Abstract
This chapter engages with two main sources, the ‘Chronicle’ of St Monica’s Convent, Louvain (written by Mary Copley c.1631–1660) and the ‘Responsa Scholarum’ of the English College, Rome (1598–1685), in order to explore how family and childhood memories contributed to the traditions English Catholics developed about their past, their collective memory. The importance of family connections and descent in religious identity are discussed, and also how memories from childhood could be used in the construction of religious culture. Where possible, the Responsa and Chronicle are correlated with other sources to illuminate how their writers selected and interpreted material. The essay also discusses some examples of English Catholic martyrologies which engaged with issues of family, family relations and identity.
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Notes
- 1.
She wrote anonymously, but has been identified by Victoria van Hyning as Mary Copley. Victoria van Hyning, ‘Naming names: Chroniclers, Scribes and Editors of St Monica’s Convent, Louvain, 1631–1906’ in C. Bowden and J. Kelly, eds., The English Convents in Exile 1600–1800: Communities, culture, identity (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013). Van Hyning notes that Copley clearly used written sources as well, although she chose to emphasise oral history, pp. 88–90.
- 2.
A. Hamilton (ed.), The Chronicle of the English Augustinian Canonesses Regular of the Lateran: at St. Monica’s in Louvain (now at St Augustine’s Priory, Newton Abbot, Devon) vol. 11548–1625, vol. 21625–44 (Edinburg, 1904) (hereinafter SMC) vol.2 p.35.
- 3.
This connection was occasionally noted by English Catholic writers; for example, John Mush, who compared Marmaduke Bowes, the first person executed for priest-harbouring, to Alban: Mush, ‘Clitherow’, pp. 367–8.
- 4.
According to the Chronicle’s record of her age at profession. Who were the nuns? Database gives Helen Draycott’s dates and offers a Draycott family tree: https://wwtn.history.qmul.ac.uk/search/search.php?uid=LA085"e=no&given=&religion=&surname=draycott&variants=on&cid=0&sdate=0&edate=0&loc= https://wwtn.history.qmul.ac.uk/ftrees/Draycott.pdf
- 5.
APC 1575-77: p.13 (11/08/75), p.21 6/09/75 p.46 12/11/75, p.80 20/01/75-6, p.110 28/04/76 p.145 19/06/76 p.213 7/10/76.
- 6.
APC 1577-8, p. 325 14/09/78. Draycott had been summoned on 7 October 1576 (APC 1575–77 p. 213) and could have been committed at that time. Mrs Draycott might have lodged in or near the Fleet, or made visits to London or Draycott could have had periods of leave from prison.
- 7.
See A. Kenny, ‘Introduction’ to Kenny, (ed.) The Responsa Scholarum of the English College, Rome, Part One: 1598–1621 (Catholic Records Society Records Series, vol.54) (published for the Society, 1962); Kenny, ‘Introduction’ to Kenny (ed.) The Responsa Scholarum of the English College, Rome, Part Two, 1622–85 (Catholic Records Society Records Series, vol.55) (published for the Society, 1963); E. Henson (ed.) Registers of the English College, Valladolid, 1589–1862 (Catholic Records Society Records Series, vol.30) (Published for the Society, 1930); L. Underwood, Childhood, youth and religious dissent in post-Reformation England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), Appendix A pp. 199–201; L. Underwood, ‘Youth, religious identity and autobiography at the English Colleges in Rome and Valladolid, 1592–1685’, Historical Journal 55:2 (2012) 379–74. Note that ‘Responsa Scholarum’ entries are here cited by the ‘Liber Ruber’ number by which they are arranged in Kenny’s edition, rather than by page number. Entries up to LR628 are in vol. 1, and subsequent to LR628 in vol. 2. The Responsa are in Latin; translations are mine unless otherwise stated.
- 8.
Van Hyning, ‘Naming names’ & ‘Subsumed Autobiography’; C. Walker, ‘“Doe not suppose me a well mortifyed Nun dead to the world”: Letter-writing in early modern English convents’ in J. Daybell (ed.) Early modern women’s letter-writing, 1450–1700 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001). See also C. Bowden ‘Collecting the lives of early modern women religious: obituary writing and the development of collective memory and corporate identity’ in Women’s History Review 19:1 (2010) 7–20, on the use of obituaries to help create collective history in the convent.
- 9.
Cf Victoria van Hyning, ‘Expressing selfhood in the convent: Anonymous chronicling and subsumed autobiography’ in Recusant History 32:2 (2014) 219–234 at pp. 229–30.
- 10.
