Preview: NO Preview: An Independence Day Break

Just to let you know that I won't be on the Son Rise Morning Show on Monday, July 3rd! The hosts and producers of the program are taking the day off--and the Fourth of July, Independence Day too, and the rest of the week too--during a summer break!

We will be back to continue our series on Father Henry Sebastian Bowden's Mementoes of the English Martyrs and Confessors on Monday, July 10, with a segment on Saint Thomas More!

Also, today, June 30, is the 55th anniversary of Pope Saint Paul VI's issuance of his Moto Proprio on The Creed of the People of God:

According to this earlier issue of The Pilot from Boston:

In his apostolic letter (“Solemni Hac Liturgia”) accompanying the Credo, Pope Paul VI noted that the text “repeats in substance, with some developments called for by the spiritual condition of our time, the creed of Nicea, the creed of the immortal tradition of the holy Church of God.”

According to the pope, the Credo was issued due to concerns about “the disquiet which agitates certain modern quarters with regard to the faith,” “the influence of a world being profoundly changed, in which so many certainties are being disputed or discussed,” “even Catholics allowing themselves to be seized by a kind of passion for change and novelty,” and “disturbance and perplexity in many faithful souls.”

Jacques Maritain drafted the Credo at the Pope's request. 

Image Credit (Public Domain): Originally entitled Yankee Doodle, this is one of several versions of a scene painted by A. M. Willard that came to be known as The Spirit of '76. Often imitated or parodied, it is a familiar symbol of American patriotism

Three Books of Hours and a Roman Missal in the News

It seems lately that announcements about prayer books and their owners and provenance are attempting to inform us more about their owners and their significance. The fact that Queen Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn owned and prayed with copies of the same edition of the Book of Hours published in Paris circa 1527 by printer Germain Hardouyn has been the centerpiece of an exhibition at Hever Castle (Queen Catherine's copy was on loan from the Morgan Library in New York City).

More recently there was the news that Thomas Cromwell owned a copy of the same Book of Hours that's included in Holbein's portrait, as the Smithsonian Magazine reported:

Through her research, McCaffrey [Kate McCaffrey, who identified and researched the provenance of the two queens' books] learned of the existence of a third copy of the Book of Hours—one donated to Cambridge by Dame Anne Sadleir in August 1660. When Hever’s curatorial team viewed the copy, Palmer pointed out its resemblance to the volume lying on a green tablecloth in the famous portrait, which Holbein painted between 1532 and 1533.

Palmer, Emmerson and McCaffrey began searching for more evidence to confirm the connection. They looked into the Cambridge book’s provenance, tracing its ownership from Cromwell to Sadleir, whose husband was the grandson of Cromwell’s secretary Ralph Sadleir (also spelled Sadler). The trio then shared their research with leading experts like Borman, who examined their findings and came to the same conclusion.

Previously, researchers had paid little attention to the Cambridge copy, which was known as the Hardouyn Hours after its printer. As Emmerson tells Artnet’s Richard Whiddington, scholars studying this era tend to focus more on handwritten texts than printed books. Additionally, the book “has remained uncleaned for many decades, with dirt and tarnish masking the finer details of the silver-gilt binding.”

I wonder about the attempts to use the fact that two of Henry VIII's queens and Thomas Cromwell used the same edition of a prayer book as an insight into their relationships, as the same article from the Smithsonian website quotes two of the specialists involved:

“This book of devotional prayers is remarkable for its unusually grand binding, covered with velvet, jewels and highly decorated silver gilt borders, all of which date from the time it was printed and illuminated,” says Nicolas Bell, a librarian at Cambridge’s Trinity College, in the statement. “It has been enormously exciting to position this luxurious creation in the very center of the court of Henry VIII, where we know that both Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn owned copies of the very same edition.” . . .

The newly identified prayer book “gives us a little window into” the everyday lives of three giants of Tudor history, Emmerson tells the Times. “We often see them as adversaries, but they were also in each other’s company. They had to get along for propriety’s sake. It’s a surprising connection between these otherwise warring individuals.”

I don't think it's that surprising at all: the Book of Hours was the prayer book used at the time by pious laity. Why would the three of them praying with the same book mean they were getting "along for propriety's sake"? Do the curators imagine them meeting in a chapel and praying an hour antiphonally? How common was ownership of this particular printed edition? Has that been considered while highlighting these connections? As the MET in New York City notes:

A century later, the invention and adoption of printing made books of hours even more accessible to a wider audience, and a press like that of the Hardouyn family (89.27.4, fols. 5v–6r) made copies by the dozen or more. However numerous and easy to produce, the widespread printed books of hours never attained the appeal of the finest handmade manuscript copies, each one not only a functional prayer book but a unique work of art.

More on mass-produced Books of Hours here.

Besides, as the Smithsonian story comments, the inclusion of Cromwell's Book of Hours may have a different, non-religious or devotional purpose: "The book’s inclusion in the Holbein portrait may allude to Cromwell’s recent appointment as Master of the Jewels [in April 1532]". And as the Tower of London website notes:

It was almost certainly to celebrate his appointment as Master of the Jewels that Cromwell commissioned Hans Holbein, the most celebrated artist of the age, to paint his portrait in around 1532-33.

