Thomas Stapleton, RIP

According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, Thomas Stapleton, former Prebend at Chichester Cathedral, died in exile on October 12, 1598. He was known as a controversialist and theologian:

Controversialist, born at Henfield, Sussex, July, 1535; died at Louvain, 12 Oct., 1598. He was the son of William Stapleton, one of the Stapletons of Carlton, Yorkshire. He was educated at the Free School, Canterbury, at Winchester, and at New College, Oxford, where he became a fellow, 18 Jan., 1553. On Elizabeth's accession he left England rather than conform to the new religion, going first to Louvain, and afterwards to Paris, to study theology. In 1563, being in England, he was summoned by the Anglican bishop Barlow to repudiate the pope's authority, but refused and was deprived of the prebend of Woodhorne in Chichester Cathedral, conferred on him in 1558. He then retired to Louvain with his father and other relatives. In 1568 he joined Allen at Douai and took a great part in founding the English college there, both by lecturing and by devoting to its support his salary as lecturer in theology at Anchin College.

His talents were so remarkable that he was soon appointed public professor of divinity, and canon of St. Amatus; and together with Allen he completed the degree of D.D. on 10 July, 1571. In 1584 he resigned these preferments to enter the Society of Jesus, but did not complete his novitiate, and returned to Douai. Philip II appointed him professor of Scripture at Louvain in 1590, to which office a canonry in St. Peter's Church was annexed; and soon after he was made dean of Hilverenbeeck in the Diocese of Boisle-Duc. The emoluments of these offices were all spent in relieving necessitous English Catholics. Meanwhile his fame as a theologian had spread to Rome and Pope Clement VIII thought so much of his theological writings that he caused them to be read aloud at his table. Twice he invited Stapleton to Rome in vain, but his offer to make him prothonotary Apostolic in January, 1597, was accepted. It was generally believed that he would be created cardinal, a suggestion which was disapproved of by Father Agazzari, S. J., rector of the English College, and obstacles were put in the way of his journey to Rome (Eley, "Certaine Briefe Notes", p. 254). He accordingly remained at Louvain till his death in the following year. He left his books and manuscripts (now lost) to the English College at Douai. An original painting of Stapleton is preserved at Douai Abbey, Woolhampton, England.

His first works were translations: Ven. Bede's "History of the Church in England" (Antwerp, 1556), the "Apology of Staphylus" (Antwerp, 1565), and Hosius on "The Expresse Word of God" (1567). His original works were very numerous: "A Fortress of the Faith" (Antwerp); "A Return of Untruths" (Antwerp, 1566); "A Counterblast to M. Horne's vain blast" (Louvain, 1567); "Orationes funebres" (Antwerp, 1577); "Principiorum fidei doctrinalium demonstratio" (Paris, 1578); "Speculum pravitatis hæreticæ" (Douai, 1580); "De universa justificationis doctrina" (Paris, 1582); "Tres Thomæ" (Douai, 1588); "Promptuarium morale" in two parts (Antwerp, 1591, 1592); "Promptuarium Catholicum in Evangelia Dominicalia" (Cologne, 1592); "Promptuarium Catholicum in Evangelia Ferialia" (Cologne, 1594) and "Promptuarium Catholicum in Evangelia Festorum" (Cologne, 1592); "Relectio scholastica" (Antwerp, 1592); "Authoritatis Ecclesiasticæ circa S. Scripturarum approbationem defensio" (Antwerp, 1592); "Apologia pro rege Philippo II" (Constance, 1592), published under the punning pseudonym of Didymus Veridicus Henfildanus, i. e. Thomas the Stable-toned [truth-speaking] Henfieldite. "Antidota Evangelica", "Antidota Apostolica contra nostri Temporis Hæreses" (both at Antwerp, 1595); "Antidota Apostolica in Epistolam Pauli ad Romanos" (Antwerp, 1595); "Triplicatio inchoata" (Antwerp, 1596); "Antidota Apostolica in duas Epistolas ad Corinthios" (Antwerp, 1598); "Orationes catecheticæ" (Antwerp, 1598); "Vere admiranda, seu de Magnitudine Romanæ Ecclesiæ" (Antwerp, 1599); "Orationes academicæ miscellaneæ" (Antwerp, 1602); "Oratio academica" (Mainz, 1608). All his works were republished in four folio volumes in Paris in 1620, with an autobiography of the author in Latin verse and Henry Holland's "Vita Thomæ Stapletoni".

