On 3 July in the year 1587, a man called Gulielmus Laurus, Eboracensis, that is, presumably, William Laurel from York, arrived in Rome as a pilgrim.Footnote ¹ The entry relating to him in the pilgrim book of the Venerable English College is squeezed between two others, both of which say ‘mansit diebus 8’, this being the normal length of time that free lodging was offered to visitors. It may thus be inferred that he also stayed for eight days, and also, that he was a Catholic. His life is otherwise attested in his own Latin verse, and in a letter from the Belgian humanist, neo-Latin poet and Bishop of Antwerp, Laevinus Torrentius, to Jean Matal in Cologne which confirms his recusant identity.Footnote ² Like many neo-Latin poets, part of what he writes is vers d’occasion, saluting his friends, or honouring his patrons, but a good deal of it is also autobiographical, reflecting upon the condition of English Catholics, and the difficulties of exile. He was heir to the epigrammatic tradition of Martial, and like the Roman poet, reflects on his own circumstances, and as a result, he expresses the practical difficulty of life as an exile with unusual vividness. Though in his published work, Laurus always describes himself as ‘Anglus’, he appears in a collection of neo-Latin verse put together in eighteenth-century Venice by one François Noël,Footnote ³ now in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, as ‘Gulielmus Laurus Belga’. This is presumably an error which arose because he lived in Belgium for a significant part of his life, and offers another clue as to his biography.Footnote ⁴

Quite a number of English Catholics responded to the accession of Elizabeth by choosing exile. There was a major exodus of academics who refused to take the Oath of Supremacy after 1561, many of whom sought work in Louvain. More unusually, Nicholas Sanders’ mother and siblings also settled at Louvain in the 1560s. Other important centres for English Catholics in the Elizabethan era were Douai, where William Allen founded a college in 1570 after a period at Louvain, and the Venerable English College in Rome, founded 1579. Jane Dormer, Duchess of Feria, was a magnet for distressed English Catholics in Spain after 1559, as was her grandmother, Lady Hungerford, who lived in Louvain from 1558. Katy Gibbons has shown that there was an extensive English community in Paris by the 1580s.Footnote ⁵

As Liesbeth Corens demonstrates, English recusants developed convents, colleges, and networks, and precariously-constructed systems, especially in Belgium and Northern France, whereby recusants in England channelled funds to support English Catholics abroad.Footnote ⁶ Laurus, however, seems not to have been able to tap into these networks, which, when he went to Continental Europe in the 1570s or 80s, were still in an early stage of development. The English College at Valladolid was founded in 1589, the College of St Omer was not founded until 1593, and the first English convent, at Brussels, was founded in 1599.

The unhappiness which is visible in many of Laurus’s poems may also stem in part from the fact that to early modern perceptions, exile was stigmatizing. William Cecil writes warningly to a recusant, Thomas Copley, of ‘the infamy that wilful exile doth bring, to be accompted, if not a traitor, yet a companion of traitors and conspirators, a man subject to the curses and imprecations of zealous good subjects, your native countrymen’.Footnote ⁷ Even St Robert Southwell admits that ‘to be a vagabond and fugitive was the Curse of Cain, a sordid punishment to suit his crime’.Footnote ⁸ While the freedom to practice one’s religion or to receive a Catholic education might indeed be good and sufficient reason to go abroad, an exile’s motives were always suspect; there was always the possibility that he was running away from some kind of trouble. Thus Milton writes of the Catholic exile William Barclay, ‘as for that which Barclay, in his ‘Image of Minds,’ writes concerning the horrible and barbarous conceits of Englishmen in their religion, I deem it spoken like what he was, a fugitive papist traducing the island whence he sprung’.Footnote ⁹ Milton was stung by Barclay’s comment on the tendency of Protestants to secede from the established church, and it is clear that his use of ‘fugitive’ carries overtones not of a refugee from persecution, but of ‘renegade’.

