The English Convents in Exile, 1600–1800

Communities, Culture and Identity

James E. Kelly, Caroline Bowden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317034025
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

In 1598, the first English convent was established in Brussels and was to be followed by a further 21 enclosed convents across Flanders and France with more than 4, 000 women entering them over a 200-year period. In theory they were cut off from the outside world; however, in practice the nuns were not isolated and their contacts and networks spread widely, and their communal culture was sophisticated. Not only were the nuns influenced by continental intellectual culture but they in turn contributed to a developing English Catholic identity moulded by their experience in exile. During this time, these nuns and the Mary Ward sisters found outlets for female expression often unavailable to their secular counterparts, until the French Revolution and its associated violence forced the convents back to England. This interdisciplinary collection demonstrates the cultural importance of the English convents in exile from 1600 to 1800 and is the first collection to focus solely on the English convents.

Part I
Communities

Chapter 1
From Community to Convent: The Collective Spiritual Life of Post-Reformation Englishwomen in Dorothy Arundell’s Biography of John Cornelius

Elizabeth Patton

In the east of England, in the County of Dorchester, there lived a daughter of the Earl of Derby, a widow lady, who had been the wife of John Arundel, commonly called the “Great Arundel.” This gentlewoman, for the sake of retirement, lived in the country. The Lieutenant of the County suspected that she used to receive Catholic priests into her house, for she and all her family were Catholics, and her house was near the sea. He accordingly often sent spies to watch the place, to prowl around the house, and to ferret out its most secret affairs.

(Dorothy Arundell, The Life of Father John Cornelius)¹

The ‘daughter of the Earl Derby’ referred to in this description, which is printed here in English for the first time, is Anne Stanley, Lady Stourton (1548/49–1602), daughter of Edward, 3rd Earl of Derby and widow of Sir John Arundell (1527/30–90) of Lanherne, Cornwall. The text cited above comprises the opening paragraph of The Life of Father John Cornelius by Dorothy Arundell,² daughter of Lady Stourton. This is the only known biography of a priest by an Elizabethan Englishwoman, and although it has been cited frequently by historians of the English mission, Arundell’s work remained in manuscript form and was never printed in its original English; I discuss its complex provenance below.³ In this chapter, I draw on Arundell’s work in conjunction with additional primary and secondary sources to trace her transition from an actively apostolic Catholic community – established by her mother and operating under conditions of secrecy in Post-Reformation England – to a cloistered convent in the heart of Catholic Brussels, the Benedictine Monastery of the Assumption of Our Lady, which she herself took part in establishing.

In the winter of 1590/91, following the death of Sir John Arundell, Lady Stourton relocated with a large group of Catholic family members to her jointure property at Chideock Castle, Dorset, near the south coast of England. Under the leadership of John Cornelius (1554–94), who may have become a Jesuit shortly before his death, the community was active for almost four years, from the winter of 1590/91 until the arrest and execution of Cornelius in the summer of 1594.⁴

The community was under the spiritual direction of Cornelius, who had been educated as a child by the Arundells and later sent by them to Oxford and the English College in Rome. In 1583, he returned to England as an ordained priest and rejoined the Arundell family in London, where Sir John was under house arrest for his opposition to the Elizabethan Settlement. Becoming the family’s confessor and spiritual adviser, Cornelius remained associated with the Arundells in London until Sir John’s death in 1590, after which he relocated with Lady Stourton to Chideock.

Much of our knowledge of the community at Chideock comes from the work of Dorothy Arundell. In her early thirties when the community was established, she had a history of covert resistance to the Elizabethan Settlement both in her native Cornwall and in London, and after Cornelius returned to England in 1583, he became her spiritual director for ten years.⁵ In an associated vow taken at the same time, if not earlier, she promised to join the exiled Bridgettines of Syon Abbey, which her sister Cycyll entered, but in practice, this second vow was deferred until the dispersal of the Chideock community in 1594.⁶ In a final letter from prison shortly before his death, Cornelius urged her to proceed with her plan to enter the Bridgettines and she began preparing for that almost immediately. As I will discuss in the second section of this chapter, soon after her arrival in Brussels in the mid-1590s, Arundell once again came under the spiritual direction of a priest for a brief period prior to carrying out her vow to enter a contemplative Order in the fall of 1598.

