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Notes On Persons's “Memorial for the Reformation Of England” (1596)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 September 2015

T.H Clancy S.J
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Extract

The late Harold Laski, in a letter to O. W. Holmes, characterized Persons’s Jesuit’s Memorial as “the most cold-blooded plot for exterminating opponents known outside St. Bartholomew.” On the face of it, this tends to confirm the suspicion which was expressed by Holmes in this very correspondence, and which reviewers have voiced since the letters were published, that Laski often wrote about books of which he had a very imperfect knowledge. And yet there is a sense in which the Jesuit’s Memorial is cold blooded, iust as the whole Counter-Reformation was in a certain sense cold-blooded. Whenever the Church is faced with a new challenge she must tighten up her lines of discipline and ruthlessly prune certain: venerable practices and customs or at least establish an order of priority among them. Many view with distaste the mentality engendered by the Council of Trent. It would be well, however, to try and see what the Counter-Reformation was trying to do before we condemn it. And for a real insight into the Counter Reformation spirit few books can equal the Jesuit’s Memorial.

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Articles
Information
British Catholic History , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , January 1959 , pp. 17 - 34
Copyright
Copyright © Catholic Record Society 1959

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References

1. Letter of Sept. 13, 1922. Holmes-Laski Letters (Cambridge, U.S.A. 1953) p. 53.

2. That had been the object of the Book of Succession published the previous year. On this book see L. Hicks's article in Recusant History IV (1957), pp. 104 ff.Google Scholar

3. Memorial. Preface.

4. Ibid.

5. Memorial. Title page.

6. In his Manifestation of the Great Folly, (1602), p. 56a, Persons said that it was not easy to get hold of a copy “for that no copies are given abroad but only to some few confident friends to have a sight there of and give their judgement of the matter.” He also stresses the point that the Memorial consisted not of decrees but of suggestions for a legislative program, p. III a.

7. Its character might be judged from the last sentence: “As I take the Jesuits to be the very worst of men, so I think the preceeding accounts have proved Father Parsons to be the very worst of Jesuits.”

8. No attempt has been made in these pages to correct Gee's interpretations, or those of the appellants, nor indeed to show that Persons was ahead of or behind his time. I have attempted rather to show that he was of his time.

9. This copy is not paginated. In all references in these notes the part is given in Roman numerals, the chapter in arabic numerals. The reference in parenthesis is to the corresponding page in Gee's edition.

10. There is a Latin Manuscript translation of the Memorial by Richard Walpole at Stonyhurst College, MS A IV, 18, 4. Two short contemporary digests of the original are to be seen in the Public Record Office S.P. 12/261 n. 91, 92. From Persons's letter of the 10th of June, 1601, to the Infanta, it seems that there was a Spanish translation also; Knox, T. F. (ed.) Letters and Memorials of Cardinal Allen, p. 375.Google Scholar

11. Lord, Acton: Lectures on Modern History (London, 1906), p. 108 ff.Google Scholar Note that provisions for social and political reform included in the Memorial are only touched on obliquely in the present paper.

12. Compare the attitude of Ignatius of Loyola as described by Candido, de Dalmases in the review, Christus (Paris) 1958, p. 251.Google Scholar

13. On the primitive church as a commonplace in the religious controversy of the time, see Jedin, H., History of the Council of Trent (Edinburgh, 1957) I, p. 128.Google Scholar

14. Memorial I, 1 (p. 4)Google Scholar.

15. Ibid.

16. Douay's tentative claim to be the first such realization (see Douay Diaries, p. 4) has to be revised in the light of the facts given by Pastor, History of the Popes, Vol. 17 (London, 1929) pp. 211 ff.Google Scholar

17. See the Rheims Annual Report 1579-80 for a glowing account of the situation in England at the entry of the mission from Rome. C.R.S. No. 11, pp. 553-559.

18. Persons's activities on behalf of the seminaries in Spain are summed up in a series of articles by S.J., L. Hicks, Month, 1931.Google Scholar

19. Memorial II, 1 (p. 116)Google Scholar.

20. Memorial I, 9 (p. 93)Google Scholar.

21. Memorial II, 4 (p. 150f).Google Scholar

22. Memorial III, 5 (p. 260f.). The other educational reforms are outlined in II, 4 (pp. 148 ff.).

23. Memorial I, 8 (p. 90f.) Durham, Newcastle, and Richmond are suggested as possible sites.

24. Ibid. Bristol is suggested as a possible archiepiscopal see.

25. Persons came to Oxford in 1563. In 1568 he was enrolled among the number of fellows of Balliol. He left the university in 1573.

