7
Emilie K. M. Murphy
I.
In recent years, scholars have at last started to listen to the past.1 Historical research on the acoustic, aural, and musical aspects of earlier societies is currently being produced with increasing momentum, and this has provided a wealth of insight into the experiences of historical men and women.2 In this essay I utilise this methodology to uncover the experiences of English Catholic men and women who lived on the continent. Studies of English Catholics have traditionally neglected the experiences of their continental compatriots and co-religionists. John Bossy’s seminal work marked English Catholics off from the ‘Catholicisms of the continent’ and subsequent discussion generally remained insular.3 In the last few years, scholars have demonstrated the value of looking beyond England’s borders. For example, in her work on English exiles in sixteenth-century Paris, Katy Gibbons firmly rejects the view that English Catholics were isolated and introverted, by placing English Catholic experience in the context of wider European religious and political tensions.4 Recent work on English Catholic exile convents also firmly integrates the experiences of English Catholics within Europe.5
Drawing on this burgeoning research, I ask what music can tell us about the ways English Catholics in the Spanish Habsburg territories from 1568 to 1659 cultivated a ‘sense of place’ in exile.6 I focus on five religious institutions founded in the Spanish Habsburg territories during this period: the Benedictine convent of Our Lady of the Assumption in Brussels (founded 1598); the Augustinian convent of St Monica’s in Louvain (founded 1609); the double monastery of the Syon Abbey Bridgettines that settled in Lisbon in 1594; the seminary college of St Omer, which was established for the education of English Catholic boys in 1593; and the Royal English College in Valladolid (founded 1589). I explore these communities in order to witness, or rather ‘hear’, in new ways the manifold musical interactions that they had with other English Catholics, their co-religionists on the continent, and those at home.
The notion that the bond between English Catholics and their nation was irrevocably severed when they were exiled to the continent (even temporarily) – as implicit, for instance in Richard Helgerson’s Forms of Nationhood – has been firmly rejected by Mark Netzloff in his analysis of Catholic polemical texts.7 Other scholars have also been quick to emphasise a sense of English ‘nationalism’ within the exile community, but in contrast to Netzloff’s nuanced approach, which recognises that ‘Englishness’ is not a ‘stable or monolithic entity’, we have been told that English Catholics did not share communal relationships with their continental co-religionists;8 that seminaries and convents were ‘stridently English’ in their orientation and composition;9 and even that ‘nunneries functioned in effect as little self-enclosed Englands that shut out foreign cultures around them’.10 The most recent surveyor of such literature has disparaged this ‘apparent obsession with ethnic exclusiveness’, and blamed scholars for their over-reliance on the available source material such as pamphlets and other printed polemic with an explicit agenda.11 A potentially misleading picture has been painted, skewing our understanding of ‘English’ exile identities by obscuring other priorities and activities, such as musical performances that helped to secure patronage, which blurred national and cultural lines.
In asking what ‘hearing’ English Catholicism can tell us about the way communities constructed their relationships, this essay stands as a corrective to scholarship that either presumes exiles had little connection with England, or that they remained unproblematically ‘English’. Instead, I highlight various examples of multicultural influences present in the communities, and the transnational exchanges between them. I call attention to the daily musical rhythm of the institutions, including established practices, musical training, and the local and international interactions with such sounds. From this I argue that aural engagement played a significant, if not vital, role in supporting English Catholic exiles’ ‘sense of place’ on the continent, showing how the aural environment could prompt a multifaceted sensory response from its listeners, which was critical to experiencing the sacred.
I am concerned with the music that nuns made, as well as the reactions of those outside of the convents to the sounds produced within the convent walls. Hearing was not isolated from the other senses, and in this period noises were believed to have significant powers. As the Oxford scholar John Case asserted in 1588:
Music…has God for a father, Nature for a mother; it has a divine quality whereby the mind, the image of God, is wondrously delighted. It is a physical and natural thing, by which not only the ears of men, but the sense of all beings, as it were, are comforted in a way which is beyond speech or thought.12
Music had the power to effect physical and emotional changes in hearers, both curing illnesses and comforting at times of distress.13 Music could be harmful as well as beneficial: as Jonathan Willis has highlighted, the human mind was regarded ‘as stable as a weathercock when it came to the buffeting effects of music, swinging in accordance with the mood of a particular melody’.14 Accordingly, a person’s relationship with music had to be carefully controlled and monitored.
This tension was manifest in the seemingly contradictory advice from the Bible and church fathers, epitomised in Saint Augustine’s attempt to reconcile both the positive and negative attributes of music in an uneasy synthesis:
I realise that when they are sung these sacred words stir my mind to greater religious fervour and kindle in me a more ardent flame of piety than they would if they were not sung… But I ought not to allow my mind be paralysed by the gratification of my senses, which often leads it astray.15
This power extended beyond music to other melodious sounds. For example bells were blessed and consecrated with devotional messages so that when they were rung their sounds would banish demons, and prevent bad weather.16 It was also thought that ringing unconsecrated bells might attract the devil.17 Due to the physical properties sound could convey, Murray Schafer’s observation that ‘hearing is a way of touching at a distance’ seems particularly pertinent as continental English Catholics used music to bring themselves closer to their co-religionists back in England.18
II.
Music (including song, chant, and the ringing of bells) was ever-present in convents and seminaries on the continent. Fundamental to the daily rhythm of the institutions was the call to choir with the ringing of bells for the performance of the divine office. From the institutions’ foundation, the regulations for these performances were set out explicitly in the rule books and constitutions. As well as specifying when and where music should be used, these texts were also clear about the proper way communities should sing. In the Lisbon Rule from 1607 for the Bridgettine community of Syon, the directions reflected concerns about music’s power over men and women’s physical bodies, specifying that ‘when ye sing, see ye sing nothing but what is appointed to be sung in the book: and that which is not written to be sung, let it not be sung’.19 Curtailing the scope of the nuns’ singing in this way was intended to curb the power that music had to gratify the senses, which might lead the mind astray. This was expanded upon, albeit more positively, in the Lisbon Additions of the same year, where it was emphasised:
[A]ll singing ought to bee the office of the Divine praise, and the fruit of the labour… not only of them that do sing the psalms, but also of them that do hear them… The singing of all shall bee grave simple plain and modest: not broken, high or clamorous but with all humility and devotion.20
Rigorous standards were vital; the experience for listeners was as important as for the singers, and the music was not to be high or clamorous, which might have a negative and distracting effect. The music was to be simple, and divine, in order to ensure that those hearing had their devotions enhanced by the music as much as those performing.
