This essay examines the first fifty years of the Jesuit mission in England and its influence on the public and private lives of the Catholic gentle- and noblewomen who actively supported it. The Society of Jesus had been given special authority by the pope in 1540 to promote the Catholic reformation, and its highly educated members vowed to go wherever he sent them “into the whole world, and preach the gospel to every creature.”1 While on their apostolic mission, their “way of proceeding” was to adapt according to the circumstances they encountered.2 Thus, in England where practicing the Roman Catholic faith had been a treasonable offense since 1571, their main approach was to convert the gentry and nobility in their own houses and secretly print and distribute “seditious” materials.3 Out of necessity, they worked closely with several women who aspired to live as Jesuits. From about 1580 to 1630, these women negotiated new boundaries between their domestic and public lives, and tested traditional gender-assigned roles: they had received a good humanist education, underwent the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises with the intent of leading an apostolic way of life; they harbored and accompanied priests as they traveled around the country; they disputed theological points with men; and they provided a Catholic education (including Latin and music) for children, either in private houses or in Jesuit colleges on the continent.4
The imprecise markers between reformed and Catholic devotional materials meant that these women sang and played some of the same repertory for spiritual recreation as that of gentlewomen (and gentlemen) of other religious beliefs, but their interpretation of it was very different.5 Much of it helped prepare them, their children, and/or other members of the household for performing music at clandestine liturgies. Their private houses became venues not only for the celebration of such masses—theoretically open to all Catholics and as such the public worship of the church—but also for the kind of education available in pre-Reformation choir schools.6
Teaching was integral to the Jesuit mission, with curricula designed to train priests (and Catholic laymen) how to bring about conversion by instructing the young, and preaching and disputing persuasively.7 Because the educational program was based on the Spiritual Exercises, students were actively involved in the learning process, which included extensive repetition but prioritized the creative application of the subject matter over rote learning.8 Such approaches to education were particularly suited to the arts, which, according to Ignatius, “dispose the intellectual powers for theology.”9 The study of practical music was also beneficial because singing musical settings of texts helped students learn Christian doctrine, and performing music, if properly regulated, was a worthwhile activity for recreation.10 Even though Ignatius resisted efforts by the pope to have Jesuit priests sing in choir, he accepted that singing and playing music was necessary for students. Furthermore, when students sang even simple plainsong or falsobordone (harmonized plainsong) at masses and vespers, more people were attracted to the services and more men encouraged to join the Society. Liturgical music that consisted of, or was based on, plainsong was particularly useful in the mission because it was easily adaptable, especially during this period in which musical performance practice was so flexible.11 Thus, in the mission in the New World, plainsong, pricksong, and playing indigenous musical instruments formed part of the curriculum so that the converts could participate actively in the Mass.12
Music appears to have been equally integral to the Jesuit mission in England, perhaps because, as Katherine Steele Brokaw points out in this volume, “musical harmony” had been emphasized by the Marian administration as “symbolic of the community’s unity with each other and God.”13 The Jesuits’ way of proceeding—by converting the gentry in their private houses—made it appropriate that at liturgies celebrated there, family members, their servants, and friends would participate in the music. They used the traditional instrument of the church, the organ, when available, as well as instruments available in domestic settings, especially other keyed instruments and viols.
Often disguised as gentlemen under assumed names, or circulating among their own gentry families and friends, English Jesuits were usually able to preach, hear confessions, and celebrate the liturgy for about three years only before they were captured, imprisoned, and (unless they could escape) executed for treason. Edmund Campion and Robert Persons were the first to arrive from the English College in Rome in 1580; they were followed by Jasper Heywood and William Holt in 1581; William Weston in 1584; Henry Garnet and Robert Southwell in 1586; and John Gerard in 1588.14 Some of the women who came into contact with them were attracted by the Ignatian model of self-examination and vocation, and expressed the wish to join them, even to the extent of welcoming martyrdom.15 However, Ignatius, who had experienced problems with two influential women who became Jesuits, had made the decision not to establish an order for women.16 This decision was in line with the Tridentine decrees that directed all women’s religious orders to be cloistered, including tertiary and teaching orders.17
Nevertheless, many women supported the mission in an active way. Gerard reported that Elizabeth (Roper) Vaux, having “complained that our priests were forbidden to receive vows [from women] . . . was ready to set up house wherever . . . I judged best for our needs.”18 Her sister-in-law, Anne Vaux, who never married, even made private vows to Garnet: he reminded her shortly before his martyrdom that after his death, she would no longer be bound by them.19 Her contribution to the mission was widely acknowledged; indeed, Michael Walpole dedicated his translation of Pedro Ribadeneira’s biography of Ignatius to her, describing her as one of Ignatius’s children.20 She and her widowed sister Eleanor (Vaux) Brookesby rented White Webbs in Warwickshire for use as a secret Jesuit center; Garnet described it as the refuge of “many holy women consecrated to God.”21 Like Jesuits, they used aliases as protection against discovery: Anne’s was Mrs. Perkins, sister to Mr. Meysey/Meaze (one of Garnet’s aliases), and Eleanor’s was Mrs. Edwards.
