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 HISTORIES OF THE SACRED AND SECULAR

Divided Loyalties?
Pushing the Boundaries of
Gender and Lay Roles in the
Catholic Church, 1534–1829

Lisa McClain
Histories of the Sacred and Secular, 1700-2000

Series Editor
David Nash
Department of History
Oxford Brookes University
Oxford, UK
This series reflects the awakened and expanding profile of the history of
religion within the academy in recent years. It intends publishing exciting
new and high quality work on the history of religion and belief since 1700
and will encourage the production of interdisciplinary proposals and the
use of innovative methodologies. The series will also welcome book pro-
posals on the history of Atheism, Secularism, Humanism and unbelief/
secularity and encourage research agendas in this area alongside those in
religious belief. The series will be happy to reflect the work of new scholars
entering the field as well as the work of established scholars. The series
welcomes proposals covering subjects in Britain, Europe, the United
States and Oceania.

Editorial board:
Professor Callum Brown (University of Glasgow, UK)
Professor William Gibson (Oxford Brookes University, UK)
Dr Carole Cusack (University of Sydney, Australia)
Professor Beverley Clack (Oxford Brookes University, UK)
Dr Bert Gasenbeek (Humanist University, Utrecht, Netherlands)
Professor Paul Harvey (University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, USA)

More information about this series at

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 Lisa McClain

Divided Loyalties?
Pushing the
Boundaries of Gender
and Lay Roles in the
Catholic Church,
1534-1829
Lisa McClain
Department of History
Boise State University
Boise, ID, USA

Histories of the Sacred and Secular, 1700-2000

ISBN 978-3-319-73086-8    ISBN 978-3-319-73087-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73087-5

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018932155

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

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Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
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microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the pub-
lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the
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Printed on acid-free paper

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The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 For Doug, Sue, and Kim McClain,
with love and gratitude for your support and encouragement all these years
 Preface

Since his election in 2013, Pope Francis I has engaged the estimated 1.2
billion Catholics and innumerable non-Catholics worldwide with his
frank, inclusive talk on issues as diverse as poverty and homosexuality. At a
time when many seem confused by the Church’s apparent willingness to
reconsider its traditions regarding some issues—such as divorce—but not
others—such as women’s ordination—Divided Loyalties? Pushing the
Boundaries of Gender and Lay Roles in the Catholic Church, 1534–1829
provides history, context, and insight revealing how ordinary Catholics
and the Catholic Church have successfully navigated such challenges and
controversies before without undermining the faith, family, or society. It
takes readers into a long-ago world of gender confusion and religious
questioning by scandalous nuns, Catholic rogues, and “Apostolic
Viragoes” in the British Isles after King Henry VIII famously broke with
the Roman Catholic Church to marry Anne Boleyn in 1534. For the next
three centuries, Catholicism was illegal in the British Isles. In the frequent
absence of churches, priests, and sacraments, Catholics experimented with
gender roles and expanded religious roles for ordinary Catholics in a des-
perate attempt to save souls. Divided Loyalties? reveals the history of
Catholics worshiping in an illegal, underground faith who would do what
they had to do to be good women and men AND good Catholics. And the
Catholic Church was on board … to a point.
Filled with richly detailed stories, this book explores how Catholics cre-
ated and tested new understandings of women’s and men’s roles in family
life, ritual, religious leadership, and vocation. Engaging personal narra-
tives, letters, trial records, and other stories reveal how far ordinary

vii
viii PREFACE

Catholics would go to get their needs met and how far the Catholic
Church would bend its rules on gender and laypeople’s roles in the Church
to sustain Catholics struggling to keep their faith alive. In the many gen-
erations that passed between Henry VIII’s break with Rome and full
Catholic emancipation in the British Isles in 1829, Catholics had time to
set limits, loosen them, and face the consequences.
This is history, but the lessons learned inform our contemporary discus-
sions not only about gender and lay roles in the Church but also about
divine power and authority itself. The primary aim of this book is to
explore the Catholic Church’s long-term, ongoing process of balancing
gendered and religious authority. My intent is not to take sides in any
debates but to introduce historical evidence and a framework for inter-
preting developments. As a historian specializing in both the history of
Catholic Christianity and gender studies, I firmly believe it is incumbent
upon scholars to provide a clear sense of why these stories of past lives and
events matter—to find meaning in a narrative, not simply because it reveals
new, scholarly insights into the past, but because it connects to themes of
humanity and society that bridge centuries.
I am grateful to the many friends and colleagues who gave of their valu-
able time to wrestle with ideas over tasty beverages and to critique and edit
this work, providing encouragement and direction: particularly Doug
Sims, whose fine editorial talents helped craft the final text; members of
the Group for Early Modern Studies at Boise State University—Steve
Crowley, Matt Hansen, Janice Neri, Mac Test, and Jim Stockton; Brady
Jones; Karen Wadley; Sue McClain; Dane Johns; and students in my Boise
State University graduate seminar on gender and sexualities—Shiann
Johns, Steve Humiston, Marsha Hunter, Victor Higgins, Tim Syreen,
Julie Okamura, Chelsee Boehm, KayCee Babb, Tristan Kelly, Roy Cuellar,
and Tim Reynolds.
I would also like to acknowledge the generosity of the Idaho Humanities
Council that helped fund travel with a Research Fellowship, and the assis-
tance of Pat Fox and the archival staff at the Harry Ransom Humanities
Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin.
Last, but certainly never least, I am deeply indebted to my immediate
family, Doug, Anna, and Will, for their patience, love, and support.

Boise State University, Boise, ID Lisa McClain

 Contents

1 Introduction: Devout Outlaws   1

Part I Pushing the Boundaries of Gender  11

2 The New Normal  13

3 Disobedient Women  41

4 Wodehouse’s Choice  79

5 Amending the Marriage Contract 117

Part II Pushing the Boundaries of Religion 155

6 The “Good Catholic” 157

ix
x CONTENTS

7 Sharing the Job: Cooperation Between the Priesthood

and Laity 195

8 Where the Catholic Church Draws the Line: Mary

Ward vs. the Catholic Priesthood 235

Index 275
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Devout Outlaws

Mary Ward broke the law, and she knew it. She and her companions—
known as the English Ladies—were Catholics.1 Together, they practiced
an illegal faith in the Protestant British Isles in the seventeenth century,
during the religious conflict and violence of the Reformation era.
However, the English Ladies did more than worship behind closed doors.
They deceived the authorities. They disguised themselves to evade arrest.
They taught and encouraged others to practice an outlawed religion.
They assisted renegade priests working underground on behalf of the
Roman Church. In doing so, these women risked imprisonment and even
execution.
Yet it was not only the laws of England that Ward transgressed. Ward
and the English Ladies sought to serve the Catholic Church in a new way,
a way not yet approved by the papacy. Similar to nuns, these devout
women understood themselves as called to a religious vocation. Unlike
nuns, they wanted to live and work free from the cloister so they could
care for the spiritual needs of Catholics worshiping covertly in their home-
land. Despite such seemingly good intentions, the papacy suppressed
Ward’s Institute of English Ladies, bringing the organization to an abrupt,
unpleasant end. With his 1631 papal bull, Pastoralis Romani Pontificis,
Pope Urban VIII not only suppressed the Institute but gave it “sharper

© The Author(s) 2018 1

L. McClain, Divided Loyalties? Pushing the Boundaries of
Gender and Lay Roles in the Catholic Church, 1534-1829,
Histories of the Sacred and Secular, 1700-2000,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73087-5_1
2 L. MCCLAIN

censure” than was usual because of the serious dangers posed to Christians
by these women’s activities. He declared the Institute null, void and of
“no authority or importance.” The English Ladies were “extinguished,”
“removed entirely from the Church of God. We destroy and annul them,
and we wish and command all the Christian faithful to consider them and
think of them as suppressed, extinct, rooted out, destroyed and abolished”
(Wetter 2006, 213–18; also 129–37).2 The papacy even imprisoned Ward
briefly for heresy and kept her under surveillance for years after her release
(67–103). She and the English Ladies were devout outlaws.
Considering such scathing language, it is surprising to find Urban
VIII, less than a decade later, assuring Mary that she was not a heretic and
providing her a pension. He communicated secretly to keep Ward’s
Institute house in Munich open although her Institute no longer existed
(Rapley 1990, 213–14n35). Urban asked his nephew, Cardinal Francesco
Barberini, to provide a letter of introduction for Ward and her compan-
ions to Queen Henrietta Maria of England. Ward was going back to
Protestant England to work for the Catholic cause but this time with
papal knowledge and support. Barberini’s 1638 letter praised Ward as
“much esteemed in Rome both for her well known qualities and piety.”
He encouraged Henrietta Maria to receive Ward, showing “all kindness
she can to her and her company” (Chambers 1882, 2:452). Urban’s
envoy in England, Count Carlo Rossetti, welcomed Ward enthusiastically,
reporting that he had been commanded to “serve her in all he could”
(Kenworthy-­Browne 2008, 65). What was simultaneously so objection-
able and yet so laudable about Ward and her Ladies that would explain
such an “about face”?
On the surface, it seems obvious that these unmarried women’s
attempts to serve God and the Church without being enclosed in a con-
vent forced Urban’s hand. Ward and the English Ladies clearly appeared
to violate church law. Moreover, accusations coming out of England
­portrayed these women as driving a contentious wedge between Catholics
who differed in their opinions of the women and their work. Women dis-
guising themselves, traveling and living independently, and interacting
with virtual strangers —it was scandalous, almost unthinkable. At best,
critics found the women’s efforts vain and useless. At worst, naysayers gos-
siped about these “whores” and “galloping nuns” (Godfather’s Information
1623; Dirmeier 2007, 1:763–64; Chambers 1882, 1:318–19, 2:169–70,
183–87). The social conventions of gender did not support women who
assumed the freedom that these English Ladies did.
 INTRODUCTION: DEVOUT OUTLAWS 3

Some scholars view Ward as a proto-feminist pioneer for refusing to be

enclosed in a convent, while others prefer to see her as a conservative
Catholic woman whose attempts to avoid enclosure unintentionally chal-
lenged gender biases (Wetter 2006; Strasser 2004; Lux-Sterritt 2011; Ellis
2007; Harriss 2010; Rapley 1990, 3–9, 28–34). Neither of these interpre-
tations of Ward quite unravel the puzzle posed by Ward’s unusual status.
If this woman’s unconventional activities were so divisive among English
Catholic clergy and laity, Urban VIII should not have been so willing to
smooth the way for her return to England. Her gender hadn’t changed.
She and her companions still lived together outside a convent. The pope
clearly intended them to work among prominent Catholics, serving
Catholic interests. If the original objections to Ward and the English
Ladies were truly grounded in disagreements over these women’s lack of
enclosure, their adoption of non-traditional gender roles, or the types of
public, pious works that the women performed, why encourage Ward’s
return, where she would presumably continue to cause divisions among
Catholics? What was really going on here?

The Bigger Issue

Ward’s tussle with Urban VIII illuminates more than one woman’s failed
attempt to found a new form of women’s religious life. Her story opens a
window through which to examine the ongoing process by which societies
balance gender and religious priorities. Historically, across societies, across
faiths, and across continents, groups and individuals have been willing to
alter their traditional gender expectations and gendered economic, social,
and religious roles to meet pressing, immediate needs. From craftswomen
who stepped up to fill labor shortages after the Black Death to female citi-
zens who took up arms during the French Revolution, times of instability
and change are often associated with re-negotiations of gender roles. One
of the best-known recent examples is the U.S. and Great Britain’s use of
women’s labor outside the home in World War II, in fields as diverse as
manufacturing (Rosie the Riveter) and intelligence gathering and analysis
(the code breakers at Bletchley Park). Although most individuals had been
socialized to believe that women were not supposed to fill such roles (in
fact, were incapable of doing such work), the times seemed to demand it.
Governments needed women’s labor because they had recruited the
majority of able-bodied men to fight. At war’s end, however, employers
and governments dismissed the majority of these women. It was not
4 L. MCCLAIN

because their work had been unsatisfactory. Women had proven them-
selves capable and invaluable. Instead, it was because the need evaporated.
The war was over.
Once crises end, the presumption is that men and women return to
traditional gender roles—“the way things used to be”—in home, society,
and work force, even if some individuals prefer the new roles. Surely every-
one understood that the violation of gender norms was a temporary mea-
sure, acceptable only to address a short-term, emergency situation? But
what of women who had been challenged, even fulfilled, through their
higher status, highly valued efforts and wished to continue?
Of late, tensions between gender norms and religious needs are rising,
and not only within Christian denominations. For example, many funda-
mentalist Islamist groups such as ISIS and Boko Haram have traditionally
appealed to particular interpretations of sharia law and nature (kodrat) as
restricting women’s work and movements to the private, domestic sphere
(Shehadeh 2007). Despite these oft-stated values, these same organiza-
tions have reportedly been recruiting and training Muslim women for
public and militant roles, such as Boko Haram’s use of female suicide
bombers in Cameroon in 2015. This is likely because women are less likely
than men to attract the suspicion of authorities and more likely to be
allowed to pass through security checkpoints with a minimum search
(Bloom 2007). Groups of individuals, both large and small, male and
female, prove willing to transgress customary gender norms and religious
roles to meet a perceived greater need.
As such examples indicate, our assignment of individuals into gender
roles has never been set in stone. Numerous times, gender roles based
upon social, cultural, legal, or religious mores or divine or natural laws
have been overturned by the very political, social, and religious authorities
that created them; and this raises many questions and concerns. Under
what circumstances is it acceptable to transgress gender norms? Are there
limits, and if so, what are they and who determines them? How do the
majority accept what was previously taught as improper and insupportable
(if not unnatural and sinful) as suddenly palatable, even admirable? And,
after the greater immediate need is satisfied, what next? The gendered and
patriarchal structures imbedded within societies, religions, and cultures do
not change simply because women’s efforts were used to bridge tempo-
rary gaps in labor, religion, or service to the state in times of necessity. The
memory of women’s achievements and capacities will likely fuel future
 INTRODUCTION: DEVOUT OUTLAWS 5

