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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 December 2024
This article offers an in-depth examination of Sir Tobie Matthew’s conversion as an attempt to understand not only the internal process of conversion for one individual, but also its meaning for the English Catholic community during the early seventeenth-century. Matthew was an extraordinary figure. He was both learned and extremely well-connected, with friends in the highest echelons of the Roman Catholic Church, and in English society, and this despite his conversion. He maintained those relationships to his benefit throughout his life. Officially he was at times an exile from England and at other times at court, nonetheless he was always at the centre of dynastic politics. He maintained loyalty to England throughout his life, but clearly felt a draw to Catholicism for its intellectual tradition, emotional appeal, his desire to travel; and, perhaps, also for reasons of sexuality. Sir Tobie’s conversion reveals just how complex the relationship between religious and national identity could be after the Reformations.
The author first wishes to express his gratitude to Harvard Divinity School which through the generous Yang Visiting Scholarship in World Christianity allotted the time and resources to finish this article; and to thank Michael Questier for offering feedback and supplying some of his unpublished research, Carlos Eire for reading early drafts of this paper, and the anonymous reviewers from British Catholic History.
1 Tobie Matthew, A True Historical Relation of The Conversion of Sir Tobie Matthew to the Holy Catholic Faith; with the Antecedents and Consequences Thereof, A.H. Matthew, ed. (New York: Burns & Oates, Limited, 1904), 52, hereafter Relation. The most complete manuscript is at the Folger Library in Washington, D.C., see Tobie Matthew, A True Historical Relation of the Conversion of Sir Tobie Matthew to the Holy Catholic Faith, Washington 1640, V.a. 269.
2 Matthew, Relation, 51.
3 For more on conversion in early modernity, see Kenneth Mills and Anthony Grafton, eds. Conversion: Old Worlds and New (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2003); Bruce D. Hindmarsh, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiography in Early Modern England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Jan M. Bremmer, Wout J. van Bekkum, and Arie L. Molendjik, eds. Paradigms, Poetics, and Politics of Conversion, (Dudley: Peeters, 2006); David M. Luebke, Jared Poley, Daniel C. Ryan, and David Warren Sabean, eds. Conversion and the Politics of Religion in Early Modern Germany, (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008); Molly Murray, The Poetics of Conversion in Early Modern English Literature: Verse and Change from Donne to Dryden (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009); W. J. Torrance Kirby, Persuasion and Conversion: Essays on Religion, Politics, and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Boston: Brill, 2013); Brooke Conti, Confessions of Faith in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014); Simon Ditchfield and Helen Smith, eds. Conversions: Gender and Religious Change in Early Modern Europe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017); Abigail Shinn, Conversion Narratives in Early Modern England: Tales of Turning (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2018); Lieke Stelling, Religious Conversion in Early Modern English Drama (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Chiara Petrolini, Vincenzo Lavenia, and Sabina Pavone, Sacre metamorfosi: Racconti di conversion tra Roma e il mondo in età moderna (Rome: Viella, 2022).
