Sir William Paulet, Willow Tree; St. John Ogilvie, Oak Tree

According to the History of Parliament online, Sir William Paulet always conformed to the religious practice and command of the King or Queen he served, and thus was able to adjust his religious beliefs to serve Henry VIII, Edward VI, (Lady Jane Grey/the Duke of Northumberland), Mary I, and Elizabeth I:

Paulet was named as executor of Henry VIII’s will, taking precedence after Archbishop Cranmer and the chancellor, and was one of the five Councillors to receive a bequest of £500. According to the testimony given by Secretary Paget as to the King’s intentions, he was also to have had lands and an earldom, but he had to wait for promotion in the peerage until after the overthrow of the Protector Somerset. He had already added extensively to his inheritance by grant and purchase [from the Dissolution of the Monasteries] and under Edward VI he obtained further lands in Dorset, Hampshire, Hertfordshire, Middlesex, Somerset and Wiltshire, being one of the five major recipients of crown lands by gift. For a few months in 1547 he served as lord keeper of the great seal after the dismissal of Wriothesley and was holding the office when the first Parliament of the reign was summoned. Shortly after his appointment he was one of the seven Councillors who signed a request to the young King for a commission empowering the Council to wield full authority during the minority. He was an assiduous attendant at Council meetings, several of which were held at his house in London and at Basing in 1549 and 1552.9

. . . As befitted one who, in the words of Sir Robert Naunton†, was ‘always of the King’s religion, and always [a] zealous professor’, and despite his uncharacteristic vote against the Act of Uniformity in 1559, he had no difficulty in accommodating himself to the Elizabethan settlement. Although he refused to take the oath incorporated in the Act of Succession he remained in the forefront of national affairs until the summer of 1570, when apparently on account of ill-health he withdrew to Basing. He absented himself from the Parliament of 1571 and was excused attendance at the trial of the 4th Duke of Norfolk early in 1572.11

He benefited thus from the Dissolution of the Monasteries and the fall of Somerset, and survived the fall of Northumberland/Lady Jane Grey. Before that, he had received St. Thomas More's Chelsea estate. If Barbara Walters had asked him the infamous "What kind of tree are you?" question she asked Katherine Hepburn, he would have had the opposite answer, although he would have had to translate it for her: He was a willow tree not an oak:

Paulet died intestate on 10 Mar. 1572 at Basing and was buried there. He had spent lavishly on his building there and at Chelsea (where he had been granted Sir Thomas More’s house in 1536) and at his death he owed over £34,000 to the crown and some £12,000 to individuals. Several portraits of Paulet survive. According to Naunton, Paulet ascribed his retention of high office under four sovereigns to his ability to bend (Ortus sum ex salice, non ex quercu) and (Sir) Richard Morison saw in him one who had ‘a tongue fit for all times, with an obedience ready for as many new masters as can happen in his days’. But many men were as ready as Paulet to trim to Tudor winds of change, and it was another hostile critic, John Knox, who came nearer the truth when, speaking of those who governed for Edward VI, he asked, ‘Who could best dispatch business, that the rest of the Council might hawk and hunt, and take their pleasure? None like unto [Paulet]’.12

Image Source.

Compare him to St. John Ogilvie, SJ, who suffered and died on March 10, 1615. He stood firm like an oak tree and received a crown of martyrdom:

He is the only canonized martyr of the Scottish Reformation.

Born in Scotland in 1579 and raised as a Protestant, Ogilvie was sent abroad for studies and converted to Catholicism. He entered the Jesuit novitiate in Vienna in 1599 and was ordained to the priesthood in Paris in 1610.

Ogilvie returned to his native Scotland in 1613 and within a year was arrested in Glasgow. He spent many months in prison and was tortured, but he refused to denounce the pope’s supremacy. On March 10, 1615, he was tried for high treason, found guilty, and executed.

The year after his death, Ogilvie's Relatio, his own account of his arrest, imprisonment, and torture that he wrote in prison, was printed in various cities in Europe and circulated secretly in England and Scotland.

He was beatified in 1929 and canonized in Rome in 1976.

Prayer to St. John Ogilvie, SJ
(from the Jesuits in Britain)

St. John Ogilvie, by your devotion to Christ
you held fast to the faith, even unto martyrdom.
With the grace of God, may I have a loving heart in the midst of trials.
May I, like you, “be of good cheer” and trust in the love of God.
Amen.

Oxbridge and the Stamford Oath

William Whyte writes for History Today on the monopoly Oxford and Cambridge held on university education in England from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century:

From 1334 onwards, graduates of Oxford and Cambridge were required to swear an oath that they would not give lectures outside these two English universities. It was a prohibition occasioned by the secession in 1333 of men from Oxford to the little Lincolnshire town of Stamford. They were escaping the violence and chaos which often attended medieval university life – the frequent battles between students, and between students and other communities within the town – the same conditions, in fact, which had led an earlier generation of scholars to up sticks and leave Oxford for Cambridge. But their action now threatened both universities, and so the Stamford experiment had to be suppressed. The sheriff of Lincoln, the lord chancellor, even the king, Edward III, were all called into play and the result became known as the ‘Stamford Oath’; an oath which Oxford and Cambridge graduates continued to swear until 1827. 

England was thus different than countries on the European Continent or even than Scotland:

This was in sharp contrast to the European experience. Just as Oxford and Cambridge were establishing and policing their unique right to produce graduates, ever growing numbers of universities were being founded across the Continent. In the 14th century new institutions appeared in towns from Pisa to Prague; from Kraków to Cahors. In the years that followed, the gap in numbers between English universities and those on the Continent grew even greater, with over 100 founded or refounded in Europe after 1500. Oxford and Cambridge remained the only universities in England. Indeed . . . in the mid-17th century, universities were springing up in such unlikely places as the small towns of Prešov in Slovakia and Nijmegen in the Netherlands. The English experience was also very unlike that of the Scots, who acquired five universities between 1451, when Glasgow opened, and 1582, when Edinburgh was established.