It wasn't to show Cromwell's sentimental attachment to that Book of Hours, as Owen Emmerson avers: it was to announce that he was moving up at Court--he's not looking that jeweled book, he's displaying it!

Now comes the news that Father John Huddleston's Roman Missal has been identified and obtained for Moseley Old Hall in Staffordshire, stressing its connection to the relationship between the Benedictine priest who sheltered the then King of Scotland after defeat at the Battle of Worcester and King Charles II's deathbed conversion in 1685:

Father John Huddleston was a Benedictine priest who resided at Moseley Old Hall during the time that Charles II sought refuge here in 1651.

When Charles arrived at Moseley on 8th September 1651, Father Huddleston gave him shelter in his own first-floor bedroom and it is believed that during his time here, Charles consulted a collection of Father Huddleston's books, with the missal likely to have been one of them.

When Charles II returned to England as king in 1660, he made Father Huddleston chaplain to his mother, Queen Henrietta Maria, and then later to his wife, Catherine of Braganza. Father Huddleston was held in high regard by the king, so much so that in 1685, as King Charles II lay dying in Whitehall Palace in London, Father Huddleston was summoned to his bedside to hear the king’s confession, administer the Eucharist and receive him into the Catholic Church.

Whether or not King Charles II of Scotland was likely to have read or prayed with Father Huddleston's Roman Missal in 1651 seems uncertain to me. If Father Huddleston was using the Roman Missal for daily Mass, etc., it might not have been available to Charles to consult, unless he was attending the Masses. Father Huddleston might indeed have had this Roman Missal with him when he received Charles into the Church, but that detail/provenance is not mentioned.

As for Father Huddleston after that famous deathbed conversion, the old Catholic Encyclopedia has these details:

On the accession of James II, Huddleston continued to reside with the Queen Dowager at Somerset House. Shortly before his death his mind failed and he was placed in the charge of "the Popish Lord Feversham", one of the few persons present at Charles II's reconciliation to the Church, who managed his affairs as trustee. To this arrangement is probably due the unusual circumstance that the probate of his will was obtained the day before his funeral. He was buried in the churchyard of St. Mary le Strand (Parish Register, MS.). 

Image Credit (public domain) Holbein's portrait of Thomas Cromwell

Image Credit (public domain): Portrait of Dom John Huddleston O.S.B. (1608-98), after a portrait by Jacob Huysmans

Preview: Saint John Fisher on the Son Rise Morning Show

As might be expected, Father Henry Sebastian Bowden dedicates more than one day to the memory of Saint John Fisher, Cardinal Bishop of England in his book Mementoes of the English Martyrs and Confessors. Around the date of his June 22, 1535 beheading Father Bowden includes five:

June 22: Ascending the Steps

June 23: Learning for Life

June 24: The Wedding Garment

June 25: A Martyr's Sleep, and

June 26: The Bones of Elias

On Monday, June 26 on the Son Rise Morning Show, we'll reflect on the memory of Saint John Fisher stopping on the way from the Tower to Tower Hill to open his New Testament and pray for a suitable verse to sustain him before his execution. I'll be on the Son Rise Morning Show at my usual time: about 6:50 a.m. Central/7:50 a.m. Eastern: please listen live here and/or listen to the podcast later here!

We should remember that Bishop John Fisher was a brilliant scholarly and a holy man, renowned for both among his peers in England and on the Continent. As the old Dictionary of National Biography explains:

In 1501 he was elected vice-chancellor of [Cambridge] university. We learn from his own statements, as well as from other sources, that the whole academic community was at that time in a singularly lifeless and impoverished state. To rescue it from this condition, by infusing new life into its studies and gaining for it the help of the wealthy, was one of the chief services which Fisher rendered to his age. In 1503 he was appointed by the Countess of Richmond [Margaret Beaufort, Henry VII's mother and Henry VIII's grandmother] to fill the newly founded chair of divinity, which she had instituted for the purpose of providing gratuitous theological instruction in the university; and it appears to have been mainly by his advice that about the same time the countess also founded the Lady Margaret preachership, designed for supplying evangelical instruction of the laity in the surrounding county and elsewhere. The preaching was to be in the vernacular, which had at that period almost fallen into disuse in the pulpit. . . .

Fisher's genuine attachment to learning is shown by the sympathy which he evinced with the new spirit of biblical criticism which had accompanied the Renaissance. It was mainly through his influence that Erasmus was induced to visit Cambridge, and the latter expressly attributes it to his powerful protection that the study of Greek was allowed to go on in the university without active molestation of the kind which it had to encounter at Oxford (Epist. vi. 2). Notwithstanding his advanced years, Fisher himself aspired to become a Greek scholar, and appears to have made some attainments in the language.

