8 - The 1590s to the Gunpowder plot

Summary

THE SECOND VISCOUNT MONTAGUE STARTS TO LOOK ABOUT HIMSELF

Lady Magdalen, the dowager Viscountess Montague, was clearly a powerful focus for Catholics in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in both Sussex and Southwark. She attracted seminarist chaplains who had an agenda which was, as we shall see, extremely ambitious. After her death they used her reputation for zealous Catholicism and undoubted piety to advance their cause. They chose to turn her into a saint: hence Richard Smith's famous encomium of her.

But, after she was gone, would her priests and friends be able to rely on the holder of the family's title – her stepgrandson, Anthony Maria Browne, the second Viscount Montague? After all, he and the Lady Magdalen had hit it off very well. Why should he not be sympathetic to their courses? Perhaps he already was? The second viscount's father, Anthony Browne, had himself been of a Catholic temperament. Indeed, in the early 1590s (before his premature death) he may have been attracting Catholic interest, in part because it must have been expected that he would fairly soon inherit his father's estates and mantle. The informer Robert Hammond denounced him for associating with Catholic undesirables. According to Robert Gray, the Jesuit John Curry had been at River Park, Anthony Browne's residence. Thomas Simpson, who was ordained as a priest in the early 1580s by the cardinal of Guise and who conformed in spring 1593, had, it seems, some sort of entrée at River Park.