The Tixall Circle and St Monica’s

The collection of seventeenth-century recusant verse known as Tixall Poetry, from a recusant coterie centred on Tixall in Staffordshire, includes a poem of forty-four lines which has not hitherto attracted attention, titled ‘The Royal Nun’ (see appendix).Footnote ¹ I would like to suggests that it prompts consideration of the inclusion of residents of St Monica’s, Louvain as part of the Tixall coterie. The verses of ‘The Royal Nun’ are assigned to two speakers, Pulcheria and Marina, and to a ‘Chorus of Virgins’: it is in fact a reworking of two separate verse passages in Act I, and Act III, scene 2, respectively, of Nathaniel Lee’s play Theodosius or the Force of Love, published in 1680.Footnote ²

The plot is ultimately prompted by a historical event: the vow of virginity taken by the three granddaughters of the Emperor Theodosius the Great, Pulcheria, Marina and Arcadia, in 414 AD. Pulcheria, the oldest, was thirteen at the time; and the political context for this unusual manoeuvre was their father Arcadius’s untimely death. In order to safeguard the succession of their only brother, the eleven-year-old Theodosius II, Pulcheria persuaded her sisters to join her in consecrating themselves as virgins, to forestall any opportunistic usurpation of the imperial throne via marriage to one of the three. The ultimate source is chapters one and three of book IX of the Ecclesiastical History of Sozomen, which was printed in Greek as early as 1544. A Latin translation by Beatus Rhenanus was first issued in 1523,Footnote ³ and though it was not printed in English until 1720, there were several French versions by the mid-seventeenth century.Footnote ⁴

Lee, who preferred to set his plays in the past, may have encountered the story in Thomas Massinger’s The Emperour of the East, published in 1632, which is itself based on the account of Pulcheria and her siblings in the Jesuit Nicolas Caussin’s The Holy Court, translated by Sir Thomas Hawkins, and published in St Omers in 1626.Footnote ⁵ Caussin’s version is based on Sozomen, and is roughly historical. However, the plot and characterisations of Lee’s Theodosius is largely derived from incidents in le Calprenède’s long romance, Pharamond.Footnote ⁶ The revised version of the verses which is titled ‘The Royal Nun’ features Pulcheria, which the original verses do not: this suggests that the reviser was familiar with the original story, perhaps via The Holy Court (popular and widely read in recusant circles), or via Massinger’s play.

It is not uncommon for seventeenth-century coterie poets to take pre-existing verses and rework them. It is also not unusual to find reworkings which are more serious in intention than their original.Footnote ⁷ The Tixall circle had a particular connection with St Monica’s, Louvain, a house of Augustinian canonesses; and I would like to suggest that the revision of ‘The Royal Nun’ was undertaken as a result of the close connections between the Tixall poets and the canonesses of St Monica’s.

Arthur Clifford, a descendant of the Aston family, published Tixall Poetry in 1813, from manuscripts now lost, and Tixall Letters in 1815, for which the manuscript selection he made survives, and is now in the British Library.Footnote ⁸ The circle which is revealed by these poems and letters consisted of five interrelated recusant families and their friends in the mid-seventeenth century: Fowler of St Thomas, Aston of Tixall, Aston of Bellamore, Persall of Canwell, all in Staffordshire, and Thimelby of Irnham in Lincolnshire. The principal authors appear to have been the first Lord Aston of Forfar, who lived principally at Tixall, and his children: Herbert Aston of Bellamore, Gertrude Aston, and Edward Aston. Another daughter of Lord Aston, Constantia (later Fowler), was an enthusiastic collector of verse from family and friends.Footnote ⁹ Other members of the circle who are identifiable as writers and recipients of occasional verse (usually from poem-titles) include Edward Thimelby, Lady Dorothy Shirley and Sir William Pershall. Clifford, in his introduction, explained that his edition of the Tixall poems was based on material from three manuscript books, and ‘a large quantity of loose scraps of paper’, all of which have since disappeared. The verses titled ‘The Royal Nun’ were in the third of these books, poems collected by Catherine Gage, second wife of Walter Aston, the third Lord Aston of Forfar.Footnote ¹⁰