The first date we have for William Laurus is that he was in Rome in 1587. There are two ways of reading the information we have about the chronology of his life. If, as a Catholic, he had left York for the continent in 1586/7, this would make considerable sense. The authorities were actively persecuting York Catholics in 1586, the year of the terrible death of St Margaret Clitherow, in response to the rise in recusancy in York through the 1570s, when seminary priests were evidently successful in converting a number of the better sort (of whom Margaret Clitherow was one).Footnote ¹⁰ J. C. H. Aveling, in Catholic Recusancy in the City of York, observes that ‘from about 1569-70 there began to appear in the city a very small but definite and well instructed group of Catholic recusants’, whose numbers increased dramatically through the 1570s, due to a combination of factors: availability of Louvain books, apostolically-minded recusant prisoners, and undercover seminary priests from Douai.Footnote ¹¹ Between 1582 and 1589, fifteen seminary priests, together with four Roman Catholic laymen, were executed on Knavesmire, the York equivalent of Tyburn.Footnote ¹² An anonymous ‘Yorkshire Recusant’s Relation’ from the 1580s confirms the climate of fear in the city in 1585-6.Footnote ¹³ However, the name Laurus does not appear in the lists of York recusants: it might be an alias, chosen because of the association of laurels with poetry, though this is perhaps the less likely in that Robert Turner (d. 1599), in a poem addressed to the author, remarks on its felicitousness: ‘poëta es/Conveniens etenim nomen et omen habes’ (You are a poet: truly, this is suitable; you have the name and the sign).Footnote ¹⁴ Turner would not, I suggest, have written this sentence if Laurus was an assumed name, so perhaps Laurus/Laurel managed to avoid discovery, or perhaps he was not from the city of York itself, but from a family somewhere in the West Riding.

William Laurus’s verse sheds some light on his background, particularly a long poem, De Aerumnosa auctoris vita (‘on the author’s unfortunate life’). Quite apart from the fact that the capacity to write fluent Latin verse suggests a privileged background, Laurus indicates he was brought up in comfortable circumstances:

The ‘war’ Laurus refers to is the Dutch revolt against Spanish rule. In 1587, Philip II’s forces were consolidating their control over the southern half of the country.

Laurus thus stresses that it was religion alone, not lack of prospects at home, which took him overseas. The next evidence for his existence is two years later; a letter which the bishop of Antwerp, Laevinus Torrentius (Liévin van der Beke) wrote on 25 July, 1589, to Jean Matal, who was an exceedingly learned jurist and textual scholar in Cologne.Footnote ¹⁶ The career of Jean Matal is a good illustration of the type of life for which Laurus seems to have been aiming, and of the uncertainty which was involved in securing employment of that kind. Born in France, he studied at Dôle, Freiburg, and more than one Italian university. While in Bologna, he encountered a Spanish canon lawyer called Antonio Agustín, who took him on as a secretary and subsequently employed him as a research assistant. Eventually he struck out on his own, and moved to the Low Countries, where he came into contact with associates of Georg Cassander in Cologne. It was there that he eventually established himself. Irenic by temperament, he was deeply affected by the confessional divisions of the times, and like other contemporaries, turned to scholarship as a means to escape and bridge that divide. So the essential first step, clearly, for a man who aspired to this sort of life, was to acquire a patron. Torrentius, who presumably met Matal when he was in the Low Countries, was, in recommending Laurus, probably conscious that his friend had similarly been dependent on luck and contacts when he was a young man.

Torrentius’s letter of recommendation reads much like the letter of recommendation an academic of today would write. It introduces William Laurus as an exile from Britain on account of religion. Torrentius avers that he is highly educated, and his problems are not of his own making. He then explains that given the political situation, he is not himself in a position to do anything for the man, and he wonders if his Cologne friend could find him a teaching post of some kind. Antwerp had been wrested from the Protestants in 1585 by the Duke of Parma, and William the Silent’s Protestant republic was regrouping in the north Netherlands with Amsterdam as their new capital. Torrentius, who had been appointed bishop of Antwerp in 1576, was not actually installed in his see until 1587. 1588, of course, was the year of the Armada, in which the Spanish land forces in the southern Netherlands, commanded by Parma, were deployed to give aid to the Spanish fleet, so in 1589, Antwerp must have been going through difficult and uncertain times.