The late, great Father Marvin O'Connell wrote a major study of Thomas Stapleton in 1964, well-reviewed here and here, by me!

James I's "Historian Royal", Thomas Dempster, RIP

Thomas Dempster, a Scottish Catholic, sometime seminarian, scholar, exile, antiquarian, lecturer, and even James I's "Historian Royal" for a brief time, died on September 6, 1625. According to his entry in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, he was peripatetic. There is some debate about the year of his birth, either in 1574/5 or 1579; he preferred the latter because it made his academic achievements seem more prodigious!

While he was a serious scholar on many matters, Dempster seems to have exaggerated many details in his own life (including the number of his siblings!). Nevertheless, the sketches of his life in the available on-line materials reflects the travels he undertook, the sponsors and protectors he found as part of the life of a scholar in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. As a Catholic in Scotland or England he had to go into exile to study and teach. Among his patrons are James I of England, Cosimo de Medici of Tuscany, and Pope Urban VIII:

[He] was born at Cliftbog, Aberdeenshire, the son of Thomas Dempster of Muresk, Auchterless and Killesmont, sheriff of Banff and Buchan. According to his own account, he was the twenty-fourth of twenty-nine children, and was early remarkable for precocious talent. He obtained his early education in Aberdeenshire, and at ten entered Pembroke Hall, Cambridge; after a short while he went to Paris, and, driven thence by the plague, to Louvain, whence by order of the pope he was transferred with several other Scottish students to the papal seminary at Rome. Being soon forced by ill health to leave, he went to the English college at Douai, where he remained three years and took his M.A. degree.

While at Douai he wrote a scurrilous attack on Queen Elizabeth, which caused a riot among the English students. But, if his truculent character was thus early displayed, his abilities were no less conspicuous; and, though still in his teens, he became lecturer on the Humanities at Tournai, whence, after but a short stay, he returned to Paris, to take his degree of doctor of canon law, and become regent of the college of Navarre. He soon left Paris for Toulouse, which in turn he was forced to leave owing to the hostility of the city authorities, aroused by his violent assertion of university rights. He was now elected professor of eloquence at the university or academy of Nîmes, but not without a murderous attack upon him by one of the defeated candidates and his supporters, followed by a suit for libel, which, though he ultimately won his case, forced him to leave the town. A short engagement in Spain, as tutor to the son of Marshal de Saint Luc, was terminated by another quarrel; and Dempster now returned to Scotland with the intention of asserting a claim to his father’s estates.

Finding his relatives unsympathetic, and falling into heated controversy with the Presbyterian clergy, he made no long stay, but returned to Paris, where he remained for seven years, becoming professor in several colleges successively. At last, however, his temporary connexion with the collège de Beauvais was ended by a feat of arms which proved him as stout a fighter with his sword as with his pen; and, since his victory was won over officers of the king’s guard, it again became expedient for him to change his place of residence. The dedication of his edition of Rosinus’ Antiquitatum Romanorum corpus absolutissimum to King James I. had won him an invitation to the English court; and in 1615 he went to London. His reception by the king was flattering enough; but his hopes of preferment were dashed by the opposition of the Anglican clergy to the promotion of a papist. He left for Rome, where, after a short imprisonment on suspicion of being a spy, he gained the favour of Pope Paul V., through whose influence with Cosimo II., grand duke of Tuscany, he was appointed to the professorship of the Pandects at Pisa. 