In 1616, Mary Ward attempted to renegotiate the boundary between women and men engaged in the English mission, explaining to Pope Paul V why women should be allowed to participate (officially):
As the sadly afflicted state of England, our native Country stands greatly in need of spiritual labourers, and as priests both religious and secular, work assiduously as apostles in this harvest, it seems that the female sex should and can in like manner undertake something more than ordinary in this same common spiritual necessity . . . we also desire . . . to embrace the religious state and at the same time to devote ourselves according to our slender capacity to the performance of the works of Christian charity towards our neighbour that cannot be undertaken in convents.22
Nevertheless, the pope held to the Tridentine position that all women’s orders should be enclosed. Moreover, many (covert) English Catholic priests disapproved of the Jesuits’ interactions with women.23 In A Decacordon, William Watson complains that Gerard not only led men in the Spiritual Exercises, but also “In like manner he dealeth with such Gentlewomen, as he thinketh fit for his turne, and draweth them to his exercise,” such as “Mistresse Wiseman now prisoner.”24
Jane (Vaughan) Wiseman (a close friend of Elizabeth and Anne Vaux and Eleanor Brookesby) and Wiseman’s son, William, who had rented a house in London for Gerard’s use, were arrested in 1594 for harboring him. Also arrested during the raid was the musician John Bolt, perhaps a former deputy to the recusant Sebastian Westcott, master of the choristers at St Paul’s Cathedral.25 Bolt had some seditious material on him, including Southwell’s Saint Peters Complaint and Richard Whitford’s Jesus Psalter. Whitford was a monk of Syon Abbey, the Bridgettine convent where Wiseman’s eldest daughters, Anne and Barbara, were professed.26 At his arrest, Bolt also “confesste that certeine leaves conteynenge lines and many verses beginninge Why do I use my paper penne and inke . . . is all of his owne hand wrytinge”; this refers to a poem on the martyrdom in 1581 of Campion (attributed by Garnet to Henry Walpole, who became a Jesuit martyr in 1595).27 Bolt escaped, but “Widow Wiseman” spent several years in prison before being condemned to be crushed to death. She was eager to be martyred, but Elizabeth stayed the execution, and eventually Wiseman was pardoned by James I.
Another friend of the Vauxs and Wisemans was Anne Howard, Countess of Arundel, who sheltered Southwell from 1586 to 1592 and Gerard in 1594; she took a vow of chastity after the death of her husband in 1595.28 Watson considered her behavior inappropriate:
[She] was brought into such a forwardnesse of following these holy fathers & taught withal her lesson how to use the art of dissembling, according to the Jesuits rule.29
During Elizabeth’s reign, it became progressively more difficult to provide a Catholic education for children. Wealthy parents hired private unlicensed tutors or arranged for their children to be educated on the continent, both options being illegal.30 William Bell, suspected of assisting Campion and Persons in the 1580s, described in his Testament the kind of education he hoped would be given to his children after his death. Significantly, it refers to skills taught to pre-Reformation choristers, not only for his sons but also for his daughter:
I would that Marguerite my daughter should, so soone as thee [sic] is able to goe to schoole, and be applied in her bookes, and with her neelde [needle], so farre forth as shee be of capacitie, and if it may be, that shee be also taught her pricksong, and plainesong, and to play on the virginalls.31
Bell’s children were subsequently brought up by Edward Sheldon and his sister Elizabeth Russell, whose father, Ralph Sheldon, was a friend of Persons, as well as of William Byrd and Thomas Paget.32
Because the subjects of Latin, music, and Catholic doctrine were so intertwined, some Catholic priests were able to disguise themselves as music teachers. For example, in 1586, an informer reported that one George Lingam was staying at Francis Perkins’s house, Ufton Court, and that “under collor of teaching on the virginalls, goeth from papist to papist, is thought also to bee a priest, so made in Queen Marie’s tyme.”33 Likewise in 1605, it was reported
[t]hat there are in the Lord [Henry] Mordant’s house certain persons suspected to be very dangerous, in regard of their own obstinacy and their Popish superstition, and also for labouring to seduce others from the truth; namely Tutfield, tutor to the Lord his son, and late tutor to the Lord Vaux [Elizabeth Vaux’s son, Edward]; and Gregory Hill, a musician who teaches the daughters of the said Lord in that art.34
