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‘Casting Anchor in the Harbour of Religion’: The Peregrination of Humfrey Leech (1571–1629)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 September 2015

Barbara Coulton
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Extract

The title of this paper is taken from a work written in 434 A.D.: the Commonitorium of Vincent of Lerins. Leech considered this a ‘golden book’; we will see later the significance of Vincent for Leech, while Leech's life will perhaps illuminate his own age. Calling himself ‘Peregrinus’, Vincent wrote: ‘whereas I was at one time involved in the manifold and deplorable tempests of secular warfare, I have now at length, under Christ's auspices, cast anchor in the harbour of religion’. His aim was to pass on the teaching of the Fathers and to give guidance ‘for distinguishing the truth of the catholic faith from the falsehood of heretical pravity.’

Type
Research Article
Information
British Catholic History , Volume 28 , Issue 1 , May 2006 , pp. 55 - 74
Copyright
Copyright © Catholic Record Society 2006

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References

Notes

1 Sulpitius Severus, Vincent of Lerins, John Cassian, A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, second series, vol. 11 (Oxford and New York, 1894), p. 131.

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68 Foley, Records, vol. 1, p. 647. According to The Diary of the English College Rome, Foley, Records, vol. 6, p. 313: ‘John Gamett, vere Gardiner, received into the Catholic church by Fr. Leech in February, 1627’.

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74 D.N.B., Whitelocke, Yelverton.

75 Foley, Records, vol. 2, pp. 24–63; McCoog, part 1, p. 125, under Bradshaw: Arrowmith was born c. 1585 in Lancashire, ordained abroad as a secular priest, and entered the Society in 1623; in 1626 he joined the College of Blessed Aloysius, in Lancashire.

76 Foley, Records, vol. 2, pp. 24–6.

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85 Leech, Dutifull Considerations, pp. 15–19.

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88 Reynolds, E. E., Campion and Parsons. The Jesuit Mission of 1580–1 (London, 1980),Google Scholar chapter 11. See also McCoog, Thomas M., ‘“The Flower of Oxford”: The Role of Edmund Campion and Early Recusant Polemics’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 24 (1993), pp. 899–913.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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90 Edwards, Francis, Robert Persons, pp. 347–74;Google Scholar quotation at p. 351. For the attacks on Persons by Matthew Sutcliffe, dean of Exeter, and others, see Houliston, Recusant History, 22, pp. 141–51 (see n. 31).