GEMMS sermon #30000 is found in a collection of 64 sermons that follow a full liturgical year, and is attributed to the Catholic martyr, Peter Wright, who was executed in London in 1651. (Figure 1) The sermons are not dated, although the last in the collection (which is unfinished in this manuscript) was preached for the occasion of the Jubilee Year of 1650, and thus can be dated to the final year of Wright’s life. Although the collection may represent sermons composed and preached over the course of a single year, they could as well have been composed at different times during Wright’s career, and only subsequently transcribed into a single volume. References in some sermons, though, indicate an audience of Catholics living in England and consequently practising their religion under severe restrictions. The Jubilee Sermon was printed in an article by Godfrey Anstruther in 1951, but the others in the manuscript seem never to have been published.[1]
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| Figure 1: Portrait of Peter Wright from Edward Leedes alias Courtney, R. P. Petri Writi sacerdotis Angli e Societ. Iesu mors, quam ob fidem passus est London 29 Maij 1651 (Liège, 1651). |
Peter Wright was born in Northamptonshire around 1603. As a young man, he joined the war in the Netherlands – fighting on the Dutch side against the Spanish Habsburg empire, which was (of course) perceived as being the Protestant side. However, he soon abandoned the army and in 1629 entered the Society of Jesus, the Catholic Reformation religious order par excellence. In 1636 he was ordained, and in 1642 returned to the military front as chaplain to the English Regiment fighting on the Habsburg side – a regiment largely composed of English Catholics. In 1644, he was sent to England.[2]
Wright’s years in England were those of the Civil Wars between Charles I and the Parliamentarians, the regicide, and the seizure of power by the republican ‘Commonwealth’. Catholics were affected by the turmoil, whether they fought for the King or attempted to remain neutral; some Catholics, after 1646, sought to negotiate toleration with the new powers-that-were.[3] Wright was not a distant observer of these conflicts: he was at Oxford while it served as the Royalist headquarters, acting as chaplain to the Catholic Henry Gage. Gage had commanded the English Regiment under the Habsburgs in Flanders, then returned to command the garrison of Oxford for King Charles I, and was ultimately killed in 1646. After Gage’s death, Wright lived under the protection of the Marquis of Winchester (Figure 2). Winchester, though a Royalist, was reportedly involved with attempts to negotiate with the Independents’ (or Congregationalist) faction in the Army for some sort of toleration for Catholics in whatever post-war settlement was established – this presumably was during his short periods of release from prison, for he remained a prisoner (as a Royalist and a Catholic) from 1645 until the early 1650s.[4]
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| Figure 2: Wenceslaus Hollar, Portrait of Marquis of Winchester, engraving. 17th century. The Wenceslaus Hollar Collection, Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto. |
These royalist connections may well have influenced Wright’s fate. Peter Wright was the only Catholic martyr executed by the Commonwealth during its rule from 1649 to 1653 (when it was replaced by Oliver Cromwell’s rule as Lord Protector). He was condemned under the Elizabethan statute of 1585, which defined it as treason for an English subject, having been ordained a Catholic priest, to enter the realm. Between 1628 and 1641, executions of Catholics had in fact ceased; various priests were still tried and convicted, but Charles I – by means of reprieves and decrees of banishment – avoiding executing any of them. However, between 1641 and 1646, Charles I’s opponents ensured that twenty priests were executed under the 1585 statute – a sudden return to persecution which Catholics found disconcerting.[5] Yet, during these same years, a small number of men were actually acquitted when tried for the crime of being priests – something which seems to have occurred seldom or never prior to 1641.[6]
