The authorship of “News from Spayne and Holland” and its Bearing on the Genuineness of the Confessions of the Blessed Henry Walpole, S.J.

Abstract

In an article contributed to “The Month” for November 1951 the present writer expressed doubt about the genuineness of the confessions which Henry Walpole is said to have written during his imprisonment in the Tower in 1594. These enigmatical confessions, which are in the Public Record Office, were published by Father Pollen in volume V of the Catholic Record Society Publication. In the article in “The Month” the present writer based his argument on the government’s failure to use such compromising confessions, on the absence in Walpole”s subsequent conduct and correspondence of any sign of such a moral collapse as these pages represent, and lastly on Walpole's apparent admission in the confessions that he translated and augmented “Philopater”, a remark so fantastic that Walpole could not have made it. For the development of these arguments I must refer my readers to the pages of “The Month”. What is here aimed at is to show that the book which Walpole really did “translate and augment” is the anonymous work, entitled “News from Spayne and Holland”.