This Morning: Sts. Owen and Garnet, SJ on the Son Rise Morning Show

Just a reminder that I'll be on the Son Rise Morning Show at about 7:50 a.m. Eastern/6:50 a.m. Central to continue our series on the 40 Martyrs of England and Wales. Anna Mitchell and I will discuss Saint Nicholas Owen, SJ and Saint Thomas Garnet, SJ.

Please listen live here on the Sacred Heart Radio website; the podcast will be archived here; the segment will be repeated on Friday next week during the EWTN hour of the Son Rise Morning Show (from 6:00 to 7:00 a.m. Eastern/5:00 to 6:00 a.m. Central).

As I commented Friday, Nicholas Owen was the master-engineer and builder of priest-holes or priest-hides (and other hiding places) in recusant Catholic's homes. He worked alone and secretly to construct these hiding places. Many of them have been found, but probably not all: Britain Magazine lists the Top Five.

Father Henry Garnet, SJ, Saint Thomas Garnet's uncle, was also captured on January 23, 1606. He has not been beatified or canonized I presume because of questions about his involvement in the Gunpowder Plot. According to the old Catholic Encyclopedia (1909): 

It is a matter of regret that we have as yet nothing like an authoritative pronouncement from Rome on the subject of Garnet's martyrdom. His name was indeed proposed with that of the other English Martyrs and Confessors in 1874, and his cause was then based upon the testimonies of Bellarmine and the older Catholic writers, which was the correct plea for the proof of Fama Martyrii, then to be demonstrated. But these ancient authorities are not acquainted with Garnet's actual confessions which were not known or published in their time. The consequence was that, as the discussion proceeded, their evidence was found to be inconclusive, and an open verdict was returned; thus his martyrdom was held to be neither proved nor disproved. This of course led to his cause being "put off" (dilatus) for further inquiry, which involves in Rome a delay of many years. 

The Jesuits in Britain offer this biography:

Henry Garnet was born in 1555 in Derbyshire. He travelled to Rome to become a Jesuit in 1575 and after studying and teaching for 11 years, returned as a missionary to England in 1586,a period of extreme danger for Catholics.  Garnet’s brethren were regularly betrayed and arrested, tortured and executed.  Victims included Robert Southwell, with whom Garnet had travelled to England, and William Weston, the only other Jesuit in England at the time of his return.  Garnet thus became superior of the English mission.   He ministered secretly to recusant Catholics, moving from safe house to safe house at great risk, to celebrate the sacraments and the principal liturgical events.  When he became aware of plots against the Crown, he consistently advised against them.  In 1604 he told the authorities of what became known as the Bye Plot, foiled mainly through his intervention.  A year later he became aware of the much more serious Gunpowder Plot through information given under the seal of confession.  Once all the main conspirators had been tried and condemned and therefore unable to given evidence, Garnet, with four companions, was finally captured at Hindlip Hall, Worcestershire.  He was tried and executed in May 1606, despite lack of any evidence that he was a conspirator. 

Father Henry Garnet, SJ was executed by hanging, drawing, and quartering on May 3, 1606. Catholic spectators at his execution regarded him as a martyr. There was a famous relic--lost during the French Revolution--of a bloodstained husk of straw on which some saw Garnet's image. It's depicted on his portrait above.

Preview: Saints Nicholas Owen and Thomas Garnet, SJ

On Monday, September 21, we'll move on in our Son Rise Morning Show series highlighting the 40 Martyrs of England and Wales to the reign of James I of England who succeeded Elizabeth I in 1603. Anna Mitchell and I will discuss Saint Nicholas Owen, the Jesuit lay brother and Saint Thomas Garnet, SJ, two Jesuits who suffered martyrdom in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot.

Catholics in England had hoped for some tolerance and leniency from King James VI of Scotland as he travelled south to take his new throne and crown, uniting the kingdoms of Scotland and England in his personal rule. They were disappointed, however, when he continued to impose the same fines and restrictions on them and some Catholics plotted against the King, his family, and Parliament to murder them, lead an uprising, and place one of James I's daughter on the throne as a figurehead--the Gunpowder Plot, discovered on November 5, 1605. The plotters were either killed as they tried to escape or arrested, tried, and executed for treason, most famous among them, Guy Fawkes, the gunpowder expert.

As a result of this discovered Plot, stricter laws were passed against Catholics and a nation-wide search for Jesuits and other priests began, since the Jesuits were supposed to have contrived in the Plot. Father Henry Garnet, SJ, the uncle of Saint Thomas Garnet, SJ was among those who were executed with the plotters.

Saints Owen and Garnet are among those who were arrested, questioned, and tortured in the wake of the Gunpowder Plot. Saint Nicholas Owen died under torture in the Tower of London on March 22, 1606; Saint Thomas Garnet was hanged, drawn, and quartered on June 23, 1608.

