Stephanie A. Mann's Blog, page 278
April 2, 2013
Making Toleration and "The Glorious Revolution"
From Harvard University Press. Definitely a new view of James II and his efforts to promote the Declaration of Indulgence for religious toleration:
In the reign of James II, minority groups from across the religious spectrum, led by the Quaker William Penn, rallied together under the Catholic King James in an effort to bring religious toleration to England. Known as repealers, these reformers aimed to convince Parliament to repeal laws that penalized worshippers who failed to conform to the doctrines of the Church of England. Although the movement was destroyed by the Glorious Revolution, it profoundly influenced the post-revolutionary settlement, helping to develop the ideals of tolerance that would define the European Enlightenment.
Based on a rich array of newly discovered archival sources, Scott Sowerby’s groundbreaking history rescues the repealers from undeserved obscurity, telling the forgotten story of men and women who stood up for their beliefs at a formative moment in British history. By restoring the repealer movement to its rightful prominence, Making Toleration also overturns traditional interpretations of King James II’s reign and the origins of the Glorious Revolution. Though often depicted as a despot who sought to impose his own Catholic faith on a Protestant people, James is revealed as a man ahead of his time, a king who pressed for religious toleration at the expense of his throne. The Glorious Revolution, Sowerby finds, was not primarily a crisis provoked by political repression. It was, in fact, a conservative counter-revolution against the movement for enlightened reform that James himself encouraged and sustained.
Table of Contents
Note to Readers
Introduction
1. Forming a Movement: James and the Repealers
2. Writing a New Magna Carta: The Ideology of Repeal
3. Fearing the Unknown: Anti-Popery and Its Limits
4. Taking Sides: The Three Questions Survey
5. Seizing Control: The Repealers in the Towns
6. Countering a Movement: The Seven Bishops Trial
7. Dividing a Nation: The Geography of Repeal
8. Dancing in a Ditch: Anti-Popery and the Revolution
9. Enacting Toleration: The Repealers and the Enlightenment
Appendix: A List of Repealer Publications
Abbreviations
Notes
Manuscripts Consulted
Acknowledgments
Index
This book, which I have ordered, should be an excellent rebuttal to works like Michael Barone's tedious and tendentious Our First Revolution, which somehow ignores the anti-Catholic legislation of the Glorious Revolution and the overturning of religious tolerance in Colonial Maryland while claiming that "the Revolutionary settlement was also a step forward for religious liberty". (Barone does add the caveat that the step forward did not include Catholics or Quakers, so it was a tiny step.) You might remember that I've mentioned William Penn's support of James II's toleration before and commented on the limited tolerance granted by the Glorious Revolution's Act of Toleration here.
March 31, 2013
A Recusant Martyr (Blessed John Bretton) and His Widow
According to this tremendous account of his life and death, the layman Blessed John Bretton was executed on April 1, 1598 after years of recuscancy "For words spoken out of Catholic Zeal" "because he was reconciled to the Roman Catholic Church," he "urged others to embrace the same religion" and he "denied the spiritual primacy of the Queen." His wife, Frances, survived him and continued their recusancy. Just some highlights:
John Bretton was executed at York on 1st April 1598 because of his faith, the culmination of many, many years of courage and steadfastness in the face of persecution, by both John Bretton and Frances, his wife. . . .
The earliest reference to the Recusancy of John and Frances Bretton occurs in Archbishop Sandys’ List of Yorkshire Recusants returned to the Privy Council in 1577, wherein they are stated to have “no Habilities (Wealth)” “and yet are the most obstinate and perverse”. This list was sent five years after the Earl of Huntingdon had begun his intense investigation and persecution of Catholics in Yorkshire, four years before the passing of the Act 23 Eliz. c1 which made “reconciliation” to the Catholic Church a capital crime. For many years, because of the persecution he was suffering through his Recusancy, John Bretton was forced to flee and hide. Altogether he seems to have been a fugitive from 1577 to 1593, when the Act 35 Eliz. c2 forced all recusants to return home and stay within five miles thereof on pain of the loss of all property. . . .
That the Brettons were regarded as amongst the more notorious recusants is shown by the fact that on 12th February, 1589, within a year of their first conviction, the Exchequer issued a Commission for the assessment and seizure to the use of the Queen of two thirds of their lands and all their goods and chattels in accordance with the Statute of 1586. The Memoranda Roll recording this Commission and the subsequent enquiries gives the text of the patent, signed for the Queen by Burghley, and the names of the Yorkshire Gentry thereby empowered. They included “John, Lord Darcye: Sir Thomas Fairfax: Sir Richard Malliverer: Sir George Savell, and eleven others” In fact only six people, Richard Wortley, William Wentworth, Thomas Wentworth, Robert Bradford, Henry Farrer and Michael Kaie did the work and had produced before them on 8th April 1589, not only details of John Bretton’s property, but also that of forty five other recusants whose names were included in the schedule, including Maud (Matilda) Wentworth, widow, who was Frances’ aunt by marriage and lived over the way at Bretton Hall, and Dorothy Wentworth, the wife of Maud’s son, Matthew, also living there. . . .