Yet as he goes to his death, so weak that he has to carried in a chair, he stops, stands up, leans against a wall and opens his small New Testament book at random, praying:

"O Lord, this is the last time that ever I shall open this book. Let some comfortable place now chance unto me--" and he opens it to John 17:3-4:

"This is everlasting life, that they may know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ Whom Thou hast sent. I have glorified Thee on earth, I have finished the work that Thou gavest me to do."

Having read that he said, "Here is even learning enough for me to my life's end." 

Father Bowden chose Psalm 138:6 for this daily entry: "Thy knowledge is become wonderful to me."

His calmness and readiness for his martyrdom is also demonstrated in his final preparations for his execution: Awakened early the morning of June 22, 1535, he asked to be allowed to sleep a few more hours until 9:00 a.m., the time set for him to die ("A Martyr's Sleep"), and he dressed warmly before he left his cell ("The Wedding Garment"). He was asked not to make any speech on the scaffold and he was content with that.

On the scaffold ("Ascending the Steps"), Father Bowden provides the detail that Saint John Fisher recited another Psalm (33:6): "Come ye to Him and be enlightened, and your faces shall be confounded." He forgave the executioner and removed his gown and tippet (like a stole over his shoulders) and the crowd there to witness his execution was shocked at how emaciated he was because his face was "a mere death's head". His body was left on the scaffold but his head was prepared for exhibition on London Bridge, where it stopped the traffic because his face seemed to look more lifelike! ("The Bones of Elias") Finally his head was dumped into the Thames and replaced by St. Thomas More's.

Speaking of St. Thomas More's head, which was retrieved by his daughter Margaret Roper before it could be dumped into the Thames, there are fears that his skull, a major relic, is deteriorating in the vaults of St. Dunstan's Anglican church in Canterbury. It is buried in the church because the Roper family vault is there and Margaret's husband Will Roper, kept the relic after her death.

Saint John Fisher, pray for us!

Fisher and More Religious Freedom Week Thoughts

As Anna Mitchell pointed out during our discussion of Henry VIII's prison visit to Blessed Sebastian Newdigate Monday morning on the Son Rise Morning Show, the USCCB's Religious Freedom Week begins today, June 22, the feast of Saints John Fisher and Thomas More. The portraits above laud them as "England's Most Glorious Martyrs" (note that the clipping dates from before their canonization in 1935, 400 years after their executions).

On the day of their feast, the USCCB asks us to reflect on "Respect for Sacred Spaces":

In a pluralistic society such as ours, respect for sacred spaces is especially vital for the sake of civil peace, which is part of the common good. In recent years, a wave of vandalism and arson has hit Catholic churches and statues. That wave rose following the leaked draft of the Dobbs decision, and it crested after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, allowing states to regulate abortion. June and July of 2022 saw a huge spike in anti-Christian and anti-life attacks on churches. There have been over 250 attacks so far, and that number steadily continues to grow. [well, it certainly can't diminish!]

Before Fisher and More were executed in 1535, sacred spaces in England seemed to be safe: chantry chapels, parish churches, abbey churches, cathedrals, pilgrimage sites, friaries, priories, convents, and monasteries. All their shrines, stained glass, statues, altars, libraries, chalices, patens, pixes, and reliquaries also seemed safe. But with the Dissolution of the Monasteries during Henry VIII's reign, and the greater destruction of the religious fabric of sacred spaces during Edward VI's reign and the Elizabethan iconoclasm after the brief restoration of Catholic worship under Mary I, the pattern of destruction began. We could say that it started, however, in 1536, with the first wave of dissolutions or suppressions, and continued with the larger houses and the campaign against monastic life in general with the Visitations of the larger monasteries and the establishment of the Court of Augmentations to dispose of the sacred spaces of the monasteries with the conversion of some abbey churches into parish churches or cathedrals.

Of course, sixteenth century England did not have any idea of religious freedom: this meme from the beginning of the USCCB's attention to matters of religious freedom in the USA with the "Fortnight for Freedom" in reaction to the HHS/ACA contraception mandates and the Little Sisters of the Poor battles against them reminds us of that!

I'd previously shared this article from The Historical Journal (2022) by Martin Heale, "Thomas More and the Defense of the Religious Orders in Henry VIII's England", and draw your attention to it again with a couple of excerpts. In the course of the article, Heale comments more than once about St. Thomas More's admiration for the Observant Friars at Greenwich, the Carthusians at the London Charterhouse, and the Bridgettines of the House of Syon. On page 936 of the journal, he begins to explore More's defense of monasticism in general:

Alongside his unfettered praise for strictly observant religious orders, More’s polemical writings echoed his ‘Letter to a monk’ by repeatedly emphasizing the inherent value of the monastic way of life. In his ‘Letter to Bugenhagen’, More expressed a very high estimation of the monastic calling: ‘Religious orders have produced a great many men of extraordinary sanctity…[while] the purest segment of the Christian people have always been found in religious orders.’ Their way of life was also certified by the great holiness of their original founders. Monastic living, More added, with its austerities and self-denial, followed Christ’s teaching and example far more faithfully than the pampered and indulgent lives of its evangelical critics.75 The supplication of souls set out a robust defence of the friars’ practice of begging and the endowments held by monastic houses.76 And in the Apology, More denied that the professed religious life was in any way inferior to the calling of secular priests, and asserted that Christian people were bound to show honour towards religious persons on account of their ‘holy profession of their godly state of living’. 77 

You'll need to access the article for the end note links.

