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The Polemical Gravitas of Robert Persons

The reputation of Robert Persons as a prose stylist has suffered from the repellant myth his opponents constructed around him. What if his works created a phenomenal stir at the time? A. L. Rowse, the most eloquent spokesman for the ‘common-sense’ English view of the matter, puts this down to the deceptively natural, easy prose of Persons, the smiling face of the villain. Haunted—if Rowse is to be believed—by the sound of the bells of St. Mary Magdalen, pealing backwards as if for a fire when he was expelled from Balliol in 1573, he nursed a lifelong grudge against his own nation for so dismissing his great intellectual gifts. No wonder Swift, himself a bitter, ‘conjured’ spirit, thought Persons the pick of Elizabethan prose writers. Everything he wrote, so smoothly and plausibly, was devoted to the overthrow of the State in England and the establishment of a Catholic monarchy under which Jesuits would exercise a monopoly of power. Rowse acknowledges Persons’ spirituality, notably evident in The Christian Directory, but treats it as being of his active career a thing apart.