Owen had been captured on January 23, 1606 along with Blessed Edward Oldcorne, Blessed Ralph Ashley, and Father Henry Garnet when they had all finally emerged from their hiding places at Hindlip Hall. The pursuivants who had searched the house for days didn't find them, but the four Jesuits were suffering hunger and thirst. The Jesuits in Britain website notes this about him:

Many of the martyrs of England died very public deaths on the scaffold of Tyburn, but Nicholas died as he had lived; in secret. We have no memorable saying of his to meditate on – his priest holes, which are his wordless prayers, are all that remain. Nicholas in his agonised, furtive death had finished with all concealment and disguises and was welcomed by Campion and all the martyrs into a fellowship where there is no use for human language.

We do, however, have the record of what he said under torture in 1606:

He confesses that he has known and sometimes attended Henry Garnett, the Provincial of the Jesuits for around four years.

He confesses that he was at the house of Thomas Throgmorton called Coughton at the beginning of November last year, when the Lady Digby was there and by the watch that was in town they knew that Robert Catesby, Thomas Percy, and the rest of the gun powder plotters were up in arms.

That on All Saints Day last year, Garnett said Mass at Coughton House, and that at that Mass there were around half a dozen people.

That Henry Garnett was at Henlipp, the house of Thomas Abington some six weeks before he was apprehended and Hall the Jesuit was there about three days before the house of Mr Abington was searched.

That while he was staying with Garnett, he made his fire and served him and that both he and Garnett hid in a secret room below the dining room.

As the Jesuit website notes:

There was no new information in these confessions and the authorities lost patience. The tortures became more violent and on the next day, despite a plate they had fitted around Nicholas to prevent the torture further damaging his pre-existing injuries, Nicholas died, quite literally broken apart by the torture.

The authorities were now in an awkward position. Not only had they been torturing illegally an already injured man, but they had murdered him before extracting a confession. A cover up was swiftly arranged with an inquest returning a verdict of suicide.

The cover up was as bad as the crime and Catholics did not believe that Owen would have committed suicide.

Saint Thomas Garnet was not executed as a direct result of the Gunpowder Plot aftermath, but he was arrested, questioned, and tortured in 1605 by the authorities because he was Father Henry Garnet's nephew. They wanted to know more about Henry Garnet's involvement in the Plot. Thomas Garnet was eventually released and exiled in 1606. The Jesuits in Singapore tell Saint Thomas Garnet's early life story on their website:

St. Thomas Garnet was born in 1574 at Southwark, England as the son of an Oxford don. Because Catholic colleges had been turned over to aggressive Protestants, young Thomas went to the continent in 1593 to attend the newly opened Jesuit college at Saint Omer.

Garnet's father Richard Garnet was at Balliol College at Oxford when restrictions were being placed on any students who seemed to be leaning toward Catholicism. The Catholic Encyclopedia praises him: "and by his constancy gave great edification to the generation of Oxford men which was to produce Campion, Persons and so many other champions of Catholicism." Garnet studied at Saint Omer and returned to England in 1595 only because his ship on the way to Valladolid was diverted to the shores of England by a storm. He and his companions were held by the Archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift, and encouraged to conform to the Church of England. He eventually escaped and returned to the Continent.

Thomas studied for the priesthood at the College at Valladolid in Spain and was ordained in 1599; he returned to England and, as noted above, was caught up in the Gunpowder Plot investigation. When he was exiled in 1606, he and the other priests onboard a ship set for Flanders (Belgium) were warned that they would be executed if they returned to England.

As the College of Saint Alban's in Valladolid describes his last visit to England and his martyrdom:

The following year, however, he returned surreptitiously to England, where he was betrayed for being a priest. In November 1607, he was intensively interrogated for the Protestant Bishop of London by Sir Thomas Wade, the superintendent of the keep and a renowned torturer of priests. However, having refused to answer Wade’s questions nor make the new anti-Catholic oath of loyalty, Father Thomas was moved to the Old Bailey prison.

He refused an opportunity given to him by Catholics to escape, choosing to obey an inner voice that said to him “Noli fuguere”(“Don’t flee”). Condemned for his priesthood, he was stripped, hung, drawn and quartered at the gallows in Tyburn, London on June 23 1608.

Saint Nicholas Owen, pray for us!

Saint Thomas Garnet, pray for us!

"The Lord's Prayer" and Henry the Eighth

There has been quite a lot of confusion about changes to the translation of the Pater Noster in the Roman Rite for the dioceses of Italy. The headlines for the stories usually indicate that Pope Francis has changed the wording of the Lord's Prayer and indignation ensues: "He can't make me change the way I say the Our Father! How dare he? Who does he think he is?".

What's even more confusing is that even excellent clarifications of the matter use English to explain how the Italian bishops have revised the Latin of the Roman Missal into Italian! or how the French bishops did so for their vernacular edition of the Roman Missal!

