The Martyrs of Douai

In the Diocese of Westminster, England, today is the feast of the Douai Martyrs--that is, martyrs who studied at the English College/seminary in Douai during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries--who have been beatified and canonized. According to the website of the Diocese of Westminster:

The Martyrs of Douai were a group of men who trained for the priesthood at Douai College during the English Reformation and were executed on their return to England for preaching the Catholic faith. Operating as a Roman Catholic priest during the Protestant Reformation was considered high treason, with a punishment of being hanged, drawn and quartered. In total, 158 members of Douai College were martyred between the years 1577 and 1680, including St Robert Southwell and St Edmund Campion.

These men provided essential pastoral and spiritual guidance for Catholics throughout the country and administration of the sacraments. They willingly took on this mission knowing that, as soon as they stepped onto English soil, their lives would be in imminent danger. Many people risked their lives during this period to support these men by sheltering them or allowing them to celebrate Mass in their homes.

In recognition of the work of these men and the sacrifice they made, 80 alumni of Douai College were beatified by Pope Pius XI in 1929, their feast day is celebrated on the 29th October.

Nineteen of the 158 martyrs were canonized in 1970:

Cuthbert Mayne
Ralph Sherwin
Edmund Campion, SJ
Alexander Briant, SJ
John Payne
Luke Kirby
Eustace White
Edmund Gennings
John Boste
Robert Southwell, SJ
Henry Walpole, SJ
John Almond

Edmund Arrowsmith, SJ
Ambrose Barlow, OSB
Alban Roe, OSB
Henry Morse, SJ

John Southworth

John Wall

John Kemble

(We'll talk about Saint John Kemble, a Popish Plot martyr, on Monday, November 2 in the last installment of our series on the Son Rise Morning Show!)

St. Cuthbert Mayne was the first Englishman prepared for the priesthood at Douai and he is the protomartyr of the English seminaries established on the Continent. Born in Devonshire, he was ordained an Anglican minister but became Catholic in the early 1570's while at Oxford. He returned to England in 1575, serving in Cornwall, and was arrested a year later. One of the charges against him was that he had an Agnus Dei, an image of Jesus as the Lamb of God, blessed by the pope. He was hung, drawn and quartered in Cornwall on November 29, 1577.

Blessed Thomas Thwing, the last Douai martyr, suffered during the Popish Plot hysteria in 1680. From 1664 to 1679 he served as a missionary priest in England. He and other members of Sir Thomas Gasciogne's household, including the master, were accused of a conspiracy to kill King Charles II and brought to London for trial. The others were acquitted but he was found guilty and condemned; the King pardoned him but the House of Commons demanded his execution. Of course he was innocent of any charges of conspiracy; he was guilty of being a Catholic priest. Blessed Thomas Thwing was hanged, drawn, and quartered on October 23, 1680.

The Catholic Encyclopedia provides information about Catholic activities in Douai:

To English Catholics, the name Douai will always be bound up with the college founded by Cardinal Allen during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, where the majority of the clergy were educated in penal times, and to which the preservation of the Catholic religion in England was largely due. Several other British establishments were founded there — colleges for the Scots and the Irish, and Benedictine and Franciscan monasteries — and Douai became the chief centre for those who were exiled for the Faith. The University of Douai may be said to date from 31 July, 1559, when Philip II of Spain (in whose dominions it was then situated) obtained a Bull from Pope Paul IV, authorizing its establishment the avowed object being the preservation of the purity of the Catholic Faith from the errors of the Reformation. Paul IV died before he had promulgated the Bull, which was, however, confirmed by his successor, Pius IV, 6 January, 1560. The letters patent of Philip II, dated 19 January, 1561, authorized the establishment of a university with five faculties; theology, canon law, civil law, medicine, and arts. The formal inauguration took place 5 October, 1562, when there was a public procession of the Blessed Sacrament, and a sermon was preached in the market-place by the Bishop of Arras.

