Dorothy Arundell's “Acts of Father John Cornelius”: “We Should Hear from Her, Herself—She Who Left a Record of It in These Words”

Abstract

Notes

¹ The Spanish Infanta led Arundell into the church, while Mary Percy was accompanied by the Papal Nuncio. They professed as nuns along with Gertrude and several other founding members on November 21, 1600 (See figure 1).

² The DNB entry on “Dorothy Arundell” has been silently emended in response to my communication of November 2009; it now reads “formerly in the Jesuit archives but now listed as missing.”

³ Dr. Earle Havens, Curator of Early Books and Manuscripts, Sheridan Libraries, Johns Hopkins University.

⁴ With the continuing assistance of Thomas M. McCoog, S J., a search is underway. Because of centuries of migration and disruption, the archival holdings of many English colleges and convents from this period are scattered or fragmentary. “Who were the Nuns?” is a research project at Queen Mary University, London, led by Michael Questier and Caroline Bowden, that is launching an online database to track membership in English convents during these periods of exile. See <http://wwtn.history.qmul.ac.uk/>

⁵ Translated for this article by Troy Tower, Doctoral Graduate Student, Department of German and Romance Languages and Literatures, Johns Hopkins University. Page numbers throughout refer to the 1667 edition of the Inghilterra.

⁶ Challoner appends this comment to his essay on Cornelius: “Since this was written I received from the English college of St. Omer's, a copy of a manuscript concerning Mr. Cornelius, the original of which is kept in the archives of that college” (217–88).

⁷ Translated into English in 1660 by the Jesuit Thomas Plowden.

⁸ “Poscia istorica della vita, e morte del suo maestro. . . . E da lei che ne scrivea di veduta, sarà preso quasi quel tutto che ion e racconterò.” Concerning Bartoli's use of “discepolo,” there are indications in the “Acts” that Cornelius may have guided Dorothy Arundell in the formal and intensive Spiritual Exercises prescribed by St. Ignatius, founder of the Jesuit order. She twice refers to herself as the spiritual disciple of Cornelius (“sua discepolo a la spirito”; “Giovanni Cornelio” 352, 361), and she includes an excerpt from a final letter by Cornelius reminding her of her religious vows (see page 10 of this essay).

⁹ “On that evening there was a ‘banquet’ in the Marshalsea Prison at which one or two priests and several ladies and gentlemen were present, and at which the pièce de resistance was a sermon on St. Mary Magdalen. Walsingham's secretary passed on a spy's report of it in shocked tones to his master: ‘Among other guests were three gentlewomen very brave in their attire, two of them daughters of Sir John Arundell’” (Devlin 119). For a critique of earlier assumptions that Southwell delivered this sermon, see Brownlow 35 and passim.

¹⁰ According to Philip Caraman, the sermon “was later expanded and printed secretly in London under the title, Mary Magdalen's Funeral Tears; it was dedicated to D(orothy) A(rundell). . .”

¹¹ At this time, jointures continued to be protected from recusancy fines.

¹² The same number recurs later in the text, when “more than eighty” members of casa Arundell are described as weeping after a possibly miraculous event: “e piangevano tutti della famiglia in numero oltre ad ottanta” (Bartoli, “Giovanni Cornelio” 367).

¹³ At least one of these children pursued a religious vocation: when “John Tremaine” matriculated at the English College in 1614, he reported having made some of his “rudimental” studies in religion at Chideock. The Tremaynes were part of the extended Arundell family: a “ring of gold” valued at forty shillings was bequeathed to an earlier John Tremayne by Dorothy Arundell's grandmother, Lady Elizabeth Arundell, in a 1564 will, which also included a comparable bequest to her granddaughter: “for my little daughter, Dorothy Arundell, a little jewel for her neck worth 40 s[hillings]” (Cornwall Record Office, AR/21/15/1, 2; June 12 and November 9, 1564).Three Tremayne women—Anne, Margaret, and Jane—were arrested during the 1594 raid.