According to Henry Bradley in the Dictionary of National Biography, Cosimo de Medici also sponsored Dempster's great work on the Etruscans:

The duke appointed him professor of civil law in the university of Pisa, with a handsome stipend, and defrayed the expenses of his journey to England for the purpose of bringing home his wife. It appears that on his return he ventured, notwithstanding his recent troubles, to pass through Paris, for Rossi tells the story that his wife, walking through the streets of that city with her shoulders bare, attracted such a crowd of gazers that she and her husband had to take refuge in a house to avoid being crushed to death. In the same year (1616) Dempster made a second visit to London, partly to purchase books which the grand duke authorised him to obtain at his cost for use in the preparation of his great work on ‘Etruria,’ and on 9 Nov. he delivered his inaugural lecture.

Dempster continued to hold the Pisan professorship for three years, during which he completed the ‘Etruria,’ and presented the manuscript to the grand duke.

His marriage caused him some difficulties:

He had married while in London, but ere long had reason to suspect his wife’s relations with a certain Englishman. Violent accusations followed, indignantly repudiated; a diplomatic correspondence ensued, and a demand was made, and supported by the grand duke, for an apology, which the professor refused to make, preferring rather to lose his chair. He now set out once more for Scotland, but was intercepted by the Florentine cardinal Luigi Capponi, who induced him to remain at Bologna as professor of Humanity. This was the most distinguished post in the most famous of continental universities, and Dempster was now at the height of his fame. Though his Roman Antiquities and Scotia illustrior had been placed on the Index pending correction, Pope Urban VIII. made him a knight and gave him a pension. He was not, however, to enjoy his honours long. His wife eloped with a student, and Dempster, pursuing the fugitives in the heat of summer, caught a fever, and died at Bologna on the 6th of September 1625.

Dempster owed his great position in the history of scholarship to his extraordinary memory, and to the versatility which made him equally at home in philology, criticism, law, biography and history. His style is, however, often barbarous; and the obvious defects of his works are due to his restlessness and impetuosity, and to a patriotic and personal vanity which led him in Scottish questions into absurd exaggerations, and in matters affecting his own life into an incurable habit of romancing. The best known of his works is the Historia ecclesiastica gentis Scotorum (Bologna, 1627). In this book he tries to prove that Bernard (Sapiens), Alcuin, Boniface and Joannes Scotus Erigena were all Scots, and even Boadicea becomes a Scottish author. This criticism is not applicable to his works on antiquarian subjects, and his edition of Benedetto Accolti’s De bello a Christianis contra barbaros (1623) has great merits.

Author Ingrid D. Rowland mentions Dempster in the context of the fraudulent representation of some Etruscan documents in her book The Scarith of Scornello: A Tale of Renaissance Forgery:

A precocious teenager, bored with life at his family’s Tuscan villa Scornello, Curzio Inghirami staged perhaps the most outlandish prank of the seventeenth century. Born in the age of Galileo to an illustrious family with ties to the Medici, and thus an educated and privileged young man, Curzio concocted a wild scheme that would in the end catch the attention of the Vatican and scandalize all of Rome.

As recounted here with relish by Ingrid D. Rowland, Curzio preyed on the Italian fixation with ancestry to forge an array of ancient Latin and Etruscan documents. For authenticity’s sake, he stashed the counterfeit treasure in scarith (capsules made of hair and mud) near Scornello. To the seventeenth-century Tuscans who were so eager to establish proof of their heritage and history, the scarith symbolized a link to the prestigious culture of their past. But because none of these proud Italians could actually read the ancient Etruscan language, they couldn’t know for certain that the documents were frauds. The Scarith of Scornello traces the career of this young scam artist whose "discoveries" reached the Vatican shortly after Galileo was condemned by the Inquisition, inspiring participants on both sides of the affair to clash again—this time over Etruscan history.