4 There were many early efforts to account for his life, see Anthony Wood, ‘Tobie Matthew,’ in Athenae Oxonienses. An exact history of all the writers and bishops who have had their education in the University of Oxford from 1500 to the author’s death in November 1695 (London, 1721), 2:194–196; George Oliver, Collections towards illustrating the Biography of the Scotch, English, and Irish Members of the Society of Jesus (London: C. Dolman, 1845): 139–140. Alban Butler’s short biography relies on the Relation and Wood, see Alban Butler, The Life of Sir Tobie Matthews (London: J.P. Coghlan, 1795). More biographies have emerged in the twentieth century including A.H. Matthew, The Life of Sir Tobie Matthew: Bacon’s Alter Ego (London: Elkin Matthews, 1907), hereafter Life; David Matthew, Sir Tobie Matthew (London: M. Parrish, 1950). John Phillip Feil made a more rigorous effort in his doctoral dissertation. He devotes the first 256 pages of his dissertation to Tobie’s biography: John Philip Feil, Sir Tobie Matthew and His ‘Collection of Letters (University of Chicago, Ph.D. Dissertation, 1962). Others have taken on Tobie Matthew’s life and his conversion. Yoggerst attempted to understand his literary contributions and make solid claims about texts attributed to him, see Sister Mary Hillary Yoggerst Ad. PP.S., Sir Tobie Matthew: Recusant Man of Letters (Fordham University, Ph.D. Dissertation, 1952), and Zink investigated insights about the role of gender in Tobie’s work, see Sharon Louisa Zink, Translating Men: Humanism and Masculinity in Renaissance Renditions of Patristic Texts (University of London, Ph.D. Dissertation, 2001). Other studies briefly use Tobie as a point of comparison to explain some element of English Catholicism or conversion, see Michael C. Questier, Conversion, Politics, and Religion in England, 1580-1625 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Peter Lake and Michael Questier, eds. Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c. 1560-1660 (Rochester: The Boydell Press, 2000); and Michael Questier, ‘Like Locusts over all the World: Conversion, Indoctrination and the Society of Jesus in Late Elizabethan and Jacobean England,’ in Thomas McCoog, ed. The Reckoned Expense: Edmund Campion and the Early English Jesuits; Essays in Celebration of the First Centenary of Campion Hall, Oxford (1896–1996) (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1996), 265–84. Marotti dedicated three pages specifically to Tobie’s conversion in a chapter titled ‘Performing Conversion,’ see Arthur F. Marotti, Religious Ideology & Cultural Fantasy: Catholic and Anti-Catholic Discourses in Early Modern England (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), 115–119. Nevertheless, we lack a modern critical biography of Tobie Matthews.
5 John Harrington remarked that Tobie ‘was likely for learning, for memory, for sharpness of wit and sweetness of behaviour to have proved another Tobie Matthew,’ in Rosamund Oates, Moderate Radical: Tobie Matthew and English Reformation (New York: Oxford, 2018), 130.
6 Toby writes precious little about his first banishment, and does not mention that he was ordained, see A.H. Matthew, Life, 70, 117. Yoggerst’s dissertation reproduces Bellarmine’s notice confirming Matthew’s ordination, see Yoggerst, Tobie Matthew, 226.
7 In some ways, this likens Tobie’s Relation to St. Ignatius’s so-called ‘autobiography’, penned by Luís Gonçalvez da Camara, more a hagiography of the Society of Jesus than a biography of Ignatius. For more on the category of spiritual autobiography and its function, see Murray, Poetics of Conversion, Shinn, Conversion Narratives, Kathleen Lynch, Protestant Autobiography in the Seventeenth-Century Anglophone World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), Alan Stewart, The Oxford History of Life-Writing, Volume 2: Early Modern (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).
8 The manuscript is now in the Folger Library, since Henry Folger purchased it from Dobell. After Tobie wrote it, his relations owned it until it came into Butler’s possession. Thereafter it was stolen and eventually found by Reverend Neligan at Cork until purchased by Edward Dowden who permitted A. H. Matthew to use it for his autobiography. Chiara Petrolini, ‘Il giornale di conversion di Toby Matthew,’ Societá e storia, 160.2 (2018): 269–287, at 278, fn. 28. Lynch notes that it is not an autograph copy, but that it was signed by Tobie and that wherever his name appears it is in his hand, see Kathleen Lynch, Protestant Autobiography, 68–9.
9 See A. H. Matthew, The Life of Sir Tobie Matthew, 69–73. Matthew did not identify an autograph manuscript, but notes that portions of the autograph copy were known to Tobie’s first biographers, Alban Butler and Anthony à Wood, see: A.H. Matthew, The Life of Sir Tobie Matthew: Bacon’s Alter Ego (London: Elkin Matthews, 1907), vii–viii. Stewart calls the Relation ‘the last surviving version of a life that was rewritten several times over multiple decades, as Matthew’s own life underwent some startling changes,’ Stewart, Life-Writing, 164. A copy of the letter that Tobie sent to Mary Gage survives in the Jesuit Archives in Britain as MS 949, see Stewart, Life-Writing, 168, fn. 10.