26. As a student of medicine. See his memoirs in. C.R.S., No. 2, p. 24.

27. Memorial II, 4 (p. 151).

28. One great advantage of the dictation method was that it left a residue in the form of personal notebooks which, at least for priests who were without a library, was very important. Persons in his Defence of the Censure (1582, p. 2) said that such notebooks were “to learned men … the storehouse of memory.” In Rome he made his own epitome of the Controversies of Bellarmine (C.R.S. No. 2, p. 25). This is probably the same “dictate” that circulated in England (see Persons's Discoverie of J. Nichols at sig. Fiiii 1); and in Rheims (C.R.S. No. II, p. 557).

29. On Padua's leadership in the natural sciences at this time see the article of Randall, J. H. in Journal of the History of Ideas, 1940, pp. 177–206.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

30. Persons was always contemptuous of degrees lightly come by. Clement VIII issued a decree, Sept. 19, 1597, putting restrictions on doctorate-hunting among English priests. On Persons's hand in this decree and contemporary opinion about its aptness, see Fitzherbert Letters, C.R.S. No. 41, index, s.v. “doctorate.”

31. In this, as in many other passages, we see a desire on Persons's part to restore the good name of England. For the low esteem to which England had fallen in France at this time, see Ascoli, G., La Grande Bretagne devant Vopinion francaise, Vol. I (Paris, 1927), pp. 87–224.Google Scholar

32. Memonal II, 1 (p. 117). Maravall, J. treats of the counter-Reformation's faith in education in his La Philosophie Politique Espagnole (Paris, 1955) pp. 36ff.Google Scholar

33. Memorial II, 3 (p. 143 f.).

34. Ibid.

35. Memorial II, 3 (p. 145 f.).

36. Memorial II, 2 (p. 121). The whole paragraph is drawn from this chapter and from the last chapter, III, 5 (p. 259 ff.).

37. These institutions were the distant ancestors of the modern pawnshops. See Encyclopedia Britanica, art. “Pawnbroking”, (14th ed.), Catholic Encyclopedia, art. “Montes Pietatis”.

38. It was a common thing in those times to regard as corporal works of mercy not only the building of schools and churches but also the repair of roads and bridges. See Persons's complete enumeration of these and other good works in chapter 6 of the first part of the Christian Directory (p. 271 in 1650 ed.). The same frame of mind is seen throughout the preface of Fuller's Worthies. He reduces public benefactors to several heads: “them who have been builders of Churches … Free Schools … Bridges … Almshouses …” (pp. 33 f10., of 1662 cd,). See also the complaint of Alderman Pury quoted by Hill, C., Economic Problems of the Church, p. 11.Google Scholar

39. Book 3 of the third Controversia Principalis, Vol. III, pp. 714 ff., of the 1858 Naples edition of the Opera Omnia. The same division is to be seen in the Elizabethan Homilies, table of contents, p. 142 of 1844 Oxford ed.

40. A discovevie of I. Nichols (1581) sig. ciiii 3.

41. Persons never finished this memoir, it was privately printed in Letters and Notices, 1877, where the passage cited is at p. 220.

42. See Helen, C. White, Social Criticism in Popular Religious Literature (New York, 1944 Google Scholar), Chapters 1 and 8.

43. To his examiners), who were evidently anxious to discover something about Persons's political activities, the captured Jesuit, Henry Walpole, could only tell of a man writing begging letters. “Of f. Persons I could never gather any particular matter he went about, but the seminaryes and residences in Spayne … in which matter I know he taketh great paynes writing infinite letters weekly to as many as he dependeth upon for their maintenance.” The English Martyrs, C.R.S. No. 5, p. 296.