This past weekend I attended four sessions of the Eighth Day Institute (EDI) Florovsky-Newman Week. Each began with the EDI Convocation including the Nicene Creed (without the filioque), a morning or evening prayer, and the Lord's Prayer. Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox pray together, but not really, because Catholics don't add the Doxology and Protestants and Orthodox don't say exactly the same Doxology!

But as this blog explains, Protestants have different versions of the Lord's Prayer among them too:

Have you ever been a little confused when it comes to saying the Lord’s Prayer in a church service?

I remember when I first visited an evangelical church, that did not have a fixed, liturgical tradition. When it came to reciting the Lord’s Prayer, one group was still saying, “And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us….,” while the other group had finished their, “And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors…,” several seconds earlier. The “debtors” waited patiently until “trespassers,” like me, had finished, before continuing together.

Clarke Morledge goes on to explain why these variations in English Protestant translation exist. Blame it first on Henry VIII:

King Henry VIII, the boisterous regent of England, had broken away from the Pope, regarding the dispute over what Henry considered to be his unlawful marriage. The Catholic leader refused to grant Henry an annulment, so Henry declared himself to be the supreme head of the Church of England. But what would this breakaway church from Rome look like?

What Henry wanted to do was to standardize on a form of Christian instruction and congregational worship in the language of the people, English, and not in Latin, that formed the backbone of the Roman Mass. A standardized form of the Lord’s Prayer in English was part of Henry’s plans, and he enlisted Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, to execute those plans.

Even Henry changes his mind about which version to use, as he adopts some parts of William Tyndale's translation. Henry did not like Tyndale since he opposed Henry's divorce from Katherine of Aragon, but he did consider Tyndale's version of Lord's Prayer had some merit. But Cranmer encouraged him to stick with the first version they'd decided on, according to the blog.

Then King James I creates some more confusion with the Authorized Version:

The story takes an interesting turn from there, during the early 17th century reign of King James. King James agreed upon having a formal revision of the English Bible, what became the so-called “Authorized” King James Version (KJV), in 1611. Here is Matthew 6:9-13 in the KJV:

Our Father which art in heaven, 

Hallowed be thy name.

Thy kingdom come, 

Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread.

And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.

And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil:

For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.

Notice the subtle change that the King James translators did by substituting “debts” for “trespasses,” etc. . . .

So, why did the King James translators change Tyndale’s “trespasses” in Matthew to “debts,” and leave us all befuddled in reciting the Lord’s Prayer for centuries? The King James translators chose the word “debts,” because it was a more literal reading of the original Greek.

We Catholics actually use Henry VIII's translation at Mass today with changes as described in this article from the EWTN Library:

Later, the Catholic Church made slight modifications in the English: "who art" replaced "which art," and "on earth" replaced "in earth." 

At Mass, we add the Doxology after the Priest prays this after we've recited the Our Father:

Deliver us, Lord, we pray, from every evil, graciously grant peace in our days, that, by the help of your mercy, we may be always free from sin and safe from all distress, as we await the blessed hope and the coming of our Saviour, Jesus Christ.

And the congregation replies:

For the kingdom, the power and the glory are yours now and for ever.  

AMEN.

(Except that we don't say Amen until after another prayer! This leads some Catholics when praying the Our Father outside of Mass--during public recitation of the Rosary, for example--to leave the Amen off at the end of the prayer. Usually when they pray the Our Father out loud--at Mass--they don't end the prayer with Amen.)

James I's "Historian Royal", Thomas Dempster, RIP

Thomas Dempster, a Scottish Catholic, sometime seminarian, scholar, exile, antiquarian, lecturer, and even James I's "Historian Royal" for a brief time, died on September 6, 1625. According to his entry in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, he was peripatetic. There is some debate about the year of his birth, either in 1574/5 or 1579; he preferred the latter because it made his academic achievements seem more prodigious!

While he was a serious scholar on many matters, Dempster seems to have exaggerated many details in his own life (including the number of his siblings!). Nevertheless, the sketches of his life in the available on-line materials reflects the travels he undertook, the sponsors and protectors he found as part of the life of a scholar in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. As a Catholic in Scotland or England he had to go into exile to study and teach. Among his patrons are James I of England, Cosimo de Medici of Tuscany, and Pope Urban VIII:

[He] was born at Cliftbog, Aberdeenshire, the son of Thomas Dempster of Muresk, Auchterless and Killesmont, sheriff of Banff and Buchan. According to his own account, he was the twenty-fourth of twenty-nine children, and was early remarkable for precocious talent. He obtained his early education in Aberdeenshire, and at ten entered Pembroke Hall, Cambridge; after a short while he went to Paris, and, driven thence by the plague, to Louvain, whence by order of the pope he was transferred with several other Scottish students to the papal seminary at Rome. Being soon forced by ill health to leave, he went to the English college at Douai, where he remained three years and took his M.A. degree.

