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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 September 2015
ALTHOUGH THE LETTER which follows was printed in the very year in which it was written, and has been reprinted twice since, I do not hesitate to make it available again, seeing that the writer was the proto-matyr of the English Reformation, John Houghton, the last Prior of the London Charterhouse, canonized in 1970. The text of Houghton's letter and of the answer to it from his correspondent, a fellow-Carthusian at Cologne named Dietrich Loher (Loer), are preserved in a book by the latter, a small octavo volume issued at Cologne in 1532. Following its titlepage, which reads D. Dionysii Carthusiani, Doctoris extatici vita, simul & operum eius fidissimus catalogus. Coloniae excudebat Iaspar Gennepius. MDXXXII, there are seven pages containing the original Latin text of both letters. Today it has become a rare book, which is hardly to be found outside a few great libraries and therefore cannot be widely known or easily read. This is obviously the source from which, almost a century ago, Dom Lawrence Hendriks reprinted Houghton's letter as Appendix VI to his pioneer study, The London Charterhouse, its monks and its martyrs.’ Even this work is no longer within everyone's reach today. Hendriks, moreover, printed only the Latin text, without any indication where it came from, and devoted but a few lines in his Chapter VII to its general contents, remarking that this and a short letter written when Houghton was Prior of Beauvale ‘are the only authentic writings of Blessed John Houghton that have come down to us.’ Wishing to make once more available this precious evidence concerning the personality and preoccupations of the martyr-made all the more poignant for us by the realization that little more than two years and a half after the penning of this gracious and affectionate exchange of letters, Houghton in May 1535 was to undergo King Henry's specially savage butchery at Tyburn-I offer an English version of both letters, with some notes to place the correspondence in its historical setting. The Latin originals are reprinted as an Appendix to this article.
1 There are copies, for example, in the Bodleian, the British Library (2 copies), Selwyn College Cambridge, the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris, the Bibliotheca Colombina at Seville, and N. America reports only that at Harvard. There is also a copy in the collection of the present writer.
2 London, 1889. The letter was reprinted from Hendriks a year later by Dorn Victor-Marie Doreau in his book Henri VIII et les martyrs de la Chartreuse de Londres, Paris, 1890, pp. 407–409.
3 The actual source of the letter has long been unknown; the exchange of letters between Houghton and Loher receives no mention in Dorn Maurice Chauncy's Historia (Mainz, 1550) which is our prime source for the inside story of the last years of the London Charterhouse. The biliographer of the Order, Dorn Theodore Petreius, in his Bibliotheca Cartusiana (Cologne, 1609) says of Houghton (p. 195) ‘Epistolarum opus … edidit’, but John Pits writing in 1613 (Relationurn historicarum de rebus Anglicis tomus primus, Paris, 1619) comes closer to the truth with his entry (p. 724): ‘Epistolarum maxime ad Theodorisum Loerum Carthusianum, Librum unum. Miraberis forsan religiosissime pater.’ Though he makes a single letter into a book, he does name Houghton's correspondent correctly and also quotes the incipit of Houghton's letter; subsequent authorities, such as Gillow and D.N.B., merely repeat the imprecise information of their predecessors.
4 Hendriks pp. 92–3. Dorn David Knowles, The Religious Orders in England, III, (1959), quotes from Hendriks two sentences from the present letter (p. 225, n. 3); it is quoted from also by the brothers Mathew on p. 292 of their book (cf. note 6)
5 The modern edition, begun by the Carthusian monks of Montreuil-sur-mer in 1896, was completed in 42 volumes (44 parts) only in 1935.
6 The ‘Vicarius’ was the second in rank in each Carthusian house, in effect the Sub-prior. Loher had originally been professed in the Charterhouse of Strasbourg and had been transferred to this house of St. Barbara at Cologne, where he acted as Sacristan (third in rank) and then Vicarius. Thereafter, the spread of the Reformation so violently disturbed the pattern of Carthusian life in Germany that Loher, who was obviously a devout and trustworthy monk and also a capable administrator, was moved by the General Chapter from one crisis point to another. He died on a visitation at Wiirzburg in 1554. There is an admirable summary of his career by the brothers David and Gervase Mathew in their The Reformation and the contemplative life (1934) pp. 303–04. It is there stated that Loher was Sacristan at Cologne from 1525 to 1536 and then Vicarius from 1536 till 1539, but the present letters show that he was already Vicarius by the middle of 1532. With hindsight we can appreciate the dramatic irony of finding Loher, in this same year 1532, dedicating his edition of the Commentaries written by his beloved Denis on the Four Gospels, to King Henry VIII, and following that in September 1533 by dedicating another volume in the same series (Denis on the Sapiential Books) to Thomas Cromwell.
7 See note 14.
8 Dom John Batmanson (see note 14), Houghton's immediate predecessor as Prior of London, had been Prior of Hinton Charterhouse in Somerset from 1523 until 1529, when he was transferred to London. He was succeeded at Hinton by a monk who had been Procurator of the London house, Dom Edmund Horde, who continued in office at Hinton till he subscribed the surrender of that house on 31 March 1539. Horde is therefore the Prior of Hinton mentioned here and at the end of Loher's reply.