Laurus’s own account in ‘De aerumnosa … vita’ says that he had hoped to study in Belgium, but left due to ongoing hostilities.Footnote ¹⁷ He therefore crossed the Alps, came down into the plain of the Po, and traversed the Euganean Hills, just south of Padua, heading for Venice, where he marvelled at the wealth of the city. He next crossed the Apennines in order to visit Rome. If this is the visit mentioned by the pilgrim book, it took place in 1587, and if he was going on foot and spending some time in each locality, he had probably been travelling on the continent for about a year. After a visit to Rome, he went to Loreto as a pilgrim, and from thence down to Naples. He then went northwards to Genoa, took ship for Sicily, and then visited Spain, again by ship: the ‘urbs Bethis’ he also mentions is probably Seville. He went north from Andalucia to Compostella, then crossed over the Pyrenees into France. Then he returned to Italy:

This narrative might possibly be pieced together with the external evidence as follows: Laurus arrived in the southern Netherlands perhaps in 1585, intending to study, and perhaps ultimately teach, at a Belgian university centre such as Louvain or Liège, both of which were much frequented by English Catholics. This plan was interrupted by his mistrust of the local political situation, and he went on his travels. His visit to Venice was apparently sightseeing, and he does not mention visiting the university town of the Veneto, Padua, though it was frequently visited by Englishmen.Footnote ¹⁹ But we can see from the record in the Venerabile that he visited Rome as a pilgrim, and many, though not all, of the cities he mentions thereafter were notable pilgrimage sites, notably Loreto and Compostella. Travelling in the dress of a pilgrim, with a long coat, scrip, and girdle, was the cheapest possible way to get around in Catholic Europe.Footnote ²⁰ He passed through Antwerp in 1589, where he solicited the interest of Torrentius, in the course of his long journey from northern Spain through France and eventually to Italy.

However, there is some difficulty with this reconstruction, principally created by his reference to ‘two lustra’. A lustrum is five years, though the phrase ‘two lustra’ does not necessarily have quite the precision of ‘ten years’, since ‘lustrum’ can mean merely ‘a period of several years’. But since he was writing in 1595 at the latest (the date at which this poem was first published), in this reconstruction of events, this period of prosperity in Italy can only have lasted for six years at most, since it has to be fitted in between the 1589 letter, placing him in Antwerp, his subsequent extensive travels, and 1595. This seems distinctly on the short side for two lustra. Additionally, someone who had decided to go from Compostella to Italy would more reasonably head towards the French Riviera and cross into Italy along the coast road, rather than go to Antwerp before striking south, and slogging over the Alps, which would be about twice as far (though of course, he might have been wandering aimlessly from one city to another). But an alternative reconstruction of this exiguous evidence is that the visit to Rome mentioned in the poem is not the visit of 1587, and in fact, Laurus’s first arrival in Belgium should be moved back in time to something more like 1576/7. Since the Dutch revolt was well under way by that time –– the so-called ‘Spanish Fury’ (the sack of Antwerp with the loss of some 8,000 lives), took place in 1576 –– Laurus’s comment about war in Belgium would be just as relevant in the 1570s. Equally, recusants were already being persecuted in York in that decade. As we will see, his poems suggest that by 1595 he no longer considered himself a young man, which may be a reason to favour the earlier date.

But in any case, mysteriously out of employment, and having paid a visit to Rome as a pilgrim, Laurus left Italy once more after 1587, crossing the Alps again, and descending into war-torn Belgium,

This may be the occasion of his seeking the help of Torrentius in finding a permanent post two years later. In fact, the sequence of Laurus’s publications suggests that after 1589, he did indeed develop a connection with Cologne, since it is where almost all his verse was published, and with Jean Matal, since his major collection, Harmonia Laurea, includes a congratulatory poem by Matal.Footnote ²² It is obviously significant that the first of these publications, in 1593, is a poem dedicated, with grateful thanks, to Levinus Torrentius: Ad reverendiss. dominvm Laevinvm Torrentivm, Antvverpiens. Episcopum virtute & doctrinà clarissimum, & Musarum in Belgica Maecenatem vnicum. Subsequently, he published a formal elegy addressed to the University of Cologne in 1596, which lays stress on the university’s Catholic orthodoxy, and suggests that he established a connection with that institution.Footnote ²³

By 1595, according to Harmonia Laurea, he had found another Maecenas. His collection is dedicated to this individual, named as Carolus Billaeus, and described as eques auratus and counsellor to Ernst of Bavaria (who was Prince-elector-archbishop of Cologne from 1583 to 1612). This was Charles Billée, a privy counsellor in Liège from 1591, and from 1594, a knight, whom Torrentius mentions several times in his correspondence, engaged in various diplomatic duties.Footnote ²⁴ He died in 1606, and his distinguished career is thus summed up by the Liège antiquarian Théodose Bouille:

It is far from clear whether by 1595, Laurus was attached to the household of Billée, and therefore residing in Liège, or based in Cologne. The fact that François Noel later thought that he was a Belgian may suggest that the last phase of his career that we know of was in Liège.

