Note B — Chapter LV
Reading edition
Lady Digby had been brought up a strong Protestant, and, like most converts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to the Church of Rome from Calvinistic Puritanism, she became an ardent devotee of the Jesuits. (The point of contact was probably a common interest in the problems of the mystical life, and a tendency towards a grave, sober, strict regularity of “daily walk and conversation.”) George Gilbert, a gentleman of high Suffolk family and great wealth, was likewise a convert from Calvinism, through the instrumentality of the Jesuit Fathers, Darbyshire and Parsons. Gilbert, as a young man, daily “waited upon the ministry” of the once celebrated Puritan Divine, Dering, the friend of Thomas Cartwright. George Gilbert died in Rome in 1583, holding in his hand a crucifix made in prison by “the Blessed” Alexander Briant, a martyr friend of “the Blessed” Edmund Campion. Of Briant it is said he was “of a very sweet grace in preaching,” and that he was “replenished with spiritual sweetness” when suffering the tortures of the rack. George Gilbert mainly defrayed the cost of painting on the walls of the Church of the English College at Rome certain pictures of some of “the English Martyrs,” although “old Richard Norton,” of Norton Conyers, near Ripon, and some others who as exiles had “with strangers made their home,” likewise subscribed to the expense of the pious and artistic work. I saw, on the 13th October, 1900, through the kind courtesy of the Right Reverend Monsignor Giles, D.D., Rector of the English College, copies of these remarkable pictures, copies which are painted on the walls of that very College where Father Oldcorne himself had been educated.
The original pictures on the walls of the Church are no longer in existence. The copies, however, even in our own day, have played an important part in “the beatification” of those of the English Martyrs already beatified, including “the Blessed” Thomas Percy Earl of Northumberland, who suffered death at York in 1572. — See the “Acts of the English Martyrs,” by the Rev. J. H. Pollen, S.J. (Burns & Oates).