Whyte explains that religion played a role:

Just as the two universities wanted to control the supply of teachers and students, so the English Church and state wanted to control the universities. Universities could be – indeed, were – the source of dangerous heresies, where people learnt to think the wrong things. Oxford gave birth to the reforming, proto-Protestant Lollard movement in the 14th century. Cambridge was home to an alarming nest of evangelicals – humanist-inspired converts to church reform like the martyrs Robert Barnes (c.1495-1540) and Thomas Bilney (1495-1531) – 200 years later. With only two universities it was easier to control theological debate and even to use one of the institutions to oversee the other. It is no coincidence that the Cambridge-educated bishops Hugh Latimer and Nicholas Ridley, together with the Cambridge-educated archbishop Thomas Cranmer, were sent to loyalist, Catholic Oxford to be tried and burnt in the 1550s.

This control was also used to remove Catholics from the universities and to restrict Protestant dissenters from attending them: Anglicans removed Puritans and Puritans removed Anglicans. Two years before the Catholic Emancipation Act passed in 1829, which opened the way for Catholics to attend Oxford or Cambridge again after a few centuries--although receiving a degree would be difficult since graduates still had to swear an oath to uphold the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England--the Stamford Oath was disavowed. 

Whyte describes why:

If the existence of this alliance helps explain why Oxbridge was successful in blocking any rivals, then the breakdown in this relationship also helps account for what happened next. The 1820s were a period of acute crisis for Church, state and the two universities alike. The decision to grant full civil liberties to Dissenters in 1828 and then to Roman Catholics in 1829 reflected – and helped enact – a breakdown in the exclusive link between the Church of England and the government. It also called into question the privileged position of Oxford and Cambridge. Still redoubts of Anglican orthodoxy, still loyal to the confessional state, they both looked, as the poet and critic Matthew Arnold would later observe of Oxford, homes ‘of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties’.

Starting Chesterton's "Heretics"

Tomorrow night our Wichita area Chesterton group will start another book by Chesterton: the work that led to his great masterpiece, Orthodoxy: Heretics! On the American Chesterton Society website, Dale Ahlquist comments on this 1905 work:

This book is not an attack but a defense, a defense of the ancient truths that are under attack by modern heretics. Chesterton claims to have gained a deeper appreciation of the Christian Faith through the simple exercise of defending it. He says he never realized the great philosophic common sense of Christianity until the anti-Christian writers pointed it to him.

Heresy, it turns out, is usually a distinct lack of common sense. A heresy is at best a half-truth, but usually even less than that. A heresy is a fragment of the truth that is exaggerated at the expense of the rest of the truth. The modern world praises science and hygiene and progress. These are all very well and good, but they have been elevated at the expense of larger truths, such as faith and tradition and permanent ideals.

In this book, Chesterton takes on George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, and other “heretics” whose names may not be familiar, even if their “heresies” are still exceedingly familiar. The original objection to Heretics, which in fact compelled Chesterton to write Orthodoxy, is that his own criticisms of others were not to be taken seriously unless Chesterton himself declared what he stood for. This is perhaps why Heretics is considered the negative for which Orthodoxy is the positive. But any reasonable reader can see that Chesterton’s criticisms are a defense of a well-defined position. By criticizing moral and artistic relativism, he is defending identifiable and absolute standards. By criticizing egoism and the cult of success, he is defending humility. By criticizing skepticism, morbidity and muddle-headedness, he is defending faith, hope, and clarity.

Clarity. The truth which Chesterton is defending should be obvious. But because Chesterton has to defend it, it obviously isn’t obvious. The heretics have obscured the truth, they have distracted us, they have won us over with lies. The first lie is that truth doesn’t matter.

Chesterton begins his study of modern heresies and those who defend them by noting that heretics "nowadays" are different than those of the past: they want to be known as heretics!--they don't want their teaching to be considered orthodox at all. After all, Arius thought that he was right about the Person of Jesus Christ; he thought he was orthodox--had the right teaching--and that St. Athanasius was wrong. That's why St. Athanasius was forced into exile over and over again. To Arius and his followers, St. Athanasius was the heretic!

Now, no one wants to be orthodox:

Nothing more strangely indicates an enormous and silent evil of modern society than the extraordinary use which is made nowadays of the word "orthodox." In former days the heretic was proud of not being a heretic. It was the kingdoms of the world and the police and the judges who were heretics. He was orthodox. He had no pride in having rebelled against them; they had rebelled against him. The armies with their cruel security, the kings with their cold faces, the decorous processes of State, the reasonable processes of law—all these like sheep had gone astray. The man was proud of being orthodox, was proud of being right. If he stood alone in a howling wilderness he was more than a man; he was a church. He was the centre of the universe; it was round him that the stars swung. All the tortures torn out of forgotten hells could not make him admit that he was heretical. But a few modern phrases have made him boast of it. He says, with a conscious laugh, "I suppose I am very heretical," and looks round for applause. The word "heresy" not only means no longer being wrong; it practically means being clear-headed and courageous. The word "orthodoxy" not only no longer means being right; it practically means being wrong. All this can mean one thing, and one thing only. It means that people care less for whether they are philosophically right. For obviously a man ought to confess himself crazy before he confesses himself heretical. The Bohemian, with a red tie, ought to pique himself on his orthodoxy. The dynamiter, laying a bomb, ought to feel that, whatever else he is, at least he is orthodox.

It is foolish, generally speaking, for a philosopher to set fire to another philosopher in Smithfield Market because they do not agree in their theory of the universe. That was done very frequently in the last decadence of the Middle Ages, and it failed altogether in its object. But there is one thing that is infinitely more absurd and unpractical than burning a man for his philosophy. This is the habit of saying that his philosophy does not matter, and this is done universally in the twentieth century, in the decadence of the great revolutionary period. General theories are everywhere contemned; the doctrine of the Rights of Man is dismissed with the doctrine of the Fall of Man. Atheism itself is too theological for us to-day. Revolution itself is too much of a system; liberty itself is too much of a restraint. We will have no generalizations. Mr. Bernard Shaw has put the view in a perfect epigram: "The golden rule is that there is no golden rule." We are more and more to discuss details in art, politics, literature. A man's opinion on tramcars matters; his opinion on Botticelli matters; his opinion on all things does not matter. He may turn over and explore a million objects, but he must not find that strange object, the universe; for if he does he will have a religion, and be lost. Everything matters—except everything.