efforts to expand gender opportunities for both men and women, but the
duration of these conflicts is typically too short (often less than a decade)
to produce long-term changes to institutions and widely shared societal
attitudes and practices.
In contrast, we have a historical anomaly in Mary Ward’s world. The
religious clashes of her lifetime were part of larger Catholic-Protestant
conflicts in the British Isles that officially lasted almost 300 years and
arguably much longer. As a result, any changes to gender and religious
roles undertaken in response to the needs of the times had sufficient time
to gain a foothold among Catholics in the British Isles. Many genera-
tions passed between Henry VIII’s break with the Roman Catholic
Church in 1534 and the Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1829 which
legally ended the long process of Catholic emancipation in the British
Isles. Catholics had time to test balances and boundaries between gender
norms and religious needs in different situations. Catholics had time to
set limits or loosen them.
By the nineteenth century, when the government officially lifted restric-
tions on Catholicism, Catholics had lived with their new gender and reli-
gious roles for generations. Turning back the clock to embrace earlier
attitudes and practices would not have been easy or automatic. Yet these
cultural changes were evolutionary rather than revolutionary. They took
place as a result of the struggle of Catholic leaders to meet the needs of a
beleaguered religious population and of individual Catholics to reconcile
themselves to the demands of their situations. This meant that it did not
require a conscious effort on anyone’s part to reshape ideas about religion
and gender.
By integrating the puzzle of Pope Urban VIII’s harsher-than-usual
suppression of Ward’s Institute into this much larger story about broader,
overlapping gendered and religious concerns, the contours of almost
three centuries of gender and religious change emerge, a change precipi-
tated as a largely unintentional byproduct of Catholic efforts to reclaim
the British Isles for Rome and sustain an illegal minority faith. The first
part of this book examines changing gender roles and the many ways in
which both women’s and men’s understandings of what was appropriate,
natural, and divinely created for each sex transformed as they struggled to
practice Catholicism in a Protestant state. A brief historical overview of
religious reforms and gendered traditions in the British Isles is provided
in Chap. 2. Chapter 3 explores how Catholic women, traditionally taught
6 L. MCCLAIN

to be quiet, modest, and obedient, carved out new roles for themselves as
leaders and lawbreakers as they struggled to uphold an underground faith
in their homes and beyond. Chapter 4 investigates how Catholic men—
many of whom occasionally bowed their heads before Protestant priests
to avoid impoverishment—understood and re-created their masculinity in
new ways under these circumstances. Chapter 5 continues by scrutinizing
Catholic women and men in relationship with one another to discover the
subtle adjustments in gender and religious roles necessitated within mar-
riage by religious conflicts.
Examining such issues from the perspective of gender alone is valuable
but provides an incomplete picture of the transformations occurring
among Catholics in the British Isles. Gender and religious norms have
long supported and reinforced one another within a larger patriarchal sys-
tem. Neither “trumps” the other in some hierarchy of importance.
Individuals and societies negotiate men’s and women’s gender roles within
a web of other issues and concerns, including religion. Similarly, religious
leaders, institutions, and believers negotiate religious roles within a web of
other priorities and pressures, including gender.
The second part of this book thus alters the perspective of inquiry to
explore the same conflicts and concerns through a primary lens of faith.
Chapters probe how different religious roles evolved to meet the needs of
Catholics living in a Protestant state and how gender was interwoven
throughout such transformations. For example, just as Catholics created
new understandings of what it meant to be good women, men, wives, and
husbands, so did they need to create new definitions of what it meant to
be a good Catholic, the subject of Chap. 6. In addition, just as the Church
saw religious advantages to softening strict borders between gender roles,
so did it blur traditional boundaries between lay and priestly roles, as
Chap. 7 explores. Need, again, drove such evolutions, as the Catholic
Church adjusted to the challenges of its status as an illegal faith and the
realities of upholding an underground church. Gender, of course, was inti-
mately embedded within these changes, and the concluding Chap. 8
weaves the broader lessons learned at the intersections of religion and
gender throughout the book into an answer to the conundrum of Mary
Ward’s treatment. It also provides a framework through which to interpret
broader controversies concerning gender and lay roles in the Catholic
Church in Ward’s day and our own.
Although this book is not about Mary Ward, we will meet her many
times along the way. Her story will be joined with many others, such as the
 INTRODUCTION: DEVOUT OUTLAWS 7

layman Francis Wodehouse’s tale of unusual physical suffering brought

about by the conflict between his masculine and religious priorities. We
will examine the lives and choices of religious men and women such as
Henry Garnet, Gertrude More, and Lucy Herbert, whose letters and spiri-
tual writings coupled with trial records and monastic chronicles reveal a
tapestry of intentional and unintentional re-negotiations of gendered and
religious roles. These new interpretations of the lives and experiences of
better-known Catholics couple with those of less well-known believers,
such as the Dublin women who rose up against Protestant authorities the
day after Christmas, provoking a street riot.
History is, at its heart, about storytelling. When enough stories accu-
mulate, patterns emerge that scholars can then interpret and contextual-
ize. Bringing together what otherwise might appear to be three centuries
worth of anecdotal or insignificant snippets of Catholic experiences reveals
such patterns of evolving gender and religious norms. We can begin to
identify circumstances under which it was acceptable for Catholics to
transgress gender and religious mores, the limits to such transgressions,
who drew them, and why. We begin to understand the rationalizations
that a majority of Catholics made to transform what had previously been
taught as unacceptable, unnatural, and even sinful into something admi-
rable. Even after the Catholic Church’s emergency situation in the British
Isles dwindled following Catholic Emancipation in 1829, the Church
could hardly expect Catholics of the nineteenth century simply to return
to gender and religious roles as they had been in the sixteenth century.
Too much had changed.

Gender and Religious Roles Today

The primary aim of this book is to explore issues surrounding the Catholic
Church’s long-term, ongoing process of balancing gendered and religious
authority. As in so many other historical situations, a crisis or great need
led to changes in the range of available gender and religious roles. As
Ward’s attempts to create a new female religious organization demon-
strate, some women sought to create new roles for women in the Catholic
Church and British society. As many other examples throughout this book
testify, men did the same. Contrary to oft-expressed fears, society did not
collapse, government and church did not crumble, and the world did not
end with the redrawing of gender boundaries.
8 L. MCCLAIN

These events are part and parcel of a long-standing discussion not only
about women’s and men’s natural or God-given roles but also about
divine power and authority itself. The earliest Christians and Church
Fathers argued over such issues and took centuries to agree upon a hierar-
chical structure of authority that has since been revised or reinterpreted
many times. This hierarchy eventually excluded women, but it also
excluded certain types of men. In Ward’s era, both clerics and laypeople
expressed concerns over perceived subversions of authority made by men
and women, laypeople and clergy, Catholics and Protestants. Who exer-
cises authority, what legitimates it, and who submits to it and how? All of
these issues are addressed herein.
Although these disputes occurred hundreds of years ago, they are
debates that continue in related forms even today within the Catholic
Church, other faith traditions, and secular societies worldwide. These are
not dry theological or philosophical dialogues but vibrant discussions of
embodied beliefs. People of faith are questioning traditional gender and
lay roles taught within their religious affiliations. They view this not as
rebellion but as part of what it means to be engaged, faithful believers. In
seeking greater connection with the divine and meaningful ways to serve
their faith, they intentionally or unintentionally press up against existing
boundaries, just as Mary Ward did. Although such “transgressions” have
frequently been viewed with fear and stigmatized as potentially disruptive,
dangerous, and destructive to traditional orders, three centuries of
Catholic experiences in the British Isles reveal positive consequences and
strengthening of religious culture that can result from extending gender
and religious roles beyond custom and tradition.

Notes
1. The institute did not operate with an official name at this time. Although
later known as the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mary Ward’s orga-
nization went by various titles during her lifetime, such as the Institute of
English Ladies and the English Virgins.
2. The bull was first drafted in 1628. Orders to suppress the Institute’s houses
on the continent were communicated to nuncios by Propaganda Fide as
early as October 1629; however, such orders were never communicated to
Ward. Ward continued to believe that efforts to suppress the houses were a
mistake and not originating from the pope until she was shown a published
copy of Pastoralis Romani Pontificus after her imprisonment and release. By
1631, the suppression was largely complete.
 INTRODUCTION: DEVOUT OUTLAWS 9

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Bloom, Mia. 2007. “Female Suicide Bombers: A Global Trend.” Daedalus 136,
no. 1: 94–102.
Chambers, M.C.E. 1882. The Life of Mary Ward (1585–1645). 2 vols. Edited by
Henry James Coleridge. London: Burns & Oates.
Dirmeier, Ursula, ed. 2007. Mary Ward und ihre Gründung: Die Quellentexte bis
1645. 4 vols. Corpus Catholicorum 45–8. Münster: Aschendorff Verlag.
Ellis, Pamela. 2007. “‘They Are but Women’: Mary Ward (1585–1645).” In
Women, Gender and Radical Religion in Early Modern Europe, edited by Sylvia
Brown, 243–63. Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions, 129. Leiden:
Brill.
Godfather’s Information, or Certaine Observations Delivered me by Mistress Marie
Allcock, the First Minister of Mistress Wardes Companie at Leeds (Liege) Yea the
First of All Who Was Publicklye so Called. 1623. n.p.
Harriss, Patricia. 2010. “Mary Ward in Her Own Writings.” Recusant History 30,
no. 2: 229–39.
Kenworthy-Browne, Christina, ed. 2008. Mary Ward 1585–1648: A Briefe
Relation with Autobiographical Fragments and a Selection of Letters. Rochester,
NY: Boydell and Brewer for the Catholic Record Society.
Lux-Sterritt, Laurence. 2011. “Mary Ward’s English Institute and Prescribed
Female Roles in the Early Modern Church.” In Gender, Catholicism, and
Spirituality, edited by Lux-Sterritt and Carmen M. Mangion, 83–98. London:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Rapley, Elizabeth. 1990. The Dévotes: Women and Church in Seventeenth-Century
France. Kingston, Ontario: McGill/Queen’s University Press.
Shehadeh, Lamia Rustum. 2007. The Idea of Women in Fundamentalist Islam.
Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida.
Strasser, Ulrike. 2004. “Early Modern Nuns and the Feminist Politics of Religion.”
The Journal of Religion 84, no. 4: 529–554.
Wetter, M. Immolata. 2006. Mary Ward: Under the Shadow of the Inquisition.
Translated by M. Bernadette Ganne and M. Patricia Harriss. Introduction by
Gregory Kirkus. Oxford: Way Books.
 PART I

Pushing the Boundaries of Gender

 CHAPTER 2

The New Normal

Mary Ward (1585–1645) was born into a changed world. To understand

these changes is to understand her story. Henry VIII’s break from Rome
in 1534 marked the first defection of a major European country from
papal authority in the Reformation era, and the Catholic Church during
her lifetime was under new pressures. Henry cut spiritual, legal, institu-
tional, and financial ties to the Roman Church throughout England,
Ireland, and Wales. Catholic churches became Protestant ones. Rites were
changed. Monasteries were dissolved. Catholic property reverted to the
state. Catholic priests became Protestant ones or they lost their offices.
Despite Henry’s eldest daughter Mary I’s resumption of ties with the
Catholic Church during her brief reign (1553–1558), his younger,
Protestant daughter, Elizabeth, severed them again soon after taking the
throne. Within two years, Elizabeth I’s government passed the Acts of
Supremacy and Uniformity (1559) and the Irish Act of Uniformity
(1560), which, together, again removed England, Ireland, and Wales from
papal authority. Scotland, then an independent monarchy, also severed ties
with Rome in 1560. Lowland Scots accepted the Calvinist/Presbyterian
theology of the Scottish Kirk with rapidity while Catholicism remained
illegally entrenched in the relatively inaccessible Highlands until the gov-
ernment’s destruction of the clan system in the mid-eighteenth century

© The Author(s) 2018 13

L. McClain, Divided Loyalties? Pushing the Boundaries of
Gender and Lay Roles in the Catholic Church, 1534-1829,
Histories of the Sacred and Secular, 1700-2000,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73087-5_2
14 L. MCCLAIN

(Mullett 1998; Heal 2003; Walsham 2014; Dawson 2007). Protestantism

was thus established as the only legal religion of the British Isles. It would
remain so for the next 270 years.
Catholic worship continued clandestinely, however, during these three
centuries. Men left their homes to train for the priesthood at newly estab-
lished Catholic seminaries on the continent and began returning in 1574
as part of a Catholic quest to reclaim the British Isles, especially England
and Ireland, for Rome (Mullett 1998, 51–53, 59–60; Murray 2009, 5–19,
261–321). England, Wales, and eventually Scotland—each Catholic for
almost a millennium before Protestant reforms—became mission fields,
lands to be converted. Ireland, which never lost its Catholic majority, did
not need to be reconverted so much as continuously supplied with priests
and leadership to serve an underground church that was a poorly kept
secret from Protestant authorities. This story is well known. Priests often
stayed in the manor houses of wealthier Catholics, using them as bases of
operation to serve surrounding communities. Lacking physical churches,
tithes, and administrative support, missionary priests served their flocks
from the margins, hiding from Protestant authorities while providing spir-
itual comfort and the sacraments to Catholics and attempting to reconcile
Protestants to the Catholic Church (McClain 2004, 20; Mullett 1998,
19–21; Kaplan 2007, 172–97). It was this work that Ward and the English
Ladies felt called to join.

Not Quite Nuns

Mary Ward grew up amidst these political and religious changes, spending
her childhood in several Catholic households trying to adjust to “the new
normal.” Missionary priests served these homes, providing spiritual com-
fort and the sacraments (Lux-Sterritt 2006, 196–201; Peters 1994,
28–54).1 Increasingly certain that she was called to the religious life yet
living in a country where there were no longer any Catholic convents,
Ward crossed the English Channel in 1606 when she was 21 years old,
hoping to be accepted at one of the many continental convents welcoming
Catholic women and girls from the British Isles. She initially joined a
Flemish house of Poor Clares, the female branch of the Franciscan order,
and later founded an English house of the same order. Ward’s religious life
changed at age 24 after she received a series of divine revelations begin-
ning in 1609 in which she said God called her to explore a different type
of women’s religious vocation based on the example of the Society of
 THE NEW NORMAL 15

Jesus. “Take the name of the Society,” these visions told her (Kenworthy-­
Browne 2008, 146; Simmonds 2008, 120–35). These visions would
alter her personal journey, the mission, and the future of the Catholic
Church.
However, Ward had a problem. Women’s and men’s opportunities
throughout much of the British Isles were based upon interpretations of
divine law, natural law, and English common law which together circum-
scribed a set of roles and expectations for each sex. Theologians based
divine law on interpretations of Judeo-Christian scripture that helped pre-
scribe the character and place of each sex in divinely created hierarchies of
family and society (i.e., Gen 2:7–25; Luke 1:26–56, 2:1–20). Such beliefs
defined women as subordinate to male authority and inherently sinful, yet
ideally chaste, modest, and out of the public eye.
Natural law, in contrast, was based on philosophers’ inference of uni-
versal principles about human nature gleaned from their observations of
human behavior. Its proponents, most notably Aristotle, created binding
moral rules based on those principles. Perceived differences in physical
and mental character between men and women justified women’s subor-
dination to men and “naturally” legitimated their lesser status and rights
in society.
English common law then translated divine and natural understandings
about both men and women into a legal system that upheld traditional
gender roles, judged moral and ethical issues, and conferred or denied
rights and privileges based on gender. Common law placed an unmarried
young woman under the legal authority of her father or other male guard-
ian. If a woman married, she did not enjoy legal rights and status in her
own right but rather was “covered” under her husband’s rights as if they
were one person in a complex and sometimes contradictory system known
as coverture. An unmarried adult woman, whether spinster or widow, was
permitted to exercise limited legal rights but not to the extent a man could
(T.E. 1632). A woman inspired, as Ward was, to pursue a new way of life
could not simply do so.
Just as women could not act as men did within worldly society, neither
could women pursuing a religious calling act within the Catholic Church
as men could. Since 1298, Pope Boniface VIII’s decretal, Periculoso,
required all nuns—also known as women religious—to stay enclosed
behind convent walls, in what is known as mandatory claustration.
Although enforcement of this strict ideal was never absolute, this was not
some little-known, antiquated rule that Ward could ignore. The Council
16 L. MCCLAIN

of Trent (1545–1563), the Catholic Church’s influential Reformation-era

council held to determine correct Christian belief and practice and to
reform abuses, had recently confirmed Periculoso and the values behind it.
Female religious needed to be isolated to protect them from heresy, temp-
tation, and opportunities for sin, especially sexual sin, to which their wom-
anly natures allegedly inclined them (Makowski 1999, 1–8, 23–28, 31,
38–40, 104, 121, 126–27; Waterworth 1848, 240–41). Yet the Church
had tolerated other small groups of pious women living communally yet
unenclosed, such as the beguines, beatas, klopjes, and Ursulines (Makowski
1999, 122–23; Kooi 1995, 80; 2012, 26–28, 111, 124). Why not one
more? With such precedents, Ward hoped that she and her colleagues
might obtain an exception to strict enclosure, especially considering the
great need and Rome’s desire to reclaim the British Isles.
Requesting papal approval, Ward asked that her Institute of English
Ladies bypass Periculoso and traditional episcopal hierarchies to exist, as
the Jesuits did, under the direct jurisdiction of the pope and free from any
cloister as a form of “mixed life.” Her ladies would be more than lay-
women but not nuns. They sought to blend elements of lay and monastic
life into something new. They would live together out in the world under
the authority of the Roman Church. They would follow a regular routine
of communal prayer, ritual observances, and religious discipline. They
would adopt conservative, distinctive dress appropriate to the secular
world but would not wear nuns’ habits. They would be led by a female
superior, an “abbess.” And while English Ladies made the traditional
three monastic vows of chastity, obedience, and poverty, they took such
vows privately, not publicly and solemnly before church authority as nuns
did. The primary purpose of such a mixed life would be to sustain and
relieve distressed Catholics and promote the salvation of others through
educating young girls or “by any other means that are congruous to the
times,” “in any place,” for the “propagation” of the Catholic Church
(Chambers 1882, 1:376–78, 384).

