William Harris' "The Hound of Heaven"

The January 2018 issue of the BBC Music Magazine features an article by Paul Spicer, who leads The English Choral Experience (ECE) and its annual week at Dore Abbey. He writes about English choral works which are not often performed and which he believes have not received their due. One of them he mentions is William Harris' setting of Francis Thompson's "The Hound of Heaven" for baritone solo, chorus and orchestra. Harris is best known for "Faire is the Heaven" and "Bring Us, O Lord God". The website for the English Choral Experience promises a link to the article, but I receive a 404 error when I try to access it--perhaps you'll have better luck.

Francis Thompson's "The Hound of Heaven" is a thrilling spiritual poem depicting the soul pursued by God; Thompson published it in 1893; he died in 1907. Harris wrote his work in 1917-1918 and it has not been performed since 1948!

A doctoral student at the University of Iowa wrote his doctoral essay on Harris' choral piece, "The Danger of Disappearing Things": William Henry Harris' "The Hound of Heaven":

The aim of this essay is to provide the context and background necessary for the reader to explore and consider possible answers as to why William Henry Harris’ largest work, The Hound of Heaven, is not nearly as famous as other similarly comparable pieces. Harris is largely remembered for his Anglican church music, particularly his two most popular anthems, Faire is the Heaven and Bring Us, O Lord God. However, in the late 1910s, he composed a large-scale choral-orchestral concert work, adapting Francis Thompson’s epic religious allegory, The Hound of Heaven.

Furthermore, Harris received a significant award designed to help finance the publication of The Hound of Heaven. Beginning in 1917, The Carnegie United Kingdom Trust invited British composers to submit their manuscripts of unpublished large-scale works to a contest called the Carnegie Publication Scheme. The intent of the award was to make newly composed British works available to the public and to enhance the nation’s English music heritage. Harris was among six composers chosen to receive the Carnegie Award in 1919 for his entry The Hound of Heaven.

This essay will briefly explore and detail the life of Harris; the genesis, construction, and performance history of The Hound of Heaven; and the creation of the Trust’s Publication Scheme. Most importantly, this essay will conclude with an exploration into possible reasons why The Hound of Heaven did not enjoy a lasting legacy.

More about William Harris from Naxos, including an album of his Anthems.

Of course, I must comment on Dore Abbey, the former Cistercian house where Paul Spicer holds his week long choral experience. The ECE website notes:

Dore Abbey is located in west Herefordshire in the beautiful Golden Valley just a short distance from the Welsh border. Dating from 1147 it is a former Cistercian abbey that would once have rivalled many cathedrals for size. Sadly, the nave was lost to the Dissolution of the Monastries (sic) but the remainder was restored and has been used as a parish church since the 16th century.

Settled next to the River Dore and in the shadow of the Black Mountains and Offa's Dyke, Dore Abbey is a unique and beautiful place in which to experience beautiful music-making.

Dore Abbey was suppressed in 1537; it was smaller house with a value of 101 pounds. More about Dore Abbey here.

Leonel Power's Ave, Regina Caelorum

In my most recent blog post for The National Catholic Register I continued my series on the Marian Antiphons, the prayers sung at the end of Compline (Night Prayer) in The Liturgy of the Hours. The Ave, Regina Caelorum is chanted or prayed from the Feast of the Presentation (February 2) through the Wednesday evening of Holy Week. I always feature an English composer in my examples of settings for these antiphons, and this time I chose Leonel Power:

The fifteenth century English composer Leonel Power’s Ave, Regina Caelorum is one of only 40 of his works that have survived.

The BBC Music website has more examples of Leonel Power's works here.

According to ArchivMusic:

Power lived and worked in a time of great cross-fertilization and change in European music. While the late fourteenth century had been a period in which French music crossed the channel to Britain, in the first few decades of the fifteenth, English music and musicians were influential on the Continent. Many English musicians are known to have been present among the international convention of the Council of Constance, as well as traveling with their English patrons on campaigns such as Harfleur and Agincourt (or in occupied France afterwards). And Leonel Power was one of the most prominent among them. The important manuscript known as "Old Hall" was probably compiled for the chapel of the Duke of Clarence, but was later associated with the royal chapels of both Henry V and Henry VI (Henry V composed a piece of music within it). Power wrote possibly three times as much music as any other known composer in Old Hall, and his theoretical treatise "on the gamme [gamut, or musical scale]" was also well-known.

