Native American Jacobites!

From The Catholic Herald, a review of a new book from OUP about the Wabanaki confederation of what is now north-eastern USA and south-eastern Canada, highlighting their desire to aid the Catholic Stuarts:

It was 1715 and a tribal people were preparing to assist in restoring Britain’s exiled Royal House of Stuart, sharpening tomahawks, covering themselves in war paint and raising sails on ships built to the highest technical standards of the day.

No, I haven’t been drinking too much Bourbon. Nor am I confusing Scottish highlanders, American Indians and Caribbean pirates. I am writing about a combination of two facts – the amassing of a fleet of sailing ships by the Indian tribes of the Wabanaki confederation, and the role which those tribes played in the Jacobite movement – facts which are virtually unknown but which can be studied in Matthew Bahar’s book, Storm of the Sea: Indians and Empires in the Atlantic’s Age of Sail. . . .

From the time they learned of the “Glorious Revolution” until the 1760s, the Wabanaki supported the claims of the Stuart dynasty, making them some of the last adherents of the Jacobite cause. It was a position which contributed to their cooperation with the Jacobites’ French allies in colonial campaigns during the War of the League of Augsburg, the War of the Spanish Succession and the War of the Austrian Succession – cooperation of greater strategic significance than might be readily apparent.

The more that Indian aid could minimise France’s need to send men and supplies to North America, the more resources France could spare for a Stuart restoration. Conversely, British victories in the colonies would divert French resources from Jacobite efforts. In 1745, for example, the French colonial fortress of Louisburg fell to a New England army. Had the fortress held out, the army and fleet which Louis XV sent to recapture it the following year would have been ordered to support Prince Charles Edward Stuart’s Jacobite rising, even if it meant setting out on such a mission after the Battle of Culloden.

The Wabanaki also contributed to bleeding dry the House of Hanover’s ability to make war. One of the major props of the power of Hanover was naval supremacy. The British navy’s most important source of timber for shipbuilding was the Wabanakis’ homeland. . . .

More from OUP about the book:

Narratives of cultural encounter in colonial North America often contrast traditional Indian coastal-dwellers and intrepid European seafarers. In Storm of the Sea, Matthew R. Bahar instead tells the forgotten history of Indian pirates hijacking European sailing ships on the rough waters of the north Atlantic and of an Indian navy pressing British seamen into its ranks.

From their earliest encounters with Europeans in the sixteenth century to the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763, the Wabanaki Indians of northern New England and the Canadian Maritimes fought to enhance their relationship with the ocean and the colonists it brought to their shores. This native maritime world clashed with the relentless efforts of Europeans to supplant it with one more amenable to their imperial designs. The Wabanaki fortified their longstanding dominion over the region's land- and seascape by co-opting European sailing technology and regularly plundering the waves of European ships, sailors, and cargo. Their campaign of sea and shore brought wealth, honor, and power to their confederacy while alienating colonial neighbors and thwarting English and French imperialism through devastating attacks. Their seaborne raids developed both a punitive and extractive character; they served at once as violent and honorable retribution for the destructive pressures of colonialism in Indian country and as a strategic enterprise to secure valuable plunder. Ashore, Indian diplomats engaged in shrewd transatlantic negotiations with imperial officials of French Acadia and New England.

Positioning Indians into the Age of Sail, Storm of the Sea offers an original perspective on Native American, imperial, and Atlantic history.

Henry VIII and Sanctuary

If you've seen the Charles Laughton-Maureen O'Hara movie version of Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame, you surely remember the moment that Quasimodo carries Esmeralda into Notre Dame Cathedral and raises her in his arms to proclaim "Sanctuary, Sanctuary!" And the crowd below goes wild!

As this blog dedicated to English Legal History notes, criminals in England had the right of Sanctuary too, claiming protection from the Catholic Church:

In medieval England, a criminal could go to a church and claim protection from the law. The authorities and the processes of criminal justice could not reach him. This was based on the idea that no force could be used on the consecrated and holy ground of the churches.

This privilege, called sanctuary, could be taken up by any criminals, ranging from murderers, rapists and thieves to the simple debtor who owed a sum of money.

The common law of the time stated that the privilege of sanctuary could only be used for up to 40 days. However, there were in existence some large sanctuaries (such as Westminster Abbey) that could house hundreds of criminals and had the facilities for them to stay indefinitely. When the criminals attempted to continue their criminal activities from the Abbey, the practice of these large sanctuaries was heavily frowned upon by the authorities and the public.

One of the most famous claimers of Sanctuary was not a criminal, however, but the wife and then widow of King Edward IV, Elizabeth Woodville. She remained with her children and household in Westminster Abbey's Sanctuary during two periods of the Wars of the Roses.

Of course, Henry VIII, since Church and State become one under his Supreme rule, eventually eliminated the rights of Sanctuary:

There was a significant case between 1516 and 1520 regarding a large sanctuary at St John’s Priory. This led to calls for reform and Henry VIII declared that the ancient kings and old popes never had the intention of letting the sanctuaries be used to such a gross extent.