Van Hyning ‘Expressing selfhood’ pp. 222–224. Copley used this text in composing her Chronicle: Van Hyning, ‘Naming names’ p. 89.
- 11.
Van Hyning, ‘Naming names’.
- 12.
Underwood, ‘Youth, autobiography and religious identity’; Underwood, Childhood, Chap. 2.
- 13.
See Underwood, Childhood pp. 31–50.
- 14.
C.H. Bowler, ‘Sir Henry James of Smarden, Kent and Clerkenwell, recusant’ in A.E.J. Hollaender and W. Kellaway (eds.), Studies in London history presented to P.E. Jones, (London: Hodder, 1969) pp. 289–313.
- 15.
LR553; LR899; LR946; LR949; LR1053.
- 16.
Underwood, Childhood pp. 93–7.
- 17.
Cf Underwood, Childhood pp. 42, 44, 60, 70.
- 18.
CRS 53 p. 322 (Northern Composition Books, 1629–32, printed from transcriptions made c.1708 of now-lost originals).
- 19.
The Oath of Allegiance was imposed by James I in 1606; Catholics debated over whether the Oath only involved legitimate civil allegiance to the monarch, or whether it conceded power to the King over spiritual matters and was therefore unacceptable.
- 20.
SP14/65/no.11.
- 21.
Under the treason statute of 1581. The obvious explanation would be that he purchased a pardon, but the calendars of pardon rolls for 1617–1629 (the deducible time-window for the events Reading describes) do not mention him. The ‘fine’, rather than an official transaction, may have been a bribe to have the charges dropped before trial.
- 22.
These records have been collected and analysed by Dr Simon Healy of the History of Parliament, from whose unpublished databases I gratefully cite: Hereafter ExRS.
- 23.
Sequestration could be imposed on grounds of recusancy, royalism or both; some respondents made no distinction, reporting suffering ‘for king and faith’.
- 24.
Calendar of the proceedings of the committee for compounding, &c., 1643–1660, preserved in the State Paper Department of Her Majesty’s Public Record Office ed. M.A. Everett Green (5 vols., London, 1889–92, reprinted Nendeln, 1972), pp. 2982, 2793, 3057, 3047,1953, 3185, 3179, 2270, 2943,104, 330,345, 455, 1851.
- 25.
Dr Simon Healy (History of Parliament Trust), ‘Persecution and toleration in Jacobean Yorkshire: the case of Richard Cholmeley of Brandsby’, unpublished paper. I am grateful for permission to cite.
- 26.
Healy, ‘Persecution and toleration’.
- 27.
TNA C 2/Jas I/B21/31.
- 28.
Acts of the Privy Council vol. 33 (1613–14) p. 388.
- 29.
Knafla, Louis A. ‘Stanley, Henry, fourth earl of Derby (1531–1593), magnate’. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, May 2015). Date of access 26 Feb. 2019, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-26272
- 30.
See Healy, ‘Persecution and toleration’ and above. Healy’s main source for this is The Memorandum Book of Richard Cholmeley of Brandsby, 1602–1623 (North Yorkshire county record office publications XLIV) (Northallerton, 1988).
- 31.
ExRS. A case in Star Chamber in 1608 involved a servant of John Tarbock, messenger of the Privy Chamber, who had allegedly been attacked by a Catholic in revenge for his part in prosecuting Catholics for hearing Mass: TNA STAC 8/16/15.
- 32.
Dorothy Musgrove in fact lived several years with her uncle William Copley, Mary’s father; but this was some time after Mary had entered the convent. SMC 1:89.
- 33.
Responsa Scholarum Part II LR839.
- 34.
LR422, LR695, LR707.
- 35.
Van Hyning, ‘Expressing selfhood’. Van Hyning discusses in particular Copley’s emphasis on links to Sir Thomas More and on a tradition of learned women. The imaginative construction of monastic communities as families is seen, most obviously, in the way superiors are addressed as parents, as well as community members as siblings (‘sisters’ or ‘brothers’).
- 36.
SMC 1:261–2. See the Copley family tree at https://wwtn.history.qmul.ac.uk/ftrees/Copley.pdf accessed 31/01/2019.
- 37.
Discussions of Copley’s life and literary works include Susannah B. Monta, ed., A Fig for Fortune by Anthony Copley: A Catholic Response to The Faerie Queene (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), ‘Introduction’, 1–62; Clare Reid, ‘Anthony Copley and the Politics of Catholic Loyalty 1590–1604’, Sixteenth-Century Journal 43.2 (2012): 391–413; L. Underwood, ‘Sion and Elizium: National identity, religion and allegiance in Anthony Copley’s A Fig for Fortune’ Renaissance and Reformation 41:2 (2018) 65–96.
