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‘Sir Thomas Heywood the Parson’ and Donne's Catholic Background
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 October 2016
Extract
Jonn Donne's modern biographers have had to redress an imbalance in the laconic account of his Catholic background given by his earliest biographer, Izaak Walton. For example, Baird D. Whitlock introduced the story that the priest Thomas Heywood, Donne's grand-uncle, was ‘executed’ for his faith in 1574, when Donne was two years old. Whitlock found this story in A. W. Reed's Early Tudor Drama, where Reed presumed that ‘Sir Thomas Heywood the Parson’, as he is named in his brother Richard's will, was also the subject of a note inscribed on another document relating to Richard Heywood: ‘ye 14th of June 1574, a fryar who was akin was executed’. Though this note is the only evidence of Thomas Heywood's purported execution, the story has been accepted by Donne's biographers since Whitlock, despite various contrary evidence.
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Notes
1 Augustus Jessopp began this work in his DNB article of 1882. Here Jessopp pointed out the descent of Donne's mother from Elizabeth More and John Rastell, who died in exile, as well as the fact that Donne's two uncles, Ellis and Jasper Heywood, also died in exile and moreover were Jesuits. Jessopp's earlier essay on Donne's biography, his introduction to an edition of Donne's Essays in Divinity (J. Tupling, London, 1855), showed little awareness of Donne's Catholicism as a significant factor in his psychological growth. However, in his full-length biography of 1897, Jessopp expanded the catalogue of Donne's Catholic connections (John Donne, Sometime Dean of St Paul's [Methuen, London, 1897], pp. 3-5). Among new items here contributed were the deaths in exile of Margaret Giggs and her husband Dr John Clement; of Winifred and William Rastell; and of Elizabeth and John Heywood, Donne's grandparents. Jessopp was also first to point out the death of Henry Donne, Donne's younger brother, in prison in 1593 for harbouring a priest. Two years after Jessopp's last effort, Edmund Gosse referred for the first time to the Catholicism of Donne's father, and he gave a far more detailed account of the maternal relations already mentioned by Jessopp (The Life and Letters of John Donne, 2 vols [London, 1899], I, 3-11). Signalling his emphasis as a modern biographer on the importance of family relationships in the development of personality, Gosse actually began his biography with this sentence: ‘History presents us with no instance of a man of letters more obviously led up to by the experience and character of his ancestors, than was John Donne’ (ibid., I, 3). Biographers since Gosse have continued to focus on the details of Donne's early Catholic associations.
2 ‘The Heredity and Childhood of John Donne’, Notes and Queries, CCIV (1959), 259, 262.
3 Early Tudor Drama (Methuen, London, 1926), p. 35.Google Scholar This document is B.M. Additional MS. 35333, a description of arms granted to Richard Heywood, whose will (P.C.C., 18 Lyon) was proved in 1570 (ibid., p. 32). That Thomas Heywood is styled a parson in the will may merely refer to his function in an earlier reign, or it may mean that Heywood was still serving in the church under Queen Elizabeth in 1570. In any case he seems to have been one of those priests who continued to administer the sacraments clandestinely. Reed informs us that Heywood had been a monk of St Osyth's Abbey in Essex until its dissolution in 1539. At that time he had subscribed to an acknowledgement of King Henry's supremacy over the Church of England, and had received in consequence a small pension on the usual understanding that he would exchange his monk's habit for that of a secular priest. This evidently he did (ibid., pp. 32-35).
4 Cf. Edward, S. Lecomte, Grace to a Witty Sinner (Walker, New York, 1965), pp. 6, 9,Google Scholar and 14; and Bald, R. C., John Donne: A Life (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1970), p. 24.Google Scholar
5 ‘At Lacock, the xxvi of August, 1574. A letter for the delivery of the Popishe pristes that said Masse in Lent last; viz. Heyward, Heywood, and Dolman’ (A.P.C. VIII, 287). The lack of an address on this letter makes it unclear who was to deliver the priests and why. Possibly they were to be tried for having said mass, or possibly their trials were over and they were to begin serving time in some other prison or prisons. They were not being sent to execution, for Oliver Heyward died in Newgate, 15 July 1586 (C.R.S. 2, 267); and Alban Dolman lived on into the reign of James I (H.M.C., Salisbury, XVIII, 195).
6 Whitlock, p. 262, n. 22.
7 John, Stow, Annates (London, 1631), p. 678 Google Scholar (quoted by Whitlock, p. 262). Cf. Gabriel, Holinshed, Chronicles of England, 6 vols. (London, 1807–08) IV, 324 Google Scholar (quoted by Reed, p. 35). An apparently related account of these events appears in John, Strype's The Life and Acts of Matthew Parker, 4 vols. (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1821), II, 365–6.Google Scholar Though there are some differences of detail between this account and the one in Stow and Holinshed, Strype's version also makes no reference to crimes other than saying or hearing mass. Strype gives yet another account in his Annals of the Reformation, (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1824), I, 497–98,Google Scholar which again varies in some details, but not on the nature of the charges. This last account incorporates a letter about the Palm Sunday caper written from Court on 8 April 1574 by George Gardiner, Dean of Norwich. Gardiner's letter, while it is specific on several points of detail concerning the prisoners, mentions no crime but the hearing and saying of mass (ibid., 1,497-8).
8 A.P.C. VIII, 218, 270, and 287. Maybe the strongest evidence that Heywood was not executed for his faith is the fact that his name never appeared in the lists or martyrologies that Catholics in exile began to produce in the 1580's
9 C.R.S. 1, 119.
10 C.R.S. 5, 192. Unlike others on this list of those who died in jail, ‘Haiwood’ is not described explicitly as a priest; but the title ‘Sir’ was an alternate way to indicate priesthood.