More about the Old Hall Manuscript at the British Library here.

Chesterton and Mary, Queen of Scots

Mary, the former Queen of Scotland, was executed on February 8, 1587. Tomorrow night, our Greater Wichita American Chesterton Society local society will meet to discuss two essays by Chesterton from the Ignatius Press edition of Lepanto: one on Cervantes and the other on Mary, Queen of Scots. The second essay is titled "If Don John of Austria Had Married Mary, Queen of Scots".

Chesterton wrote more about Mary of Scotland: in a 1931 book of biographies called Revaluations and in an article in the Illustrated London News about the Casket Letters, those letters that allegedly implicated Mary in the murder of her second husband, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley. The biographical essay is in the volume In Defense of Sanity: The Best Essays of G.K. Chesterton, also from Ignatius Press, edited by Joseph Pearce, Aidan Mackay, and Dale Ahlquist.

In the essay we'll discuss tomorrow, Chesterton picks up on the notion that the hero of Lepanto, Don John of Austria, wanted to rescue Mary, marry her, and restore her to the throne of Scotland--and of course, reign with her there and in England after Elizabeth I died. Chesterton thinks marriage would have been good for both Mary and John and for Scotland, England, Europe, and the Catholic Church:

For Don John: And to the career of Don John it would have given a climax and a clue of meaning which its merely military successes could not give; and handed his name down in history and (what is much more important) in legend and literature, as a happier Antony married to a nobler Cleopatra. And when he looked into her eyes he would not have seen only bright chaos and the catastrophe of Actium, the ruin of his ships and his hopes of an imperial throne; but rather the flying curve and crescent of the Christian ships, sweeping to the rescue of the Christian captives, and blazed upon their golden sails the sunburst of Lepanto. . . . 

For Mary: If ever there was a woman who was manifestly meant, destined, created, and as it were crying aloud to be carried off by Don John of Austria, or some such person, it was Mary Queen of Scots. If ever there was a woman who went to seed for want of meeting any sort of man who was anything like her equal, it was she. . . . She never met a complete man; and Don John was very complete. . . .

For Europe and Christendom: There was a moment when all Christendom might have clustered together and crystallised anew, under the chemistry of the new culture; and yet have remained a Christendom that was entirely Christian. There was a moment when Humanism had the road straight before it; but, what is even more important, the road also straight behind it. It might have been a real progress, not losing anything of what was good in the past. The significance of two people like Mary Stuart and Don John of Austria is that in them Religion and the Renaissance had not quarrelled; and they kept the faith of their fathers while full of the idea of handing on new conquests and discoveries to their sons. They drew their deep instincts from medieval chivalry without refusing to feed their intellects on the sixteenth-century learning; and there was a moment when this spirit might have pervaded the whole world and the whole Church. There was a moment when religion could have digested Plato as it had once digested Aristotle. For that matter, it might have digested all that is soundest in Rabelais and Montaigne and many others; it might have condemned some things in these thinkers; as it did in Aristotle. Only the shock of the new discoveries could have been absorbed (to a great extent indeed it was absorbed) by the central Christian tradition. What darkened that dawn was the dust and smoke from the struggles of the dogmatising sectaries in Scotland, in Holland, and eventually in England. But for that, on the Continent, the heresy of Jansenism had never so much over-shadowed the splendour of the Counter-Reformation. And England would have gone the way of Shakespeare rather than the way of Milton; which latter degenerated rapidly into the way of Muggleton.

If this sounds interesting, and you are in the Wichita area, we will meet on the second floor of Eighth Day Books at 6:30 p.m. tomorrow (February 9) to discuss. Refreshments will be served.