10 Matthew, Relation, 45.
11 Ibid., 48.
12 Ibid., 4.
13 Ibid., 13, 24.
14 Ibid., 26–30. He continued these studies as he traveled through Italy, reading ancient texts on his travels, including in Florence where they gave him ‘sufficient assurance that Protestancy was not only a mere innovation, but a damnable kind of novelty in the judgment of the whole primitive Church’, 37. Lynch notes that these arguments settled the question of his religious allegiance, Lynch, Protestant Autobiography, 35. Catholics did not practice this strategy of intellectual conversion alone; Tobie received many books from his father, who collected an immense library of refutation literature over his lifetime, Matthew, Relation, 129. See also Murray, ‘The Radicalism of early modern Spiritual Autobiography’, in Adam Smyth, ed. A History of English Autobiography (New York: Cambridge University Press,2016): 41–55, at 48 and Danielle Clarke, ‘Life Writing for the Counter-Reformation: The English Translation and Reception of Teresa de Ávila’s Autobiography’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 50.1 (2020): 75–94, 80; and Shinn, Conversion Narratives, 68.
15 Matthew, Relation, 36–37.
16 Ibid., 99. Unsurprisingly, Tobie fails to mention the Protestant rebuttal concerning the many internecine theological arguments Catholics waged, see J. Sears McGee, ‘A “Carkass” of “Mere Dead Paper”: The Polemical Career of Francis Rous, Puritan MP’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 72.3 (2009): 347–71, at 356.
17 Marotti, Religious Ideology, 119.
18 Matthew, Relation, 1. ‘[T]he phenomenon of spiritual journeying used mobility as a means to bring about spiritual growth and conversion’, see Liesbeth Corens, Confessional Mobility and English Catholics in Counter-Reformation Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 107.
19 Shinn, Conversion Narratives, 137–138.
20 Marotti, Religious Ideology, 110, 118. See also, Arthur F. Marotti, ‘In Defence of Idolatry: Residual Catholic Culture and the Protestant Assault on the Sensuous in Early Modern England’, in Lowell Gallagher, ed. Redrawing the Map of Early Modern English Catholicism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 42. For more on the sensuous and the affective, see Robin Macdonald, Emilie K. M. Murphy, and Elizabeth L. Swann, eds. Sensing the Sacred in Medieval and Early Modern Culture, (New York: Routledge, 2018), and Giovanni Tarantino, ‘Religion and Spirituality,’ in Claire Walker, Katie Barclay, and David Lemmings, eds. A cultural History of the Emotions in the Baroque and Enlightenment Age, eds. (New York: Bloomsbury, 2019), 35–53.
21 Matthew, Relation, 7–8. Perhaps Tobie was alluding to Augustine who was once similarly moved by a beggar, see Augustine, The Confessions of the Incomparable Doctor (St. Omer’s: English College Press, 1620), 245, hereafter Confessions.
22 Matthew, Relation, 22.
23 Matthew, Relation, 14. Shinn argues that the senses were a locus for spiritual transformation and moreover that this passage charts Matthews trajectory from passive sensory reception to active participation in the Catholic liturgy, see Abigail Shinn, ‘The Senses and the seventeenth-century English conversion narrative’, in Macdonald, Murphy, and Swann, eds. Sensing the Sacred, 99–101.
24 The parallels between this story and Augustine’s moment of conversion hearing the voice in the garden should be noted, see Confessions, 395–6. Smyth comments on how autobiographies rely on ‘a series of alignments and overlappings’ with the Confessions, and this scene in particular, see Smyth, “Introduction,” in A History of English Autobiography, 2–3.
25 Foreign trained clerics like Tobie Matthews stand as a convincing example of the ways in which English Catholic history and European Catholicism were integrated, see Caroline M. Hibbard, “Early Stuart Catholicism: Revisions and Re-Revisions,” The Journal of Modern History 52.1 (1980): 31, 34.
26 See Corens, Confessional Mobility, 28–9; Emilie K. M. Murphy, ‘Language and Power in an English Convent in Exile, C. 1621–c. 1631’, The Historical Journal, 62.1 (2019): 101–25; Katy Gibbons, English Catholic Exiles in Late Sixteenth-century Paris (Rochester: Bodyell Press, 2011); Caroline Bowden and James Kelly, eds. The English Convents in Exile, 1600–1800: Communities, Culture, Identity, (Burlington: Ashgate, 2013).
