By Kelly Plante
In 1623, at age seventeen and with misgivings, Helen More boarded a ship with two of her cousins and four other English women, leaving behind English soil, her home and her beloved father in Low Leyton, a small village in Essex, to embark on her new life in France: a journey that would transform her – inside and out – in a matter of ten years. Her name would change from Helen to Gertrude. She would no longer retain the option to marry; she would participate in a battle of wordsdefending a controversial Christian mystic against being labeled a heretic; and she would die a painful death in 1633, at age twenty-seven, never returning to England and seeing her father only twice more. But for now, she was bound for Cambrai by way of Douai. There, the women would found a convent named Our Lady of Comfort, where More would become a Benedictine nun in exile. In the eyes of her spiritual advisor Benet Jones, several factors made her an ideal candidate for religious life: her education, her prominent Catholic name – she was the great-great-granddaughter of Thomas More, martyred by Henry VIII seventy years before her birth – and, most important, her dowry, which her wealthy father would contribute to enable the convent to be founded. All that was missing was More’s full acceptance of cloistered life.
Throughout More’s lifetime, within the Catholic Church, the Counter-Reformation whirled, stirring up and casting out heretics in response to the Protestant Reformation that had begun a hundred years earlier. After executing More’s famous great-great-grandfather, Henry VIII suppressed 625 English monasteries and convents. To compensate – to survive anti-Catholic sentiment and still live the cloistered life during the Protestant Reformation – some Catholics went abroad. Twenty-two English convents were established on the Continent between 1598-1665, with 4,000 women joining them between 1598 and 1800 (WWTN). More’s was the second of six English Benedictine convents (after Brussels, 1598) formed on the Continent by 1623 (the second of three to be formed during her lifetime), and it was not immune from the religious zeal against perceived Protestant threats from within. Between 1600 and 1800, English Benedictine nuns produced more than 1,0000 manuscripts; notable among these writers, yet little recognized to this day, was Gertrude More. Her anti-authoritarian writings were radical for their time and place, and her composition of them showed courage.
More started at Cambrai as an extrovert living in an introvert’s world. Outwardly, she wanted to support the new convent, which her father and her spiritual advisor valued. If she left, the convent would lose her dowry and would not survive past its infancy. Inwardly, she was in turmoil. The dominant method in Benedictine convents at that time, Ignatian prayer (prescribed meditations to replay Biblical events through the senses), did not help More to overcome her misgivings or to feel at peace with her newly cloistered life. Feisty in disposition, witty and educated, she suffered in silence. When Augustine Baker arrived at the convent in 1624, he brought with him a mysticism focused on cultivating an individual relationship with God that would assist More through her interior/exterior struggle and would inspire her writing. More’s pro-Baker texts would marry her interior and exterior worlds, calming her inner turmoil by tying it to an outward purpose. But she was not ready to listen to another authority figure – even one who allegedly taught anti-authoritarian methods – yet.
When More confronted Baker, he diagnosed her internal dilemma thus: “What she needed was to be brought into a simplicity of soul which is the immediate disposition to union with God, and that can be done only by the Divine working with the soul’s co-operation” (Holloway). This might sound quite conservative, even banal, to modern readers, but for More, it was radical. “Immediate disposition” meant she need not access God through a male, patriarchal confessor – she could do it herself. Baker called this simply the “way of love.” Baker’s matter-of-fact description summed it up thus: “Consider your call, That’s all in all” (Sandeman 15).
After achieving inner and outer peace, a transformation apparent to herself and those who spent each day with her in the convent, More’s comfort in her new spiritual practice was called into question by a recently arrived confessor at Cambrai, Father Francis Hull, who resented that the nuns did not come to him for confession and that Baker and his methods appeared to have greater influence than his. Hull lodged a formal complaint against Baker, accusing him of heresy and anti-authoritarianism. More’s new way of life was threatened by these charges, and she took action. She started writing. Surviving More are four works (none of which are in her own handwriting) appearing in three editions: an Apology, or prose treatise defending Baker and his methods; fragments from various of her spiritual prose texts; spiritual meditations titled “Confessiones Amantis” (“Confessions of a Lover”); and nine poems.
It is written that when More died of smallpox “in a most virulent form,” she endured “with complete serenity and resignation” (Sandeman 24). How this interior state could possibly coincide with the gruesome physical effects described by Baker (Wekking xiv) is difficult for the mind to comprehend. Nonetheless, More died in the care of four other nuns, one of whom said More proved a comfort to her rather than the other way around. On her deathbed, she declined to talk to a confessor, retaining her spark and conviction for inner-relation with God: she would speak “to no man” (Sandeman 25).
After More’s death, Baker set to work at preserving her writings and her legacy – which secured his own legacy as well since she was his star pupil. Baker’s work nonetheless helped enable this compilation of her poetry, which marks the fifth modern (and hopefully not the last) edition of More’s writing. More’s distinctive legacy breathes new life into how we might think about early modern women writers, who were first and foremost religious, and for whom the process of writing spiritual texts could prove liberating in its unique ability to unify and reconcile the interior with the exterior self. More’s biography is significant not only for her famous family name nor for her proximity to prominent Christian mystic Baker: It shows that writing was crucial for her spiritual growth and survival as a highly educated and spirited early modern woman.
Works Cited
Baker, Augustine. The Life and Death of Dame Gertrude More, ed. Ben Wekking. Universität Salzburg, Institut fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 2002.
Holloway, Julia. “More, Helen [name in religion Gertrude] (1606-1633).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2004.
Sandeman, Frideswide. Dame Gertrude More. Fowler Wright Books, Hereforeshire, 1997.
Who Were The Nuns (WWTN)? Queen Mary University of London, accessed July 2020.