Violence and Its Aftermath

The Church certainly seemed to need and want such help. In particular,
Catholic leaders went to great lengths to reclaim the two largest and most
influential kingdoms—England and Ireland—for Rome. In the first
decades of Elizabeth’s reign, they considered seizing power through vio-
lence. In his 1570 papal bull, Regnans in excelsis, Pope Pius V released all
 THE NEW NORMAL 17

Elizabeth’s subjects from their loyalty to their heretic queen, removing

any taint of sin should they rebel. Influential Catholics living in her realm
or in exile in continental Europe schemed to topple Elizabeth from the
throne and replace her with a Catholic monarch. The usual candidate was
her cousin, Mary Queen of Scots. Open insurrections, such as the Northern
Rising of 1569, and behind-the-scenes plots, such as the Throckmorton
and Babington Plots, ended in failure and eventually with Mary’s behead-
ing at Fotheringay Castle in 1587. In the 1580s and 1590s, the papacy
openly supported Catholic Spain’s efforts to invade the British Isles, most
notably the failed Spanish Armada of 1588 and a later, smaller armada sent
to support an Irish rebellion in 1595, which also failed. Philip II
(1527–1598), King of Spain and former King of England during his mar-
riage to Mary I, hoped to depose Elizabeth and return her realm to
Catholic loyalty. Some Irish Catholics encouraged such plans, even invit-
ing the Spanish monarch to place one of his relatives on the throne of
Ireland (Mullett 1998, 57). This move would have the double benefit of
reconciling Ireland to Rome and removing Ireland from English control.
After Elizabeth’s death in 1603 ended the Tudor monarchy, the Stuart
monarchs faced a declining threat from violent Catholic extremists. With
his accession to the English crown as James I, the Protestant James VI of
Scotland united the crowns of England, Scotland, and Ireland. Initially,
Catholics sought to remove him. Following the failure of the 1603 Main
and Bye Plots to depose or kidnap James, and the much better known
Gunpowder Plot of 1605 in which Guy Fawkes and other conspirators
planned to blow up king and Parliament, Catholic attempts to overthrow
the Protestant monarchy fell off sharply. None had worked, and all had
resulted in increased persecution of Catholics and harsher enforcement of
the laws against them. Catholics began to conclude that reconversion
would be a long, drawn-out process, if it occurred at all.
However, if not a return to Roman jurisdiction, what then? What was
Catholic presence in the British Isles to look like? Although the Catholic
Church named cardinals and bishops as ecclesiastical leaders over the
British Isles, there were no public, clearly defined Catholic parish, episco-
pal, or diocesan structures or administrations. There were no ecclesiastical
courts to enforce discipline. There was little property or funding. With the
many priests arriving on mission, it was not always clear who was in charge.
Should it be the secular priests—those who chose a life free from the mon-
astery and who promised obedience to a bishop? Alternatively, should it be
the regular priests—those ordained clerics who also had taken monastic
18 L. MCCLAIN

vows and followed a rule (or regula) of one of the religious orders, such as
the Jesuits or Benedictines? Priests were divided over whether to operate as
though the institutional hierarchies of the medieval era were still in place or
to embrace the idea of the British Isles as a true mission field—a blank slate
upon which no concrete rules were written. Heated conflicts erupted over
who had authority over whom, as will be discussed further in Chap. 8. On
this issue, the secular priests and the Jesuits in particular disagreed. As the
secular priest, John Mush, complained, “Verily, here is nothing but most
lamentable confusion, debates & factions among both clergy and people”
(Tierney 1841, 4:clxxix–xxx). Even in Ireland, which boasted a majority
Catholic population, enthusiastic bishops, and underground monastic
activity, secular and regular priests competed with one another for influ-
ence and the loyalties of the laity (Mullett 1998, 65–69, 120–36, 185–93).
In this environment of changing Catholic expectations and uncertain
leadership, Ward began pursuing her plans for the Institute. Stumbling into
these conflicts, Ward’s plan encountered opposition from the very Catholics
she hoped to serve. Church approval was a lengthy process lasting many
years, and while religious officials debated the merits of Ward’s vision, she
and the English Ladies were already at work. Ward travelled back to England
and was joined by other women to help with the mission. Beginning in
1609, members lived together in London in a house kept by the Institute.
Others stayed with Catholic families—wealthy and poor—in the country-
side. Their activities consisted primarily of underground evangelization.
They educated girls, catechized families, and performed acts of charity. They
persuaded and prepared people to turn or return to the Catholic faith, find-
ing priests for reconciliation and the sacraments when the time came
(Mother Mary Margaret 1955, 28–29; Chambers 1882, 2:25–38). The
women supported missionary priests by providing safe places for them to
stay and by funneling Christians to them (Chambers 1882, 1:44). Most of
this was done surreptitiously, as the practice of Catholicism was illegal, even
in Ireland where Catholics outnumbered Protestants. Support of Catholic
priests, especially Jesuits, was punishable by fines, imprisonment, and pos-
sibly death under the charge of treason (McClain 2004, 21–25, 204–8).

A Knock on the Door in the Night

Protestant authorities knew all about Catholics’ underground activities,
and from the 1570s through the eighteenth century, successive parlia-
ments passed laws of increasing severity impacting Catholics in England,
 THE NEW NORMAL 19

Ireland, Wales, and Scotland.2 These parliaments hoped to curb Catholic

practices, hamstring the mission, and eventually erode Catholic loyalties.
Rather than criminalizing Catholic religious beliefs, per se, these laws
prosecuted Catholics for betraying the monarch and state by acting in the
interests of a foreign power—the papacy. Nowhere was the equation of
Catholicism with treason more clearly stated than in the long title of one
of the last penal laws passed during Elizabeth’s reign, the “Act for the bet-
ter discovery of wicked and seditious persons terming themselves Catholics,
but being rebellious and traitorous subjects” (35 Eliz I, c. 2). Reconciling
anyone to Catholicism, as the English Ladies would do, became a treason-
able offence, as did carrying or circulating papal bulls and Catholic reli-
gious objects such as crucifixes and rosaries. The government ordered
Catholics living abroad to come home. It became illegal and punishable by
death just to be a priest ordained after 1559 in the British Isles. Those who
harbored or assisted priests were to “suffer death, loss, and forfeit as in
cases of one attainted of felony” (13 Eliz I, c. 1 & 2, building upon 35
Henry VIII, c. 2; also 27 Eliz I, c. 2; 29 Eliz I, c. 6; 3 and 4 James I, c. 4,
5; 7 James I, c. 6).
Protestant efforts to smoke out Catholics and encourage conformity to
the state church also included the Recusancy Acts, a set of civil laws rather
than criminal ones. Subjects who recused themselves from weekly Church
of England, Church of Ireland, or Church of Scotland services—hence the
term, recusants—faced increasingly stiff fines. The government restricted
Catholics and other dissenters from practicing certain professions and
often preferred to fine Catholics rather than imprison them. Parliaments
held during the reign of the perpetually cash-strapped James I, for exam-
ple, increased fines to such high levels that many Catholics who recused
themselves could not afford to pay. The makers of the law anticipated
these financial realities and wrote the law to allow the government to seize
two-thirds of a recusant’s land for non-payment of fines (3 James 1, c. 4).
Even if the recusant died, heirs could not reclaim the land until they paid
all the arrears. The government repealed the Recusancy Acts in 1650 dur-
ing the Commonwealth period, but the penal laws continued in effect
until 1829, supplemented by further fines, confiscations of property, and
restrictions on economic opportunities and political participation.
These laws significantly hampered male missionaries’ efforts to convert
and minister to Catholics and avoid detection. The government’s enforce-
ment of these laws waxed and waned depending on where one lived in the
British Isles and whether there was any perceived threat of foreign invasion
20 L. MCCLAIN

or domestic rebellion, but being Catholic always carried risks. Even when
the “threat level” was low, the risks never disappeared. Recusants and
potential converts had to weigh the costs of Catholicism and of helping
Catholic clergy. Priests needed to be particularly careful. Priest hunters,
called pursuivants, and law enforcement officials learned how to identify
male missionaries by their dress, mannerisms, speech, possessions, and
company they kept. They learned the travel patterns that missionaries used
to sneak into and around the country. They learned the homes and fami-
lies with which missionaries would be most likely to stay. They became
good at their jobs.
Consequently, many Catholics enjoyed only sporadic access to priests
and sacraments throughout the seventeenth century while frustrations and
fears over salvation grew, particularly in England, Scotland, and Wales.
Catholics dreaded the unexpected knock on the door that might be the
priest hunters arriving with a warrant to search. Some families built inge-
niously disguised hiding places in their homes to conceal any priests or
incriminating Catholic books and objects from such scrutiny. Poorer
Catholics might construct small, hidden outbuildings on their property to
hide visiting priests. Pursuivants eventually discovered these ruses, too.
Inevitably, a number of priests and laypeople were arrested, imprisoned,
fined, and sometimes executed (Kaplan 2007, 123). The Catholic Church
has canonized or beatified almost 300 English, Welsh, Irish, and Scots
martyrs taken in these ways. The number of Catholics arrested, impris-
oned, and fined was much higher.
Many Catholics began looking for ways to convince the monarchy of
their loyalty to the crown. By and large, throughout the seventeenth cen-
tury, the government refused to listen. Catholics’ very practice of their
religion made them lawbreakers. Protestants were taught to view
Catholics with suspicion, as lying, criminal, disloyal subjects, especially
after the Gunpowder Plot, the Irish Rebellion of 1641, and later when
the majority of Catholics supported Charles I and the losing Royalists in
the Civil War.
In this environment of suspicion, women such as Ward and the English
Ladies who served the Catholic cause often possessed advantages over
men. Reflecting widely accepted attitudes about women based on natural
law, the authorities presumed women were less likely and less capable of
planning treason or political rebellion. In addition, under common law,
women were not considered fully responsible for their actions in the way
that men were. If Protestant authorities searched their homes, some
 THE NEW NORMAL 21

women claimed that Catholic items found there did not belong to them
but to men and that they, being women, were not acquainted with the
uses of such things. If the authorities arrested a woman for breaking the
Catholic penal laws, they typically released her or gave her a lighter pun-
ishment than a man would have received. Convicted recusant women,
even those originally sentenced to death, were likely to be reprieved
(Chambers 1882, 2:34; Petti 1968, 44–80; Stone 1892, 110, 138–39;
Blundell 1933, 29; SP Dom 12/168/6; CSP Dom 14/98/26, 27, 35,
36, 40). The Protestant government only executed three women under
the penal laws despite their disproportionately high activity on behalf of
the Catholic cause.
Under such circumstances, would the Catholic Church approve of
women undertaking new types of work in support of its missionary activi-
ties in the British Isles—work that was desperately needed, that men found
increasingly difficult to perform safely and effectively, but that women
could accomplish with less risk? Ward believed so. Catholics in the British
Isles and in Rome gradually learned to accommodate their expectations
and efforts to the realities of practicing Catholicism illegally in a Protestant
country.
Catholic leaders had already made exceptions to well-known religious
laws and conventions to make Catholic worship, the mission, and the sal-
vation of souls possible. One of the most obvious accommodations was to
Catholic understanding of religious space. Without churches, priests often
found themselves marrying, baptizing, burying, and absolving Catholics
of their sins in unusual places, such as woods, fields, and jail cells (McClain
2004, 55–80; SP Dom 12/192/46; Chambers 1882, 2:28). The Church
had always been willing to bend some of its rules in times of emergency,
not as rejections of doctrine but as necessary, temporary, and justifiable
suspensions of rules in particular situations (McClain 2004, 6). Various
popes, such as Gregory XIII, also issued indulgences to inspire Catholics
to work for the British Isles’, particularly England’s, reconversion (Bridgett
1899, 49, 99). Such leniencies occurred frequently under a variety of cir-
cumstances throughout Catholic Church history.
By 1590, the emergency situation had already lasted for decades with
no end in the foreseeable future. Exceptions occurred on a larger scale and
were gradually institutionalized. The papacy, for example, granted a special
dispensation to missionary priests that allowed them to publish their books
anonymously and without indicating the place of publication. Ordinarily,
the Church banned such anonymity in publication, but it was considered
22 L. MCCLAIN

too dangerous for these writers to publish using their names. Not only
they but their families might face persecution. It was more important,
Rome felt, to encourage authors to write and distribute books that might
strengthen the Catholic cause in the British Isles than it was to enforce the
usual decrees (Merrick 1947, 64–65; Waterworth 1848, 19–21).
Not all Catholics in continental Europe agreed with such accommoda-
tions, feeling that Catholics in the British Isles received special treatment.
For example, in 1615, Mutio Vitelleschi, the newly elected General of the
Society of Jesus, proved willing to bend Jesuit practice to the special cir-
cumstances in England to try to strengthen the effectiveness of the mis-
sion. The body of Jesuits that elected him, however, objected to such
partiality, claiming that it contradicted the vision of their founder. The
Spaniard Ignatius Loyola founded the Society of Jesus in 1534 as a means
to combat heresy, especially Protestant heresy, in the early years of the
Reformation. He viewed the Catholic Church’s troubles as largely a prob-
lem of pastoral care that could be remedied by a new form of religious
service. Although one of many new religious societies established in the
sixteenth century, the Jesuits were distinctive in their organization and
relationship to Rome. A former soldier, Loyola organized the Jesuits in
quasi-military fashion as an all-male order, governed by a general, and
answerable directly to the pope. Jesuits viewed themselves as warriors
fighting for Christ, the pope, and the truth of Catholic Christianity. They
were not tied to a church or monastery but ready to go wherever the
church commanded them, leading people to Catholicism as good pastors
of God’s flock.
Loyola intended the Society of Jesus to transcend nationalities,
Vitelleschi’s opponents argued (Lockey 2015, 62–64). Jesuits were to
unite spiritually to serve God, not divide themselves into groups such as
English, Spanish, or French. Yet, what had the British done? Exactly
that—they established particularly English, Irish, and Scots colleges in
places such as the Low Countries, Rome, and Spain. These schools were
run largely by English clerics. They hosted student populations that were
predominately English, Irish, Welsh, and Scots, with the obvious intent to
train these men to return home on mission and likely face martyrdom.
Vitelleschi was torn. He wanted missionary efforts in the British Isles to
succeed, but he did not believe they could unless he authorized unpopular
accommodations to standard Jesuit ideals. In the end, he risked the anger
of his colleagues to encourage missionary goals. First, he asked the leaders
of Jesuit provinces in which the schools were located to accept more
 THE NEW NORMAL 23

Englishmen and Irishmen than was traditional. Then, he elevated the

English Mission first, in 1619, to vice-provincial status and later, in 1623,
to a full province. He thereby allowed the English an unusual and contro-
versial measure of autonomy as a nationally organized province and mis-
sionary effort (McCoog 1994, 16–17, 20, 24–25).3 Vitelleschi was likely
gratified when a large proportion, approximately one-fifth, of English stu-
dents at these seminaries elected not only to be ordained to the priesthood
but also to join the Society.