27 Tobie Matthew, A Missive of Consolation: Sent from Flanders to the Catholikes of England (Louvain, 1647), 75.
28 Teresa of Ávila, The Flaming Hart (Antwerpe: Johannes Meursius, 1623). Tobie also translated several other lives in a practice Murray has called ‘spiritual autobiography by proxy’, see Molly Murray, ‘The Radicalism of early modern spiritual autobiography’, in Adam Smyth, ed. A History of English Autobiography (New York: Cambridge, 2016), 41–55, at 50.
29 Feil, Sir Tobie Matthew, 79, 212. Tobie also had a Jesuit confessor, see Petrolini, ‘Il giornale di conversion,’ 280–1.
30 Feil makes this claim in the first page of his biography of Tobie, see Feil, Sir Tobie Matthew, 2, 6.
31 Matthew, Relation, 48.
32 Oates’ recent biography of Tobie’s father gives some indication to the troubled relations, see Oates, Moderate Radical, 104, 130–1.
33 It seems that the Matthews had even less hope for their second son John, who was neither intellectually capable nor judicious with his purse, see Oates, Moderate Radical, 104.
34 Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, Elizabeth, 1595-1597, ed. Mary Anne Everett Green (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1869) (hereafter CSP), 168.
35 CSP, 1598-1601, 4.
36 CSP, 1598-1601, 4. The precise nature of these fits is unclear, but Feil and Stewart agree that he suffered an epileptic seizure in 1596, and Stewart also adds that he had a mental fit: see Feil, Tobie Matthew, 2, 9, and Stewart, Life-Writing, 171. It is also clear that Tobie was suffering from melancholy or depression, see Oates, Moderate Radical, 130–1 and Bod. Rawl MS A 369 fo. 52r. A letter from Chamberlain to Carleton reveals that these fits continued until at least 1602, see CSP, 1601-1603; With Addenda 1547-1565, 188. For Tobie’s reaction to his father’s letter, see CSP, 1598-1601, 8.
37 CSP, 1598-1601, 97.
38 See, for example, a marginal note where Tobie remarked ‘He still alludes to the Prodigall Sonne.’ Confessions, 172.
39 Feil, Tobie Matthew, 12–13. See, Confessions, 60 where Tobie comments in a marginal note ‘A woful thing that parents care more for their childrens fortune then for their soules.’
40 Matthew, Confessions, 60.
41 It is interesting to note that Bishop Matthew had scorned his own parents by his conversion to the Church of England, see Matthew, Relation, vi.
42 Sutcliffe, The Unmasking a Masse Monger (London: 1626), dedication, Av, see also Zink, Translating, 205.
43 Matthew, Relation, 131–132. Tobie’s father was famous for refuting Edmund Campion, campaigned to ban Catholic works in England, and frequently preached against Catholicism, emphasizing obedience. Michael Questier, Conversion, Politics, and Religion in England, 1580-1625 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 17; W.J. Sheils, ‘An Archbishop in the Pulpit: Tobie Matthew’s Preaching Diary 1606-1622’, in Diana Wood, ed. Life and Thought in the Northern Church c. 1100-1700: Essays in Honour of Claire Cross, (Rochester: The Boydell Press, 1999), 382-398, esp 396; David Matthew, Sir Tobie Matthew, 29; and Oates, Moderate Radical.
44 Matthew, Relation, 2-3.
45 Ibid., 3. He even asks God for forgiveness for lying to his parents, though he ensures the reader that he felt secure in God’s mercy for this sin. One wonders if he had this episode in mind when he created the chapter heading ‘How he deceaved his Mother, and went to Rome’. Confessions, 198.
46 Matthew, Relation, 3.
47 Matthew, Relation, 5. Again, was Tobie thinking of this when he entitled a section of the Confessions, ‘He neglecteth the commandment of his Parents, through the desire he hath to play at ball’, Confessions, 26.
