ABSTRACT
James Maurus Corker was born in 1636. He felt very deeply the disgrace of his father’s disloyalty to the Royalist cause. He broke away from the family circle in 1656, became a Roman Catholic and joined the English Benedictine monastery at Lamspringe, near Hildesheim, in the territory of the Elector of Bavaria. The English Benedictines represented a visible testimony to the persistence of the mediaeval tradition, to the pre-Reformation glories of the great abbeys. The Duchess’s account of her conversion, and Dryden’s defence of it, may not be based on elaborate theological debate but, rightly or wrongly, it was a very human and real position in the seventeenth century. And it was a position which accords well with what Corker and the English Benedictines stood for. For Dryden to have been received into the Roman Catholic Church by a Jesuit or a priest of the secular clergy chapter might have given some grounds for doubts about his seriousness and sincerity.