- 38.
Aged 39 (SMC 1:244), so born in 1583.
- 39.
Hazel Pierce, Margaret Pole, 1473–1541: Loyalty, lineage and leadership (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009), pp. 128–40, pp. 181–3; Mayer, T. F. ‘Pole, Sir Geoffrey (d. 1558), alleged conspirator’. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, January 2008). Date of access 26 Feb. 2019, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-22447
- 40.
Michael Questier’s current work on the writing of English Catholic martyrology until 1970 discusses extensively the centrality of the campaign for canonisation to the historiography.
- 41.
William Roper’s biography was first published in 1626; Thomas Stapleton’s earlier work, in his Tres Thomae, was in Latin.
- 42.
Michael Questier’s ‘Catholicism, kinship and the public memory of Sir Thomas More’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 53:3 (2002) 476–509 explored the descendants of Thomas More as a network, which he argues became a group within the faction of English Catholics campaigning for episcopal government. Katie Forsyth ‘The Matter and Materiality of Thomas More’s Workes’ (unpubl. paper 2015) considered the role of family in that earlier memorialisation of More.
- 43.
This also emulates Thomas Stapleton who notes in his own preface that he was born in the month and year of More’s martyrdom. Reynolds edn of Hallett’s translation of Tres Thomae p. xvi.
- 44.
This assertion of More descendants being ‘heirs’ of Sir Thomas’ virtues is seen in other printed works dedicated to them, and in some references in correspondence: Questier, ‘Public memory’.
- 45.
Mush, John, An Abstracte of the Life and Martirdome of Mistres Margaret Clitherowe (1619) (facsimile edition, D.M. Rogers, Ilkley, 1979).
- 46.
Printed in J. Morris (ed.), The Troubles of our Catholic forefathers related by themselves (3 vols., London, 1872–77), vol. 3 pp. 360–440.
- 47.
Underwood, Childhood, Chap. 9.
- 48.
Passage quoted in A. Hamilton, preface to SMC vol. 2, pp. xii–xiii, citing the ‘old annals’ of the English Dominicans of Brussels. The original manuscript has not yet been traced.
- 49.
A complete version of the Life is found in an eighteenth-century transcription, Birmingham Archdiocesan Archives Ms.R941 pp. 623–[634]. Another MS in what seems to be a sixteenth-century hand is incomplete: Archives of the Archdioces of Westminster, A7 no. 74 (pp. 339–342).
- 50.
BAA R941 p. 626, cf. AAW A7 no. 74 p. 340.
- 51.
BAA R941 p.[631].
- 52.
E. Waugh, Edmund Campion (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 3dn, 1961), p. 199.
- 53.
Bossy, English Catholic Community.
- 54.
See, for example, M.B. Rowlands (ed.), Catholics of parish and town 1558–1778 (Catholic Record Society, 1999); W.J. Sheils, ‘“Getting on” and “getting along” in parish and town: Catholics and their neighbours in England’ in Kaplan et al., Catholic communities in Protestant states pp. 67–83.
- 55.
Anstruther Seminary Priests vol.2 p. 230.
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Manuscript
Archives of the Archdioces of Westminster
A7 no.74 (pp.339–342).
The National Archives, London
STAC 8/16/15
SP 14/65/no.11
Birmingham Archdiocesan Archives
Ms.R941 pp.623–[634]
Printed
J.R. Dasent (ed.), Acts of the Privy Council of England, new series, (London, from 1890, reprinted Nendeln, 1967).
E. Henson (ed.) Registers of the English College, Valladolid, 1589–1862 (Catholic Records Society Records Series, vol.30) (Published for the Society, 1930).
A. Kenny, (ed.) The Responsa Scholarum of the English College, Rome, Part One: 1598–1621 (Catholic Records Society Records Series, vol.54) (published for the Society, 1962); Kenny, ‘Introduction’ to Kenny (ed.) The Responsa Scholarum of the English College, Rome, Part Two, 1622–85 (Catholic Records Society Records Series, vol.55) (published for the Society, 1963).
Mush, ‘Clitherow’, pp.367–8. True report of the life and martyrdom of Mrs Margaret Clitherow’ J. Morris (ed.), The Troubles of our Catholic forefathers related by themselves (3 vols., London, 1872–77), vol.3 pp.360–440.
Mush, John, An Abstracte of the Life and Martirdome of Mistres Margaret Clitherowe (1619) (facsimile edition, D.M. Rogers, Ilkley, 1979).