William Byrd and Dmitry Shostakovich

I've often seen the comparison offered between William Byrd in sixteenth century England and Dmitry Shostakovich in 20th century Russia. This article by Jeremy L. Smith in the Winter 2007 issue of Music & Politics describes the situation much more completely:

Was Byrd the Shostakovich of his time? Surely the aptness of this analogy has occurred to others. Few matters in musicology were more widely discussed not too long ago than the premise that Dmitry Shostakovich had a close if, as some fervently argued, essentially dissident relationship with Josef Stalin, the de facto leader of the Soviet Union for nearly a quarter century (c.1929-53).[1] Evidence of a similar political relationship between Byrd and England’s long-reigning ruler Elizabeth I (r.1558-1603) is mainly confined to discussions in the traditional musicological literature. But readers of the widely distributed New York Review of Books have lately been exposed to claims that Byrd’s great contemporary William Shakespeare had strong ties to the Catholic cause during a time when England was under statutory Protestant rule.[2] Thanks to a seminal essay Joseph Kerman had placed in those same pages some time ago—that has now been complemented and furthered by Kerman himself, Philip Brett, David Mateer, Craig Monson, and others—the NYRB audience at least has been alerted to the circumstance that if there were indeed a dissident platform on which Shakespeare stood, Byrd stood alongside him, and on a much surer footing.[3]

Shostakovich won the remunerative Stalin Prize twice (1947 and 1953).[4] He wrote sincerely patriotic music during wartime, praised Stalin's leadership enthusiastically, and offered a musical tribute to the dictator's grandiose but ill-conceived project to halt the desiccating winds from eastern deserts by planting a vast forest belt. He held various positions of leadership in the Soviet system and eventually joined the Communist Party in 1963. Yet he also composed bitterly satirical works, such as his Antiformalisticheskii Rayok, attacking Soviet positions on the arts that he found objectionable. Overall, many feel that at the core of his work, where he could bring to bear a highly developed musical language fraught with “colossal emotional power,” Shostakovich expressed a consistent and profound disaffection for the Stalinist reign, if not for the Soviet system as a whole.

Byrd enjoyed a position of cultural and economic power in his musical world too, thanks to official ties.[5] Notably, he was a leading member of Elizabeth’s prestigious Chapel Royal. Along with his mentor Thomas Tallis, he also held a royal patent for twenty-one years (1575-96) that put him in charge of a monopoly for printed music, printed music paper and music importation. Not surprisingly, Byrd wrote works for the English state and its religion and in these he often evoked Elizabeth herself, as in his “Queenes Alman” for keyboard, his anthem “O Lord, make thy servant Elizabeth our queen,” and two madrigalian settings of “This Sweet and Merry Month of May,” which celebrated “Eliza” as “the queen of second Troy.” No one has detected any irony in these works. Yet there is a larger body of music by Byrd, featuring many settings of sacred texts in Latin, which seems poignantly to betray his ties of allegiance to some of the more militant forces of Catholicism, among them the Jesuit missionary movement that was antithetical to the Elizabethan Settlement.

Please read the rest there.

More Fruits of the EDI Symposium: Against Amazon

One of the themes of the Eighth Day Institute Eighth Annual Symposium, "Friendship in a Fractured Age" last month was that friendship may be impeded, not aided, by our digital communications systems and processes--that was the theme that Ken Myers of Mars Hill discussed in his two talks “Liberalism and the Trivializing of Friendship” and “Social Media and the Commodification of Friendship).

To foster conversation and discussion without those digital aids, the Eighth Day Institute hosts several regular events, including the Hall of Men and the Sisters of Sophia. Tomorrow night, EDI will host the second Round Table--a monthly meeting of members and others talking around a rectangular table at The Ladder. The EDI website explains the format:

Doors open at The Ladder at 6:30 pm on the first Tuesdays of each month. At 6:45 pm., anyone interested in pitching a topic gets thirty seconds to use their rhetorical skills to convince us their proposal deserves discussion. Proposed topics are ranked by secret ballot, tallied in real time, and then taken in sequence, third-ranked, second-ranked, and finally the first-ranked question from the previous meeting, which will have given you some time to ponder and prepare for one of the three topics. Each topic is given about 30 minutes of discussion, with a ten-minute break in between each round.

