An Elizabethan Heroine: Lady Cecily Stonor

Author Gareth Russell asked me to contribute an article on one of my heroes or heroines. On his blog, he offers an introduction to my selection:

A few months ago, I fell into a conversation about heroism and whether it still serves a purpose. In his biography of Anne Boleyn, published in 2010, Professor George Bernard dismissed the idea, quoting the Communist playwright Bertolt Brecht's response to "Unhappy the land that has no heroes" - "Unhappy the land that needs heroes". Bernard, paralleling the old idea of heroism with the contemporary fascination with celebrity, continued, "Models are not necessary ... Men and women should not need to study the life of Anne Boleyn, or modern 'celebrities', to learn that if you do not like your lot in life, you should do what you can to improve it."

This certainly raises a valid point about projecting our own needs and neuroses onto the men and women of the past and, in doing so, misrepresenting them. However, I also think that people can be heroic and inspirational without being whitewashed. Theology teaches us that even the holiest saints had their flaws. To be inspired does not necessarily equate with creeping on metaphorically knee to the shrine of the revered. In this vein, I am delighted to share an article by American author Stephanie A. Mann, author of Supremacy and Survival: How Catholics endured the English Reformation, who has written a reflection on Lady Cecily Stonor, a English Catholic who defended her faith in the time of Queen Elizabeth I.

An excerpt from my essay (please read the rest there):

Although I write often about the Catholic martyrs of the English Reformation era and certainly highlighted them in my book about the English Reformation—and there are three women honored by the Catholic Church among the canonized and beatified martyrs of that era, I have not chosen a martyr as my heroine.

The heroine I’ve chosen does have much in common with those three martyred Catholic women (St. Margaret Clitherow, St. Margaret Ward, and St. Anne Line). She could have suffered the same punishment they did: she was a recusant Catholic and she protected Catholic priests in her home. Because she came to trial in 1581 before it was a felony for hiding Catholic priests, she avoided execution. But she suffered much because she remained true to her Catholic faith and her conscience.

Lady Cecily Stonor (nee Chamberlain) and her late husband Sir Francis Stonor (+1564) had two sons, Francis and John, and three daughters. They were recusants and because they would not attend Sunday services in the Church of England, they had to pay huge fines, selling land and estates as necessary. In 1577, according to the Stonor Park website, the family paid the modern equivalent of £50,000 in fines. . . .

I am going to participate in the blog tour for Gareth Russell's new book on the English monarchy, so watch this space.

The Martyrs of 1588, Part IV

On October 5, 1588, English authorities continued their execution of Catholic priests after the Spanish Armada: Father William Hartley, Father John Hewitt, and Robert Sutton were all martyred in London. Father Hartley was born in the Diocese of Lichfield and brought up a Protestant. He was Chaplain and Fellow of St. John's College, Oxford, but Tobie Matthew, later Archbishop of York removed him from his post because he seemed "too Catholic." He then went to Rheims, was reconciled to the Catholic Church, ordained, and returned to the English Mission in 1580.

He was arrested, in the house of Lady Stonor, and imprisoned in the Tower within year and held in prison for five years. In 1585 he was banished, along with 20 other priests, but he returned to England even though he knew the consequences. When he was captured again, the government was not in a banishing mood. Three martyrs set out on October 5: Father Hartley died at Shoreditch and his mother witnessed his execution.Father John Hewitt, who had been captured in the Spanish Netherlands by Lord Leicester and send back to England for trial died at Mile's End Green, and Robert Sutton suffered at Clerkenwell.

The Stonor family was the great recusant family of South Oxfordshire. St. Edmund Campion and Father Robert Parsons had a base of operations there, including a printing press. Father Hartley took 400 copies of Campion's "Decem Rationes" to Oxford's St. Mary the Virgin. More about the Stonor Press here.

Lady Cecily Stonor offered quite a defense of her recusancy after her arrest in 1581:

I was born in such a time when Holy Mass was in great reverence and was brought up in the same faith. In King Edward's time this reverence was neglected and reproved by such as governed. In Queen Mary's it was restored with much applause, and now in this time it pleaseth the State to question them, as now they do me, who continue in the Catholic profession. The State would have the several changes, which I have seen with mine eyes, good and laudable. Whether it can be so I refer to your Lordships' consideration. I hold me still to that wherein I was born and bred, and find nothing taught in it but great virtue and sanctity, and so by the grace of God I will live and die in it.