English Jesuit Research Articles

Review of Book: The English Jesuits from Campion to Martindale

Review of Book: The English Jesuits from Campion to Martindale

Newton Defends His First Publication: The Newton-Lucas Correspondence

W ITH A STACCATO FLOURISH of his most trenchant style Isaac Newton brought to a close his correspondence of four years with the English Jesuits of Liege. More than a correspondence was concluded. The period of discussion and exchange initiated in 1672 by the publication of Newton's first paper on colors now ended conclusively. For the second time within a space of six years plans for a fuller publication of his work in optics were dropped. After a fiery climax of wild fury the curtain fell on one act of Newton's life, marking the beginning of a long intermission of solitude and recuperation. The correspondence of Newton and Lucas holds interest then for a number of reasons. It

The Irish Missal of Corpus Christi College, Oxford

Eighty years have gone by since F. E. Warren published his work on The Liturgy and Ritual of the Celtic Church. Two years before that date Warren had published the full text of a very puzzling Irish missal which had been in the library of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, probably for some three hundred years. Since Warren wrote, the manuscript has been transferred from the library of Corpus Christi College to the Bodleian Library, where it is kept in a box which contains the missal and its satchel of leather. Its class-number is C.C.C. 282. In 1892 an English Jesuit scholar, H. Lucas, made a careful collation of Warren’s readings with the manuscript text; a note in his handwriting, which records a few minor errors, is preserved in the box with the manuscript.

English Catholics and the Papal Deposing Power 1570-1640

If we survey the Jesuit writers on the deposing power during the period 1603-1640, we find that for the first seven years Persons is the only English Jesuit to treat of the subject and he touches on it in all his last four books. The fullest treatment is in A Treatise tending to Mitigation but neither there, nor in the other books is there anything more than an explanation of the points of contention, treated according to the system of Bellarmine. For a few years after Persons's death in 1610 the steady flow continued of Latin works by the Jesuit controversialists on the continent: Becanus, Gretser, Bellarmine, Lessius and others. Some of these works were translated into English, together with some of the works of the French Jesuits referred to in the previous article. After 1613 the decree of the Jesuit General Aquaviva, forbidding Jesuit writers to treat of the subject, took effect, and with the exception of the works of Thomas Fitzherbert against the defenders of the Oath of Allegiance the voice of the Jesuits, at least on the deposing power, was heard no more.

An Early-Seventeenth Century Translator: Thomas Everard, S.J.

Thomas Everard, born at Linstead, Suffolk, in 1560, was the son of a Catholic father and was probably brought up as a Catholic in England. As a comparatively young man he met Fr. John Gerard S.J. and under Fr. Gerard’s influence he went abroad to train for the priesthood. He was ordained priest in 1592 and joined the Society of Jesus in the following year. His subsequent career was similar to that of many another English Jesuit of the period. He was Minister for some years at St. Omers College and also at the nearby Jesuit house at Watten, and he later held the post of Socius to the Master of Novices in the Novitiate at Louvain. For a short period in 1605/06 he was in England on the mission, and again in 1617 he came over to his native country, only to be betrayed a year later into the hands of the priest-hunters and imprisoned. He was released from prison in 1620 and sent into exile, but once again he returned to England and continued to work on the mission in spite of further imprisonment and great hardship. He died in London in 1633 (1).

John Abbot (1588 – ? 1650)

JOHN ABBOT, who abroad used the alias of Ashton (C.R.S. XXX, 105) and in England called himself John, or Augustine, Rivers, was born of a London family in 1588. Our chief authority for his early life is entry 289 in the Registers of the English College at Valladolid (C.R.S. XXX). From this we learn that he was aged 21 in 1609, a Londoner born of respectable but non-Catholic parents. A passage taken by Foley (VII, 1152) from the Annual Letter of the English Jesuit College of St. Omer for 1609 adds to our knowledge of his family: “The fathers … received many Protestants into the Church; among whom was an Oxford student of great talent belonging to the Aobot family (a family most hostile to the Catholic faith, two members having been its bitterest foes, viz. a bishop and a dean)”. This can only refer to George Abbot (1562–1633) who at the time of writing was Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry, in 16l0 was made Bishop of London, and in 1611 became Archbishop of Canterbury (D.N.B. I, 5), and to his brother Robert Abbot (1560–1617) who in 1609, though not apparently a dean, was chaplain in ordinary to King James and in that year was made Master of Balliol College, and later became Bishop of Salisbury (D.N.B. I, 24). Both brothers published noted anti-Catholic controversial works, and George as bishop was an active persecutor of Catholics. Since the brothers were of a Guildford family, their relationship to John Abbot may not have been close, but it is perhaps significant that all three went to Balliol.

Note on a Copy of the Responsiones of Robert Parsons

Another memorial of Cardinal Allen and of his friends in Rome has lately been brought to my notice by Lord Gerald Wellesley, to whom it belongs, and may fitly be placed in record here in connection with the plaquette of Aristotle. This is a copy of the second edition (Rome, Zannetti, 1593) of the celebrated replies (Responsiones) issued seriatim to each clause of Queen Elizabeth's edict against Catholics in the year 1591: Elizabethae Angliae Reginae Haeresim Calvinianam propugnantis saevissimum in Catholicos sui … Regni edictum … cum responsione ad singula capita … per D. Andream Philopatrum Presbyterum, etc. It is common knowledge that the pseudonym of Philopater conceals the name of the famous English Jesuit, Fr. Robert Parsons, so that the authorship of the book alone takes us back into the circle of the English College at Rome, which Dr. William—afterwards Cardinal—Allen had helped to found in 1575, and of which Parsons had been appointed Rector in 1585. But this particular copy, as the various inscriptions and stamps it bears testify, had sundry bibliographical adventures which it is not without interest to retrace.