Cover Story: Queen Catherine of Aragon at Blackfriars

Two new books feature cover illustrations of Queen Catherine of Aragon before Henry VIII on June 21, 1529 at the ecclesiastical trial held at Blackfriars to determine the validity of their marriage: Criminal-Inquisitorial Trials in English Church Courts: From the Middle Ages to the Reformation by Henry Ansgar Kelly from CUA Press and Betrayed Without a Kiss: Defending Marriage after Years of Failed Leadership in the Church by James Clark from TAN Books.

It's a dramatic scene of course--one that Shakespeare could not resist--as the queen ignored the Papal Legate and Cardinal Wolsey and spoke directly to her husband. Her speech is equally compelling. Here's another image (since I'm not completely sure of the copyright status of the other two illustrations, I won't post them) by Henry Nelson O'Neil, which is in the Public Domain:

The blurb for the CUA Press book by Henry Ansgar Kelly mentions this crucial event in the lives of Henry and Catherine:

After inquisitorial procedure was introduced at the Fourth Lateran Council in Rome in 1215 (the same year as England’s first Magna Carta), virtually all court trials initiated by bishops and their subordinates were inquisitions. That meant that accusers were no longer needed. Rather, the judges themselves leveled charges against persons when they were publicly suspected of specific offenses—like fornication, or witchcraft, or simony. Secret crimes were off limits, including sins of thought (like holding a heretical belief). Defendants were allowed full defenses if they denied charges. These canonical rules were systematically violated by heresy inquisitors in France and elsewhere, especially by forcing self-incrimination. But in England, due process was generally honored and the rights of defendants preserved, though with notable exceptions.

In this book, Henry Ansgar Kelly, a noted forensic historian, describes the reception and application of inquisition in England from the thirteenth century onwards and analyzes all levels of trial proceedings, both minor and major, from accusations of sexual offenses and cheating on tithes to matters of religious dissent. He covers the trials of the Knights Templar early in the fourteenth century and the prosecutions of followers of John Wyclif at the end of the century. He details how the alleged crimes of "criminous clerics" were handled, and demonstrates that the judicial actions concerning Henry VIII’s marriages were inquisitions in which the king himself and his queens were defendants. Trials of Alice Kyteler, Margery Kempe, Eleanor Cobham, and Anne Askew are explained, as are the unjust trials condemning Bishop Reginald Pecock of error and heresy (1457-59) and Richard Hunne for defending English Bibles (1514). He deals with the trials of Lutheran dissidents at the time of Thomas More’s chancellorship, and trials of bishops under Edward VI and Queen Mary, including those against Stephen Gardiner and Thomas Cranmer. Under Queen Elizabeth, Kelly shows, there was a return to the letter of papal canon law (which was not true of the papal curia). In his conclusion he responds to the strictures of Sir John Baker against inquisitorial procedure, and argues that it compares favorably to the common-law trial by jury.

The preview from TAN for Clark's book demonstrates that he does address The King's Great Matter and Saint John Fisher's role in it: Chapter Three: "Searching for John Fisher: The Counter-Revolution to Protestantism from the Council of Trent to Humanae Vitae". [Get it: "Searching for Bobby Fischer"?]

It's still interesting that two publishers chose illustrations of this event on these books on rather different topics.

Saint John Fisher, pray for us!

Happy Feast of St. Dominic

Today is the feast of St. Dominic, who along with St. Francis of Assisi was the great mendicant founder of the Medieval era. Next year, his Order of Preachers celebrates its 800th jubilee! On the day after he died, August 5, 1221, the Order of Preachers established a chapter in Oxford. The Dominicans are present there today at Blackfriars.

As the Blackfriars website notes:

At the Reformation, there were 55 houses in England and Wales. Their visitation began in 1538, and by March 1539 all were dissolved. Those friars who did not accept appointments in the Established Church were left without a pension and had to seek a Dominican life in the priories of Europe. In disguise and using aliases, they would return to England one by one as missionaries. Some were captured, imprisoned and tortured. Community life was restored in the Province by the foundation of a priory at Bornhem, Flanders, in what is today Belgium, in 1658, by Philip (later Cardinal) Howard. He also refounded the nuns, and began a school, to which English Catholics could send their sons, and where potential friars could be formed. So many men wanted to join the Order that a second priory was required, and a house was founded first in Rome and then in Louvain.