An expert on the Italian Renaissance and one of only a few people in the world to work with the Etruscan language, Rowland writes a tale so enchanting it seems it could only be fiction. In her investigation of this seventeenth-century caper, Rowland will captivate readers with her sense of humor and obvious delight in Curzio’s far-reaching prank. And even long after the inauthenticity of Curzio’s creation had been established, this practical joke endured: the scarith were stolen in the 1980s by a thief who mistook them for the real thing.

Rowland almost makes it seem that Dempster's work on the Etruscans was as fraudulent as Curzio's!

Maurice Chauncey: A Carthusian Who Took the Oath

According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, Maurice Chauncey was:

Prior of the English Carthusians at Bruges, date of birth unknown; died at Bruges, 2 July, 1581. He was the eldest son of John Chauncey, Esq. Wood thinks he studied at Oxford, and afterwards went to Gray's Inn for a course of law. Finally he entered the London Charterhouse. In 1535 the majority of the Carthusians refused to take the oath of supremacy, but Chauncy, on his own confession, consented to take it. After the surrender of the monastery in 1537, Chauncy with a few others joined the Carthusians of Sheen who had settled in Bruges. On the accession of Mary they returned to Sheen, and in 1556 Chauncy was elected prior. In 1558 they retired again to Bruges, living with their Flemish brethren until 1569, when they obtained a house on their own in St. Clare Street. The hostility of the Calvinists compelled them to leave Bruges in 1578. Failing to settle at Douai, they retired to Louvain (May, 1578). Chauncy died at the old house in Bruges. In his history of the Carthusians he frequently laments his weakness in taking the oath of supremacy. He wrote: "Historia aliquot nostri saeculi Martyrun in Angliâ", etc. (Mainz, 1550, and Bruges, 1583); "Commentariolus de vitae ratione et martyrio octodecim Cartusianorum qui in Anglia sub rege trucidati sunt" (Ghent, 1608), a portion of which was reprinted; "Vitae Martyrun Cartusianorum aliquot, qui Londini pro Unitate Ecclesiae adversus haereticos", etc. (Milan, 1606). "The Divine Cloud of Unknowing", in manuscript, is ascribed to him by Anthony a Wood.

He died in Bruges on July 23, 1581. According to Philip Hughes in his Rome and the Counter Reformation in England, Chauncey wrote to Father William Allen in 1577 complaining about how the missionary priests wore secular clothing when they returned to England. Allen had to instruct Chauncey about the dangers the priests were already facing--before Parliament had made it a treasonous offense for a priest to be present in England. Alison Plowden provides some quotations from Allen's reply to Chauncey in her Danger to Elizabeth.

George Sand and the English Augustinians

So my husband and I were eating pizza at a nearby restaurant and I found a review in the Wall Street Journal of a newly-translated biography of George Sand, Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dupin. It highlighted the detail that Aurore was raised by her grandmother and sent to the convent school of the English Augustinians in Paris. This convent, Notre-Dame-de-Sion on the rue des Fossés-Saint-Victor (now rue de Cardinal Lemoine) was founded by English Catholic exiles. In her memoirs, Aurore described the experience:

THIS convent was one of the three or four British communities established in Paris during Cromwell’s ascendency…. It is the only one now in existence, its house having endured the various revolutions without suffering greatly. Its traditions say that Henriette of France, the daughter of our Henry IV. and wife of the unfortunate Charles I. of England, had often come to pray in our chapel with her son James II. All our nuns were English, Scotch, or Irish. Two-thirds of the boarding pupils and lodgers, as well as some of the priests who came to officiate, belonged to these nations. During certain hours of the day the whole school was forbidden to speak a word of French, which was the best means for learning English rapidly. Naturally our nuns hardly ever spoke anything else to us. They retained the habits of their country; drank tea three times a day allowing those among us who were good to take it with them.

The cloister and the church were paved with long tombstones, beneath which were the venerated bones of those Catholics of Old England who had died in exile, and been buried by favor in this inviolable sanctuary. There were English epitaphs and pious inscriptions everywhere on tombs and walls. Large old portraits of English princes and prelates hung in the Superior’s room and in her private parlor. The beautiful and amorous Mary Stuart, reputed a saint by our chaste nuns, shone there like a star. In short, everything in that house was English, both of the past and of the present; and when within its gates, one seemed to have crossed the Channel. All this was a “nine days’ wonder” to me, the Berri peasant.

