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1. Benjamin Norton to Richard Smith and [in Smith's absence] Thomas More (8 May 1609) (AAWA VIII, no. 106, pp. 499–500. Holograph)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 October 2009

Extract

My very good frendes I deferred my wrightinge soe long that I feared mee yow woulde thinke I had forgotten yaw for wante of matter to wright of, and meanes to sende, but nowe I have to to muche matter unlesse yt weare better. Wee weare verry lyke to have loste M.r Wilson whoe abought the latter ende of Aprill fell daingerouslye sicke, abought which tyme hee wrought unto yow, but hee was lyke to have beene in his grave beefore the letters wente owte of the howse. and albeeit hee stande a hylene (as children saye) yett is it generallye thought thatt hee is soe wasted, and spente wrth the sicknes, that hee will scareslye bee able to goe to them which some tymes sende for him. to whome hee had now gone had not his sicknes hindred him. but thankes bee to god he wente not. for when that side [?] hathe him amongst [word illegible] them [?] whatt maye they not doe with him? Accowmpte of him as noe longe liver & provide againste suche a sede vacante whatt is best [‘bee’ deleted] to bee donne.

Type
The Newsletters
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 1998

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References

1 George Birkhead.

2 Elsewhere (e.g. AAW A X, no. 126) references which Richard Smith makes to ‘Mr Dorme’ clearly indicate Anthony Maria Browne, second Viscount Montague. However, Sir Robert Dormer, of Wing in Buckinghamshire, who married Elizabeth Browne, daughter of Anthony Browne, first Viscount Montague, was also a host to the secular clergy.

3 Richard Broughton, secular priest.

4 Richard Parker, secular priest, became an assistant to the archpriest George Blackwell and went to Rome in 1602 with Giles Archer to represent Blackwell against the appellants, Anstr. I, 269. He entered SJ in 1608, CRS 75, 261. He died at the end of April 1609, AAW A VIII, no. 123. Birkhead was unaware in May 1609 that Parker had become a Jesuit, AAW A VIII, no. 110. Cuthbert Trollop was appointed in Parker's place in May 1610, Letter 10.

5 William Hanse, secular priest, who resided mainly with the East Anglian pro-Jesuit families of Drury and Rookwood, Anstr. I, 147–8. He became one of George Blackwell's assistants in 1598. In December 1609 we find him, with the priests John Bavant and Ralph Stamford, refusing to sign the secular clergy's letters to the cardinal protector, AAW A VIII, nos 187, 188.

6 The recusant Richard Carey, CRS 76, 19, 41, 66, 80. Cf. CSPD 1603–10, 310, 403, 503; ARSI, Anglia 37, fos 105v–6r.

7 Birkhead reported Carey's arrest on 22 March 1609, and said that Marshall, a footman (apparently in Viscount Montague's service), was imprisoned in the Gatehouse because he ‘shuffled of’ the oath of allegiance when it was tendered to him, AAW A VIII, no. 96 (p. 471). The informer William Udall effected the arrest. Marshall was thought to be a priest, possibly Hugh Philips alias Evans, ordained in 1602, since Marshall's own alias was Phillips. Richard Blount SJ noted that Marshall was arrested at Carey's house in a secret hiding place, ARSI, Anglia 37, fo. 104r.

8 Birkhead said the sum of money was £1100, AAW A VIII, no. 96; Richard Blount said it was £1300 ‘and bonds for some 3000li more’, ARSI, Anglia 37, fo. 106r. Cf. CRS 76, 66; Harris, ‘Reports’, 242. Some of this money belonged to the deceased recusant Thomas Hoord (who had a sister in the service of the Browne, Dormer and subsequently Sackville families, Davidson, 257). Both Carey and Hoord seem to have been trustees of funds for the maintenance of the Catholic clergy, PRO, SP 14/20/21, 31/26. According to Blount, the seizure was made at Carey's brother's house in Holborn. Thomas Ravis, Bishop of London, intended to retain Carey's property but ‘the Treasurer hath seased all for the King’, ARSI, Anglia 37, fos 104r, 106r.

