The lyrical Catholicism of the Norfolk-born Jesuit priest and poet executed in 1595 anticipated the metaphysical poets John Donne, George Herbert and Henry Vaughan. His feast day is on 21 February, the day of his martydom

Tudor England in the late 1580s was jittery with fears of a Catholic revival. Sir Francis Walsingham, the spy- master extraordinaire at the court of Queen Elizabeth I, presided over a le Carré-like world of political double-dealing and “spiery” (as the Elizabethans called it). Moles were planted in Catholic seminaries abroad while England’s island diplomacy created a looking-glass war where priest was turned against priest, informant against informant.

Jesuits in particular were regarded as a sinister order bent on destabilising the monarch and her Tudor realm. While it is doubtful how anti-Catholic Elizabeth I herself really was (she was thought to keep a crucifix, candles and other crypto-Catholic ornaments by her bedside), Catholic Spain’s ill-fated attack on England in 1588 served to intensify her clamp- down on suspect traitors.

In the paranoid post-Armada years, pro-Spanish “Mass-mongers” and “Romish” subversives were smoked out of hiding and on occasion publicly disembowelled. Amid the hangman’s shambles, of course, the relics stained in blood were prized by those thousands who cleaved to the Old Religion.