For all but a handful of people, Tudor literature comprises the familiar galaxy of English authors beginning with Wyatt and ending gloriously with Shakespeare. It is generally agreed that the relative position of every writer of the period has long since been established. Surrey, Sidney, Spenser, Marlowe, Kyd, Lyly, Greene, Gascoigne, Nash and other lesser lights all have their place in the history of English literature, in university curricula, and in standard anthologies. Any suggestion that there are other potentially significant writers yet to be recognized is received with considerable surprise, if not outright scepticism.

The Order of Friars Minim was founded by St Francis of Paula, whose birth took place in Calabria in 1416. The new friars received Papal approval in 1474. By the date of their founder’s death in 1507 they were organised in five provinces extending over Italy, France, Spain and Germany and were already setting out for the mission fields of the New World. But despite an extraordinarily rapid growth in the early sixteenth century, not a single one among more than 350 houses of the Order was to be found in England or Wales by the time that King Henry VIII began the spoliation of the monasteries. It was therefore only after Catholic men and women were forced to go abroad if they wished to give their lives to God in the cloister, that (as far as we know) the order received its first English subjects.

“I am a Christian, who never changed that Religion, that I drank in with my milke: nor ever, I thanke God, was ashamed of my profession”, James declared in 1608, in his Apology for the Oath of Allegiance. Five years earlier he had reminded the members of his first English Parliament that as “I am no stranger to you in blood, no more am I a stranger to you in Faith, or in matters concerning the house of God. And although this my profession be according to mine education wherein (I thanke God) I sucked the milk of God’s trewth, with the milke of my nurse: yet do I here protest unto you, that I would never … have so firmly kept my first profession if I had not found it agreeable to all reason and to the rule of my conscience.”