Nevertheless, Heale emphasizes that More, the Christian humanist and Catholic apologist, balanced that "very high estimation of the monastic calling" with an acknowledgement of problems among the monastic houses in England, and a rather tepid defense of those houses. While he regretted the dissolution of monasteries in Lutheran Germany (p. 940) More did not mount a defense of the monastic orders or houses. Heale concludes:

It is improbable that Thomas More himself, through his polemical writings, could have impeded the Henrician regime’s plans to embark upon a significant programme of monastic suppression in the mid-1530s. After all, More . . .  had issued stark warnings about the likely negative social and economic consequences of dissolving religious houses: a viewpoint that came to be quite widely shared within a few years of the suppressions. 113 He was, moreover, by no means unique among English humanists in his predilection for strictly observant forms of monastic life, and a concomitant lack of enthusiasm for ‘unreformed’ religious houses.

Tomorrow I'll post my preview for on Monday, June 26 discussion of Father Henry Sebastian Bowden's mementoes of Saint John Fisher on the Son Rise Morning Show!

Saint John Fisher, pray for us!

Saint Thomas More, pray for us!

From "First Things": A Consideration of the 'Anglican Reset'

Hans Boersma, Gerald McDermott, and Greg Peters collectively ask: "Is the Anglican "Reset" Truly Anglican?" in First Things, posted on June 9 of this year:

The Kigali Commitment of April 21, 2023, was a shot heard around the world. Thirteen hundred Anglican leaders, dominated by bishops and clergy from the Global South, gathered in Kigali, Rwanda, to declare that they no longer recognized the Archbishop of Canterbury as their leader. Representing 85 percent of the Anglican Communion, they pronounced their determination to “reset the Communion on its biblical foundations.”  

The boldness of this statement is striking. Not only does it signal the end of English domination of the Communion, but it also demonstrates counter-cultural courage. The leaders of the Global Anglican Fellowship Conference (GAFCON) and the Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches (GSFA) have defied Global North elite opinion and financial coercion by denouncing the Church of England’s February 2023 decision to bless same-sex couples. . .

The question they ask, while commending the one thousand, three hundred leaders for taking a stand, is if they've taken their stand on the right foundation:

The Kigali Commitment repeatedly appeals to the authority of the Bible alone and fails to mention either the authority of the Church or the role of tradition, describing the Bible as “the rule of our lives” and the “final authority in the church” without mentioning that Scripture functions within the context of tradition—in particular, the common liturgy of the Church and the Book of Common Prayer—and the Church’s teaching authority.

They cite Bishop John Jewell (1552-1571), Richard Hooker (1554-1600), and Bishop Francis White (1564-1638), and more recently, the 2002 statement of Evangelicals and Catholics Together to demonstrate that Anglicans and even some Evangelicals have acknowledged "there is no such thing as Scripture without tradition, that every person reads Scripture through the lens of some tradition or other, whether he realizes it or not", attributing that sentiment to Hooker. This is in contrast to the Kigali Commitment's reliance on the "clarity" of the Biblical text as Boersma, McDermott, and Peters see it.

That reminded me that Catholic World Report recently featured an interview with Casey Chalk about his new book  The Obscurity of Scripture: Disputing Sola Scriptura and the Protestant Notion of Biblical Perspicuity (Emmaus Road, 2023). Chalk also refers to this hermeneutic of interpretation as "perspicuity", citing the Westminster Confession of Faith, paragraph 7:

All things in Scripture are not alike plain in themselves, nor alike clear unto all: yet those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed for salvation are so clearly propounded, and opened in some place of Scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain unto a sufficient understanding of them.

Chalk's comment:

The above statement requires a little bit of unpacking. The Westminster divines are not saying that all of Scripture is equally clear, but that enough of it is that both learned and unlearned Christians, relying on the Holy Spirit in prayer and leveraging things like biblical preaching or good commentaries, that they should be able to understand what is necessary for salvation.

So, anytime you talk to a Protestant and he or she says something like “the Bible clearly teaches X,” they are making recourse to the doctrine of clarity. Of course, a lot of times that person may be going well beyond what the Westminster divines had in mind, given their narrow understanding of perspicuity. But the basic premise is that Scripture is clear enough on what’s necessary for salvation, or the essential doctrines of the Christian faith, that any well-meaning Christian should be able to read his or her Bible and find precisely that.

Be that as it may, when I read the text of the Kigali Commitment, I did note that the signers of this document did appeal to Anglican tradition and the teaching authority of the Church of England, specifically to the Lambeth Conference of 1998:

Public statements by the Archbishop of Canterbury and other leaders of the Church of England in support of same-sex blessings are a betrayal of their ordination and consecration vows to banish error and to uphold and defend the truth taught in Scripture.