44. This is the meaning Persons gives to the term “rents of assize”. Economic historians are not at all sure about the original meaning of the term. See Lipson, E., Economic History of England, London, 1947, Vol. I, p. 95 n. and references there given.Google Scholar

45. See Hay, M. V., The Jesuits and the Popish Plot, p. 208 f.Google Scholar; Clark, G. N., The Latet Stuarts, 2nd ed. p. 54.Google Scholar

46. Dialogue entre le maheustre et le manant (1594). Printed in Vol. III of the 1752 ed. of Satire Menipee. p. 556. Compare Hotman's Franco-Gallia, ch. 16 ol 1574 ed.

47. The whole matter of restitution of church lands is treated in Memorial I, 5 (pp. 49–57)Google Scholar.

48. Memorial I, 5 (p. 55). The Prince and parliament should also approve this redistribution.

49. Memorial I, 6 (pp. 67 ff.).

50. Memorial 1, 5 (p. 57).

51. Ibid. On the religious state as a suitable outlet for younger sons and daughters of the nobility, see III, 3 (p. 228 f.).

52. Memorial I, 5 (p. 56). The revival of the English Benedictines came later. See the 17th century account by Augustine Baker in C.R.S. No. 33, pp. 160 ff.

53. Memorial I, 7 & 11, 7 (p. 74 f.; 187 f.).

54. Memorial I, 10 (p. 102 f).

55. Ibid. (p. 103 f.).

56. Memorial I, 9 (p. 98). This provision probably has some relation to the “Tyburn prophecy” of Gregory Gunnes in 1585. See Newdigate's, C. A. article, Month, July, 1934, PP. 56 ff.Google Scholar

57. Memorial I, 7 (p. 76).

58. See Tanner, J. R., Tudor Constitutional Documents, pp. 360 ff.Google Scholar

59. Memorial II, 2 (p. 133 f.). Compare the ideas of Bellarmine on reform of the episcopacy, outlined in J. Brodrick's biography, I, 448 ff.

60. Memorial II, 2 (pp. 133 ff.).

61. Memorial I, 7 (p. 71).

62. Memorial I, 4 (pp. 32 ff.).

63. Persons was careful to lay down the rules for such a disputation because, as he complained frequently, Protestants, since they had rejected the scholastic method, did not really know how to carry on an argument. See De Persecutione, P. 54 f.

64. Memorial I, 4 (p. 42 f.). The “great oontroversie” was touched off by Jewell's challenge sermon of 1559. A. C. Southern gives a complete list of the numerous books that followed, pp. 60 ff. of his Elizabethan Recusant Prose (1950).

65. Memorial 1, 8 (p. 82). On the counter-Reformation insistence on using art and other exterior aids to devotion see Male, E., L'Art Religieux de la fin du XVle siècle (1951) pp. 9 ff., pp. 21 ff.Google Scholar

66. Memorial I, 4 (p. 42). Even so, Persons's faith in the power of reason was not so great as Campion's, who in 1580 when passing through Geneva, insisted on challenging Theodore Beza to a disputation. See Persons's account in his memoir of Campion, Letter and Notices, Dec. 1877, p. 7.

67. Memorial I, 4 (p. 41).

68. Memoires et Correspondance de Duplessis-Mornay, Paris, 1624. Tome II, pp. 94–99 Google Scholar; Tome V, p. 376.

69. Memorial I, 4 (p. 33). It must be noted, however, that both Persons and Mornay changed their opinions on this question later on.

70. Memorial I, 4 (p. 44).

71. Memorial I, 9 (pp. 98 ff.). Persons had experience of the Inquisition in both Rome and Spain. It was a source of pride to him that he was able to help his countrymen who had fallen foul of that institution. See Manifestation of the Great Folly, p. 50 b., and his declaration of July 19, 1580, in his Letters, C.R.S. No. 39, p. 34.

72. Control over the press would not, of course, be an innovation in England.

73. Memorial I, 4 (p. 40). The refutation of heretics would be left to the scholars who would write in latin.

74. See his letter of 24 August 1583, in C.R.S. No. 39, p. 173.

75. See Ernest, Strathman's article in Joseph Quincy Adams Memorial Studies, Washington, 1948, pp. 665 ff.Google Scholar

76. Letter to Crichton from Seville, 10 May 1596, reprinted in Knox, Letters and Memorials of Cardinal Allen, p. 382. See also C.R.S. 39, 225 f.

77. Memorial II, 4 (p. 150).

78. Letter to Englefield, 10 May 1596, in H. More's, Historia Mtssionis Anglicana, P. 333.