How Far Could the Boundaries of Gender

Be Pushed?
Given this demonstrated willingness to compromise established policies to
meet the needs of Catholics in the British Isles, where would the Catholic
Church draw its limits about women and related expectations about gen-
der? The Irish Jesuit Henry Fitzsimon, in 1609, in his Words of Comfort to
Persecuted Catholics, noted how mutable attitudes and policies involving
gender could be when religion was involved. Protestants such as the fiery
preacher, John Knox, declared it unlawful for a woman to rule England
when Catholic Mary I sat upon the throne but “in Queen Elizabeth’s days
that unlawfulness was lawful.” Similarly, in Scotland, Protestants initially
supported a woman—Catholic Queen Dowager Marie de Guise—as head
of the church until their numbers increased enough for them to “change
their doctrine” and remove her (Fitzsimon 1881, 23).
Catholic willingness to change gender expectations to meet religious
needs was evident in the daily lives of ordinary Catholics. Lay Catholics
often stepped in to fill the gaps left by an irregularly available priesthood,
and some of these Catholics were women. Although it was not normally
their role, Catholic women baptized children and arranged burials. They
motivated neighbors, relatives, and poor people to reconcile with the
Catholic faith. They taught and prepared them to receive Catholic priests
and the sacraments at the soonest opportunity (McClain 2015, 445,
452–53; Mush 1849, 99). Such women were not trying to assume male
or priestly roles. They were simply trying to serve God and their neigh-
bors’ souls as best they could in trying times. Mary Ward and her English
Ladies can be seen as part of this larger phenomenon, seeking to institu-
tionalize new types of women’s participation in the work of the Church.
Henry Garnet, Jesuit superior in England from 1587 until his execu-
tion following the Gunpowder Plot in 1606, even appeared to entertain
24 L. MCCLAIN

the idea of women taking a more active role in Catholic ministry, possibly
having an approved role in administering the sacraments. It was a practical
matter of need. There were so few priests in the British Isles that it was
difficult enough to have one priest present, let alone another person
approved to administer the sacraments. How could a priest himself receive
the Eucharist if there was no one to give it to him? In 1599, Garnet
addressed a letter to Marco Tusinga, one of the Jesuit Robert Persons’s
aliases, about his dilemma. Persons (1546–1610) was one of the instiga-
tors of the mission and one of its first missionaries. A polemical writer,
diplomat, and perhaps the most influential promoter of the English
Colleges on the continent, Persons was then serving as rector of the
English College in Rome. In the letter, Garnet lamented the current state
of affairs and ran through what he saw as his choices. At one point he
observed that, “it was once the custom in England for women to minister
in the public temples.” He was not criticizing women’s ministry in pre-­
Christian times, but rather seeming to consider this as an option having
some tradition behind it. The tension between socially and religiously
approved gender roles and immediate social and religious needs was appar-
ent. Ultimately, Garnet informed Persons that he would ask the pope for
a general permission for priests to administer the sacrament to themselves
(CSP Dom 12/271/105). Although Garnet eventually discarded the
option of women administering the Eucharist, he was not the last Catholic
to entertain the possibility of expanding women’s roles in this sacrament.
Perhaps nowhere was this tension between gender and religious roles
played out more publicly than in Mary Ward’s efforts to train women to
aid the mission. She conceived the women’s work as a complement to the
work of male missionaries to save souls and work for her country’s recon-
version. In the early seventeenth century, the need for more workers in the
mission field was obvious. The need for the Catholic Church to bend its
rules in this emergency situation was already being felt, particularly among
clergy struggling to meet the pastoral needs of Catholic believers (McClain
2004, 55–139; 2007, 77–96; 2013, 90–124). Ward envisioned the papacy
approving her innovative Catholic female organization to help meet these
pressing needs. Her Institute of English Ladies, modeled upon Loyola’s
Society of Jesus, would work undercover to help meet the spiritual neces-
sities of Catholics worshipping clandestinely within Protestant England.
Reports concerning Ward’s Institute written by both Catholics and
Protestants indicate that the English Ladies were having some measure of
success on the mission. Institute numbers grew. Forty women had joined
 THE NEW NORMAL 25

by 1612. By 1616, Institute houses were opening across Europe. By 1628,

the Institute would span from Liège to Naples to Prague and number
approximately 200 members (Rapley 1990, 28; Wetter 2006, 162n2).
Gendered attitudes about women actually facilitated the English Ladies’
work on the mission and allowed them to reach groups—such as the poor—
who historians often describe as underserved by the mission. For over two
decades, Ward and her English Ladies eluded discovery and punishment
more easily than male missionaries. They taught, served, performed chari-
table acts, and prepared laypeople for reconciliation and the sacraments.
They got away with it so often because ingrained gendered stereotypes about
women did not allow the authorities to comprehend what Catholic women
working in this capacity would look like or do (Walker 2000, 1–23; 2004,
228–42; Bowden 2010, 297–314; Bowden and Kelly 2013). Authorities
searched either for “galloping girls” (a pejorative term describing flighty,
uncontrolled women who shunned many gender expectations) or nuns.
Ward’s English Ladies were neither. The authorities could not find what they
were looking for, thus allowing Ward’s English Ladies to work relatively
undetected in England for almost 20 years (McClain 2015, 447–48).
Following their papally-supported return to England in 1639, Ward
and her colleagues established themselves in London. They continued to
live together chastely and modestly, thinking of themselves as a family with
Ward as their head. They educated Catholic girls and performed charitable
acts. In many ways, their efforts on behalf of Catholics after the suppres-
sion look quite similar to their earlier Institute work. In 1642, after the
outbreak of the Civil War, Ward and many of her companions journeyed
northward and established another household of chaste, modest women
near York. The war came to their doorstep when Parliamentary and
Royalist armies struggled through the Siege of York in 1644. Ward fell ill
and died shortly thereafter in January 1645. Her work, however, contin-
ued. Decades after her death, English Catholic women revived a form of
Ward’s Institute that would spread across continents by the nineteenth
century, a legacy which will be discussed in the final chapter (Wallace
2011, 134).4

Broke Catholic Men and the New Normal

After Ward’s death, the very real needs of Catholics in the British Isles
continued in an era of uncertainty lasting through the eighteenth century.
Protestants might turn a blind eye to the Mass they knew their neighbor
26 L. MCCLAIN

hosted next door behind locks and shutters; or they might not. It remained
illegal to be a priest in the British Isles. The penal laws remained on the
books, and the authorities enforced them in some years but not in others.
Restrictions on Catholics’ education and livelihoods increased. Depending
on where and when one lived, Catholics might face disarmament, disen-
franchisement, fines, and limitation on land ownership and inheritance. In
addition, the stigma of treason was difficult to dispel. Catholic hopes rose
and fell with political developments.
In this environment, women such as Ward were not the only ones
struggling to reconcile the demands of both their faith and their gender.
Men, too, have a gender. Catholic men restricted by the penal laws often
found it difficult to fulfill the traditional duties expected of them as men.
William Blundell (1620–1698) referred to such challenges when he
took up his pen and opened his notebook in the mid-1640s, just as Mary
Ward’s life neared its close. Blundell was an impoverished rural gentle-
man trying to support his large Catholic family in Little Crosby in
Lancashire. Married at the age of 15 to Ann Haggerston, William eventu-
ally fathered 14 children, 10 of whom survived infancy. Commissioned as
a captain of dragoons when he was 22, Blundell was permanently dis-
abled in 1642 during his first battle fighting for Charles I under the
Royalist banner in the English Civil War. A musket shot to the thigh
shattered his femur and allegedly shortened one of his legs by three
inches, requiring him to wear a special high-heeled shoe for the remain-
der of his life. He spent the next five decades at home, in jail, or in exile.
Throughout this time, he collected his correspondence, receipts, and
personal musings into a private notebook or commonplace book (Blundell
1933, 4–16, 31, 37; Baker 2010).
Blundell’s story takes us forward from Ward’s death and the Civil War
years to the end of the seventeenth century and introduces the idea of an
evolution in gender and religious roles for Catholic men that occurred in
tandem with debates and adjustments regarding Catholic women’s roles.
Blundell’s revelations highlight the tensions many men experienced as
they struggled to remain good Catholics while providing for their families.
Their challenge was that it was almost impossible to do both. Between the
penal and recusancy laws, as well as occasional extra taxes, fines, and
sequestrations of Catholic property, many Catholic men such as Blundell
were broke. For example, the government fined Blundell heavily for his
recusancy and sequestered his property when he could not pay. He became
financially dependent, forced to borrow money from women—his two
 THE NEW NORMAL 27

sisters—and from Protestant men to keep his family financially afloat. He

was often in jail or forced into hiding. In the midst of these losses and
absences, Ann, his wife, provided the family’s main financial support. She
petitioned and was granted legal rights to one-fifth of the Blundell prop-
erty to maintain their family. Even after William was able to repurchase his
land from the government, he was perpetually in debt (Blundell 1933,
31–32, 40). Was William or any other Catholic man truly still head of his
household if he was restricted from providing for his family—one of the
primary responsibilities of masculine headship?
Despite such handicaps, Catholic men in the British Isles continued to
work and hope for better times, hopes that would remain largely unful-
filled until the later eighteenth century. The coronation of Charles II in
1660, for example, raised Catholic hopes for toleration including William
Blundell’s. This event is known as the Restoration because it restored the
Stuart monarchy following the beheading of the last king, Charles I, and
the Interregnum. Blundell joined Charles II’s entourage on its triumphant
return from exile, and his notes from this period exude an ebullient opti-
mism that Charles would ease the plight of Catholics (Blundell 1933,
92–93). Indeed, Charles II tried to persuade Parliament toward greater
leniency (Mullett 1998, 76). His Protestant opposition generally tri-
umphed, however, passing legislation such as the Test Act of 1673, which
effectively barred Catholics from many social or economic opportunities,
such as the holding of public office and military service. In 1677, Blundell
wrote his Protestant cousin, Sir Roger Bradshaigh, a Member of Parliament,
pleading with him not to vote to levy special taxes upon Catholics. All
Catholics, as good subjects, Blundell wrote, would cheerfully pay their
general taxes in support of the Crown; and if a foreign power, including
Rome, attacked on any pretense, Catholics could be counted upon “to
pay, to pray, and to fight” for the defense of the realm (Blundell 1933,
184–85). Blundell insisted that Catholics were good men to be counted
among all other good men. The government did not listen.
When Charles II’s successor, his brother, James, Duke of York, revealed
he was Catholic, many Protestants conditioned to believe in a Catholic
threat panicked, and the pressures on Catholic men increased. Protestants
believed the lies of Titus Oates, who in 1678 claimed to have evidence
that Catholics were again plotting to overthrow the Protestant monarchy
and rebel against their Protestant neighbors, just as they had tried to do
under Elizabeth I and James I. Before Oates’s poor character and the
flimsy nature of his evidence were exposed, the government tried and
28 L. MCCLAIN

e­ xecuted over two dozen Catholics as traitors (Greaves 1992). These were
the last English and Irish Catholic martyrs made during the penal times.