There were already a considerable number of English Catholics living at Douai, and their influence made itself felt in the new university. In its early years, several of the chief posts were held by Englishmen, mostly from Oxford. The first chancellor of the university was Dr. Richard Smith, formerly Fellow of Merton and regius professor of divinity at Oxford; the regius professor of canon law at Douai for many years was Dr. Owen Lewis, Fellow of New College, who had held the corresponding post at Oxford; the first principal of Marchiennes College was Richard White, formerly Fellow of New College; while Allen himself, after taking his licentiate at Douai in 1560, became regius professor of divinity. It is reasonable to suppose that many of the traditions of Catholic Oxford were perpetuated at Douai. The university was, however, far from being even predominantly English; it was founded on the model of that of Louvain, from which seat of learning the majority of the first professors were drawn. The two features already mentioned — that the university was founded during the progress of the Reformation, to combat the errors of Protestantism, and that it was to a considerable extent under English influences — explain the fact that William Allen, when seeking a home for a projected English college abroad, turned his eyes towards Douai. . . . His object was to gather some of the numerous body of English Catholics who, having been forced to leave England, were scattered in different countries on the Continent, and to give them facilities for continuing their studies, so that when the time came for the re-establishment of Catholicism, which Allen was always confident could not be far distant, there might be a body of learned clergy ready to return to their country. This was of course a very different thing from sending missionaries over in defiance of the law while England still remained in the hands of the Protestants. This latter plan was an afterthought and a gradual growth from the circumstances in which the college found itself, though eventually it became its chief work. . . .

Please read the rest of the article to see how the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror meant the return of the Catholic scholars, seminarians, and monks to England. The article does not mention the Carthusian house that was also dissolved during the Reign of Terror (perhaps it had few English connections since the English Carthusian exiles were first located in Bruges and finally suppressed in Nieuwpoort by Emperor Joseph II), but the Chartreuse Saints-Joseph-et-Morand is now an art museum.

Martyrs of Douai, pray for us!

Image Credit: the Colleges at Douai (the English College is on the top), Adrien de Montigny (?–1615)[2] - From Les Collèges à Douai of the Album of Duke Charles of Croy. (Public Domain)

Sir Robert Dudley, RIP--and His Second Wife

Sixty-one years and two days after his father, Queen Elizabeth's favorite Robert Dudley, 1st Earl of Leicester died (September 4, 1588), Sir Robert Dudley, his illegitimate son died on September 6, 1649 outside Florence, Italy. His mother, Douglas or Douglass Howard Sheffield Stafford, had supported him with written testimony in a Star Chamber trial early in King James I's reign that she and Robert Dudley had been married before he married Lettice Knollys in 1578, thus claiming that Sir Robert Dudley was Leicester's legitimate heir. The Star Chamber ruled against him and he and Elizabeth Southwell left England for Italy in 1605.

Part of the reason his father's marital issues had been so confusing is that as Elizabeth I's favorite Leicester had feared her anger if he did marry again after Amy Robsart died in 1560, found dead on September 8. He told Douglas that he could not marry her because of this fear, yet he acknowledged their son and Sir Robert was with Leicester at Tilbury preparing for the Spanish Armada to land in 1588 before he died.

Sir Robert's mistress, Elizabeth Southwell disguised herself as a page and they converted to Catholicism, received a dispensation from the Pope and were married; Robert and Elizabeth had thirteen children. Elizabeth died in 1631 after the birth of their last child so Robert survived her for 18 years. They were both interred in San Pancrazio in Florence.