While at Douai he wrote a scurrilous attack on Queen Elizabeth, which caused a riot among the English students. But, if his truculent character was thus early displayed, his abilities were no less conspicuous; and, though still in his teens, he became lecturer on the Humanities at Tournai, whence, after but a short stay, he returned to Paris, to take his degree of doctor of canon law, and become regent of the college of Navarre. He soon left Paris for Toulouse, which in turn he was forced to leave owing to the hostility of the city authorities, aroused by his violent assertion of university rights. He was now elected professor of eloquence at the university or academy of Nîmes, but not without a murderous attack upon him by one of the defeated candidates and his supporters, followed by a suit for libel, which, though he ultimately won his case, forced him to leave the town. A short engagement in Spain, as tutor to the son of Marshal de Saint Luc, was terminated by another quarrel; and Dempster now returned to Scotland with the intention of asserting a claim to his father’s estates.

Finding his relatives unsympathetic, and falling into heated controversy with the Presbyterian clergy, he made no long stay, but returned to Paris, where he remained for seven years, becoming professor in several colleges successively. At last, however, his temporary connexion with the collège de Beauvais was ended by a feat of arms which proved him as stout a fighter with his sword as with his pen; and, since his victory was won over officers of the king’s guard, it again became expedient for him to change his place of residence. The dedication of his edition of Rosinus’ Antiquitatum Romanorum corpus absolutissimum to King James I. had won him an invitation to the English court; and in 1615 he went to London. His reception by the king was flattering enough; but his hopes of preferment were dashed by the opposition of the Anglican clergy to the promotion of a papist. He left for Rome, where, after a short imprisonment on suspicion of being a spy, he gained the favour of Pope Paul V., through whose influence with Cosimo II., grand duke of Tuscany, he was appointed to the professorship of the Pandects at Pisa. 

According to Henry Bradley in the Dictionary of National Biography, Cosimo de Medici also sponsored Dempster's great work on the Etruscans:

The duke appointed him professor of civil law in the university of Pisa, with a handsome stipend, and defrayed the expenses of his journey to England for the purpose of bringing home his wife. It appears that on his return he ventured, notwithstanding his recent troubles, to pass through Paris, for Rossi tells the story that his wife, walking through the streets of that city with her shoulders bare, attracted such a crowd of gazers that she and her husband had to take refuge in a house to avoid being crushed to death. In the same year (1616) Dempster made a second visit to London, partly to purchase books which the grand duke authorised him to obtain at his cost for use in the preparation of his great work on ‘Etruria,’ and on 9 Nov. he delivered his inaugural lecture.

Dempster continued to hold the Pisan professorship for three years, during which he completed the ‘Etruria,’ and presented the manuscript to the grand duke.

His marriage caused him some difficulties:

He had married while in London, but ere long had reason to suspect his wife’s relations with a certain Englishman. Violent accusations followed, indignantly repudiated; a diplomatic correspondence ensued, and a demand was made, and supported by the grand duke, for an apology, which the professor refused to make, preferring rather to lose his chair. He now set out once more for Scotland, but was intercepted by the Florentine cardinal Luigi Capponi, who induced him to remain at Bologna as professor of Humanity. This was the most distinguished post in the most famous of continental universities, and Dempster was now at the height of his fame. Though his Roman Antiquities and Scotia illustrior had been placed on the Index pending correction, Pope Urban VIII. made him a knight and gave him a pension. He was not, however, to enjoy his honours long. His wife eloped with a student, and Dempster, pursuing the fugitives in the heat of summer, caught a fever, and died at Bologna on the 6th of September 1625.

Dempster owed his great position in the history of scholarship to his extraordinary memory, and to the versatility which made him equally at home in philology, criticism, law, biography and history. His style is, however, often barbarous; and the obvious defects of his works are due to his restlessness and impetuosity, and to a patriotic and personal vanity which led him in Scottish questions into absurd exaggerations, and in matters affecting his own life into an incurable habit of romancing. The best known of his works is the Historia ecclesiastica gentis Scotorum (Bologna, 1627). In this book he tries to prove that Bernard (Sapiens), Alcuin, Boniface and Joannes Scotus Erigena were all Scots, and even Boadicea becomes a Scottish author. This criticism is not applicable to his works on antiquarian subjects, and his edition of Benedetto Accolti’s De bello a Christianis contra barbaros (1623) has great merits.

Author Ingrid D. Rowland mentions Dempster in the context of the fraudulent representation of some Etruscan documents in her book The Scarith of Scornello: A Tale of Renaissance Forgery:

A precocious teenager, bored with life at his family’s Tuscan villa Scornello, Curzio Inghirami staged perhaps the most outlandish prank of the seventeenth century. Born in the age of Galileo to an illustrious family with ties to the Medici, and thus an educated and privileged young man, Curzio concocted a wild scheme that would in the end catch the attention of the Vatican and scandalize all of Rome.