Read more here about how Frances struggled without his constancy and loyalty to the Faith:
One might be forgiven for hoping that, having had so much suffering in her life, culminating in her husband’s execution Frances Bretton would now be left in peace - but this was not to be. Within a month the Escheator was on her track. His very presence was proof that the family fortunes were in great jeopardy. In the midst of her grief, therefore she had to remind herself that it now devolved on her alone, as legal owner, to safeguard the livelihood of her children. To whom could she turn for advice ?
Her own kinsfolk, the Wentworths, one of the most powerful families in Yorkshire, doubtless watched events with interest, if not with sympathy. But, with one exception, (Michael of Woolley), all her male relatives appear to have been, at best, "Church Papists". One or two were strong and active supporters of the new religion. Tenacious of this world’s goods they must, as a whole, have been highly impatient with her rigid adherence to Catholic principle. Even her aunt, Maud Wentworth of Bretton Hall, after maintaining her recusancy for many years had, in her old age, publically conformed three years previously and thus preserved her property intact for her son, Matthew.
Although Frances herself finally submitted to the Archbishop of York and was pardoned of her previous recusancy for the sake of her own son, Luke, and his inheritance, she was was soon numberered among the recusants again, and died in the Catholic faith. Blessed John Bretton and Frances also had two other sons, Richard and Matthew, who became Catholic priests!
You can see, on a slide-show, a shrine to Blessed John Bretton on the website of Sts. Peter and Paul Catholic Church in Wakefield.
John Bretton was executed at York on 1st April 1598 because of his faith, the culmination of many, many years of courage and steadfastness in the face of persecution, by both John Bretton and Frances, his wife. . . .
The earliest reference to the Recusancy of John and Frances Bretton occurs in Archbishop Sandys’ List of Yorkshire Recusants returned to the Privy Council in 1577, wherein they are stated to have “no Habilities (Wealth)” “and yet are the most obstinate and perverse”. This list was sent five years after the Earl of Huntingdon had begun his intense investigation and persecution of Catholics in Yorkshire, four years before the passing of the Act 23 Eliz. c1 which made “reconciliation” to the Catholic Church a capital crime. For many years, because of the persecution he was suffering through his Recusancy, John Bretton was forced to flee and hide. Altogether he seems to have been a fugitive from 1577 to 1593, when the Act 35 Eliz. c2 forced all recusants to return home and stay within five miles thereof on pain of the loss of all property. . . .
That the Brettons were regarded as amongst the more notorious recusants is shown by the fact that on 12th February, 1589, within a year of their first conviction, the Exchequer issued a Commission for the assessment and seizure to the use of the Queen of two thirds of their lands and all their goods and chattels in accordance with the Statute of 1586. The Memoranda Roll recording this Commission and the subsequent enquiries gives the text of the patent, signed for the Queen by Burghley, and the names of the Yorkshire Gentry thereby empowered. They included “John, Lord Darcye: Sir Thomas Fairfax: Sir Richard Malliverer: Sir George Savell, and eleven others” In fact only six people, Richard Wortley, William Wentworth, Thomas Wentworth, Robert Bradford, Henry Farrer and Michael Kaie did the work and had produced before them on 8th April 1589, not only details of John Bretton’s property, but also that of forty five other recusants whose names were included in the schedule, including Maud (Matilda) Wentworth, widow, who was Frances’ aunt by marriage and lived over the way at Bretton Hall, and Dorothy Wentworth, the wife of Maud’s son, Matthew, also living there. . . .
Read more here about how Frances struggled without his constancy and loyalty to the Faith:
One might be forgiven for hoping that, having had so much suffering in her life, culminating in her husband’s execution Frances Bretton would now be left in peace - but this was not to be. Within a month the Escheator was on her track. His very presence was proof that the family fortunes were in great jeopardy. In the midst of her grief, therefore she had to remind herself that it now devolved on her alone, as legal owner, to safeguard the livelihood of her children. To whom could she turn for advice ?