Elizabeth Southwell, a former lady-in-waiting to Elizabeth I, is perhaps more interesting, although Sir Robert was an explorer and writer. Her version of Queen Elizabeth's death has been part of the story of that queen through the centuries, source of the famous line that "must" is not a word to use to princes and other details of her death:

Written or dictated in April 1607 by Elizabeth Southwell (1584–1631), a maid of honor who attended the Queen during her final illness, this detailed account weaves political, medical, magical, and theological observations into a haunting narrative that culminates with the explosion of Elizabeth’s corpse during her wake. Southwell’s manuscript is preserved in the Jesuit Archives in London among the papers of the English Jesuit Robert Persons, who used “the greatest part of the sayd narration, though not all” in a lengthy refutation of the Oath of Allegiance.1 A manuscript copy of Persons’s redaction of Southwell’s manuscript, labeled “strange and incredible particulars,” is transcribed in John Nichols’s Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth, the source from which Southwell was most often cited by twentieth-century historians.

Almost all of Chapter Three (quoted above), "Some Strange Eruption to Our State: Elizabeth Southwell’s Manuscript Account of the Death of Queen Elizabeth" from Catherine Loomis' book The Death of Elizabeth I: Remembering and Reconstructing the Virgin Queen from Palgrave Macmillan may be found in the book preview on Amazon.com (search for Elizabeth Southwell).

Loomis seems to accept most of Elizabeth Southwell's eyewitness account--and she was a cousin of Saint Robert Southwell--but analyses how Father Robert Persons, SJ used it against the memory of Elizabeth I in various ways. She refers to Sir Robert Dudley and Elizabeth Southwell as "recusants" but I think they had acknowledged Elizabeth I's supremacy while in England and probably James I's before they left for Italy and became Catholic.

James I refused to recognize Dudley as Leicester's heir and gave his titles to other courtiers in England; Charles I awarded Dudley's English/Anglican wife the title of Duchess of Dudley in 1644 and recognized Dudley's legitimacy but did not restore his lands or titles. Dudley served Duke Ferdinand of Tuscany as a naval advisor.

Sadly, the church in which Robert and Elizabeth were buried is no longer a church--it's a museum. There a funeral chapel, still consecrated for Catholic worship, inside the museum, but Robert and Elizabeth's tombs are not included in the Rucellai family sepulchre.

"Spanish Elizabethans" in Exile and Their Books

Since I'm reading a book right now about how Catholics in England adapted to their changed lives of worship and community (Lest We be Damned: Practical Innovation & Lived Experience Among Catholics in Protestant England, 1559-1642. Routledge: 2005, by Lisa McClain) seeing this book, Radicals in Exile: English Catholic Books During the Reign of Philip II by Freddy Cristobal Dominguez from Penn State University Press, among some new releases intrigues me.

In discussing the devotional literature written by English Catholics in exile for the recusant Catholics who remained home, McClain makes the point that the exiles often urged the recusants to observe Catholic worship just as they had before the Elizabethan Acts of Settlement and Uniformity. They should still go to Confession frequently, attend Mass on Sunday, etc., even though it was really impossible for them to do so: without priests, churches, parishes, etc. She comments that many of these exiles writing these guides were under the patronage of Tridentine communities and rulers: they were benefiting from the great Counter-Reformation revival in Rome and throughout Catholic Europe: they didn't know or acknowledge that what they were telling the "folks back home" was impossible. She further notes that, beholden to their mentors in exile, it behooved them to support papal or royal opinion on how English Recusant Catholics should be behave. Later Catholic writers, especially Jesuit missionary priests like St. Robert Southwell in A Short Rule to a Good Life, would provide more reasonable and feasible alternatives to the Catholic devotional and Sacramental life that the recusants of England had lost through personal, private, and imaginative means when no priest was available for the Sacraments.

Radicals in Exile explores another aspect of the lives and work of exiled English Catholics, particularly in Spain:

Facing persecution in early modern England, some Catholics chose exile over conformity. Some even cast their lot with foreign monarchs rather than wait for their own rulers to have a change of heart. This book studies the relationship forged by English exiles and Philip II of Spain. It shows how these expatriates, known as the “Spanish Elizabethans,” used the most powerful tools at their disposal—paper, pens, and presses—to incite war against England during the “messianic” phase of Philip’s reign, from the years leading up to the Grand Armada until the king’s death in 1598.

