H.C. White on "Tudor Books of Saints and Martyrs"

Readers of this blog might have been wondering if I've forgotten about the English Reformation and the Catholic Martyrs of England and Wales since I've been posting so much about Saint John Henry Newman and the Greek Fathers of the Church, books about Newman, etc,. I have not.

I've been reading, to great benefit, Helen C. White's Tudor Books of Saints and Martyrs, her survey of the books published before and during the English Reformations during the Tudor dynasty. 

She begins, after a survey of the development of devotion to the martyrs and saints from the Early Church to the Medieval Era, with pre-Henrician Reformation devotion to the saints and books of saints and martyrs, when England was pretty solidly Catholic, through the changes wrought by Henry, Edward, and Elizabeth with their effects on Catholics and of course, the interim of Mary's reign with the reversion to Catholicism and restoration of the heresy laws with their effects on Protestants. While there is plenty of historical narrative, the focus of the book is the books published during that era. Many of those books are stories of martyrdoms, Catholic and Protestant. White maintains an excellent balance of explication and analysis, describing the strengths and weaknesses of the accounts of those martyrdoms.

Table of Contents:

I. The Saint's Legend as a Literary Type

II. "The Golden Legend" [Caxton's 1483 translation of Voragine's Legenda Aurea]

III. The Attack on the Saint's Legend

IV. The Catholic Martyrs under Henry

V. Foxe's Book of Martyrs

VI. Foxe's Ecclesiastical History

VII. The English Mission

VIII. The Triumphs of Death (mya favorite chapter!)

IX. Continuing Classics and Emergent Types

Notes, Bibliography, Index

By documenting the history of the forms and contents of the books saints and martyrs from the reigns of Henry VII to Elizabeth I, White has simultaneously sketched out the history of religion in England during the Tudor Dynasty. I say "sketched out" because she confines her religious narrative to this specific genre, the saints' lives and legends. Only insofar as these books reflect the religious changes (from Catholic unity to Henrician compromises to Calvinist reform to Marian revival to Elizabethan compromise) does she trace that narrative. Because of course how the people of England were supposed to think and write and read about the saints and martyrs, how to model their lives on their examples and ask their intercession in prayer and devotion was affected by the religious changes throughout this dynasty.

I. White begins with a review of the history of saint's lives and legends from the early Church martyrs during the waves of Roman persecution, highlighting Saints Stephen, Perpetua, and Polycarp. Then she looks at the transition from martyrs to confessors, with Saint Martin of Tours for example. She examines Voragine's Legenda Aurea and his systematization of the calendar of the saints and discusses these legends in the Middle Ages as sources of both exhortation and entertainment, noting some of the pitfalls of exaggeration in these lives, their miracles and wonders, etc.

II. Then she looks at William Caxton's translation of Voragine's Legenda Aurea (in the crucial year of 1483: the death of Edward IV, the brief succession and disappearance of his son Edward V, and the beginning of the brief reign of Richard III, succeeded by Henry Tudor as Henry VII, founder of the Tudor dynasty). White highlights The Golden Legend's basic framework and homiletic purpose. Caxton starts with the Apostles, then proceeds to the Martyrs, the Confessors, and the Virgins, exploring themes of wisdom, piety, charity, and miracles.

III. White contrasts the last printing of Caxton's book in 1527 with the first smuggled copies of Tyndale's English New Testament (written on the Continent in 1525 and 1526) before discussing the Humanists's attack on the superstition evident at saint's shrines (Erasmus, and even More, who distinguished between legitimate devotion to the saints and abuse of that devotion). She cites a 1548 sermon preached by Bishop Stephen Gardiner before Edward VI (as a test of his conformity) in which Gardiner highlights the three most important changes in the Church of England: First, the renunciation of the authority of the Pope; Second, the dissolution of the abbeys; Third, that "images [of the saints] were pulled down" (p. 68) She describes the books that accompanied that crucial third change and Henry VIII's own reaction to the over-reaction of some against images and the saints, except for, of course, any devotion to Saint Thomas of Canterbury! Photo above of the candle in Canterbury Cathedral in place of the shrine/tomb that Henry VIII had destroyed.

IV. Now we turn to the Catholic protomartyrs of English Reformation: the Carthusians, Bishop John Fisher, and Thomas More. White opines that "unlike Fisher, More would be remembered today, even if he had never been a martyr" because he was "the greatest genius in his country in that day" (p. 116). She devotes several pages to the different lives of Thomas More, from William Roper's memorial, to Harpsfield, Stapleton, and Ro. Ba., noting their different approaches and contexts, as they wrote about More from their exiles on the Continent (except Harpsfield). There's a great quotation in this chapter about "son Roper": "All this (anecdotes and reflection on More's humor and story-telling) Roper had to refresh his memory, and up to around some ten years before he presumably wrote his story, he had the help of his wife [Margaret]. With her he must often have talked over these things, doubtless finding in the later consequences much help for understanding what had once seemed so puzzling." (p. 122) More's "Dearest Meg" helped build her father's legacy.

V. and VI. In the chapters about John Foxe and his Book of Martyrs and Church history, White pays tribute to his dramatic story-telling, his consistent black-and-white, good vs. evil view of the religious controversies of his day. She also analyses his inability to contemplate any compromise in that conflict. As she notes, Foxe dedicates his works to Elizabeth I, praising her rule over the Church of England, exalting the virtues of her mother Anne--but he cannot contemplate how Henry VIII condemned good men like John Lambert to the stake. He has to find another villain to exculpate a hero and he chooses Bishop Stephen Gardiner as the deceitful persuader against Henry's better Protestant judgement. Foxe could not imagine that Henry VIII believed in the Real Presence and the Sacrifice of the Mass, just as he could not imagine any religious imagery as being anything but an occasion of idolatry. White sums up Foxe's work as the story of great victory, the victory of the State over the Church.