Singing in the choir was first and foremost an act of prayer, and such a critical part of monastic life that, on occasion, discounts were offered on the dowries of potential nuns with musical skills and beautiful singing voices.21 Particularly musical nuns were singled out within the convent chronicles by name. At St Monica’s in Louvain, the chronicler recorded the professions of Sister Anne Evans who had ‘learnt in the world to play upon the virginals [and] was since become so skilful upon the organ’, Sister Lioba Morgan who ‘was also very skilful in prick-song’,22 and Sister Mary Skidmore who was able to enter St Monica’s in part ‘because she could play on the organs’.23 Similarly, men with a calling to the priesthood who demonstrated musical ability might be shown leniency if other qualities were lacking. This is clear in the record made in the diaries of the English college of Douay (founded by William Allen in 1568) after the entrance of John Worthington on 5 January 1607:
And he desires to become a priest if he can now obtain the knowledge for that office, for he can only understand Latin and at the most, write it. But he is a skilful musician, both in singing and at the organ. And so he is received into the College that he may at the same time help our choir and instruct others in this art, while he performs his studies.24
Musical leaders like Worthington were important for ensuring high musical standards. In the convents, this was the responsibility of the nun elected ‘Chantress’. Musical expertise was essential for this position, and formed the basis of their election. The Chantress instructed the choir and was also responsible for appointing the best singers. As the constitutions for St Monica’s explained: ‘when two are to sing together, she shall be careful to appoint two such as have voices that will best agree one with another, that there be no discord’. The constitutions also made clear that the Chantress ‘shall also be very careful that… it be done in such a manner that it might stir one up to devotion’.25
The daily performance of music was vital to the lives of those within the institutions, although musical practice within the communities was diverse, and a product of the experiences of its individual members.26 Within the convents, musical practices were also affected by the ecclesiastical authorities’ implementation of enclosure. The provisions of enclosure were first asserted in the papal bull Periculoso in 1298 and were unambiguously reaffirmed at the Council of Trent. In the twenty-fifth session in December 1563 it was announced:
[T]he enclosure of nuns be restored wherever it has been violated… No nun shall after her profession be permitted to go out of the monastery, even for a brief period under any pretext whatever, except for a lawful reason to be approved by the bishop.27
The physical boundaries of the convents were clearly demarcated from the surrounding landscape by high walls. This was essential for the institutions’ definition as explicitly sacred spaces, and acted as protection, as Trent decreed, from ‘the rapacity and other crimes of evil men’.28 Yet sounds could carry beyond the convent walls, and Trent also raised a series of questions over the compatibility of music with enclosure. As we have seen, music’s ability to gratify the senses and arouse moral deviance, as much as devotion, was a serious concern – especially with regard to female religious. This anxiety was present before Trent; in 1446, for example, the City Fathers of Florence sheltered the nuns from the ‘corrupting influence of secular music’ by barring heraldic civic musicians from playing within fifty yards of any convent.29
Walls also divided the convents on the inside and separated the easily accessible public church from the nuns’ church, which was part of the internal, cloistered space of the convent. Interactions between these spaces were strictly aural. Heard but not seen, from the choir the nuns followed the public religious ceremonies; they listened to the words of the priest, sang their parts in the office and sang in unison with the local community. Concerns over musical performance also extended to the performance of sacred music by the nuns: as Silvia Evangelisti explains, ‘even when hidden in their choir or behind the curtains of their parlours, singing nuns might be heard by outsiders, triggering fantasies about their forbidden bodies’.30 The Tridentine response, as implemented by the episcopacy, was often to discourage more elaborate forms of music. And yet, despite several laws banning nuns from playing instruments and singing for outsiders (except sacred music related to religious subjects or episodes related to the lives of saints) it is clear that a more flexible approach, permitting various kinds of performances, prevailed.
The evidence for these more diverse musical occasions is found in surviving music books, the employment of musicians, records of instruments, and accounts of specific musical performances. This documentation demonstrates that despite concerns, it was important for the sounds from the convents to be heard beyond their walls. This was partially due to patronage, as musical performances advertised both the convents and seminaries as beacons of ‘English’ devotion, which attracted English lay exiles. The convents and seminaries simultaneously appealed to the local laity, who were attracted to the foundations as exemplars of Counter-Reformation zeal. The style of the music they heard was also a poignant amalgamation; the institutions contained English men and women, and, as we shall see, they seem to have generally preferred using English musicians as teachers and performers. At the same time, as Andrew Cichy has shown, the institutions used continental repertoire in their liturgical functions. To hear ‘English Catholicism’ in the Spanish Habsburg territories, then, was to hear ‘a meeting point between English Catholics and the musical fruits of the Counter-Reformation’.31 The convents and seminaries stood defiant on the continent, in the face of established Church of England, and consequently, they were incorporated into networks of transnational piety.
Influence from continental Catholics and from England was facilitated in part by the employment of musicians. The jubilee of Margaret Clement at Louvain in 1606 was marked by an entire week of musical festivities; musicians were loaned from the Archducal chapel itself to support the music-making, with volunteers from the local burghers performing alongside them.32 Similarly, in 1599 the clothing ceremony of the first eight postulants at the Benedictine convent in Brussels was conducted in the presence of the entire court of the Archdukes, as well as the Archbishop of Mechelen and the papal nuncio.33 Musicians employed by the Archdukes Albert and Isabella included several English Catholic exiles, including Peter Philips and John Bull. At St Omer, the Annual Letter of 1653 provides evidence that music and dancing were still being taught at the College and that despite the troubled years of the interregnum, they maintained ‘two skilled singing masters brought from England’.34 St Monica’s and the Brussels Benedictines also employed permanent musicians during this period, namely the English Catholic exiles John Bolt and Richard Dering.
