There is something wrong with a person who actively seeks to be a martyr. It seems necessary to establish this from the outset, for although Glyn Redworth's intriguing book refuses to make judgements about the rights and wrongs of the story he tells, many readers will feel that, in the interests of justice, some sort of moral assessment has to be attempted. Redworth tells the story of Luisa de Carvajal, a Spanish noblewoman who in 1605, at the age of 39, left Spain for England, with the avowed intention of giving support to persecuted English Catholics and, by so doing, to get herself martyred. Extraordinary, remarkable, this she certainly was, but she was also a severely damaged woman.
Luisa de Carvajal was born into one of the richest and most highly connected families in Spain. She was inclined towards piety from a very early age, although, by her own account, it was a high‐handed piety which demanded suitable submission from the objects of her charity. When Luisa was six years old, her mother and father died and she went to live with her great‐aunt in the Descalzas Reales, the convent‐palace in Madrid. The next few years were happy ones, but with the death of her great‐aunt, she was taken at the age of ten into the household of her uncle, the marquis of Alcazán.
In a chapter entitled “Blessed Discipline”, Redworth describes what happened next. Its opening words are “From its earliest days, Christianity despised the human body and the temptations that came with it.” This isn't true, of course, but we know why he thinks it is, and this is the source of a great confusion. Redworth writes sympathetically about Luisa and her religion – and about other matters which he seems to think may be culture‐ or creed‐specific, or both. Francisco Hurtado de Mendoza, Luisa's uncle, subjected her to an “exercise” of physical penance which amounted to torture, employing a servant to whip her, at times explicitly re‐enacting the scourging of Jesus. Luisa's ready, even joyful, embracing of this self‐mortification is perhaps the most disturbing part of her story, and it found expression in a number of poems, some of which Redworth adds in an appendix. They make uncomfortable reading, invoking the “pleasing and pleasureful chain” of “sweet manacles, coveted noose…”.
Most readers would interpret this narrative as the tale of a child groomed to accept abuse at the hands of an adult who sought to justify his perverted desires by invoking a religious motive. But although Redworth admits that such penance went far beyond anything sanctioned by the Church for adults, let alone children, he is strangely unwilling to deplore what happened:
… from these cruel experiences she was able to create a sheet‐anchor for her life, one where her sense of purpose embraced the fact that her life might be extinguished by enemies of her religion (p. 32).
Such open‐mindedness may be well‐intentioned, but it is not good enough; even if Luisa had been inclined to be a martyr before her horrible experiences, she might well, like Teresa of Avila, have grown out of the inclination. What Luisa learned was to associate pain with the pleasure of God's approbation, and all the effort of her adult life was directed towards achieving a painful death.
Despite the grisly nature of Luisa's predilections, there is more than a little comedy in Redworth's account of how she proceeded to get her own way, retaining her inheritance in defiance of the provisions of her father's will, cajoling the Society of Jesus into supporting her English venture, and eventually setting up house in a London she regarded as inhospitable and comparatively uncivilised. Redworth supposes that the Jesuits were motivated to help Luisa at least in part by the promise of her money, dedicated to the Jesuit mission in England. He also speculates that they reckoned that in the event of Luisa gaining her object and being put to death, the resultant diplomatic scandal would precipitate a war with Spain that would bring Catholicism back to England. This seems far‐fetched: the organisers of the English Mission are much more likely to have worried about the danger that a woman so bent on martyrdom might pose to the secrecy of their priests. In the event, Luisa did preserve her silence about the travelling Jesuits and sometimes provided a Resistance‐type service for them. She was brave and resourceful, intelligent and indubitably pious, but one cannot help entertaining a doubt of her being entirely agreeable. To be a martyr she needed to be noticed and she would pick quarrels with people in the street, one of which resulted in her being arrested and kept briefly in prison, an experience which she described as a foretaste of martyrdom. The Spanish ambassador, Pedro de Zúñiga, exasperatedly questioned what was the point of bickering with shopkeepers, “with little authority and fewer results”, and one is inclined to agree with him. She did a lot of arguing and by her own account was instrumental in convincing the priest John Drury to refuse James I's Oath of Allegiance. This was not necessarily well done: James’ oath was a much milder affair than Henry VIII's Act of Supremacy, and it is arguable that Catholics could have taken it with a clear conscience, but Luisa's counsel was always for open war. Never actually achieving martyrdom herself, she eventually found a role as a secret collector, preserver and supplier to the faithful of the body parts of martyred Catholics.
“She‐apostle” was a derogatory term applied to her, of which the “she” part indicates that her opponents thought she was acting outside the natural capacity of her sex. Redworth's feminist approach celebrates her for doing what she wanted to do in a male‐dominated society, but a feminist approach should also take her and her aspirations seriously. Was Luisa's work worth doing, did she actually do anything significant to ease the lives of the thousands of ordinary Catholics who simply wanted unmolested access to the Mass and the sacraments? Luisa's energy was fuelled by her fierce allegiance to the Church and her deeply personal desire to achieve some kind of self‐immolating union with God, but her story does not tell us that she ever spoke much of the same God's love and mercy.
Nevertheless, the possibility of finding Luisa herself slightly repellent does not derogate from the value of Glyn Redworth's book, which is full of fascinating detail, diligently researched. Although rather over‐colloquial at times, his style moves easily between Luisa's autobiography, contemporary records and his own narrative. Despite what one can only describe as the weirdness of its subject, The She‐Apostle is an engrossing and enjoyable read about a strange and little‐known area of English and Spanish history.