The pre-selected question for this meeting is provoked by a beautiful little booklet I purchased from Eighth Day Books: Against Amazon: Seven Arguments / One Manifesto: Is there a justifiably moral rationale to boycott Amazon? In other words, are you for or against Amazon and why or why not?

Light hors d'oeuvers will be provided.

As usual, beer and wine will be available on a donation basis.

We're looking forward to room full of ladies and gentlemen engaging in a great ecumenical dialogue of love and truth.

We hope to see you 6:30 pm at The Ladder on Tuesday, February 6!

More about the booklet here (I own #22 out of 1000 in its second edition!) I don't think you'll find it on Amazon!!

It's snowing here in Wichita as I type this so the picture of the front door of Eighth Day Books on a snowy afternoon in March 2015 is most appropriate.

Fruits of the EDI Symposium: The Friendship of Christ

I have read and reread Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson's historical novels of the English Reformation and blogged about them (The King's Achievement, By What Authority, Come Rack! Come Rope!), but this is first of his books of spirituality I have read. The Scepter edition which I bought from Eighth Day Books at the Eighth Day Institute's Eighth Annual Symposium, features a foreword by Ignatius Drostin from the 1991 Thomas More Publishing edition (with a little mistake: The Lord of the World is not an historical fiction novel!).

From the publisher (an excerpt from the book):

It is at once the privilege and the burden of Catholics that they know so much of Jesus Christ. It is their privilege, since an intelligent knowledge of the Person and the attributes and the achievements of Incarnate God is an infinitely greater wisdom than all the rest of the sciences put together.

To have a knowledge of the Creator is incalculably a more noble thing than to have a knowledge of His Creation. Yet it is a burden as well; for the splendour of this knowledge may be so great as to blind us to the value of its details. The blaze of the Divinity to him who sees it may be so bright as to bewilder him with regard to the humanity. The unity of the wood vanishes in the perfection of the trees.

Catholics then, above all others, are prone -- through their very knowledge of the mysteries of faith, through their very apprehension of Jesus Christ as their God, their High Priest, their Victim, their Prophet and their King -- to forget that His delights are to be with the sons of men more than to rule the Seraphim, that, while His Majesty held Him on the throne of His Father, His Love brought Him down on pilgrimage that He might transform His servants into His friends. For example, devout souls often complain of their loneliness on earth. They pray, they frequent the sacraments, they do their utmost to fulfil the Christian precepts; and, when all is done, they find themselves solitary.

There could scarcely be a more evident proof of their failure to understand one at least of the great motives of the Incarnation. They adore Christ as God, they feed on Him in Communion, cleanse themselves in His precious Blood, look to the time when they shall see Him as their Judge; yet of that intimate knowledge of and companionship with Him in which the Divine Friendship consists, they have experienced little or nothing.

They long, they say, for one who can stand by their side and upon their own level, who can not merely remove suffering, but can himself suffer with them, one to whom they can express in silence the thoughts which no speech can utter; and they seem not to understand that this is the very post which Jesus Christ Himself desires to win, that the supreme longing of His Sacred Heart is that He should be admitted, not merely to the throne of the heart or to the tribunal of conscience, but to that inner secret chamber of the soul where a man is most himself, and therefore most utterly alone.

This was a very successful book, based upon sermons preached in Rome in the Church of St. Silvestro-in-Capite, during the year of 1911. Some of them were also preached in the Carmelite Church in Kensington in 1910, and first published in 1912.

The contents:

Part I. Christ in the Interior Soul

I. The Friendship of Christ. [General] Gen. ii: 18
II. The Friendship of Christ. [Interior] Gen. ii: 18
III. The Purgative Way. Psalm l: 4
IV. The Illuminative Way. Psalm xvii: 29

Part II. Christ in the Exterior

V. Christ in the Eucharist. John vi: 35
VI. Christ in the Church. John xv: 5
VII. Christ in the Priest. John i: 17
VIII. Christ in the Saint. Matthew v: 14
IX. Christ in the Sinner. Luke xv: 2
X. Christ in the Average Man. Matthew xxv: 40
XI. Christ in the Sufferer. Colossians i: 24

Part III. Christ in His Historical Life

XII. Christ Our Friend Crucified [The Seven Words]
XIII. Christ Our Friend Vindicated [Easter Day] John xx: 17

Although this is book based on sermons describing crucial progress in the spiritual life, Benson brings many of his talents as a writer of fiction to his examples. He sketches the character and life of men and women wanting to know and love Jesus with as much skill, although on a simpler scale, as he does the men and women of Tudor England. The chapters on the Seven Words of Christ from the Cross and on Easter Day would be perfect reading for Good Friday and Easter Sunday morning, as Benson leads the reader to meditate deeply on the victory of the Cross and Resurrection.

