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3. Christopher Bagshaw to Thomas More (4 August 1609 (NS)) (AAWA VIII, no. 137, pp. 573–6.)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 October 2009

Extract

I reaceved only one letter from yow by mr Champneys pacquett & he no more as he will signifye. What will ensue Bianchetto his letters theffect will showe. Many conceyve smalle hope from an Antihierarchicall Archpriest of any good & that conceypte fortyfyed by delegation to mr Thomas fitzherbert a man of good partes & my freinde in particular but against whome some suppose inefragable exseptions. This very day was signifyed to me by reporte (& letters they say) from Rome that the Pope meaneth to make Byshopps for Englande. I have tolde the Nuntio heere that some will not mislike if f Parsons be made a Byshoppe (the Pope in his conscience thinckinge him able, wherof others dowbte) so that he will goe into Englande from whence he ranne awaye & there defende that Oathe wherof he talketh & writeth beinge out of gunshott.

Type
The Newsletters
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 1998

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References

53 Anthony Champney, secular priest.

54 Cardinal Lawrence Bianchetti, Vice-Protector of the English nation, generally regarded by the secular clergy as unfavourable to their interests. He had been a chamberlain to Gregory XIII. He had supported the scholars in the English College in Rome in 1579 when they campaigned for the Jesuits to be installed there, Pollen, J.H., The English Catholics in the Reign of Elizabeth I (1920), 280Google Scholar. He represented SJ's case to the pope during the conflict between SJ and the students at the college in the 1590s. Bianchetti was enlisted by SJ in their struggles against OSB in 1607–8, Lunn, EB, 78.Google Scholar

55 See Letter 8.

56 Birkhead was aware that Bagshaw did not trust him, AAW A VIII, no. 92.

57 Robert Ubaldini, Bishop of Montepulciano, papal nuncio in France. In June 1609 he tried half-heartedly to obstruct Richard Smith's journey to Rome (or at least to moderate Smith's impetuosity), AAW A VIII, no. 115; Conway, AH 23, 133Google Scholar. But in 1612 he advised Rome that on balance a bishop should be appointed for English Catholics in spite of Jesuit objections, Allison, ‘Richard Smith's Gallican Backers’, part I, 341. The leading secular priest William Bishop, however, still did not trust him, AAW A XII, no. 35, although Ubaldini in June and August 1612 had assured the papal secretary of state, Cardinal Borghese, that Bishop was firmly opposed to the 1606 oath of allegiance, Conway AH 23, 98–9.Google Scholar

58 For Bagshaw's antagonism towards Robert Persons at Balliol College, Oxford in the 15705, and ever since, see Kenny, A., ‘Reform and Reaction in Elizabethan Balliol, 1559–1588’, in J. Prest (ed.), Balliol Studies (1982), 1751.Google Scholar

59 Bagshaw refers to Persons's most recent work against the oath of allegiance of 1606, The Iudgment of a Catholicke English-Man (St Omer, 1608).Google Scholar

60 William Barlow, Bishop of Lincoln, attacked Persons in An Answer to a Catholike English-Man (1609)Google Scholar. Richard Holtby SJ reminded Persons in a letter of 6 May 1609 that Barlow ‘was my Lo. of Essex his Confessor at his death’ and ‘published al that the poor Lo. had told him in secrett for the discharge of his conscience, as this minister then persuaded him’. Holtby noted that Barlow's book would shortly appear, and that Barlow was concerned at James's words in the first edition of his Apologie for the Oath of Allegiance that he would leave Persons to the ‘hangman’. Barlow thought it might remind the public of his role in justifying (at Paul's Cross) the condemnation and execution of Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex in 1601. Seeing that the king's ‘booke was called in to be in some thinges corrected, he wold be pleased, that those wordes (the hangman) might be leaft out’, ‘for otherwise persons wold in his reply play upon him, and call him by his maiesties warrant Hangman, for answering his booke’ and so ‘in the next edition he wished instead of the (Hangman) the (Rope) might be put in’, AAW A VIII, no. 105 (p. 498). Barlow noted in his Answer, sig. Ar, that James ‘vouchsafed not the Conflict with such a Rake-shame, but adiudged a Rope the fittest answer for him’. See James I, An Apologie for the Oath of Allegiance…Together with a Premonition (second edition, 1609)Google Scholar, sig. (c)r; Milward II, 110–11.

61 Out of Barloes booke’ written above.

62 Cardinal William Allen.

63 Bagshaw and John Cecil were distrusted by secular priests like William Bishop because they had ruined a project for a college in the University of Paris for the secular clergy, AAW A XI, no. 172; PRO, SP 12/269/27, fo. 44r; CRS 41, 51–2.

64 Hoby, A Letter. For Theophilus Higgons's conversions to and from the Church of Rome, see Questier, , ‘Crypto-Catholicism’, 60.Google Scholar

65 Chelsea College.

66 Anthony Champney noted on 14 August 1609 (NS) that Archbishop Richard Bancroft ‘gevethe a librarie of 3000il [Matthew] Sutcliff [Dean of Exeter] 800il’ and King James had promised financial assistance, AAW A VIII, no. 142 (p. 589).

67 A college in Paris was desired by the secular clergy in which they could respond to Protestant polemicists and also pursue higher degrees at the Sorbonne. The college was set up in October 1611, housed and financed by the generosity of Thomas Sackville, fourth son of the first earl of Dorset. In 1613 it moved into the recently refurbished College d'Arras, a fourteenth-century foundation belonging to the Benedictine Abbey of St Vaast at Arras, Allison, ‘Richard Smith's Gallican Backers’, part II, 255–8; idem, ‘The Origins of St. Gregory's, Paris’, RH 21 (1992), 11–25, at PP. 12–13; CRS 41, 51–2.

68 Richard Stevens, formerly a secretary to Bishop John Jewel of Salisbury, Anstr. I, 334.

69 Probably a reference to Pierre Coton SJ.

70 Sir Thomas More, great-grandfather of Thomas More the clergy agent.

71 Cf. SirMore, Thomas, Utopia, ed. Surtz, E. and Hexter, J.H. (Yale Edition of the Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 4, New Haven, 1965), 43.Google Scholar

72 Founded in the fourteenth century. See Le Maire, C., Paris Ancien et Nouveau (3 vols, Paris, 1685), II, 473.Google Scholar