The connection between St Monica’s and the Tixall circle begins with the Thimelbys. Mary Thimelby professed at St Monica’s in 1635, taking the name Winefrid, and was joined by her sister Frances, who was clothed in 1642 and died two years later, taking her final vows on her deathbed. Another sister, Katherine Thimelby, married Herbert Aston, in 1638, and reciprocally, his sister Gertrude Aston married one of the Thimelby brothers, Henry. When both Henry and their only child died young, in or shortly after 1655, Gertrude Thimelby, née Aston, went to St Monica’s, where her sister-in-law Winefrid had been for twenty years. She became a canoness, and remained at St Monica’s for at least ten years, dying in 1668. Gertrude Aston was one of the most notable poets of the Tixall circle. Herbert, in a lengthy celebration of his sister’s gifts, wrote to her as if she were another Horace:

Katherine Aston, née Thimelby, died in 1658, after twenty years of marriage. She had had ten children, two of whom, Catherine and Gertrude, were partly brought up at St Monica’s after their mother’s death. They were perhaps the youngest of the four daughters. Catherine, known as Keat, who was physically frail and had problems with her sight, decided to become a nun, and was professed on 19 August, 1668, the year in which her aunt Winefrid Thimelby became Prioress.Footnote ¹² The younger Gertrude, known in the family as Gatt, eventually returned to her father at Bellamore, though she may not have married: certainly, she was still being addressed as ‘Gertrude Aston’ in 1690, by which time she was at least thirty-two.Footnote ¹³ Before looking at reasons for thinking why ‘The Royal Nun’ might have been known in Louvain, the extent of the connection between St Monica’s and Tixall must be addressed. Tixall Letters reveals an extensive, regular and affectionate correspondence between Winefrid Thimelby and her widowed brother-in-law Herbert Aston. Her letters make reference to communication between inhabitants of Bellamore and of St Monica’s, and to correspondence with other relatives such as Elizabeth Cottington, who was in touch with both Winifred and Herbert. Arthur Clifford claimed to have seen sixty to seventy letters from Winefrid Thimelby, and printed only a selection in Tixall Letters.Footnote ¹⁴ According to Richard White, alias Johnson, confessor to St Monica’s, in a document for 1668 written for Winefrid Thimelby, nuns were permitted to write one letter home a year, while the prioress could write twice.Footnote ¹⁵ However, Winefrid Thimelby had to report to Herbert Aston on the health, welfare, and intentions of his daughters: in practice, the distinction between private correspondence and the convent’s business could not easily be maintained.Footnote ¹⁶ The extent of the correspondence between Louvain and the Tixall circle therefore allows for the inclusion of St Monica’s in the circulation of poetry. Winefrid Thimelby’s letters, as Jenna Lay and Victoria Van Hyning have both pointed out, share the Tixall circle’s cultural reference points: her style is highly literary and richly metaphorical.Footnote ¹⁷ She also appears to have read some of the Tixall verses. She refers to Catherine as ‘this little mesinger of love’, as she returned for a time to her father’s family at Bellamore; recalling a poem, perhaps by Herbert Aston, ‘On the death of Mr P—’s little daughter’ which is preserved in Tixall Poetry , and refers to the dead child as ‘your pretty messenger of love’.Footnote ¹⁸ Mr P—is probably Sir William Pershall, husband successively of another of Herbert Aston’s sisters and another of Winefrid Thimelby’s. Gertrude Aston wrote two poems to the Pershalls on the deaths of a son and a daughter.Footnote ¹⁹ A daughter who lived (born to Frances Aston) was born in 1637, so given that Winefrid Thimelby was professed in 1635, she may well have been already in Louvain when the poem was written.