A Man and His Sword

Anti-Catholic hysteria over this “Popish Plot” increased persecution of
Catholics in many urban and rural areas, including Blundell’s Lancashire.
In 1679, the government seized Blundell’s sword and required him to put
up a bond for his good behavior. To say that he resented it would be an
understatement. His sword was clearly more than a mere weapon in his
eyes. It symbolized his ability to protect his family and his status as a free
man. He wrote to a friend, John North, a Catholic bookseller in Dublin,
describing his sword as his “trusty” longtime companion that had been
with him when he had sacrificed the use of “his limbs, his lands, and his
liberty,” doing a man’s duty serving his king in the Civil War. Now this
new king’s men were stripping him of his sword, “yet I hear no personal
charge against me, nor do I fear any at all except purely on the account of
the religion I have always professed” (Blundell 1933, 203). Six months
later, he was still ranting about his sword in another letter to Ireland, to
his son-in-law, Richard Butler. “I know no reason at all, besides the Will
of my Superiors, why I should be compelled” to post bond and give up
this sword. He had done everything the government had asked of him:

It was in the noblest cause imaginable that I lost the use of my limbs. I was
in my younger days 4 times made a prisoner for my Loyalty. I paid my ran-
som twice. I was then no less than 10 years sequestered. After I had been
plundered of all and when I was compelled to purchase my own lands with
the money which I took upon interest: when this was done, I paid … a tenth
part of my revenues. (204)

So much had been taken from him—basically beggaring his family—all to

prove he was an obedient subject. And how had his loyalty been repaid?
The government had now stripped him of his means to defend his family
after denying him the means to provide for them. How dare they take his
sword after all he had sacrificed and done to prove himself loyal. He prayed
to carry this cross with patience (204).
Catholic hopes rose again during the brief reign of James II from
1685–1688. After withstanding attempts to block his succession, James
gained the crown after his brother’s death. James worshipped openly as a
 THE NEW NORMAL 29

Catholic and pursued a measure of toleration for Catholics while publicly

vowing to uphold England’s constitution and the Protestant state churches
of England, Ireland, and Scotland. He suspended the enforcement of the
penal laws and used his royal prerogative to dispense with the Test Act,
allowing Catholics to serve openly in public office as well as in the army.
In 1687, he issued a Declaration of Indulgence granting freedom of wor-
ship to Catholic and Protestant dissenters. Catholic optimism soared!
Exiled Catholics returned from abroad, and the Catholic religious orders
conspicuously opened chapels and schools. Blundell mentioned his satis-
faction in being able to use the court system and carry his sword again. He
was a full man before the law once more (243–44, 246).
Catholic jubilation proved short-lived after such a visible Catholic pres-
ence frightened many Protestants, who continued to distrust Catholics
and Catholicism. Although James’s efforts at greater religious toleration
were ad hoc measures and not actual repeals of the penal laws, Protestants
feared what James might do if given sufficient time and opportunity. This
unease grew with the birth of an heir, James Francis Edward, in 1688.
Protestants realized their Catholic king could be succeeded by another
Catholic king and that either monarch might return the realm to Rome’s
authority. This simply would not do.
James II’s brief reign and the open Catholic presence he tolerated
ended with his forced abdication in 1688 in favor of his Protestant daugh-
ter, Mary, and her husband, William of Orange. A group of Protestant
leaders invited William to invade England an exact century after Protestants
had opposed Spanish King Philip II’s attempts to invade England with the
Spanish Armada. James’s government collapsed, and he fled to the conti-
nent with his family in a virtually bloodless coup known as the Glorious
Revolution. William III and Mary II ruled jointly and, in 1689, Parliament
passed the Toleration Act, extending a limited religious tolerance to all
Protestant faiths that embraced the doctrine of the Trinity. Catholics,
however, were conspicuously excluded from this tolerance (Kaplan 2007,
243–46).
Restrictions on Catholics grew in the immediate aftermath of the
Glorious Revolution. William and Mary’s government limited their ability
to carry arms, inherit and buy land, and practice law. These were limita-
tions that disproportionately impacted men. When the Protestant govern-
ment confiscated arms and horses from Catholics in 1692 and 1694,
Blundell chafed over the indignity. They took his sword again! Although
he was now a sickly man above 70 years of age, his government still feared
30 L. MCCLAIN

him as a potential traitor. He was even named as a conspirator in a ficti-

tious Jacobite plot to restore James to the throne, an accusation quickly
proven to be without substance (Blundell 1933, 269–74).

The Protestant Ascendency

Catholics in Ireland such as the Butlers—the family of Blundell’s daughter
and son-in-law—were particularly hard hit by new political and economic
restrictions. In contrast to the Scots who had embraced Protestantism
before their union with the English monarchy, many Irish despised
Protestantism as a foreign import of the English crown. Quarrels over reli-
gion exacerbated pre-existing linguistic, cultural, and political discord.
Loyalty to Catholicism became linked to one’s loyalty to Ireland, a form of
opposition to English dominance. In the first decades of the Reformation,
particularly during Elizabeth I’s reign, English reformers worried about
alienating the tenuous loyalties of nominally English families who had
resided in Ireland for centuries, known as the Old English. Leaders often
exercised religious authority in Ireland hesitantly or irregularly. The same
cannot be said of their secular authority. Successive English governments in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries deprived Catholics in Ireland of
their land and bestowed it on incoming English adventurers and colonists.
This was true for lands belonging to Gaelic Irish, also known as the Old
Irish, as well as the Old English. Although James II might have been
expected to champion his co-religionists’ claims against such injustices dur-
ing his reign, he did not. He may have been Catholic, but he was first and
foremost King of England, and he protected English interests in Ireland.
Ireland’s Catholics rebelled in 1641, helping precipitate the outbreak
of the English Civil War, and they did so again after the Glorious Revolution
in support of James II against William and Mary in what is known as the
Williamite War. The deposed James finally pledged to emancipate Ireland’s
Catholics and restore Irish lands to their original owners when he needed
Catholic support to reclaim his crown. From 1688 to 1691, Ireland’s
Catholics fought for James. They lost.
If it was difficult for a Catholic man such as Blundell to maintain his
family in England, it was even more difficult for most Catholic men in
Ireland to do so. Blundell’s son-in-law, Richard Butler, suffered heavy
fines, confiscation of lands, and periods of imprisonment from the Titus
Oates Plot in 1678 through the Williamite War. His wealth was greatly
reduced.
 THE NEW NORMAL 31

His son, Edmund Butler—William and Ann Blundell’s grandson—pro-

vided new perspective on such material loss and its relationship to man-
hood. Edmund languished in jail after being captured while leading an
assault on Londonderry in 1689 as part of the Williamite War. As an eldest
son, he could expect to inherit the bulk of his father’s possessions and
status, yet he understood how the penal laws had impoverished his family.
He accepted that he was not going to inherit much in the way of material
wealth. As Edmund wrote to his grandfather in July 1694, jail was unpleas-
ant, as one would expect, but “when I consider that imprisonment may in
a manner be termed my inheritance, my father, my grandfather, and almost
all my ancestors having undergone it for my Master’s [i.e., God’s] sake, I
think I have no reason to repine at my lot.” It was better than having con-
formed to Protestantism out of cowardice or base desires (Blundell 1933,
259–60). He replaced the worldly legacy he would have inherited had his
family not been Catholics with the spiritual wealth gained by witnessing
for the Catholic faith. He restored his masculine honor and family pride by
enduring, even embracing, persecution.
The Irish eventually made peace with William and Mary, who promised
increased toleration for Catholics in the Treaty of Limerick, but any clem-
ency proved short-lived. Between 1695 and 1727, Protestant landowners
in Ireland pressed for both the English and Irish Parliaments to pass a
series of harsh laws—known as the Penal Code—against Irish Catholics.
The new Penal Code went further than existing laws, prohibiting Irish
Catholics from voting, holding office, receiving a university education,
practicing law, and wearing swords. The laws also restricted land purchases
and inheritance rights. In sum, Catholics may have been the religious
majority in Ireland, but they were effectively subjugated economically,
politically, and socially by the Protestant government in what is known as
the Protestant Ascendency.

A New Dynasty and a New Struggle for Catholic

Emancipation
The eighteenth century, which saw a transition from the Stuart to the
Hanoverian monarchy after the death of Anne (r. 1702–14), thus began a
time of great change for Catholics throughout the British Isles. The specif-
ics will be explored in greater detail in subsequent chapters; for now, it is
sufficient to note that by approximately 1750, most Catholics in England,
Wales, Ireland, and Scotland sought accommodation with the Protestant
32 L. MCCLAIN

monarchy and their state churches, striving to appear as unthreatening as

possible while carving out social and economic spaces for themselves
(Mullett 1998, 159–96). In contrast to seventeenth-century fears, the
majority of Protestants now tended to accept Catholic claims of political
patriotism. Despite a politically active Catholic community in exile and
brief, unsuccessful rebellions in 1715 and 1745 designed to place the
Catholic Stuarts back on the throne, the Protestant Hanover monarchs
George I (r. 1714–27) and George II (r. 1727–60) acknowledged the loy-
alties of the vast majority of Catholics within the realm and avoided blanket
national persecutions (Glickman 2009, 54). Overt anti-Catholic sentiment
and enforcement of the penal laws gradually declined. As long as Catholic
practices were invisible to the public eye, they were tolerated. As a 1776
Protestant report out of Dundee, Scotland, explained, there was “a con-
gregation of papists or those of the Church of Rome who have a priest …
but keep not open door, these having no tolleration, though they are
winked at” (Mullett 1998, 178–80; also Kaplan 2007, 8, 142–43, 195–97).
However, while Catholic numbers grew and the sacraments became
more readily available in many areas, these were still uncertain times. The
penal laws were still on the books, and there were limits to Protestant
toleration. Just because Catholics generally lived in peace with their neigh-
bors now did not mean that they could count on doing so in the future.
Enforcement of the penal laws had always been sporadic, so there was
always an underlying fear that any new crisis might spur new persecutions
(Williams 1960, 263; Mullett 1998, 136–37; Kaplan 2007, 96–98, 355).
In light of their continuing vulnerability, some Catholics laid low, hoping
to remain invisible to public scrutiny. Other Catholics, however, refused
to isolate themselves from public affairs. Through a variety of pamphlets,
novels, histories, and treatises, these Catholics placed their illegal faith
directly in the public eye to debate and demonstrate Catholics’ political
loyalties and sense of national identity (Glickman 2009, 6–18, 53–86,
122–57, 222–57).
By the end of the eighteenth century, during the reign of George III (r.
1760–1820), Catholics fought to repeal prejudicial laws once and for all.
Between 1778 and 1791, prominent Catholics formed a Catholic
Committee to advocate for emancipation. They initially supported a lim-
ited lifting of restrictions on Catholics with the first Catholic Relief Act in
1778. The government granted some of their requests, in part to allow
Catholics into the army to fight for the crown against colonial rebels in the
Americas. Such tolerance, however, provoked anti-Catholic rioting, first in
 THE NEW NORMAL 33

Edinburgh in 1779 and then in London in 1780, known as the Gordon

Riots, incited by the propaganda of Lord George Gordon, President of
the Protestant Association of London. A second Catholic Relief Act of
1791 repealed restrictions and penalties more extensively, extending to
Catholics the liberties given to all other Nonconformists a hundred years
earlier through William and Mary’s 1689 Act of Toleration (18 George
III, c. 60; 31 George III, c. 32; Kaplan 2007, 352–53). In 1800, the Scots
Catholic Alexander Geddes believed that Catholics throughout the British
Isles had engaged in over 200 years of their own “secret reformation,”
purging themselves of the worst dogmas and dangerous loyalties and
beliefs that had so aroused Protestant fears (Geddes 1800, 217–18). Only
later in the nineteenth century with the Roman Catholic Relief Act of
1829, however, did the British government commit to removing more
fully the anti-Catholic stigma that had become acculturated in the British
Isles over almost three centuries since Henry VIII’s break with Rome.
By this time, Mary Ward had been in her grave 164 years and William
Blundell, 131 years. Much had changed. Protestantism had spawned new
faiths in the British Isles, such as John Wesley’s Methodism. The Jesuit
order had been suppressed (1773) and reinstated (1815) by the papacy.
Some British subjects, such as the Deists, rejected institutionalized
Christianity, while others rejected religion and God altogether. England,
Ireland, Scotland, and Wales were now united as Great Britain. The Tudors
gave way to the Stuarts who, in turn, passed the crown to the Hanovers.
The English Civil War, Glorious Revolution, French Revolution, and
many other domestic rebellions, colonial revolts, and foreign wars had
threatened the monarchy and its interests. Industrialization and related
economic and socio-demographic changes unsettled many individuals and
communities.
In spite of such profound change, many of the Catholic Church’s needs
remained similar to those during Ward’s and Blundell’s lifetimes.
Catholicism remained illegal, and the penal laws remained on the books
throughout this time. Catholics still faced political, economic, and social
disadvantages for recusancy. Although some Protestants winked at
Catholic worship conducted behind closed doors, others did not. Catholics
never knew when what had been tolerated informally would no longer be
found acceptable; and while some Catholics—particularly those in urban
areas of England and Ireland—could attend an occasional Mass and find a
priest for confession, baptism, or burial, other Catholics could not. Priests
still faced imprisonment and exile in many areas of the British Isles.
34 L. MCCLAIN

Although the details of the crisis fluctuated through decades and ­centuries,
the need for someone or something to relieve Catholics did not evaporate
until the early nineteenth century.
Throughout this time, dominant gender roles throughout society
changed little, despite occasional challenges (Mendelson and Crawford
1998, 201). During the instability of the Civil War and Glorious
Revolution, for example, some women carved out public roles by writing,
publishing, petitioning, and rioting. Predictably, most opportunities dried
up soon after the conflicts ended (Hughes 2012; McDowell 1998;
Wiseman 2006; Gillespie 2004). Even following the widespread eco-
nomic, political, and social transformations of the eighteenth century,
divine law, natural law, and common law continued to circumscribe wom-
en’s submission to male authority. The law of coverture still subsumed
women under the legal identities of their fathers or husbands. Women
were still not held fully responsible for their behaviors and were still pun-
ished more lightly under the law than men. The arguments and evidence
used to justify women’s subordination often changed, but the conclusions
about the need for women’s obedience remained. This was true for women
across social ranks (Tague 2002, 7, 18–48, 219). Similarly, while eco-
nomic, social, and political upheavals limited many men’s opportunities to
get ahead, groups of men such as laborers, university students, and high-
waymen experimented with alternative ways a man might establish a mas-
culine reputation. Such men attempted to assert new types of manhood,
but they never displaced or superseded traditional masculine values and
patriarchy (Cohen 1996; Shepard 2003; Mackie 2009).
Admittedly, this amalgamation of Catholic histories of such diverse
areas into one larger narrative is somewhat misleading, yet it is necessary
and enlightening. England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales—considered col-
lectively here as the British Isles—boast separate histories, identities, cul-
tures, and languages. Religious and political balances varied over time and
within each kingdom and region. The papacy certainly devoted a dispro-
portionate amount of its efforts to reclaiming England and Ireland in
comparison to the interest it showed in Scotland and Wales. The robust
opportunities to practice Catholicism in Western Ireland in the 1590s
would likely have been envied by Catholics in Edinburgh, while Catholics
in northern Wales or the Scottish Highlands would probably not have
traded places with Catholics near London at the time of anti-Catholic
persecutions during the Popish Plot in the late 1670s or the Gordon Riots
in 1780 (Mullett 1998, 51–55, 65–67; Glickman 2009, 158–90).
 THE NEW NORMAL 35

Despite such differences, these regions were joined by the shared pres-
sures of centuries of Catholic-Protestant conflict in the Reformation era.
Catholics throughout the British Isles lived under similar laws. They faced
similar prejudices, persecutions, and uncertainties. They shared similar goals
and often worked together across political boundaries to revive and sustain
the Catholic faith and a Catholic presence throughout the British archipel-
ago. They lost the public, institutional presence, property, and wealth of
their faith. They had to fight to justify their religious beliefs and practices
and their political loyalties. They had to prove their path to salvation was
the right one, whereas once it had been presumed to be the only one.
Moreover, inhabitants of the British Isles, no matter their nationality or
faith, shared similar beliefs about gender. Although they might disagree
about many things, a Scots Calvinist like John Knox and an English
Catholic like Archpriest William Harrison could agree that both divine
and natural laws created women as subordinate to men and prohibited
women from leading in matters of religion. Neither a typical Welsh good-
wife nor an Irish fishmonger would have challenged a husband’s right to
lead in all matters, especially religion, within his own home or questioned
a wife’s obligation to submit to his headship.
Although such parallels are represented herein with sensitivity to his-
torical differences, England has primacy of place as the driving force
behind the religious events and changes occurring throughout the Isles.
Wales had been annexed and united to England since 1284, but Henry
VIII (himself of Welsh origin) incorporated Wales formally under the
English crown by 1542. He also elevated Ireland from a Lordship to a
Kingdom in 1542, declaring himself king. Approximately 60 years later,
in 1603, James VI of Scotland inherited the English crown after the
death of his cousin, Elizabeth I. He united the hereditary crowns of
England and Scotland and ruled from England as James I. Decisions
made by the Protestant crown and Parliament at Westminster thus pre-
cipitated many of the choices made in Edinburgh and Dublin as well as
in the countryside of Wales, Ireland, and Scotland (Armitage 2000;
Bradshaw and Roberts 2003).

