Loftus The Invention of Memory

An Irish family scrapbook 1560-1934
1. Auflage 2013
ISBN: 978-1-907970-15-3
Verlag: Daunt Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 456 Seiten

From the arrival of his first ancestor in Dublin in 1560, Simon Loftus traces the fascinating story of his family's heritage in Ireland - piecing together fragments of legend and biography that span over 350 years of Irish history. The background is the colonial conquest of Ireland and the clash of religious and national identity, but the focus is close at hand, familial. The passions and eccentricities, the daily concerns and relationships, the rich dramas and anecdotes of individuals in this Ascendancy family - over eight generations - combine to form an enthralling memoir of shifting viewpoints and entertainingly inconsistent accounts of a shared past. The Invention of Memory is a profound family portrait and a sweeping history that examines the nature of recollection and how our memories are shaped by experience and time. 'Spell-binding, full of treasures and often extremely moving.' - Selina Hastings 'A series of beautifully rendered evocations of landscape, people, attitudes, emblems and events. It treats the sweep of a melancholy history with the utmost poise and discernment.' - Irish Times 'A wonderful excursion through history, illuminating more famous events of Anglo-Irish history through the delicious, inconsequential details of Simon Loftus's family.' - Matthew Fort 'A powerfully evocative mixture of biography and legend, peppered with heart-warming and heart-wrenching anecdotes.' - Financial Times 'Apart from the sheer enjoyment of Loftus's exhumations, his thoughts on the multiple uses of 'the memory of a past that never was' deserve to be pondered.' - Times Literary Supplement

Autoren/Hrsg.

Loftus, Simon

Leseproben

The manuscript of Adam’s life that so much absorbed me as a boy seemed to echo with the man himself – a resonant, somewhat daunting brogue – as he told his story in ways that brooked no contradiction. Even now, this is true. When I read that he was sent to Cambridge with an unusually generous allowance from his father, which he used to procure ‘the love and esteem of his contemporaries in the University’ and the ‘friendship with those who were most distinguished there for their virtue, learning and family interests,’10 it sounds like the old Archbishop, re-inventing his youth as a tale of earnest endeavour. The facts were otherwise. Adam’s father had died when he was a child, and the friends that he made at Cambridge included dangerous fundamentalists, intent on religious revolution.

It was a drastic break with his past, for the Yorkshire of Adam’s childhood was a stronghold of recusancy, and the tradition in which he was raised was Catholic in all but name. When his father died I think it likely that he was sent to Richmond, to lodge with his relatives Gabriel and William Lofthouse and be taught by their friend John Moore, who was master of the school that had long been associated with the Chantry of Our Lady. All three of them were priests – Gabriel had also been a monk – and they clung to traditional Catholic ways, despite the introduction of new forms of worship. They believed in the saints, prayed for the dead, sang God’s praise.11

So the youth who set off for Cambridge, a year or two after the founding of Trinity College, was moving from the heartland of the old faith to a place in ferment, seething with radical ideas. King Henry was dead – succeeded by his clever but sickly son, Edward VI – and the Council of Regency was packed with men committed to reform on the continental model. This meant that Court and university were briefly in accord as to the future of the English Church, for Cambridge had long been a centre of Protestant debate and a magnet for reformers from Germany and Geneva. ‘Germany’ had even become a nickname for the White Horse Inn, where they gathered to discuss the teachings of Luther and Melancthon, Zwingli, Calvin and Martin Bucer. Those debates shaped the views of a brilliant generation – including a future archbishop, Adam Loftus, and his future friend Thomas Cartwright.12

For men such as these, educated in the bracing air of Cambridge radicalism, reading the Bible in English and discovering the primitive force of scripture, Puritanism was the breath of belief. ‘And there appeared unto them cloven tongues as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost and began to speak with other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance.’13 That sense of the Word, of the purifying flame, is hard to capture in the subsequent tangle of Adam’s life but it was, I feel sure, the spark that fired him14, when he was young.

Those exciting days ended quite suddenly, in 1553, with the death of King Edward at the age of fifteen. Edward’s half-sister Mary (whose mother and husband were Spanish) reversed his radical changes with Catholic vengeance, and burned those who refused to recant their heresy. Adam left Cambridge without taking his degree, was ordained as a priest and hid himself in the country. He was appointed to the parish of Outwell in Norfolk – thirty miles north of Cambridge – and then moved again to Gedney, in the fens of Lincolnshire. He stayed there, in quiet obscurity, while more notable dissenters were torched at the stake.15 It took five years of apparent conformity before the accession of Protestant Elizabeth ended this reign of terror.