Henry proceeded to abolish almost all sanctuaries and removed the possibility of using the privilege for almost all crimes. The practice did not breathe its last until a statute of 1624 which stated ‘no sanctuary or privilege of sanctuary to be hereafter admitted or allowed in any case’.

The reason I bring this up is because there's a fascinating post on the Oxford University Press blog by an author of a recent book about the practice of Sanctuary in England and her reactions to another famous author on the subject. Shannon McSheffrey, Professor of History at Concordia University in Montreal writes:

For the last fifteen years I have been having an intense dialogue in my head with a long-dead historian, Isobel D. Thornley (1893-1941). Isobel is my best frenemy. Two pieces she wrote in 1924 and 1932 remain standard citations for one of my favourite subjects, medieval sanctuary; this is a feat of scholarly longevity that few of her contemporaries can boast. Having dug through the same documents—and benefitted enormously from following in her footsteps—I admire Isobel’s archival diligence and the boldness of her arguments. I also disagree with almost everything she says.

Isobel’s place in the interwar historical community in London is mostly forgotten: she does not appear in any directories of important historians of the past—neither the Institute of Historical Research’s London’s Women Historians, for instance, nor another of the IHR’s pantheons, Making History. Her name does live on in the form of the Thornley Bequest Fund, established when she left her estate to the University of London. Over the decades Isobel’s legacy has benefited hundreds of historians, both students and academic researchers, many of whom probably have no idea who she was. . . .

The continuing influence of her work on sanctuary is not due to a precocious modernity; her sententious writing style probably seemed old-fashioned in the 1920s. It is, I think, the clarity and the no-nonsense tone that continues to convince many readers, even though her interpretations are unquestionably Whiggish, congruent with the views of her mentor Pollard. Sanctuary was a “great evil,” for it allowed criminals to escape punishment. In her account, “bold” and forward-thinking civic leaders allied with the judiciary to destroy the “hoary” popish institution of sanctuary and bring England into Protestant modernity.

I disagree with Thornley’s interpretation of English sanctuary on many fronts, too many to rehearse here (quick version: it was much more complicated). . . .

From OUP Next Month: Bad Queen Bess?

From the publisher, Oxford University Press:

Bad Queen Bess? analyses the back and forth between the Elizabethan regime and various Catholic critics, who, from the early 1570s to the early 1590s, sought to characterize that regime as a conspiracy of evil counsel. Through a genre novel - the libellous secret history - to English political discourse, various (usually anonymous) Catholic authors claimed to reveal to the public what was "really happening" behind the curtain of official lies and disinformation with which the clique of evil counsellors at the heart of the Elizabethan state habitually cloaked their sinister maneuvers. Elements within the regime, centred on William Cecil and his circle, replied to these assaults with their own species of plot talk and libellous secret history, specializing in conspiracy-driven accounts of the Catholic, Marian [Mary, Queen of Scots], and then, latterly, Spanish threats.

Peter Lake presents a series of (mutually constitutive) moves and counter moves, in the course of which the regime's claims to represent a form of public political virtue, to speak for the commonweal and true religion, elicited from certain Catholic critics a simply inverted rhetoric of private political vice, persecution, and tyranny. The resulting exchanges are read not only as a species of "political thought," but as a way of thinking about politics as process and of distinguishing between "politics" and "religion." They are also analyzed as modes of political communication and pitch-making - involving print, circulating manuscripts, performance, and rumor - and thus as constitutive of an emergent mode of "public politics" and perhaps of a "post reformation public sphere." While the focus is primarily English, the origins and imbrication of these texts within, and their direct address to, wider European events and audiences is always present. The aim is thus to contribute simultaneously to the political, cultural, intellectual, and religious histories of the period.

Oxford also notes that in Bad Queen Bess?: Libellous Politics, Secret Histories and the Politics of Publicity in Elizabethan England, Peter Lake, University Distinguished Professor of History and co-author (with Michael Questier) of The Trials of Margaret Clitherow:

• Puts Catholic polemical and political activity at the center of Elizabethan politics
• Focuses on the emergence of a style of public politics consequent on the religious conflicts and uncertainties of the age
• Emphasises the interaction between performance, manuscript, rumor, and print in the conduct of public politics, both by the state and its enemies
• Draws upon the emergent genre of the libellous secret history as a type of historical analysis

While this sounds fascinating, it does give me pause: This book uses the lies, half-truths, and deceptions the government and its critics used against each other to present the truth about history! See the table of contents here.

'the true life of a man is in his letters'

From Oxford University Press comes this new book about Blessed John Henry Newman:

John Henry Newman was one of the most eminent of Victorians and an intellectual pioneer for an age of doubt and unsettlement. His teaching transformed the Victorian Church of England, yet many still want to know more of Newman's personal life. Newman's printed correspondence runs to 32 volumes, and John Henry Newman: A Portrait in Letters offers a way through the maze.

Roderick Strange has chosen letters that illustrate not only the well-known aspects of Newman's personality, but also those in which elements that may be less familiar are on display. There are letters to family and friends, and also terse letters laced with anger and sarcasm. The portrait has not been airbrushed. This selection of letters presents a rounded picture, one in which readers will meet Newman as he really was and enjoy the pleasure of his company. As Newman himself noted, 'the true life of a man is in his letters'.