48 Feil, Sir Tobie Matthew, 26–27.
49 Stewart compares this with Augustine who is reunited with his mother at the time of his conversion, see Stewart, Life-Writing, 170.
50 Feil, Sir Tobie Matthew, 4.
51 Calendar of the manuscripts of the most Hon. The Marquis of Salisbury, preserved at Hatfield house, Hertfordshire, eds. M. S. Giuseppi and G. Dyfnallt Owen (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1968), 46.
52 At least this was the impression Chamberlain gave Carleton, see CSP, 1611-1618, 465.
53 Matthew, Relation, 135.
54 Matthew, Relation, 135.
55 A. H. Matthew, Life, 282.
56 A. H. Matthew, Life, 287, see also Feil, Tobie Matthew, 199–200.
57 Tobie, Relation, 132. One commentator deemed that this passage was ‘A blemish upon the taste of the “Relation’ for its ‘unsympathetic and almost inhuman account which Sir Tobie gives of his mother’s death’: see Arthur Henry Bullen, ed. ‘The Rise and Growth of the Memoir in England’, The Gentleman’s Magazine 300 (1906), 259–77, 274. Stewart connects this to Matthew’s sonnet on Augustine: ‘Matthew’s image of his mother— the “talking Scriturist” reduced to a preliterate child—has strong echoes of the sonnet he wrote to Augustine’s mother St Monica, in which he implored the saint to “let my mother they best daughter bee | and make her learne at last, that tis no shame | to put Christes crosse, before her A.B.C”’ see Stewart, Life-Writing, 175.
58 Teresa of Avila, The Flaming Hart (Antwerp: 1642) 1v, hereafter Flaming Hart.
59 Anthony G. Petti, ‘Unknown Sonnets by Sir Tobie Matthew’, Recusant History, 9.3 (1967): 123–158, 128.
60 In contrast to his mother, who called for her silks at her deathbed, he underscores Theresa’s humility, see Flaming Hart, 503.
61 Confessions, 206.
62 Ibid., 97–8.
63 Matthew, Missive of Consolation, A4r–v.
64 Confessions, 282.
65 In one instance, William Prichard complained to Dudley Carleton that Tobie was not good about remembering his friends in his early travels to France in 1598, see CSP, 1598-1601, 4.
66 Marotti, Religious Ideology, 115–116.
67 Feil, Sir Tobie Matthew, 13.
68 Wood, Athenae, 2: 194. These sojourns distinguished Tobie from his peers, see David Matthew, Sir Tobie, 14.
69 David Matthew, Sir Tobie, 30.
70 Matthew, Relation, 58.
71 Ibid., 58.
72 Matthew, Relation, 59. It is worth noting the resonances between this belief and those of many people questioned concerning religious plurality by the Inquisition, see Stuart Schwartz, All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).
73 Matthew, Relation, 59–60. Why this clemency from Cecil? Perhaps because of his relationship with Archbishop Matthew? It is interesting to note parallels with Sir Oliver Manners, who, through the efforts of the Jesuit John Gerard, converted to Catholicism, and was later ordained.
74 Tobie Matthew, Saggi Morali del Signore Francesco Bacono, Cavagliero Inglese, Gran Cancelliero d’Inghilterra (London: Giovanni Bilio, 1618), 3, see also Feil, Sir Tobie Matthew, 114.
75 Tobie Matthew, A Collection of Letters, Made by Sr Tobie Matthew, Kt (London: Printed for Tho. Horne, Tho. Bennet, and Francis Saunders, 1692), 336–337.
76 Feil, Sir Tobie Matthew, 64–67. For more on Ribadeneyra’s views on Elizabethan Persecution, see Pedro de Ribadeneira, Pedro de Ribadeneyra’s Ecclesiastical history of the schism of the Kingdom of England: A Spanish Jesuit’s history of the English Reformation, ed. Spencer J. Weinreich (Boston: Brill, 2017). Giudice claims that Matthew was in ‘constant contact’ with Bellarmine. Franco Giudice, ‘Tobie Matthew, Francis Bacon, and Galileo’s Letter to Benedetto Castelli’, Galileana, 17 (2020): 7–26, 18.