Provenance of Arundell’s Life of [Father John] Cornelius

Although the manuscript of Arundell’s Life of Cornelius was long presumed to be held in the Jesuit Archives in Rome, a recent search has determined that it is now missing. The last person to mention consulting it was Richard Challoner (1691–1781), who reported that ‘a copy’ had been sent to him from St Omer, an outline of which he appended to his 1741 biography of Cornelius.⁷ Based on Challoner’s outline, collated with citations from other sources as referenced above, it now appears that Arundell’s work was translated at least twice for publication.⁸ It first appeared in a Spanish publication among similar accounts of the sufferings of English Catholics, the Historia Particular de la Persecucion de Inglaterra, published in 1599 by Diego de Yepes, later bishop of Tarazona.⁹ Over sixty years later, it was translated into Italian by the Jesuit Danielo Bartoli for a chapter on Cornelius in his 1667 history of the English Mission, Dell’istoria della Compagnia di Giesu: L’Inghilterra parte dell’Europa (hereinafter Inghilterra).¹⁰ As this chapter will show, the publications by Yepes and Bartoli appear to be based on separate manuscript accounts of the Life of Cornelius, the first written by Arundell almost immediately after the priest’s execution in 1594, and the second about five years later, after she entered the Brussels Benedictines in 1598.¹¹ Her initial version was translated directly into Spanish in circumstances of some urgency for the Historia Particular, either by Yepes or by his collaborator, Joseph Creswell SJ. The Historia Particular was part of an effort to attract donors for the English colleges and to build sympathy in Spain and the Spanish Low Countries for the large communities of English Catholic exiles now living there, as well as to remind King Philip, in particular, of the importance of persisting in plans for another Armada.¹² Although Arundell was not identified by Yepes as the author of his chapter on Cornelius, and it has not previously been identified with her, I argue here that the intimate knowledge of events in the community at Chideock displayed in the Life of Cornelius, combined with both intertextual and extratextual evidence, serves to identify this person as Arundell.

In contrast to the anonymous chapter on Cornelius in the Historia Particular, Arundell is clearly identified as the author of the second, considerably expanded, account published by Danielo Bartoli in his 1667 Inghilterra, which she is documented as having written after entering a Benedictine convent in Brussels in 1598.¹³ Bartoli identifies Arundell with respect as ‘the historian of her master’s life and death’ and affirms that ‘almost everything’ in his chapter on Cornelius in the Inghilterra comes from Arundell’s writing.¹⁴ His historian’s concern for accuracy is compounded by the need to preserve a clear line of transmission for evidence regarding the possible sainthood of Cornelius, and although he also draws on additional sources that had accumulated in the intervening half-century of assiduous record keeping by Jesuit historians, in certain key passages he clearly strives to transmit her precise wording to the extent possible in translation, helpfully flagging such moments for the reader with variations on the phrase, ‘this is what she herself wrote’.

I have used English translations of these clearly identified passages for my partial reconstruction of Arundell’s lost final manuscript account, collated with direct citations from her work by later historians, who generally regard her biography of Cornelius as ‘the main groundwork of the various histories of this martyr’.¹⁵ Although Bartoli seems not to have regarded the earlier Historia Particular as a significant source, his chapter on Cornelius follows the same narrative sequence as the earlier chapter by Yepes but considerably expands upon details of the activities at Chideock. While Arundell appears to have eliminated a few brief passages in her second version of the Life, which Bartoli used as his source text, she also added significant amounts of new and primarily autobiographical material, including an extended description of her rhetorically complex responses to interrogators following the raid in which Cornelius was arrested, which I have discussed elsewhere.¹⁶

Drawing on these two versions of the Life of Cornelius throughout this chapter, I examine the history and spiritual structure of the community at Chideock. I then trace the profound transition made by Arundell after the apostolic community at Chideock had disbanded in 1594. From that cloistered perspective, she wrote her second and final version of the Life of Cornelius, which is consistent with hagiographic tradition in that it establishes the spiritual commitment of Cornelius and provides testamentary evidence of his possibly miraculous deeds. In addition to this, however, as a literary and historical narrative intermixed at times with autobiography and authorial introspection, the Life also sheds light on the deliberately obscured activities of Catholics, and Catholic women in particular, during the Elizabethan period.

The Community at Chideock: ‘She and all her family were Catholics, and her house was near the sea’

Arundell’s first version of the Life begins with the vignette of her mother in the process of establishing the Catholic community at Chideock cited in my opening anecdote. Lady Stourton’s castle was indeed ‘near the sea’: although it was destroyed during the Civil War, a simple martyrs’ memorial marks the former location just east of the border with Devon and less than a mile from the associated fishing village of Seatown on the south coast of England, an area distinguished by networks of sunken roads that had been used for centuries by smugglers and that now served the community’s needs as well. Priests were not only hidden in Lady Stourton’s house, they were using these existing smuggling routes to minister to Catholics in the surrounding countryside.

If we accept the figure given by Arundell in her later, expanded version of the Life, this group may have included as many as eighty individuals: ‘After John Arundell had died’, she says, Cornelius ‘persuaded the new widow to move the house and family, all in all a good eighty people, from London to their castle … in Dorchester’.¹⁷

Recent scholarship has explored the significance of such extended familial groupings for Catholics in post-Reformation England. In his study of the Sussex branch of the Catholic Montague family, for example, Michael Questier acknowledges the difficulty of assigning precise boundaries to relationships among the highly intermarried Catholics of Elizabethan and Jacobean England, and he uses the multivalent term, ‘entourage’, as a marker for such loosely defined yet interdependent social entities ‘grouped around leading members of the family’.¹⁸ In December 1590, just such an ‘entourage’ based on kinship and affinity formed around Lady Stourton as leader of the Arundell family at Chideock Castle, Dorset, almost certainly varying in size over time in response to occasion and circumstance (some had recently accompanied her to Cornwall for the burial of her husband, for example), but maintaining what appears to have been a substantial presenc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Plates
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Note on the Text
• Introduction
• PART I Communities
• PART II Culture: Authorship and Authority
• PART III Culture: Patronage and Visual Culture
• PART IV Identity
• Select Bibliography of Secondary Sources
• Index