Back to the Puzzle

This brief, yet necessary, odyssey through the history of the British Isles
now comes to a close. We can now return to the stories that are the heart
of this book, more comfortable in the context in which such lives were
36 L. MCCLAIN

lived—all of which, of course, brings us back to the original conundrum

introduced in the last chapter. As this condensed history reveals, the
Roman Church had a great desire to reclaim or at least sustain Catholicism
in the British Isles. If Ward’s Institute of English Ladies was reasonably
successful in its efforts on the mission and if the Roman Catholic Church
was willing to go to great lengths and bend its own rules to maintain
Catholicism in the British Isles, why did Urban VIII suppress Ward’s
Institute? A need was clearly there, and the women appeared to be filling
it. In addition, even more surprisingly, after having “extinguished,” per-
petually abolished, and every other synonym for destruction he could
think of to “remove [the Institute] entirely from the Church of God”
(Wetter 2006, 213–18), why did he facilitate Ward’s return to England
less than a decade later, asking his most influential associates—a queen, a
papal envoy, a count—to assist her and her companions?
To answer this question, we must take a closer look at both women’s
and men’s gender roles, their relationships with one another, and their
various attempts to remain good Catholics despite the many pressures to
conform to Protestantism. And what of the Church’s role in this? As the
Catholic Church struggled to adjust to “the new normal”—its position as
an illegal, underground church—to what extent would Catholic priests
and Church leaders support changes to gender and religious roles in the
British Isles? Piece by piece, chapter by chapter, we will add the stories
necessary to solve the puzzle of the harsher-than-normal suppression of
Mary Ward’s Institute. In the process of examining these three centuries
of gender and religious change, we will also have built a foundation upon
which to answer the bigger issues raised about gender and religious
authority up through the present age. Who exercises religious authority,
what legitimates it, and who submits to it and how? The answers may sur-
prise you. We’ll begin with the women …

Notes
1. The quality of histories of Ward varies between enthusiastic hagiographical
accounts and rigorous scholarship wherein authors interpret critically the
primary sources written by Ward and her supporters that were clearly biased
in her favor. The full texts, many of them translated, of primary documents
by and relating to Ward contained within Chambers (1882) are authorita-
tive and invaluable. Only recently has a full body of documentation relative
to Ward and her Institute become easily accessible to scholars, most notably
 THE NEW NORMAL 37

in Dirmeier (2007), some of which duplicates texts provided by Chambers.

Both resources are used throughout this book. Other important materials
include the English Vita, or the Briefe Relation, a biography written shortly
after Ward’s death, most likely by Winifred Wigmore and/or Mary Poyntz,
two of Ward’s closest companions; an Italian Vita, possibly also by Poyntz
or Elizabeth Cotton at a later date from Rome; and Ward’s incomplete
Italian Autobiography. I will be using Kenworthy-Browne’s reprint and
edited versions (2008). A biography/autobiography of 50 painted images
known as The Painted Life is extant and displayed at www.congregatiojesu.
org/en/maryward_painted_life.asp and the Convent of the Congregation
of Jesus in Augsburg, Germany. Letters and other documents have been
preserved in archives of the Congregation of Jesus at the Bar Convent, York;
Munich; Nymphenburg; and Bamburg. Vatican archival material reflecting
the Roman Church’s attitudes toward Ward and the Institute became avail-
able with the opening of Inquisition archives in 1998.
2. Irish recusants were subject to the same penalties as English recusants
(Burton et al. 1911).
3. A Jesuit Irish mission was officially begun in 1598 and lasted until the sup-
pression of the Society of Jesus in 1773. Ireland was not raised to provincial
status until 1860, after the re-establishment of the order.
4. By 1900, approximately 6000 followers were educating 70,000 girls in 200
schools worldwide without credit to Ward. Leo XIII’s Constitution Conditae
of 1900 and subsequent Regulations of Canon Law in 1901 finally made it
possible for women to live as religious under simple vows, paving the way
for more diverse forms of religious life for women.

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 CHAPTER 3

Disobedient Women

Catherine Holland was a liar, and she was proud of it. In this woman’s
autobiographical account of her conversion to Catholicism, she described
her years of living a double life, bragging about how well she deceived
everyone. She hid contraband items in her room. She read banned books.
She snuck away from the house to meet lawbreakers. When she feared she
was close to being caught, she covered her tracks. Eventually she ran away
to begin a new life of her own choosing (Holland 1925). Catherine
Holland was willful, deceptive, and defiant and showed no small measure
of satisfaction in being so. She was a disobedient woman.
Like Mary Ward, Holland was a Catholic woman pushing the boundar-
ies of proper gender and religious behavior in her era. Yet unlike Ward and
the English Ladies, most Catholics lauded Holland’s behavior. Holland
may have been a disobedient woman, but she was a good Catholic. She
rejected Protestantism and eventually became a nun. The Catholic Church
held up women such as Holland as heroic exemplars for the faith. Behavior
that Catholics never would have condoned from women in a Catholic
country could become a source of pride for those living in a Protestant
one. By exploring a variety of such confrontations between gender and
religious authority in this and subsequent chapters, we can begin to iden-
tify patterns in how ordinary Catholic women and men pushed against

© The Author(s) 2018 41

L. McClain, Divided Loyalties? Pushing the Boundaries of
Gender and Lay Roles in the Catholic Church, 1534-1829,
Histories of the Sacred and Secular, 1700-2000,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73087-5_3
42 L. MCCLAIN

traditional definitions of proper male, female, and Catholic behavior. And

as the Catholic Church struggled to maintain its presence, doctrines, and
authority in the British Isles, we see where the Church would draw its line
in the sand.
For almost 300 years, Catholic women from the British Isles such as
Ward and Holland struggled to be both good women and good Catholics,
walking a tightrope strung between the contradictory dictates of their
gender roles and the Catholic faith. The first prescribed obedience, humil-
ity, modesty, and subservience to male authority, while the second coun-
seled resistance and disobedience to Protestant authority. How was it
possible for a woman to be simultaneously obedient and disobedient?
Subservient and rebellious? It may have seemed an impossible task.
Holland, Gertrude More, and Mary Ward—the lay and religious women
whose transgressive actions and ideas are explored in this chapter—were
among the many Catholic women who tried to balance these opposing
expectations while creating new models of Catholic womanhood.
As explained in the previous chapter, women were not simply free to
create a new way of religious life or a new relationship to male authority.
Prior to Protestant reforms, divine law, natural law, and English common
law combined to create a set of roles and expectations for women’s behav-
ior. For example, if a woman wanted to understand how to be pleasing to
God, she sought the advice of her priest. Priests counseled women not to
trust in their own faulty judgment, but to rely on the Church to interpret
God’s will for women. Then Protestant reforms and penal laws made
Catholic priests scarce, leaving Catholic women with no authorities to
interpret God’s will for them.
If women wanted to re-negotiate this relationship, they needed a recog-
nized, external authority to legitimate their efforts. They found that author-
ity in the idea of “conscience.” Many Catholics in this era understood
conscience not as individual preference or judgment, but as the voice of God
communicated directly to the believer’s heart through the Holy Spirit. To
follow one’s conscience was to be directed by God in how to follow God’s
will and law above all else (Gaudium 1965, #16; Lockey 2015, 291; Aquinas
1947, I–II: 109:3). To act against conscience was a sin (Persons 1754,
233–41, 283, 355–61, 423–29, 621–22). A woman who claimed that God
inspired her to act in a particular way asserted that her behavior was justified
by God’s will. In contrast to well-known Protestant appeals to conscience,
however, these Catholics did not replace a priest’s or the Church’s mediation
with conscience. Instead, they utilized c­ onscience in addition to traditional
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
effort, you will leave behind no mark, any more than you do when
you put your finger in a pail of water and pull it out again.
2. The puttee is to make us tight and strong and ready to
march; but the belt is also to hang things on.
That is the worst of life—we have to carry a lot of burdens.
Some of them, of course, we make for ourselves. We often tie things
on to us by silly acts and sins. The best thing to do with them is not
to have any, or get rid of them as soon as possible.
But there are real burdens that God sends. They are His gifts to
us, and we need a place to carry them—duties and tasks and home
calls and troubles and sorrows. Oh, there are a lot of things to do,
and if you have no belt, where in the world are you going to hang
them all?

3. Now the Bible says a splendid girdle is "Truth."

A true girl and boy is well-knit, straight up and down, like a

perpendicular line. You know where to find them. They will always
win out. They have no sloppy one-sidedness that will tip them over.
And they can carry a lot of things on their belt.
A false boy and girl double up when a burden is put on them.
They are too weak to bear up. But a true one stands so nobly, and
whatever you lay on them, you know they will carry safely.
And what is Truth?
It means being real, whole, not broken up, not a fraction, but a
whole number. It means ringing true, like a bell without a crack.
In early times, they used sometimes to make images, and when
they got cracked and old, they would patch them up with wax and
putty and then paint them over till they looked lovely; and sold them
for real things. By-and-by the weather and time wore off the paint
and dug out the wax, and then they stood in their shameful cracky
look, and people said, do not be waxy, but genuine right through.
The word "sincere" is from two Latin words, sine—without, and
cera—wax.
The true girl and boy is unwaxed. There is no paint covering up
nasty cracks. They ring true.
I went into a store once in Toronto and had an awful
experience. I bought some article and sent in an American cart-
wheel. That, you know, is a silver dollar. It shot up the wind tubes to
the office, and in a jiffy it was shot back down again, with an acid
stain on it.
It was a false piece! What do you think of that? I was so
confused, for I feared they might think I was trying to pass bad
money. And me a minister too!
When it struck the testing table, it did not ring right, and the
acid soon told the story, and I got the old fraud back again.
Any life like that has not got on the girdle of truth. It is like a
glittering object on the ground that looks like a diamond, but proves
to be glass. It is like a piece of timber that looks all right and is put
in the ship, but it had a worm inside, and became rotten, and the
ship sank.
Gird yourselves up, girls and boys. Fasten up your life, strong
and firm, and be true, and you will have a great help in being a good
soldier of Jesus Christ.
 XXVIII
THE SOLDIER'S OUTFIT—THE KIT BAG

When you go on a journey you carry a suitcase, or you take a trunk,

in which you place your belongings that you will need while away
from home.
When the soldier goes off to the war he has a bag in which he
puts some of the things he cannot do without—things that are
absolutely necessary.
First. It is wonderful when you come down to bed rock, how few
things we need, after all. Most of us are overburdened.
There is hardly a girl or boy that has not a whole lot of unused
baggage lying around—old toys and books, old ribbons and hats.
They fill the bureau drawer and lie around the room and take up
space in cupboards until your mother simply gives them away or
burns them up.
When I left Vancouver to come to Toronto, I had a bonfire in my
back yard for a lot of stuff that I used to think I had to save up.
Houses are like that, too. I roomed once in a very beautiful
home, but the drawing-room was so full of furniture that you could
not turn around without getting a bump somewhere.
There are a lot of things in our homes and a lot of material in
our lives, and a lot of stuff in our minds that is just like piles of old
lumber in the fence corner, doing no good; or like a lot of old clothes
in a cupboard, only gathering moths.
The soldier knows that, and he just carries around what he can
use, and the kit bag is where he keeps them. It is a very fine thing
to be able to carry useful things around with us.
 A useless girl or boy is usually in the road.
What is the good of a lot of clothes if you can't wear them?
I saw a man on the vessel on which I once sailed to Australia
who had seventeen suits of clothes, and their chief use was in
keeping busy his cabin boy, who brushed them.
And what's the use of a lot of information in your mind if you
can't use it?
I do not know which is the worse, having too many things or
having nothing useful.
I have read of a beehive in California, away out on the face of a
cliff. It is stored full, but all day long hundreds of bees swarm around
the cave; and while men have put on leather suits, very little has
ever been secured from that nest of useless sweetness.
But second: The kit bag has in it not merely things the soldier
has to daily use—socks to keep his feet warm and dry; brushes to
keep the snarl out of his hair; razors to keep his face smooth; soap
to keep him clean—but he also stores away in it precious things, and
they are useful too: Letters from home—what would he do without
their messages of love?
They say the saddest sight in a camp was the disappointed face
of a boy when the mail came and there was nothing for him.
If you are a young person, away from home and forget the old
folks, that's the way your mother looks when you neglect to write.

"The tender words unspoken,

The letters never sent,
The long-forgotten messages,
The wealth of love unspent.
 For these some hearts are breaking,
For these some loved ones wait;
So show them that you care for them,
Before it is too late."

There are books and photographs of those beloved, looked at first

thing in the morning and last at night; and when the kit and all
belongings are left in store when the battle is on, those precious
photos are taken out and hidden next the heart, under the tunic.
There, too, is the Testament, placed by loving hands when the
outfit was packed—perhaps the mother gave her own to her boy
when he left; and there is a smudge mark yet on the cover, where a
tear dropped, that she tried very hard not to let fall, but could not
help it.
Many a boy valued that Testament, and after some of them
were found, there lay in the pocket, with the pages glued together
by the blood, and sometimes torn with a bullet mark, the gift of
pious love.
Oh, how grand it is to have a life filled with precious values—the
values that make us richer, and help to adorn us and cheer us and
brighten us.
A little child on the seashore saw a bright spangle. Picking it up,
she found it was attached to a gold thread, and drawing the thread,
she found other spangles, which she wound round her neck and
body, covering it with brightness. And as we go through life, it is
very lovely to pick up the precious sparkling things filled with love
value, and wind them around our hearts.
 Dear girls and boys, have you anything of value in your lives—of
a real worth while—real costly things?
Marbles and toys and air balloons, and wrist watches and spats
and gorgeous neckties are all right; but you will need more if you
are going to amount to anything, and I suggest you store up your kit
bag with precious things of noble thoughts and full minds and sweet
memories and useful deeds, for it is not what you have or how much
you weigh that counts, but what you are and what you can do.
Did you ever hear people discussing somebody, and did you
overhear some one say, "Oh, there's nothing in him." There may be
feet in his boots, and arms in his coat sleeves and legs in his pants,
and a head in his hat, but his real self is empty—"To Let" is seen
written over his face.

Be something in this toiling age

Of busy hands and feet.
A light upon some darkened page,
A shelter from the heat.
Be found upon the workmen's roll,
Go sow or plant or plough.
Bend to the task with willing soul.
Be something, somewhere, now.