Her own kinsfolk, the Wentworths, one of the most powerful families in Yorkshire, doubtless watched events with interest, if not with sympathy. But, with one exception, (Michael of Woolley), all her male relatives appear to have been, at best, "Church Papists". One or two were strong and active supporters of the new religion. Tenacious of this world’s goods they must, as a whole, have been highly impatient with her rigid adherence to Catholic principle. Even her aunt, Maud Wentworth of Bretton Hall, after maintaining her recusancy for many years had, in her old age, publically conformed three years previously and thus preserved her property intact for her son, Matthew.
Although Frances herself finally submitted to the Archbishop of York and was pardoned of her previous recusancy for the sake of her own son, Luke, and his inheritance, she was was soon numberered among the recusants again, and died in the Catholic faith. Blessed John Bretton and Frances also had two other sons, Richard and Matthew, who became Catholic priests!
You can see, on a slide-show, a shrine to Blessed John Bretton on the website of Sts. Peter and Paul Catholic Church in Wakefield.
March 30, 2013
John Donne and The Resurrection; Anne Hyde and Her Conversion
Last year, I posted on the death of John Donne, the Dean of St. Paul's, poet, pamphleter, Anglican preacher and former Catholic: Find that post here. For Easter Sunday this year, here is his Resurrection poem from the Holy Sonnets:Moist with one drop of Thy blood, my dry soul
Shall--though she now be in extreme degree
Too stony hard, and yet too fleshly--be
Freed by that drop, from being starved, hard or foul,
And life by this death abled shall control
Death, whom Thy death slew ; nor shall to me
Fear of first or last death bring misery,
If in thy life-book my name thou enroll.
Flesh in that long sleep is not putrified,
But made that there, of which, and for which it was;
Nor can by other means be glorified.
May then sin's sleep and death soon from me pass,
That waked from both, I again risen may
Salute the last and everlasting day.
More on Donne here.
March 31 is also the anniversary of Anne Hyde's death in 1671--the Duchess of York, mother of two queens, Mary II and Anne, she had become Catholic (secretly) soon after the Restoration in 1660. Her conversion to Catholicism influenced her husband, James, the Duke of York and later King James II and VII, to become a Catholic himself. The great compendium of English Catholic spiritual writing, Firmly I Believe and Truly, contains this account of her conversion!
Happy Easter
Christ is Risen!
Truly, He is Risen!
Or, in Charles Wesley's words:
Christ the Lord is risen today, Alleluia!
Earth and heaven in chorus say, Alleluia!
Raise your joys and triumphs high, Alleluia!
Sing, ye heavens, and earth reply, Alleluia!
Love's redeeming work is done, Alleluia!
Fought the fight, the battle won, Alleluia!
Death in vain forbids him rise, Alleluia!
Christ has opened paradise, Alleluia!
Lives again our glorious King, Alleluia!
Where, O death, is now thy sting? Alleluia!
Once he died our souls to save, Alleluia!
Where's thy victory, boasting grave? Alleluia!
Soar we now where Christ has led, Alleluia!
Following our exalted Head, Alleluia!
Made like him, like him we rise, Alleluia!
Ours the cross, the grave, the skies, Alleluia!
Hail the Lord of earth and heaven, Alleluia!
Praise to thee by both be given, Alleluia!
Thee we greet triumphant now, Alleluia!
Hail the Resurrection, thou, Alleluia!
King of glory, soul of bliss, Alleluia!
Everlasting life is this, Alleluia!
Thee to know, thy power to prove, Alleluia!
Thus to sing, and thus to love, Alleluia!
March 26, 2013
Holy Week and the Ordinariate
I interrupt my self-imposed absence from blogging during Holy Week because I want to comment briefly on the most providentially serendipitous historical context of the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham's Holy Week in London. Taking over Our Lady of the Assumption and Saint Gregory on Warwick Street, the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham this Lent, began Holy Week services in the Anglican Use, of course, with Palm Sunday. But it is the homily of Monsignor Keith Newton for the Chrism Mass that I draw your attention to, as he begins with a quotation from Blessed John Henry Newman, citing a letter Newman wrote to A.J. Hammer in 1845: "To my mind the overbearingly convincing proof is this--were St Athanasius or St Ambrose in London now, they would go to worship, not at St Paul’s Cathedral, but to Warwick Street".
You might remember that Newman later recalled in the Apologia pro vita sua: "I had once been into Warwick Street Chapel, with my father, who, I believe, wanted to hear some piece of music; all that I bore away from it was the recollection of a pulpit and a preacher, and a boy swinging a censer."
March 25, 2013
Holy Week Break
I'm taking a break the rest of this week to observe Holy Week and the Triduum.I'll be back during the Easter Octave!God bless you all.