Bornhem provided the friars with new base for their missions back in England. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there were probably a dozen friars working the missions at any one time. Between 1620 and 1800 there were about sixty different mission stations in England, but only a few were permanent all the way through the period. Dominicans also worked as chaplains in foreign embassies in London. From 1730 the brothers felt able to hold their chapter meetings in England. 1745 was the last year a Dominican was imprisoned for being a priest. After the French Revolution, the priory at Bornhem was lost. Some friars set out for America, where the Province of St Joseph was founded in 1805. Others, together with the nuns and the school, returned to England.

During the reign of Mary I, the Dominicans had returned briefly to England as pastors at St. Bartholomew the Great, Smithfield. Her mother's marriage "trial" before the Papal Legatine Court took place in the London Blackfriars on June 21, 1529. After Emancipation in 1829 and Restoration of the Hierarchy in 1850, the order returned to England again. Great English Dominicans of the twentieth century include Father Bede Jarrett and Father Vincent McNabb (he was Irish but lived and worked in London!)

St. Dominic, pray for us.

The Dominicans in England, Before and After

The English Reformation, of course. In honor of the feast of St. Dominic of Guzman, founder of the Order of Preachers, the Dominicans, some background on this order of friars in England. According to the Blackfriars site, the order settled first in Canterbury, but then in Oxford, establishing themselves in the intellectual center:

When a dozen Dominican friars, led by Gilbert of Fresney, their first provincial, arrived in England on 5 August 1221, they first visited Canterbury, the ecclesiastical capital of England, then London, the political capital. They finally established their first community inside the city walls of Oxford, England’s intellectual capital, on 15 August. These friars of the Order of Preachers quickly settled into the life and teaching of the early University, which proved a good place to find new recruits. Land for a new priory just outside the city walls was provided by the generosity of the Countess of Oxford, Isabel de Bolebec.

Like the first foundation at Oxford, every house in the province was to be a centre of learning, and each formed and educated novices for the mission of preaching. Priories were soon founded in other major towns and cities, where the friars could find alms on which they had to live. As mendicants they were forbidden to own and rent properties until 1475. The friars and their houses and large churches for prayer and preaching often became known as ‘Black Friars’, because of the black cape (cappa) the brothers wear over their white habits. ‘Blackfriars Bridge’, where the medieval London Blackfriars stood on the north bank of the River Thames from 1224, and where the English parliament met more than once during the Middle Ages, is only one example. A gift of shoes in 1233 indicates that about 100 brothers lived in the London Blackfriars, the largest of the medieval communities.

The friars exercised their mission at all levels of society. Not only did they work among the most unfortunate, but they were also confessors to royalty and acted as ambassadors or diplomats. When a new priory was founded, it was normally with the help of a royal or noble benefaction. By 1275 the Province of England contained at least 76 houses, not only 39 in England, but also 23 in Ireland, 9 in Scotland, and 5 in Wales. There was also a monastery of nuns at Dartford. Before the Black Death in the fourteenth century, the Province could boast of being the largest in the Order, with a membership of around 3,000 friars. Scotland became an independent province in 1481, and Ireland in 1484.

Of course, all this was destroyed by the Dissolution of the Monasteries, when Cromwell turned his attention to the friars:

At the Reformation, there were 55 houses in England and Wales. Their visitation began in 1538, and by March 1539 all were dissolved. Those friars who did not accept appointments in the Established Church were left without a pension and had to seek a Dominican life in the priories of Europe. In disguise and using aliases, they would return to England one by one as missionaries. Some were captured, imprisoned and tortured. Community life was restored in the Province by the foundation of a priory at Bornhem, Flanders, in what is today Belgium, in 1658, by Philip (later Cardinal) Howard. He also refounded the nuns, and began a school, to which English Catholics could send their sons, and where potential friars could be formed. So many men wanted to join the Order that a second priory was required, and a house was founded first in Rome and then in Louvain.