A sophisticated poem in the Tixall collection also hints that verse might have been either written at Tixall and sent to St Monica’s, or written at St Monica’s and sent back to the family in Staffordshire. It is called ‘A Sigh to St Monica’s Tears’. While any recusant might choose to write about St Monica and celebrate her role in the conversion of St Augustine, the last of the three verses indicates that it was either written by an Augustinian canoness, or in the persona of one:

The speaking voice is of one who has bidden farewell to her family, and been reborn as the ‘adopted child’ of St Monica, or rather, of the persuasive tears which softened the heart of her as yet unconverted son (the tears which are pearls also suggest that the writer was familiar with Richard Crashaw’s The Weeper, on Mary Magdalen).Footnote ²¹ Winefrid Thimelby uses the same metaphor when she writes of Gertrude Aston, à propos of her bereavements and consequent decision to become a canoness, ‘who can repine att so hapy a flood, which has raysed her to the contemplation of heaven, wher such pearlls as her teares contribute with other jewells to the ritches of that ocean of delight’; this sentence might suggest that ‘A Sigh’ was known to her.Footnote ²² The poem shows a knowledge of Augustine’s life-story and his mother’s role in it, as revealed in his Confessions. If it is not by a canoness, it is certainly by someone for whom the state of being a canoness is imaginatively present. But Gertrude Aston, an accomplished poet and for the last ten years of her life, an Augustinian canoness, would be a very possible author for it.

Byzantium was of some interest to English recusants: Pulcheria is principally noticed by recusant writers for her correspondence with Leo the Great and her role in the Council of Chalcedon (for Protestants, she is principally a model of a virtuous and successful woman ruler). One way of investigating whether her story was known in any of the English convents in exile is by looking at the names of the speakers in The Royal Nun, Marina and Pulcheria. The former is known but not common in seventeenth-century England, the latter is very unusual indeed. It is therefore worth examining Englishwomen’s names in religion, since it is reasonable to suppose that if a woman took a new name on becoming a nun, she chose that of a saint for whom she felt some special attachment. Mary Thimelby thus took the name Winefrid—that of a Cambro-British virgin martyr who was important to English recusants.Footnote ²³ A St Marina of Alexandria is named in the Roman martyrology as a virgin (June 18): she is one of the several Byzantine women saints who disguised their gender and lived as a monk, and her story is found in the Golden Legend. The name Marina was occasionally used in the English recusant community as a baptismal name, and additionally, four English Benedictines took Marina as a name in religion.Footnote ²⁴ However, I know of no seventeenth-century Englishwoman christened Pulcheria, either Catholic or Protestant, and the only Pulcheria ever to be canonised is the Theodosian princess who features in ‘The Royal Nun’, who is named in the English version of the Roman martyrology.Footnote ²⁵ It may therefore strengthen the case for thinking that ‘The Royal Nun’ was known in St Monica’s that two English Augustinian canonesses chose this name. One was a canoness of St Monica’s, Anne Tunstall, Pulcheria in religion, who professed in 1696, and the other a canoness of the Augustinian house in Paris, Elizabeth Throckmorton, who took the name Elizabeth Teresa Pulcheria when she professed in 1714.Footnote ²⁶

‘The Royal Nun’ is based on excerpts from a play with music, and like its original, assigns verses to voices (though not the same voices as in the play): a ‘Chorus of Virgins’, and two individuals, Pulcheria and Marina, while Eudosia is also named (the third sister, Arcadia, is evidently intended). In Lee’s Theodosius, we are informed near the beginning of Act One that Theodosius II and his two younger sisters, Marina and Flavilla, all intend to take vows of religion, leaving the oldest sister, Pulcheria, as empress. Towards the end of the act, Theodosia, Marina and Flavilla appear, dressed in white. The two sisters are addressed by Atticus, ‘the chief Priest’ (i.e. Patriarch of Constantinople, in succession to the great saint, John Chrysostom, who is named in the verse) and two other priests. They confirm their commitment to religious life, and immediately vanish into strict enclosure (Le Calprenède was evidently unable or unwilling to imagine a society in which vowed virgins remained actively at large in the secular world, which Pulcheria most certainly was). Theodosius is distracted from making his intended vows by, among other events, the appearance of a beautiful pagan, Athenais. She agrees to convert to Christianity in the course of Act Two, and takes the Christian name Eudosia. The first three stanzas of ‘The Royal Nun’ thus belong to a different musical moment, in Act Three, scene 2, when the newly-baptised Eudosia reappears, on her way to her confirmation. The speaking/singing voices at this point are Atticus, a chorus, and two ‘Votaries’, apparently female. Though she is merely becoming a Christian and not a nun, she is rather inexplicably addressed as if she is entering a life of seclusion and penitence.

