By IHE Graduate Scholar Jeanne Michelle Datiles
All Saints and All Souls: twin feasts that mark the start of November. Perhaps the familiar roll call of ‘apostles, martyrs, confessors, virgins’ from the Litany of Loreto pulses in our mind when we think of All Saints. While those ancient categories still stand, they’re given depth, fleshed out, and amplified by Vatican II’s Lumen Gentium: “Everyone . . . is called to holiness. . . . All the faithful of Christ . . . are called to the fullness of the Christian life and to the perfection of charity” (§40).1 This universal call must then entail a hallowing of life wherever life is lived. This has been in the back of my mind recently as I’ve been combing through hundreds of court records of English Catholics during the sixteenth-century religious reformations, a time when traditional Catholic practice was effectively banned in England. Various strategies were adopted in attempts to remain faithful, from outward submission and tenuous compromise to vehement opposition. Regardless, English Catholics sought holiness wherever it could be found, be it at home or in prison, with others or alone.
One name appears repeatedly in the court books: Vavasour.2 Cambridge-educated with some theological training, Dr. Thomas Vavasour joined the stream of Catholic exiles who fled the country during the reign of Henry VIII’s son, Edward. After studying medicine in Venice, he returned home, married Dorothy Kent, and set up a practice in York. The Vavasours seem to have been a “power couple,” looking after the health of their patients (Dorothy was a midwife) and sustaining — or rejuvenating — the faith of other Catholics. Known for their apostolic energy, they hid priests, including the martyr Edmund Campion, and hosted clandestine Masses in their house, making their home a center of Catholic activity.3 Considered a significant threat by the authorities, Thomas was forced into hiding before finally being arrested and imprisoned.4 Since he was thought to be “inclined to seduce others [convert them],” they placed him in solitary confinement.5 He was in prison for the next decade, At times he was allowed to give medical attention to fellow prisoners, and, for a short time, was released on bail to recuperate from illness at home. That appears to be the last time Dorothy saw her husband, her attempts to see him in prison having failed.
After recovering from his illness, he remained a prisoner in Hull Castle from 1579 until his death in May 1585. While her husband was in prison and before her own imprisonment, Dorothy kept the family together, which included at least five children, and tried to continue his medical practice as best she could. As a midwife, she helped Catholic mothers not only deliver but secretly baptize their newborns. She had her own share of arrests and imprisonment and was an integral member of a group of women who were regularly brought before the High Commission, which included two of her daughters and the martyr, Margaret Clitherow. After seven years of imprisonment with several female friends, she died in Ousebridge prison in October 1587.6
Their story, of course, doesn’t end in shadow — far from it. Piecing together their family tree from various sources, we know that two of their sons followed their father’s example and went abroad for several years; both are recorded as studying for the priesthood in the English College in Douai. Over the next three generations, we can trace Vavasour women forging bonds which helped sustain extensive Catholic networks across England and Europe, some marrying into other Catholic families and others entering the English convents in exile in Europe.7 Although not officially canonized, Thomas and Dorothy Vavasour lived the universal call to holiness, their lives influencing not only their immediate world of Elizabethan York but ultimately reaching much farther, leaving a sure and lasting legacy. To the Vavasours — as much as to the Campions and Clitherows — belong the Feast of All Saints.
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1. Lumen Gentium: Dogmatic Constitution of the Church, chapter 5, “The Universal Call to Holiness,” infra 39-41.
2. Vavasours appear in several of the act books of the Court of High Commission at York as well as recusant lists, e.g. Rawlinson Mss. B452, Bodleian, Oxford.
3. Letter to Archbishop Grindal from the Privy Council, August 1581: “Campion confesseth that he was in the city of Yorck [sic] at the house of D. Vavassor [sic],” in Richard Rex, “Thomas Vavasour, M.D.”, British Catholic History (formerly Recusant History), 20:4 (1991), 447.
4. Both Vavasours were described by Archbishop Grindal as “worth nothing but willful” in reports sent to the Privy Council (Domestic, Eliz. Vol. CXVII). The earliest priest-hole in England is allegedly the one in the Vavasours’ former house in York, to the east of York Minster, ref. Michael Hodgetts, Secret Hiding Places (Pear Branch Press, Dublin: 2024), 119-120. Thomas successfully hid in this house, arguably in this priest-hole, for two days until he eventually surrendered.
5. W. Nicholson, The Remains of Edmund Grindal (Cambridge, 1843), p. 350-1, letter of Archbishop Grindal to William Cecil, Lord Burleigh, 13 Nov. 1574. Cecil and Vavasour were contemporaries at Cambridge; while a student, Vavasour was remembered as an articulate defender of transubstantiation. Grindal refers to this in the letter: “His great anchor-hold was in urging the literal sense of hoc est corpus meum, thereby proving transubstantiation…knowing his disposition to talk, [we] thought it not good to commit [Vavasour] to the castle in York [because there are other Catholics there that he might encourage] but rather to a solitary prison in…the castle at Hull, where he shall only talk to the walls.”
6. William Hutton, Notes by a Prisoner in Ousebridge Kidcote (1594) provides details about the Vavasours’ apostolate and their individual arrests, imprisonments, and deaths. Hutton himself was from the same parish and in the same prison as the Vavasours; also see Rex, 448.
7.Ten Vavasour women appear in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century convent records of the Augustinians in Louvain, the Benedictines in Cambrai and Brussels, the Poor Clares in Rouen and Dunkirk, and the Franciscans in Brussels. Their records can be found in Queen Mary, University of London’s digital project, Who Were the Nuns? A Prosopographical Study of the English Convents in Exile 1600-1800, doi: https://wwtn.history.qmul.ac.uk/ .