This is what happened to Peter Wright’s companion in the dock, Thomas Middleton. Middleton was actually the Superior in England of another religious order, the Dominicans. And the witness against Wright and Middleton was a lapsed Catholic and former Dominican, one Thomas Gage, the actual brother of Colonel Henry Gage. Gage had testified against various other priests, some of whom had been executed. Yet at the trial of Wright and Middleton, Gage gave evidence in favour of Middleton: he stated that Middleton might not necessarily be a priest, even though he was a Dominican friar, and indeed superior. He noted that Saint Francis of Assisi had founded a religious order, and yet never been ordained priest. Against Wright, however, Gage ruthlessly declared that he had seen him celebrating Mass in the military camp at Ghent, and that he had also been Gage’s brother’s chaplain at Oxford. This evidence convicted Wright.[7] Wright may have been in part the ‘proxy victim’ of power struggles between factions in the new republican state: the Independents, with whom his patron had once negotiated, and the Presbyterians, who might consequently be keen to ‘make an example’ of him.[8]
The upshot was that Peter Wright was executed at Tyburn, by the notorious method of hanging, drawing and quartering, on 19 May 1651. (Figure 3) An account of his martyrdom was published that year in Latin, and in Italian translation.[9]
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| Figure 3: Image of execution of Peter Wright from Mathias Tanner, Societas Jesu usque ad sanguinis et vitae profusionem militans, in Europa, Africa, Asia, et America...., Praga, 1675. |
This sermon (GEMMS-SERMON-30000) attributed to Wright, from the volume now at Stonyhurst, was preached on the Feasts of Ss. Peter & Paul, 29th June (Figure 4). Because Peter is held to be the first pope, Sts. Peter & Paul was a feast of great importance for Catholic claims about the nature of the Church and of the papacy. In this sermon on the two martyred apostles, the preacher’s concern with Peter’s significance for the Church’s authority is apparent. He starts by comparing the order and hierarchy of Old Testament worship to the new order of Petrine supremacy: Peter’s primacy among the Apostles is likened to the divine choice of Aaron for the Israelite priesthood. Here, similarity with the Temple worship which preceded Christ is not a criticism – it is offered as validation:
In the 14th Chapter of the Book of Numbers you shall find that although all the Princes of the twelve tribes of Israel gave their rods to be kept in the tabernacle... yet only the rod of Aaron blossomed forth and produced fruit which was a most certain testimony of his being legally chosen to his sacerdotal and Pontifical dignity, for perpetual memory of which / Almighty God commanded that rod to [be] kept in the tabernacle. This is a most true and excellent type of what we are to say, for what happened figuratively in the Jewish law is actually and really performed in the Catholic Church.
Or again, he insists that Jewish example shows that the Church must have a visible, ordered structure:
The 28th Chapter of Exodus speaketh of nothing, but of the manner and matter and Order in the making and burnishing and setting forth those ornaments. The like is recorded in the Third Book of Kings and 6th Chapter… Here was everywhere order, order in the making of the vestments, order in the disposition of the building, order in the carved work, order in the embroidery, order in the painting, order in the ministers of the house of God.[10]
From this appeal to precedent, Wright moves on to demonstrating the papal supremacy. His argument has two parts: first, he tries to show that it is necessary that the Church should have “one Supreme… Pastor that might in a Monarchical way govern and direct the same”; secondly, he makes the case that “St Peter and his successors are these vicars or Pastors”. Wright argues that since “just and due order” characterized the Temple, and order brings “perfection” and beauty in nature, therefore it follows that Christ would provide that order should also govern the Church.
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| Figure 4: Peter Wright, "In Festo Sti Petri et Pauli," 47th sermon, Stonyhurst MS. A/IV/15, unpaginated. © Governors of Stonyhurst College. |
Wright’s sermon uses Christ’s ‘Tu es Petrus’ declaration from Mathew 16:18: “You are Peter, and on this Rock I will build my Church” to expound the ‘Petrine claim’, but he also appeals to other texts. For example, he emphasises the differences between promises made by Christ to all the Apostles, such as “the Spirit of truth… shall teach you all truth” (John 16:13), and promises or commands given to St Peter alone, e.g. “Confirm thy brethren.” (Luke 22:32). Wright also cites early Christian authors and Church Councils in support of Catholic interpretations: Augustine, Origen and Ambrose are mentioned during this sermon, as well as St Leo the Great and the Council of Chalcedon, as evidence of Peter’s primacy continuing in his successors.