As recounted here with relish by Ingrid D. Rowland, Curzio preyed on the Italian fixation with ancestry to forge an array of ancient Latin and Etruscan documents. For authenticity’s sake, he stashed the counterfeit treasure in scarith (capsules made of hair and mud) near Scornello. To the seventeenth-century Tuscans who were so eager to establish proof of their heritage and history, the scarith symbolized a link to the prestigious culture of their past. But because none of these proud Italians could actually read the ancient Etruscan language, they couldn’t know for certain that the documents were frauds. The Scarith of Scornello traces the career of this young scam artist whose "discoveries" reached the Vatican shortly after Galileo was condemned by the Inquisition, inspiring participants on both sides of the affair to clash again—this time over Etruscan history.

An expert on the Italian Renaissance and one of only a few people in the world to work with the Etruscan language, Rowland writes a tale so enchanting it seems it could only be fiction. In her investigation of this seventeenth-century caper, Rowland will captivate readers with her sense of humor and obvious delight in Curzio’s far-reaching prank. And even long after the inauthenticity of Curzio’s creation had been established, this practical joke endured: the scarith were stolen in the 1980s by a thief who mistook them for the real thing.

Rowland almost makes it seem that Dempster's work on the Etruscans was as fraudulent as Curzio's!

Why Was England So Slow to Embrace Religious Toleration?

When Hilaire Belloc described the goals of Cardinal Richelieu to make his king and his nation strong, secure, and united, he cited Richelieu's view that a country could be divided in religion and still maintain unity. Both Catholics and Protestants in France could be loyal subjects and participate in the governance and the community of the kingdom. Richelieu wanted to reduce the power of some Huguenot leaders, because his young king--remember that Henry IV was assassinated while Louis XIII was a child--was in danger of a permanent loss of power:

He had noticed how during his own youth the great nobles and especially the great Protestant nobles were black- mailing and weakening the Crown, after the assassination of Henry IV. The worst culprit was old Sully, who went off with enormous loot as the fruit of threats to aid civil war against the Queen Regent. The King, the heir of Henry IV, was only a boy, under the title of Louis XIII; until he should be of age his mother, Marie de Medici, a violent but unpractical woman, was left in control. The result was that the rich could do pretty well what they liked. The Protestant nobles and the large Protestant middle class of the towns took full advantage of this position. It will be remembered that Henry IV, by the Edict of Nantes, had allowed them to hold a number of strong walled cities and to govern them as a sort of State within the State, and had also permitted them to call national assemblies of their faction, which were a perpetual menace to the central power of the King. Richelieu saw that the first thing to be done if the Crown was to be saved, its power increased and thereby the whole nation consolidated, was to take away these dangerous special favours, and treat the Huguenots like everybody else. He was determined when he came to power that there should no longer be a realm within the realm, and a rival power strong enough to threaten the monarchy. 

But by so much as he was determined upon this was he also determined upon the fullest toleration for Calvinism. Richelieu was the first of that long line of public men from his day to ours to treat religious difference as a private matter, and to believe that one can have a united country without unity of religion. James I of England, as we have seen, had some such idea at the back of his head; but he never really put it into practice, for the hatred and fear of the Catholic Church of the great land-owners his subjects, whose fortunes had come from the loot of the Church, was too strong for him. And what is more, the great landowners proved in the long run too strong for the English Crown, and destroyed it, substituting their own two assemblies, the House of Commons and the House of Lords, known as "Parliament," for the old popular kingship of England. Richelieu saw the menace, though it had not fully developed in his own time, and he was determined that France should follow the opposite course. It is therefore due to him not only that France became politically united as a strong monarchy, but also that the peasantry won the long battle with the noble classes and became the main owners of the soil of France; whereas in England the noble classes, that is the squires, ate up the peasantry and became the main owners of the soil themselves.

Even after he had destroyed the Huguenot power center and completed the siege of La Rochelle, for example, Richelieu maintained the Edict of Nantes:

All the more was Calvinism tolerated as a religion. In that very lifetime which saw priests butchered in England after the cruel fashion for which the Puritans were openly responsible during their period of power, Calvinism in Catholic France was perfectly free. It had no martyrs and suffered no persecution. 

And Huguenots could be doctors, lawyers, own property, travel freely, visit Paris, etc--while Catholics in England had many restrictions against them and had to pay crippling fines.

Of course, Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, but nevertheless, the French monarchy had adopted religious tolerance as an acceptable administrative policy within his kingdom and both Catholics and Protestants were trusted--as much as a monarch ever trusts his subjects' loyalty--to be loyal subjects. But in England at the same time, Catholics were not trusted as loyal subjects because of their faith. The English monarchy presumed that any Catholic, unless he denied his religious allegiance to the Pope (abjured his faith and was no longer a Catholic) was a traitor or an imminently potential traitor, plotting or liable to plotting against the king.

Why did France progress for a generation at least into a more modern, tolerant view of religion in their country than England did?