Yet somehow in these years of dangerous upheaval the young Adam Loftus came to the notice of a great and cunning politician, his lifelong protector. For lurking in the shadows of this story, unmentioned in any account of Adam’s early life, is the man ‘to whom I was best known, even from my youth,’ William Cecil.16

None of the flamboyant favourites of the Elizabethan Court exercised greater or more enduring power than this ruthless chameleon. A convinced reformer with close connections to Cambridge, Cecil had risen from relatively humble origins to hold high office under King Edward. He survived the perilous transition to the following reign, conformed to Catholicism and served the new Queen, but even before Mary died he was in secret communication with her sister Elizabeth. One of her first decisions as Queen was to appoint him Secretary of State.

I have no idea how preacher and politician came to meet, or what so impressed William Cecil about the unknown Yorkshireman. But the evidence is clear, as Adam always acknowledged, that this was the man ‘whom in all my good causes I have found a special patron and defender.’ I think it was Cecil who found a quiet parish in his native Lincolnshire where the young Loftus could hide from persecution when Mary was on the throne, and then, when the climate changed, set him on the path to preferment – by recommending him as chaplain to his friend the Earl of Sussex, the Queen’s Lord Lieutenant in Ireland.

Adam Loftus embarked for Dublin in June 1560, and it seems that he seldom looked back. He certainly never returned to the small stone house on the ridge at Swineshead where he was born. But many years later, when he was grand, he was granted a coat of arms: trefoils for the shamrock of Ireland, a chevron of ermine for his robes of state. The crest was a boar’s head, snarling against the sky – punning reminder of the place he had left behind.

Notes

10 ‘From the Grammar school he was sent to Trinity College in Cambridge; where his Father gave him a more than ordinary allowance, which the youth had discretion enough to use in the manner most to his advantage. He procured to himself the love and esteem of his contemporaries in the University, and founded a friendship with those who were most distinguished there for their virtue, learning and family interests.’ , SL Archive. Adam must have arrived at Trinity shortly after its foundation in 1546, but the college records of admissions in the early years are defective, and the evidence for his time there as an undergraduate is based on later narratives and implied from the fact that he took his doctorate there, in 1566.

11 Gabriel Lofthouse had been a senior monk at Kirkstall Abbey and was granted a pension of £6 when his monastery was dissolved in 1539. He then became a chantry priest at Richmond. In his will dated 4 August 1552 he left eight pence ‘for singing and saing suche suffraiges as are appoynted by the kings majesties proceedings to be song or said for the souls of the departed’. William Lofthouse was chaplain to the Guild of St John, which administered the best endowed of the eight chantries associated with the Parish church of St Mary, in Richmond. It maintained its own Guild House nearby and its chaplain was comfortably rewarded. William was granted an annual pension of £5-6s-8d at the time of the Dissolution and was buried in Richmond on 16 Jan 1562. He left two pence to ‘everye scoler which use to sing Sondais and holidays in the quere’ and a shilling ‘to everye prest being present at my buriall’. He bequeathed ‘a clothe of reade say with roses in yt’ to the high altar of Richmond Church and ‘a clothe with the image of Saynt Lawrence’ to the altar of St John – and requested that he be buried next to his brother Gabriel, ‘in the porche of Saynt John in Richmond Churche’. The brothers Lofthouse made small bequests of money to the poor of the town – and to relatives, god-children, servants – but owned almost nothing by way of material possessions. Gabriel left ‘a wod spone tipped with silver’ to one of his fellow priests, a ‘long gowne’ to another and ‘his shirte’ to a third, the schoolmaster John More. William left ‘one feddar bed and one quyshing [cushion] which was my brother Sir Gabriells’ to his nephew Christopher Cooke. John More acted as his executor. , Surtees Society, Vol 29 (1853).

12 Martin Bucer arrived in Cambridge in 1549 and taught there until 1551. Thomas Cartwright enrolled as a sizar (poor scholar) at Clare Hall, at the age of thirteen, in 1547 – before transferring to St John’s College, three years later. Adam Loftus was a couple of years older. ‘The normal undergraduate came to Cambridge when he was 14 or 15, or even younger, and the general course of studies in arts lasted for seven years, though only a minority of those who entered completed it.’ J.C.P. Roach (ed.), Victoria County History, Vol 3 (1959). Cartwright graduated BA in 1553 / 4, as did Cartwright’s future scourge, John Whitgift – afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury.

13 Tyndale’s translation of the Acts of the Apostles was read by many reformers (mostly in the version known as ‘Matthew’s Bible’) as an allegory of their own calling, burning with the Pentecostal flame. There was a strong political undercurrent to this Puritan ecstasy, for Tyndale’s translation was intended to be read by ploughboys – itself a radical notion – and he himself was executed for his beliefs, in 1536.

14 The quotations from Adam Loftus’s speech at the induction of Walter...