ABSTRACT
Thomas White (1592/3-1676), better known in English Catholic historiography by his alias, Blacklo[w], is a man in need of historical rehabilitation. Condemned by Anglicans as a seditious republican and by Catholics as a dangerous heretic, White had an alarming ability to gain enemies in a variety of circles. His work attracted widespread condemnation from Charles II to the Holy Office in Rome.1 Despite White’s posthumous vilification, he had a pious upbringing: in his Apologia for Rushworth’s Dialogue (1654) White noted that he never saw any reason to abandon, ‘the religion of [his] birth and education’.2 White’s recusant pedigree was impressive. His father was a middling landowner who had survived the worst ravages of the Elizabethan persecution. White’s mother, Mary Plowden of Plowden, Shropshire, was a daughter of the distinguished lawyer and Elizabethan courtier, Edmund Plowden. White’s education was typical for a middling sort of recusant family in Jacobean England: educated by the Jesuits at St Omers from the age of 12 White completed his studies at the Jesuit-controlled Royal English College at Valladolid which he entered to read Philosophy in 1609. His youth was peripatetic spending short stints in the educational establishments of the English Catholic diaspora. He was ordained at Arras in 1617. In 1626 he was appointed the secular clergy’s chief representative at the Lateran, succeeding his friend and colleague, Thomas More (secular agent, 160917, 1622-25). White was a promising clergyman, well known in the courts of Madrid and Rome. He was a prolific scholar: during the English Civil War he lived in Paris where he gained a reputation as a noted philosopher boasting Descartes, Hobbes and John Evelyn amongst his circle. Whilst in European exile White formulated two works which overshadowed his life and condemned his posthumous reputation. The Middle State of Souls (1659) denied the infallibility of the pope and questioned Rome’s doctrinal
position on purgatory and the second, The Grounds of Obedience and Government (1655), argued for passive obedience to the political status quo. Political republicanism, ecclesiastical Gallicanism and the defence of the corporate continuity of the English secular clergy with their medieval predecessors marked the ideological stance of what came to be known amongst the seventeenth century English clergy as the Blacklowist party.