I have heard people say, "heretical though it might be to say" and then espouse something as a truth. Plato would say that they are modern sophists; they have taken nominalism to such an extreme that their statements mean nothing--nothing but power. Chesterton is pointing out, throughout this book in some way, the abuse of language in modern culture, language abused because it does not serve truth but only power and control.

When Chesterton "takes on" George Bernard Shaw he points out some problems with Shaw's vision:

For the truth is that Mr. Shaw has never seen things as they really are. If he had he would have fallen on his knees before them. He has always had a secret ideal that has withered all the things of this world. He has all the time been silently comparing humanity with something that was not human, with a monster from Mars, with the Wise Man of the Stoics, with the Economic Man of the Fabians, with Julius Caesar, with Siegfried, with the Superman. Now, to have this inner and merciless standard may be a very good thing, or a very bad one, it may be excellent or unfortunate, but it is not seeing things as they are. It is not seeing things as they are to think first of a Briareus with a hundred hands, and then call every man a cripple for only having two. It is not seeing things as they are to start with a vision of Argus with his hundred eyes, and then jeer at every man with two eyes as if he had only one. And it is not seeing things as they are to imagine a demigod of infinite mental clarity, who may or may not appear in the latter days of the earth, and then to see all men as idiots. And this is what Mr. Shaw has always in some degree done. When we really see men as they are, we do not criticise, but worship; and very rightly. For a monster with mysterious eyes and miraculous thumbs, with strange dreams in his skull, and a queer tenderness for this place or that baby, is truly a wonderful and unnerving matter. It is only the quite arbitrary and priggish habit of comparison with something else which makes it possible to be at our ease in front of him. A sentiment of superiority keeps us cool and practical; the mere facts would make, our knees knock under as with religious fear. It is the fact that every instant of conscious life is an unimaginable prodigy. It is the fact that every face in the street has the incredible unexpectedness of a fairy-tale. The thing which prevents a man from realizing this is not any clear-sightedness or experience, it is simply a habit of pedantic and fastidious comparisons between one thing and another. Mr. Shaw, on the practical side perhaps the most humane man alive, is in this sense inhumane. He has even been infected to some extent with the primary intellectual weakness of his new master, Nietzsche, the strange notion that the greater and stronger a man was the more he would despise other things. The greater and stronger a man is the more he would be inclined to prostrate himself before a periwinkle. That Mr. Shaw keeps a lifted head and a contemptuous face before the colossal panorama of empires and civilizations, this does not in itself convince one that he sees things as they are. I should be most effectively convinced that he did if I found him staring with religious astonishment at his own feet. "What are those two beautiful and industrious beings," I can imagine him murmuring to himself, "whom I see everywhere, serving me I know not why? What fairy godmother bade them come trotting out of elfland when I was born? What god of the borderland, what barbaric god of legs, must I propitiate with fire and wine, lest they run away with me?"

The truth is, that all genuine appreciation rests on a certain mystery of humility and almost of darkness. The man who said, "Blessed is he that expecteth nothing, for he shall not be disappointed," put the eulogy quite inadequately and even falsely. The truth "Blessed is he that expecteth nothing, for he shall be gloriously surprised." The man who expects nothing sees redder roses than common men can see, and greener grass, and a more startling sun. Blessed is he that expecteth nothing, for he shall possess the cities and the mountains; blessed is the meek, for he shall inherit the earth. Until we realize that things might not be we cannot realize that things are. Until we see the background of darkness we cannot admire the light as a single and created thing. As soon as we have seen that darkness, all light is lightening, sudden, blinding, and divine. Until we picture nonentity we underrate the victory of God, and can realize none of the trophies of His ancient war. It is one of the million wild jests of truth that we know nothing until we know nothing.

Now this is, I say deliberately, the only defect in the greatness of Mr. Shaw, the only answer to his claim to be a great man, that he is not easily pleased. He is an almost solitary exception to the general and essential maxim, that little things please great minds. And from this absence of that most uproarious of all things, humility, comes incidentally the peculiar insistence on the Superman. After belabouring a great many people for a great many years for being unprogressive, Mr. Shaw has discovered, with characteristic sense, that it is very doubtful whether any existing human being with two legs can be progressive at all. Having come to doubt whether humanity can be combined with progress, most people, easily pleased, would have elected to abandon progress and remain with humanity. Mr. Shaw, not being easily pleased, decides to throw over humanity with all its limitations and go in for progress for its own sake. If man, as we know him, is incapable of the philosophy of progress, Mr. Shaw asks, not for a new kind of philosophy, but for a new kind of man. It is rather as if a nurse had tried a rather bitter food for some years on a baby, and on discovering that it was not suitable, should not throw away the food and ask for a new food, but throw the baby out of window, and ask for a new baby. Mr. Shaw cannot understand that the thing which is valuable and lovable in our eyes is man—the old beer-drinking, creed-making, fighting, failing, sensual, respectable man. And the things that have been founded on this creature immortally remain; the things that have been founded on the fancy of the Superman have died with the dying civilizations which alone have given them birth. When Christ at a symbolic moment was establishing His great society, He chose for its corner-stone neither the brilliant Paul nor the mystic John, but a shuffler, a snob a coward—in a word, a man. And upon this rock He has built His Church, and the gates of Hell have not prevailed against it. All the empires and the kingdoms have failed, because of this inherent and continual weakness, that they were founded by strong men and upon strong men. But this one thing, the historic Christian Church, was founded on a weak man, and for that reason it is indestructible. For no chain is stronger than its weakest link.

Our Chesterton group will gather on the second floor of Eighth Day Books around 6:30 p.m. and discuss the first several chapters. Lenten appropriate refreshments will be served; that means: no cake!