Music teachers like Hill were considered “very dangerous” because of their potential influence as religious educators. During the 1594 raids organized by Richard Topcliffe on known Catholic households (including the Wisemans’), at the house of a Mrs. Marchant the pursuivants found “a very bad man and by report one that doth great [word omitted] in the country, for under the colour of teaching the childer music it is thought that he doth teach them worse matters. For he is a notable recusant and was taken when Campion was taken.”35 This was John Jacob, a friend of Gerard’s, imprisoned again in 1593 and described as “a syngyng man and . . . a goar from one recusante’s houwse to another undar the colar to teche mewseke.”36 Even so, it was possible for a few Catholic musicians (favored by Elizabeth) to follow their own conscience of faith in positions supporting the state church. For example, Westcott was still teaching choristers at St. Paul’s in 1582, even though, in 1563, he had been accused by Bishop Edmund Grindal of instilling “corrupte lessons of false Religion into the eares and myndes of those children committed unto him.”37
Some women following the Jesuit model acted as tutors, even though it was unusual for women to teach music and Latin (except in some convents).38 Several of Mary Ward’s “English Ladies,” having trained on the continent, returned to England, and “[i]n a manner similar to that of the missionary priests . . . would typically live with a family, under the guise of a member of the household.”39 One of them, Sister Dorothea, taught the curriculum of Ward’s Institute to children in their parents’ houses.40 Ward’s plan of 1612 for her school refers to “liberal arts, singing, playing musical instruments” including “playing the organ.”41 Ward based her curriculum on those of English Jesuit schools for boys, one of which gives a detailed description of music instruction. According to the Constitutiones for St. Omer, founded by Persons in 1592, students were to be taught the organ and harpsichord, which “greatly adorn and are well suited to ecclesiastical chant” (cantum ecclesiasticum valde ornant et decent), and viols, the music for which was especially distinguished (Honorata est Musica mere ex violis).42
The use of viols at St. Omer presumably stems from their importance to pre-Reformation English choir schools. Since the 1540s at the latest, choristers played on viols at least some of the liturgical music that they sang (with men), such as motets, and to substitute for the organ or regals for accompanying a solo voice (or voices) in the moralistic songs written by their masters for their recreation, some of which were included in choristers’ plays.43 They may have used viols (in addition to the keyboard) for practicing other skills, such as various ways of improvising descant (counterpoint) on plainsong. During Elizabeth’s reign, choristers continued to play viols in the larger institutions of the established church, such as St. Paul’s Cathedral.44 In his will of 1582, Westcott bequeathed his “cheste of vyalyns and vialles to exercise and learne the children and Choristers.”45 Presumably, Westcott had continued to educate his choristers the way he had during Philip and Mary’s reign, producing apprentices such as Peter Philips.46 However, as Thomas Whythorne commented ca. 1576:
When the old stor of the miuzisians be worn owt, the which wer bred when the miuzik of the chiurch waz maintained . . . yee shall hav few or non remaining, exsept it be A few singing men, and plaierz on miuzikall instriuments, of the which ye shall fynd A very few or non that kan mak a good lesson of deskant.47
The progressive decline in music education at choir schools may have helped create a market for printed music treatises in English. Such treatises, combined with musical training provided by tutors, would help Catholic households to maintain skills useful for the liturgy, such as making “a good lesson of deskant,” and make it practical to collect and preserve old as well as newly composed Latin liturgical music.48 A Briefe Introductione to the True Art of Musicke by William Bathe (who became a Jesuit in 1595) includes the rules of making descant on a plainsong, and his Briefe Introduction to the Skill of Song demonstrates notational methods of “Musitions in old time.”49 Thomas Morley’s Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke, dedicated to Byrd, includes instruction on “obsolete” musical practices used in Latin “pricksong,” noting their utility for singing old music.50 Morley’s Introduction is also a mine of information on the teaching methods of the “old descanters.”51