Although he refrained from explicit commentary on English political affairs, one cannot help noticing implied connections between his discussion about Church authority, and theories of government – and there is a distinct Royalist tinge to Wright’s observations. For example, Wright declares that order brings “perfection and… imprinteth such a beauty and lustre, upon terrene things that it makes them resemble in some sort the celestial: but on the contrary the want of this order turns all things topsy-turvy, causes perturbations, horrible confusions and the world to became like to an infernal chaos”. Furthermore, when speaking of the Roman Apostolic Succession, he argued that “If none succeeded St Peter the whole state of the Church is altered… from a monarchy to an Aristocracy… who can therefore not conceive that it’s fallen to a new imperfect form of government.”
Although, when he does mention England explicitly, Wright carefully speaks of disorder in the government of the Church, the idea of disorder in the polity hovers nearby: as when Wright observed that the absence of order in favour of ‘this private spirit, this self-reflecting judgement’ has produced the current chaos in ‘this kingdom’ – note his use of ‘kingdom’, rather than ‘Commonwealth’ or even ‘nation’. Multiple changes of government, Wright said, at length ruined “the Commonwealth of the Romans”; Christ would not “subject his Church to such chops and changes to be governed first by one, then by many… one while the bishops, then by kings and Princes, here by women, there by Children, then by I know not whom, as it is now and hath been of late in England.” By implying connections between the two, one also gets a sense of their being causally related: the breakdown of civil order has been caused by the rejection of the proper order of Christ’s Church. And indeed, English Catholics did sometimes attribute the catastrophe of the Civil Wars to England’s descent into heresy.[11]
In the final part of his discourse, Wright turns to expound the purpose of the papal succession descended from Peter: that the Church under that primacy is guaranteed not to teach error in its doctrines. Matthew 16:18 is cited: “Portae inferi non praevalebunt”, “the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it”; so is Luke 22:32 “Confirm thy brethren” and John 11:14, the command to Peter “Feed my sheep”. This text is explained according to St Bernard of Clairvaux’s interpretation: that Christ’s command, because it specifies no particular ‘flock’, implies a universal responsibility for all his ‘sheep’. Wright’s use of scriptural texts gives us a sense of the essential polemical arguments English Catholic congregations would have been familiar with.
The end point of Wright’s sermon brings the subject back to his hearers’ spiritual lives. He assures them that that it is a “singular comfort to Catholics to sail in this ship of St Peter”, “cutting through the tempestuous billows of this world” to the “haven of eternal repose”, and to have a “heavenly physician” with “sure and sovereign antidotes against all the poisonous heresies of Satan or his Ministers”. Therefore, in “doubts and difficulties” one should “humbly and promptly submit our selves to its Judgement”, and “never recede in the lest tittle from its doctrine.” The sermon culminates in an exhortation to obedience and a promise of consolation, but this is led up to by a process of argument and proof by which the preacher attempts to demonstrate that the grounds for this confident obedience are indeed rock-solid.
This sermon, and the collection of which it is part, gives an important insight into Catholic preaching in England – a fascinating perspective on English sermon traditions, as these were the clandestine sermons of a proscribed religious faith. Although records are scant and texts extremely rare, we know that preaching had been essential to the ‘English Mission’ since its beginnings in the late Elizabethan period. This volume of Wright’s sermons gives a sense of how that tradition had developed by the mid-seventeenth century. It further helps us relate preaching in England to the records we have of sermons preached by English Catholics outside England, in expatriate colleges and convents. Peter Wright’s sermon on Sts. Peter & Paul is one of nearly 150 Catholic sermons which have now been added to the GEMMS database. We hope to increase our coverage of Catholic sermons, helping to make GEMMS a truly comprehensive record of early modern English preaching.
The above image of Stonyhurst MS. A/IV/15 is used with the kind permission of Stonyhurst College.
[1] Bl. Peter Wright and Godfrey Anstruther, ‘An English Martyr on the Jubilee Year: A Sermon”, Life of the Spirit (1946-1964) 5(55) (1951), pp.283-294.
[2] Thompson Cooper and Geoffrey Holt. "Wright, Peter (1603–1651), Jesuit." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 23 Sep. 2004; Accessed 30 Apr. 2024. https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-30050.
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