Rookwood family papers 1606-1761

摘要

The history of early modern English Roman Catholicism never loses its romance or its fascination. This volume of papers relating to the Rookwood family of Coldham Hall at Stanningfield, in Suffolk, is not short on either of those qualities. A notorious recusant family, the house of Rookwood sent eight of its sons and daughters abroad to Catholic religious orders and the priesthood during the seventeenth century. The most famous member of the family, Ambrose Rookwood, met a traitor's death in 1606 for his involvement in the Gunpowder Plot conspiracy. Near the end of the century another Ambrose - this one a Jacobite conspirator - was also executed, for taking part in a plot against the life of William III. One of the papers collected in this volume records his defiant statement from the scaffold: 'If it be a Guilt to have Complied with what I thought, and still think to have been my Duty, I am Guilty. No other Guilt do I Owne.' It is unclear why the date range on the front cover begins in 1606 when the earliest document, a plea to the Attorney General against recusancy fines, dates from 1636. The book, though, is a window into the heart of the religious struggle in early modern England, with a bearing on some of its most important episodes, going back as far as the treason of 1605, and the date range was perhaps chosen with this in mind.