March 24, 2013
A Winchester Martyr on Lady Day
Blessed James Bird or Byrd or Beard was hung, drawn, and quartered for the crime of converting to Catholicism and denying the ecclesial supremacy of Elizabeth I on March 25 in 1593--when he was about 19 years old. He was born and he died in Winchester.
He had traveled to Reims in France after his conversion in his 19th year to attend the seminary but had decided that he didn't have a vocation to the priesthood after all. Returning to England, the authorities suspected what he'd been up to and presented him with the Oath of Supremacy (which by statute requiring certain officials to take the oath, he would normally not have been ask to do). When he refused to take the Oath or even attend an Anglican service--even after his father begged him to--he was condemed to death.
This blog tells a rather charming--or horrible--story of his father seeing his head still on the pole upon the gates of Winchester:
BORN at Winchester of a gentleman's family and brought up a Protestant, he became a Catholic and went to study at Rheims. On his return he was apprehended and charged with being reconciled to the Roman Church, and maintaining the Pope under Christ to be the Head of the Church. Brought to the bar he acknowledged the indictment and received sentence of death as for high treason, though both life and liberty were offered him if he would but once go to the Protestant Church. When his father solicited him to save his life by complying, he modestly answered that, as he had always been obedient to him, so he would obey him now could he do so without offending God-After a long imprisonment he was hanged and quartered at Winchester, March 25, 1593. He suffered with wonderful constancy and cheerfulness, being but nineteen years old. His head was set upon a pole upon one of the gates of the city. His father one day passing by thought that the head bowing down made him a reverence, and cried out: "Oh, Jemmy my son, ever obedient in life, even when dead thou payest reverence to thy father. How far from thy heart was all treason or other wickedness."
He was beatified in 1929 by Pope Pius XI.
He had traveled to Reims in France after his conversion in his 19th year to attend the seminary but had decided that he didn't have a vocation to the priesthood after all. Returning to England, the authorities suspected what he'd been up to and presented him with the Oath of Supremacy (which by statute requiring certain officials to take the oath, he would normally not have been ask to do). When he refused to take the Oath or even attend an Anglican service--even after his father begged him to--he was condemed to death.
This blog tells a rather charming--or horrible--story of his father seeing his head still on the pole upon the gates of Winchester:
BORN at Winchester of a gentleman's family and brought up a Protestant, he became a Catholic and went to study at Rheims. On his return he was apprehended and charged with being reconciled to the Roman Church, and maintaining the Pope under Christ to be the Head of the Church. Brought to the bar he acknowledged the indictment and received sentence of death as for high treason, though both life and liberty were offered him if he would but once go to the Protestant Church. When his father solicited him to save his life by complying, he modestly answered that, as he had always been obedient to him, so he would obey him now could he do so without offending God-After a long imprisonment he was hanged and quartered at Winchester, March 25, 1593. He suffered with wonderful constancy and cheerfulness, being but nineteen years old. His head was set upon a pole upon one of the gates of the city. His father one day passing by thought that the head bowing down made him a reverence, and cried out: "Oh, Jemmy my son, ever obedient in life, even when dead thou payest reverence to thy father. How far from thy heart was all treason or other wickedness."
He was beatified in 1929 by Pope Pius XI.
St. Margaret Clitherow and Holy Week
I'll be on the Son Rise Morning Show this morning at 7:45 a.m. Eastern and 6:45 a.m. Central (etc) to discuss St. Margaret Clitherow, who was crushed to death on March 25, 1586 at the age of 30. Brian Patrick and I will also discuss the liturgical celebration of Holy Week before and after the English Reformation. You can listen live here--otherwise tune in on your local EWTN affiliate radio station!Remember that St. Margaret Clitherow was a convert--when she was 18 years old--and since she was born just two years before Queen Mary I died, she almost certainly had no memory and little knowledge about the processions, rituals and traditions of Holy Week in England before the Reformation under Henry VIII, further advanced by Edward VI and his Protectorate, and briefly restored by Mary. At the beginning of Elizabeth I's reign, and particularly in York, of course, there was a transition period and some Catholic priests continued to celebrate Mass and the Sacraments according to the old ways, but even in York, government pressure to uniformity succeeded in ending those practices.
More about St. Margaret Clitherow from last year here--note that the Latin Mass Society of England and Wales will honor her with a pilgrimage this year on Saturday, May 4 (the Feast of the Martyrs of England and Wales)--and more about the pilgrimage to York I'll lead this September here.
For more information about Holy Week before the English Reformation, please see my posts from last year on the Pray the Mass website: on Palm Sunday and on the Triduum.
