[It’s a bit too complicated to outline here, but I’ve included further reading on the Archpriest Controversy in the ‘Further Reading’ section if you would like to familiarize yourself with the context – highly recommended reading!]
Another of these sixteenth-century “useful idiots” was a gentleman poet and friend of Watson called Anthony Copley. His writings claimed that the courtly Jesuit Robert Persons was the bastard son of a plowman, “a common ale house squire, and the drunkest sponge in all the parish where he lived,” and that he had “two bastards, male and female, upon the body of his own sister” before “he ran away… and so became a Jesuit.” Eighteen such books attacking Persons and his designs upon the English throne appeared between 1601 and 1603, and eventually Persons responded.
In his “Manifestation of the Great Folly and Bad Spirit of Certain in England calling themselves secular priests,” published in 1602, Persons sank to the same level as Copley. He sneered that the cross-eyed William Watson “looks nine ways at once” and was so short-sighted “he can discern nothing that touches not his eye.” Watson, he wrote, was remembered at his seminary in Rheims for being as clumsy as he was stupid and for arriving so poor that he licked “the dishes which other men had emptied.”
Other priests received similar treatment while Copley was dismissed as “a little, wanton idle headed boy.”
Bancroft was so pleased when he saw the pamphlet that he told the man who brought it to him “that if he had brought him a £100 he could not have done him a greater pleasure, and, scratching his elbow, said that this was that he looked for all this while, viz, that one should write against another.”
Author’s Note:
Some of this gossip still survives: historians who are Catholics usually spell “Persons” with an “e”; Protestants spell it with an “a” – an allusion to his supposed origins as the bastard son of a parson.
Source:
Lisle, Leanda De. "Hope and Fear" After Elizabeth: The Rise of James of Scotland and the Struggle for the Throne of England. New York: Ballantine, 2005. 160-61. Print.
Original Source(s) Listed:
Law, Jesuits and Seculars, p. xcii.
Law, Jesuits and Seculars, pp.. xciv-xcv.
Rivers, 18 June, 1602, in Foley (ed.), Records, vol. I, p. 39.
Further Reading:
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