Freddy Cristóbal Domínguez looks at English Catholic propaganda within its international and transnational contexts. He examines a range of long-neglected polemical texts, demonstrating their prominence during an important moment of early modern politico-religious strife and exploring the transnational dynamic of early modern polemics and the flexible rhetorical approaches required by exile. He concludes that while these exiles may have lived on the margins, their books were central to early modern Spanish politics and are key to understanding the broader narrative of the Counter-Reformation.

Deeply researched and highly original, Radicals in Exile makes an important contribution to the study of religious exile in early modern Europe. It will be welcomed by historians of early modern Iberian and English politics and religion as well as scholars of book history.

"Book History" is a still-developing historical research discipline, according to this article in Perspectives on History, the newsmagazine of the American Historical Association:

"Book history" is a long-contested and ever-developing concept. It emerged from two schools of thought, both of which focused on the book in Western culture: 19th-century Anglo-American analytical bibliography, which examined the physical features of books to draw conclusions about their production, and the French scholars of histoire du livre, who in the 1960s began using a socioeconomic lens to study broad trends in publishing, writing, and reading. In 1982, Robert Darnton argued in his influential essay "What Is the History of Books?" that book history is research having to do with any of the stages of a work's life, from author to publisher to printer to bookseller to reader. Since then, scholars have debated how much to focus on the physical characteristics of books versus trends in book markets, authorship, and reading. How large a role content should play in book history has also been contested.

Johns Hopkins University Press publishes a journal titled Book History:

Book History is devoted to every aspect of the history of the book, broadly defined as the history of the creation, dissemination, and reception of script and print. It publishes research on the social, economic, and cultural history of authorship, editing, printing, the book arts, publishing, the book trade, periodicals, newspapers, ephemera, copyright, censorship, literary agents, libraries, literary criticism, canon formation, literacy, literary education, reading habits, and reader response. Book History is the official publication of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing, Inc. (SHARP).

Mary C. Ehrer of Fordham University, for example, has written a couple of books about reading and writing in pre-Reformation England and has inspired other historians to use "bibliography in the service of biography" or of history, political and religious, as demonstrated by a festschrift published by Boydell & Brewer:

Reading, writing, sharing texts, and book ownership in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and how they fostered social and intellectual links and networks between individuals, particularly among women: these are subjects which the pioneering work of Mary C. Erler has done so much to illuminate. The essays here, in this volume in her honour, build on her scholarship, engaging with Professor Erler's characteristic use of bibliography in the service of biography by investigating how the physical object of the book can enlighten our understanding of medieval readers and writers. They analyze, for example, what "reading" means in terms of the act itself (and the accessories, such as bookmarks, that helped to set the stage for reading), whether done aloud or silently, in such different venues as an aristocratic court, bourgeois household, village community, and monastic cloister. They also consider the culture of medieval reading practices, especially those of women, across social classes, and in terms of the transition between the pre- and post-Reformation periods; the fluidity of genre boundaries; and changes in devotional reading and writing in this liminal period. A wide variety of genres are covered, including secular romance, devotional texts, schoolbooks, and the illustrated Old Testament preface to the famous Queen Mary Psalter, which recasts the story and image of ancient Israelites to suit elite readerly taste.

Image Credit (public domain): King Philip II in old age, by Juan Pantoja de la Cruz, 1590–98

The English Reformation in Art and Music

Two packages arrived on Monday: one containing a fine used copy of of Margaret Aston's The King's Bedpost: Reformation and Iconography in a Tudor Group Portrait and the other a newly released CD from Stile Antico, In a Strange Land: Elizabethan Composers in Exile.

I've listened to the CD twice and am still reading the book.

I'm familiar with the stories of most of the composers on the CD (Dowland, Byrd, Dering, Philips, White, and De Monte) and have CDs with some of the same works (Byrd's "Tristitia et anxietas" and his "Quomodo cantabimus", written in response to Philippe de Monte's "Super flumina Babylonis"; Robert White's "Lamentations a 5", etc).

