The O'Neill Dies in Rome

Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone, "The O'Neill", died on July 20, 1616, in Rome. He is buried in San Pietro in Montorio, famous for Bramante's Il Tempietto. HistoryToday.com provides this background on his conflict with Elizabeth I and his final exile to Rome:

O’Neill surrendered to the English the following year on the day before Queen Elizabeth’s death. He went to London and met the new king, James I who, it seemed for a time, would be more understanding, but after the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 patience with Catholicism ran out and the English regime returned to the whittling away of the O’Neill and O’Donnell estates. Hugh O’Neill hoped to argue his case again in London, but Red Hugh’s successor, his younger brother Rory O’Donnell, Earl of Tyrconnel, decided to get away abroad. O’Neill realized that the English would take this to mean he was plotting another uprising and that he himself would be implicated. He decided he must go too and said a sad farewell to his friends.

O’Neill and O’Donnell and more than ninety followers set sail in a French ship from Rathmullan in Donegal. They landed in Normandy, went on to the Spanish Netherlands and were quickly packed off to Italy, where the pope provided them with a house in Rome paid for by Philip of Spain. Pleas for Spanish help in Ireland were ignored. The English government was surprised and delighted by the departure of the earls, which in the opinion of the attorney-general of Ireland, Sir John Davies, enabled it to complete the work of St Patrick, who ‘did only banish the poisonous worms, but suffered the men full of poison to inhabit the land still.’ O’Donnell soon died, in 1608, and was buried in the church of San Pietro di Montorio. British agents keeping an eye on O’Neill in Rome reported that after a good dinner he liked to talk of the prospect of ‘a good day in Ireland’.

Hugh O’Neill never saw his good day in Ireland. Almost blind in his final years, he died of fever in 1616 in his sixties and was interred beside O’Donnell. The Protestant plantation of Ulster proceeded apace and the flight of the earls would be the first of many departures from Ireland by native Irish over the following centuries.

You can see the marker for his grave on the church's website.

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The Former Bishop of St. Asaph Dies in Rome

Thomas Goldwell, the former Bishop of St. Asaph's in Wales (mostly) died on April 3, 1585 in Rome. He was the last surviving bishop of the Catholic hierarchy of England and had endured many dangers and changes in fortune, because he was true to his Catholic faith from the reign of Henry VIII to the reign of Elizabeth I. He was in exile during the reign of Henry VIII with Reginald Pole and then returned to England during the reign of Mary I before departing again after Elizabeth I's supremacy was legislated. Goldwell traveled with Edmund Campion and Robert Parsons on their mission to England in 1580, intending to return in spite of his age to minister to the Catholic underground. He became ill, however, while still on the Continent and so returned to Rome.

He was a Theatine, having joined the order founded by Gaetano dei Conti di Tiene, Paolo Consiglieri, Bonifacio da Colle, and Giovanni Pietro Carafa, afterwards Pope Paul IV while in exile with Pole, so when he went into exile the last time, he served that order at San Silvestro al Quirinale (pictured). The Catholic Encyclopedia describes his career in Italy:

He then became an active Catholic exile. He started at once for Rome, but was detained at Louvain by sickness. He refused the offer of an Italian bishopric, preferring to devote himself to his order (the Theatines) and to the conversion of England. In 1561 he was made superior of his old convent at Naples, and also warden of the English Hospital at Rome. He was the only English bishop at the Council of Trent, where he was treated with marked respect. He was there engaged in the revision of the Breviary and the Missal; and also urged the council to excommunicate Queen Elizabeth. . . . In 1563 Goldwell was vicar-general to the Archbishop of Milan, St. Charles Borromeo. In 1567 he was made vicar of the cardinal archpriest in the Lateran, and in 1574 the Cardinal Vicar Savelli made him his vicegerent; he thus became, so to speak, the "working" bishop of Rome. . . . One of the last acts of his long and strenuous career was to serve on the Congregation for the Revision of the Roman Martyrology, in 1582. On the death of the Bishop of Lincoln, in 1584, Goldwell became the sole survivor of the ancient English hierarchy. He died the next year, and was buried at St. Sylvester's.

The Bishop of Lincoln who died in 1584 was Thomas Watson. He was 69 years old when he died in captivity at Wisbech Castle on October 15, after spending 25 years in captivity during Elizabeth I's reign, including time in the Tower of London.

