A Pearle for a Prynce: Jerónimo Osório and Early Elizabethan Catholics

Abstract

At the end of 1562, Jerónimo Osório, a Portuguese Humanist, sent a copy of his Epistola Hieronymi Osorii ad Serenissimam Elisabetam Angliae Reginam (1562) to Queen Elizabeth of England. 1 This letter employed theologically based rhetorical arguments to persuade Elizabeth to rejuvenate Catholicism in England and drive all heretics from her kingdom. It was the first of four works in a twenty-year long polemical battle, a battle in which John Foxe, the famous martyrologist, eventually became involved. Additionally, this was the first controversy regarding the Elizabethan religious settlement initiated by a non-English writer. 2 In March, 1565, Richard Shacklock, an exiled English Catholic living in Louvain, published A Pearle for a Prynce, his translation of Osório's Epistola. By this date, Osório's letter had been in circulation for nearly two and one-half years, and Walter Haddon's reply to it, Gualteri [End Page 401] Haddoni pro reformatione Anglicana epistola apologetica ad Hier. Osorium, Lusitanum (1564), had been in print for one. 3 An examination of the content of Osório's letter, which angered Elizabeth and was perceived by her Secretary of State, William Cecil, as an act of lèse-majesté, will explain why it appealed to Shacklock and why he chose to translate it. Furthermore, the printed version of A Pearle, the means by which Shacklock's translation was conveyed to his audience, reveals much about the ideology of exiled Catholics during the first few years of Elizabeth's reign.