Third: Each soldier has to have a kit bag, and he puts his name on it
in white paint, so that everybody knows it is his.
You and I have to carry our belongings with us too, good or
bad, and nobody can steal them, as sometimes happened with the
boys' kit bags. Ours always go along with us.
It seems so foolish not to gather good belongings that you
won't want to bury or throw away. Life is a queer sort of thing, and
the strange thing is that while you carry your belongings with you,
you are also sending them on ahead of you, and they build your
future home.
A woman once dreamed that she died and went up to heaven.
Angel guides took her through the lovely city and showed her its
wonderful streets and homes.
One was a magnificent palace with a beautiful situation, and
great towers and windows. She asked who it was for and was
surprised to hear it was for her footman who did the dirty work
around the stable and house.
In another street was a little bungalow—beautiful too, for
everything was fair and lovely, but still very small and humble. She
asked who that was for, and was told it was to be her future home.
In disgust she said, "What! Do you know who I am, and how much
wealth I have? You give my ignorant footman a great palace, and
me this little bit of a place!" And the angel quietly said, "Well,
madam, we are doing our best with what's sent up."
So you see your kit bag possessions are with you now, but the
real possessions of your life, your thoughts and words and deeds are
helping to form the home you will some day live in forever.
I think it would be a good idea to see that we have only the
best, and send on only those things that will help build a beautiful
home of the soul.
Oliver Wendell Holmes, a great American writer, once wrote
these words:
 "Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
As the swift seasons roll;
Leave thy low vaulted past;
Let each new temple nobler than the last
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast
Till thou at length art free,
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea."

XXIX
THE SOLDIER'S OUTFIT—THE UNIFORM

The uniform helps to change a variegated mass of men into an

army. A regiment would not look anything like what it does were it
not for the uniform.
It is the kilts that not only have a history but that give the
Highlanders their glorious influence. The Scotchman thinks the kilties
are the only soldiers, and one can respect his enthusiasm, for great
deeds have been done by the troops from the land of the heather.
The uniform puts the finishing touch on a soldier.
I have seen the boys take the oath, but it was after they visited
the storehouse and came out in the glory of the khaki, with their
swagger stick, that you saw written all over them, "I'm a soldier of
the king."
That uniform is the badge of service. Every one who wears it is
a marked man. His uniform proclaims him. He does not need a tag.
 A girl was once converted at some church meetings, and she
went up to an old member and with shining face, said, "Oh, Mr.
Blank, I am a Christian, and I wish you were one too." The old man
flushed and said, "My dear little girl, I have been a Christian for forty
years." "Oh, I'm sorry," she said, "I'm sorry I spoke. I never knew."
He was a Christian but nobody knew. He lacked the marks.
But a soldier, once he dons the uniform, is at once known.
More than that, a uniform is like a flag. It represents the
empire. Each nation has its own flag and its own uniform, and
wherever its soldiers go, they carry, so to speak, their country with
them.
If they are bad, they dishonour their flag and bring disgrace on
their colours and the uniform.
One of the greatest motives behind the men in the war was "the
honour of the company or the regiment or the battalion or the
brigade."
One company lost a trench and were heartsick with depression,
and when the time came, half dead with weariness and hunger and
thirst, they retook it and were happy because they had saved the
honour of the company. The uniform means that.
A bad man or a coward not only hurts himself, but he brings
disgrace on the company. Every deed of evil or cowardice comes
back on the flag and the country to which the man belongs who
wears its uniform.
The uniform speaks to the soldier of duty—it makes duty easier.
In New York the street sweepers were clad in a white uniform and
they say every man felt a little bigger and better and more anxious
to do better work because of the uniform.
 A boy in the Trail Rangers or the Boy Scouts can't help feeling
the influence of his uniform.
A mother told me about her daughter, a Girl Guide, doing
something wrong in school one day when she had on the uniform.
The mother said, "Oh, daughter, you did not do it with the uniform
on, did you?" And it nearly broke the child's heart.
You can't do things in uniform you might do in plain clothes. It
makes you a member of a league of honour, in spite of yourself. It
bucks a fellow up and sort of puts him on his honour. It says, "Here,
you are not your own now. You belong as you never did before to
your country, and your country is counting on you." A chap can
hardly go back on that!
The uniform proclaims loyalty too.
To don the khaki meant that the boy heard the call. The S.O.S.
sounded his country's need, and up he sprang because he was a
loyal subject. Of course, some loyal subjects could not and did not
have to join the army. But every one who could did, unless he was a
shirker and a slacker.
Loyalty means doing your duty. It means ready to do your bit
whether at home or on the firing-line. It does not matter which, if it
is your bit.
More than that, the uniform puts responsibility on the wearer.
You know how big even a boy can feel when he joins the Boys'
Brigade or the Boy Scouts and gets a uniform on. It makes him feel
inches taller, and his chest gets thicker, which is perfectly right. He
will do things in uniform and under the spell of what it all means
that before he would hardly dare believe to be possible.
 The uniform is full of history, just as the flag is, and somehow
when it is donned, all the great history presses on the wearer and
makes a bigger man of him, if he has anything in him, and makes
him able for big things.

"Britain be proud of such a son!—

Deathless the fame which he has won.
Only a boy—but such a one;
Standing forever by his gun;
There was his duty to be done—
And he did it."

If your dad had a boy or if you had a brother who heard the world's
call, and signed up and was measured and had his muscles and
heart and lungs and eyes all tested, and then in one big moment,
while his dad's throat was choking, stood up erect before the officer
and swore in for service; and if later that boy or brother came up
home all shining in buttons, with his boots black and his puttees
neat and strong, and his belt tightening up his loins—you know just
how a new passion of loyalty would surge through you.
If you were a girl you would be sorry, and decide to try to go as
a nurse, or perhaps drive a car; if you were a young boy, you would
hit your toy drum harder and step out more briskly and tell all the
other boys you thought you could get the job of a drummer.
Oh, the uniform does help to deepen our sense of loyalty.
Now, girls and boys, I am telling you all this for a purpose. You
know there is another army all over the world called the Salvation
Army, made up of people who wear uniforms and play bands and go
to war against the worst of all enemies, the one called Sin. And they
do a wonderful lot of good in the world and deserve our respect and
support. They have won by their loyalty even homage from kings.
But did you know your father and mother, who are members of
the church, belong to an army too, and wear a uniform too? It is the
great army of Jesus Christ, those who have sworn to be His servants
and to do His work, and the uniform is just their Christian life.
I know some church members do not look or act any different
from those who are not. But the real member tries to and when he
joins he puts on the uniform of a Christlike life which works for
Christlike ends.
When the Christians first began to live it all out, the world used
to say, "See how these Christians love one another." Their Christian
membership was like a badge. Everybody knew where they
belonged.
I want to ask you to join up there and put on the uniform of
church membership. I will tell you why.
It helps to make you a better Christian. It is taking your stand
on His side, and you can't do that, if you mean it, without being
made deeper and stronger.
I do not think any one can be as good outside the church as in
it, and I am sure we should be better inside than out of it. Those
who are good without going to church are good because the church
has made it possible. Just as all who were not in the army were safe
because the great army and navy were protecting them. But it is not
fair to borrow other people's money to live on. You should have your
own. And it is not fair to get the good the church brings us without
coming in and helping her. It is not fair to give no return for service
received.
So I ask you to join God's church because it helps you, and it
helps the church and it tells everybody where you stand.
Then it expresses your loyalty. Jesus gives us His church and if
everybody refused to come in, it would die, and His work would
perish.
Announce your loyalty now! Fight the fight now!

"He is counting on you!

On a love that will share
In His burden of prayer,
For the souls He has bought
With His life blood and sought,
Through His sorrow and pain
To win 'home' yet again.
He is counting on you;
If you fail Him—what then?"

It is very hard to be a citizen-at-large, that is, a citizen of the world.

You have to be a citizen of some country.
A great Scotch poet said:

"Breathes there a man with soul so dead

Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land."
To love the world you have to know how to love your own part of it.
And so in order to tell the world of our loyalty to Christ, we need
to fasten down to the church that stands for Christ.
To have a sort of general love for God without helping to spread
His cause will soon result in the loss of your love for God.
Take away the church for ten years, and you would not want to
live in your town after.
And then it is a fine thing to put the church uniform on as early
as possible. It is not fair to live your life for yourself and your own
pleasures until you get too old for them, and then bring what is left
and offer it to God.
In the Old Testament days it was the unblemished lamb that
was asked for; and, dear girls and boys, God wants you now, in the
days of your youth. The church needs your fresh, bright young lives.
The future so big with promise needs strength and vigour, and you
have it. Therefore, do not stand off, but line up soon, and then you
will have a long life of service, and not a poor little meagre piece at
the end.
The sooner you become an out-and-out worker for Jesus, the
more you will be able to help Him. There is no life sadder than to
have to go out at the end with no record of service.
A young man, dying, had given himself to God but seemed sad
and troubled, and they asked him what was the matter, had he lost
his trust? "Oh, no," he said, "not that, but I have to go and meet
Jesus with empty hands!"
And some one wrote a hymn which says:

"Must I go and empty handed,

 Thus my dear Redeemer meet,
Not one day of service give Him,
Lay no trophies at His feet?"

You, girls and boys, put the Christian uniform on now; join up soon.
Then think of the long and splendid record of service that will be
yours if you stand loyal to the army of Jesus Christ.

XXX
"Q" AND "S" GROCERY

Did you ever hear of that sort of a store? When I first saw the sign I
wondered what it meant. I had heard of college societies with letters
that describe them, and I had seen letters like that on music sheets;
but whatever could it stand for over a grocery store?
Perhaps it meant "Quick and Sure" or perhaps it was the name
of the men who owned it, only I could not see why they should be
ashamed of their name, for most merchants want their name known.
At last some one told me it stood for "Quality" and "Service."
Then I saw what a splendid sign it was.
It made people curious. It was so mysterious-looking that
everybody would ask about it and talk about it, and that would
advertise it; while the meaning, once found out, made you feel
confident. A store that serves out quality is worth going to.
 Any one who can show that he has quality and that he is
anxious to serve is worth getting acquainted with.
Think of those two things.
(a) Quality.
So many hunt after quantity. When I was a very small boy my
grandfather used to offer me my choice between a nickel and a big
copper penny, and I took the penny every time. It was more to hold.
I could feel it better.
Every child would rather have a big apple than a little one, and
they all hunt the plate for the biggest piece of cake or pie. Some big
people are no better, for they do not always look for quality, either.
Big things do appeal to us.—Big mountains and big seas, and
big trees and big houses, and big horses and big automobiles, and
big men, and I suppose it has a place.
It is wonderful to stand in the mountains and just feel their
great size; it is an inspiration to go out to British Columbia and stand
in some forest corridor and look up at those great Douglas firs, that
tower up above your heads and spread their branches over a field.
In Vancouver, at Stanley Park, there is one so big that autos
back into it and have a photograph taken.
But after all, the chief thing is not size, but meaning and
character. There are some big vegetables that are so big they are no
use. They are soft and overgrown.
Soul is more important than bulk.

"For tho' the giant ages heave the hill

And break the shore and ever more
Make and break and work their will
 Though world on world in myriad myriads roll
Round us each with different powers
And other forms of life than ours
What know we greater than the soul."

Have you ever gone out on a frosty night and looked up at the sky
and thought of the great spaces above you, and the sun millions of
miles off? Did you know that if a train travelling one mile every
minute could fall off the earth and keep going, it would take forty
millions of years to reach the nearest fixed star? And yet your soul is
more important than it all!

"Knowest thou the value of a soul immortal?

Behold the midnight glory, worlds on worlds
Amazing pomp. Redouble this amaze;
Ten thousand add, add twice ten thousand more
Then weigh the whole; one soul outweighs them all,
And calls the astonishing magnificence
Of unintelligent creation poor."

There is a wonderful instrument used by men of science, called a

microscope, and it shows us that the smallest things are more
wonderful even than the big things you can see with your eye. The
little insect that makes the coral, that is so graceful, is an object of
wondrous beauty under the microscope.
 When you buy a flower, it is not the biggest you want, it is the
richest and loveliest, the one of quality.
What is it makes a man? Not size. That may make a prize-
fighter, but who wants to be a prize-fighter? He is muscle and bone
and beef, but that is not manhood.
A real man is a gentleman, even if he is not much to boast of in
size. The real signs are not those of bigness, but something inside of
him—the peculiar quality that makes you honour and love him.
Here is what Margaret Sangster says of it:

THE LITTLE GENTLEMAN

I knew him for a gentleman

By signs that never fail;
His coat was rough and rather worn,
His cheeks were thin and pale;
A lad who had his way to make
With little time for play;
I knew him for a gentleman
By certain signs to-day.

He met his mother on the street,

Off came his little cap;
My door was shut, he waited there
Until I heard his rap.
He took the bundle from my hand;
And when I dropped the pen,
He sprang to pick it up for me—
This little gentleman of ten.
 He does not push or crowd along.
His voice is gently pitched;
He does not fling his books about
As if he were bewitched.
He stands aside to let you pass,
He always shuts the door.
He runs on errands willingly,
To forge or mill or store.

He thinks of you before himself;

He serves you if he can,
For in whatever company
The manners make the man.
At ten or forty 'tis the same.
The manner tells the tale;
And I discern the gentleman
By signs that never fail.

I have read of three women who were once talking about pretty
hands. Not one of them tested the matter by the size of their hands,
and yet they, too, forgot quality. One said she kept hers pretty by
washing them in milk; another dipped hers in berry juice, and the
third washed hers in the fragrance of flowers.
While they were talking, a poor old woman came and asked for
something to eat, and they were so busy talking about the kind of
hands they had they could not help her.
 Another woman whose hands were worn with work, and
hardened by the sun, and all wrinkled, and who was passing by,
listened to the poor old woman's cry, and fed her. Then she asked
the three what they had been doing, and they said, "We will leave it
to you to say whose hands are the loveliest." And do you know, girls
and boys, she passed by the hands of milky whiteness and the
hands that smelt of flowers, and turning to the working woman said,
"She has the prettiest, for she uses them for gifts to others!"
It is quality of character that counts.
You may be as big as a giant and as strong as a horse, and yet
lack in the only thing that really counts or lasts—a quality that gives
you worth.
What is worth anyhow? What are you worth? You say, "Oh, my
daddy is a millionaire. We have a lovely house and gardens, and I
get new dresses every month. Whew! We are worth a lot!"
Well, perhaps you are, for a man can have money and
something more. If he has only money piles, he is terribly poor.
You are worth just what you are. Just what your quality is.
They used to talk years ago of "ladies of quality" and they
meant the upper uppers—the swells and people with titles. Now we
know there are splendid ladies with titles, but it is not the title that
makes them ladies of quality, it is what they carry in their hearts.
I will tell you how to get character quality.

"I would be true, for there are those who trust me,
I would be pure, for there are those who care;
I would be strong, for there is much to suffer,
I would be brave, for there is much to dare.
 "I would be friend to all—the foe—the friendless;
I would be giving and forget the gift,
I would be humble for I know my weakness,
I would look up, and laugh—and love—and lift."