77 Gage (1582-1638) was a diplomat and businessman, the son of Edward Gage. For more on this friendship, see J.P. Vander Motten and Katrien Daemen-de Gelder, ‘Sir Toby Matthew and his “Fidus Achates” George Gage, 1607–1620’, ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews, 23:1 (2010), 20-30
78 Feil, Sir Tobie Matthew, 53.
79 Feil, Sir Tobie Matthew, 75–76.
80 The two were also collaborators. James I missioned each of them in the Spanish match. Gage went to Rome to seek a dispensation from Gregory XV, and Tobie to Spain. Both would negotiate with Peter Paul Rubens for his artworks.
81 Bray has demonstrated the association between Jesuits and ‘sodomites’ and Stewart has elucidated both the link between monastic culture and homosexual activity and Catholicism and sexual excess. Zink, Translating Men, 227–8, Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London: Gay Men’s Press, 1982), 21 and Alan Stewart, Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 38–83, 47. Jessica Keene has shown that this association with religious orders and ‘letcherousness’ dates back to the Henrician reform and the dissolution of the monasteries: Jessica Keene, ‘“Furnaces of all letcherousness”: Narratives of Sexual Depravity and the Dissolution of the English Monasteries’, Sixteenth Century Journal 53.2 (2002): 379–403.
82 In this, Tobie was no different than other converts as hypersexuality and effeminacy were categories used as terms of abuse used across confessions, see Simon Ditchfield and Helen Smith, ‘Introduction’, in Ditchfield and Smith, eds. Conversions, 4, and Frances Dolan, Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999).
83 Boswell encouraged many scholars to delve more deeply into this question. Boswell argued that religious life and especially life in monastic communities offered a sort of safe-haven for so-called ‘sodomites’: John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 243–266.
84 See Richard Ince, ‘Littell Prittie Tobie Matthew’, The Contemporary Review, 144 (1933): 342–7. Zink has linked this to an overt attempt to feminize a man in his forties, Zink, 220.
85 Matthew’s translation was highly polemical in nature and Protestants like Sutcliffe already opposed it on these grounds for making claims on Augustine’s status as a monk, see Questier, Conversion, Politics, and Religion, 77.
86 See Zink, Translating Men.
87 See Kathleen Curtin, ‘Augustine in the Lady’s “Closet”: Gender, Conversion, and Polemic in Seventeenth-Century English Translations of the Confessions’, Studies in Philology 115, no. 3 (2018): 524–543, 524.
88 Sutcliffe, Unmasking, 57. In Zink’s view, Sutcliffe and others saw this as too ‘feminine’, see Zink, Translating Men, 203–4. Indeed, in a later translation of the Confessions, written as an emendation to Tobie’s, William Watts insists that Tobie had primarily written the text for ‘The collapsed Ladies he knew had no skill to examine the Latin’, see St. Augustines Confessions Translated: And With some marginal notes illustrated Wherein Divers Antiquities are explained; And the marginal notes of the former Popish Translation, answered, trans. William Watts (London: 1631) V, xiii, 258, see also Zink, Translating Men, 205.
89 For example, he says that Maria Maddalena dei Pazzi was ‘by sex a woman, but in spirit & strength of mind, more then a man’, see Vicenzo Puccini, The Life of the Holy and Venerable Mother Suor Maria Maddalena de Patsi (St. Omer’s English College Press, 1619), preface 3, hereafter Suor Maria. Perhaps these examples reflect Crawforth’s argument that ‘unstable notions of gender lie at the heart of early modern conversion narratives’: Hannah Crawforth ‘ “A father to the soul and a son to the body”: gender and generation in Robert Southwell’s Epistle to his father’, in Ditchfield and Smith, eds. Conversions, 62. This confirms the instability that Bouley claimed in his findings concerning the gender and body of saints: Bradford Bouley, Pious Postmortems: Anatomy, Sanctity, and the Catholic Church in Early Modern Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 109–128.