Instruments were fundamental to the acoustic environment of the institutions; John Bolt is recorded as having instructed the nuns of St Monica’s on the organ as well as in voice, and it is possible that Dering did the same in Brussels.35 Instruments were provided in abundance at St Omer, and Giles Schondonch, the rector from 1600 to 1617, left written instructions listing the variety of musical instruments befitting particular situations. For the reception of guests and persons of distinction, ‘the broken consort’ was the most ‘delightful’, and instruments should include ‘the bass viol, or viol de gamba; the lute, or wanting this, the orpharion; the treble viol, the cither, the flute; add the tenor violin and the bassoon for effectiveness and charm’.36 Wind instruments should be used ‘especially for church services, for the reception of persons of high rank and for the theatre’. Schondonch also detailed the variety of wind instruments available to the scholars, including the hautbois, recorder, the sackbut and the cornet. The organ and harpsichord were identified as ‘suitable and pleasing for church music’.37
With such lavish provision, it should be no surprise that music was renowned at St Omer.38 Music was important to the college for inspiring the devotion of the scholars, and this piety was displayed prominently during musical entertainments for guests. As the Apostolic Nuncio, Guido Bentivoglio recorded in his letter to Cardinal Scipione Borghese after his visit in 1609:
I returned soon after dinner to inspect the Seminary more carefully, and was entertained by the scholars with vocal and instrumental music, in which they are instructed so as to increase in them a spirit of devotion… [A]fter supper I was again treated with sacred music, to my infinite delight.39
Music was also vital for the edification of the local laity, and for building relationships with St Omer’s citizens. The scholars’ duty in this regard was fulfilled, as the Nuncio noted that the ‘city shows itself very favourable to the College’.40 When the boys left St Omer, it was either for a career in the priesthood, or to return to England in order to support the faith of their beleaguered community as laymen. The importance placed on musical training, and the frequency of musical recreation and performances, suggests that for either of the paths they chose, music was fundamental for their preparation.41
Musical recreation also occurred in the convents. For example, according to both her contemporary biographer, Sister Shirley, and the chronicler of the convent, Mary Copley, Mother Margaret Clement of St Monica’s sung a ‘Dutch ditty’ before her death in May 1612.42 The particular song Clement performed has proved impossible to identify, but Shirley recorded that it was ‘from the exceeding Joy & Jubilation of her hart [she] sang a devout song of Jesus which made of the Elders to weep that sat near her’.43 That this song was a ‘Dutch ditty’ highlights the outside influences that were present within the institutions. The Clement family had lived in exile in the Low Countries since the accession of Elizabeth, when Margaret was about nineteen. She would therefore have been very familiar with Dutch music, and brought this influence into the convent of St Monica’s, when she joined as a founding member in 1609.
In a similar way, the majority of the other nuns who had grown up in England would have brought popular English songs with them to the continent. This is evident from the ex-Syon brother Thomas Robinson’s 1622 ‘exposé’ of the Bridgettine community. After Robinson left the community, he penned an assault on its many alleged failings, and its scandalous use of music:
[W]ell doe they [the nuns] manifest the abundance of idleness that is in them, when at sundry times playing upon their instruments for their fathers [confessor’s] recreation, they sing him ribaldrous Songs and jigs, as that of Bonny Nell, and such other obscene and scurrilous Ballads, as would make a chaste ear to glow at the hearing of them, and which I would scarce have believed would have proceeded out of their mouths, had I not heard them with my own ears.44
Sources such as this made the English populace aware of England’s Catholic exiles whilst simultaneously denouncing them, and Robinson did so very specifically by criticising their ears. Robinson highlighted the chastity of his own ears, and solidified his role as the ‘earwitness’ of the event, by inferring how unchaste the nuns’ ears were, as ears were often linked with the female genitals during this period (a point I will return to later).45 Keith Botelho has drawn attention to the way that ‘earwitnessing’ was a vital form of proof during this period, and Robinson used this strategy to underline his trustworthiness.46 He would scarcely have believed what he had witnessed, if he had not ‘heard them’, with his own chaste, and reliable ears.
The Bridgettines were soon aware of Robinson’s text, as is evident from a manuscript letter that survives in the British Library:
About the first of December 1622, Syon had a full notice and sight of a most slanderous printed libel, sett forth by one Thomas Robinson against them: but because they then understand that it bine published divers months before it came to there knowledge and no doubt to the grief of their parents and friends whose remedy and comfort they were bound to procure with all possible speed.47
The community made sure to respond to Robinson point-by-point, including his attack on music:
And though these Nuns as others of this country singe or have music sometimes at their grates, yet that these ever sung Bonny Nell, or any immodest tunes or ditty, it is only his false tongue which doth affirm it.48
The nuns’ response confirmed Syon’s use of recreational music with the retort that it was no different to the behaviour of other religious communities. They also attempted to restore their reputation for chastity by denouncing Robinson’s ‘false tongue’. Tongues, in a similar way to music, were also viewed as extremely unstable during the period: as Carla Mazzio has argued, quoting the words of Erasmus, the tongue was ‘an ambivalent Organ’.49 As the organ of speech and singing, the tongue was also associated with the ear, and with hearing. As George Webbe stated in The Arraignment of an Unruly Tongue (1619) ‘they [who] imitate the poyson of the Adder in their Tongue; so they have the deafenesse of the Adder in their Eare’.50 By condemning Robinson’s tongue, then, the nuns were also implicitly casting doubt on his ability to hear clearly.
Syon’s indignant response in order to protect their reputation was partially due to their reliance on patronage, because the relationships that the communities held locally and internationally were often forged by musical performances. The principal income for the English convents and seminaries came from the support of longstanding patrons of high status. As a result of their exile, the communities were reliant on the many sporadic gifts they received in exchange for specific acts. For example, individual directions to pray for the souls of deceased, usually during vespers and matins, were recorded in benefactors’ books for the communities. Several are extant, and the money secured and recorded in these accounts represents an economy of song, whereby musical performances were part of a cycle of economic transactions. This is exemplified by the following extract from the year 1624–5 in the benefactor’s book of St Monica’s:
In primis received of Mr Standford to pray for his soul 20
Item received of Mr Bannister to pray for his wife 60
Item received of Mrs Copley to pray for her brother 40
Item received from Mrs Cooke a legacy left us by her husband 200
Somma 320.51
Singing prayers from the choir attracted potential new benefactors by arousing their devotions at the services they attended, and in turn they made payments and legacies for the communities to pray for their souls, the cycle thereby beginning again.
The importance of the economy of song to the communities is particularly conspicuous when things go wrong, as a series of incidents from the Brussels Benedictine convent demonstrates. The strife started simmering from the early 1620s, and from 1628 to 1632 the convent was in a state of ‘open warfare’.52 The disputes in the convent were related to the rivalries that fragmented English Catholics between Jesuits and seculars during the period, which began soon after the arrival of the first Jesuits to England in the 1580s and were to last until well into the seventeenth century. Put briefly, Catholic loyalties were divided between the secular clergy (those without a Rule) and the Jesuits. Both at home and abroad there were frequent arguments between the two factions over strategies for the Mission and tactics to be adopted by Catholics in England.53 This split was explosively paralleled in the Brussels convent, and catalysed controversies that had a devastating effect on the community, which was not in agreement over the choice of confessor. Although from 1599 the secular priest Robert Chambers was the community’s official spiritual director, the abbess Mary Percy had made the decision to allow some of the nuns to have an English Jesuit confessor. In 1628 Chambers died and the Archbishop of Mechelen, Jacobus Boonen, appointed Anthony Champney (then Vice-Rector at Douay) as confessor to the Brussels community. This was a controversial choice: Champney had been involved in the anti-Jesuit movement, and was one of thirteen priests who had signed the protestation of allegiance to Queen Elizabeth in 1603. By 1631, two clear factions in the convent had emerged: a pro-Jesuit group led by Mary Vavasour, and the rest led by the abbess, Mary Percy, and her prioress Agatha Wiseman. The following events serve to underline my point that music was a fundamental form of expression for the nuns, as well as vital for generating patronage, and therefore critical for their survival.