9 Robert Cecil, first Earl of Salisbury.

10 This may be Edward Walpole SJ whose alias was Rich. But Edward's brother, Michael, also a Jesuit, used the same alias. See Letter 9.

11 Alexander Cuffauld, the son of William Cuffauld and Mary the daughter of Sir Geoffrey Pole of Lordington (fourth son of Sir Richard Pole by Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury). Constance Cuffauld, one of William Cuffauld's daughters, married Richard Lambe of Sussex. During this period Benjamin Norton usually resided with the Lambe family. Constance was formerly a gentlewoman of Magdalen, Viscountess Montague, second wife of Anthony Browne, first Viscount Montague, CSPD 1591–4, 381Google Scholar. The Lambes lived in Midhurst, Letter 42, although the family also had property in Tillington, WSRO, Ep. 1/17/11, fo. 37r; Cockburn, J. (ed.), Calendar of Assize Records: Sussex Indictments: James 1 (1975), 17.Google Scholar

12 Anthony Rouse, secular priest. He was banished in mid-1606, returned to England and renounced his Catholic clerical orders. See Anstr. I, 295–6; Jessopp, A., Letters of Fa. Henry Walpole, S.J. (Norwich, 1873), 3940.Google Scholar

13 Humphrey Cross, a messenger of the chamber who was employed also as a high commission pursuivant.

14 John Wragge, high commission pursuivant, who had arrested George Blackwell in June 1607.

15 Richard Bray (or Bracy), messenger of the chamber and high commission pursuivant; cf. Salisbury MSS XXI, 63–4Google Scholar. The secular priest Edward Bennett wrote on 26 December 1611 that, four days before, on 22 December, as George Gage was being escorted to appear before Archbishop George Abbot by Wragge, Rouse, Bray and John Griffin, a struggle took place in Milford Lane between the pursuivants and Sir William Price, one of Price's brothers, and a Lieutenant Frost. Gage escaped. Griffin and Wragge were wounded. Rouse was thrown into the Thames. Wragge killed someone who came out of a tavern to intervene. Wragge was arrested and taken to Newgate, but was released, AAW A X, no. 166; cf. Downshire MSS III, 181Google Scholar. On 31 January 1612 (NS) Anthony Champney reported that ‘the newe commission given to the pour[s]ivantes…extendethe to the seasinge of all money and goodes which by probable coniecture are ordayned to the mayntenance of prestes but they cannot execute this without the assistance of a constable which…will excuse on mr. Gage who ys sayd to have killed a pursivant who chalenged him or his man for a preest’, AAW A XI, no. 11 (p, 25). (Earlier, on 20 November 1611, Bennett, too optimistically, had written that, on 17 November, Wragge had been so badly injured by a gentleman, who defended a priest whom Wragge tried to arrest, that Wragge was likely to die, AAW A X, no. 148.)

16 Thomas Finch, a secular priest who had turned renegade. He was a cousin of the Shelley family at West Mapledurham, Buriton, Hampshire, Mott, fo. 364v. On 23 September 1609 (NS) however, Thomas More, in Paris, wrote to Richard Smith that Finch had now come to Paris ‘poor and needie [r]epenting him selfe of his former courses’, AAW A VIII, no. 154 (p. 625). Later, in March 1611, Norton noted that Finch had left the Benedictines whom he had temporarily joined in Louvain and had returned to England with Sir Henry Wotton, AAW A X, no. 29.

17 Chyngton in Seaford parish, East Sussex.

18 Thomas Heath, son of Jerome Heath, at whose house in Winchester in 1592 Norton had narrowly escaped arrest, Anstr. I, 257. See Letter 17.

19 Either Sir John Caryll of Warnham, who died in 1613, or his son Sir John Caryll of Harting, though probably the former.

