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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 September 2015
Friar Dominic, the title character of The Spanish Fryar (1681), is usually regarded as a ‘crude caricature of Catholicism,’ an advertisement for Dryden's Protestantism during the Popish Plot crisis of 1680. But there is another way of looking at him. One may ask, why does Dryden make this wicked priest a Dominican at a time when Jesuits are being singled out for vituperation? Why does he call him Friar Dominic, have him refer to Saint Dominic as a ‘sure Card’ who never fails ‘his Votaries,’ and plainly term him ‘this Jacobin’ (II.iii.2), another name for a Dominican? Evidently, he wants the reader to notice that his satire is aimed at one particular Order, not all Catholic Orders. As William Prynne noted long before, ‘no Protestants’ ever wrote ‘so bitterly against these Popish orders as themselves do one against the other.’ Dryden's choice seems odd, since Dominicans were a handful compared to the 120 Jesuits, 80 Benedictines and 55 Franciscans in the English mission. They were not even worth the historian's numbering. Besides this, Cardinal Philip Howard, Dryden's uncle by marriage, was an eminent Dominican under whose aegis Dryden would place two of his sons after the 1688 Revolution, when they went to Rome to serve the Pope.
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9 ‘John Speke to his brother, Hugh Speke,’ London, June 14, 1679, CSPD 1679–1680, p. 176.
10 Warner, The History of English Persecution of Catholics and the Presbyterian Plot, 2 vols., ed. Birrell, T. A., trans. Bligh, John S.J. (London: for the Catholic Record Society, 1953), 1: p. 263.Google Scholar A portrait of St. Thomas White faces the title page. Birrell notes that Matthew Clay had a brother, Daniel Clay of Nottinghamshire, who was ‘a Franciscan of the Hungarian Province, incorporated with the English Province in 1655.’
11 John Speke, CSPD 1679–1680, p. 176.
12 CSPD 1680–81, p. 672.
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63 Cooke, History of Party, 1: p. 76.
64 Trial of Stafford, p. 209. I wish to thank Dr. John Morrill of Cambridge University for identifying the ‘Lord Holies’ who voted ‘not guilty’ as being Francis 2nd Lord Holies, and for informing me of his also having abstained from voting on the 2nd Exclusion Bill.
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67 ‘Politics,’ pp. 99.