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Cardinal Philip Howard OP, Rome and English Recusancy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
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Philip Howard remains an enigmatic character — clearly influential in Church and State in his time — but a shadowy figure in the history of English Recusancy. Yet his career opens a window on all the major problems which dogged the English Catholics in the 17th century — episcopal government, relations between religious and secular clergy, loyalty to the Stuarts, the ramifications of the Oates plot and, of course, finance. He played a crucial role in the most turbulent period of Recusancy between the Restoration and the Revolution Settlement, yet because he spent the last six months of his life destroying papers his influence is not easy to assess. Howard was the subject of a lengthy unpublished biography by his later confrere Father Godfrey Anstruther OP. This was a project which began in 1955 when Anstruther was living at Santa Sabina in Rome and was Spiritual Director at the Venerable English College. He wrote to a friend, “... I have been rereading Palmer’s Life of Howard, and I never realised before how uninspired it is. It has all the matter but no literary merit and, alas, no references. Shall we do a new one?” His new one occupied much of the rest of his life and it was a source of frustration that he was never able to get it published. This paper draws heavily upon it and I am grateful for the late Father Anstruther’s exhaustive research and to Father Bede Bailey OP for access to his files at the Dominican Archives in Edinburgh.
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- Copyright © 1995 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 CFR Palmer OP, Life of Philip Thomas Howard OP, (1867)
2 Archives of the English Province of the Order of Preachers. (Arch OP) Anstruther Papers. Anstruther–Bullough I April 1955.
3 Anstruther MS Life of Philip Howard (Arch. OP) Chapter 5, 110–11) [Chapter references are given as the pagination of the MS is unclear] Hereafter Anstruther MS.
4 J Bossy, The English Catholic Community 1570–1850 (1975), 67.
5 Westminster Archdiocesan Archives (WAA) Volume 39 No 103 Chapter–Howard 25 February 1676.
6 Anstruther MS Chapter 7,4.
7 Anstruther MS Chapter 7,13.
The tone of Anstruther's assessment of Howard is generally lukewarm bearing the implication that he was not really up to the job.
8 Birrell, T, Holzhauser and England. Three Episodes, Gremgane Literalur und Kultur im Kontext (Amsterdam 1990), 453–63Google Scholar.
9 Anstruther MS Chapter 7, 22.
10 WAA Volume 39 No 215 Howard to the Clergy of England and Scotland (printed).
11 WAA Volume 39 No 225 Observations by the Chapter on the Rule of the Institute (1684).
12 WAA Volume 39 No 231 Howard–Perrot 19 January 1685.
13 WAA Volume 39 No 255 Draft letter Chapter–Howard.
14 Bossy op cit, 67.
15 Ibid 67–8.
16 J Kirk, Biographies of English Catholics (1909), 50–51.
17 Bumet, G, Some Letters Containing an account of what seemed most Remarkable in Switzerland, Italy etc. (Amsterdam 1686)Google Scholar, Letter 4, 231.
18 Anstruther MS Chapter 7, 50.
19 Anstruther MS Chapter 8, 3.
20 Anstruther MS Chapter 10, 4.
21 G Burnet quoted in Anstruther MS Chapter 8,17.
22 Anstruther MS Chapter 8,13.
23 Anstruther MS Chapter 8, 33–4.
24 The tomb is not easily visible, being one of a group of stones set in the floor behind the high altar.
25 Anstruther MS Chapter 8, 67–8.
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