The Assertio translation of 1687

When James ii signed the Declaration of Indulgence in 1687, Catholic anti-Protestant titles poured from English presses in record numbers. More than 8 per cent of the total Catholic book production in England for the entire century following 1615 appeared in that year alone.Footnote ⁴ An important contributor to this effort was the London printer Nathaniel Thompson, who in 1687 published no fewer than forty-three titles explicitly promoting Catholic doctrines and practices. The author of four of these was identified only by the initials ‘T. W.’, or ‘T. W., Gent.’. They were: Some queries to the Protestants concerning the English Reformation (Wing W.836); Speculum ecclesiasticum: or, An ecclesiastical prospective-glass (Wing W.838); Monomachia: or, A duel between Dr. Tho. Tenison … and a Roman Catholick souldier (Wing W.834); and a translation of Henry viii's Assertio septem sacramentorum against Martin Luther (Wing H.1468).Footnote ⁵ The following year the same press, now managed by Nathaniel's widow, Mary, issued a second, ‘Revis'd and Corrected’ edition of T. W.'s Assertio translation (Wing H.1469).

At first sight, the Assertio translation stands somewhat apart from the other works signed by T. W., which all focused on the key issue for Catholic controversy in the 1680s, namely the legitimacy of the Church of England following the break with Rome. Henry viii's refutation of Luther pre-dated that event by more than a decade. None the less, its first appearance in English dress served several important polemical functions in 1687. It showed that there was a royal precedent for James ii's public promotion of the Catholic cause; it challenged a century of Protestant claims that there was something essentially disloyal and seditious about being Catholic; and it complicated the Church of England's origin story with a reminder that its prime mover remained a devout Catholic all his life.

The Assertio translation was therefore a potent addition to contemporary Catholic propaganda. It is however interesting that no attempt was made editorially to underline its relevance for 1687, for instance with a new preface or other apparatus. The only seventeenth-century addition was a portrait of Henry viii, which appeared as the frontispiece to the second edition. Otherwise, besides the royal treatise itself, the translation included only the preliminaries of editions published between 1521 and 1523: the oration of John Clerk, the English emissary who presented the treatise to Pope Leo x; the pope's reply to Clerk; the papal bull conferring on Henry the title ‘Defender of the Faith’ as a reward for his literary efforts; Henry's dedicatory preface to Leo; and his preface to the reader. No single Latin edition of the Assertio contained all, and only, these preliminaries, so it is not possible to identify the source used by T. W. in his translation. It is likely that more than one Latin version was consulted, with different preliminaries drawn from each. The marginalia are translations of those attached to the earliest editions of the Assertio.Footnote ⁶

The translation itself is largely an accurate one, which undoubtedly explains why it has remained in print and e-print up to the present day. That is not to say, however, that it is free from idiosyncrasies and even defects. It is worth examining these in a little detail for the insight they give into T. W.'s translation practices. There are occasional lexical inaccuracies. For instance, in the king's preface to the reader, ‘traditos ab antiquis patribus ecclesiasticos ritus eludit’ is rendered ‘who abolishes the Ecclesiastical Rites and Ceremonies left by the Fathers’, where the translator has apparently confused eludere (‘to make sport of’) with eluere (‘to wash away’, ‘to remove’).Footnote ⁷ To take an example from the body of the Assertio, from its discussion of communion in both kinds, we see that ‘cui populum sperabat alacriter applausurum’ is rendered ‘which he foresaw would be Prais'd and Applauded by the People’, where one might object that foresight is not the same as hope.Footnote ⁸ As both these examples also show, the translator was quick to expand on the original, often by the use of doublets: ‘Rites and Ceremonies’ for the simple ritus, ‘Prais'd and Applauded’ for applausurum. This can cross the line from stylistic embellishment to glossing, for instance when, in the king's treatment of papal power, T. W. translates ‘papatum negaverat esse divini iuris’ as ‘he deny'd the Popes Supremacy to be of Divine Right, or Law’.Footnote ⁹ It can also lead the translator to add ideas unwarranted by the original, most remarkably in the king's discussion of communion in both kinds, where the original ‘cum Christi corpore’ is rendered as ‘with the body and blood of Christ’.Footnote ¹⁰