Within a haphazard collection of documents relating to the community in the Archive of the Archdiocese of Mechelen is an extremely revealing letter to Archbishop Boonen from 1632. The letter is in the hand of Agatha Wiseman and endorsed in the margins and at the end by various nuns of her faction.54 The letter is fourteen pages long, and contains twenty-eight points describing a series of violent events that had occurred at the convent since the Archbishop and papal nuncio’s last visit in February of that year. This visit was supposed to have put an end to the unrest in the convent, as permission had been granted to the Appellants, the Jesuit faction, to receive a Father of the Society six times a year. However, when the time came to elect new officers ‘the Appellants made there a mutiny’. The group surrounding Mary Vavasour cried out that they would not surrender their places and offices: ‘that the said convent had confirmed them, and that they would maintain their right’. From then on, conflict was ‘made daily in the places where the convent meet but especially in the choir’. It began on Saturday in the first week of Lent, when:
D[ame]. Martha [Colford] began her office of chantress, but D. Aurea [James, pro-Jesuit] would perforce intone the psalms with her, w[hi]ch she did in extraordinary and unaccustomed tunes of purpose (as it may seem) to – make a discord, see that one part of the religious following the Chantress, and the other part D. Aurea, there was made an unsupportable discord and confusion, to the great scandale of those who were in the church.
Musical terminology such as ‘discord’ frequently translated into other categories of expression during the period; in particular, it was often used, as it still is today, to describe disrupted social and political relations. The use of ‘discord’ twice here emphasised the situation: the discord was both a metaphor and an acoustic reality, as the two factions battled for power through clashing simultaneous psalm-tunes.
The conflicts in the choir steadily worsened: the letter explained how on March 12 the two chantresses appointed rival nuns to sing from the martyrology, with the result that the nuns physically fought over the book. In an attempt to prevent similar embarrassment, later that day, ‘at the high masse my Lady [Abbess Mary Percy] to prevent contentions ordained that the tract (which is ordinarily sung by 2 or 3 religious to each verse who are appointed by the chantress) should be sung by all the religious together’. The resulting violent fall-out led to the Abbess physically intervening as she commanded the nuns ‘not to strive so at masse’ and in the process ‘received a blow on the face’ from the pro-Jesuit Mary Phillips.
The fisticuffs in the choir stalls did not cease and on Sunday 14 March at Matins the letter described how similar factional rivalry resulted in ‘the religious laying aside for a time the divine office they betook themselves to chiding and striving together in the choir’. The letter explained how the sounds of the nuns’ dispute were ‘to the scandal of the people in the church’, as they listened to the nuns snatching books from one another and pushing each other to the ground. The violence continued, and on 26 March the community had to take a dramatic step: ‘we have bin forced to shut the choir door, and to say our office in private, rather than by irreverence in the church to offend god and scandalize those that come thither’. The fact that the nuns were prepared to cut themselves off from the local community in this way indicates that the problems were so severe that they were willing to risk their livelihoods: as previously discussed, the community relied on their performance in the choir to generate patronage. It was this that prompted the desperate prioress, Wiseman, to write the letter to the Archbishop.
It is clear that the nuns’ reputation was greatly damaged, as stories of the divided convent were soon circulating in manuscript.55 These troubles had a devastating effect on professions to the convent, which plummeted during the years of strife. Only one sister, Elizabeth Sunley, joined the community between 1628 and 1637, in stark contrast to the immediately preceding years between 1618 and 1627, when twenty-eight new choir nuns and lay sisters were professed.56 Between 1638–1652 only one other nun, Grace Bake, was professed and 1652 marked a resolution to the conflicts when Mary Vavasour was elected abbess after the death of Alexia Blanchard. Normal musical practice and provision was restored, the economy of song gained momentum again, and the ‘discord’ was over.57
III.
Alongside the devotion aroused by the performance of sacred music and the divine office, bells were critical in demarcating the aural boundaries of the communities.58 Of especial importance to Catholic communities was the Ave or Angelus Bell, which according to the constitutions from St Monica’s was rung every day after Compline: ‘they shall ring the Ave bell three times, and every time ring it thrice’.59 At every peal the Ave Maria was said, and in between the Angelus devotion in memory of the incarnation. Bells were audible to individuals beyond the convent and seminary walls, as their echoes across the landscape were intended to summon the faithful hearers to prayer. The sound of bells prompted a significant response from one listener in particular. In 1601, when English Catholic exile Richard Verstegan was based in Antwerp, working as a publisher and intelligence agent for the superiors of the English mission, he composed two poetic ‘expositions of the Ave bell’, and published them within his Odes in imitation of the Seaven Penitential Psalms (1601), which were dedicated to the English Benedictine convent in Brussels, to be performed with their ‘sweet voices and virginals’.60
Verstegan had strong ties to the Brussels community through a mutual Catholic friend, Gabriel Colford. Colford’s arrival on the continent in 1593 was noted in a letter from Verstegan to Robert Persons, and by 1595 the authorities were soon aware that, like Verstegan, Colford was involved in the illicit English Catholic book-trade.61 By 1600, Colford had a close relationship with Verstegan, and Verstegan paid the account for Colford’s purchases at the Plantin House printing press in Antwerp.62 In the following years, Colford was intimately linked with the convent: his daughter Martha entered in 1609, he was also one of the house’s translators, and by 1629 the community noted that he had transcribed the convent’s statutes for them.63 In the dedication of his Odes to the community, Verstegan explained how he had already ‘communicated them with a friend’ who had encouraged him to publish them: ‘And now hauing yeilded unto the one, and aduentured the other, I knew no better way then to make dedication of them unto your selues’.64 Based on their mutual acquaintance it could well be that Verstegan dedicated the Odes to the community on Colford’s insistence; perhaps Colford and Verstegan had visited the convent together and heard the community’s Ave bells ringing across Brussels’s soundscape. Written in the first person, sounds permeate Verstegan’s poems, and prompt multifaceted sensory responses that are vital for stirring memories. Verstegan’s sensuous language is explicitly intended to arouse devotion, and the aural and metrical aspects of his poetry demonstrate the way that the sound of the poetry itself could invoke a sense of time and place.