9 General Chapters were held each year at the Grande Chartreuse and attended by all the Priors of the Order. But by reason of distance the priors of England and of Saxony were excused this annual journey and attended instead only in leap-years. 1532 was one such year and it was possibly at this, the most recent, Chapter that Horde had received Loher's promise to send his editions to England. But the Mathew brothers (op. cit. p. 132) state that Houghton himself attended the 1532 Chapter, though they do not cite documentary evidence for this; if he did, then 1532 was not the occasion of the Horde-Loher meeting, for the present letter states positively that Houghton had never met Loher. The reason for Loher's presence at the Grand Chartreuse at Chapter on that occasion is not clear, for he was not then a Prior, only second in rank at Cologne. If the General Chapter of 1531 is meant, Horde may have attended as Co-Visitor (see note 20) representing the English Province as a whole.
10 The ‘aeditio prima’ of this work, De perfecto mundi contemptu … heptalogus was issued at Cologne by the printer Melchior Novesianus in November 1530 ‘impensis D. Gulielme [sic] Loer a Stratis’ (cf. Biblioteca Colombina. Catdlogo de sus libros impresos. Tom. III (1891) p. 297).
11 An edition (the first?) of Scalae religiosorum pentateuchus appeared at Cologne in 1531 (Bibliotheca Catholica Neerlandica impressa, The Hague (1954) no. 1155).
12 The gulden and its subdivision the stiver were the currency of the great commercial port of Antwerp; when Don Fernando Colombo bought the copy of De perfecto mundi contemptu cited in note 10, at Cologne on 15 July 1531, he paid for it ‘40 hater’, the Spanish ducat being then worth 612 haler. (loc. cit.).
13 The designation ‘the Charterhouse besyde London’ is used in a document of 1520 quoted by Hendriks (p. 72), the word ‘beside’ meaning ‘hard by’, the equivalent of Houghton's Latin ‘prope Londonias’. The site of the Charterhouse was in fact just outside the city wall, in West Smithfield.
14 Dorn John Batmanson died as Prior of the London Charterhouse on 16 November 1531 and Houghton, then only recently made Prior of Beauvale in Nottinghamshire, was elected to succeed him by the unanimous vote of his former brethren in London. Batmanson had earlier been Prior of Hinton and was known as a writer—Pits attributes ten titles to him; he had been involved by Edmund Lee, the future archbishop of York, in criticising Erasmus's Greek New Testament, which earned him a tart dismissal from that touchy scholar. Thomas More, too, seems to have joined in reproving the monk's audacity, for Knowles has printed evidence (op. cit. p. 469) identifying him as the unnamed recipient of More's ‘letter to a monk’, already in print by 1520. Loher himself had already corresponded with Batmanson: a letter to him from Batmanson dated from the London Charterhouse on 15 May 1531, offering help and encouragement for his publications, and Loher's reply dated 17 November 1531 (misprinted 1532) are to be found prefixed to another edition by Loher, Denis's Commentaries on Acts with his Epitome of both Testaments, issued in an octavo volume by the Cologne printer Peter Quentel in January 1532.
15 The reference is perhaps to Jacob's recovery of his ‘lost’ son Joseph, in Genesis 45.
16 The colophon of Loher's 1530 edition of the De perfecto contemptu mundi, as already quoted in note 10, shows that the printing of the works of Denis began not as a simple commercial venture by a printer but was paid for by the Carthusians themselves. Another ‘Dionysian’ first edition, published only a month later, is stated (loc. cit.) in its colophon to have been paid for under the will (‘ex testamentaria ordinatione’) of the Carthusian F. Bruno Loher a Stratis, presumably a blood-relation of Dietrich.
17 Whether Loher enclosed with this letter a manuscript list of the works of Denis, we have no means of discovering. It could be that he sent Houghton a copy of the very 1532 Vita et operum catalogus to the printing of which he prefixed the two letters here translated. But it should be noted that the Life, accompanied by the catalogue of the works, had already been printed as part of Loher's octavo edition of the Commentaries of Denis on the Pauline Epistles, published at Cologne in 1530 (Bibt. Colomb. II p. 296); both these were also included in a reprint of the same Commentaries published at Paris in the following year (copy in the Bodleian). It remains a possibility, however, that it was the arrival of Houghton's letter that moved Loher to re-publish the Life and catalogue as a separate booklet on its own, with his own reply forming something of an Apologia and a manifesto for his collective edition in folio of the entire works of Denis.
18 Not much is recorded about Dom William Exmew, here greeted as Houghton's Vicarius, but later made Procurator. Chauncy, who during his own novitiate learned to admire Exmew's holiness, records that Houghton himself chose his young Vicarius to be his Confessor. Shortly after Houghton's execution, Exmew was one of the three monks next chosen to undergo Cromwell's most extreme pressure to conform, but after prolonged torture in prison had failed to break their resolution, all three followed their late Prior to martyrdom at Tyburn. William Exmew was Beatified in 1886.
19 This was Dom Edmund Horde; see note 8.
20 It may be conjectured that Horde had been appointed to such a position in order for him to assist the aged Dom John Jonbourne, Prior of Sheen and for many years Visitor, in the overall government of the Province. Houghton himself had been made Visitor after he became Prior at London, not long before these letters were exchanged.
21 The feast of the Nativity of Our Lady was celebrated on 8 September, therefore Loher's letter was written on 15 September.