‘The Royal Nun’ in fact makes a great deal more sense than Lee’s original lyrics, though the fact that the name Eudosia is used for the third sister in the Tixall version instead of the historically-correct Arcadia, or Lee’s name for her, Flavilla, suggests that ‘The Royal Nun’ is dependent on Theodosius and not the other way round. The modifications which have been made to the original text have a striking effect on its tone, in particular, the shift from plural to singular. In ‘The Royal Nun’, Eudosia is praised, then Pulcheria enters into dialogue with her sister Marina. Each woman has her own perspective and experience, whereas in Theodosius, a succession of male voices addresses the sisters jointly, with depersonalising effect. In the play-text, the possibility of an earthly lover is raised (though only to be rejected); ‘The Royal Nun’ excises these verses, producing the effect of a rather more mature decision.

If we then ask who might actually have been responsible for creating ‘The Royal Nun’, perhaps the most likely answer is Herbert Aston, who died in 1688/9. His own early manuscript miscellany (1634), now Beinecke MS Osborn b.4, reveals him as a reader of more secular verse than his sisters. Helen Hackett writes,Footnote ²⁷

He could easily have acquired Lee’s playtext after 1680, when it was printed. The Astons were interested in plays: Frances Boothby, author of the first play by a woman produced on the professional London stage, was an Aston connection. Herbert’s niece by marriage, Elizabeth Cottington, wrote to him at Bellamore about this forthcoming production, and about other London theatre-going in 1669, so the interest stayed with him into adult life.Footnote ²⁸ He was himself a poet, and also, a man who maintained unusually affectionate and intimate relationships with several of his female relatives. In the 1680s, St Monica’s had many fond associations for him. It had sheltered his beloved sister Gertrude and his daughter Keat during their lives, and it was still the home of his devoted correspondent, Winefrid. He is therefore a highly possible author for a text profoundly sympathetic and sensitive towards the perspectives of enclosed women.

Music and the English convents in the Low Countries

Another question I would like to raise is whether, like its original, ‘The Royal Nun’ might have been performed. The verse is simple octosyllabic rhymed couplets, a metre often used for hymns,Footnote ²⁹ and it is worth addressing the possibility that the text was created to be sung rather than merely read. For many Catholic girls, it was important to be able to sing confidently. For those who became quire nuns, training in music was absolutely necessary, and additionally, for upper-class girls who returned to the world (almost all recusant nuns were gentlewomen), singing was an elegant accomplishment. The family of Mary Wiseman, the first prioress of St Monica’s, were to some extent patrons of John Bolt, former Master of Music at the Chapel Royal, who had been music master and instructor to the Queen herself. Subsequent to his conversion, he was resident in mostly recusant families, teaching children to sing and play.Footnote ³⁰ When he was arrested on 15 March, 1594, on his way to a house where the authorities hoped to find the Jesuit John Gerard, he had just spent a week at the Wiseman home, Braddocks.Footnote ³¹ Bolt went abroad after his release and spent some time at St Omer’s. Later he went to the English Benedictine convent at Brussels, ‘to help their music, which hath been so famous’.Footnote ³²

At St Monica’s, the music was initially in the hands of its organist, Sister Mary Skidmore, and the convent’s first confessor, Father John Fenn. According to the Chronicle, ‘he was also a skilful musician in song but not in instruments, and did teach our sisters both at St Ursula’s and here before Mr Johnson came’.Footnote ³³ He died in 1613. ‘Mr Johnson’ may be an alias or a slip of the pen for John Bolt, since in 1613, Reverend Mother Wiseman induced Bolt to accept the position of organist and chaplain to St Monica’s, which he retained until his death in 1640, having served the convent for twenty-eight years.Footnote ³⁴ Bolt would obviously have been capable of composing music, and there is evidence that he considered it appropriate to encourage excellence in the convent’s musical life, as he had previously done at Brussels: the Chronicle states, ‘[he] did here set up all our music to the honour of God, teaching our sisters to sing and play on the organ’.Footnote ³⁵ The account of his death ends,