In addition to lexical inaccuracies and liberties taken with the content, there are also some fundamental syntactical errors. For instance, in the preface to the reader, the king declaims of Luther ‘quam putris huius animus, quam execrabile propositum, qui et sepulta resuscitat schismata’ (‘how diseased his soul, how damnable his design, who revives even buried schisms’).Footnote ¹¹ T. W. translates this as ‘how infectious is his Soul who revives these detestable Opinions and buried Schisms’, clumsily making the nominative execrabile propositum the object of resuscitat.Footnote ¹² An example of poor translation from the body of the Assertio is another of the king's criticisms of Luther: ‘[a]nd this he Whispers, not only in one City, but publishes to the whole World’ for ‘idemque non in una quapiam urbe susurrat, sed per totum buccinat orbem’.Footnote ¹³ Here the translator makes non qualify in una urbe when it clearly qualifies susurrat.

The case for Thomas Ward as translator of the Assertio

The author of the first three ‘T. W.’ tracts published by Thompson in 1687 has long been identified as Thomas Ward.Footnote ¹⁴ Ward was born near Guisborough, north Yorkshire, into a Protestant family but he converted to Roman Catholicism in early adulthood, leaving England to serve with the papal guard and participate in maritime operations against the Ottomans. On the accession of James ii, he returned to England and undertook to defend Catholicism with the pen, using the nom de plûme ‘the Roman Catholick souldier’, as in the title of his Monomachia. He engaged in numerous controversies, notably with the later archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Tenison, over the aspersions cast on the Church of England in the Speculum. Ward again left England after James vacated the throne, but continued to write anti-Protestant polemic while presumably attached to the exiled court. He died, like the former king, at St.-Germain-en-Laye.

The most natural conclusion to draw, and the one advocated here, is that the ‘T. W.’ who translated the Assertio for Thompson's press in 1687 was the same ‘T. W.’ whose Some queries, Speculum and Monomachia appeared from the same press in the same year, namely Thomas Ward. (There is the possibility that ‘T. W.’ was a sort of cypher that Thompson used for some of his Catholic authors to protect them and him from legal action; but this possibility is remote, given that Catholics had little to fear from litigation in 1687, and that Thompson himself evidently did not fear prosecution and seemed rather to welcome it.)Footnote ¹⁵ Against this conclusion stand two considerable difficulties. The first is the fact that no-one has ever previously proposed Ward's authorship. In particular, the earliest biography of Ward, an anonymous notice which began to appear in the nineteenth-century reprints of his work, is notably silent on the question.Footnote ¹⁶ The second difficulty, which will be considered in the next section, is that another T. W., Thomas Webster, is now generally credited with the translation.

In favour of Ward's authorship is the fact that he had experience of translating theological Latin: his Some queries was a rendering of the Dubia quaedam super reformatione anglicana of Peter Manby, the Catholicising dean of Derry, though it was omitted from the list of his works in the anonymous biography of 1807.Footnote ¹⁷ This may suggest that translations were deliberately excluded from that account, making the absence of the Assertio from it less problematic. If the claim of that biography is to be believed, that Ward attended his local grammar school in Pickering where he excelled at classics, the translation of Henry's Assertio can be assumed to have been broadly within his capabilities.Footnote ¹⁸ The same biography tells us that, while working as a private tutor to the children of a wealthy gentleman, ‘[c]hurch history, the ancient Fathers, the Scriptures, and the more modern Catholic controversies, always occupied his literary hours’, and that while in Italy he conducted independent historical research in various libraries, including the Vatican.Footnote ¹⁹ Certainly, his Speculum reveals a knowledge of the Bible and the Fathers that would have been sufficient to enable him to navigate the evidence marshalled in the Assertio. Indeed, Ward's theological acumen was such that one literary opponent, Tenison, believed him to be a Jesuit masquerading as a former soldier, while another, Henry Wharton, deduced that he was Cambridge-educated.Footnote ²⁰ Ward was swift to deny it:

The testimony of Ward's admirers and opponents alike therefore confirms that he was capable of translating the Assertio. That he did so is not provable; but it is possible to gain an insight into Ward's idiosyncrasies as a translator. This is because there exists an independent translation of Manby's Dubia, published in Dublin in the same year that Ward's Some queries appeared in London.Footnote ²² The comparison is instructive. For instance, Manby had described Cranmer as ‘primus ille Reformator Ecclesiae Anglicanae’, which the Dublin translator rendered accurately as ‘that first Reformer of the Church of England’. Ward, however, offered a doublet that enlarged on the author's meaning: ‘that first Patriarch or Reformer of the Church of England’.Footnote ²³ Again, Manby's question ‘Utrum defectus Missionis sit error in fundamentis?’ is rendered literally in the Dublin version as ‘Whether the want of Mission be a fundamental Error?’, while Ward glosses: ‘Whether want of Mission be not an errour in the Foundation of any Church?’Footnote ²⁴ Manby concludes his point by demanding that Anglicans explain the warrant by which Cranmer and other reformers challenged Catholic doctrine, declaring ‘aut hic nodus solvendus est, aut simul agis & Judicem & testem & Accusatorem’. Again, the Dublin translator plays a straight bat: ‘If you do not untie this knot, you do act as Judge, Witness and Party.’ Ward, by contrast, seems to lose his way, offering an extensive gloss that does violence to the syntax of the original: ‘Untie this knot, or confess that Cranmer, Luther, Calvin, Socinus, &c., made themselves Judges, Witnesses, and Accusers.’Footnote ²⁵ Ward's doublets, glosses and syntactical lapses, in contrast with the accuracy offered by Manby's Dublin translator, have clear parallels with those characteristics of the Assertio translation already noted. These parallels do not prove that Thomas Ward was the T. W. who translated the Assertio, but they strengthen the already strong suspicion, established on other grounds, that he was.

The fictitious ‘Thomas Webster’

By 1908, the catalogue of the British Museum had already identified the author of the 1687 Assertio translation as Thomas Webster.Footnote ²⁶ No less a bibliographical authority than Donald Wing canonised this identification with his annotation ‘[c]f. BM’.Footnote ²⁷ The basis for it is, however, unclear. It seems to have originated in a tentative query to be found in Francis Peck's 1735 catalogue of controversial religious tracts from the reign of James ii.Footnote ²⁸ When Peck came to describe Some queries to the Protestants by ‘T. W., Gent.’ – which was, as already established, by Ward – he posed the following question: ‘Quaere, if this Mr T. W. was not one Mr. Webster of Lynne. See No. 184. infra.’Footnote ²⁹ Peck's cross-reference was to a tract published in 1688 by a priest at Great Yarmouth, Luke Milbourne: A short defence of the orders of the Church of England, as by law establish'd: against some scatter'd objections of Mr. Webster of Linne: by a presbyter of the diocess of Norwich.Footnote ³⁰ The British Museum cataloguers seem to have taken this query to be a positive identification, and while Peck himself had made no connection between this T. W. and the author of the Assertio translation, Wing was to do so. He confidently described Milbourne's tract as ‘[a] reply to remarks by Webster in his translation of the Assertio’.Footnote ³¹

The difficulty with Wing's description is that the Assertio translation contains no objections, scattered or otherwise, to the validity of Anglican orders. It faithfully represents Henry's original, and for obvious reasons of chronology the king was not concerned either with the wording of the Edwardine Ordinal or with the validity of Matthew Parker's consecration. As already observed, there are no additional interpolations into the text (in the form of an added introduction, conclusion, or excursus) by the translator. Even the notes are simply translations of the marginalia which appeared in Pynson's 1521 version of the king's work, and have not been augmented or updated (though some were silently omitted). Moreover, nothing in Milbourne's tract relates to any part of the Assertio. Having satisfied himself that ‘Mr. Webster of Linne’ was T. W., the author of the Assertio translation, Wing assumed that Milbourne was responding to that translation. But what must have seemed to be confirmatory evidence was in fact a circular argument.