¹⁴ “Traditori (disse) e nemici dell Reina, io ricoglierli? io sustentarli? io nasconerli? Se di tall fatta huomini v'habbia, io nol so: ben so che non ne conosco veruno” (Bartoli, “Giovanni Cornelio” 355). A 1671 Latin translation by Louis Janin reads: “Proditares, inqit, & Reginae hostes collegerim, sustenaverim, occultarim, si quae usquam vivant eiusmodi hominum portenta nescio, unum scio talem me nosse neminem” (334).

¹⁵ In his Treatise of Equivocation, the Jesuit Henry Garnet provides defensive strategies for underground priests and the Catholics who harbored them: “whosoever frameth a true position in his mind and uttereth some part thereof in words, which of themselves being taken several from the other part reserved, were false, does not say false or lie before God, howsoever he may be thought to lie before men” (86–87).

¹⁶ Although the possibility remains that a copy or copies of Arundell's original manuscript may be extant, no evidence has emerged other than Challoner's late 18th-century reference (see page 3 in this essay), and chances are slim that any survived the turmoil faced by Jesuits in the following century.

¹⁷ “. . . vuolsi udire da lei medesima, che ne lasciò memoria in queste parole . . .”

¹⁸ For a discussion of the parallel instance involving Margaret More Roper and the similarly displayed head of her father, see Goodrich. Arundell would almost certainly have had this well-known event in mind, either during her actual experience or while recounting it.

¹⁹ See, for example, a speech attributed to Dorothy Arundell in “Merrye Englaunde, or the Golden Tymes of Good Queen Bess.”

²⁰ “Hor aggiungo (dice ella) a quanto fin hora ho scritto del B. P. Cornelio, una particolarità, la quale, peroche s'appartiene a me, malvolentieri la publicava.”

²¹ “Sentendomi io dunque interiormente costretta all'adempimento del mio vota de Religione, e per cio, con ogni possibile diligenza licentiatami da mia madre, e volendo altresi, per uno straordinario movimento che m'invitava a faro, riverire la sacra testa del Padre, che tuttavia era esposta in su la forca, m'inviai per cola, e pervenutale da presso, quanto sarebbe il trarre d'un arco, la vidi coronata di luce, appunto quale ho veduta piu volte la luna; Dubitai, non provenisse cio da qualche mio travedere per abbagliamento de gli occhi, avvegnache quel dì pur sosse molto chiuso di nuuoli, e scuro.”

²² In 1877 Foley claimed that Arundell “was astonished to see it encircled with rays of light” (472), and in 1957 A. L. Rowse elaborated further: “brave Dorothy Arundell saw it surrounded with rays of light . . . doubtless, poor woman, through her tears” (366).

²³ “Ma quanto piu io mi avvicinava, tanto la corona di luce meglio mi compariva. Dunque, così com'io era seduta su'l cavallo, mi fermai a riguardarle un mezzo quarto d'hora, fin che ne fui distolta dal sopragiungere de'viandanti: ed io me ne andai, ripensando meco stessa quel della Scrittura, che Iddio è mirabile ne'suoi santi.”

²⁴ Perhaps in response to this shift in focus, Bartoli draws the reader's attention back to Cornelius by making explicit Arundell's implied designation of the martyr as among “[God's] saints”: “Così ella; e non punto lungi dal vero nell'appropriar che fà un così degno titolo al P. Cornelio” (“Giovanni Cornelio” 363).

²⁵ For a discussion of Southwell's “imaginatively engaging religious verse” in the larger context of English letters, see Alison Shell (63 and chapter two passim). In a more localized study of Southwell's imagery, Anne Sweeney examines his hyperrealistic portrayal of “biblical persons caught in the middle of spiritual crises,” arguing that “[s]uch realism allowed a new engagement, opening up a private space to be filled by the observer with his or her personal response to the affective scene” (9). In this respect, note that Arundell also creates a “private space” during her Magdalen-like ekphrasis, by not divulging the substance of her fifteen-minute meditation.

Cornwall Record Office, AR/21/15/1, 2; Original Will, Elizabeth Arundell, June 12 and November 9, 1564.

Public Record Office. Calendar of state papers, domestic series, of the reigns of Edward VI, Mary, Elizabeth, James I, 1547–1625. 12/248. Manuscript.