Educated women and men of the gentry were expected to have the ability to appreciate music and to sing and play musical instruments for recreation. Musical repertories favored by reformed and Catholic households are not always clearly distinguishable: the selection might depend as much on musical tastes and ambition as on religious belief. However, the devotional songs favored by many reformed households, especially for teaching children, were simple settings of psalms, such as Sternhold and Hopkins’s Whole Booke of Psalmes (also sung in church) or Whole Psalmes in Foure Parts.52 In contrast, the Catholic recusant Elizabeth (Bernye) Grymeston chose texts of a different nature, and accompanied herself on an unusual instrument, the organ.53 Her Miscelanea, published posthumously in 1604 by her husband, Christopher, includes religious texts written by her “cousin,” the Jesuit Southwell (whose “seditious” texts were found on Bolt when he was arrested). Chapter XI is entitled “Morning Meditation, with sixteene sobs of a sorrowful spirit, which she [Elizabeth] used for mentall prayer, as also an addition of sixteene staves [stanzas] of verse taken out of [Southwell’s] Peters complaint; which she usually sung and played on the winde instrument.”54 Elizabeth sang them to her son, Berny, who demonstrated that he understood her teaching by writing a verse of his own (an “active” way of learning): chapter XII, “A Madrigall made by Berny Grymeston,” uses the image of her playing the organ and singing the penitential stanzas while looking lovingly at him.55
Grymeston’s Miscelanea also includes verses from Odes in Imitation of the Seaven Penitential Psalmes printed by Richard Verstegan, a supporter of the Jesuit mission.56 Verstegan dedicated this publication “To the vertuous Ladies and Gentlewomen readers of these ditties” in hopes that their “sweete voyces or virginalles may voutsafe so to grace them, as that thereby they may be much betrered.”57 Verstegan’s dedicatees may have been the English nuns at the Benedictine Convent at Brussels founded in 1598 by Mary Percy (with the assistance of Holt and Persons).58 These nuns were reportedly famous for their music by the time Bolt went to their convent (sometime between 1608 and 1611) “to help their music.”59 Grymeston’s copying of selections from Verstegan’s Odes demonstrates that repertories of devotional song suited to English nuns—the well-educated daughters of English gentry living on the continent—were also suited to their sisters and cousins, who were educating their children in England.60
Several generations of women, including female servants, in the “firmly Jesuit-supporting” Petre household (in which Bolt taught intermittently from 1586 to 1589) took an active role in music and music education.61 The household accounts for the period 1558–1560 include a reward for one of the senior female servants, Mrs. Persey, for “teaching the gentlewomen to play on the virginalles.”62 In 1605, a Tom Boult (perhaps a relative of John Bolt) was paid for viol strings and for teaching viol to Besse Hatch, the daughter of a servant.63 Catherine Petre (wife of William, 2nd baron Petre) was the daughter of Edward Somerset, 4th earl of Worcester, to whom Byrd dedicated his Cantiones sacrae (1589). She was the person who handed over the instruments and music books (including Byrd’s Gradualia) in 1608 to Richard Mico, who was to teach the children to play the viol. The receipt signed by Mico (GB-ERO MS D/DP E2/1) includes a “Chest of violls wch are in number 5”; keys to “the wind Instrument” (an organ installed in 1590) and to “the greate virginales.”64 Mico also bought another pair of virginals for their daughter, Mary, then aged eleven.65
Women in the Paston household were similarly much involved in music making. Margaret (Berney) Paston was given a miscellany entitled “Preciosas Margaritas” by her musically gifted husband, Edward Paston. The gift of these fifty-three compositions (GB-Lcm MS 2036, comprising three partbooks) suggests that she, too, was musical.66 Thirty-three of the pieces are liturgical (fifteen by Byrd), and many have text incipits or titles only, therefore belonging to the category of textless polyphony, or sol-faing songs (for playing on viols and/or for singing using sol-fa syllables).67 One assumes that Margaret herself would have taken part in singing and/or playing these and similar pieces for recreation, perhaps with her daughters Catharine, Francisca, and Anne, cousin Helen Draycott, and niece Mary Berney when they were old enough.68
Sol-faing songs straddled the boundaries between different faiths: they were acceptable to non-Catholics who could enjoy the “absolute” music without problematic texts, but for Catholics, an incipit would be sufficient to remind them of some or all of the text of a Latin motet or mass setting, which they could either sing from memory or meditate on while sol-faing or playing the viol.69