Blesseds Christopher Bales, Nicholas Horner, and Alexander Blake

Blessed Christopher Bales, priest and martyr, and companions (laymen who assisted him) Blessed Alexander Blake, and Blessed Nicholas Horner, were all executed on March 4, 1590 at three different sites in London. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, his career as a missionary priest in England was brief:

 

Priest and martyr, b. at Coniscliffe near Darlington, County Durham, England, about 1564; executed 4 March, 1590. He entered the English College at Rome, 1 October, 1583, but owing to ill-health was sent to the College at Reims, where he was ordained 28 March, 1587. Sent to England 2 November, 1588, he was soon arrested, racked, and tortured by Topcliffe, and hung up by the hands for twenty-four hours at a time; he bore all most patiently. At length he was tried and condemned for high treason, on the charge of having been ordained beyond seas and coming to England to exercise his office. He asked Judge Anderson whether St. Augustine, Apostle of the English, was also a traitor. The judge said no, but that the act had since been made treason by law. He suffered 4 March, 1590, "about Easter", in Fleet Street opposite Fetter Lane. On the gibbet was set a placard: "For treason and favouring foreign invasion". He spoke to the people from the ladder, showing them that his only "treason" was his priesthood. On the same day Venerable Nicholas Horner suffered in Smithfield for having made Bales a jerkin, and Venerable Alexander Blake in Gray's Inn Lane for lodging him in his house.

In this autobiography, Father John Gerard, SJ, mentions Father Bales and another priest from Rheims, Father George Beesley, as being among those coming with him and Father Edward Oldcorne, noting that three of them suffered martyrdom while he did not:

"Two priests from Rheims joined us, as our former companions preferred to take time before they faced the dangers which awaited them on the opposite shores. The ship then set sail with four priests on board, a goodly cargo indeed, had not my unworthiness deprived me of the crown, for all those other three suffered martyrdom for the faith. The two priests were soon taken, and being in a short space made perfect, they fulfilled a long time. Their names were Christopher Bales and George Beesley, but my companion, the blessed Father Oldcorne, spent eighteen years of toil and labour in the Lord's vineyard, and watered it at length with his blood."

The Catholic Encyclopedia has this information on Blessed Nicholas Horner:

Layman and martyr, born at Grantley, Yorkshire, England, date of birth unknown; died at Smithfield, 4 March, 1590. He appears to have been following the calling of a tailor in London, when he was arrested on the charge of harbouring Catholic priests. He was confined for a long time in a damp and noisome cell, where he contracted blood poisoning in one leg, which it became necessary to amputate. It is said that during this operation Horner was favoured with a vision, which acted as an anodyne to his sufferings. He was afterwards liberated, but when he was again found to be harbouring priests he was convicted of felony, and as he refused to conform to the public worship of the Church by law established, was condemned. On the eve of his execution, he had a vision of a crown of glory hanging over his head, which filled him with courage to face the ordeal of the next day. The story of this vision was told by him to a friend, who in turn transmitted it by letter to Father Robert Southwell S.J., 18 March, 1590. Horner was hanged, drawn and quartered because he had relieved and assisted Christopher Bales, seminary priest and martyr, b. at Cunsley, Durham, 1564, d. on the Scaffold at Fetter Lane, London 4 March, 1590.

 

Father Bales and his lay companions were  beatified on December 15 in 1929 by Pope Pius XI.

I posted about the map of the martyrs that Graeme Garvey created a few days ago: it's featured on the The Catholic Herald online now, with some details about how he did it!

Mapping the Martyrs

A gentleman from Yorkshire, Graeme Garvey, who has written for the St. Austin Review and published a website on World War I veterans, among his other projects, sent me this link to a map showing the locations of the births and deaths of the English and Welsh martyrs, Venerable, Blessed, and Canonized.

He has noted the martyrs from Yorkshire, Lancashire, and other locations--those not canonized from the Pilgrimage of Grace--and those martyred in London at various sites. At the bottom of the map he provides a list of the martyrs' known birthplace by county.

Not only that, but he has linked on-line sources for each martyr, including some from this blog.

This is a tremendous resource, worthy of wide distribution. My only minor criticism is that St. Oliver Plunkett, tried, convicted, and martyred in London, should have been on the map, even though he was canonized separately.

It's always great to see devotion to these great heroes of the faith--Mary's Dowry productions, the Catholic Truth Society publications, and now this great map!

Holy Catholic Martyrs of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, pray for us!

Belloc on Laud and Cromwell, Anglo-Catholics and Puritans

Tomorrow on the Son Rise Morning Show Anna Mitchell and I will continue our discussion of Hilaire Belloc's Characters of the Reformation, returning to England tomorrow after visiting the Holy Roman Empire and France the past couple of episodes. Our subjects this week are William Laud and Oliver Cromwell, so we are dealing with the reign of Charles I and the English Civil War. Belloc is also back to analyzing aspects of his historical figure's personality and character. With High Church Archbishop of Canterbury William Laud, Belloc is also ready to comment on contemporary Anglo-Catholicism and its adherents:

Laud was the Protestant Archbishop of Canterbury under Charles I of England. He belonged to that generation which was born somewhat before the year 1600 and which was old by the middle of the seventeenth century — that is, by the time that each party in the great religious quarrel of the Reformation was dimly appreciating that the battle was a drawn one, and that there could not be a complete victory on either side. 

It will be remembered that the middle of the seventeenth century, and more particularly the date 1648 (The Treaties of Westphalia), marks that moment of exhaustion on the two sides. After it, what used to be united Christendom was permanently divided into the two camps of the Catholic and Protestant cultures, the boundaries of which have not appreciably changed from that day to this. Laud, as Archbishop of Canterbury, was the principal figure in English official Protestantism; that is, in the new establishment set up by William Cecil, and known as "The Church of England" in the critical period when the conflict was being decided. He was put to death by the English revolutionaries a little before the general settlement just mentioned; and he had begun his characteristic activities less than twenty years after the beginning of the century. 