These statements are also a repudiation of Resolution I.10 of the 1998 Lambeth Conference, which declared that ‘homosexual practice is incompatible with Scripture,’ and advised against the legitimising or blessing of same sex unions’. 

This occurred despite the Archbishop of Canterbury having affirmed that ‘the validity of the resolution passed at the Lambeth Conference 1998, I.10 is not in doubt and that whole resolution is still in existence’. (page 2)

I thought of what Saint John Henry Newman might say about this putative schism in the Anglican Communion. Or rather, what he did say to those in "the Religious Movement of 1833" who had remained in the Church of England as he referred to them in his lectures on Anglican Difficulties.

In the first lecture "On the Relation of the National Church to the Nation" he warned them:

I have said all this, my brethren, not in declamation, but to bring out clearly to you, why I cannot feel interest of any kind in the National Church, nor put any trust in it at all from its past history, as if it were, in however narrow a sense, a guardian of orthodoxy. It is as little bound by what it said or did formerly, as this morning's newspaper by its former numbers, except as it is bound by the Law; and while it is upheld by the Law, it will not be weakened by the subtraction of individuals, nor fortified by their continuance. Its life is an Act of Parliament. It will not be able to resist the Arian, Sabellian, or Unitarian heresies now, because Bull or Waterland resisted them a century or two before; nor on the other hand would it be unable to resist them, though its more orthodox theologians were presently to leave it. It will be able to resist them while the State gives the word; it would be unable, when the State forbids it. Elizabeth boasted that she "tuned her pulpits;" Charles forbade discussions on predestination; George on the Holy Trinity; Victoria allows differences on Holy Baptism. While the nation wishes an Establishment, it will remain, whatever individuals are for it or against it; and that which determines its existence will determine its voice. Of course {9} the presence or departure of individuals will be one out of various disturbing causes, which may delay or accelerate by a certain number of years a change in its teaching: but, after all, the change itself depends on events broader and deeper than these; it depends on changes in the nation. As the nation changes its political, so may it change its religious views; the causes which carried the Reform Bill and Free Trade may make short work with orthodoxy.

We'll have to wait and see how the Archbishop of Canterbury, et al, respond to the Kigali Commitment, but Newman predicted the direction the Church of England would go: following the Nation, the Parliament, and the zeitgeist of the age.

Preview: King Henry VIII Visits an Old Friend in Prison

On Monday, June 19, we'll discuss Henry VIII's visits to his old friend/courtier, Blessed Sebastian Newdigate, held in prison on the king's orders because he would not swear the Oath of Supremacy. It's very appropriate that we remember these events because Monday is the anniversary of Newdigate's martyrdom, along with Humphrey Middlemore and William Exmew on June 19, 1535.

I'll be on the Son Rise Morning Show at my usual time: about 6:50 a.m. Central/7:50 a.m. Eastern: please listen live here and/or listen to the podcast later here!

Arrested on May 25, they had been imprisoned in Marshalsea for about a fortnight before their trial at Westminster on June 11. The three were taken before the Privy Council before their trial, refused again to swear Henry's oaths and were condemned to death. While in prison, they were chained at the neck and hand and foot against pillars, unable to move. 

While his former courtier, now a Catholic priest, was in Marshalsea, Henry VIII visited him to try to persuade to swear the oath. It's interesting that according Father Bowden, the king's method of persuasion, other than imprisonment and confinement, is similar to the line of questioning often used in this period, when the issue was the monarch's Supremacy over the Church in England: Why can't you just go along with everyone else? Why do you have a problem with the king being the Supreme Head and Governor of the Church of England? What makes you so special? Do you think you're better, holier, than everyone else?

As Bowden quotes the exchange: after hearing the Henry's bribes and threats, Father Newdigate replied:

In court I served your Majesty loyally and faithfully, and so continue still your humble servant, although kept in this prison and bonds. But in matters that belong to the doctrine of the Catholic Church and the salvation of my poor soul, Your Majesty must excuse me.

Then Henry VIII asked:

Art thou wiser and holier than all the ecclesiastics and seculars of my kingdom?

Father Newdigate's reply:

I may not judge of others, nor do I esteem myself wise or holy, being far short in either; only this: I assure myself that the Faith and doctrine I profess is no new thing, but always among the faithful held for Christians and Catholics. We must obey God rather than men.

Thinking of why Father Bowden assembled these Mementoes of the English Martyrs and Confessors in 1910: it was because he knew Catholics in England then--as Catholics all over the world today--face the same question Henry VIII asked: why do you have to be different from everyone else? 

And Blessed Sebastian Newdigate answered, basing his steadfastness not on himself, but on the Truth he believed in: We must obey God rather than men, quoting the Acts of Apostles (5:29)

Father Bowden titles this memento: "The Whims of a King" with the Psalm verse: "Put not your trust in princes: in the children of men, in whom there is no salvation." (Psalm 145:2-3)

Blessed Sebastian Newdigate, pray for us!

Blessed Humphrey Middlemore, pray for us!

Blessed William Exmew, pray for us!