This was, indeed, the perfect book to read the week after a weekend of prayer and consideration of the meaning of friendship in the Christian life. I enjoyed spending several hours each day in the company of good friends, hearing some great speakers, and thinking about how important friendship is in my life. My late parents often said two things about friendship: 1) that your spouse should be your best friend as well as your lover and companion, and 2) that you will have only a few very good friends whom you can count on and who should be able to count on you, and I suppose a third thing, 3) that you have to work on friendship. Monsignor Benson outlines how to work on friendship with Jesus, remembering that even that desire to work on our friendship is a grace that only God can give:

Human friendships usually take their rise in some small external detail. We catch a phrase, we hear an inflection of a voice, we notice the look of the eyes, or a movement in walking; and the tiny experience seems to us like an initiation into a new world. We take the little event as a symbol of a universe that lies behind; we think we have detected a soul exactly suited to our own, a temperament which either from its resemblance to our own, or from a harmonious dissimilarity, is precisely fitted to be our companion. Then the process of friendship begins; we exhibit our own characteristics; we examine his: in point after point we find what we expected to find, and we verify our guesses; and he too, no less, follows the same method, until that point is reached (as it is reached in so many cases, though not, thank God! in all), either in a crisis, or after a trying period, when we discover either that we have been mistaken from the beginning, or that we have deceived the other, or that the process has run its course; the summer is come and gone, and that there are no more fruits to gather on either side.

Now the Divine Friendship -- the consciousness, that is to say, that Christ desires our love and intimacy, and offers His own in return -- usually begins in the same manner. It may be at the reception of some sacrament, such as we have received a thousand times before; or itmay be as we kneel before the Crib at Christmas, or follow our Lord along the Way of the Cross. We have done these things or performed those ceremonies dutifully and lovingly again and again; yet on this sudden day a new experience comes to us. We understand, for example, for the first time that the Holy Child is stretching His arms from the straw, not merely to embrace the world -- that would be little enough! -- but to embrace our own soul in particular. We understand as we watch Jesus, bloodstained and weary, rising from His third fall, that He is asking our own very self in particular to help Him with His burden. The glance of the Divine Eyes meets our own; there passes from Him to us an emotion or a message that we had never before associated with our own relations with Him. The tiny event has happened! He has knocked at our door, and we have opened; He has called and we have answered. Henceforth, we think, He is ours and we are His. Here, at last, we tell ourselves, is the Friend for whom we have been looking so long: here is the Soul that perfectly understands our own; the one Personality which we can safely allow to dominate our own. Jesus Christ has leapt forward two thousand years, and is standing by our side; He has come down from the painting on the wall; He has risen from the straw in the manger -- My Beloved is mine and I am His. . .

II. The Friendship has begun then. Now begins its process.

The essence of a perfect friendship is that each friend reveals himself utterly to the other, flings aside his reserves, and shows himself for what he truly is.

My review is perforce incomplete, because anyone reading the book is led to think of her own progress, or lack thereof, in becoming a true friend of Jesus. Although Monsignor Benson published this more than 100 years ago, his book of sermons convicts the reader today.

How "Crisis inspired Art" during the English Reformation

The English tenor Ian Bostridge reviews Andrew Gant's O Sing Unto The Lord: A History of English Church Music for The New York Review of Books. What caught my eye was, of course, his comments on the English Reformation and the influence of religious change on English Church Music:

Yet while the fifteenth century was in many ways a glorious age for English music and saw individual composers, no longer anonymous, moving for the first time into the limelight, it was the trauma of the English Reformation from the 1530s on that somehow resulted in an outpouring of immortal music that still speaks to us today. The Reformation was, as Gant pithily puts it, siding with a particular revisionist strand of recent historiography, “an insurrection by the government against its own people…with the added complication that the government kept changing sides.” It produced the dissolution of the monasteries, with the attendant destruction of much of the musical fabric of the country, a revolution in but also a prolonged uncertainty about the status of the liturgy, and a devastating loss of existing books and manuscripts comparable in its effects on musical life to that of the iconoclasm of the 1530s and 1540s upon the visual arts.