The Contents:

Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
A Chronology of John Henry Newman
1. Early Years (1801-33)
2. The Oxford Movement (1833-39)
3. Under Siege (1839-43)
4. From Oxford to Rome (1843-46)
5. Early Catholic Years (1846-51)
6. The Pressure of Crises (1852-58)
7. Dark Days (1859-63)
8. The Apologia and the Oxford Mission (1863-65)
9. Answering Pusey and Anticipating the Vatican Council (1865-69)
10. Vatican I and Answering Gladstone (1870-76)
11. Honorary Fellow of Trinity and Cardinal (1876-81)
12. Final Year (1881-90)
Index of Correspondents

Amazon.com offers a generous preview and/or Kindle sample. 

Strange is an excellent interpreter of Newman's life and thought. Next to Father Ian Ker and Edward Short, he is one of the best. Several years ago, I read his Newman 101 published by Ave Maria Press and reviewed it for Amazon:

Over the years I have read many books about Newman: biographies, studies, monographs. I have read Newman's major works and many of his sermons. I have taught classes on Cardinal Newman. When I picked up this book to read as a review before attending a seminar at Christ Church at the University of Oxford, I really did not expect to learn anything new.

With that preface out of the way--this book truly impressed me. Father Strange reveals Newman's influence and impact on his life and vocation as a priest in so many wonderful ways, so that the book has a very appropriate "heart speaks to heart" quality (Cor ad cor loquitor/Heart Speaks to Heart was Newman's motto as Cardinal).

He provides an excellent overview of Cardinal Newman's life and his major efforts and works. The chapter on Marian Doctrine and Devotion, not always a theme expected in an introductory study of Newman, was truly revelatory. Newman's apologetic for the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Mary, like his explanation of the First Vatican Council's declaration on Papal Infallibility, provides a clear defense of the Church's teachings while placing them in their proper context of the Divine Economy of Salvation.

Father Strange also enlightens when describing Newman's understanding of God's providence in his life (and in the lives of all Christians), the course of Newman's sermons at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin during the Oxford Movement, his efforts to help the laity, and to advance Christian unity.

The last two chapters are perhaps the most extraordinary: a comparison of St. Thomas More and Venerable John Henry Newman as a meditation on sanctity and canonization and an analysis of Newman's epic poem, "The Dream of Gerontius".

The title may indicate that this book is on an introductory level, it's true (in the U.K. the title was "John Henry Newman: A Mind Alive" which does not have such a college course catalog flavor about it). The writing is clear and accessible, but the richness of Father Strange's introduction goes far beyond just an acquaintance or chance meeting--it reveals friendship and understanding. Highly recommended to anyone wanting to know more about Venerable (soon to be Beatified) John Henry Newman.

A Catholic Colony Before Maryland

Jessie Childs writes on the OUPBlog about an idea to found a colony in the New World to provide religious freedom to English Catholics during the reign of Elizabeth I:

Over the summer of 1582 a group of English Catholic gentlemen met to hammer out their plans for a colony in North America — not Roanoke Island, Sir Walter Raleigh’s settlement of 1585, but Norumbega in present-day New England.

The scheme was promoted by two knights of the realm, Sir George Peckham and Sir Thomas Gerard, and it attracted several wealthy backers, including a gentleman from the midlands called Sir William Catesby. In the list of articles drafted in June 1582, Catesby agreed to be an Associate. In return for putting up £100 and ten men for the first voyage (forty for the next), he was promised a seignory of 10,000 acres and election to one of “the chief offices in government”. Special privileges would be extended to “encourage women to go on the voyage” and according to Bernardino de Mendoza, the Spanish ambassador in London, the settlers would “live in those parts with freedom of conscience.”

Religious liberty was important for these English Catholics because they didn’t have it at home. The Mass was banned, their priests were outlawed and, since 1571, even the possession of personal devotional items, like rosaries, was considered suspect. In November 1581, Catesby was fined 1,000 marks (£666) and imprisoned in the Fleet for allegedly harboring the Jesuit missionary priest, Edmund Campion, who was executed in December.

William Catesby's son Robert would lead the Gunpowder plotters in 1605:

Seven years later, in the reign of the next monarch James I (James VI of Scotland), William’s son Robert became what we would today call a terrorist. Frustrated, angry and “beside himself with mindless fanaticism,” he contrived to blow up the king and the House of Lords at the state opening of Parliament on 5 November 1605. “The nature of the disease,” he told his recruits, “required so sharp a remedy.” The plot was discovered and anti-popery became ever more entrenched in English culture. Only in 2013 was the constitution weeded of a clause that insisted that royal heirs who married Catholics were excluded from the line of succession.

Every 5 November, we British set off our fireworks and let our children foam with marshmallow, and we enjoy “bonfire night” as a bit of harmless fun, without really thinking about why the plotters sought their “sharp remedy” or, indeed, about the tragedy of the father’s failed American Dream, a dream for religious freedom that was twisted out of all recognition by the son.