"All Is True" Isn't; Shakespeare at Home

I couldn't sleep one night last week, so I left my bed and sat down to watch TV. There I stumbled onto All Is True, Kenneth Branagh's 2018 film about Shakespeare going home after the Globe burns down, staying at home, reconciling with family, and dying there on his birthday. Of course, all in the movie is not true, but the screenwriter Ben Elton offers some theories to explain the mysteries of Shakespeare's life. The Folger Library describes some of those mysteries:

Despite new insights being revealed every year about his work and the early modern world he inhabited, the things we still don’t know about William Shakespeare would fill several internets. Though we talk a lot about Shakespeare’s genius — the richness of his language, the timelessness of his characters, the universality of his stories, and the beauty of his poetry — for my money, we don’t talk enough about his greatest achievement of all: The mystery surrounding the man himself.

We know only the barest facts of Shakespeare’s biography: Where he was born and when he died, when he was baptized, the date of his marriage, the birthdays of his children, a number of his court appearances, and a handful of real estate dealings. There are huge gaps where we know practically nothing about him (most of his first 18 years) and don’t know where he was or what he was doing (particularly the seven-year gap between 1585 and 1592). And after 400 years of searching, scholars still haven’t uncovered any of Shakespeare’s workbooks, diaries, rough drafts, or love letters written to his wife (and/or mistress) — anything that would reveal something of the man’s politics, personality, or personal feelings.

In All is True, Shakespeare is not particularly welcome at home; he's been away too long for his wife to allow him to share her bed, so he sleeps in the "second-best bed" which is prepared for visitors (and Elton uses that designation to offer some explanation for why Shakespeare wills that second-best bed to his wife Anne). He mourns his son Hamnet to the disappointment of Hamnet's surviving twin, Judith, who has a secret, while Anne and Judith share a secret about the boy's death at age 11. When Shakespeare learns their secrets, he changes and some of the wounds of the family are healed.

He doesn't seem to fit in very well in his hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon either, and has some conflict with Sir Thomas Lucy, which may date from an earlier accusation of poaching. For the most part, Elton ignores the issue of religion in sixteenth century England, although Anne does remind her husband that on Sunday in their town, you'll be fined if you don't attend Church of England services. And Sir Thomas Lucy would be one of those noting whether or not you attended on Sunday at Holy Trinity Church. As William and Anne take their place in church, Lucy alludes to the fact that Shakespeare's father John had not been regular in his attendance, but Branagh's Shakespeare provides the explanation in another scene that John did not attend because of the debts he owed in town, not because he was a recusant Catholic. The main religious conflict in town is between Anglicans and Puritans, and the vicar of the church is trying to keep the peace.

But Sir Thomas Lucy was an earnest Protestant, and as the old Dictionary of National Biography explains: "He often appeared at Stratford-on-Avon as justice of the peace and as commissioner of musters for the county. As justice of the peace he showed great zeal against the Catholics, and took his share in the arrest of Edward Arden in 1583." Edward Arden was a relative of William Shakespeare (Mary, his mother, was an Arden). He was implicated in one of the plots against Queen Elizabeth I and as Robert Harrison in the old Dictionary of National Biography judges, he:

was a probably innocent victim of the rigorous severity adopted by the ministers of Queen Elizabeth in order to defeat the numerous Roman Catholic conspiracies in favour of Mary Queen of Scots and against the protestant sovereign. He was the head of a family that had held land in Warwickshire for six centuries from the days of Edward the Confessor downwards. His father, William, having died in 1545, Edward succeeded his grandfather Thomas Arden in 1563. He kept to the old faith and maintained in his home, Park Hall, near Warwick, a priest named Hall, in the disguise of a gardener. This man, animated with the fierce zeal of his order, inflamed the minds of the Arden household against the heretical queen, and especially influenced John Somerville, Edward Arden's son-in-law. This weak-minded young man had been greatly excited by the woes of the Scottish queen, who had given to a friend of his a small present for some service rendered her when at Coventry in 1569. He talked of shooting the Queen of England, whom he vituperated as a serpent and a viper, and set out for London on this deadly errand. Betraying himself, however, by over-confident speech, he was arrested, put to the rack, and confessed, implicating his father-in-law in his treason, and naming the priest as the instigator of his crime. All three were tried and sentenced to death. Somerville strangled himself in his cell. Arden was hanged at Tyburn (October 1583), but the priest was spared. Arden's head and Somerville's were set on London Bridge beside the skull of the Earl of Desmond. 

Interesting that the priest was spared . . . 

I enjoyed watching All is True; it's a film trying to answer some of the questions we have about Shakespeare: some things may be plausible, others not. 

One funny note: Branagh as Shakespeare never wears a hat, even when in town. I think that's so he looks like Shakespeare in the Chandos portrait!

Preview: Mementoes of Five Jesuit Popish Plot Victims

The mementoes for the next few Mondays in our Son Rise Morning Show series on the English Martyrs selected by Father Henry Sebastian Bowden are among the most dramatic so far: five Jesuit martyrs, offered a pardon while the nooses are around their necks at Tyburn Tree; one of the Carthusian martyrs, visited by Henry VIII himself while in prison; and the great Cardinal Bishop, St. John Fisher on the day of his beheading.