Crisis inspired art. If the Elizabethan age was the age of Shakespeare, it was also that of Thomas Tallis and William Byrd. The politico-theological ferment that so obviously fed the playwright’s imagination may have, less directly, lent a certain expressive tension to the masses and motets of these two great composers, both royal servants who remained orthodox Catholics in a period of Protestant ascendancy that, for some, amounted to a Protestant terror.

In 1581 the Jesuit missionary Edmund Campion was hanged, drawn, and quartered for treason; a fellow Jesuit, Henry Walpole, wrote a poem in protest, “Why do I Use my Paper, Ink and Pen?” Byrd set it to music. The Recusancy Act of 1593 imposed fines and eventual house arrest on those who failed to attend Anglican worship; between 1592 and 1595 Byrd nonetheless wrote and published his three great settings of the Latin Mass, a service officially outlawed under the new dispensation. Yet Byrd was also, in the midst of all this, a loyal servant of the state: in 1588, after the defeat of the Spanish Armada, Queen Elizabeth had written a poem extolling her triumph, “Look and bow down thine ear, O Lord, from thy bright sphere behold and see thy handmaid and thy handiwork.” Byrd set it to music as part of the victory celebrations.

Please read the rest there.

Gant dedicates four chapters to the period before, during, and after the English Reformation:

4. Keeping Your Head: The Approach of the Reformation, 1509–1547
5. The Children of Henry VIII: Reformation and Counter-Reformation, 1547–1558
6. Church Music and Society in Elizabeth’s England, 1558–1603
7. Plots, Scots, Politics and the Beauty of Holiness, 1603–1645

Lawrence Humphrey, RIP

Lawrence Humphrey died on February 1, 1590. Not Blessed Lawrence Humphrey who was martyred at Winchester in 1591 because while delirious with a fever, he was overheard cursing Elizabeth and proclaiming her a heretic. When he recovered he was charged with treason, even though he could not remember saying what witnesses reported! He was hanged, drawn, and quartered anyway.

This Lawrence Humphrey, president of Magdalen College, Oxford, and dean of first Gloucester and then Winchester cathedrals, had some trouble with Elizabeth I too because he did not want to wear the surplice. As Thompson Cooper describes his career and beliefs in the Dictionary of National Biography:

Throughout his life Humphrey advocated advanced protestant opinions. He consequently obtained from the college on 27 Sept. 1553, soon after the accession of Mary, leave to go abroad, on condition that he should not depart from the realm without the royal license. He went first to Basle, and then to Zurich, and his name is subscribed to a letter from the protestant exiles at the latter place to their brethren at Frankfort, dated 13 Oct. 1554. On 24 Dec. 1554, and again on 15 June 1555, the college authorities gave him a further extension of leave, and at the same time helped him to defray the cost of his studies abroad. While at Zurich he associated with Parkhurst, Jewel, and other protestant exiles, and lodged in the house of Christopher Froschover, the printer (Zurich Letters, i. 11). He highly extols the hospitality and kindness of the magistrates and ministers there. As he continued abroad beyond the time for which leave had been granted, his name fell out of the list of fellows of Magdalen College before the July election in 1556. On 23 April 1558 he was admitted into the English protestant congregation at Geneva (Burn, Livre des Anglois à Genève, p. 11). In June 1559 he was living at Basle.

