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The Polemical Gravitas of Robert Persons

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 September 2015

Victor Houuston
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Extract

The reputation of Robert Persons as a prose stylist has suffered from the repellant myth his opponents constructed around him. What if his works created a phenomenal stir at the time? A. L. Rowse, the most eloquent spokesman for the ‘common-sense’ English view of the matter, puts this down to the deceptively natural, easy prose of Persons, the smiling face of the villain. Haunted—if Rowse is to be believed—by the sound of the bells of St. Mary Magdalen, pealing backwards as if for a fire when he was expelled from Balliol in 1573, he nursed a lifelong grudge against his own nation for so dismissing his great intellectual gifts. No wonder Swift, himself a bitter, ‘conjured’ spirit, thought Persons the pick of Elizabethan prose writers. Everything he wrote, so smoothly and plausibly, was devoted to the overthrow of the State in England and the establishment of a Catholic monarchy under which Jesuits would exercise a monopoly of power. Rowse acknowledges Persons’ spirituality, notably evident in The Christian Directory, but treats it as being of his active career a thing apart.

Type
Research Article
Information
British Catholic History , Volume 22 , Issue 3 , May 1995 , pp. 291 - 305
Copyright
Copyright © Catholic Record Society 1995

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References

Notes

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2 The First Book of the Christian Exercise (Rouen, 1582, S.T.C. 19353), p. 2. The spelling and punctuation of quotations and titles by Persons and his contemporaries have been modernised except where quoted from a modern edition.

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20 ‘Motum quendam animorum … ad religionem Catholicam tuendam, ac recuperandam nostra hacaetate’, R. Persons to Pope Paul V, Rome, 30 June 1605 (State Archives, Turin, MS. Raccolta Mongardino, 61. No. 4, fol. 2b). Grateful acknowledgements to the Director, Dr. I. Massabb Ricci, for permission to quote from this source.

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22 Archives of the Society of Jesus, Rome, MS. Anglia 31/2 284–87.

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30 Archives of the Society of Jesus, Rome, MS. Anglia 38/2.

31 ‘Aetatem laboribus fractam’, ibidem, fols. 150, 156, 161.

32 ‘Semper paratus semper erectus semper in mediam flammam periculosissimae concertationis irrumpensanimae magnae,” archives of the English Province of the Society of Jesus, London, MS. 46/12/7, fol. 1957. Grateful acknowledgements are made to Fr. F. G. Holt, S.J., for permission to quote from sources in these archives.

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39 R. Persons to King James, Rome, 18 Oct. 1603 (Stonyhurst College archives, MS. Anglia 3, No. 36, fol. 75b).

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45 Middleton, T., A Mad World, My Masters (London, 1608), Act 1, Scene 2, lines 47–59 Google Scholar (The Selected Plays of Thomas Middleton, ed. Frost, David L. [Cambridge, 1978], pp. 14–15).Google Scholar