We'll start on Monday, June 12 with Blessed Thomas Whitebread (or Whitbread), SJ, preparing his fellow Jesuits for great suffering on the Feast of Saint James almost a year before their execution and the dramatic scene of Fathers John Gavan, William Harcourt, Anthony Turner, John Fenwick, and Whitebread himself at Tyburn on June 20, 1679. 

I'll be on the Son Rise Morning Show at my usual time: about 6:50 a.m. Central/7:50 a.m. Eastern: please listen live here and/or listen to the podcast later here!

On page 192 of Mementoes of the English Martyrs and Confessors, Father Bowden describes the homily Father Whitebread gave on the Feast of St. James, July 25, 1678, as the Provincial Superior to the Jesuits in England. Father Whitebread had been a missionary to the Catholics in England since 1647--more than 30 years--traveling back and forth to the Continent. On one of his trips to the Jesuit college at Saint-Omer in Flanders, Whitbread met Titus Oates. Oates presented himself as a convert to Catholicism from Anglicanism and as wanting to join the Jesuits. Whitbread rejected his application and told him to leave Saint-Omer. Both men returned to England.

On the Feast of Saint James, Father Whitebread expanded upon the question Jesus asked the Apostle James and John after their mother asked Him to give them special honors in His Kingdom, sitting at His right and left: "Can you drink the chalice I am going to drink? They said to him, "We can." (Matthew 20:22) Whitebread goes on to ask his congregation of Jesuits:

Can you drink the chalice? Can you undergo a hard persecution? Are you contented to be falsely betrayed and injured? . . . Can you suffer the hardships of a jail, the straw bed, the hard diet, the chains and the fetters? Can you endure the rack? . . . Can you patiently receive an unjust sentence of a shameful death?

To each question the answer is "Possumus (We can). Blessed be God."

And they did.

On his return to England as this Jesuit website explains, Titus Oates had

joined forces with Israel Tonge, who harbored suspicions of the Jesuits' plotting against the king. Tonge and Oates invented the story of a plot by the Jesuits to assassinate the king, overthrow the government and re-establish the Catholic religion. They were able to present this accusation to the king in mid-August, 1678, but he did not find it credible. So Oates fabricated more details and presented the revised accusation to the king's privy council on September 27, setting into motion a deadly chain of events.

Then members of the Jesuit order, including Thomas Whitebread, were arrested, put on trial, and eventually found guilty of this treasonous and murderous conspiracy.

So that brings us to Bowden's second memento of these Jesuit martyrs, on page 197, "A Bribe Rejected". As the five Jesuits, John Gavan, William Harcourt, Anthony Turner, John Fenwick, and Whitebread had prepared themselves at Tyburn to suffer the "shameful death" of condemned traitors--with the nooses around their necks--

there came a horseman in full speed from Whitehall, crying, "A pardon! A pardon!" . . . the King granted them their lives . . . on condition of their acknowledging the conspiracy and laying open what they knew thereof. They all thanked His Majesty . . . but they knew of no conspiracy, much less were guilty of any, and could not therefore accept any pardon on these conditions. . . .

If they did, they would be lying.They could not sin to save their lives. In a way they answered the King's implied questions with "Non Possumus"--We cannot.

Bowden uses one of Our Lord's replies to Satan's temptations in the desert from the Gospel of St. Matthew as the verse for this memory of five Blessed English martyrs: "Then Jesus saith to him: Begone, Satan: for it is written, The Lord thy God shalt thou adore, and him only shalt thou serve." (Matthew 4:10)

Blessed Thomas Whitbread, pray for us!

Blessed John Gavan, pray for us!

Blessed William Harcourt, pray for us!

Blessed Anthony Turner, pray for us!

Blessed John Fenwick, pray for us!

Preview: A Bishop Confessor in Elizabeth I's Reign

After our Memorial Day break, I'll be back on the Son Rise Morning Show Monday, June 5 to discuss another of Father Henry Sebastian Bowden's Mementoes of the English Martyrs and Confessors. On at my usual time, about 6:50 a.m. Central/7:50 a.m. Eastern: please listen live here and/or listen to the podcast later here as we (Matt Swaim or Anna Mitchell and I) discuss Bowden's comments about Bishop David Poole or Pole of Peterborough, a Confessor (not proclaimed a saint but perhaps a martyr in chains in a cause never begun).

Bishop David Poole had a full academic and ecclesiastical career in the midst of Henry VIII's Great Marital Matters, according to the Dictionary of National Biography, although it's not clear from that source how he responded to Henry VIII's efforts to obtain a decree of nullity of his first marriage and how the king resolved that issue, but he must have taken the Oaths of Succession and Supremacy to hold the various offices listed below. Evidently, the date of his birth is not recorded, because he first

appears as a fellow of All Souls' College, Oxford, in 1520. He devoted himself to civil law, and graduated B.Can.L. on 2 July 1526 and D.Can.L. on 17 Feb. 1527-1528. In 1529 he became an advocate in Doctors' Commons. He was connected with the diocese of Lichfield, where he held many preferments, first under Bishop Geoffrey Blyth, and then under Bishop Rowland Lee. He was made prebendary of Tachbrook in Lichfield Cathedral on 11 April 1531, archdeacon of Salop in April 1536, and archdeacon of Derby on 8 Jan. 1542-3. He had previously received the high appointment of dean of the arches and vicar-general of the archbishop of Canterbury on 14 Nov. 1540.