His personality is most interesting. He was of the middle ranks of society, with no special advantages of birth, and gained public attention wholly through his own energy and character. That energy was intense and never failed him to the end; it was as great in his last days as in his first and it animated a very small body — for he was almost a dwarf in size. His volume of work and correspondence was enormous, his power of attention to detail was equally great, and he followed a fixed clear policy with great chances of success, which was only defeated by the rise of a general rebellion against the English Royal Government, in which his own activities and office were included.

The importance of Laud in any study of the great religious quarrel and its unsatisfactory drawn settlement in the seventeenth century is considerable, and it lies in this: he was an early example of how the great Catholic recovery which had marked the end of the sixteenth century reacted upon the Protestant world. But at the same time Laud is a still more striking example of the way in which the Reformation had made the Protestant attitude of mind inescapable for those who had broken away from Catholic unity. In other words, the interest of his career lies in this — that in spite of certain sympathies with Catholic tradition and in spite of their recovering certain sides of the general European culture, the Protestants throughout Europe and even in England (where Catholicism was still so strong), were condemned to be the victims of the original violent rebellion which had taken place in their fathers' time.

And the issue is of course, the authority of the Pope. Belloc notes that Laud and others wanted Christian unity but could not accept one authority in the Church: the Vicar of Christ (whom they thought of as "an Italian priest" at worst, the bishop of Rome at best):

Laud was the chief and leader of those who had come to deplore the losses inflicted by the Reformation and the wounds which it had inflicted upon normal human habit. He was the leader and representative of those who feared and disliked Puritanism as a moral disease. He had sympathy with the natural and excellent use of images in worship. One of the counts in the indictment against him on which he was put to death was his having put up a statue of Our Lady and the Holy Child, which one may still see standing above the main door of the University Church of Oxford (St. Mary's). He and those like him, who were now becoming numerous in the English Established Protestant Church, not only felt a sentimental attraction towards the lovely and human externals of Catholic worship, but were also inclined — one cannot use a stronger word, but at any rate inclined — to consider the fullness of Catholic doctrine in nearly all points. 

They inclined (as their descendants, the High Churchmen, do to-day) to an explanation of the mystery of the Eucharist more and more approximating to the truth. They inclined to Sacramental Penance and the Sacramental view of religion in general. They were particularly strong upon the necessity of a hierarchy and upon what they hoped was in their own case and what they admitted in the case of Catholics to be, the Apostolic Succession. They desired to regard their clergy as priests and some of them indeed would come to say even "sacrificing priests." But with all this they remained Protestant. They remained (though they would not have admitted it) thoroughly anti-Catholic, because they rejected that one part of Catholic doctrine which is its essential — the combination of unity and authority. The unity of the visible Church and its invincible authority were repugnant to their growing nationalism, and those who preserved such an attitude of mind were just as much the enemies of Catholicism as the most rabid Puritan could be, or the most complete agnostic. 

Laud himself used a phrase which has become famous in this regard: he said that he could not consider reunion "with Rome as she now is." Now that phrase was not only a rejection of unity, but by its wording it implied that there was no united visible Church of God on earth. The use of the word "Rome*' in this connection emphasized and was intended to emphasize the doctrine that "the Church of Rome hath erred" — which inevitably includes the doctrine that "all the Churches [as the phrase goes] had erred"; and that therefore there was no united visible infallible Church.

Analyzing Laud's legacy after his execution by Parliament, Belloc comments:

Laud became the target for a double attack. He had repressed Puritanism in religion, he had supported personal monarchy in politics. His person was seized by the rebels, he was imprisoned, and at last they put him to death.

Such a career and such a termination to it created what may be called "The Legacy of Laud." Politically that legacy came to nothing. The victory of the wealthier classes in England was so complete and the corresponding defeat of the monarchy so thorough that the very idea of government by a King died out in about half a century after Laud's death. One long life-time after his beheading on Tower Hill the English throne was filled by a puppet monarch who was not even allowed to attend the governing Council of the realm. And from that day onwards England has been governed by the great land-owners and by the money- dealers of the City of London. . . .

But the legacy of Laud in ecclesiastical matters had more vitality. It fell very low during the eighteenth century, but it was revived before the end of that century . . . There followed, in the same lifetime, the Tractarian Movement, and there now exists in greater force than has hitherto been known, a Laudian spirit acting in varying degrees throughout one great section of the English Protestant Establishment. The more devoted followers of that spirit go far beyond Laud himself in their imitation of Catholicism, and even in the attempt to recover the spirit of that from which they are separated; a considerable minority express themselves openly in favour of that reunion with the Catholic Church which Laud himself rejected.

Then Belloc turns to Oliver Cromwell, military leader, regicide, and Lord Protector. Like St. Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell before them, William Laud and Oliver Cromwell have something in common: they both lost their heads. The timing was just different! Cromwell's body was exhumed during the reign of Charles II and he was "executed". His head was displayed on a pole in front of Westminster Hall until 1685 (Charles II's father had been tried by Parliament in Westminster Hall.)

After reviewing the religious doctrines of Calvinism, Belloc comments on Cromwell and his Puritanism:

The way in which Cromwell was typical of the whole Calvinist business is nowhere better seen than in his attitude towards the old religion which this new religion had set out to kill — that is, his attitude towards Catholicism. Catholicism was for him the very spirit of evil, to destroy which from off the face of the earth seemed to him the highest of the duties lying to his hand insofar as he could fulfil it. He could fulfil it to a considerable degree in this one Province of Europe, the British Isles, when he had achieved despotic power. And his intense fanaticism on this point appears especially in his treatment of Ireland. For the rest and in general, Cromwell was the typical figure of what is called Puritanism. 

Puritanism is a particular form and degree of Protestantism which has specially flourished in England, Scotland and Wales, but of which there were wide areas throughout the Protestant world, notably in Scandinavia and in Holland. To be a Puritan is almost exactly the same as to be what the old world used to call a Manichaean. The Puritan and the Manichee have the same attitude towards the universe; their creeds work out to the same moral and social practice. But there is one doctrinal difference between them, for while the Manichee believes in an evil principle which works side by side with and is equal to the principle of good in the universe, the Puritan, proceeding from Calvin and therefore only admitting one will in the universe, makes both evil and good combine in the same awful God who permits, and in a sense wills, evil, and particularly the sufferings of man.

