generation in Search of a Modern Faith by Carol E. Harrison from Cornell University Press:

In this well-written and imaginatively structured book, Carol E. Harrison brings to life a cohort of nineteenth-century French men and women who argued that a reformed Catholicism could reconcile the divisions in French culture and society that were the legacy of revolution and empire. They include, most prominently, Charles de Montalembert, Pauline Craven, Amélie and Frédéric Ozanam, Léopoldine Hugo, Maurice de Guérin, and Victorine Monniot. The men and women whose stories appear in Romantic Catholics were bound together by filial love, friendship, and in some cases marriage. Harrison draws on their diaries, letters, and published works to construct a portrait of a generation linked by a determination to live their faith in a modern world.

Rejecting both the atomizing force of revolutionary liberalism and the increasing intransigence of the church hierarchy, the romantic Catholics advocated a middle way, in which a revitalized Catholic faith and liberty formed the basis for modern society. Harrison traces the history of nineteenth-century France and, in parallel, the life course of these individuals as they grow up, learn independence, and take on the responsibilities and disappointments of adulthood. Although the shared goals of the romantic Catholics were never realized in French politics and culture, Harrison's work offers a significant corrective to the traditional understanding of the opposition between religion and the secular republican tradition in France.

As I read the introduction I thought how nineteenth century Catholics in both England and France had to rebuild their churches--the English after centuries of penal laws and martyrdom; the French after the Revolution, the Terror, and the revolutionary campaign of De-Christianization that led to destruction of churches, suppression of monasteries, and the martyrdom of priests and nuns. The difference for the French, as Harrison is explaining to me, is that as the Catholic laity worked to influence their society--re-evangelize it!--they also had to consider the Church's relationship with the monarchy and whether it was good for the Church or not. Harrison notes in the introduction that nineteenth century Catholics in France were for a time at least solidly ultramontane, ascribing the weakness of the Church in France during the Ancien Regime partially to its Cisalpine stance of loyalty to the Bourbons instead of the Papacy. More on Romantic Catholics after I've read it!

Then I have The Oxford Movement: Europe and the Wider World 1830-1930, edited by Stewart J. Brown and Peter B. Nockles from Cambridge:

The Oxford Movement transformed the nineteenth-century Church of England with a renewed conception of itself as a spiritual body. Initiated in the early 1830s by members of the University of Oxford, it was a response to threats to the established church posed by British Dissenters, Irish Catholics, Whig and Radical politicians, and the predominant evangelical ethos – what Newman called 'the religion of the day'. The Tractarians believed they were not simply addressing difficulties within their national Church, but recovering universal principles of the Christian faith. To what extent were their beliefs and ideals communicated globally? Was missionary activity the product of the movement's distinctive principles? Did their understanding of the Church promote, or inhibit, closer relations among the churches of the global Anglican Communion? This volume addresses these questions and more with a series of case studies involving Europe and the English-speaking world during the first century of the Movement.

My husband gave me both of these books for Mother's Day!

And finally, thanks to the Queen Anne Boleyn blog and Beth von Staats who introduced us in a way, I have received a review copy of God's Traitors: Terror and Faith in Elizabethan England, from the author herself, Jessie Childs!

The Catholics of Elizabethan England did not witness a golden age. Their Mass was banned, their priests were outlawed, their faith was criminalised. In an age of assassination and Armada, those Catholics who clung to their faith were increasingly seen as the enemy within. In this superb history, award-winning author Jessie Childs explores the Catholic predicament in Elizabethan England through the eyes of one remarkable family: the Vauxes of Harrowden Hall.

God’s Traitors is a tale of dawn raids and daring escapes, stately homes and torture chambers, ciphers, secrets and lies. From clandestine chapels and side-street inns to exile communities and the corridors of power, it exposes the tensions and insecurities masked by the cult of Gloriana. Above all, it is a timely story of courage and frailty, repression and reaction and the terrible consequences when religion and politics collide.

I may have to bump God's Traitors up in the queue after Romantic Catholics!

What are you reading, readers? Or planning to read?

King St. Henry VI?

 

Desmond Seward writes about the veneration of Henry VI in spite of his failings as a monarch in the April issue of the BBC History Magazine. According to the article, which is not available free on-line of course, pilgrimage to his tomb at Windsor rivaled and even eclipsed the pilgrimage traffic to Canterbury and St. Thomas a Becket's tomb. He was never canonized even though Henry VII supported his  cause for sainthood and Henry VIII maintained devotion to him. This blog from the College of St. George at Windsor Castle provides some of the same background as Seward highlights:

 

The tomb of Henry VI became the object of veneration and the scene of miracles of healing attracted many pilgrims.  Miracles attributed to the King included those connected with one of his treasured relics – an old hat – the King’s Medicine against Headache.   Relics were kept at Windsor until the Reformation.  The metal collecting box for alms still stands beside the tomb. . . .

Henry VI was not considered a successful king but rather a good and holy man widely regarded as a saint.   His one lasting achievement was in education, founding Eton College and King’s College, Cambridge.  At Windsor we commemorate his birthday with the ceremony of the Lilies and Roses.  Boys from Eton College attend an obit service together with representatives from Eton and King’s to lay lilies and roses on the tomb of Henry VI while special prayers are said.

“Let Thy blessing O Lord, be upon the Colleges of Thy servant King Henry VI and as Thou has appointed unto them diversities of gifts, grant then also the same spirit, so that they may together serve Thee to the welfare of Thy realm, the benefit of all men, and Thy Honour and Glory; through Jesus Christ Our Lord”.

Seward notes that one reason Henry VI was held in veneration was his mistreatment and death: not accused or tried, but simply murdered in the Tower of London. Known for his piety, leniency and charity, Henry's death seemed so undeserved. Although Henry VII may have supported his Lancastrian cousin's cause for political reasons, it seems clear that the source of devotion to Henry was lay piety--at least two men condemned to death prayed to Henry and reported that he prevented their being hanged to death by placing his hand between their necks and the rope!

Although he was a failure as a monarch, Henry VI successfully founded two great institutions: King's College, Cambridge (The King's College of Our Lady and St. Nicholas at Cambridge), and Eton (The King's College of Our Lady at Eton besides Windsor), both in 1441. Seward also describes Henry's devotional life, as he was dedicated to spiritual reading, prayer, and monastic retreat--it seems he might have been a better monk than monarch.

I look forward to the May issue of the BBC History Magazine as it will feature an article by Jessie Childs about recusants during Elizabeth I's reign, based upon her book, God's Traitors!