90 Sutcliffe, Unmasking, 31.
91 Ibid., 37.
92 Ibid., 43.
93 Ibid., Unmasking, 57.
94 Ibid., 59, and see Zink, Translating Men, 206.
95 In A. H. Matthew, Life, 212–3. Matthew believes that this reference to undress refers to full court attire, but notes that Seccombe ‘seems to have placed a different construction on the words’, 213. Yoggerst clarifies that Seccombe thought the description was licentious, see Yoggerst, ‘Sir Tobie Matthew’, 173.
96 Suzanne Gosset, Anon, Hierarchomachia, or the Anti-Bishop, ed. Suzanne Gossett (Toronto: Associated University Presses Ltd., 1982.), Il. 1827–1836. I am thankful for the ability to draw on Michael Questier’s analysis from an unpublished chapter on the Hierarchomachia, which he kindly shared with me.
97 Hierarchomachia, IV.1.11.1871–1877.
98 BL Stowe MS 169 fo. 158, see also Murray, Poetics of Conversion, 110.
99 In A. H. Matthew, Sir Tobie Matthew, 158–9. In a letter from Trumbull to Carleton dated February 12, 1618, Trumbull also explains that he had been told by Trumbull that he [Tobie] had been sent away ‘for conversing with some greate Ladyes’, Secretaries of State: State Papers Foreign, Flanders, 1585-1780, doc ref number: SP 77/13 f.165.
100 See Zink, Translating Men, 205, and Curtin, ‘Augustine in the Lady’s “Closet”’, 539.
101 John Gee, The Foot out of the Snare: With a Detection of Sundry Late Practices and Impostures of the Priests and Iesuits in England. Whereunto is added a Catalogue of such books as in this Authors Knowledge have been vented within two years last past in London, by the Priests and their Agents (London: 1624). See also Zink, Translating Men, 205.
102 Archives of the Archdiocese of Westminster, A Series, vol. XXVI, p. 195 (endorsed ‘A Fragment about Sir Toby Matthew’), translated by J.P. Feil: Feil, pp. 192–3. With thanks to Michael Questier for sharing these citations from the AAW from an unpublished chapter on the Hierarchomachia. William Case made a similar accusation in 1632: Feil, Sir Tobie Matthew, 194, citing AAW, A XXVI, p. 194. Feil refers to another document titled ‘Characteres Tobia et aliorum’, AAW, A XXVIII, p. 223, Feil, Sir Tobie Matthew, 194–5. Stewart identifies this woman as Lucy, countess of Carlisle and notes that Matthew’s intimacy with Lucy ‘was grist to the gossip mill’: Stewart, Life-Writing, 177.
103 Feil, Sir Tobie Matthew, 214–215. Feil citing Vatican Library Barberini Latini 8633/216ff and PRO 31/9/17/202–212. The issue of Tobie’s extravagant lifestyle and dress had also long been a topic of conversation as a letter of 1617 from Chamberlain to Carleton indicates: ‘I heare he [Tobie] is grown very gay or rather gawdie in his attire which I should not have expected of his yeares and judgement’: Letters of John Chamberlain, Memoirs XII, Part 2, ed. Norman Egbert McClure, 105, hereafter LJC. One wonders if Tobie’s extravagance stands as more evidence of his Jesuit training. As Tutino points out George Gilbert had penned a set of instructions on how to convert the English people based on the experience of the great authorities of Robert Parsons and Edmund Campion. From their example he claimed it was best for missionaries to have ‘several luxurious outfits’, see Stefania Tutino, ‘Jesuit Accommodation, Dissimulation, Mental Reservation’, in Ines G. Županov, ed. The Oxford Handbook of the Jesuits (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 216–240, at p. 220.
104 The journal of Sir Simonds D’Ewes from the beginning of the Long Parliament to the opening of the trial of the Earl of Stafford, ed. Wallace Notestein (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1923), 125. Though it is possible that ‘seduced’ did not necessarily have a sexual connotation, there was a campaign comprised of ‘gossip and innuendo’ circulating regarding Tobie in the days before his banishment. Lynch, Protestant Autobiography, 66–7.
105 Marotti, Religious Ideology, 116 and Alan Bray, ‘Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship’, Queering the Renaissance, Jonathan Goldberg, ed. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 54.