Belloc picks up his common theme, that the English Reformation had led to the creation of new wealth:

The accidents by which Oliver Cromwell became the typical figure of English Protestantism in its extreme or Puritanical form were these: 

He was a cadet of one of those millionaire families who had gained their enormous wealth out of the wreck of the monasteries during the period of the Reformation. His father, of whom he was the only surviving son, was himself the only son of the enormously wealthy Sir Henry Cromwell, and Henry was the son of Richard Cromwell, nephew of Thomas Cromwell, the man who dissolved the monasteries under Henry VIII. Richard Cromwell's real name was Richard Williams. He was nephew to Thomas because his mother had been Thomas Cromwell's sister, his mother having married a tavern-keeper in Putney, near London, whose name was Williams. Richard took on his important relative's name, but both he and those who succeeded him had to use the name Williams for legal purposes, and when his great-grandson, Oliver, lay in state, the title "Oliver Cromwell, alias Williams," was embroidered on the half- royal hangings which draped the bed. . . .

He had a genius for forming and leading cavalry. No one suspected it, least of all himself, until the opportunity came which made it manifest. Cromwell was already in his forty-third year when the War broke out. He had barely entered his forty-fifth when it was clear he would become the principal military figure. He was installed the head of the victorious army by the time that he was forty-eight, and in his fiftieth year it was he who plotted for and achieved the death of King Charles. He proceeded to the conquest of Ireland, a task which he accomplished with horrible cruelty and as a result of which he dispossessed nineteen-twentieths of the Irish nation, confiscating their land wholesale. He intended to destroy the Catholic Church altogether in that country. He thought that he had achieved that end before he died; but there he was mistaken.

Nevertheless, Cromwell's success and his Protectorate were decisive in the process of establishing Protestantism in England:

All that political experiment of an English military republic under a "Protector" was ephemeral. It was bound to break down and did so within two years of Cromwell's death. He died on the third of September, 1658, and the dead King's son, young Charles, returned and was crowned Charles II in the Spring of 1660. Nevertheless, that for which Cromwell stood had, in effect, conquered. 

Those who retained Catholic principles and inclinations in England were still very numerous; when he died they were still more than a quarter of the population. In Ireland, in spite of massacre and wholesale robbery the great Catholic mass stood firm, and there at least seven-eighths of the people retained their religion in spite of the conquest; but the Civil War had completed both in Britain and in Ireland that long process of Catholic impoverishment and Protestant enrichment which had begun with the Dissolution of the Monasteries more than a hundred years before and had been continued with the Irish confiscations under Elizabeth and completed with the enormous fines levied upon all those landowners in England who stood out boldly and openly proclaimed themselves Catholic. 

Further, the victory of those for whom Cromwell stood and of whom he was the most conspicuous leader was the virtual end of the monarchy, although kingship had come back amid universal rejoicing before young Charles had been crowned at Westminster and all the rest of it. The great landowners and the great merchants, acting through the House of Commons and the House of Lords, which they formed, took over the government in England and have retained it ever since. Further, after that episode there could be no question of the Catholic Faith returning in any strength. It might have survived in a large fraction of the people, but it could never again mould the general spirit of England. 

Oliver Cromwell, therefore, is not only the chief Puritan figure at the decisive moment, the seventeenth century, when the Protestant and Catholic separated finally and agreed to call it a drawn battle; he is also the figure who marks the turning point in the transformation of England from a Catholic to a Protestant country. The process was not completed under him. Catholicism largely survived in England till it received its death blow there in 1688. But by the time of his death the Protestant character of England as a whole was firmly fixed.

Blessed Robert Drury, An Appellant Martyr

Blessed Robert Drury was born in Buckinghamshire in about 1567. He studied at the English College, Rheims, France in 1588, and the English College, Valladolid, Spain in 1590. Ordained at Valladolid in 1593. Returned to England in 1593 to minister to covert Catholics around London, England. He was one of the signers of the loyal address of 31 January 1603 which acknowledged the queen as lawful sovereign on earth, but maintained their loyalty in religious matters to the Pope. When James I came to the throne, the king required them to sign a new oath which acknowledged his authority over spiritual matters. Robert refused, and was arrested in 1606 for the crime of being a priest. He was offered his freedom if he would sign the oath; he declined. Martyred by being hanged, drawn, and quartered on 26 February 1607 at Tyburn, London England. He is one of the Eighty-five Martyrs of England and Wales beatified by Saint Pope John Paul II in 1987.

Blessed Robert Drury attempted to appease Queen Elizabeth and her government as one of the Appellants. Two of the 13 who signed the Protestation of Allegiance would be executed during the reign of James I of England: today's martyr and Blessed Roger Cadwallador (in 1610 on August 27). The Appellants opposed the Jesuit methods of leading the Catholic mission to England and attempted to compromise, pleading a divided but honest loyalty--secular loyalty to Elizabeth's authority as the Queen of England; religious loyalty to Papal authority as the successor to St. Peter. The Appellants also opposed the authority and methods of the Archpriest George Blackwell, whom they thought favored the Jesuit approach. The Jesuit approach, articulated by Father Robert Parsons, was uncompromising: total loyalty to the Roman Pontiff and absolute refusal to adopt public acceptance of the Church of England while remaining privately opposed. The Jesuits would not tolerate Church Papists who attended Anglican services to avoid the fines and imprisonments, for example. The Elizabethan regime took advantage of these disagreements to encourage division among Catholics in England.

Even if Elizabeth I had accepted their appeal for relief to her Catholic subjects, the succession of James VI of Scotland ended this attempt--because he would not compromise, either. He demanded that the Appellants accept his authority over both religious and secular matters with the Oath of Allegiance. Members of the Appellant party were divided over whether they could take James I's new oath. Drury and Cadwallador were arrested and refused to take the oath.

