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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 September 2015
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.
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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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5 ‘John Howlet’ (i.e. Robert Persons), Epistle Dedicatory to A Brief Discourse containing Certain Reasons why Catholics Refuse to go to Church (London, 1580, S.T.C. 19394).
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9 A Relation of the King of Spain's Receiving in Valladolid (Antwerp, 1592, S.T.C. 19836a), pp. 23–24.
10 Sir Francis Hastings (d. 1610) was a younger brother of Henry Lord Hastings, Earl of Huntingdon and President of the North.
11 Persons, R., A treatise of Three Conversions of England from Paganism to Christian Religion (St. Omer, 1603, S.T.C. 19416), vol. 1, p. 171.Google Scholar An entertaining symbol of Protestant disruption of established truth is John Bale's marriage to the nun Dorothy, who thus was no longer a gift to God but a gift from Christ (vol. 1, pp. 62, 167).
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19 ‘Pereat … totus neruus historiae’, R. Gibbons to C. Aquaviva, Valladolid, 6 Oct. 1593 (archives of the Society of Jesus, Rome, MS, Hispania 136.92–3). Grateful acknowledgements to the archivist, Fr. Wiktor Gramatowski, S.J., for permission to quote from sources in these archives.
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.
21 Copley, Anthony, An Answer to a Letter of a Jesuited Gentleman (London, 1601,Google Scholar S.T.C. 5735), and Another Letter of Mr. A.C. to his Dis-Jesuited Kinsman … Also a Third Letter (London, 1602, S.T.C. 5736).
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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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