The preservation and cultivation of musical skills suited to Catholic liturgies in wealthy households lie behind the few surviving descriptions from this period of solemn masses. All but one refers to instruments being played, as well as to singing. From July 15–23, 1586, a Jesuit conference was held at Hurleyford Manor, the house of Richard Bold (a relative of Gerard), to welcome Garnet and Southwell to England. According to Weston, Bold’s house, which was remote,
possessed a chapel, set aside for the celebration of the Church’s offices. The gentleman was also a skilled musician, and had an organ and other musical instruments, and choristers, male and female, members of his household [i.e., including servants]. During those days it was just as if we were celebrating an uninterrupted octave of some great feast. Mr. Byrd, the very famous English musician and organist, was among the company.70 [italics mine]
“Some gentlewomen” who had gone there “to hide” (presumably nuns) likely participated in the music, and perhaps also Bold’s wife, Jane (Mordaunt), a relative of Henry Mordant, whose daughters studied music with Gregory Hill.71 Garnet himself “had a fine singing voice” and was “very skilful in music and in playing upon musical instruments.”72
Southwell, referring to the same conference in a letter to Claudio Aquaviva, general of the Society of Jesus in Rome, mentions that “choice instrumental and vocal music was to be performed” (et insigni, variorum instrumentorum et vocum symphonia decantatum) for a festal mass.73 He does not mention anyone by name (letters could be intercepted, as this one was) or that women sang in the chapel choir, perhaps because Aquaviva, in Rome, would not have approved, and/or possibly even because it was usual practice in England for women to participate.
On November 21, 1604, the feast of the Presentation, “High Mass was sung” at White Webbs, the house rented by Anne Vaux and Eleanor Brookesby. Garnet refers to several Jesuits being there: Gerard, Richard Blount, John Percy, Thomas Strange, and Thomas Cornforth, chaplain of Edward Vaux.74 The “holy women” taking refuge there presumably attended the mass: they most likely led a relatively public (unenclosed) life, like Sister Dorothea, and like the three Bridgettine nuns who attended the mass celebrated by Campion at Francis Yate’s house, Lyford Grange, but were “disguised in Gentlewomans apparrell” the following day when the house was raided.75
In 1605, the feast of Corpus Christi was described by three different people at (Owen Rees suggests) the same unidentified location.76 One account is by the Spanish widow Luisa de Carvajal, who, according to one of Watson’s followers, was persuaded by Michael Walpole (and other Jesuits)
to go from Valladolid, through France, into England, in order to convert (or rather pervert) our English Females. . . . For they persuaded her, she should be called the Apostoless, or She-Apostle of England.77
According to Carvajal:
The Masses were numerous [with] . . . music of diverse, finely tuned voices and instruments (las músicas de diversas voces y instrumentos en extremo acordadas); and this same music [of voices and instruments], after the lunches and dinners, with spiritual and moving motets, delighted the soul.78
Garnet, who had arranged for Carvajal to be escorted there from Douai, gives a similar description of the music in a letter to Elizabeth Shirley at St. Ursula’s, and mentions that twenty-five people left the following day: “We kept Corpus Christi day with great solemnity and music, and the day of the octave made a solemn procession about a great garden.”79 Charles de Ligny reports that Garnet and other Jesuits were there, and that Monsieur Willaume Byrd . . . sonnait les organes et plusiers aultres Intrumens (“Mr William Byrd . . . played the organ and several other instruments”).80 Byrd’s Gradualia I, which includes a Corpus Christi Mass proper, was published that year; it also includes a setting for one voice (medius) and four instruments (presumably viols) of Adoramus te. This could have been one of the “moving motets” performed after meals, but the reference to “organs and other instruments” at Mass suggests that it could have been performed liturgically, especially because its text is proper to the office of the Invention of the Cross, which occurred during Carvajal’s visit.81