Richard Dering's "Factum est silentium" was an exciting and exuberant discovery:

Factum est silentium in caelo,
Dum committeret bellum draco cum Michaele Archangelo.

Audita est vox millia millium dicentium:
Salus, honor et virtus omnipotenti Deo.
Millia millium minestrabant ei et decies centena millia assistebant ei.
[Alleluia.]

There was silence in heaven
When the dragon fought with the Archangel Michael.

The voice of a thousand thousand was heard saying:
Salvation, honour and power be to almighty God.
A thousand thousand ministered to him and ten hundreds of thousands stood before him.
[Alleluia.]

Here it is sung by the Choir of Clare College! As another record label, Hyperion, describes Dering and this work, which is the Antiphon for the Benedictus canticle during the Lauds of Michaelmas:

Dering was, like Philips, an English Catholic musician who went into exile in the Spanish Netherlands (or, according to another account, converted to Catholicism while visiting Rome in 1612). By 1617 he was organist to the convent of English nuns in Brussels, and in the same year published his first collection of Cantiones Sacrae; the publisher was the noted Phalèse of Antwerp who also published music by Philips. Factum est silentium comes from a second collection which appeared in 1618; its declamatory, dramatic style shows clearly the influence of the new Italian Baroque style which Dering’s compatriots in England were perhaps slower to embrace.

The new work on the CD, a setting of Shakespeare's poem, "The Phoenix and The Turtle", underwhelmed me. The words were lost in the music of Huw Watkins. The liner notes explain that he "portrays the busy hustle and bustle of funeral preparations, before a slower sublime setting of the concluding threnody." "Busy hustle and bustle of funeral preparations"? I don't hear that in the poem's opening:

Let the bird of loudest lay 

On the sole Arabian tree 

Herald sad and trumpet be, 

To whose sound chaste wings obey. 

But thou shrieking harbinger, 

Foul precurrer of the fiend, 

Augur of the fever's end, 

To this troop come thou not near. 

From this session interdict 

Every fowl of tyrant wing, 

Save the eagle, feather'd king; 

Keep the obsequy so strict. 

Let the priest in surplice white, 

That defunctive music can, 

Be the death-divining swan, 

Lest the requiem lack his right. 

And thou treble-dated crow, 

That thy sable gender mak'st 

With the breath thou giv'st and tak'st, 

'Mongst our mourners shalt thou go. . . .

This sounds more directions first for who should not attend the funeral and then who should, not running around making arrangements! The notes do mention the theory that Shakespeare is paying tribute to St. Anne Line and her exiled husband Roger.

More on Aston's study of the meaning and date of "King Edward VI and the Pope" which is in the National Portrait Gallery in London after I've finished reading the book.

Catholic Composers in Exile

Stile Antico has a new CD coming out tomorrow, focusing on the Catholic composers who fled in England and composed sacred and secular works on the Continent:

The regime of Queen Elizabeth I dealt harshly with supporters of the old Catholic religion. Torn between obedience and conscience, some of England’s most talented musicians – Philips, Dering and Dowland – chose a life of exile abroad. Others chose to remain in spiritual isolation in England, comparing themselves to the exiled Israelites in Babylon. Amongst them were Robert White, whose five-part Lamentations are one of the glories of English music of any age, and William Byrd, whose anguished Catholic music is referenced in Shakespeare’s enigmatic poem The Phoenix and the Turtle, vividly set by Huw Watkins especially for Stile Antico, and receiving its first recording here.