In the two poems, sounds provoke specific physical and emotional responses: as we hear in the opening line of his first poem, an Ave bell was the ‘the Chaser of my sence-detayning slumber’. The sounds then stimulate memory, as Verstegan explains in the second stanza: ‘For sounds and sights are messengers assigned / To bring lost memory unto the mind’.65 The memory in this instance was the message that the Angel Gabriel had brought to Mary, and the sound of Gabriel’s voice is repeatedly referenced, which Verstegan imagines due to the sound of the bell: ‘whereof an Angels voice the message brought / As metals noise renewed it to my thought’.66 This notion of imagined sounds prompted by real sounds recurs in the second poem, where the ‘bel reneweth to our eares / The sound of ioy now twyce before exprest’. The recollection, as Verstegan explains, is in honour of ‘The contemplation of the mystery / Of the subjected state of heavens king / And the revival of the memory / That three times, thrice a day the bell doth ring’. Verstegan also highlights the chastity of Mary in distinctly aural terms. In the first poem ‘her chaste ears… could no noise receive’, and he emphasises the sacredness of sound itself: it was Mary’s ears that ‘conceived first’ with the sound of the Angel’s voice.67 The poem ends with the birth of Jesus, which was heralded by the sound of trumpets: ‘The Angels trumps did sound the heavens peace’.68
In the second poem, Verstegan emphasises how bells’ punctuation of the day provokes thoughts on life’s transience. He calls on those who hear the midday bell to remember the sacrifice of Jesus, to examine their consciences and remember their own personal sins.69 In the last stanzas, at the end of the day, the bells served to remind those listening of the end of life on earth and the importance of living well in order to die well.70 Together, Verstegan’s poems testify to the ability of sounds, particularly bells, to move listeners to further devotion by recalling key events in Christian history and precepts of Christian doctrine. Moreover, in the second poem these memories and devotional acts are intimately linked with the passage of time, with the repeated references to the hours of the day and the course of life. The sensory and temporal rhythms of devotion are enhanced by the metrical regularity of Verstegan’s verse, and by his extensive use of repetition throughout. Nearly every stanza contains multiple uses of the same words, for example in the eighth stanza of the first poem where love begins and ends the first three lines, beginning and completing the cycle ready for it to start again:
Love first bred grief and grief did pittie moue,
And pittie sought the way to woork redresse,
And kynde redresse the true effect of loue.71
In combining the rhetorical tropes including enumeratio (the division of a subject into causes and effects) and anadiplosis (the repetition of a word or clause at the end of one line at the beginning of the next line), Verstegan invokes a specific, liturgical sense of time as circular.
From the outset Verstegan explicitly emphasises the aurality of his verses, referring to them as ‘ditties’ and making plain that they were intended for performance with the nuns’ ‘sweet voices’ and their virginals. This gives the poetry a sense of dual temporality. The sound of the bells recalls the past, prompting an imagined remembrance of Gabriel’s voice as he spoke to the Virgin Mary in Nazareth, and at the same time the verses are designed to be heard in the present moment as they are performed by the nuns. This was evidently effective, and Verstegan’s Odes were popular in England as well as on the continent and circulated widely even among Protestants. For example, Verstegan’s poetic imitations of the seven penitential psalms were included anonymously in Elizabeth Grymeston’s Miscellanea, Meditations, Memoratives (first printed 1604), and then in 1620 Martin Peerson’s Private Musicke, which included a musical setting of ‘Our Blessed Lady’s Lullaby’.72
Verstegan’s meditations on the Ave bell demonstrate both the imaginative ways that Catholics forged an individual relationship with Christ, and the communality of such interactions for those within earshot. For readers in England, the imagined sounds of the bells prompted by Verstegan’s poetry, as well as the sounds of the meditative poetry itself as it was read aloud, would have bound Catholics together and consolidated the community of hearers. On the continent, as their Catholic faith instructed them, those that heard the bells sounding from the institutions will have cast their minds to the nuns and seminarians at prayer, and were united with them during their private devotions. Forged through both real and imagined sounds, communal relationships between English Catholics both at home and abroad, as well as the local international laity, were unavoidable, and indeed desirable. These relationships are underlined in the final part of this essay, where I explore the events and devotions surrounding a damaged statue of the Virgin Mary at the English College in Valladolid.
IV.
In the summer of 1596, the Spanish port of Cadiz was raided by English and Dutch soldiers under the dual command of Lord Charles Howard of Effingham and Robert Devereux the earl of Essex. In the carnage, a statue of the Virgin Mary with the Christ child was attacked: dragged along the streets, beaten and mutilated. The figure of Christ was cut out of the Virgin’s arms and her face disfigured. The statue was discovered abandoned in the wreckage left by the soldiers in the plaza and was claimed by Martin de Padilla, secretary of state and war to Philip II, where it was sent to Madrid and placed in his private chapel. A few years later, hearing of the wounded Madonna, the scholars at the English College at Valladolid signed a petition claiming it was more appropriate that ‘the English Catholics should disclaim the injuries which the English heretics have inflicted upon our Lady, and should serve and revere the image abused by them’.73 The petition was successful, and in September 1600 the image was carried in procession from Madrid to Valladolid.
Although scholars such as Peter Davidson have argued that the statue became ‘the image of England self-wounded by the ignorance and blindness of her children’, this should not overshadow the multi-national and multi-cultural aspects of the festivities surrounding the arrival of the statue to Valladolid, which attracted the devotion and attention of several nations within this cosmopolitan city as well as the local Spanish laity.74 According to the surviving contemporary account penned in Spanish by Antonio Ortiz, when Philip III and his consort Margarita arrived at the College ready for the festivities to celebrate the arrival of the Vulnerata, they were greeted by the students who:
above in the quire sang Te Deum laudamus, in their accustomed Ecclesiastical Music which contented so much… [T]he Duke of Lerma and other noble men that came with the king; thought the singers had been procured from abroad, but understanding that it was the ordinary music of the College, and only the students, received double contentment to hear it…75
It was important for the College to emphasise that it was their own students singing for the monarchs: their Englishness was emphasised alongside their musical prowess. As well as music for the liturgy, the students also performed for the Spanish monarchs when they entered the Great Hall: ‘the Musicians in the other room adjoining, divided only with a curtain, began to play upon their vials and virginals a very grave and pleasant song of eight parts’.76 Music supported the College’s assimilation within the city, as the students ‘integrated Spanish identity into English music’.77 This is explicit when the English students, giving thanks for the Spanish monarchs’ ‘favour and protection’ also ‘began a sweet and artificial song made after their country [England’s] manner of musicke and the ditty in Spanish to the purpose’. Hearing English Catholicism on this occasion, then, was to hear purposeful hybrid of English music with Spanish words, and ‘the English musicke with the Spanish ditty gave extraordinary contentment to all’.78
The Vulnerata quickly became fundamental to the musical tradition and devotions of the College. In the College archives are the Diario de Costumbres, a collection of documents that reveal a vivid picture of College life from 1600–1731. Among the documents are the details of ‘What is observed in devotion to and veneration of the statue of Our Lady, Saint Mary Vulnerata’. These included the directions that:
A Mass of our Lady will be said all through the year at 10am and 11am of which notice will be given by ringing the bell at full swing, and at this Mass, the statue of Our Lady will be exposed to view.