The “organ and other instruments” used at clandestine liturgies would most likely be small and portable.82 It is notable that sometime between 1623 and 1639, in Petre’s chapel at Ingatestone a “frame for a payr of harpsicorne virginals” was installed, bearing in mind that at St. Omer the harpsichord as well as the organ was used to accompany voices in the liturgy.83 Viols were even more portable, provided excellent accompaniments to and substitutes for voices, as well as having the long-standing association with training liturgical musicians. Music appropriate for consorts of viols in particular blurred the boundaries between spiritual recreation and the liturgy. The professional musicians discussed in this essay—Westcott, Bolt, Byrd, and Mico—all played the viol as well as keyboard instruments.84
The descriptions of music performed at clandestine liturgies celebrated in English Jesuit-influenced households stress the beauty and solemnity of the occasions, as if a fully functioning form of the public mass were still available to all Catholics. However, several compromises in the musical practices were necessary, contrary to those advocated by Tridentine reformers: in masses celebrated at Bold’s house, women sang in choir with men, and instruments other than the organ may have been played. Carvajal’s reference to the same musicians playing at liturgies and for recreation is significant because of the possible implications for women’s participation in instrumental music. The women discussed in this essay may well have sung and/or played the viol, organ, or harpsichord in liturgies as well as for spiritual recreation. Moreover, the descriptions bear a resemblance to liturgies celebrated at Jesuit educational institutions, such as St. Omer, as well as to liturgies performed in the mission to the New World. The resemblance is understandable if we bear in mind that private English houses served not only as places of clandestine worship but also in lieu of choir schools. And because gentlewomen, whose domain was the house, were among the most active supporters of the Jesuits, the Jesuits in turn gladly accepted their contributions to the mission and assisted them in founding Jesuit-style women’s institutions on the continent. Unfortunately, this did not last: Gerard’s support of Ward’s Institute led to his being forced to resign his rectorship of Liège Abbey.85 In 1631, Ward was imprisoned as a heretic and Pope Urban VIII suppressed “the pretended she-Jesuites.”86 The inclusion of women as active musical participants in Mass may for a brief period have been an extraordinary result of the English Jesuits’ “way of proceeding.”
1. Bible, Douai-Rheims: Mark 16.15. Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, 130.
2. See McCoog, Society of Jesus, 267–272.
3. Carrafiello, “English Catholicism,” 771–774; Scully, “Trickle Down Spirituality?,” 285–299. The pope excommunicated Elizabeth in 1570.
4. The Spiritual Exercises consist of four “weeks” of directed meditation. Ignatius, Spiritual Exercises; Lux-Sterritt, “Virgo Becomes Virago”; McBride, “Recusant Sisters.”
5. Austern, “For Musicke Is the Handmaid,” 77–91; Brokaw, “Tudor Musical Theater,” this volume.
6. Southern, Elizabethan Recusant House, 29–30: Magdalen Montague “hindered none from hearing Masse in her house.” Dolan, “Gender and ‘Lost’ Spaces,” 652–658; Hodgetts, “Godly Garret,” 38–44; McGrath and Rowe, “Elizabethan Priests.”
7. Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, 154. This paragraph is based on information given in Culley and McNaspy, “Music and the Early Jesuits,” 213–245; Kennedy, “Jesuits and Music,” 15–60.
8. Ratio Studiorum, 1586 (revised 1599); Whitehead, “To Provide for Learning,” 109–143; Loach, “Revolutionary Pedagogues?,” 67.
9. Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, 179.
10. Forney, “Proper Musical Education,” 91–101; Willis, Church Music, 164–174.
11. Westrup, “Domestic Music,” 25–26, lists titles that refer to flexible performance options.
12. Bermúdez, “Urban Musical Life,” 177.
13. Brokaw, this volume.
14. Monumenta Angliae I, lx–lxiii. Seminary (non-Jesuit) priests, trained at Douai, began arriving in 1574.
15. Rhodes, “Join the Jesuits,” 33–49.
16. Simmonds, “Women Jesuits?,” 120–135 and Rhodes, “Join the Jesuits,” 40–45, discuss Isabel Roser and the Spanish Infanta Juana of Austria.
17. Council of Trent, Twenty-Fifth Session, 240. Beales, Education, 203; Walsham, “Translating Trent?” discusses the implementation of Tridentine reforms in England. Tertiaries lived in communities and bound themselves to a mendicant order; Culpepper, “Our Particular Cloister,” 1017–1037.
18. Caraman, [Gerard] Autobiography, 148.
19. Caraman, Garnet, 422–423.
20. Ribadeneira, Life of B. Father Ignatius, A2r–v.
21. Eleanor and Edward Brookesby had earlier sheltered Persons; Lux-Sterritt, Redefining Female Religious Life, 160.
22. “Memorial to Pope Paul V,” in Rowlands, “Recusant Women,” 169.