Apart from Laurus’s own dedication to Billée, Harmonia Laurea (1595) is prefaced with a series of poems addressed to the author by various hands, in traditional humanist style, which give a suggestion of his range of acquaintance, without enabling us to answer the question of where he was living. Only one of them was British, Robert Turner, who was a Scot by descent, though born in Devon. He was a rather similar type of man to Laurus, an academic and rhetorician, though unlike him, he became a priest. He taught rhetoric, first at Douai and subsequently at other colleges. In 1595, he was teaching at the Jesuit college in Ingolstadt, a position he attained through the influence of Cardinal Allen, and he also became a member of the privy council of Wilhelm, duke of Bavaria. Later, he was made canon of Breslau in Silesia, and secretary for the Latin tongue to the Archduke Ferdinand. He was the editor of the literary remains of St Edmund Campion, among other works, and also wrote public laudations of important individuals on appropriate occasions, part of the duty of a professor of rhetoric. He published a laudation of Ernst of Bavaria when that prince became Archbishop of Liège in 1584, though this can hardly have served to introduce him to Laurus, since it was published about a decade before Laurus was drawn into the orbit of Charles Billée.Footnote ²⁶

Most of the other poets who write in Laurus’s praise are fairly obscure, though mostly known to history: François Feuardent (1539-1610) was a Franciscan theologian who spent most of his life in Paris, Jean Matal (1510-1597) was professor at Cologne, Jean Polit (1554-1601) was secretary and historiographer to Ernst of Bavaria from 1588 (another link with Charles Billée’s milieu), and Wilhelm Salzmann (n.d.) was a writer and translator based in Cologne, as was Wilhelm Mai (n.d). Johannes Fabricius (n.d.; self described as a doctor of medicine), may possibly be identifiable with the Lusatian-German poet Johannes Fabricius Bescoviensis, who published between 1577 and 1602. Wilhelm Mai, who contributes a poem to Harmonia Laurea, also translated François de Coster’s Enchiridion Controversiarum into German, and this translation includes among its front-matter seven poems by William Laurus, of a fiercely anti-Protestant nature. Their titles include ‘On the various horrible deaths of the heresiarchs’, ‘on the contentions of the heresiarchs amongst themselves’, and ‘on the discord of the sects’. Catholics frequently commented on the disunity of the Protestants; it was precisely this which led Milton to write so bitterly about John Barclay.Footnote ²⁷

The gratulatory poetry in Harmonia Laurea mostly indicates nothing more complex than that Laurus was well regarded by French, South Netherlandic and German Catholic contemporaries, but a couple are of interest. Fabricius compares Laurus directly with the Ovid of Tristiae: His poem opens:

Ovid was exiled by the all-powerful emperor Augustus; though he was by no means blameless; in his poems from Pontus, on the bleak shores of the Black Sea, he reiterates again and again that his punishment was disproportionate to his offence. Robert Turner similarly focuses on the sadness of Laurus’s story, and also on his own response, which is conditioned by the fact that he shared Laurus’s position as an exile from England. The fact that ‘Tristia’ is the first word of the poem in itself points the reader towards Ovid:

Turner seems to suggest that, Laurus, like Ovid, will become famous as a poet writing about exile. He strikes notes familiar in recusant writing; advocating stoic endurance of a sad and difficult present, and hoping for a better future, meaning the restitution of Catholic worship in England.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Laurus is that he did not, as far as we know, try to associate himself with one of the English colleges abroad. Taking priestly orders would have given him a means of living and a social context, and there is no suggestion in his writing that he had ever married. His writings, however, suggest that he was ambitious to make his name as a poet, and to find employment either in a university, or attached to some magnate, which squares with the contextual information we have about him:

A few English Catholic exiles managed to make a living by the pen; Rowland Williams, a native of Worcester, apparently managed to scratch a living in mid-seventeenth century Paris by writing occasional verse,Footnote ³¹ but generally, even quite prolific neo-Latin poets wrote to supplement a basic income from some other source – the Scot George Crichton (1554-1611), for example, was a very prolific writer of vers d’occasion (thirty-four items survive), but he was also Professor of Civil Law at the University of Paris.Footnote ³² Laurus’s chosen path in life was not likely to be a smooth one, and these lines suggest that he realised as much.

