Academic literature on the topic 'Tyburn Convent (London, England)'

At first glance, the actions of Fr. Charles Bowden, a member of the Brompton Oratory in London, toward a troubled, adolescent, Roman Catholic girl, Eliza (in some reports referred to as Ellen) McDermot, would appear as a praiseworthy and unselfish example of Christian charity. Fr. Bowden, a young cleric, acted on information he allegedly learned from Miss McDermot in the confessional and worked to save her from a possible life of ruin on the London streets. Fr. Bowden eventually urged the young sixteen year old pregnant girl to seek refuge at a local convent where she would have the opportunity to repent and reform her life. McDermot followed his advice, but this seemingly innocent plan to save her soul fanned the flames of hatred against Catholicism and sisterhoods. Without informing her family, Miss McDermot secretly took up residence in a convent, and she did not reveal the location to her mother. When her family complained about this so-called ‘abduction’, critics of Roman Catholicism, and sisterhoods in particular, took their campaign to the public and attacked the actions of Fr. Bowden in letters to the press, graphic pamphlets, and speeches in Parliament. The case of Eliza McDermot quickly emerged as another example which illustrated the evils of Catholic convents, but it failed to capture public attention. Several reasons help to explain the short-lived notoriety of this story, especially the failure to prove that Bowden had broken any English laws.

Abstract On the basis of reports that Jan van Eyck visited England (he was well traveled in the service of Philip the Good, duke of Burgundy), this essay speculates freely on what the diplomat and painter actually did in and around London for three weeks in 1428. The essay claims, for example, that van Eyck went to the village of Foots Cray to buy watercresses to use as models when painting greenery on the Ghent Altarpiece of the Mystic Lamb (which he completed in 1432). The recently erected gateway to the palace at Greenwich is said likewise to be the model for a towered gateway depicted on the altarpiece. After providing local detail about relevant parts of England in 1428, the essay closes with speculation (although the author writes, “The facts are known”) about the origin of a harp, of a purportedly Welsh variety, appearing on the altarpiece in the hands of an angel. The author argues that it was the instrument of an itinerant Breton musician whom van Eyck had heard in recital at the Poor Clares convent of the Holy Trinity at the Minories in Aldgate. The harpist subsequently murdered his Stepney landlady and was himself killed by enraged local housewives. Van Eyck is said to have purchased the man's harp when his worldly goods were posthumously sold.

At the end of the eighteenth century the ‘bloody code’ was still in full force in England and Wales. There were some two hundred offences which carried the death penalty, ranging from murder to stealing goods worth five shillings from a shop. In the 1780s several hundred men, women and children were sentenced to death each year, and though rather over half were reprieved, there were still about two hundred executions. In London, condemned prisoners were confined in Newgate prison in the City, and until 1783 they were transported two miles to be hanged at Tyburn on the western outskirts of the metropolis. There were usually large crowds lining the streets, and particularly notorious criminals might expect up to thirty thousand spectators at their death. A clergyman would travel in the cart with the prisoners, his main purpose being to ensure that they died repentant, and, it was hoped, with better prospects in the next world than in the present one.

Mary Ward was born in 1585 near Ripon, eldest child of a recusant family. She spent her whole life until the age of 21 in the intimate circle of Yorkshire Catholics, with her parents, her Wright grandparents at Ploughland in Holderness, Mrs. Arthington, née Ingleby, at Harewell Hall in Nidderdale, and finally with the Babthorpes of Babthorpe and Osgodby. Convinced of her religious vocation, but of course unable to pursue it openly in England, she spent some time as a Poor Clare in Saint-Omer in the Spanish Netherlands, first in a Flemish community, then in the English house that she helped to found. She was happy there, but was shown by God that he was calling her to ‘some other thing’. Exactly what it was to be was not yet clear, so she returned to England, spent some time in London working for the Catholic cause, and discovering that there was much for women to do—then returned to Saint-Omer with a small group of friends, other young women in their 20s, to start a school, chiefly for English Catholic girls, and through prayer and penance to find out more clearly what God was asking. Not surprisingly, given her early religious formation in English Catholic households, served by Jesuit missionaries, and her desire to work for her own country, the guidance that came was ‘Take the same of the Society’. She spent the rest of her life trying to establish a congregation for women which would live by the Constitutions of St. Ignatius, be governed by a woman general superior, under the Pope, not under diocesan bishops or a male religious order, and would be unenclosed, free to be sent ‘among the Turks or any other infidels, even to those who live in the region called the Indies, or among any heretics whatsoever, or schismatics, or any of the faithful’. There were always members working in the underground Church in England, and in Mary Ward's own lifetime there were ten schools, in Flanders and Northern France, Italy, Germany and Austria-Hungary. But her long struggle for approbation met with failure—Rome after the Council of Trent, which had insisted on enclosure for all religious women, was not yet ready for Jesuitesses. In 1631 Urban VIII banned her Institute by a Bull of Suppression, imprisoning Mary Ward herself for a time in the Poor Clare convent on the Anger in Munich. She spent the rest of her life doing all she could to continue her work, but when she died in Heworth, outside York, in 1645 and was buried in Osbaldwick churchyard, only a handful of followers remained together, some with her in England, 23 in Rome, a few in Munich, all officially laywomen. It is owing to these women that Mary Ward's Institute has survived to this day.