The works on the CD are:

John Dowland [1562/1563-1626] Flow, my tears  

William Byrd [1543-1623] Tristitia et anxietas  

Richard Dering [-] Factum est silentium 

John Dowland [1562/1563-1626] In this trembling shadow 

Peter Philips [1560-1628] Gaude Maria virgo 

Philippe de Monte [1521-1603] Super flumina Babylonis 

William Byrd [1543-1623] Quomodo cantabimus  

Peter Philips [1560-1628] Regina cæli lætare  

Huw Watkins [01/01/1976-] The Phoenix and the Turtle  

Robert White [1538-1574] Lamentations 

Other CDs have matched Philippe de Monte and William Byrd's settings of portions of Psalm 136. The inclusion of John Dowland is interesting, because his music was very popular at Elizabeth's Court and even as he travelled in exile--he had converted to Catholicism in Paris while in the service of two English ambassadors in the early 1580's--he wanted a Court position. He wrote to Sir Robert Cecil in 1595 that he had reverted to Anglicanism, according to Peter Warlock's chronology.

I'm not familiar with the work of Huw Watkins, but you can hear an excerpt from his setting of Shakespeare's poem, which some suggest refers to St. Anne Line and her exiled husband Roger Line. Including a new work reflecting on that era reminds me of the ORA project, which started with a commissioned work by Alexander L'Estrange, "Show me, deare Christ", contrasting John Donne, St. Edmund Campion, and St. Robert Southwell.

It makes sense that artists appreciate the struggle of artists against any censorship or oppression, but in the field of English Recusant History, as I've noted before, sympathy for Catholic composers during the English Reformation and after has been clear in the many CD releases.

Thomas Hyde, RIP: Consolation in Exile

According to Emily Tennyson Bradley in the Dictionary of National Biography, Thomas Hide or Hyde was a

Roman catholic exile, born at Newbury, Berkshire, was connected with the family to which Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, belonged [q. v.] He became at the age of thirteen (1537) a scholar of Winchester, and proceeded to New College, Oxford, where he was elected fellow in 1543, and graduated B.A. in October 1545 and M.A. in 1549 (Kirby, Winchester Scholars, p. 121; Oxf. Univ. Reg., Oxf. Hist. Soc., i. 211). He resigned his fellowship at New College in 1550, and in 1551 succeeded Everard as headmaster of Winchester. He was installed a prebendary of Winchester on 23 June 1556 (Le Neve, Fasti, iii. 33). As a fervent catholic, 'very stiff and perverse,' he was forced to resign his offices after Elizabeth's accession, and was ordered to the custody of the lord treasurer by the ecclesiastical commissioners in 1561 (Stype, Annals, ed. 1824, vol. i. pt. i. p.414). He, however, escaped abroad, and lived for some years at Louvain, where he was much esteemed by the other exiles. Cardinal Allen commends his counsel and abilities in a letter dated 1579. He afterwards removed to Douay, where he boarded with a printer's widow. He died there on 9 May 1597, and was buried in the lady chapel of St. James's Church. Pits praises his strict life and conversation, his great gravity and severity, his fierce hatred of vice and heresy.

While at Louvain Hyde published his principal work (Wood credits him with others, but does not name them): 'A Consolatorie Epistle to the Afflicted Catholikes. Being a Dissuasive against frequenting Protestant Churches, and an Exhortation to Suffer with Patience. Set foorth by Thomas Hide, Priest,' Louvain, 1579, 8vo; 2nd edition, with three woodcuts, 1580. A copy of the later edition only is in the British Museum.

[Pits, ed. 1619, p. 795; Wood's Athenæ (Bliss), i. 659; Wood's Fasti, i. 121, 128; Dodd's Church Hist., ed. 1691, i. 250; Gillow's Dict.]

Note the subtitle of Hyde's book: "Being a Dissuasive against frequenting Protestant Churches, and an Exhortation to Suffer with Patience". Hyde is obviously siding with the Jesuit view, espoused by St. Robert Southwell and others, that Catholics should not attend Anglican services for the sake of avoiding the fines imposed by Elizabeth I's government. Church Papists were trying to maintain an outward compromise of conformity. 

This was a contentious issue for Catholics and also for Anglicans: could the Anglican clergy and the authorities trust a Church Papist? To whom would he be loyal: The Pope or the Queen? 