Belloc would say it was because the land-owning nobility and upper class  in England, exemplified by the Cecils (father and son), would not permit the monarch to adopt even so much toleration as to allow Catholics to attend the Mass freely. James I promised a measure of toleration to Catholics at Court when he wanted to marry his son Charles to Catholic princesses of Spain and France, but the promises were never completely kept. He still enforced his Oath of Allegiance, had the recusancy fines levied, and restricted Catholics from taking full part in English society.

I'd suggest that the English monarchy was stuck on the issue of the papacy and never could separate the religious and regal aspects of the papal office at the time. The pope was a monarch as well as the Vicar of Christ. James I could not accept Catholic loyalty to the pope and even would have limited the spiritual authority of the papacy if Catholics had accepted the Oath of Allegiance. English leadership could not imagine a nation in which subjects or citizens would not be Protestant. What a lack of progress, a complete denial of the Whig view of British history--and they wouldn't catch up until 1829!

Belloc and Mary Ward

Anna Mitchell and I will talk about what Hilaire Belloc wrote about James I and Ferdinand II on the Son Rise Morning Show this morning about 7:50 a.m. Eastern/6:50 a.m. Central. 

Whenever I find a Doubleday Image Book (unless I already have a copy of the particular title) I buy it. It's so wonderful to see the list of books published at the back and to read the clear typeface Doubleday used for these inexpensive paperbacks! It'd be great to find a copy of Belloc's Characters with that elegant script title!

By the way, in case you missed it, here's my latest blog post at the National Catholic Register, describing Pope Benedict XVI's personal connection with and great appreciation of Venerable Mary Ward, founder, educator, and recusant Catholic!

Belloc on King James I of England and Emperor Ferdinand II

It's time again to remind you that I'll be on the Son Rise Morning Show tomorrow with Anna Mitchell to continue our discussion of chapters in Hilaire Belloc's Characters of the Reformation. Tomorrow: James I of England and Ferdinand II, Holy Roman Emperor. Listen live here tomorrow a little after 6:45 a.m. Central/7:45 a.m. Eastern.

At the beginning of the chapter on James I, Belloc states:

James I of England struck at the beginning of the seventeenth century the note which was henceforward to affect all modern life so profoundly. That note was the independence of nations — as lay societies — from the moral judgment of the Church. Henry IV of France, his con- temporary, was the symbol (as we saw in the last chapter) of the fact that the Reformation would not be successful in its attempt to overwhelm our civilization. In France, after a furious struggle in which the leaders of the nation had half of them gone Protestant and engaged in fierce civil wars against the other half, the nation as a whole had come down on the right side of the hedge, mainly through the energy of the city of Paris. But in France also the new nationalist spirit was rising, and we shall see later what a height it reached under Louis XIV, Henry IV's grandson, before the end of the century. 

James I of England stands for that nationalist principle which, in the succeeding three hundred years, completely conquered. 

Today, everyone, for the moment, accepts the principle that the nation is sovereign and lay, completely independent of every international control. The modern nation gives no obedience to any defined international moral authority — such as had been the Catholic Church with the Papacy for its supreme Judge during all the centuries when our European civilization was being built up. The modern nation is not only completely independent, but admits no religious definition. Any citizen who prefers his allegiance to a religious body to his allegiance to the nation is regarded as a traitor. Religions of all kinds are regarded as the private affair of individuals. When the citizens differ among themselves upon religion it is the duty of the State to keep the peace between them but not to affirm itself the guardian of any one set of doctrines. The sacred thing to which everybody must adhere, the one doctrine against which no one may protest on pain of heresy, is the doctrine of patriotism and the right of the nation to its complete independence. There is, thus, no common law binding all nations.

Belloc calls this "absolute nationalism". He notes that absolute nationalism and the Divine Right of Kings, which James I upheld so resolutely in both religious and secular matters, are the same thing--nothing has any authority over the State.

James I, like Henry VIII and Elizabeth I before him, had an adviser and counselor, who helped him rule England:

James came into England from Scotland with little knowledge of English ways, he talked with so strong a Scottish accent that it was not easy to understand him, and he brought with him a group of Scottish companions highly unpopular in England. It must be remembered that Scotland had been the hereditary enemy of England for centuries, and was still regarded as an alien nation. James depended more and more upon this statesman, Robert Cecil, who not only had the very highest talents as a states- man but was privy to all the secrets of the governing class around the King. He held firmly in hand a universal spy system and was adept, as his father had been, not only at discovering plots against the Crown, but at creating them by the use of secret agents and at nursing and fomenting them when they had started. 

Now it was Robert Cecil's prime object to prevent a Catholic reaction. The whole policy of his family and tradition was the gradual imposition, by force and trickery, of the new religion upon the English people. They had so far succeeded that, when James thus came to the throne in 1603, quite half the English were opposed to their ancient Faith. Most of that half were, no doubt, indifferent to religion, as were many on the other side also; but in 1603 quite half England was, upon the whole, anti-Catholic; and it was Robert Cecil's business to make all England anti-Catholic in time; or, at any rate, if that should be impossible, to make so large a proportion of England anti-Catholic as to render the full return of the Faith out of the question. Whether he invented the Gunpowder Plot or not will always be disputed. There is no positive proof that he did; all that we know for certain is that he knew all about it just after it was started, and nursed it carefully. Gunpowder was then a Government monopoly, and yet the conspirators brought it openly across the Thames in large quantities, and all their movements were known. Cecil exposed the plot just at the right moment to produce the most effect; and it is from that date (1606) that the tide turns and that England tends to become more and more a Protestant country. 