According to the Catholic Encyclopedia entry on Blessed (then Venerable) Robert Drury:

The results of the address were disappointing; Elizabeth died within three months of its signature, and James I soon proved that he would not be satisfied with any purely civil allegiance. He thirsted for spiritual authority, and, with the assistance of an apostate Jesuit, a new oath of allegiance was drawn up, which in its subtlety was designed to trouble the conscience of Catholics and divide them on the lawfulness of taking it. It was imposed 5 July, 1606, and about this time Drury was arrested. He was condemned for his priesthood, but was offered his life if he would take the new oath. A letter from Father Persons, S.J., against its lawfulness was found on him. The oath declared that the "damnable doctrine" of the deposing power was "impious and heretical", and it was condemned by Pope Paul V, 22 September, 1606, "as containing many things contrary to the Faith and Salvation". This brief, however, was suppressed by the archpriest, and Drury probably did not know of it. But he felt that his conscience would not permit him to take the oath, and he died a martyr at Tyburn, 26 February, 1606-7. A curious contemporary account of his martyrdom, entitled "A true Report of the Arraignment . . . of a Popish Priest named Robert Drewrie" (London, 1607), which has been reprinted in the "Harleian Miscellany", calls him a Benedictine, and says he wore his monastic habitat the execution. But this "habit" as described proves to be the cassock and cap work by the secular clergy. The writer adds, "There were certain papers shown at Tyburn which had been found about him, of a very dangerous and traitorous nature, and among them also was his Benedictine faculty under seal, expressing what power and authority he had from the pope to make men, women, and children here of his order; what indulgence and pardons he could grant them", etc. He may have been a confrater or oblate of the order.

Newman and History: An Interview

Francis Phillips, the book reviewer for The Catholic Herald, interviews Edward Short, author of Newman and History. She's reading the book and I am too. She asks Mr. Short about the first chapter in his bis book, "Newman, Gibbon, and God's Particular Providence":

For Newman, in Short’s eyes, “History is also the register of man’s need for salvation”. He reminds me that in his opening chapter he contends “that a good deal of history after Gibbon is flawed because it is based on the conviction that history, properly understood, can make no allowance for the providential. What I endeavour to show in that chapter is that leaving the providential out of any account of the rise of Christianity inevitably leads to bad, uncritical, ahistorical history because it produces a view of Christianity that is essentially unaccountable.”

He warms to his theme: “If the faith of the martyrs in the supernatural reality of God’s plan for our salvation does not account for the rise of Christianity, what does account for it? To say, as Gibbon says, that credulity and fanaticism and the chicane of bishops accounts for the unprecedented spread of the Christian religion is nonsense.”

Short reflects, “Gibbon may have convinced himself, in his trifling, derisive way, that history is often “little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind”. Yet what Newman shows is that, on the contrary, history is the register of man’s need for God’s salvation – indeed, his hope in that salvation. This is why Newman’s history is always so full of prayer.”

Phillips asks Short about what he admires about Blessed John Henry Newman and why he writes about him:

I am curious to know what aspect of Newman’s personality does the author most admire. Short thinks this a difficult question, telling me he is a great admirer of the man “especially his integrity. It is his integrity after all that gives him not only his wisdom but his holiness. For me”, he continues, “it is the saint in the man that commands most respect, his constant unwavering care for the cure of souls, his solicitude for the spiritual wellbeing of his fellows, the quality of his caritas. In his quiet, eminently English, self-deprecatory way, Newman was indeed a saint and one reads him not only to understand but to try to emulate that holiness.”

Is this why Short has written three books on Newman? He says wryly, “On the face of it, my writing at all might seem a quixotic undertaking. After all, I am neither an academic nor a popular author. The only reason I continue to write about Newman is that in order to write about him I must read him fairly closely and he is a delight to read. Then again, there is so much to learn from Newman. He is so charming, so witty and so companionable.”

Please read the rest there.

GKC on "The Style of Newman"

G.K. Chesterton seems to have written about almost everything and everyone. I found the text of his book A Handful of Authors online. His secretary and friend Dorothy Collins edited this book in 1953 from among many essays and reviews Chesterton had written and it was published by Sheed & Ward. Here's part of what Chesterton says about the prose style of John Henry Cardinal Newman (Blessed John Newman):

A FINE style is not a narrow or fastidious or aristocratic thing, as many think. On the contrary, style is the truly democratic thing, since it touches all common things with the same fairy wand. A man who loves all men enough to use them rightly is a democrat. A man who loves all words enough to use them rightly is a stylist. Style comes out, as the fraternal human sentiment comes out, pre-eminently and most definitely in dealing with coarse or everyday things. An eloquent outburst from Carlyle about the stars and the heroes is, in its own way, fine style. But a page of Newman's Apologia which merely describes how he left off living at some college and went to live in some settlement is also fine style. The ideal lover of mankind would linger over a postcard to his washerwoman, transposing words and modifying adjectives until it was as perfect as a sonnet.

The one weakness of Newman's temper and attitude as a whole was, I think, that he lacked the democratic warmth. This had nothing to do with his religion; for in Manning, who was a far more rigid and central Catholic than he, democracy roared like a bonfire. It had something to do with his character and something to do with his training. But in this matter of a fine style Newman was not doing anything precious or exclusive; he was doing something entirely human and sociable. Good style treats verbs and particles as good manners treats chairs and tables, easily but in the proper way. There is no such thing as being a gentleman at important moments; it is at unimportant moments that a man is a gentleman. At important moments he ought to be something better. So while we can consent to receive some poignant message or violent and sudden sincerity in any language that the man chooses to use, we feel that the finest instinct of geniality is to speak of common things with some dignity and care. No man has ever done this so well as Newman. A magic that is like a sort of musical accompaniment changes and heightens the most prosaic fragments of personal biography or scholastic explanation. And in this, as I say, he achieves for a time that awful and beautiful thing which is the dream of all democracy, the seeing of all things as wonderful, the thing for which Whitman strove and which he did not perfectly attain. In this respect Carlyle and Walt Whitman (that immeasurably greater man) are even the aristocrats compared to this classical embroiderer. They spoke in a tongue not understanded of the people. They were bold and boisterous and personal, as the better kind of aristocrats are always bold and boisterous and personal.