The Mass at 10am will be said from Easter to St Michael’s, and that at 11am from St Michael’s to Easter and on all Saturdays the statue will be exposed to view after the Mass.
Every Saturday the Salve will be sung, in winter at four o’clock in the afternoon, in summer at six, and the statue will be unveiled.
On Christmas Day, Easter and Whit Sundays, the nine feasts of Our Lady, the feasts of the Apostles and the Evangelists and on others marked on the College lists as feasts with Mass, vespers and antiphon, on the eve, at winter at four o’clock in the afternoon, in the summer at five, an antiphon will be sung with instrumental accompaniment, and on that day itself, there will be High Mass and vespers, and on these three occasions the statue will be unveiled, as it will also be on all feasts of Our Lady during the Masses said at the High Altar.79
Especially important was the visibility of the Virgin, which as the instructions repeatedly stressed should be ‘exposed to view’ or ‘unveiled’ during the devotions. This indicates the importance of viewing the Vulnerata whilst singing the liturgy and during musical performances at feasts. It was imperative for the students to contemplate the wounds of the Madonna in order to heighten their religious experience. From these rituals, there is a strong sense in which the singing of the masses was a form of reparation for the violent touch of the iconoclasts, and acted as a form of musical healing. Similar devotional behaviour was occurring among the Catholic community in England; as Alexandra Walsham has argued, disfigured shrines were regarded as symbols of the embattled Roman faith and enhanced the devotion of the beleaguered laity.80 The Vulnerata was the visible witness of suffering, and this made her almost like a relic: she had been touched, she was to be seen, and the music performed would have been heard. All the senses of the faithful individual were to be aroused by the regular performance of this communal devotion.
The impact of these rituals was significant and boosted missionary zeal, whilst attracting the devotions of the local people, both Spanish and English alike. Moreover, as Anne Cruz has argued, the festivity and the devotions of the Vulnerata placed the College in a strategic position in international politics, and at the centre of Spanish society, as the ceremonies of Valladolid made a great impression on the local community.81 For example, the Spanish noblewoman Luisa de Carvajal took an especial interest in the plight of the English and was ‘transfixed’ by the Vulnerata. Her letters revealed that ‘since it is just a few steps away from home, I present myself before her every day even if I am very sick’.82 The festivities at the college need therefore to be contextualised not only within the atmosphere of persecution and propaganda, but also in terms of border-crossing between cultures and languages which were critical to Catholic life in exile during this period.
V.
By listening to the past experiences of English Catholics on the continent, it is clear that exiled men and women must not be investigated in isolation from their continental co-religionists, nor from their Catholic compatriots in England. With the economy of song, the English convents and seminaries were linked through public piety and patronage. The local Spanish and Dutch communities were attracted to the institutions as centres of devotion, which were advertised by music and in turn inspired donation and support. Music facilitated connections between individuals, which could be discordant as much as harmonious (as we saw in the Brussels convent). Music also fostered links to the divine, and the ability of sounds to prompt a multifaceted sensory and devotional response from the listening laity is evident in Richard Verstegan’s poetry dedicated to the English Benedictine nuns at Brussels. The way that music allowed people to sense the sacred was also clear at Valladolid, where the significance of singing, seeing, hearing, and touch was epitomised through devotion to the Vulnerata, and as the ceremonies demonstrated, the way English Catholic exiles enhanced the sense of their own national identity was complex. Musical performances often blurred national and cultural lines, as we saw in Valladolid, where the seminarians performed ‘English’ music with the text of a local Spanish ‘ditty’. Another form of national expression was through the image of a wounded Mary, and yet at the same time the image was utilised by local and international visitors to the community, who adopted the image for their own devotional needs and political ends. The English seminaries and convents have been described as inhabiting ‘a liminal position – geographically separate from the families and English Catholic population they served and culturally distinct from the neighbourhoods in which they were situated’.83 And yet, rather than ‘seemingly dislocated pockets of resistance to the Protestant Church and state’, the convents and seminaries were specifically located, and their sense of place defined by what they heard.84 By sensing the sacred through sounds, English Catholics were spiritually and physically located amongst their co-religionists both at home and abroad.
Notes
Thanks to audiences at the University of Konstanz and University College Dublin for their helpful questions and comments on earlier versions of this essay.
1 See, for example, Mark M. Smith, ed., Hearing History: A Reader (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004).
2 See, for example, Christopher Marsh, Music and Society in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), Jonathan P. Willis, Church Music and Protestantism in post-Reformation England: Discourses, Sites and Identities (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010).
3 John Bossy, English Catholic Community, 1570–1850 (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1975), 6.
4 Katy Gibbons, English Catholic Exiles in Late Sixteenth-Century Paris (Woodbridge: Boydell Press for the Royal Historical Society, 2011).
5 See Caroline Bowden and James Kelly, eds., The English Convents in Exile, 1600–1800: Communities, Culture and Identity (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), James E. Kelly and Susan Royal, eds., Early Modern English Catholicism: Identity, Memory and Counter-Reformation (Leiden: Brill, 2016), Laurence Lux-Sterritt, English Benedictine Nuns in Exile in the Seventeenth Century: Living Spirituality (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017).
6 For more on theories of ‘senses of place’ and space from the field of historical geography, a good starting point is Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977). In 1568 the first Catholic seminary, the English College in Douay, was founded by William Allen. In 1659 the Treaty of the Pyrenees was signed to mark the end of the Franco-Spanish war, as part of this treaty the County of Artois was annexed and St Omer became part of France.
