He was the son of John Oldcorne, Tiler, a schismatic Catholic, of St. Sampson’s Parish, in the City of York. His mother was Elizabeth Oldcorne, a rigid Catholic recusant, who had suffered imprisonment “for the Faith.” He was born about the year 1560, and proceeded to the English College at Rome in 1582, aged twenty-one, for the higher studies. He was most probably at the Royal School in the Horse Fayre, in York, and he may have been there at the same time as Oswald Tesimond,[48] John Wright,[49] Christopher Wright, and Guy Fawkes, though about ten years the senior of the three latter. As already has been stated, before going beyond the seas he had studied medicine. He was a man remarkable alike for mental acumen, tranquillity of spirit, gentleness of nature, and strength of will. He was one of those Jesuits who, realising a higher unity, were at once Mystics _and_ Politicians. His equipoise of mind shows him to have been a very great man——indeed, on account of his combination of mental gifts and graces, I think the greatest, in reality, of _all_ the early English Jesuits. For “he saw life steadily and saw it whole.”[A] [Footnote A: Matthew Arnold.] “All the chiefest gentlemen,” says Father Gerard, Oldcorne’s contemporary, “and best Catholics of the county where he remained and the counties adjoining depended upon his advice and counsel, and he was indefatigable in his journeys.”[50] Again, a MS. Memoir[51] says, “so profuse was his liberality in aiding others that he supplied the necessities of life to very many Catholics. It was very evident his residence was well selected in the midst of the Catholics of that district of the Society of Jesus, so great and so promiscuous was the concourse of people flocking thereto for his sermons, for his advice, and the sacraments.”[52][B] [Footnote B: See Supplementum II.] Now, Father Oldcorne was the spiritual adviser of Robert Winter, another subordinate plotter, and also of Catesby, according to the statement of one Humphrey Littleton, who knew Oldcorne well. And as John Wright was a tenant of Catesby’s Mansion House, at Lapworth, in Warwickshire, about twenty miles distant from Hindlip, Christopher Wright must have not only heard of Father Oldcorne’s fame as a “counsellor of the doubtful” and a “friend in need,” but it is at least possible he may have been among those divers Catholics and Schismatics[53] in the country thereabouts who flocked to him for conference and to have his exhortations.[54][C]