106 LJC, 94.
107 Alan Bray, The Friend (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 201.
108 Chloë Houston, ‘“I wish to be no other but as he”: Persia, masculinity, and conversion in early-seventeenth-century travel writing and drama’, in Ditchfield and Smith, eds. Conversions, 216–235, at p. 226.
109 See, for example, ‘Delli duoi Baroni Inglesi [Roos and Wentworth] convertiti ultimamente in Roma -- Copia della relatione mandata al Papa alli 22 di Maggio 1609’, AAW, A VIII, p. 513.
110 The Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton, vol. I, ed. Logan Pearsall Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1907), 434–5.
111 British Library, London, Harl MS 7002/199-202, 200v. See John Walter Stoye, English Travellers Abroad 1604-1667 (London: Alden Press, 1952), 51–55.
112 Harl MS 7002/199–202, 200v.
113 In Feil, Sir Tobie Matthew, 70.
114 George Gerrard to Carleton, June 4, 1617, SP 14/92 f. 162r, The National Archives, London.
115 LJC, II, 80.
116 Feil, Sir Tobie Matthew, 117 citing STAC 8/111/26.
117 CSP, 1611–1618, 482.
118 For more on James’ sexuality, Michael B. Young, ‘James VI and I: Time for a Reconsideration?’, Journal of British Studies, 51.3 (2012): 540–67.
119 For Matthew’s relationship with Scipione, see Giudice, ‘Tobie Matthew’, 15.
120 See Franco Mormando, Bernini: His Life and His Rome (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2011), 48–50.
121 LJC, XIII vol 2, 101. For Tobie’s defense of Cerroneo see, Feil, Sir Tobie Matthew, 115–6.
122 Matthew, Relation, 3.
123 Matthew, Relation, 71.
124 Boswell, Christianity and Homosexuality, 293.
125 See Helmut Puff, Sodomy in Reformation Germany and Switzerland, 1400-1600, Chicago Series on Sexuality, History, and Society, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 31, and Mark D. Jordan, The Silence of Sodom: Homosexuality in Modern Catholicism, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 118–119.
126 Simply put, there is no strong evidence for it. Bray takes this a step further suggesting that one would be greatly mistaken to assume a softness toward sodomy on the part of these writers. Sodomy for Tobie Matthew was one of ‘those crimes which are against nature … ever to be detested and punished,’ and the sodomite for John Lyly was ‘a most dangerous and infectious beast’. Bray, ‘Homosexuality and Male Friendship’, 46. What Bray misses is that these are not Tobie’s words at all, but Tobie’s translation of Augustine’s words in his edition, see Confessions, 108–9. In fact, Tobie makes no special note of this passage whatsoever, a curious omission given that he frequently comments on passages concerning sexual sin. If anything, the passage does indeed suggest a softness concerning sodomy on Tobie’s part.
127 Yoggerst, Sir Tobie Matthew, 13.
128 Matthew, Relation, 4.
129 Matthew, Relation, 53. In his marginal notes in the Confessions he complains that heresy and sensuality were the main ‘plagues’ of his day and seems to suggest that he succumbed to them, see Confessions, 33; was sensuality the vice to which he refers?
130 Tobie Matthew to [Unknown], July 22, 1606, SP 98/2 f. 107-108r at 107v–108r, State Papers, The National Archives, London. To this he adds in the Confessions: ‘I humbly beg that in the sight of God, thou wilt still be pleased to assist my soule. And that neyther the mist, or fog of sensuality may deteyne me; nor the syde-wind of vanity divert me; nor the contrary wind of impatience tosse me’. Confessions, 11.
131 Suor Maria, 108.
132 Tobie also mistranslates eccessos not as ‘ecstasies’ but as ‘excesses’ to suggest her excessive rigor: John R. Yamamoto-Wilson, ‘“O that mine Adversary had written a Book!” Translations of Catholic Literature and the Eroticization of Pain in Seventeenth-Century England,’ Translation and Literature 20.2 (2011), 175-90, 183–4.
133 For an approach to this sort of analysis, see Frank Graziano, Wounds of Love: The Mystical Marriage of Rose of Lima (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
134 Suor Maria, 3v.
135 Confessions, 269.