Belloc credits James with the attempt, at least, of maintaining peace, but that his goal to uphold the Divine Right of Kings during his reign has had greater lasting influence:

However, above everything else in the eyes of James I, the complete independence of the English Crown must be preserved. And it could only be preserved by supporting and continuing the Protestant policy of his predecessors. He stood for Divine Right. He watered and nourished that plant until it took firm root, and since his day has spread its doctrines everywhere, so that to-day (under another name) it is quite undisputed— with the consequences which we see around us.

Nationalism is also one of the themes in Belloc's chapter on Ferdinand II, the Holy Roman Emperor, King of Hungary, and King of Bohemia:

The Emperor Ferdinand. II represents in the great religious struggle of the seventeenth century the strength of the Catholic reaction; that is, what is generally called the Counter Reformation. If he had only represented that, however, his partial success and partial failure would be less interesting than they are. He also represents another feature which had come into the struggle and strongly affected it everywhere — Nationalism. 

Everywhere in Christendom the particular interests of princes, cities, districts, nations and even of races or groups of culture, were at issue with the general interests of united Christendom. One main aspect of the Reformation, therefore, is the effort of the religious revolutionaries to assert local independence politically against authorities superior to themselves, and ultimately of course against the supreme moral authority of the Church throughout Europe.

Nevertheless, Ferdinand II, as a devout Catholic, did all he could re restore Catholicism throughout the kingdoms he ruled:

Ferdinand II is a character who, after a hundred years of religious division among Germans, undertakes to re- establish Catholicism everywhere in his dominions from the Alps to the Baltic, and from beyond the Rhine to the frontiers of Poland. He is the character who undertakes, as head of the German states, Emperor over them all, and individually the possessor of the largest amount of land as a private prince, to undo what the Reformation had done in nearly the whole of north Germany, and partly in the centre of Germany. 

Had Ferdinand II triumphed the old religion would probably have been re-established not only in Germany, but, sooner or later, in most of Europe. Nothing would have remained of the religious revolution save the small populations of Scandinavia, of England and of Scotland, and no one can say how long these remnants could have stayed out ; for there was a considerable Catholic minority in Scotland and in Scandinavia, and a very large one in England, as late as the beginning of Ferdinand's effort, that is from 1620-30. Even if England, Scotland and Scandinavia had remained strongly independent Protestant Governments, they would have counted little compared with the vastly greater numbers and wealth of the German Empire, France, Spain, Italy, Hungary, and Poland. The Protestants all put together would not have commanded one tenth of the men and money commanded by the Catholics, had Ferdinand succeeded in establishing a United Catholic German Empire. 

But in his effort to restore Catholicism universally, on the Continent at least, Ferdinand II was also considering the power of his hereditary house, the house of Hapsburg; and it was this duality of aim which was at bottom the cause of his partial failure. 

Catholic France, France under King Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu, saw that if Ferdinand II succeeded in his aims, French power would be threatened. So the French joined forces with the Protestants in the Thirty Years War.

Belloc admires Ferdinand, saying that he had:

the highest courage and the fullest tenacity of purpose but also the greatest devotion to religion and the finest personal character. He had, besides, what is of supreme value in governing men — sympathy with the masses and the humblest of his people. Anyone could approach him at any time. The population of his hereditary dominions was by the time of his death firmly bound to him with the bond of real affection.

But the Thirty Years War devastated Germany, resulted in French hegemony and Europe, and left the Holy Roman Empire as divided between Protestant and Catholic as it was before it began.

Absalom and Prince Henry; David and King James

This new recording by The Sixteen and Harry Christophers includes four versions of "When David Heard that Absalom was Slain" by Thomas Weelkes, Robert Ramsey, Michael East, and Thomas Tomkins. The lyrics:

When David heard that Absalom was slain, 
he went up to his chamber over the gate and wept; 
and thus he said: 

O my son, Absalom, my son, my son, Absalom, 
would God I had died for thee! 
O Absalom, Absalom, my son, O my son.