His self-positioning in his verse as a lonely exile is an unusual one for an Englishman. Most English Catholics resident on the continent did not dwell on exile from England; the pain they experienced was more often redirected into longing for their heavenly reward, in such works as the widely-circulated ‘Jerusalem my happy home’ (a reading of ‘exile’ which is enforced by the wording of the hymn ‘Salve, Regina’).Footnote ³³ Liesbeth Corens observes in Confessional Mobility and English Catholics in Counter-Reformation Europe that ‘Catholics did not understand physically leaving their country as breaking all ties with it in order to embrace the life of an isolated wanderer’.Footnote ³⁴ She cites substantial evidence in support of this statement which suggests that most recusants on the continent networked with other English people in one way or another. Laurus, however, seems to have associated primarily with continental intellectuals, and he does position himself as an exile. The poems addressed to him, quoted above, are direct evidence that his contemporaries responded to him as an exile. He is therefore an interesting witness to the variety of recusant experience, since he is an Elizabethan Catholic who went to Europe without, apparently, having any connections which would enable him to access the networks of mutual support which Corens has identified, other than briefly as a pilgrim. He is thus a voice for a particularly obscure group of English Catholics abroad. There is an interesting parallel to Laurus’ self-positioning in the work of another Latin poet, Elisabeth Jane Weston, who was English by descent, but taken to Prague as a young child. Like Laurus, she used Latin verse to attract patronage. Though she never set foot in England as an adult, she repeatedly self-identifies as an Englishwoman, other writers always describe her as English, and she attempted to attract attention in England: she wrote to her patron Martin von Baldhoven, indicating that she would have much preferred to live in England, were there not (unstated) reasons why she could not ― presumably, these include her religion.Footnote ³⁵ It is therefore interesting that like Laurus, she measures herself against Ovid in order to represent herself as an exile, and this stance is accepted and even reinforced in a poem addressed to her by Sir John Stradling in 1607: ‘just as the poet Naso once sought to placate Caesar’s wrath with his sad songs …so [you] …with experience of a similar lot, do similarly.Footnote ³⁶

Harmonia Laurea is divided into three sections. The first consists of elegies on the sorrows of the Catholics, ending with his long poem on his own misfortunes. The second brings together elegies on a variety of subjects from an attack on Protestant views of the Blessed Virgin to the praise of his patron Charles Billée’s mansion on the Scheldt. In the third section, called Sylvae, many of the poems are short epigrams. Hoyt Hudson observed that the epigram was the form of poetry most often taught in sixteenth-century English schools.Footnote ³⁷ It was a popular genre in the late sixteenth century. Thomas More was among the earliest English writers to write epigrams influenced by Martial, and Thomas Parkhurst, bishop of Norwich, invoked More’s reputation as a writer as the precedent for his own publication of his Ludicra in 1573.Footnote ³⁸ More’s contemporary and friend John Leland also wrote epigrams, which were eventually printed in 1589. However, it is the Scottish neo-Latinist George Buchanan (1505-1582) who may be particularly relevant to Laurus, since his epigrams, first published in 1584, were very widely read by contemporaries, and many of them pointed their satire at Catholics: Laurus, similarly, aims many of his poems at Protestants and Protestantism, so he may be responding to Buchanan’s shifting of the subject-matter of the epigram from bawdry and character assassination to religious satire.Footnote ³⁹

Laurus’s verse suggests several things about him; he was ambitious for fame as a poet, he was vehemently Catholic, and he was soured by his misfortunes. However, he found music a consolation, since he writes:

He also addressed verse to two musicians known to him, an Italian called Mansuetus Vignola, whose place of work is unknown, and a German called Walram Tummler, who was a canon of Utrecht.Footnote ⁴¹ Two of his more personal poems suggest the stress and difficulty of being an outsider in a strange country. These verses seem to strive for light mockery, but the tortured back-and forth movement of Laurus’s argument in the longer of the two conveys anger and humiliation, a response to the heartbreaking impossibility of getting patrons to keep their promises.

