Nicholas Sanders

• 1. Introduction

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  Nicholas Sanders died somewhere in the hills of south-west Ireland in the spring of 1581, believed to have perished from cold and starvation as a fugitive. He had once argued theology with cardinals, dined in Rome on the patronage of powerful men, and crossed the continent as an emissary to princes. What drove an Oxford-educated English priest to die alone in a foreign country, pursued as an outlaw by the English crown? The answers run through the upheaval of the Reformation, the corridors of the Vatican, the wars of Ireland, and a body of writing that would shape how Catholics remembered the English church for generations.

  Sanders was born around 1530 at Sander Place near Charlwood, in the county of Surrey. He was one of twelve children, his father William Sanders a man of enough local standing to have served as sheriff of Surrey. The family's Catholic faith was not merely nominal. Two of his elder sisters became nuns at Sion convent before it was dissolved. That background would set the course of everything that followed.

• 2. The Making of a Polemicist

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  At the age of ten, Nicholas Sanders entered Hyde Abbey as a student. Winchester College came next, and then New College, Oxford, where he was elected fellow in 1548 and graduated Bachelor of Civil Law in 1551. Oxford in those years was a place where religious allegiance could determine a career or end one, and Sanders' Catholic convictions put him on the wrong side of the Elizabethan settlement.

  In 1557, while Queen Mary I still reigned, Sanders was chosen to deliver the oration when Cardinal Pole's visitors were received by the university. It was a mark of trust and public visibility. When Elizabeth I came to the throne, that visibility became a liability. Around May 1559, Sanders left England with the guidance and financial backing of Francis Englefield, a Catholic exile who would remain a recurring presence in his life.

• 3. Rome, Trent, and the Exile Network

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  In Rome, Sanders was taken under the wing of Cardinal Morone, who had been a confidant of Cardinal Pole. Englefield's generosity continued to support him. Sanders was ordained a priest in the city, then received the degree of Doctor of Divinity. Even before the end of the 1550s he had been mentioned as a possible cardinal.

  In 1560 he composed a report on the state of England for Cardinal Morone, giving the Vatican a clearer picture of what Catholic life looked like under Elizabeth. He went on to serve as a theologian for Cardinal Hosius at the Council of Trent, one of the defining gatherings of the Counter-Reformation. Afterward he accompanied Hosius and Cardinal Commendone on diplomatic missions to Poland, Prussia, and Lithuania.

  By 1565 Sanders had settled at Louvain, a centre of Catholic intellectual life in the Low Countries. His mother and siblings followed him there, driven out of England by recusancy laws that penalised Catholic worship. His sister Elizabeth entered Syon convent at Rouen. That same year Sanders began engaging directly with one of the sharpest theological disputes of the age: the literary controversy between Bishop John Jewel and Thomas Harding over the legitimacy of the English church.

• 4. Writing the English Schism

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  Published in 1571, Sanders' De visibili Monarchia Ecclesiae was the first sustained narrative account of Catholic suffering in England. It appeared in the wake of two convulsive events: Pope Pius V's bull Regnans in Excelsis, which excommunicated Elizabeth I, and the Northern Rebellion, a failed Catholic uprising in the north of England.

  The larger and more consequential project was De origine ac progressu schismatis Anglicani, which translates roughly as "Of the Origin and Progression of the English Schism." Sanders never finished it. After his death it was continued from 1558 onward by Edward Rishton and printed, ostensibly at Cologne in 1585, though it was actually produced by Jean Foigny at Reims. The work went through multiple editions and its production history is entangled with some of the most notable figures of English Catholic exile.

  William Allen, the cardinal who founded the English College at Douai, is now understood to have played a large editorial role from the outset. The figure listed as "Jodochus Skarnhert" of Cologne has been tentatively identified as Robert Persons, the Jesuit who worked on the second edition of 1586. Among the sources woven into that edition was the prison journal of the Jesuit John Hart. By the third edition, Hart's journal was dropped; the suggestion is that by then Persons had learned Hart had become an informant for Elizabeth I's spymaster, Francis Walsingham.

  The work drew on the writings of Reginald Pole on the English Reformation, a life of John Fisher, Cochlaeus writing against Richard Morison, and material from Richard Hilliard. Catholic writers across Europe took it up: Girolamo Pollini, Andrea Sciacca, Bernardo Davanzati, Pedro de Ribadeneira, and François Maucroix all drew from it. On the Protestant side, Peter Heylin dismissed Sanders with a sharp nickname, calling him "Dr Slanders." Gilbert Burnet was moved by Sanders' account to write his own History of the Reformation at the end of the seventeenth century.

• 5. The Irish Gamble

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  In 1573 Sanders travelled to Spain to press Philip II to fund the Catholic exile community. He spent the following years in Madrid, where he received a pension of 300 ducats. The Spanish court was the nerve centre for planning a more direct challenge to English power.

  By 1575 James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald had formed an alliance with Sir Thomas Stukley around a projected Irish expedition planned for 1578, which Sanders was to join. The scheme had the support of the papal nuncio Filippo Sega and the quiet encouragement of King Philip. Fitzgerald and Stukley were to meet at Lisbon, but King Sebastian of Portugal intervened, persuading Stukley to redirect his forces to a campaign in Morocco. Stukley abandoned the Irish plan and sailed his troops south. He was killed at the Battle of Alcacer Quibir in August 1578.

  The Irish expedition went ahead anyway. Sanders and Fitzmaurice landed at Smerwick harbour with a force of around 600 Spanish and Italian freelance soldiers, along with arms intended for up to 4,000 Irish rebels, and with covert Papal support. Sanders carried a papal banner to Dingle and tried to rally local clans and Gerald FitzGerald, the 15th Earl of Desmond, but the hoped-for alliance never formed. The invasion fleet was captured almost immediately by Sir William Winter. In November 1580, the troops who had been holding Smerwick were massacred by the Irish Royal Army under Arthur Grey, the 14th Baron Grey de Wilton, after a three-day siege. Because Spain and the Papacy were not formally at war with England, Sanders and his men were declared outlaws.

  Grey's own report from Smerwick noted the fate of at least one of Sanders' associates: "Execution of the Englishman who served Dr. Sanders, and two others, whose arms and legs were broken for torture." Sanders himself fled into the hills. Months of fugitive life in the south-west of Ireland followed before cold and starvation ended his life in the spring of 1581.