The great restoration of the Dominican Order in England came through the efforts of Father Bede Jarrett, Provincial from 1916 to 1932. This site provides more detail. You might recall that it was at the Blackfriars in London that Queen Katherine of Aragon defended her virtue as Henry VIII's true and validly married wife. The English Heritage site notes that the Gloucester Blackfriars "is one of the most complete Dominican priories to survive from the Middle Ages in England." Dartford Priory was the only Dominican house of nuns in England, also dissolved n 1539.

The Feast of St. Dominic: The Dominicans in England

Today is the feast of St. Dominic, who along with St. Francis of Assisi was the great mendicant founder of the Medieval era. On the day after he died, August 6, 1221, the Order of Preachers established a chapter in Oxford. The Dominicans are present there today at Blackfriars.

As the Blackfriar website notes:

The daily life of prayer, study, and preaching ended abruptly in 1538 at the Reformation, which saw the dissolution by Henry VIII of all religious houses in his kingdom. Many friars fled abroad. The Priory gradually fell into ruins, and today only two archways remain on the site.

We should remember that Queen Catherine of Aragon's marriage "trial" took place at Blackfriars in London--and within the decade the Blackfriars were gone. In exile, Henry Clitherow, St. Margaret Cliterow's son became a Dominican, and Philip Cardinal Howard established a refuge in Antwerp, according to this site. The order would not be re-established in England until 1854.

This website explains what the Dominicans focused on between 1221 and 1538:

The English Dominicans, from the end of the 14th and through the beginning of the 15th centuries were most zealous in refuting the errors of Wycliff, so that their works had theological controversy as their special object. There remain few evidences of other writings, although we know the names of a few celebrated religious, such as William Richford (+1501). Very likely, several works of this period remain to be discovered in the libraries of England and the continent. Henry VIII's schism and the gradual disruption of the Church in England came at this time. A little composition in the form of a hymn, written for the "pilgrimages of grace!'' which were held unsuccessfully in 1535, against the King and his fatal policy, is preserved, still unedited, in the British Museum. It was written by John Pickering, Prior of the convent of York, who was executed at Tyburn in London in 1536. In Scotland, attention should be drawn to a remarkable work of reform accomplished by John Adamson, appointed Provincial by Cajetan in 1511; it was a real renewal of religious life and study (cf. H.M. Laurent, Leon X et la province dominicaine d'Ecosse, AFP, vol. 13, 1943, pp. 149-161).

During the reign of Mary Tudor (1543-1558), the Dominican Order was restored under the direction of William Perrin (+1558) whose work on the Blessed Sacrament of the altar, against the attacks of the Protestants, is known. In 1565, Thomas Heskins (+ ca. 1566) defended the dogma of the real presence against the famous Thomas Jewell: The Parliament of Chryste, Antwerp, 1566 (cf. A.C. Southern, Elizabethan Recusant Prose, London, 1950, pp. 48, 109-112).

The centuries of persecution (1559-1829)
The Order managed to survive in England although necessarily pursuing in secret its apostolic work; from time to time it published anonymous works. Others exist only in manuscript, such as the Controversies of Antoninus Thompson (+1760) (at the priory of Hawkesyard). The English Dominicans found places of asylum in the Netherlands, particularly in Louvain, and in France, where some were able to work and publish their writings. Their spiritual contribution is extremely rare. Quétif-Echard attributed the anonymous An Introduction to the catholick Faith by an english Dominican (London?, 1709) to Edward Ambrose Burgis (+1747), author of works of theology and history, but it really belongs to Thomas Worthington (+1754), author of a work on the rosary, now lost. John Clarkson (+1763), a theologian given shelter at Louvain like the two preceding, produced his Introduction to the celebrated Devotion of the most Holy Rosary (London, 1737).

St. Dominic, pray for us.