As the liner notes explain:

The verse in slightly modified form proved irresistible to a generation of English composers, yielding over a dozen settings of "When David heard that Absalom was slain". Scholars have conjectured that such an extraordinary proliferation of pieces was triggered by the death in 1612 of Henry Frederick Stuart, Prince of Wales and heir to his father’s kingdoms. While little direct evidence supports their theory, we know that contemporary authors often described James I as David and that a few, one of the king’s counsellors among them, associated his precocious eldest son with Absalom. Prince Henry was certainly critical of his austere father’s reign and, for a time before his premature death, displayed impressive leadership skills. The many poems and mourning songs written in Henry’s memory, including works by Sir Walter Ralegh, John Donne and Thomas Campion, contain more favourable biblical references to the prince, comparing him, for example, to Abner, the mighty cousin of Saul and eventual ally of David. And yet it is possible that 2 Samuel 18:33, with its unequivocal expression of grief, offered composers a strong rhetorical device to carry their reflections on Henry’s death.

The choral group Gallicantus released a CD of  many other compositions written upon Prince Henry's death:

In 1612, Prince Henry Frederick, son of James I and heir to the thrones of England and Scotland, died from a suspected bout of typhoid fever. His untimely death inspired a massive outpouring of artistic tributes in both verse and music, reflecting the mood of a nation mourning the loss of this popular future king at just 18 years of age. 

Prince Henry was James I's heir, but there was a rivalry between father and son. One reason for Prince Henry's popularity was that he was absolutely Protestant--he would not consider marriage to a Catholic princess; his court at St. James was more chivalrous, highly cultured, and the prince insisted on clean language and attendance at chapel services. The English people had high hopes of King Henry IX as he would reign upon his father's death, but Henry Frederick, the Prince of Wales died of typhoid fever on November 6, 1612. His younger brother Charles, took his place in the line of succession, but his uncertain health led to concerns that the Stuart Dynasty was in danger:

The unexpected death at the age of eighteen of the heir to the thrones of England and Scotland was a major blow to the Stuart dynasty, just as the equally sudden death of the fifteen year old Arthur, Prince of Wales in April 1502 had been to the first of the Tudors, Henry VII. James’s dynastic hopes now rested on the shoulders of a single surviving son, Charles, Duke of York, just as Henry VII’s focus had necessarily shifted to Arthur’s only brother. However, whereas the future Henry VIII had been a robust young man, Charles was a physically poor specimen: his legs and ankles were so weak that as an infant he preferred to crawl, and as a child he had been required to wear specially made reinforced iron boots. His condition was almost certainly hereditary, since his father had not learned to walk until he was five. Many contemporaries clearly expected that Charles, who was not quite eleven when his brother died, would not survive to reach manhood let alone marry and produce heirs of his own. . . .

In the wake of Henry’s death, the Stuart dynasty was faced with the frightening prospect of imminent extinction in the immediate male line. Were James and Charles to die within the next few years, the thrones of England and Scotland would pass to James’s sole surviving daughter Elizabeth, whose marriage at the age of sixteen in February 1613 to the Elector Palatine Frederick V raised the prospect of a foreign succession. . . .

Extinction in the immediate male line was not the only possibility which confronted James in the aftermath of the death of Prince Henry. There was also the possibility that James, who did not enjoy the best of health, would die while Charles was still a minor, necessitating the formation of a regency government.

Alternative history speculations include the conjecture that King Henry IX would have dealt more effectively with Parliament and thus averted the English Civil War.

St. Robert Bellarmine and the Declaration of Independence

Matthew Bunson, formerly editor of OSV's The Catholic Answer Magazine, writes now for EWTN's National Catholic Register. One of his first contributions is this editorial:

On the day that the Continental Congress approved its resolution for independence for the American colonies, July 2, 1776, John Adams wrote Patrick Henry, “The decree is gone forth, and it cannot be recalled, that a more equal liberty than has prevailed in other parts of the earth must be established in America.”

The formal Declaration of Independence that was approved two days later was a masterful statement of the rights of men in an age of royal absolutism.

It also had deep Catholic roots.

At a time when many Americans have lost touch with both the historical and philosophical foundations of the United States, Independence Day — July 4th — is always a good opportunity to reflect on the particular genius of our Founding Founders and the influences that shaped their thought and actions.

But any discussion of genius and influence must include two names, one the author of the Declaration of Independence and the other a doctor of the Church.

Thomas Jefferson is honored rightly as one of the greatest minds in American history, who bequeathed to his country a statement of principles that began the extraordinary experiment of the American republic. It is surprising to learn, then, that a careful study of the Declaration reveals striking parallels between Jefferson’s eloquent appeal to the unalienable rights of men and self-determination and the Church’s teachings on the human person and a properly ordered society. In fact, nearly two centuries before Jefferson, his very same ideas were written by a Counter-Reformation Catholic of equal genius: the Jesuit theologian, saint, cardinal and doctor of the Church Robert Bellarmine (1542-1621).

Bunson then compares Bellarmine's De Laicis on civil government and some passages in the Declaration of Independence and notes that Jefferson indeed know of St. Robert Bellarmine's ideas because he read Patriarcha: The Naturall Power of Kinges Defended Against the Unnatural Liberty of the People, By Arguments, Theological, Rational, Historical and Legall by Robert Filmer, a Protestant theologian defending King James I's idea of the Divine Right of Kings.

Read the rest there.