7 Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: the Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), Mark Netzloff, ‘The English Colleges and the English Nation: Allen, Persons, Verstegan, and Diasporic Nationalism’, in Catholic Culture in Early Modern England, ed. Ronald Corthell et al. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 236–60.
8 Netzloff, ‘The English Colleges’, 237; Lisa McClain, Lest We Be Damned: Practical Innovation and Lived Experience Among Catholics in Protestant England, 1559–1642 (New York: Routledge, 2004), 234.
9 Claire Walker, Gender and Politics in Early Modern Europe: English Convents in France and the Low Countries (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 38.
10 Christopher Highley, Catholics Writing the Nation in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 183.
11 Geert H. Janssen, ‘The Exile Experience’, in The Ashgate Research Companion to the Counter Reformation, ed. Alexandra Bamji, Geert H. Janssen, and Mary Laven (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013), 73–90 (at 84).
12 Cited in Linda Phyllis Austern, ‘“Tis Nature’s Voice”: Music, Natural Philosophy and the Hidden World in Seventeenth-Century England’, in Music Theory and the Natural Order, from the Renaissance to the Early Twentieth Century, ed. Suzannah Clark and Alexander Reading (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 30–67 (at 1).
13 For music and medicine, see Penelope Gouk, ‘Raising Spirits and Restoring Souls: Early Modern Medical Explanations for Music’s Effects’ in Hearing Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening and Modernity, ed. Veit Erimann (Oxford: Berg, 2004), 87–105.
14 Willis, Church Music, 26.
15 Augustine, Confessions, 10.33, trans. R.S. Pine-Coffin (London: Penguin, 1961), 238.
16 Alexander J. Fisher, ‘Bells and Apotropaic Magic in Post-Tridentine Germany’, paper delivered at For Whom the Bell Tolls. Sound, Time, and Acoustic Communication in the Early Modern World, University of Konstanz, Institute of Advanced Study, 16 January 2015. For the first book to deal explicitly with bells from the perspective of cultural history, see Alain Corbin, Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the 19th-century French Countryside, trans. Martin Thom (New York: Colombia University Press, 1998). John Arnold and Caroline Goodson have also discussed this for the medieval period, see ‘Resounding Community: The History and Meaning of Medieval Church Bells’, Viator 43 (2012): 99–130.
17 Fisher, ‘Bells and Apotropaic Magic’.
18 R. Murray Schafer, ‘Soundscapes and Earwitnesses’, in Smith, ed., Hearing History, 3–9 (at 9). This also relates to Aristotle’s description of all the senses, including sound, as forms of touch or contact – for Aristotle ‘sound… is generated by an impact’, and ‘there seems to be a sort of parallelism between what is acute or grave to hearing and what is sharp or blunt to touch’. De Anima, book 2, chapter 8. From ‘The Internet Classics Archive’, accessed 28 October 2015. http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/soul.2.ii.html.
19 All spelling for this source has been modernised to ease reading. Lisbon Rule (1607) and Additions (1607), ed. James Hogg, The Birgittine Legislation for Syon Abbey Lisbon (Salzburg, 1991), 19.
20 The Birgittine Legislation, 99.
21 See Sylvia Evangelisti, Nuns: A History of Convent Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 113.
22 Douai Abbey, Berks. St. Monica’s Louvain [hereafter DAB St. Monica’s] MS. C2 Chronicle, 1548–1837, 469. This chronicle was edited, and published as The Chronicle of the English Augustinian Canonesses Regular of the Lateran at St Monica’s in Louvain, ed. Adam Hamilton, 2 vols. (London: Sands, 1906). Prick-song means ‘pricked song’ i.e. noted down, marked on a page. Lioba could therefore read music.
23 DAB St. Monica’s MS. C2 Chronicle, 89.
24 E.H. Burton and T.L. Williams, eds., The Douay College Diaries 1598- 1654 Vol. 1, Catholic Record Society Record Series, 10 (1911), 344–45.
25 DAB St. Monica’s MS. E5 Constitutions, Ancient Customs & Ceremonies AD 1609, ff. 55–56.
26 For the only published work on music in the English convents, see Andrew Cichy, ‘Parlour, Court and Cloister: Musical Culture in English Convents during the Seventeenth Century’, in English Convents in Exile, ed. Bowden and Kelly, 175–90 (at 187).
27 Norman P. Tanner S.J., ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 2 vols. (London: Sheed & Ward, 1990), 2: 778.
28 Ibid.
29 Cited in Sharon T. Strocchia, Nuns and Nunneries in Renaissance Florence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 173.
30 Evangelisti, Nuns, 114.
31 Cichy, ‘Parlour, Court and Cloister’, 61.
32 ‘Life of Mother Margaret Clement’, in The Troubles of Our Catholic Forefathers Related by Themselves, ed. John Morris, 3 vols. (London: Burns and Oates, 1872–1877), 1: 40–42.
33 SP 12/273/49.
34 These Letters, normally printed for each year, were compilations made at Rome from the digests sent by each provincial superior deriving from the letters written to him every year from each of the colleges. Cited in William H. McCabe, ‘Music and Dance on a 17th-Century College Stage’, The Musical Quarterly 24 (1938): 313–22 (at 321).
35 DAB St. Monica’s MS. C2 Chronicle, 466.
36 Schondonch’s inventory from Louvain Univ. Lib. MS. D. 321 (160), 29–30. Copied in McCabe, ‘Music and Dance’, 314–15. A ‘broken consort’ was a term used to describe a musical ensemble that featured instruments from more than one family, e.g. strings and wind.
37 Ibid.
38 Whitehead and Leech, ‘In Paradise and Among Angels’.
39 Henry Foley, ed., Records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus: Historic Facts Illustrative of the Labours and Sufferings of its Members in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, 7 vols. (London: Burns and Oates, 1875–1883), 7: pt. 2, 1152–55.
40 Ibid.
41 This training likely supported the type of music that was used by lay-Catholics for their own household piety, and their wider communities. See Emilie K. M. Murphy, ‘Adoramus te Christe: Music and Post-Reformation English Catholic Domestic Piety’, in Religion and the Household, ed. Alexandra Walsham et al. (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2014), 242–55; ‘Music and Catholic Culture in Post-Reformation Lancashire: Piety, Protest and Conversion’, British Catholic History 33 (2015): 492–525; ‘Musical self-fashioning and the ‘theatre of death’ in late Elizabethan and Jacobean England’, Renaissance Studies 30 (2016): 410–429.
