In July 1586 Henry Garnet and R. Southwell landed on the Norfolk
coast, as Dr. Jessopp so finely tells, and resumed the work which I
have previously described. Garnet was, if somewhat less boisterous
and masterful, the new Parsons; Southwell, a retiring and amiable
man, the new Campion. As Weston was arrested in 1587, Garnet became
Vice-Prefect. In the following year John Gerard and Edward Oldcorne
joined them, and the story of adventurous ministration went on. On one
occasion the four Jesuits were nearly caught in a batch, saying mass
in a Catholic house; and in 1594 Garnet was caught and imprisoned for
three years. He escaped from the Tower, with outside assistance, in
1597, and returned to work. Southwell was betrayed by a Catholic lady
in 1592, and, after three years in the Tower, was executed at Tyburn
in 1595. In the same year Henry Walpole was arrested on arrival, and
executed at York. Father Greenway was the only other Jesuit to enter
the country before 1600, and we must leave these fathers pursuing their
adventurous work and consider the growing quarrel of the Jesuits and
the secular clergy.
That long and interesting story must be told very briefly here.
Wisbeach Castle had been chosen as a prison for captured priests, and
when Weston arrived there in 1587, he very plainly tried to assume a
leadership. As his various suggestions were rejected, he made a party
among the priest-prisoners, got himself appointed director of it, and
initiated a bitter and prolonged feud which spread far beyond the walls
of Wisbeach. To the secular priests' charges of arrogance and ambition,
the Jesuit writers retort that even in jail the English priests were so
prone to drunkenness, gambling, and immorality that Father Weston was
forced to live apart with the more virtuous. A profane historian must
not attempt to judge between them. It is enough that, especially in the
years 1595-1597, reports of violent quarrels reached Rome; and these
coincided with complaints from Belgium of the behaviour of Father Holt
(who had been sent as agent of Philip II. to Brussels and was denounced
to the authorities for his violent political partisanship), and another
rebellion of the students of the Roman college. Not only did these
complain of their Jesuit masters, but they occasionally fell into the
hands of the papal police in wine-shops and other improper places, and
were found to be a very poor and undisciplined body of youths. Mr. Law
insists that the Jesuits kept the English priests at a low level of
culture in order to control or overshadow them the more easily.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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