Moving the Annunciation
Because today is Fig Monday/Monday of Holy Week, the Feast of the Annunciation of Our Lord has been moved this year to the Monday after the Easter Octave/Divine Mercy Sunday. Nevertheless, this article by Richard Cork in The Wall Street Journal about Jan van Eyck's painting of the Annunciation seems worthy of mention today:Nothing in the Bible story is more astounding than the pivotal instant when, quite suddenly, the Virgin Mary receives an unexpected visitor. Brandishing a resplendent pair of wings, the Angel Gabriel descends from heaven and gives the young woman some shocking news: She will conceive and give birth to Jesus, the Son of God.
In December last year, I posted about the exhibition of works by Van Eyck and others in Rotterdam. Cork concludes his WSJ article with some comments about the presence of this painting in the National Gallery of Art in DC: Nearly five centuries after it was painted, "The Annunciation" became the focus of a battle between the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg and an obsessive American multimillionaire. In June 1930, Hermitage officials were appalled by Stalin's decision to sell key paintings in its collection to wealthy foreign collectors. But Andrew Mellon, the U.S. secretary of the Treasury, bought "The Annunciation" with 20 other Hermitage paintings before locking them away in a basement near his Washington home. And in 1935, after the U.S. government brought tax-evasion charges against him, Mellon suddenly announced that he would found a great gallery in the capital. Richard Cork is the author of The Healing Presence of Art: A History of Western Art in Hospitals from Yale University Press: Between birth and death, many of life's most critical moments occur in hospital, and they deserve to take place in surroundings that match their significance. In this spirit, from the early Renaissance through to the modern period, artists have made immensely powerful work in hospitals across the western world, enhancing the environments where patients and medical staff strive towards better health. Distinguished art historian Richard Cork became fascinated by the extraordinary richness of art produced in hospitals, encompassing work by many of the great masters - Piero della Francesca, Rogier van der Weyden, El Greco, William Hogarth, Jacques-Louis David, Vincent van Gogh, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Fernand Leger, Marc Chagall and Naum Gabo. Cork's brilliant survey discovers the astonishing variety of images found in medical settings, ranging from dramatic confrontations with suffering (Matthias Grunewald at Isenheim) to the most sublime celebrations of heavenly ecstasy (Giovanni Battista Tiepolo in Venice). In the process, he reveals art's prodigious ability to humanize our hospitals, alleviate their clinical bleakness and leave a profound, lasting impression on patients, staff and visitors.
March 23, 2013
More Music for Holy Week
Years and years ago, my husband bought me this CD when he went to a conference in Dallas, Texas. It was released on the L'Oiseau-Lyre label in 1989 and has been rereleased now by ArchivMusic: Barbara Katherine Jones and John Blackley direct Schola Antiqua in this 1985 collection of traditional Music for Holy Week, released as part of the Florilegium series on the L'Oiseau Lyre label.A leader of its time, this recording represents Schola Antiqua's interpretation on the subject of proportional rhythm. Up until the point of this recording, most renderings of the music were based on the principle that all notes were fundamentally of equal length.
Founded in 1972 for the study and performance of chant and early liturgical music, Schola Antiqua's discography also includes Plainsong and Polyphony from Medieval Germany and A Guide to Gregorian Chant. The first hymn on the CD is Venantius Fortunatus's Vexilla Regis:
Vexilla regis prodeunt
Fulget crucis mysterium
Quo carne carnis conditor
Suspensus est patibulo.
Quo vulneratus insuper
Mucrone diro lanceae
Ut nos lavaret crimine
Manavit unda et sanguine.
Impleta sunt quae concinit
David fideli carmine
Dicens In nationibus
Regnavit a ligno Deus.
The disc also contains the Ordinary for Maundy Thursday and Responsories, Antiphons, and the Improperia for Good Friday, concluding with the hymn Crux Fidelis/Pange Lingua, also by Fortunatus.
For years, I have also enjoyed listening to the Choir of King's College, Cambridge CD of Music for Holy Week conducted by Philip Ledger.
Unfortunately, this CD is out of print, but it includes music by Thomas Tallis, John Taverner, and Orlando Gibbons. The cover features a detail of Lamentation by Paul Troger, an Austrian artist who specialized in those Baroque ceiling paintings of apothesis and triumph, especially in monastic buildings and churches throughout Austria (including Melk Abbey). Happy Holy Week: may the celebration of the Lord's Passion and Death deepen our devotion to Our Savior and bless us with His peace and salvation. I'll be taking a break from the blog after the Monday of Holy Week.
