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The Manuscripts of the Vargas-Granvelle Correspondence, 1551–2
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 March 2011
Extract
Ever since the final years of the seventeenth century one of the most important sources for the history of the second period of the Council of Trent—still the least well documented of the three—has been the correspondence of Francisco Vargas, Pedro Malvenda, Manrique de Lara, bishop of Orense and other Spaniards at the Council, with the emperor Charles V's chief minister Antoine Perrenot, bishop of Arras, the future cardinal Granvelle. Vargas was one of the most distinguished Spanish lawyers and diplomatists of his day, combining a hatred of Protestantism with a highly critical attitude towards the Papacy. He attended the Council in 1551–2 as legal adviser to Charles's three ambassadors, of whom the chief was Don Francisco de Toledo, and being a procurator fiscal was usually referred to as ‘the fiscal’. Malvenda was a theologian of eminence sent by the emperor. Vargas, Malvenda and the bishop of Orense kept up a correspondence with Granvelle which was not shown to Toledo. The letters of all three correspondents were highly critical—to put it at its lowest—of the way in which the Council was conducted by the Papal Legate presiding, cardinal Marcello Crescentius. The legate is represented as a narrow-minded and intransigent ecclesiastic, a puppet of Rome, infuriating everyone with whom he had to deal by blocking all attempts at serious reform, denying freedom of speech to the bishops, sabotaging the attendance of German protestant representatives and attempting to insert into the doctrinal decrees passages containing inflated concepts of papal supremacy over bishops and councils.
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page 219 note 1 We still await the Göirresgesellschaft's edition of Massarelli's Acta for 1551–2, promised for [C]oncilium [T]ridentinum, Tome VII (Actorum Pars Tertia, volumen alterum) to replace Theiner's insufficient edition of 1874, while the correspondence of the Legate Crescentius with Rome does not exist save for a very few pieces.
page 219 note 2 On Vargas see Constant, G., Rapport sur une mission scientifique aux archives d'Autriche et d'Espagne, Paris 1910, 360–85Google Scholar, Buschbell, G. in C.T. XI (1937), xxx–xxxvGoogle Scholar, and Gutiérrez, C., S.J., Españoles en Trento, 1951, 478–93.Google Scholar
page 220 note 1 The Council of Trent no free assembly more fully discovered … London 1697. On Geddes, D.N.B., vii. 682.
page 220 note 2 Lettres et Mémoires de François de Vargas … Amsterdam 1699.
page 220 note 3 The fullest account of Le Vassor's Oratorian period is in Batterel, L., Mémoires domestiques pour servir à l'histoire del'Oratoire, ed. Ingold, et Bonnardet, , 1902–5, iv. 409–23Google Scholar. See also Biographic Universelle, xxiv. cols. 392–3, E. Haag, La France Protestante, vii. and J. Carreyre in Dict. de Théologie Catholique, ix. I, 460–1. The dictionary articles say Le Vassor came to England in 1697, but there are letters from him written from Salisbury in 1695 in the Trumbull papers.
page 220 note 4 Geddes at the end of a long prefatory discourse on Councils ‘showing how they were brought under bondage to the Pope’; Le Vassor in the final pages of his preface.
page 221 note 1 Journal des Sçavants, 1699, 408–12, 412–14. See also Jedin, H., Das Konzil von Trient: ein Überblick über die Erforschung seiner Geschichte, Rome 1948, 124–8Google Scholar, for further instances and Buschbell, op. cit., xxxiv–xxxv. Cf. The hesitations of Gutiérrez, op. cit., 491–2.
page 221 note 2 Buschbell, C.T. xi (Epistularum pars secunda), xxxv and passim.
page 221 note 3 Cereceda, Feliciano, S. J., Diego Lainez en la Europa religiosa de su tiempo, Madrid 1945, i. 364 ff.Google Scholar
page 221 note 4 Constant, 382 note 4, and Buschbell, xxxiii.
page 223 note 1 There are, however, the Headings of the Memorial of the Royal Council of Castile on the complaints which the pope is to be asked to remedy to which Le Vassor refers only in general terms on p. 166 (1699 edition).
page 223 note 2 Le Vassor says that Trumbull entrusted these papers to Stillingfleet when he went to France, which was in 1685, and that Stillingfleet kept them for a long time before giving them to Geddes to translate. Burnet repeats this and adds that he himself suggested Geddes as a translator (History of the Reformation, ed. Pocock, iii. 306 ff.)
page 224 note 1 H.M.C. Downshire Papers, I, ii, 506, 532, 548, 564. Burnet devotes much space to Le Vassor's translation in the third part of his History of the Reformation, where he reproduces certain parts of it (ed. Pocock, 1865, iii. 305–18) but does not add anything substantial to our knowledge. It is from him we learn the refusal of the Amsterdam printers to deal with Spanish.
page 224 note 2 Op. cit., I, i, 468; I, ii, 506, 564, 614–15, 627, 646, 671, 689.
page 224 note 3 Op. cit., I, ii, 797, 799.
page 224 note 4 Op. cit., I, ii, 846.
page 224 note 5 Jedin, Überblick …, 126.
page 224 note 6 Edited by Jonas Conrad Schramm.
page 224 note 7 H.M.C. Downshire Papers, II, III, and IV (1936, 1938, 1940).
page 224 note 8 I must express my thanks to Mr. Walne for his kind reception both of my original letter of enquiry about the Vargas letters and of my person when I visited his archives.
page 224 note 9 Cozzi, G., ‘Fra Paolo Sarpi, l'Anglicanesimo c la “Historia del Concilio Tridentino”’, Revista Storica Italiana (1956), lxviii. 559–93.Google Scholar