23. Marotti, Religious Ideology, 32–65.
24. Watson, Decacordon, 90.
25. Mateer, “William Byrd, John Petre,” 32–33; Murphy, “Music and Post-Reformation English Catholics,” 43–47.
26. Cunich, “Brothers of Syon,” 60. Two of Wiseman’s sons, Thomas and John, entered the Society of Jesus but died young, and her younger daughters, Jane and Bridget, professed at St. Ursula’s, Louvain; Connelly, Women of the Catholic Resistance, 88.
27. Kilroy, Edmund Campion, 59–88; see Murphy, “Music and Post-Reformation English Catholics,” 252–260, on Byrd’s setting of the first stanza and two newly written stanzas.
28. Southwell dedicated his Epistle of Comfort to Anne, having based it on letters he wrote to her husband, Philip Howard, who spent the last ten years of his life in the Tower. It was printed at her secret press, probably in her house at Spitalfields; Monta, “Anne Dacre Howard,” 65.
29. Watson, Decacordon, 39.
30. Beales, Education, 28–87.
31. The Testament of William Bel, 38–42. Flynn, “Education of Choristers,” 141–145. Most masters of choristers’ indentures dating from after 1560 refer to “singing” instead of “plainsong”; Flynn, “A Reconsideration of the Mulliner Book,” 252–254. “To goe to schoole” can mean going to another household; Charlton, Women, Religion, 126.
32. Harley, The World of William Byrd, 171, 205–207.
33. Sharp, The History of Ufton Court, 95. In 1599, Ufton Court was described as “a common receptacle for preistes, Jesuytes, Recusantes” (ibid., 99).
34. Calendar of the Manuscripts, vol. 17, 528. Mordant’s men included “one Tuttfeilde, bred an Oxford scholar and supposed a priest” (ibid., 626).
35. Hodgetts, “Loca secretiora,” 391.
36. Petti, Recusant Documents, 81–82.
37. A letter from Grindal to Robert Dudley in Strype, Edmund Grindal, 113–116. In 1563, schoolmasters were required to take the oath of allegiance; Beales, Education, 36.
38. In 1621, when Ward was setting up her Institute at Liège, some of the skeptical Jesuits asked whether a man would teach the girls music and language; Ward answered that the nuns themselves would teach both; Peters, Mary Ward, 228–230; Lux-Sterritt, Redefining Female Religious Life, 93.
39. Lux-Sterritt, Redefining Female Religious Life, 124. According to Bicks, “Producing Girls,” 144–145, “By 1624 Ward had made numerous trips back home to oversee the 30 known Jesuitesses of her Institute who were at work in London.”
40. See Gallagher, “Ward’s ‘Jesuitresses,’” 199–218.
41. Lux-Sterritt, Redefining Female Religious Life, 63.
42. Ward, “Sprightly & Cheerful Musick,” 105; Iribarren, “Anthony Poole,” 87–102; Beales, Education, 60–71, 158–173.
43. Woodfield, The Early History of the Viol, 206–227; Flynn, “Education of Choristers,” 151–160.
44. Payne, “Provision of Teaching on Viols,” 3–15; Milsom, “Oyez!,” this volume.
45. Gair, Children of Paul’s, 21.
46. Iribarren, “Anthony Poole,” 39–41.
47. Whythorne, Autobiography, 245.
48. For example, GB-ERO MS D/DP Z6/1, a partbook bearing the name of John Petre, includes motets by Fairfax, Tallis, Taverner, and Byrd, among others; Brett, “Edward Paston,” 58. On Byrd’s “publishing drive” between 1588 and 1591 of his older liturgical music, see Brett, “Blame Not the Printer,” 17–66. See Smith, Thomas East, 56, 157–158 on East’s printing of almost all of Byrd’s new liturgical works, including the masses à 3, 4, and 5 (ca. 1593–1595), Gradualia I (1605, dedicated to Henry Howard) and Gradualia II (1607, dedicated to John Petre).
49. Ó’Mathúna, “William Bathe, S. J.,” 47–61; both texts are edited by Karnes in Bathe, Briefe Introduction.
50. Morley, A Plaine and Easie Introduction, 183. Morley’s religious faith appears equivocal; Murray, Thomas Morley, 14–19.
51. Morley, A Plaine and Easie Introduction, 90–92; Flynn, “To Play upon the Organs,” 30–31; Flynn, “Musical Knowledge,” 178–180.