20 Norton means the priests in the Clink prison in London who favoured the 1606 oath of allegiance.

21 Robert Charnock, secular priest.

22 Birkhead reported on 2 May 1609 that other prisoners might also enjoy liberty on the same conditions as Robert Charnock, ‘namely to reside with some man no recusant and to returne when the…state calleth for them upon a moneths warninge’, AAW A VIII, no. 102 (p. 489).

23 Framlingham Castle in Suffolk.

24 i.e. for the suit for the appointment of a bishop over the English Catholics. Birkhead had recently ordered his assistants to collect the signatures of all the secular priests assenting to the suit.

25 Identity uncertain.

26 Richard Holtby SJ informed Robert Persons SJ that ‘3. or 400’ women resisted ‘the kings officers about cutting downe the wood of the forest of Dean’, though they were ‘suppressed’ by Sir Edward Winter and the sheriff; but ‘manie men of wealth are called in question for it and some [are] in prison’, AAW A VIII, no. 105 (p. 498); cf. Hasler III, 675.

27 Prince Henry. See CSPD 1603–10, 494.Google Scholar

28 James I, An Apologie for the Oath of Allegiance (1609)Google Scholar; STC 14401, 14402. The revised edition was issued on 8 April 1609 after the first edition was called in on 7 April, Larkin and Hughes, 211.

29 Weston, Edward, De Triplici Hominis Officio (Antwerp, 1602)Google Scholar, reissued twice in 1609. See ARCR I, nos 1359–61 (for the different titles).

30 Barclay, William, De Patestate Papae (1609).Google Scholar

31 Not certainly identified. For the recusant family of Poure of Bletchingdon, Oxford-shire, see Davidson, 148–50.

32 Robert (Anselm) Beech, ordained in 1594 and professed OSB at St Justina, Padua in 1596, Anstr. I, 28. Henry Bird's anti-Jesuit account of the troubles in the English College in Rome during the 1590s alleged that the Jesuits called Beech ‘miserable and perfidious’ after he left for OSB, because ‘for the sixe fyrst yeares which he stayd in the Colleedge, he was a vowed lesuit’, AAW A V, no. 112 (p. 407); Lunn, EB, 18. In late 1607 Beech had arrived in Rome in order to resist SJ's efforts to have the Benedictines' English mission suppressed. Under the terms of the settlement of December 1608 imposed on SJ and OSB by the Inquisition, Beech was ordered not to return to England, Lunn, EB, 78, 82.Google Scholar

33 The identity of this individual is uncertain. In Norton's letters, ‘Nedd’ seems to indicate his brother-in-law, the husband of a sister named Sybil/Isabel. Internal evidence in the newsletters suggests that ‘Nedd’ may be the leading Kentish recusant Edward Wyborne of Hawkwell. In a letter to More of September 1613, Norton wrote that the letters which he had most recently written to Rome were full of ‘Irishe matters’ because he had been in a place where he heard Irish rather than English news. At the same place he had heard that an ‘earle’, whom he describes as ‘neighbour’ to ‘my Nedd’, was ‘not like to be sente into his one [= own] cuntrye in haste’, AAW A XII, no. 164 (p. 365). This may refer to Richard Bourke, fourth Earl of Clanricard, who had property at Tonbridge, close to Pembury where Edward Wyborne of Hawkwell lived. Edward and his wife were presented as recusants at Battle in East Sussex during this period, as well as at Pembury in March 1613 with the earl of Clanricard himself. In the Sussex presentments Edward's wife's name is given as Sybil, Cockburn, J., Calendar of Assize Records: Kent Indictments: James I (1980)Google Scholar, no. 761; Letter 39. (Norton mentions Wyborne by his surname in his account of the seizure of recusants' property at Battle in October 1610, Letter 12.) However, genealogical and other evidence fails to support this. There is a consensus that Wyborne's first wife was Susan, daughter of Richard Warnford, but no consensus about his second wife's identity. So the question of identification here remains unsettled.