After the death of Queen Mary he returned to England. During his absence he had corresponded on theological subjects with the divines at Geneva, and brought back with him 'so much of the Calvinian, both in doctrine and discipline, that the best that could be said of him was that he was a moderate and conscientious nonconformist' (Wood, Athenæ Oxon. ed. Bliss, i. 558). In 1560, however, he was appointed regius professor of divinity in the university. In the year following he was a candidate for the presidentship of Magdalen College, and obtained letters of recommendation from Archbishop Parker and Grindal, bishop of London, but the fellows, being 'leavened much with popery,' at first refused to choose him. On 28 Nov. 1561, however, he was, on a second scrutiny, unanimously elected, and took the oaths on 17 Dec. He soon discovered that he had succeeded to 'a post of honour, but of small profit,' and accordingly, in January 1561-2, he unsuccessfully applied to Cecil for a canonry of Christ Church, adducing many instances of such pluralities (Cal. State papers, Dom. 1547-80, pp. 192, 193). He graduated B.D. on 10 June 1562, and was created D.D. on the 13th of the following month (Oxf. Univ. Reg., Oxf. Hist. Soc., i. 218). Taking advantage of the important offices he held, Humphrey 'did not only … stock his College with a generation of Nonconformists, which could not be rooted out in many years after his decease, but sowed also in the Divinity School … seeds of Calvinism, and laboured to create in the younger sort … a strong hatred against the Papists' (Athenæ Oxon. i. 559). His zeal against the Roman catholics gained for him the title of `Papistomastix.'

His anti-Catholic zeal did not prevent him from getting in trouble over his choice in vestments, however, and he was brought before Archbishop Matthew Parker and others at Lambeth, and had to retire from Oxford for awhile because he was so adamant that he would not wear the surplice. But Elizabeth I wanted him to wear the surplice and she used some charm to work him around on that subject:

On the queen visiting the university of Oxford in 1566, she was met near Wolvercot by Humphrey, Godwyn, dean of Christ Church, and other doctors in their scarlet habits. After a Latin oration by Marbeck, the queen said to Humphrey, as he was kissing her hand, `Methinks this gown and habit becomes you very well, and I marvel that you are so straight-laced on this point—but I come not now to chide.' When her majesty entered Christ Church Cathedral, Humphrey was one of the four doctors who held a canopy over her.

Soon after that, he began to wear the surplice!

You might recall that Elizabeth I's visit to Oxford in 1566 was St. Edmund Campion's moment to shine before his sovereign. He was selected to make a welcoming speech for her and impressed Elizabeth and Leicester with his eloquence and learning. Gerard Kilroy, the Campion scholar par excellence, has an article in British Catholic History examining that crucial visit in 1566 from the point of view of those remaining scholars who wanted to welcome Elizabeth and prove that their Catholicism did not prevent them from being good loyal subjects. Here is the abstract:

The Queen's visit to Oxford in 1566 has been viewed largely through the prism of John Nichols’ The Progresses of Queen Elizabeth. This article returns to the manuscript sources, all of which survive. All make the disputations central; all but one were written by Catholics who subsequently suffered for their faith: Thomas Neale, John Bereblock and Miles Windsor. The Queen's visit clearly represented for Catholics in Oxford the last chance to try to win her favour. This article explores the complex tensions that existed in early Elizabethan Oxford: between the Calvinists who dominated Christ Church and Magdalen, and those still committed to the ‘old religion’. It highlights the continuities with pre-Reformation and Marian Oxford, arguing that Sir Thomas Pope [who told St. Thomas More about the time and conditions of his execution] and Sir Thomas White had engaged, with the Owens of Godstow, in a coherent programme to preserve as many of the monastic houses as they could. An exploration of the background of the three main witnesses reveals the presence of a determined Catholic resistance to the Earl of Leicester and his Vice-Chancellor, and the beginnings of alternative centres of learning in an ‘underground’ university of halls, taverns and farms that soon included many of the leading scholars: Thomas Neale, George Etheridge, Edmund Rainolds and John Case. It was while moving along this network that Edmund Campion was captured.

Thomas Neale, for example, Regius Professor of Hebrew, wanted Elizabeth to help fund Hebrew language studies at Oxford. He presented her with a guide to Oxford, including a Latin poem, and an argument for Hebrew studies for understanding the Old Testament. Elizabeth did not endow Hebrew studies at Oxford, and Neale, like other Catholics, left Oxford.

Lawrence Humphrey died in Oxford and is buried in the Chapel of Magdalen College.

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.