52. Harris, “Musical Education,” 131–134.
53. Snook, Women, Reading, and Cultural Politics, 83–114. The organ was the instrument most associated with liturgical music in church, and therefore not usually played by women (apart from nuns in their convent). Like Grymeston, Mary Skidmore, may have been taught to play the organ in England. The seminary priest Arthur Pitts (a former chorister at All Souls, Oxford, who may have been her teacher) contributed £30 toward an organ for her to play when he and Eleanor Brookesby escorted Mary to Louvain to join St. Ursula’s; Chronicle of . . . St Monica’s [vol. 1], 36, 65, 68, 118; Cichy, “Parlour, Court and Cloister,” 182–183.
54. Grymeston, Miscelanea, D4. Southwell, himself, had intended Saint Peters complaint to be sung, according to the dedicatory Epistle addressed to his (unidentified) “loving Cosen” [A2v]. Organs were often referred to “the wind instrument”; see Bicknall, The History of the English Organ, 75, and below.
55. Grymeston, Miscelanea, E4v.
56. Snook, Women, Reading, and Cultural Politics, 85. Verstegan fled to the continent in 1582 after printing Thomas Alfield’s True Reporte of the Death & Martyrdome of M. Campion Jesuite, to which was “annexid certayne verses,” including “Why doe I use”; Kilroy, Edmund Campion, 60.
57. [Verstegan] Odes, A2.
58. Arblaster, Antwerp & the World, 78. Mary was the niece of Henry Percy, 9th earl of Northumberland (whose daughter Lucy at about nine years old studied with Byrd) and the daughter of Thomas Percy, 7th earl, whose inventory of 1570 includes virginals and viols; “Humberston’s Survey,” 154. When Henry Percy was imprisoned in 1585 for treason (with Philip Howard, mentioned above), Byrd was also under suspicion; Harley, The World of William Byrd, 131.
59. See English Benedictine Nuns in Flanders.
60. Cichy, “Parlour, Court and Cloister,” 188–190; Murphy, “Music and Post-Reformation English Catholics,” 53–58.
61. On the Petres’ links to the Jesuit mission, see Kelly, “Kinship and Religious Politics,” 332–334.
62. Price, Patrons, 86.
63. Ibid., 90.
64. Facsimile on plate 5, Hanley, “Mico.”
65. Bennett and Willetts, “Richard Mico,” 29.
66. Brett, “Edward Paston,” 54, 60. Margaret was a relative of Elizabeth Grymeston, daughter of the recusant Martin Bernye.
67. Census-Catalogue of Manuscript Sources, vol. 2, 121. On sol-faing, see Edwards, “The Performance of Ensemble Music,” 113–123.
68. According to the Chronicle of St. Monica’s [vol. 2], 35, Helen Draycott, orphaned at the age of three, was “left to be brought up by a cousin-german of hers (Mr Paston), who was also a Catholic, and so she had good education.” Catharine and Francisca Paston professed at Mary Percy’s convent, and Draycott and Berney at St. Monica’s; Sequera, “House Music for Recusants,” 11–15; Arblaster, “The Infanta and the English Benedictine Nuns,” 520, 526. At St. Monica’s, Bolt “set up all our music to the honour of God, teaching our sisters to sing and play on the organ”; Cichy, “Parlour, Court and Cloister,” 179–180.
69. Flynn, “The In nomine as a Jesuit Emblem,” further discusses sol-faing song, demonstrating the In nomine’s connections to music education and to Jesuit symbolism and meditative practices.
70. Weston, Autobiography, 71; Harley, The World of William Byrd, 175–176.
71. Weston, Autobiography, 71.
72. Comments by Thomas Stanney; Caraman, Garnet, 33.
73. Strype, Annals, vol. 3, part 2, 418.
74. Brett, Gradualia I, ix.
75. Ellyot, Very True Report, B4b. On other Bridgettine nuns who led a missionary life, see Walker, “Continuity and Isolation,” 171–175.
76. Rees, “Luisa de Carvajal,” 270–280.
77. Authentic Memoirs, 45–46.
78. Rees, “Luisa de Carvajal,” 272–273.
79. Caraman, Garnet, 320; Rees, “Luisa de Carvajal,” 274.
80. Rees, “Luisa de Carvajal,” 279, 275.
81. Ibid., 280.
82. Most Tudor organs were free-standing, single-manual instruments (with no pedal board), which could be carried by two or three men, and set in place for performance; Bicknall, The History of the English Organ, 26–68.
83. Bennett and Willetts, “Richard Mico,” 33.
84. Ibid., 35.
85. Simmonds, “Women Jesuits?,” 125.
86. Peters, Mary Ward, 569.