Over fifty years ago, Louise Imogen Guiney wrote: ‘Someone, firstin the field, should write a little book, which should be a scientific andauthentic study of Dr John Donne as a Catholic’. As Guiney pointed out, Donne’s Catholicism, even when he had ceased to practice it actively, and even after he became an Anglican minister, was a continuous influence on his life and writings. However, Donne’s biographers, those before and those since Guiney, have paid scant attention to Donne’s Catholicism, tending rather to see his life as a paradoxical development fromlibertine scepticism to Protestant fideism. Between these extremes, Donne’s religious development has usually been described in terms of riddles and contradictions, with no more than passing reference to its relativelyclear involvement in the spiritual conflict through which Catholicism was repressed in Tudor and Stuart English society. The most influential proponent of this paradoxical interpretation has undoubtedly been Izaak Walton, Donne’s friend, who inexplicably likened Donne’s rather protracted Anglican conversion to the comparatively spontaneous conversion of St Augustine. Augustus Jessopp later repeated Walton’s fundamental idea, that Donne had clean rejected Catholicism at about twenty, even though Jessopp observed that Donne was suspected by his father-in-law of Catholic sympathies as late as 1602. Edmund Gosse was the first of Donne’s biographers to acknowledge the weight of evidence illustrating Donne’s persistent Catholic sympathies; Gosse nevertheless concluded that Donne’s Catholicism had been easily corrupted in the worldly atmosphere of London in the 1590’s, that he had grown sceptical of religion altogether,and that he lapsed thereafter only occasionally into fits of Catholic religion. Very little evidence of this supposed libertine scepticism can be found. Donne was far from sharing the extraordinary sceptical atheism rumoured of Raleigh or Marlowe, and the theory that he even leaned in this directionhas little support other than weak inference from the cynical tone of some of his writings. On the contrary, Donne seems to have shared the common assumption of his time, and the main lesson of his Catholic education, that there is one true religion. But his biographers have persistently seen him (mechanically mentioning his Catholic background) as a profane writer of ‘conceited verses’ converted by saving grace into an Anglican preacher.

On the Great Staircase and in the Little Drawing Room at Coughton Court in Warwickshire hangs a family group of portraits which came from Harvington Hall in Worcestershire. The earliest, of Humphrey Pakington (1555-1631), is dated 1599 and shows him in an oval frame, with receding hair, goatee beard and dark, slightly protruding eyes. He is wearing a ruff and black doublet, and the long fingers of his left hand lightly grasp a pendent jewel. His lips are set in a straight line, and the general effect is one of woodensolemnity. Close by is the portrait by Cornelius Jansen of Humphrey’s second wife, Abigail Sacheverell, a much more vivid character. She is a podgy woman with a double chin, in a magnificently padded and slashed dress of blue and silver and an enormous lace collar set off by jewellery. Here, beyond doubt, was a capable and masterful woman, an impression which is confirmed by her surviving letters. The portrait is signed by Jansen above theleft sleeve, and is dated 1630, the year before Humphrey’s death. The series continues with two portraits of their elder daughter Mary Yate (one by the school of Jansen); with one of their younger daughter Anne Audley (also attributed to Jansen); with one of Sir John Yate, who married Mary; and with one by Adriaen van der Werff of Sir Charles Yate, son of Sir John and Mary. Finally, there is a portrait (school of Lely) of Sir Charles’s daughter, another Mary Yate, whose marriage to Sir Robert Throckmorton took the Harvington estates to the Throckmortons in 1696.

Each century since Cardinal Pole’s death in 1558 has produced itsown tribute of biographies; the recent development is a series of more detailed studies of the various aspects of Pole’s thought and career. A convenient point of departure is provided by the most recent life of Pole, the work of Dr Wilhelm Schenk. This was published in 1950, but the author had died in the previous June, and the work must have been done some years previously, so that it is in effect about twenty-five years old. During this quarter-century the early days of the Catholic Reform in Italy have been greatly studied, and among the works produced are biographies of quite a number of people who were among Pole’s friends or contacts in his earlier years. As this larger background comes into greater focus Pole himself is seen in new aspects; some old questions are answered, but new ones arise. Is he a mediaeval figure, or among the first of the new men? Was he the saintly character depicted by Beccadelli, or the carnifex et flagellum Ecclesiae Anglicanae as his successor at Canterbury, Archbishop Parker, thought? Are we to see him as a failure or a man who achieved much in an unpromising situation?

A number of Pole’s works became available in reprints in the early sixties, and this has facilitated recent studies. Of these the best known, and most considered, is undoubtedly the De Unitate? It has been the subject of two translations, and two dissertations which happily are complementary and together provide a deep and comprehensive analysis into its theology, political thought and significance. As the translations are published and available, attention here is directed to the two unpublished studies. The first of these, by Breifre V. Walker, was presented to University College, Dublin in 1972 for the degree of M.A., and is entitled ‘Cardinal Reginald Pole, Papal Primacy and Church Unity, 1529-1536’. When Pole went abroad in 1532 he was in effect escaping from the situation created by the King’s ‘Divorce’. Three years later Thomas Starkey, who had for a while been a member of Pole’s household in Italy, wrote at the King’s express command to ask for Pole’s opinion about the royal marriage, and the authority of the Pope. Starkey also suggested some answers and referred Pole to the works of Marsilius of Padua. The unexpected result was the De Untiate.

The Englishmen who were members of the Italian or Cassinese Benedictine Congregation in the seventeenth century have been neglected, mainly because, unlike the Englishmen who joined Spanish monasteries, the Cassinese did not perpetuate themselves and thus did not produce historians who would keeptheir memory alive. This is a pity, since several of them are important figures: Robert Gregory Sayer (1560-1602), who gained an international reputation as a moral theologian, which, it has been claimed, remains unrivalled among Englishmen; Roland Thomas Preston (1567-1647), whose prolific literaryoutput against the papal deposing power at least assures him of a place in the history of Anglo-Gallicanism; and Robert Anselm Beech (1568-1634), who was the agent in Rome who negotiated the setting up of the Benedictine mission to England and defended it against attack.

The Anglo-Italians failed to perpetuate themselves because in 1616 they refused to unite with the other English monks, mainly in order to remain loyal to Preston, whom the others condemned for his writings. This article deals, first, with their attempt to found a community of their own at Paris, and, then, with their final years as a group. These two episodes have not been noticed before, and they have to be reconstructed entirely from manuscripts in the archives of the Archbishop of Westminster, the Abbey of S. Pietro at Perugia, the Congregation ‘de Propaganda Fide’ and the Vatican Library.