"The Style of Newman" was first published in The Speaker in 1904.

He demonstrates some knowledge of Newman's works, comparing him to Gladstone in some respects. Anticipating the great Newman biographer Father Ian Ker, Chesterton comments on Newman's use of humor:

The truth was, as I fancy, that it was very fortunate for Newman, considered merely as a temperament and a personality, that he was forced into that insatiably fighting thing, the Catholic Church, and that he was forced into it in a deeply Protestant country. His spirit might have been too much protected by the politeness of our English temper and our modern age, but it was flayed alive by the living spirit of "No Popery". The frigid philosopher was called a liar and turned into a man. We might also dwell upon that one outburst of wild and exuberant satire in which Newman indulged: I mean his comparison (in the first lecture on "The Position of English Catholics")* of the English view of the Catholic Church to the probable Russian view of the British Constitution. It is one of the great pages of fierce English humour. Why he thus once exploded into fantastic derision I do not know. But I suspect that it was because Birmingham was full of "No Popery" rioters and his back was to the wall. This man, when he was in the sweet but too refined atmosphere of the Oxford High Churchmen, had shed many tears. But, like all brave men when he first saw the face of battle, he began to laugh.

*Of course, Chesterton means The Present Position of Catholics in England!

More about A Handful of Authors from Dale Ahlquist and the American Chesterton Society.

Blessed John Henry Newman and St. Robert Southwell

What a remarkable doctrine of the Church is the Communion of Saints! Two great holy men were born this day--one to eternal life, the other to life on earth: St. Robert Southwell was executed on February 21, 1595 and Blessed John Henry Newman was born on February 21, 1801.

St. Robert Southwell was 33 years old when he was executed at Tyburn on February 21, 1595. When he cited his age during his trial, his torturer Richard Topcliffe mocked him for claiming equality with Jesus Christ. Southwell answered that he was but a worm.

It is hard to be temperate when writing about his arrest, torture and execution--it is obviously a horrendous blot against the Elizabethan "regime". He was betrayed by a woman that Elizabeth's pursuivant Richard Topcliffe had raped and blackmailed--he promised to find her a husband since she was pregnant with his child if she would turn Southwell in; he was tortured--illegally and excruciatingly--numerous times, starting with a visit to Topcliffe's personal torture chamber, while Elizabeth's officials looked on; then he was held in fetid conditions until his father visited him in Westminster's gatehouse and petitioned the queen to put him to death rather than leave him there, in his own filth.

Moved to the Tower of London he was held in greater but solitary comfort, but Queen Elizabeth allowed the sadistic Topcliffe to continue torturing Southwell, who had readily admitted his priesthood. Prior to his trial on February 20 he was moved into a hole called Limbo; the government did not even try to implicate him in any plot against the Queen; he was executed just because he was a Catholic priest. When he was executed on February 21st, the crowds made sure he was dead before the butchery began--and no one cheered when his severed head was displayed to the crowd. Indeed, Elizabeth's government recognized that they had gone too far--there was lull in executions of Catholic priests in London. Lord Cecil even ignored Topcliffe's desires to get started on new victims.

Robert Southwell was canonized by Pope Paul VI among the group called The Forty Martyrs of England and Wales. In addition to be a great saint and steadfast martyr, he is regarded as one of the great poets of the Elizabethan Age. Some of his poetry was written while he was held in solitary confinement in the Tower of London and was published posthumously.

Pope St. John Paul II remembered the 200th anniversary of Newman's birth in this 2001 letter to Birmingham:

Newman was born in troubled times which knew not only political and military upheaval but also turbulence of soul. Old certitudes were shaken, and believers were faced with the threat of rationalism on the one hand and fideism on the other. Rationalism brought with it a rejection of both authority and transcendence, while fideism turned from the challenges of history and the tasks of this world to a distorted dependence upon authority and the supernatural. In such a world, Newman came eventually to a remarkable synthesis of faith and reason which were for him "like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of the truth" (Fides et Ratio,Introduction; cf. ibid., 74). It was the passionate contemplation of truth which also led him to a liberating acceptance of the authority which has its roots in Christ, and to the sense of the supernatural which opens the human mind and heart to the full range of possibilities revealed in Christ. "Lead kindly light amid the encircling gloom, lead Thou me on", Newman wrote in "The Pillar of the Cloud"; and for him Christ was the light at the heart of every kind of darkness. For his tomb he chose the inscription: Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem; and it was clear at the end of his life’s journey that Christ was the truth he had found.

But Newman’s search was shot through with pain. Once he had come to that unshakeable sense of the mission entrusted to him by God, he declared: "Therefore, I will trust Him... If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him, in perplexity, my perplexity may serve Him... He does nothing in vain... He may take away my friends. He may throw me among strangers. He may make me feel desolate, make my spirits sink, hide the future from me. Still, He knows what He is about" (Meditations and Devotions). All these trials he knew in his life; but rather than diminish or destroy him they paradoxically strengthened his faith in the God who had called him, and confirmed him in the conviction that God "does nothing in vain". In the end, therefore, what shines forth in Newman is the mystery of the Lord’s Cross: this was the heart of his mission, the absolute truth which he contemplated, the "kindly light" which led him on.

Other than the glory they now share in Heaven, Southwell and Newman do have some other things in common:

~They are both Englishmen, born, as Pope St. John Paul II said, "in troubled times"
~Both are converts to the Catholic faith from the Church of England
~Both went to the Continent to study for the priesthood
~Both are order priests: Southwell a Jesuit and Newman an Oratorian
~Both are poets, although Southwell is probably the greater poet (but Newman's The Dream of Gerontius is a great achievement)

Of course, they differ vastly in their deaths and that marks their different status as saints in heaven: St. Robert Southwell was canonized as a martyr, while Newman was beatified--and perhaps soon will be canonized--as a confessor of the faith. Here's an article I wrote describing the differences between martyrs and confessors.

Blessed John Henry Newman, pray for us!
St. Robert Southwell, pray for us!