Aurore was incorrect about the date of its founding. King Charles I was on the throne in 1634 when it was founded. She was there from 1817 to 1820 and her memoirs reflect some loneliness and restlessness in the cloister:

We were cloistered in the full sense of the word. We went out twice a month only, and never spent a night out except at New-Year’s. There were vacations, but I had none; as my grandmother said she preferred not to interrupt my studies, so as to have me at the convent a shorter time. She left Paris a few weeks after our separation, and did not come back for a year; then went away for another year. She had demanded that my mother was not to ask to take me out. My cousins the Villeneuves offered me their home for all holidays, and wrote to my grandmother for her permission. I wrote too, and begged her not to grant it; and had the courage to tell her, that not going out with mother, I ought not and did not wish to go out with any one. I trembled lest she should not listen to me; and though I felt the need and the wish to enjoy these outings, I made up my mind to pretend illness if my cousins came to fetch me armed with a permit. This time my grandmother approved my action; and instead of finding fault, praised my feeling in a way I found rather exaggerated. I had done nothing but my duty; yet it made me spend two whole years behind bars. 

We had mass in our chapel, received visits in the parlor, took our private lessons there; the professor being on one side of the grating while we were on the other. All the convent windows towards the street had not only gratings, but immovable linen screens besides. It was really a prison, but a prison with a large garden and plenty of company. I must confess that I never felt the rigors of captivity for an instant; and that the minute precautions taken to keep us locked up and prevent us from getting a glimpse of the outer world, often made me laugh. This care was the only stimulant we had to long for freedom; for there was not one of us who would ever have dreamt of crossing her mother’s threshold unattended: yet almost every girl at the convent watched for the opening of the cloister door, or peeped furtively through the slits in the linen screens. To outwit supervision, go down into the court three or four steps, see a cab pass by, was the dream and the ambition of forty or fifty wild and mischievous girls, who the very next day would go about Paris without in the least enjoying it; because once outside the convent inclosure, stepping on the pavement and looking at people were no longer forbidden fruit.

According to her latest biographer, Martine Reid, Aurore became "very devout" while with the English exiles, and even thought of a religious vocation for a time. St. Augustine's Priory in Ealing has this brief note about Notre-Dame-du-Sion in Paris:

Our history dates back to 1631 when an English woman, Lettice Mary Tredway, an English nun at the convent of Notre Dame de Beaulieu at Douai, together with Father Thomas Carre, a priest at the English College at Douai, conceived the idea of founding an order in France for those English women who wished to pursue their religious vocation but were prevented from doing so in England due to religious persecution.

In 1634 the Augustinian convent of the Canonesses Regular of the Lateran opened in Paris. Six English women were selected to start this new community, among them a thirteen year old girl, Margaret Dormer. She was too young to become a nun and so the school began, with Margaret Dormer the first pupil.

Over the next 250 years the community and school on the Rue des Fosses St Victor found itself at the heart of European events. The French Revolution saw the nuns enduring the terror of those years, their convent even being used as a prison for women. In the following years under Napoleon the community often played host as the Emperor enjoyed walking in the quiet of the convent gardens. Following Napoleon’s defeat, the Duke of Wellington visited the community. Revolution in 1848 saw the nuns remain at their posts, but in 1862 new premises had to be found when the property on the Rue des Fosses St Victor was demolished, and the convent and school moved to Neuilly, on the outskirts of the city.

In 1911, after nearly three hundred years, the anti-clerical laws of France saw the community compelled to leave France for England, a country where nuns were now welcome, to practise their vocation and run their school.

Image of the cloister of the convent (by Hubert Robert); Image credit for the location of the convent on rue des Fossés-Saint-Victor.