VII. On the other hand, the Catholic Recusants of Elizabeth I's reign could not even imagine a path to victory; their story is "of the resistance of the defeated and the irreconcilable" (p. 197), whose first years under the Elizabethan Acts of Supremacy and Settlement were kind of waiting game, hoping for a quick succession of Mary of Scotland (after two brief reigns, it could be imagined). Then the Jesuits (and others) Robert Parsons (or Persons) and Edmund Campion launch the English Mission in 1580. 

White devotes requisite attention to both men's books and reputations, but notes that Campion is the real hero (like the comparison and contrast of Fisher and More in chapter IV), because of his daring, the debates in the Tower, and the drama of his capture, torture, and execution. Parsons survives, leaves England never to return, and leads the later English Mission from the Continent. As White notes, he was a tireless writer and educator. She contrasts Parsons life of prose to Campion's life of poetry. Commenting on the narration of Campion's capture, she notes that his betrayer George Elliot's report is "valuable for the light it throws on Recusant life in a large country house in those days" (p. 213) Books attacking and defending Campion--including the poetry of Henry Walpole, inspired to become a missionary priest at his execution--add to his reputation and regard for him among the Catholics of England.

White also highlight a priest's "anonymous Latin diary of what happened to Catholic prisoners in the Tower of London in the years 1580 to 1585", including details about the other prisons which Catholic were incarcerated, and the tortures they endured. The diary contains tantalizingly incomplete information, for example, about the Arden family, Edward and Mary, their daughter Margaret and her husband John Somerville, and the family's resident priest, Father Hugh Hall, all accused of plotting to assassinate Elizabeth I, and condemned to death. We know that Edward and John were executed, but what of the women and the priest? The diary does not tell.

VIII. This chapter is almost entirely devoted to the character, works, and reputation of the Jesuit priest and martyr Robert Southwell, particularly to how his use of Saint Ignatius of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises helped prepare him for the sufferings he endured. White continues the pattern of compare/contrast between Campion and Southwell.

She notes that they were "two very different types of men" and those differences represent "some important differences" in their times in the English Mission. White says that Campion's brilliance is at the "full tide of the high Elizabethan genius, with all its optimistic energy and color and dramatic edge" while Southwell's genius is "something more withdrawn, more reflective, more solitary, more ecstatic; he belongs to a later, more complicated, more shadowed world" (p. 240) and sums him up on page 241: Southwell "was not only a mystic, but a poet." And as a poet, Southwell had the "metaphysical power of organization and the metaphysical power of the revelation of the heart of the matter through a lightning flash of the continued reality in momentary detail." (my italics) We should recall that White also wrote The Metaphysical Poets: A Study in Religious Experience, published by Macmillan in 1936.

White's analysis of Southwell's poetic and mystic vision and his practice of the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises reminded me of Anne R. Sweeney's Robert Southwell: Snow in Arcadia: redrawing the English lyric landscape, 1586-95, which I reviewed here. Sweeney explores more fully White's insights into Southwell's experiences of the art and culture of Counter-Reformation Rome, especially in the first chapter, "Rome: the discernment of angels". By the way, Sweeney included White's Tudor Books of Saints and Martyrs in her bibliography. And both White and Sweeney (in chapter 2, "The Spiritual Exercises: the 'inward eie') explore the influence of Southwell's use of the Ignatian method of meditation on his preparation for capture, torture, and execution--and in his poetry.

One reason for the difference between the worlds of Campion and Southwell, measured only a few years, is the increasingly desperate situation of Catholics in England. New recusant laws, the 1581 Acts of Persuasion, declaring conversion/reversion to Catholicism, called "reconciliation with Rome" an act of High Treason, and the Act of 1585 against the Jesuits and Seminary priests, making their return to England also an act of Treason--plus the horror of the Babington Plot and its aftermath, the execution of Mary of Scotland and the 1588 Spanish Armada with the State's reaction of multiple executions--when even those Catholics who proved the answer to the "Bloody Question" was that they wanted to fight to defend England from the Armada received no consideration! What cause for optimism did Southwell have?

So he wrote works of comfort and consolation to the Catholics of England: Epistle of Comfort, written for Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel, held in the Tower for years under a sentence of death, A Short Rule of Good Life, Triumphs over Death, and a Humble Supplication to Queen Elizabeth--all to help them deal with their sorrows through their sorrows. White particularly highlights the popularity of Mary Magdalen's Funeral Tears and St. Peter's Complaint, reprinted and imitated often. 

It's really a masterful chapter.

IX. This chapter describes how saints' lives and legends returned to English Anglican literature, adapting the pre-Reformation traditions to the contemporary Elizabethan standards. Thus carefully moderated poems about the Blessed Virgin Mary as the Mother of God or of an English hero like St. George could be written and published. At the turn of the century, in the last years and months of Elizabeth I's reign, chroniclers and biographers could look back on the past and write about Reformation heroes. They weren't to be canonized saints for devotion, of course, but they could be models for imitation. 

I look forward to reading White's other Tudor book, on Books of Private Devotion.