Bishop Rowland Lee was certainly Henry VIII's man, accepting his appointment as the Bishop of Lichfield in 1534 "taking at his consecration the new oath to the king as head of the English Church and not seeking confirmation from the pope. As bishop he remained in Henry’s personal service, endeavouring to establish the legality of his marriage with Anne". Since 1533, Thomas Cranmer had been the Archbishop of Canterbury and in 1540, Henry VIII had been declared the Supreme Head and Governor of the Church of England by Parliament. When Poole was named an Archdeacon, the suppression of the Monasteries had begun. 

Note there's no information about his activities or offices during the reign of Edward VI at all. The 1900 Dictionary of National Biography picks up his career with this statement:

A conscientious adherent of the Roman catholic (sic) faith, he occupied several positions of importance during Mary's reign. In her first year he acted as vicar-general of the bishop of Lichfield (Richard Sampson) and commissioner for the deprivation of married priests (Strype, Memorials, vol. iii. pt. i. p. 168), and in his capacity of archdeacon he sat on the commission for the deprivation of Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer, and the restoration of Bonner and other deprived bishops (ib. p. 36). He stood high in the favour of Cardinal Pole, said to be a relative, who appointed him his vicar-general (ib. p. 476). During the vacancy of the see of Lichfield on Bishop Sampson's death in 1554, he was appointed commissary for the diocese. In the early part of the same year he took part in the condemnation of Hooper and Taylor (ib. pp. 288, 290). On 25 April 1556 he was appointed on the commission to inquire after heretics, and to proceed against them. On the death of John Chambers, the first bishop of the newly formed diocese of Peterborough, the queen sent letters commendatory to Paul IV in Pole's favour. He was consecrated at Chiswick on 15 Aug. 1557 by Nicholas Heath [q. v.], archbishop of York.

Note that he was consecrated on the feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary and that Queen Mary I and Reginald Cardinal Pole, the Archbishop of Canterbury both died later that year on November 17.

Father Bowden recounts Bishop Poole standing up to Elizabeth I and maintaining his loyalty to the Catholic Church. It's commonly stated that while all the bishops but one (Saint John Fisher, martyr) acceded to Henry VIII's Supremacy, all the bishops appointed during Mary I's reign refused Elizabeth I's Supremacy and Reformation Parliament actions. Owen Oglethorpe of Carlisle did preside at her Coronation but all 20 (twenty) of the Catholic bishops in the House of Lords voted against her Act of Settlement in 1558.

Bowden notes that by the time of Elizabeth I's accession to the throne, Poole was a chronic invalid and received permission not to attend that first Parliament. "Old as he was, he could still bear his witness", Bowden states--Poole would be at least in his 70's if he received his degree before 1520 when he became a Fellow  at All Souls. "He refused to obey Elizabeth's behest" to consecrate Matthew Parker as Archbishop of Canterbury and "he preferred deposition to taking" her Oath of Supremacy. Deprived of his office, he was allowed for a time to live in Staffordshire with a Catholic gentleman, Brian Fowler. Thomas Bentham, Elizabeth I's bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, "represented his presence as injurious to the interests of religion, and he appears to have died in the Fleet [prison] in 1568".

Father Bowden gives this memento the title "Wisdom of the Ancients" and cites Ecclesiasticus/Sirach 8:11-12: "Let not the discourse of the ancients escape thee, for they have learned of their fathers: For of them thou shalt learn understanding, and to give an answer in time of need."

So what lessons do we draw from Bishop Poole's career? While he seems to have gone along with Henry VIII's Supremacy and take-over and remaking of the Church in his image--perhaps he retired from ecclesiastical office during Edward VI's reign?--he seems to have maintained the Catholic Faith and was ready to practice it fully under Mary I and Cardinal Pole. Finally, he was willing to refuse Elizabeth I's Supremacy and remaking of the Church when she came to the throne.

God gave him another opportunity to stand fast for the "Wisdom of the Ancients", the Fathers and Councils of the Church whom St. Thomas More and St. John Fisher and others cited before him. He took it, endured the consequences, and perhaps died as martyr in chains, although that's not certain. His Dictionary of National Biography entry, cited above, says he "was 'courteously treated by all persons among whom he lived, and at last' died 'on one of his farms in a good old age,' in May or June 1568 (Heylyn, Hist. of Reformation, anno 1559; Strype, Annals, vol. i. pt. i. pp. 214, 411)."

There is a stained glass depiction of Bishop Poole in St Mary's, Wellingborough, an Anglo-Catholic parish (refusing women's ordination in the Church of England), designed by Sir Ninian Comper in the Perpendicular Gothic Style.

May he rest in peace.