As Victoria Van Hyning has shown, our evidence for the inner lives of convents is limited and partial. She identifies the first chronicler of St Monica’s as Mary Copley: certainly, this writer has an evident interest in links with St Thomas More, and in learned women.Footnote ³⁷ She shows no sign of particular interest in music, but that does not mean that it was not important in the life of the house. St Monica’s had a pipe organ and a nun who could play it from its foundation in 1609, and St Ursula’s allowed them to take two large missals, and ‘old song books, as also some antiphonaries and versicle books’ for the new foundation.Footnote ³⁸ However, the Chronicle is silent about its musical life thereafter. Further, there is no information in Louvain records about music purchases for the convent, or about Mary Skidmore’s musical training; and Andrew Cichy, in his study of English convent music, states that the only surviving seventeenth century musical sources from St Monica’s are handwritten books of plainsong, for liturgical use.Footnote ³⁹

Cichy has observed that women brought up in seventeenth-century England could have had little experience of attending sung mass. He concluded that their musical practice was a mixture of plainsong, learned from interaction with Low Countries nuns (in the case of Louvain, from the early years at St Ursula’s), the basic mode in which the liturgy was performed, together with polyphonic motets.Footnote ⁴⁰ English nuns were familiar with religiously themed polyphonic motets sung at the offering, the elevation, and after the Mass. A number of English recusant composers were prolific writers of motets, notably William Byrd and Thomas Tallis. Richard Dering also wrote them.Footnote ⁴¹ Cichy notes, ‘having become accustomed to using polyphonic music in a devotional manner rather than to supply the necessary text of the liturgy, the nuns gave polyphony a similar place in their convents to that which it had been allocated in recusant households … domestic music could have provided the building blocks of a recusant musical language for liturgical contexts’.Footnote ⁴² Another type of devotional music with which they were familiar was hymnody. For example, the Chronicle mentions that

Some Louvain nuns emerged from demonstrably musically-literate families: apart from Mary Skidmore, who had learned to play the organ in England, Anne Evans had learned how to play the virginals. Father John Fenn, before the arrival of John Bolt, had apparently been able to teach a capella polyphonic singing. There is evidence in several English convents for the cultivation of polyphony alongside plainchant. The Brussels Benedictines, whose music was much admired, distinguished between ‘cantum’, which is plainchant, and ‘musick’.Footnote ⁴⁴ When the Sepulchrines of Liège were in their workroom, they were allowed the entertainment of hearing someone read from a pious book or telling them about a profitable example, or they could sing ‘a devout motetto’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Outsiders could not interact directly with enclosed nuns, but they could often listen to them. There were two houses of English nuns in the later seventeenth century where there is clear evidence that music was extensively cultivated. One was the Franciscan house in Bruges, where two visitors reported hearing sophisticated performances. John Walker wrote in 1671, ‘we heard a most harmonious consort of viols and violins with the organ. Then a ravishing voice of a nun singing in Italian a treble part alone, with the rest now and then keeping the chorus’. James, Earl of Perth, similarly heard ‘a hymn and a motette (although it was not a time of prayer) with the organ, violes and violins, and voices’, in 1694, so the tradition was maintained.Footnote ⁴⁶ Even more pertinently, the Augustinian canonesses of Paris rescued their convent from financial ruin in the 1650s, when revenue from England vanished due to the English revolution, through the excellence of their music, because their singing attracted charitable donations from the French nobility. The principal evidence is in Thomas Carre, Pietas Parisiensis, who explains that Cardinal Richelieu was induced to attend evensong in the convent:

