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An Epistle of Pious Grief: An Anti-Appellant Tract by Robert Persons

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 October 2016

P. J. Holmes
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Extract

During the Archpriest Controversy, altogether eighteen books were printed on behalf of the Appellant priests. On the other side, in defence of the Archpriest Blackwell, barely a third of this number of pamphlets appeared. The first of these anti-Appellant works to arrive in England—in the summer of 1601—was entitled The copy of a letter written to a very worshipful Catholic gentleman in England, of grief conceived about some scandalous dissension and books set forth tending to the disgracing one of another by such as labour in the same cause, know from its running-title as An epistle of pious grief. A small tract of fifty pages, written by ‘S.N.’, it is now so rare that only one copy is known to survive.

Type
Articles
Information
British Catholic History , Volume 15 , Issue 3 , May 1980 , pp. 328 - 335
Copyright
Copyright © Catholic Record Society 1980

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References

Notes

1 Allison, A. F. and Rogers, D. M., A catalogue of Catholic books in English printed abroad or secretly in England (London, 1968), no. 565;Google Scholar cf. Pollen, J. H., The institution of the Archpriest Blackwell (London, 1916),Google Scholar Appendix. A measure of the book's rarity is the fact that Pollen thought it entirely lost; Allison and Rogers record only one copy, at Ushaw College Library.

02 Persons, R., A brief apology (Antwerp, 1601);Google Scholar idem, A manifestation (Antwerp, 1602); J. Mush, Declaratio motuum (London, 1601); A. Champney, The copies of certain discourses (London, 1601); Allison and Rogers, nos. 613, 633, 552, 254; Pollen, loc. cit.

3 Knox, T. F., Letters and memorials of William Cardinal Allen (London, 1887), 84–85.Google Scholar

4 Knox, The First and Second Diaries of the English College, Douai (London, 1878), 309–15.Google Scholar

5 Law, T. G., The Archpriest Controversy (Camden Society, 1898), 2, 163;Google Scholar J. H. Pollen, loc. cit., Allison and Rogers, no. 572a.

6 Historical Manuscripts Commission, Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Marquis of Salisbury, XI, 478.

7 Law, 152-77.

8 Ibid., 168-9.

9 An epistle of pious grief, 2, 9-9v; O. E. (Sutcliffe, M.), A brief reply (London, 1600)Google Scholar and A new challenge (London, 1600).Google ScholarPubMed

10 Stonyhurst Archives, MS. Coll. NII, pp. 125-59. Another copy in the same volume, following p. 160. Cf. Coll. PI, 260-7. The corresponding passages are at Coll. Nil, pp. 134-50 and An epistle of piousgrief, fos 10v-16v. My grateful thanks are due to Rev. Francis Edwards, S.J., Archivist of the English Province, and to the Librarian and staff at Stonyhurst College.

11 On the stirs at Rome, see Pritchard, A., Catholic Loyalism in Elizabethan England (London, 1979),Google Scholar ch. 6, and references there; Foley, VI, 1-67; A.A.W., MS. AV, fos 407ff; ‘A story of domestical difficulties’, MS. at Oscott College. This last manuscript, a continuation of the work printed by J. H. Pollen in C.R.S., 2, 48ff, is nowhere mentioned in print, although it is similar to the document used by Anstruther, G. in ‘The Sega Report’, The Venerabile 20 (1961), 208–23,Google Scholar and as Anstruther points out is verylike the Sega Report itself (in Foley, above).