The Last Years of the Last Catholic Queen Consort of England

Queen Mary Beatrice of Modena died on May 7, 1718--after living in exile since the "Glorious" Revolution of 1688. She had known great trouble throughout her life after marrying James, the Duke of York. Exiled during the Popish Plot and the Exclusionist Crisis in 1678, she had endured her husband's affairs, including one with Catherine Sedley even as they were in exile. She, like Catherine of Aragon before her, had also experienced several pregnancies that ended in miscarriages, stillbirths, or infant death. Finally, she bore her son James Francis Edward Stuart, and her success led their final exile and fall--or at least, was a contributing cause because the English feared a Catholic heir--so off she and her infant son went to exile in France. Then James II joined her, with his Court in exile, at St. Germain-en-Laye.

She served briefly as her son's regent when James II died in 1701 and would not accede to Scottish demands that her son, James III, renounce Catholicism for the throne of Scotland--but compromised on restrictions of the number of Catholic priests in England and leaving the Church of England intact when he should succeed William of Orange. Perhaps Mary of Modena erred in not allowing the young king to go Scotland in 1702 and she ended her regency when he turned 16.

Mary of Modena remained at St. Germain-en-Laye but also spent time at the Convent of the Visitation nuns at Chaillot in Paris (destroyed, of course). She had wanted to be a nun before her marriage in 1673 and thus her attraction to the convent, where she met the former mistress of Louis XIV, Louise de la Valliere. Her daughter Louisa Maria had been born in France in 1692, but died in 1711 of smallpox--and the loss her daughter, along with the departure of her son after the Treaty of Utrecht removed French support of his claim to the throne, devastated her. She was buried in the Convent of the Visitation and thus her grave has been lost.

The Tablet, perhaps in less bitter days, published this review of Carola Oman's The Saintly Queen Mary of Modena in 1962:

The Queen Consorts of England were for the most part nonentities but two were, and are still, candidates for at least beatification, and for the same reason—the source of their holiness was the Sacrament of Marriage, Catherine of Aragon in defence of the bond, Mary of Modena in devotion to it. To the shame of the nation, each was discarded for opposite reasons, Catherine for failing to provide a male heir (she lost two in infancy) and Mary for, at long last, succeeding—she had four miscarriages and lost three girls and a boy in infancy before the birth of James Francis Edward, on Trinity Sunday, 1688. His survival, against all odds, secured the Catholic Succession and that tipped the scales, already heavily weighted by his father's indiscreet zeal for the Faith. James II had to go. It had been said of his grandfather, Henri IV, that Paris was worth a Mass. History has taken no note of the remark of the Bishop of Rheims, as he watched the exiled James come out of Notre Dame: "There is a good man, he has renounced three Kingdoms for a Mass."

The Death of An Exile

The English Catholic scholar, Father John Pitts, died on October 17, 1616. From the Catholic Encyclopedia:

Born at Alton, Hampshire, 1560; died at Liverdun, Lorraine, 17 Oct., 1616. He was educated at Winchester and New College, Oxford, where he remained, 20 March, 1578-1580. He was admitted to the English College, Rome, 18 Oct., 1581, ordained priest 2 March, 1588, became professor of rhetoric and Greek at the English College, Reims, proceeded M.A. and B.D. at Pont-à-Musson, Lic.D. at Trèves (1592), and D.D. at Ingolstadt (1595). After holding a canonry at Verdun for two years he was appointed confessor and almoner to the Duchess of Cleves, and held this position for twelve years. After her death his former pupil, the Bishop of Toul, appointed him dean of Liverdun. His chief work is the "Relationum Historicarum de rebus Angliæ", of which only one part, "De Illustribus Angliæ Scriptoribus", was published (Paris, 1619). The other sections, "De Regibus Angliæ", "De Episcopis Angliæ", and "De Viris Apostolicis Angliæ", remained in Manuscript at Liverdun. The "De Scriptoribus" is chiefly valuable for the notices of contemporary writers. On other points it must be used with caution, being largely compiled from the uncritical work of Bale. Pitts also published "Tractatus de legibus" (Trier, 1592); "Tractatus de beatitudine' (Ingolstadt, 1595); and "Libri septem de peregrinatione" (Dusseldorf, 1604).

His employer, the Duchess of Cleves, must have been Antonia or Antoinette of Lorraine, the second wife of John William, Duke of Jülich-Cleves-Berg. She was one of the daughters of Charles III, the Duke of Lorraine and Claude of Valois, the second daughter of Henri II and Catherine de Medici.

Father John Pitts shows us another path for Catholic priests in exile from England during the recusant era--he did not return to England as a missionary priest but remained on the Continent. Father Pitts taught other English Catholics in exile as they prepared for ordination, served the French nobility, and wrote scholarly works, some of which were never published.