John Fowler, RIP (A Thomas More Connection)

John Fowler was a Catholic printer and scholar who died on February 13, 1579 (new style). According to his entry in the Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900, Volume 20, he was

born at Bristol in 1537, was admitted in 1551 to Winchester School, whence he proceeded to Oxford, and was a fellow of New College in that university from 4 Oct. 1553 to 1559. He was admitted B.A. 23 Feb. 1556–7, and took the degree of M.A. in 1560, though he did not complete it by standing in the comitia. Dr. George Acworth [q. v.], in his reply to Sanders, asserts that Fowler, in the first year of Elizabeth's reign, took the oath renouncing the pope's supremacy, in order that he might retain the valuable living of Wonston, Hampshire, to which he had been instituted (De visibili Romanarchiâ, pp. 33, 34). However this may be, he left England in consequence of the changes of religion soon after the queen's accession and retired to Louvain, where he set up a printing press, which he afterwards removed to Antwerp, and finally to Douay. He printed and published several important works written by the exiled clergy, in support of the catholic cause. Henry Simpson, in his examination at York on 11 Oct. 1571, stated that Fowler printed all the English books at Louvain, written by Harding or others, and that the Duke of Alva's printer in Brussels produced all the Latin works which were written against the doings in England. He added that William Smith, a Welshman, servant to Dr. Harding, commonly brought the books to the press (Cal. of State Papers, Dom. Eliz. 1566–79, p. 365). Wood says ‘he was well skill'd in the Greek and Latin tongues, a tolerable poet and orator, and a theologist not to be contemn'd. So learned he was also in criticisms, and other polite learning, that he might have passed for another Robert or Henry Stephens’ (Athenæ Oxon. ed. Bliss, i. 441). Dr. (afterwards Cardinal) Allen calls him ‘catholicissimus et doctissimus librorum impressor,’ in a letter addressed from Rheims in 1583 to Father Alphonsus Agazzari, rector of the English seminary at Rome, asking his interest in favour of Fowler's brother Henry, then in necessitous circumstances in that city (Records of the English Catholics, ii. 216). Fowler married Alice, daughter of John Harris, formerly secretary to Sir Thomas More, and died at Namur on 13 Feb. 1578–9, being buried near the body of his father-in-law, in the church of St. John the Evangelist (Pits, De Angliæ Scriptoribus, p. 772). His widow lived afterwards at Douay, where she entertained several of the English exiles as boarders (Dodd, Church Hist. i. 532).

In addition to the marital connection to St. Thomas More mentioned above, the Catholic Encyclopedia notes that he edited and published one of St. Thomas More's works:

He seems to have had a press at Antwerp as well as at Louvain, for his Antwerp books range from 1565 to 1575, whereas his Louvain books are dated 1566, 1567 and 1568; while one of his publications, Gregory Martin's "Treatise of Schism" bears the impress, Douay, 1578. More thorough bibliographical research than has yet been made into the output of his presses will probably throw new light upon his activity as a printer. The original works or translations for which he was personally responsible are: "An Oration against the unlawful Insurrections of the Protestants of our time under pretence to reforme Religion" (Antwerp, 1566), translated from the Latin of Peter Frarinus, which provoked a reply from Fulke; "Ex universâ summâ Sacrae Theologiae Doctori os S. Thomae Aquinatis desumptae conclusiones" (Louvain, 1570); "M. Maruli dictorum factorumque memorabilium libri VI" (Antwerp, 1577); "Additiones in Chronica Genebrandi" (1578); "A Psalter for Catholics", a controversial work answered by Sampson; epigrams and verses. The translation of the "Epistle of Orosius" (Antwerp, 1565), ascribed to him by Wood and Pitts, was really made by Richard Shacklock. Pitts also states that he wrote in English a work "Ad Ducissam Feriae confessionis forma", Fowler also edited Sir Thomas More's "Dialogue of Comfort against Tribulation" (Antwerp, 1573).

You may see a copy of that publication here: It sold for $2,250 last year!