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COPYRIGHT 2003 Indiana University, Purdue University of Fort Wayne
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. (1) 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? (2) 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." (3) 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. (4) 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.
The answer to this riddle may be found in the trials of 1679-1680. There were actually two Dominicans who played the part of Judas Iscariot by testifying publicly against their fellow Catholics. Dryden targets a particular religious order because these Judas-Dominicans really existed, a fact which explains the loathing that lies just below the surface of his satire. For while many of the Popish Plot witnesses were former Catholics--for example, Titus Oates had been a convert and a seminarian, and John Smith, dubbed "Narrative Smith," had been a convert and a priest for seven years before conforming to the Church of England--they no longer pretended to be Catholics when they testified in the Plot. But Matthew Clay and Bernard Dennis came forward as Catholics and Dominican friars to testify in support of Titus Oates's perjuries. When a minority is persecuted, it reserves its greatest contempt for the traitors in its ranks. Who, then, in that crisis would have been more despised by the Catholics than these Dominican Judases? Dryden thus subtly declares his sympathy with the persecuted Catholics when he targets that particular religious order at that very moment in time.
In the Fryar, Dryden tries to reshape English attitudes toward "popery." While his countrymen are on the lookout for Jesuits engaged in an international regicide Plot, he presents them with a Dominican friar engaged in a local plot to rob a banker of his wife. His mode of satire reaches back to the Middle Ages: he attacks the kind of friar that Catholic poets like Dante and Chaucer had previously made the butt of their satires. Like them, he shows a wide spiritual gamut among Catholics, from wicked to good. Since Catholics were then attacked as uniformly wicked and the brood of Antichrist, it was an implicit plea for balance, if not for toleration, to show heterogeneity among them. (5) Dryden counters Protestant mythology about Jesuits by presenting his audience with the kind of priest that in his day posed a real menace to society--a Dominican friar conspiring with the Whigs to rob English Catholics of their good name and property. Alexander Pope, who remained a Catholic until death despite the pressures to conform, once observed that The Spanish Fryar was one of Dryden's three best plays. (6) He discerned plainly enough that it was not an anti-Catholic play.
If Dryden had wanted to attack Catholics in the style of that era, he would have shown his wicked priest taking orders from Rome to kill the king, not betraying a close acquaintance for personal gain. While it is true that Dryden himself describes The Spanish Fryar as a "Protestant play," he might mean an enlightened Protestant play. As poet laureate and historiographer royal, he clearly rises above Whig propaganda in this work, ignores the Jesuit scapegoats, and attacks a friar just like the two who were actually perjuring themselves for gain. We get a glimpse of his anger when he has Gomez refer to Friar Dominic as "Judas Iscariot" (II.iv.163) long before the epithet is warranted in the storyline, indeed two whole acts before the friar offers to perjure himself for gold. Moreover, he puts the heaviest blame on the friar, not on the officer who bribes him. Is this anti-clerical? Not at all, for Dante and Chaucer would have agreed with him that an old friar was far less excusable for wickedness than a young libertine.
Judas Iscariot was much on the minds of Catholics at the time, as seen in a poignant letter published in 1679, in which the Jesuit Thomas Jenison, writing from prison before his execution, tells his brother Robert, yet another Catholic bribed to maintain the perjuries of Titus Oates: "You have in some sense even outdone the malice of Judas," for Christ died for his Church, and you conspire "with the Devil to disappoint the design of Christ's Passion" by hiding "the truth from the Nation." (7) Dominic's willingness, in the Fryar, to perjure himself to implicate Gomez in a regicide plot holds up the mirror to Friars Clay and Dennis, the two Dominicans who helped convict their fellow Catholics in the Plot trials. Dryden might well expect that when the full story of the Popish Plot was known, his satire would be understood.
Matthew Clay, the first Dominican to swear on the side of Titus Oates in court, testified at the Old Bailey on June 13, 1679, at the trial of the five Jesuits: Thomas White or Whitebread, William Harcourt, John Fenwick, John Gavan or Gawen, and Anthony Turner. (8) The Jesuits were "all found guilty for being concerned in the plot," (9) and so they were hanged, drawn, and quartered as traitors, though later canonized as saints by the Catholic Church. In a letter recounting the trial, the Benedictine Peter Caryll is aghast at Friar Clay's treachery and reveals his emotion by putting two exclamation points, first after the phrase "an old Dominican Priest!" and then after his own lamentation over the sorrow and shame of it: "Proh dolor et pudor!" It is noteworthy that in The Spanish Fryar, the title character is called "old" and is also a priest, since he hears Elvira's confession. Caryll reports that when Oates brought in the witnesses "he had kept in reserve," including Friar Clay, "the whole Court gave a shout of laughter and hallow, that for almost a quarter [of an hour] the Cryers could not still them. Never was a Bear-bayting more rude and boysterous then this Tryal." (10) The crowd instantly grasped that an old Dominican priest testifying on the side of Oates clinched the case against the Jesuits.
The main point of contention at that trial was whether Oates had in fact been in London for an alleged regicide consult of Catholics in April 1678. Sixteen Catholic boys had crossed the sea from St. Omers to attest that Oates had never left the Jesuit Seminary from December 10, 1677, until June 23, 1678 (N.S.). In his Narrative, Oates had sworn that he came to London on April 17, 1678, to attend the consult and returned six days later to St. Omers. To confute the schoolboys, two older men came forward--the Protestant William Smith, Oates's former tutor at Merchant Taylor's School, and Friar Clay. Both swore they had seen Oates in London in April and May of 1678. Clay even gave vivid details, testifying that he had seen Oates in April at his friend Mr. Charles Howard's place, in a corner of Old Arundel House, and was "morally certain" he had seen him a second time in May in the same place. Oates interrupted him to tell the court with open satisfaction that Clay was a Catholic priest--"a priest in orders, as they say." During the cross-examination, the provincial Thomas White revealed that Clay was a doctor of divinity. Referring to him as "this good Doctor," he pointed out that both Clay and Smith contradicted the previous testimony of Oates-who had said he was in London for only six days--when they claimed to have seen him in April and May. White's objection was thrown out by the judge, who also discredited the boys from St. Omers as having been rehearsed.
John Speke, a Protestant who was at the trial, reported the next day that the witness who had "principally" confuted the schoolboys was "Father Clay." Speke added some important information not found in the printed trial--that Clay "had sworn formerly before the committee of Lords that Oates was in England those two months. He swore the same again yesterday and said, I confess, if there be nothing more to invalidate Mr. Oates' testimony than that he was at St. Omer's, that would not do, for he had already sworn that Oates was in England those months and should swear the same again." (11) Thus, Speke revealed that Clay had given the same testimony earlier before a close committee of Lords and that he had been crucial at the trial for establishing Oates's credibility. Clay himself realized his value to the government, for in 1682, when the tide turned against the Plot, he pleaded with the king for "accommodations for his old age, he having attended in town about these two years in the...
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