In a much-quoted line of Horace’s Ars Poetica (line 139), ‘the mountains travail, and a silly mouse is born’. But in Laurus’s adaptation of this trope, Pindus does not even produce so much as a mouse, but merely breaks wind. Ventosi are people who are either fickle, or puffed up with pride, but the word derives from ventus, ‘a wind’. The poem then turns on the distinction between a light, or insignificant breeze (or breath), aura, and gold, aurum. It also relates to a variety of Latin idioms to do with wind. Ventis verba dare, to give words to the wind, is to break a promise, vento vivere, is to to live on air, to live on promises. That is the subject of this poem; the mere spoken words, carried by a breath, which reward a painfully composed poem, are the promises that went unkept. Laurus published much of his verse in more than one edition. ‘De Musarum Exilio’ first appeared dedicated to Lievinus Torrentius,Footnote ⁴³ while the Elegy ‘On Nothing’ was also separately printed,Footnote ⁴⁴ as were his Sylvae.Footnote ⁴⁵ ‘A Hundred Cities of Italy’ was published in a long form in Cologne, and as a single sheet, the following year, in Douai.Footnote ⁴⁶ This might suggest that his compositions were the result of considerable effort, which might help to account for the bitterness of these verses. Another verse aims at humour, but strikes a somewhat sour note:

The Sylvae also includes a sequence of scornful epigrams addressing a youthful Calvinist minister, and more generally, the idea of Protestant ministers as self-promoted, ignorant whippersnappers.Footnote ⁴⁸ This tends to support the view that Laurus was on the Continent by the 1570s, since he seems to have considered himself middle-aged when he wrote these poems early in the 1590s. The fact that ministers might consider themselves licensed to teach without having had a lengthy formation is a theme addressed by other recusant contemporaries; notably by the elderly Swithin Wells, facing execution in 1591:

Much of Laurus’s verse either decries Protestantism, or defends the Catholic faith. Perhaps the quirkiest of the poems purports to describe an incident in the life of the interrogator and torturer Richard Topcliffe who features in the Swithin Wells narrative. Topcliffe, who seems to have been a genuine fanatic, was the self-appointed scourge of the recusants, a direct employee of Queen Elizabeth.Footnote ⁵⁰ His sexual reputation was not of the best; while torturing a priest called Thomas Pormont, he indulged himself in bizarre sexual fantasies, alleging that the Queen had allowed him to touch her breasts and stomach: Pormont made a memorandum of this, as a witness to Topcliffe’s vile character, and this document, acutely embarrassing to Elizabeth’s government, was successfully transmitted to Richard Verstegan in Antwerp, who passed it to Robert Parsons in 1592.Footnote ⁵¹ As well as this witness to his general lubricity, Topcliffe’s name was also linked with sexual betrayal: the poet-priest St Robert Southwell was betrayed into Topcliffe’s hands in 1592 by Anne Bellamy, sister of Thomas Bellamy, who was sheltering him at the family home of Uxendon. Anne had been made a prisoner in the Gatehouse at Westminster in January that year, where she was seduced, or raped, by Topcliffe, and made pregnant, which gave him leverage over her.Footnote ⁵² It is possible that this also became known abroad, though Verstegan’s next report to Parsons describes Southwell’s capture without being able to put a name to the betrayer (this was known by the time of Southwell’s trial in 1595, when she testified against him, but that postdates Laurus’s poem).Footnote ⁵³ The poem is additional testimony to the loathing Topcliffe excited among Catholic contemporaries, and also to how far his evil reputation extended among recusants: Topcliffe was based in London, and there is not the slightest indication that Laurus, a Yorkshireman, ever set foot there.