The Cardinal’s patronage attracted the interest of others, and Carre estimated that by the time of writing, 1666, the convent’s income was about ten thousand livres.Footnote ⁴⁷ The citizenry of Louvain would not have been as wealthy as the Parisian nobility, but wherever the layout of the convent church permitted a lay audience to listen to the nuns, music was potentially an income stream for them, as the willingness of the Bruges Franciscans to entertain visitors suggests. St Monica’s was by no means entirely withdrawn from the world. It was a burial-place for English catholic exiles, and even prepared to take male boarders (lodging with the priest) during the English Civil War.Footnote ⁴⁸ The convent evidently maintained links with the world outside the cloister, and the note on Bolt’s teaching quoted above confirms that laypeople came to hear the nuns sing.Footnote ⁴⁹

Motets, which were normally based on Biblical texts, are repeatedly mentioned in the sources for English nuns’ music, such as they are. But one form which was rapidly gaining ground through the seventeenth century is the oratorio, or sacred dialogue. The form can be briefly defined as a musical setting of a sacred text which is presented un-staged and is either dramatic, unfolding entirely through dialogue, or narrative-dramatic, with a narrator. The text is normally verse, and in the vernacular, and the form originated in Italy.Footnote ⁵⁰ Pietro della Valle wrote a brief, unstaged sacred dialogue in 1640, with a duration of about twelve minutes, which he called an oratorio.Footnote ⁵¹ The witness of John Walker quoted above indicates that the Bruges Franciscans had acquired Italian music for voice and chorus by 1671, so there is a possibility of influence from Italian trends in Low Countries convents.

With this in mind, let us return to ‘The Royal Nun’, as possibly the libretto for a sung sacred dialogue, or to be sung to a hymn tune with soloists and a chorus. The topic of this miniature drama is the renunciation of the world in favour of a life of chastity and seclusion. What is offered to Eudosia and Marina by Pulcheria and the nuns in this exchange is a life of enclosure, regular observance (the ‘rights [i.e., rites] devine’), simple clothes and basic accommodation, the only recreation mentioned being the use of a garden. This, of course, represents the life of a seventeenth-century enclosed nun rather than that of a fifth-century Byzantine princess.Footnote ⁵² In particular, the verses emphasise the vertiginous contrast between the clothing of a princess and that of a nun:

This emphasis is in accordance with nuns’ own perspectives. The actual ceremony of clothing was an unique moment of high drama in the life of a nun, and as spectacular as resources permitted. The aristocratic Ursula Howard was clothed at St Monica’s, as follows:

An unique portrait nun-portrait, of Margaret Wake, daughter of a Catholic convert resident in Antwerp, who was clothed as a nun in the Antwerp Carmel in 1633, survives, in which she is wearing her clothing robes as Bride of Christ rather than the nun’s habit she subsequently assumed. She is wearing sumptuous cloth of silver and a great collar edged with silver lace, and has three rows of pearls round her neck, and pearl earrings.Footnote ⁵⁴ When the poet Gertrude Thimelby, née Aston, was clothed at St Monica’s in 1658, Reverend Mother Thimelby wrote an account of it to her brother-in-law:

The clothing the widow Gertrude Thimelby wore for her clothing, the gift of Lord and Lady Aston, is described in the Chronicle:

Catherine, known as ‘Keat’, presumably kept this sumptuous garment for her own clothing, which took place ten years later. These accounts and the Wake portrait, which is now at Douai Abbey, suggest the theatricality with which English nuns marked the formal transition from secular to convent life, the importance they attached to it, and also, the intimate, familial nature of this ceremony, which, where possible, involved both the future community and the birth family of the future nun, making it, like a wedding, the conjunction of two families rather than two individuals. There was necessarily an interlude while the future nun retired to be clothed in her habit: removing the elaborate garments described in these accounts would take some time. In ‘The manner of inuesting of Nouesis’ which survives for the St Monica’s daughter house of Nazareth in Bruges, after the Mass, during which the ‘bride’ communicates in her secular clothes, the hymn ‘Veni Creator Spiritus’ and three psalms were sung.Footnote ⁵⁷ After further litanies, antiphons and responses, ‘[th]e brid is vnclothed & [th]e habit put one. In meane time, they singe musicke if ther be any.’Footnote ⁵⁸ ‘Musicke’ seems to mean something other than plainchant, so this is a possible context for ‘The Royal Nun’, if it was a performance piece. A clothing was an occasion which would bring the maximum number of actual and potential well-wishers to the church. The topic is wholly suitable, and vocal music on a relevant theme is an obvious way of filling the inevitable hiatus, while intensifying the solemn emotion of the occasion.