But you need quality in work too. We live in a pushing day when we
judge by quantity. Pile things up, drive ahead, keep moving, hustle
along. Do a lot of things.
Now, there is a better rule—not how much, but how well done.
I have a lovely picture with a beautiful frame that has a history.
It is the picture of The Doctor. You all have seen it.—Where the good
man is sitting by the side of the sick child, studying the case, the
lamplight shining on the face, and the father and mother in tears
and anxiety in the background.
Some Scotch craftsmen who knew me framed it in bird's-eye
maple, inlaid with basswood, and the frame has the story on it—The
Iris plant on the sides, a symbol of immortality, the Egyptian symbol
of eternity above, and the sand-glass below; all meant to illustrate
the battle between life and death in the picture itself.
Now, the frame is not very big, but it is very beautiful, because
the Scotch handicraft men have as their ideal to make every piece of
work as perfect in quality as possible.
Solid, steady, sure work tells, not always brilliant.
Lots of brilliant people in school never amount to anything
afterward, because they lack the quality of always sticking at it and
doing each thing the best way possible.
 If you ever watch men bowling on the green, or curling on the
ice, you know that a shot that is too swift, that has too much
quantity in it, goes through the house; the telling shot is the quiet,
steady one with the right quality of delivery in it.
(b) Service.
That grocery store said, "We want to help you." It was thinking
of others and living for others.
The motto of the Prince of Wales is "Ich dien," which means, "I
serve."
In long past years the big man was the fellow who bossed the
job.—He was called the ruler, the magistrate.
To-day, especially since Jesus, the big man is the minister.—I do
not mean the preacher in your church, but the man who gets down
beside the people and serves them. You know "minister" is a Latin
word that means "servant." Every one who tries to serve other
people is a minister. He is the biggest man everywhere. The biggest
word to-day is "Service."
There were four letters in the war that were very touching to
me, C.A.S.C.—The Canadian Army Service Corps.
They worked for everybody. They were supply centres. The
army never could have done its work without them. They were
worth all the honour could be given them, because they were the
army helpers.
Oh, if everybody would only help, what a happy world this
would be!
Most of our troubles are because we want to be helped. It
makes us selfish and jealous and mean and grabby.
The war came from it—nations seeking to get.
 School is made unhappy by it. It spoils play and games and
dinner tables and Sunday Schools and churches and lives.
God serves and nature serves. Parents and teachers serve.
Why don't you? What do you want to be always getting for?
A small boy once put a note by his mother's plate, and when
she came to breakfast, she found a bill.

"Mother, in account with Jack."

—To going messages .................. $1.00
" carrying coal ................... .50
" cutting the grass ............... .75
" gathering eggs and chopping wood 1.00
———
Total ................... $3.25

The dear mother never said a word, but left the bill on the table.
Next morning a note was at the boy's plate.

"Jack, in account with Mother."

—To looking after his baby years .... $0.00
" washing and cleaning clothes .... 0.00
" mending stockings ............... 0.00
" helping all his life ............ 0.00
———
Total ................... $0.00

The second day a shame-faced boy tore up that first bill and later on
laid his head in his mother's lap and cried.—I guess you know why!
Before a train starts, the wipers go all over her to wipe and
examine the engine; the fireman comes and builds and starts the
fire; the engineer comes and goes carefully all over the machinery;
the mechanic comes and tests all the wheels; and then she is linked
on the train, the lever is pulled, and puff! puff!—away she goes,
drawing her long line of passengers and freight!
You are going through the process now of getting ready. By-
and-by you will be hitched on to some life job.
See you get ready properly, and get coupled to the right train;
and then pull for all your might, and help serve humanity by bringing
in your load to the final station where some day we all must land.

XXXI
BETSY

Henry W. Longfellow, the poet, tells us that

"Lives of great men all remind us

We can make our lives sublime,
And departing, leave behind us,
Footprints in the sands of time.

"Footprints that perhaps another,

Sailing o'er life's solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, may take heart again."
That is all beautifully true. It is also true that many a humble,
obscure life can teach us lessons of trust and loyalty, and devotion to
good things.
The story I am going to tell you is about a humble Indian girl,
whose forefathers had been all savages, but whose home was a
Christian one among the simple native children of the North.
Over fifty years before the time of our story, an unchristianized
band of Indians fished in the inland waters, trapped in the forest for
mink and otter, muskrat, bear or silver fox; and paddled the lake in
birch barks; sometimes supplementing their paddle strokes by a sail
contrived of a blanket fastened to a pole cut from a neighbouring
bluff.
From far over the Atlantic came a brave man, with a heart full of
peace, and anxious to acquaint the native with the brightness of his
own life.
It meant much to settle in such a district in early days, long
before the iron horse had made a path across the prairie; days when
the trail wound its wandering way over rock and soil, skirting the
bluffs, penetrating forest, mounting granite hills or hiding itself in
rocky ravines.
And even after the perils of the trail were passed, there still
remained the privations of the lonely Mission, cut off from
companionship, with the keen biting winds of winter, the ice-locked
lake, the powdery-dry snow falling and falling until one wondered if
the air had turned to snow, and when morning came little was left of
the buildings except the chimney tops; the whole Mission was buried
in white as though shut up in the garments of the tomb.
 Twice a year the mail carrier braved first the heat of summer
and then the rigour of winter, and when the contents of the mail-bag
were emptied on the parlour floor what delight in once more
touching the outside world. It was like reading history after it was
past to scan the doings of the year. It was like a breath from the
dear old home to see the familiar postage stamps and to read the
welcome words of dear ones from letters, enclosing home flowers
and fragrant love messages.
In all this life no one made greater sacrifice than the
missionary's wife, who saw no women save her dusky pagan sisters
with the dark brown eyes with a yearning look in them.
Many years ago Keewatin, the "North Wind" with his little
daughter Akwinanoh were sitting by their wigwam door looking
down the long stretch of the Northern Lake, when suddenly a
strange apparition some miles away startled them into attention.
Their cry gathered almost the whole camp, which watched with
wonder and amaze a changing object moving toward them, but
unexplainable by even their keen Indian sight.
Whatever it was it gleamed and glistened in the setting sun until
finally Keewatin, with a glimmer of inspiration in his eyes, said, "I
know what it is. It is an island of light." He was nearer the truth than
he knew, for it was the tin canoe of the English missionary, the tin
reflecting, in scintillating rays, the sunlight, and the canoe bearing
the messenger of a light that so far had never yet shone for them.
Every stranger excites the curiosity of the savage man, but
Akwinanoh had a new object of interest from that day, for with the
white man came a tiny white baby that soon grew into the pet of the
reserve!
 The little daughter of the North Wind adopted the white man's
child as her special charge, and while the missionary worked and
prayed to bring the Gospel of the Christ-child into the hearts of the
Saulteaux, another little child slowly but surely worked its way into
the life of the brown maiden, transforming her, and through its
gentle pressure Akwinanoh soon yielded to the influence of the
Gospel of Bethlehem's babe.
Later she became the Christian mother of her who was known
as Betsy. Betsy grew into a girlhood that was beautiful, even from
the white man's point of vision.
She was gentle as the breath of the south wind, with a sweet
grace of manner and a consistency of life that made her a strong
support to the man who came to them in his canoe.
To be a follower of Christ seemed natural to her, for she had His
spirit, and was full of unselfish thoughtfulness.
One day as she was walking along the river edge she saw a
child slip and fall. Without a moment's hesitation she plunged into
the deep, brown stream, six fathoms at the rock, and brought the
child safe to its parents' tepee. It was early in the spring and the
waters were cold, and before night a raging fever laid her low.
For weeks she suffered, waited upon by the heathen medicine
man, uncomplainingly swallowing the hideous compounds from his
mix-all bottles, and slowly sinking under the fatal grip of pneumonia.
The young husband refused at first to allow the approach of the
white doctor, and the missionary could only pray and hope.
Finally, when one day the light burned low, the obstinate young
Indian bowed before the compelling force of necessity, and proper
medical attendance began. Then the doctor took hold, nursing her
as though she were his own child; watching symptoms and
succeeding in bringing back hopeful conditions into the wasted
frame.
It was a gay day when the report circulated through the camp
that Betsy, the beloved, was recovering under the magic spell woven
around her by the English medicine man, for no one could fail to
notice the sweet spirit and to wish for victory in the stern battle
brought on through her unselfish act.
One day in the evening, the missionary found her, oh so quiet
and worn, but gentle as ever. She could speak a little English and
seemed glad to think that she was cared for.
"Well, Betsy," said the missionary, "you have been very ill."
"Yes," she answered sweetly, "very ill, but the good light the
white man brought has been shining in my heart and all is well."
"We are glad, Betsy," said the missionary, "that God is going to
spare you. We could ill do without you. Your life has been a
benediction to the whole reserve."
"Oh, Missionary," said Betsy, weeping, "do not say that. When I
think of the story of His love it makes me ashamed. But I do wish
my people could feel and know as I do. I would like to stay among
them for a little while, for I love them. But sometimes I have a
feeling in my heart that perhaps it is not to be. I had a dream last
night, Missionary. Would you like to hear it?"
"Yes, Betsy," he replied, "but are you strong enough to talk so
long?"
"Oh, yes; I feel quite strong this evening, thanks to the white
doctor.
 "I dreamed I was going along the trail when suddenly away
before me I saw a wonderful light. It was coming my way and as it
got nearer it took on the form of a person. Soon it stood beside me
and I saw that it was the face of Christ, but oh, it was too beautiful
to describe! And I said, 'Have you come for me?' 'No,' said a voice,
'not yet.' And I thought I was so disappointed, and I said, 'Well, will
you be long?' And the answer was, 'No, not very long.' And as it
spoke it disappeared, and I awakened."
He listened, hushed and awestruck at the story of the dream of
this dusky sister of the plain.
"Well, Betsy," said he, after a moment of silence, "it is all well.
That dream may not come literally true, but the spirit of it is yours,
and some day He will come to your people, and when the right
moment arrives He will come for you too. Shall we pray, Betsy?"
"Oh, yes sir, pray," she said, "pray for me, but do not forget my
people, and my man."
The night shadows were growing darker as reverently he knelt
beside the prostrate form of that northern saint, Indian in race, but
akin to God the Father of us all. A daughter of the King, if ever there
was one.
Then reaching out her hand, she took from a corner of the tent
near her couch a birch-bark basket, made by her own hands, and
sewn with sweet grass. Giving it to the missionary, she said, "Keep
that as a remembrance for your kindness in coming to see a poor
sick Indian child."
That night the northwest wind began to moan. Soon it bore
down with the terrific force of a gale, in howling wrath. Drenching
rain fell; wild gusts of storm dashed against the Mission buildings.
 The wildness of the storm howling in mercilessness in the deep
night stillness struck chill to the heart of every one. It was one of
those sudden storms that sometimes sweep in gales over the north
country, gone in a few minutes, but ofttimes leaving a wake of
destruction.
When morning dawned, some of the boats were driven fifty
yards into the forest; trees around the camp were stripped of limbs,
and great rents ran down the bark and fibre of more than one.
But the worst deed done by it was when it lifted the tent off
Betsy's sleeping form, and left her to the wild elements whose work
was soon finished in her death through shock and wet.
It was not long until the news spread throughout the
settlement, and the Indian wailing could be heard in that lonely,
long-drawn lamentation that is theirs.
Two days later crowds of Indians thronged the little Mission
Chapel. They came dressed in their prints of all colours and fantastic
variety of costume; some with yellow handkerchiefs on their heads.
Purple, blue, white, red were seen everywhere, but mourning was
on every face, and sorrow sat on every bowed form.
A touching service in Cree, with plaintive music set to the words
of Christian hymns, and then, one by one, men, women and children
came to the front and printed a kiss upon the cold brow of the dead
woman, while some whispered messages to her to be taken to the
land of blessed spirits.
It was a sad procession that wound its way through the Mission
fields, over the hills, across the bridge and up the opposite side of
the ravine. There, amid the wooden monuments that marked the
resting-place of relatives and friends, was laid the sacred dust of
Betsy.
As the coffin was lowered, the conquering wind whistled its
triumph through the limbs of the trees in the near-by forest, but it
was a hollow triumph, for beyond the forest were the hills of light
and faith could see there the real conqueror, whose face once shone
in beauty in Betsy's dream, and who had come now for her in the
guise of the storm on which He rode, but who gave His weak one
conquest through the storm.
Reverently they lowered her body, the worn-out jewel-case of
Betsy, simple-hearted, large-souled, unselfish Betsy; heaped the
clods upon her coffin; waved farewells across her grave and went
back to the old life where storms still raged and duties dared and
dangers sought to breed fears within. But many were made stronger
now because of her.
Brave Betsy, dark of skin, but white of soul; true-hearted Betsy,
beloved of all, foe of none; she got her death through giving another
life, and for many a day her story will be told, and children will be
carried to the little Indian burying-ground and shown the simple
wooden cross, simple as herself, on which they will see in simple
letters—

"BETSY"

XXXII
A LIFE DEGREE
The other day the papers announced that when the Prince of Wales
returns from his recent tour, he is to be given the Order of the
Garter, the highest honour in the Empire in civil life, just as the V.C.
is the highest in military service.
And it is a great honour to do some deed or fulfill some duty, so
that a college or a nation gives you some distinguished degree which
allows you to put letters after your name.
But it is all right to be proud of honours, if a fellow really earns
them by hard work or genuine service. The only kind to be shunned
are the kind you buy with money or get through some second-hand
institution without any standard of toil.
Yet, after all is said and done, the great majority of you will
perhaps never have a college degree, and will never be called over
to meet the king and kneel before him, dressed up in gorgeous court
clothes, while he strikes your shoulder with a sword and says, "Rise
up, Sir Knight." You may never be a big lawyer and write K.C. after
your signature, to show you can plead in the king's name; or
K.C.M.G., to show you are one of the select knights of the royal
castle; but I want to suggest you can still wear a title, and use the
letters that stand for things worth while.
"Say, Billy, would you not feel big if the day came when your
friends called you Sir William?" Who knows but what they may! The
big men were schoolboys with some one else, and you may be one
of the coming big men.
You remember when Tom Brown went to Oxford, he used to
walk around and read the names of men like Raleigh and Wycliffe,
and feel two inches taller. He said, "Perhaps I may be going to make
dear friends with some fellow who will change the history of
England. Why shall not I? There must have been some freshmen
once who were chums of Wycliffe and Raleigh!"
Now, my point is that even if you do not, you need not fail.
Some day when you read, or now when you are reading
Tennyson, you will find a poem called "Idylls of the King," where he
speaks of knights who are "wearing the white flower of a blameless
life," and who "live pure, speak true, right wrong, follow the king
——"
If you are that, then I have the power to confer on you titles,
and although you may not put the letters after your name, you can if
you care to—William Blank, K.C.
"K" stands for kindness, and you know,

"There's nothing so kingly as kindness;

And nothing so royal as truth;"

and you know,

"So may we in bonds of love,

Each living creature bind,
And make them gentle as a dove,
If we are only kind."

There is something very attractive about a kind man; and we should

be that, for we live in lands where Jesus has been heard of, and He
has filled the earth with kindness.
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