As so often in early modern England, the honour of a family is deemed to reside in the sexual conduct of its female members. It is more damaging to Topcliffe to represent him as the father of a sexually incontinent daughter than to accuse him of sexual incontinence himself. It seems most unlikely that Topcliffe’s daughter was working as a prostitute in a brothel in Southwark (which is what these references to the Thames imply), if indeed he had a daughter at all: the vagueness of ‘ferunt’, which here means ‘they say’, suggests the fictionality of this narrative. However, what this odd poem does reveal is Laurus’s savage animosity towards Topcliffe, whose pursuit of Catholics passes the bounds of sanity; intent, like a bloodhound, on sniffing out imaginary Catholics, he comes upon evidence of his daughter’s unchastity, wrecks his own happiness, and demonstrates his own inadequacy as paterfamilias.

Robert Turner’s politely-expressed hope that Laurus’s name would ring down the ages has not been fulfilled. His slim volumes survive only in one or two copies in public repositories, almost all in Germany, there may of course have been other publications, now completely lost. In his own lifetime, he was by no means a complete failure. While he must have spent a year or two wandering around Catholic Europe owning no more than he could carry, he eventually found an employer in Italy and kept the job for ‘two lustra’. He was back living hand to mouth from after 1587 to the early 1590s, perhaps as long as five years, before finding a place as a protegé of a wealthy politician who was himself the servant of the emperor’s brother, Charles Billée, and in the 1590s, he acquired a social circle consisting of minor members of the respublica litterarum with whom he exchanged verses. Whether he survived his second patron’s death in 1606, and what happened to him if so, we do not know. But his verse reveals the sheer miserable difficulty of surviving as an exile if one had no friends and no contacts, the loneliness, uncertainty, and poverty. A ‘cataloge of certain English catholicks … dispersed in divers places’, written by an Elizabethan spy in 1598 and now in the State Papers, lists only seventy-seven laymen who were continental exiles, apart from a force of 200 soldiers, and a mere sixteen laywomen.Footnote ⁵⁶ Laurus’s difficult life thus sheds light on why exile was so seldom taken as an option in the Elizabethan era, except by intending priests, nuns, monks, or mercenaries, all of whom, in their various ways, had a place ready and waiting for them. Surviving as Laurus did required fortitude, determination, and a large measure of luck.

A Bibliography of the Published Works of Gulielmus Laurus

Ad reverendiss. dominvm Laevinvm Torrentivm, Antvverpiens. Episcopum virtute & doctrinà clarissimum, & Musarum in Belgica Maecenatem vnicum. Gvlielmi Lavri Angli. De Musarum exilio, et diuinae artis poëticae contemptu, qverimonia…. Coloniae Agrippinae, excvdebat Petrvs Keschedt. Anno MD XCIII. Köln : Keschedt, Peter, 1593

Hanc de nihilo elegiam, nemini exvlantivm et afflictarvm mvsarum Mecoenati vnico Gvilielmvs Lavrvs Anglus exul, et afflictus, nuncupauit…. Köln: Lambert Andreae, 1594

Gvilielmi Lavri n.p. Harmonia Lavrea, Quae ex tristi, & lepido argumento constat. Diuiditur in tres libros. Primus est Tristium Catholicorum. Secundus variarum Elegiarum. Tertius Syluarum. Coloniae Agrippinae, excvdebat Petrvs Keschedt. Anno MD XCIII. Köln : Keschedt, Peter, 1593

In: François de Coster, Enchiridion controversiarum Das ist: Streittiger Religions Puncten kurtzer begriff : darinnen auffs klärlichst und warhafftigst die vornembsten Argument un Einredt jetziger zeit Ketzern gegen die Catholischen erklert und wiederlegt werden trans. trans. Wilhelm Mai, Köln: Peter Keschedt, 1595, sigs. c1v-3v

Florentissimae, et tam avitae religionis inviolatae cvltv, qvam omnis praeclarae scientiae professione, doctorvmque virorum celebritatae Laudatissimae. academiae Coloniensi G. Lavrvs A. Poëtarum minimus Salutem, & omnem optat felicitatem…. Köln: Peter Keschedt, 1596

Gvlielmi Lavri n. A. Sylvarvm lib. Vnvs…. Köln : Johann von Mertzenich, 1597

[Geographia] Köln : Johan Bussemecher, 1608.

Centum Italiæ vrbes breuissime quoad celebritatem descriptæ [Latin verse]. Douai, Pierre Auroi, 1609 (s.sh.)