Other late-seventeenth-century English Augustinian canonesses bear witness to the importance the clothing ceremony held for them. A manuscript of miscellaneous religious meditations in prose which, on internal evidence, was created by an English Augustinian canoness, was bought by Sir Thomas Phillips in Brussels, and from Phillips by the Irish bibliophile William O’Brien, and sold at Sotheby’s on 7 June 2017. It begins with a meditation on clothing. The Sotheby’s online auction results include an image of the first page, which reads as follows:

The rest of this text is not currently accessible, but it is evidently a detailed meditation on the moment of clothing and its significance for inner life of the canoness herself.Footnote ⁵⁹

Further, the emotional content of ‘The Royal Nun’ is very close to that of a group of poems more certainly by an Augustinian canoness: they are in the hand of Anne Throckmorton, a canoness in Paris, and probably by her. They are ‘On the yearly day of a Profession’ (an indication that nuns celebrated this anniversary), ‘For the profession of a friend’, and ‘Upon the clothing of a friend’. All three attest to the profound emotion which nuns invested in the clothing ceremony. The third, ‘Upon the clothing’, opens,

The positivity of the choice is stressed, as it is in The Royal Nun:

Similarly, in ‘On the yearly day’, she writes

The vanity, folly and uncertainty of the secular world, the intimate pleasures of devotion and the convent as a safe haven and way-station towards ultimate bliss; all these are the central themes of ‘The Royal Nun’.

Though the name of Chrysostom is evoked, appropriate to the historical setting, the spirit which presides over ‘The Royal Nun’ is that of Augustine, founder of the order to which the St Monica’s canonesses belonged. Marina says, or sings,

This neatly summarises the climax of Augustine’s Confessions, the moment of his surrender to God, as translated by Tobie Matthew:

There is another feature of ‘The Royal Nun’ which makes it relevant to the inner life of St Monica’s. Like the other English convents, it was full of interrelated women. The descendants and connections of St Thomas More were the most famous of its lineages, but Frances and Winefrid Thimelby went to Louvain together, where they found their aunt Elizabeth Clifford; and many years later, Winefrid welcomed her sister-in-law, and subsequently, her nieces Keat and Gatt there. Lady Mary Weston, who settled at St Monica’s as a laywoman, was another connection through the Astons, since she was an unmarried half-sister of the Lady Mary Weston who married the second Lord Aston.Footnote ⁶³ Reverend Mother Thimelby’s family feeling was strong. She once wrote to her brother-in-law, ‘Doe not suppose me a well mortifyed nun dead to the world; for alas tis not so; I am alive, and as nearly concern’d for thos I love, as if I had never left them, and must shar in all their fortunes whither good or bad’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Anne Throckmorton’s verses include a poem to a friend on the death of her sister, acknowledging that such grief is hard to bear, and one to her own sister, Betty.Footnote ⁶⁵ While the survival of some of Winefrid Thimelby’s letters at Tixall mean that her attachment to her family is unusually well attested, other recusant nuns similarly built networks of relatives, principally by means of correspondence, coaxing female relatives to join them, and discreetly harassing male relatives for financial support. No wonder that they circumvented the regulations on letter-writing, since it was thus that women who were out of sight on the Continent made sure that they were not out of mind. ‘The Royal Nun’ picks up on this aspect of conventual life, since its subject is not so much a single ‘royal nun’, but a trio of sisters, the oldest of whom successfully persuades both her two younger siblings to join her in her vocation. Winefrid Thimelby’s letters to her niece Gatt deploy her considerable rhetorical talent in trying to coax the girl back to St Monica’s, and similarly, another of Anne Throckmorton’s poems, ‘When my sister Betty went to England’, breathes sisterly affection and care, but also takes occasion to warn Betty that in returning to the world, she is taking a riskier, and ultimately less satisfactory, path.Footnote ⁶⁶ The drama of ‘The Royal Nun’ was played out dozens of times in early modern English convents.