Wing and the British Museum cataloguers were evidently not aware that Peck's query about ‘Webster of Linne’ had already been satisfactorily resolved in the mid-nineteenth century by the librarian of Trinity College, Dublin, James Henthorn Todd. Todd was well advanced in his plans to update Peck's catalogue of works on popery when he heard that Chetham's Library in Manchester was working on a similar project, based on its own extensive holdings in this area. He therefore abandoned his project and generously handed over his papers to Chetham's. The Chetham project was published, in 1859, under the editorship of Thomas Jones, and Jones was scrupulous in identifying Todd's contributions. This is how we know that it was Todd who exploded Peck's suggestion (if it amounted to that) that ‘T. W.’ was ‘Mr. Webster of Linne’.Footnote ³² Todd's comments on the entry for Milbourne's A short defence shows that he was disinclined to speculate on this Webster's identity: ‘I do not know who was the Mr. Webster of Linne, against whom this tract was written, nor where his “scatter'd objections” are to be found.’Footnote ³³ But on Peck's musings as to whether T. W., the author of Some queries to the Protestants, and Webster were the same man, Todd was more forthright:

Todd was correct in supposing that the author, or rather the translator, of Some queries to the Protestants was Ward. This had been established by Watt in the Bibliotheca Britannica some twenty-five years previously. Had Todd's reference to Ward, and his scepticism about the relevance of Webster, been heeded by the British Museum's cataloguers, no confusion need ever have arisen. As it was, Peck's query about Webster had set a hare running which resulted in the creation of a fictitious ‘Thomas Webster’ in the records.

Milbourne's ‘Mr Webster of Linne’ was evidently a man from King's Lynn who challenged the validity of Anglican orders. He was almost certainly the Revd Mordaunt Webster (1636–92), vicar of All Saints’, King's Lynn, and resident thorn in the flesh of the Norwich diocese. Despite being a clergyman of the Church of England, holding not only the appointment at All Saints’ but also the post of schoolmaster in St Clement Danes in London, Webster had spent some time at the Jesuit college of St Omer in the last years of Charles ii's reign. He had returned to England on the accession of James ii, and by late 1686 was proselytising for the Roman Catholic cause in the King's Lynn area under the protection of the king himself. He even arranged a meeting with his own bishop (William Lloyd of Norwich) in August 1687, at which he hoped to prove that salvation could not be found in the Church of England. This was a meeting in which the ‘validity of Anglican orders was a crucial element’ – and which, as both parties later reported, was so ill-tempered that it nearly came to blows.Footnote ³⁵ It is difficult to imagine what other Webster of King's Lynn Milbourne, as a loyal ‘presbyter of the diocess of Norwich’, could have had in mind.

It seems therefore that the identification of T. W., author of the 1687 translation of the Assertio, as ‘Thomas Webster’ came about as the result of a series of assumptions and inferences. Starting from the reasonable assumption that the translator was the same T. W. who wrote other anti-Protestant works from London in the late 1680s, the title of Milbourne's tract (wrongly assumed by Peck to be a refutation of T. W.'s Some queries to Protestants) was used to supply the surname Webster. That T. stood for Thomas was a safe bet, given that name's historic popularity in England. The resulting amalgam ‘Thomas Webster’ was subsequently credited with another of T. W.'s works, the Assertio translation. But he was a figment of bibliographical imagination who never existed.Footnote ³⁶