A. Hamilton (ed.), The Chronicle of the English Augustinian Canonesses Regular of the Lateran: at St. Monica’s in Louvain (now at St Augustine’s Priory, Newton Abbot, Devon) vol.1 1548–1625, vol.2 1625–44 (Edinburg, 1904).
CRS 53 p.322 (Northern Composition Books, 1629–32, printed from transcriptions made c.1708 of now-lost originals).
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G. Anstruther Seminary Priests vol.2 p.230.
J. Bossy, The English Catholic Community 1570–1850 (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1975).
C. Bowden ‘Collecting the lives of early modern women religious: obituary writing and the development of collective memory and corporate identity’ in Women’s History Review 19:1 (2010) 7–20.
C. Bowden & J. Kelly, eds., The English Convents in Exile 1600–1800: Communities, culture, identity (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013).
C.H. Bowler, ‘Sir Henry James of Smarden, Kent and Clerkenwell, recusant’ in A.E.J. Hollaender and W. Kellaway (eds.), Studies in London history presented to P.E. Jones, (London: Hodder, 1969), pp.289–313.
M.A.E. Green (ed.) Calendar of the proceedings of the committee for compounding, &c., 1643–1660, preserved in the State Paper Department of Her Majesty’s Public Record Office (5 vols., London, 1889–92, reprinted Nendeln, 1972).
Dr Simon Healy (History of Parliament Trust), ‘Persecution and toleration in Jacobean Yorkshire: the case of Richard Cholmeley of Brandsby’, unpublished paper. I am grateful for permission to cite.
These records have been collected and analysed by Dr Simon Healy of the History of Parliament, from whose unpublished databases I gratefully cite: Hereafter ExRS.
A.E.J. Hollaender and W. Kellaway (eds.), Studies in London history presented to P.E. Jones, (London: Hodder, 1969).
Victoria van Hyning, ‘Naming names: Chroniclers, Scribes and Editors of St Monica’s Convent, Louvain, 1631–1906’ in C. Bowden & J. Kelly, eds., The English Convents in Exile 1600–1800: Communities, culture, identity (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), pp.87–108.
Victoria van Hyning, ‘Expressing selfhood in the convent: Anonymous chronicling and subsumed autobiography’ in Recusant History 32:2 (2014) 219–234.
B. Kaplan, B. Moore, H. van Nierop, J. Pollmann (eds.), Catholic Communities in Protestant States: Britain and the Netherlands c.1570–1720 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009).
Knafla, Louis A. ‘Stanley, Henry, fourth earl of Derby (1531–1593), magnate’. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, May 2015). Date of access 26 Feb. 2019, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-26272
Mayer, T. F. ‘Pole, Sir Geoffrey (d. 1558), alleged conspirator’. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, January 2008). Date of access 26 Feb. 2019, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-22447
Susannah B. Monta, ed., A Fig for Fortune by Anthony Copley: A Catholic Response to The Faerie Queene (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), “Introduction,” 1–62.
Hazel Pierce, Margaret Pole, 1473–1541: Loyalty, lineage and leadership (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2009).
Michael Questier’s, ‘Catholicism, kinship and the public memory of Sir Thomas More’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 53:3 (2002) 476–509.
Clare Reid, ‘Anthony Copley and the Politics of Catholic Loyalty 1590–1604’, Sixteenth Century Journal 43.2 (2012): 391–413.
M.B. Rowlands (ed.), Catholics of parish and town 1558–1778 (Catholic Record Society, 1999).
W.J. Sheils, ‘“Getting on” and “getting along” in parish and town: Catholics and their neighbours in England’ in Kaplan et al., Catholic communities in Protestant states pp.67–83.
L. Underwood, ‘Sion and Elizium: National identity, religion and allegiance in Anthony Copley’s A Fig for Fortune’ Renaissance and Reformation 41:2 (2018) 65–96.
L. Underwood, Childhood, youth and religious dissent in post-Reformation England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
L. Underwood, ‘Youth, religious identity and autobiography at the English Colleges in Rome and Valladolid, 1592–1685’, Historical Journal 55:2 (2012) 379–74.
C. Walker, ‘“Doe not suppose me a well mortifyed Nun dead to the world”: Letter-writing in early modern English convents’ in J. Daybell (ed.) Early modern women’s letter-writing, 1450–1700 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001).
E. Waugh, Edmund Campion (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 3dn, 1961), p.199.
D. Wood (ed.) The Church and childhood (Studies in Church History 31) (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994).
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Underwood, L. (2019). Childhood, Family and the Construction of English Catholic Histories of Persecution. In: Berner, T., Underwood, L. (eds) Childhood, Youth and Religious Minorities in Early Modern Europe. Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29199-0_8
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