- This article is about the Jesuit priest. For the English composer see Robert Parsons (composer).
Robert Parsons (more correctly, Robert Persons) (Nether Stowey, Somerset, June 24, 1546 – April 15, 1610, Rome) was an English Jesuit priest of equal contemporary fame with Edmund Campion, whom he accompanied on his mission to aid the English Catholics in 1580. Parsons was the superior on the mission and was intended to counterbalance Campion's fervour and impetuous zeal.[1] The Jesuit General, Everard Mercurian, had been reluctant to involve the Jesuits directly in the political machinations of the pope against England. The mission was further compromised because the pope had sent a separate group, unbeknownst to the Jesuit mission, to support the Irish rebel, James Fitzmaurice Fitzgerald. Parsons and Campion learned of this in Reims while en route to England. After Campion's capture, torture, and execution, Parsons left England, never to return. He was associated with Cardinal William Allen in his hopes of a swift conquest of England by the Spanish Armada. With the failure of that enterprise, he spent nine years in Spain. In 1596, in Seville, he wrote Memorial for the Reformation of England, which gave in some detail a blueprint for the kind of society England was to become after its return to the faith. He had hoped to succeed Allen as Cardinal on the latter's death. Unsuccessful, he was rewarded with the rectorship of the English College at Rome, the most important seminary for English Catholic priests.
References
- Hogge, Alice. God's Secret Agents; Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests and the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot. HarperCollins: 2005.
- Catholic Encyclopedia article