42 The Chronicle of the English Augustinian Canonesses, vol. 1, 99. Copley (prof. 1612 d.1669) has been identified as the first scribe of the Chronicle, whose hand is present from pages 1–621, the years 1535–1660. See Victoria Van Hyning, ‘Naming Names: Chroniclers, Scribes and Editors of St Monica’s Convent, Louvain, 1631–1906’, in The English Convents in Exile, ed. Bowden and Kelly, 71–86.
43 DAB St. Monica’s MS. Q1 Life of our Most Reverent Mother Margrit Clement, 1628, f. 140.
44 My emphasis. Thomas Robinson, Anatomy of the English Nunnery at Lisbon in Portugall (London, 1622), 13.
45 For links between ears (and mouths) and genitals, see Carla Mazzio, ‘Sins of the Tongue in Early Modern England’, Modern Language Studies 28 (1998): 93–124.
46 Keith Botelho, Renaissance Earwitnesses: Rumor and Early Modern Masculinity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
47 BL. Add. MS. 21203, f.42v.
48 BL. Add. MS. 21203, f.49.
49 Mazzio, ‘Sins of the Tongue in Early Modern England’, 93.
50 George Webbe, The Arraignment of an unruly tongue… (London, 1619), 90–91. This drew upon the story of Eve’s fall, which was represented in Psalm 58.4.5 (as Webbe annotated at the side of the page), ‘They are like the deafe Adder which stoppeth her eare, and will not hearken to the voyce of the Charmer, charming never so expertly’.
51 DAB St. Monica’s MS. P1 Benefactor’s Book, 1609–1627, unfoliated. Emphasis in original.
52 Peter Guilday, The English Catholic Refugees on the Continent 1558–1795, vol. 1, The English Colleges and Convents in the Catholic Low Countries, 1558–1795 (London: Longmans, 1914), 259. For more on this conflict, see Emilie K. M. Murphy, ‘Language and Power in an English Convent in Exile, c.1621-c.1631’, The Historical Journal (Forthcoming, 2018), doi: 10.1017/S0018246X17000437.
53 An outline of these affairs has been astutely summarised in James Kelly, ‘Kinship and Religious Politics among Catholic families in England, 1570- 1640’, History 94 (2009): 328–43.
54 Mechelen, Archief van het aartsbisdom Mechelen, doos 4: Regulieren Brussel, Engelse Nonnen, 12/2, unfoliated.
55 BL. Add. MS. 18393, 16. From the beginning of the crisis the nuns were concerned over their reputations abroad. See for example, Potentiana Deacon [in Brussels] to the Archbishop of Mechelen [Jacobus Boonen], 13 December [1622] and others in Archief van het aartsbisdom Mechelen, Mechelen, Belgium, Regulieren Brussel, Engelse Nonnen, Doos 12/1, unfoliated. See also boxes 12/2, 12/3 and 12/4, all uncatalogued and unfoliated.
56 Information from the Who Were the Nuns? Database, accessed 23 March 2015. wwtn.history.qmul.ac.uk.
57 My sincere thanks to Jaime Goodrich for allowing me to mine her expertise on the Brussels Benedictine community, and for helpful comments on a draft of this chapter.
58 As Ben Kaplan has emphasised, ‘church bells were the voices of local communities. Just as their sound carried to all within earshot, so it expressed the feelings and served the needs of the same. It proclaimed their unity as a Christian community’. In Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 50.
59 DAB St. Monica’s MS. E5 Constitutions, f. 38.
60 Richard Verstegan, Odes in imitation of the Seaven Penitential Psalmes (Antwerp, 1601), A2. Paul Arblaster has argued that Verstegan was alluding to the Brussels community in the dedication of the Odes to ‘the vertuous ladies and gentlewomen readers of these ditties’. See Antwerp and the World: Richard Verstegan and the International Culture of the Catholic Reformation (Louvain: Louvain University Press, 2004), 80–84.
61 Anthony G. Petti, ed., The Letters and Dispatches of Richard Verstegan, 1550–1640 (London: Publications of the Catholic Record Society, 1959), 155. Colford was cited in a warrant from 12 November 1595 from Sir Thomas Fleming to the Solicitor General: ‘There is one Gabriel Colford lately apprehended, that brought certain seditious books from beyond the seas into the realm, being a most lewd person, as wee do understand, and one that is emploied for the fugitives beyond the seas in messages hither into the realm’. See SP. 12 / 2 / 21, f.40.
62 Petti, Letters and Dispatches, 155–57.
63 Cited in Jaime Goodrich, ‘Nuns and Community-Centred Writing: The Benedictine Rule and Brussels Statutes’, The Huntington Library Quarterly 77 (2014): 287–303 (at 289).
64 Verstegan, Odes, unpaginated preface (A2r).
65 Ibid., 98.
66 Ibid.
67 Ibid.
68 Ibid., 101.
69 Ibid., 103.
70 Ibid., 104.
71 Ibid., 99.
72 Elizabeth Grymeston, Miscelanea, Meditations, Memoratiues (London, 1604), Fr-Hr; Martin Peerson, Private Musicke: Or the First book of ayres and dialogues, (London, 1620), Dv-D2r.
73 Cited in Michael E. Williams, St Alban’s College, Valladolid: Four Centuries of English Catholic Presence in Spain (London: C Hurst, 1986), 61–62.
74 Peter Davidson, ‘Recusant Catholic Spaces in Early Modern England’, in Catholic Culture in Early Modern England, ed. Ronald Corthell et al, 19–51 (at 25).
75 Antonio Ortiz, A relation of the solemnitie wherewith the Catholike princes K. Philip III and Quene Margret were receyued in the Inglish Colledge of Valladolid the 22. of August. 1600. Written in Spanish by Don Ant. Ortiz and translated by Frauncis Riuers and dedicated to the right honorable the Lord Chamberlayne (Antwerp, 1601), 17.
76 Ortiz, A relation of the solemnitie, 39.
77 Andrew Cichy, ‘“How Shall We Sing the Song of the Lord in a Strange Land?” English Catholic Music after the Reformation to 1700: A Study of Institutions in Continental Europe’ (Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014), 116.
78 Ibid.
79 My emphasis. Cited in Williams, St Alban’s College Valladolid, 240–241.
80 Alexandra Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity, and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 173.
81 Anne J. Cruz, ‘Vindicating the Vulnerata: Cadiz and the Circulation of Religious Imagery as Weapons of War’, in Material and Symbolic Circulation between Spain and England, 1554–1604, ed. Anne J. Cruz (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 39–60.
82 Glyn Redworth, The She-Apostle: The Extraordinary Life and Death of Luisa de Carvajal (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008), 84.
83 Walker, Gender and Politics, 174.
84 Ibid.