ABSTRACT

Margaret Clitherow’s promotion to the martyrology served to emphasize the unbroken continuity of Catholic martyr witness from the foundation of the Church and the unchanging nature of the cause for which she had died. The Catholic community saw her and the other new English Catholic martyrs of the Reformation as the true successors of those early martyrs of the English Church who had been discarded by the Protestants. Robert Persons had stressed this point in his pamphlet The copie of a double letter written in 1581 after his flight from England following the capture of Edmund Campion. His intentions had been to discredit as a pseudomartyr Robert Atkins, a deranged Englishman whose trial, ordeal and execution for blasphemy by the Inquisition in Rome on 2 August 1581 had been cited by the Protestants as an example of the cruelty of the Catholic Church. Persons, writing within the context of the execution of Everard Haunse, which had taken place on 31 July 1581, and in anticipation of that of Edmund Campion, which took place later that year, had seized the opportunity to present Haunse as a true martyr in contrast to this Protestant pseudomartyr. It is clear from the text that Persons, in 1581, envisaged many such ‘bloodie sacrifices’ in the battle to recover England for the Catholic Church. He described the seminarians of Rheims, in anticipation of possible death in England, ‘in Religious mirth saying, that they which had destroied the old memories would now make us new’.1