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THE CAPUCHIN MISSION TO ENGLAND AND SCOTLAND 213 fathered two illegitimate sons - and in 1573 divorced his wife. The two legitimate sons sided with their mother. The elder brother,. William, went abroad to the Low Countries, took service in the army of Alessandro Farnese, viceroy of the Low Countries, but after three years became a Capuchin at Brussels. He lived only a further three years, and it was probably his death which spurred on his brother, John. This young man, anxious to escape from the prospect of an unwelcome marriage and the religious pressure of his anti-Catholic father fled to the Low Countries and joined the Capuchins at Tournai in August 1593. He became an outstanding preacher, and devoted spe– cial attention to the Scottish Calvinist soldiers who were in the pay of the Spanish viceroy. On one occasion, at Dixmude, he brought three· hundred of them into the Catholic Church. His mother, driven abroad penniless after the downfall of Mary, Queen of Scots, went to live near her son, the only human consolation which remained for her.. Both were carried away by the plague in 1606, and were buried beside the elder brother, William, in the friary church at Ghent. John had succeeded, six weeks before his death, to his father's title. The omission by the spy of Francis Nugent's name is at first sight surprising. He was undoubtedly a prominent figure among the self-exiled subjects of Queen Elizabeth, and it was he more than anybody else who was to negotiate and manoeuvre over two decades for Capuchin Missions to England and Scotland. But from August 1596 until October 1600 he was, with one short break during 1598, in Italy under a cloud, suspected of unorthodox doctrine. This explains his absence from the spy's report in 1598. 2. - Francis Nugent The story of the Capuchin Mission to the British Isles in the early seventeenth century is intimately bound up with the dynamic life of this Irishman, Francis Lavalin Nugent 5 • It was natural that he should have an interest in such a project. He was a younger son of Sir Edward Nugent of Ballebranagh, county Westmeath, and a cousin of Richard Nugent, fifteenth earl of Delvin. The Nugents be– longed to the « Old English » in Ireland. They were the strong-armed guardians of the outer Pale against the attacks of the Gaelic Irish. The Nugent political tradition was one of allegiance to England tem– pered by an insistence on local independence and an unwavering United Kingdom V, ed. V. Gibbs and H.A. Doubleday, London 1926, 546; Lexicon Capuccinum, Rome 1951, 121, s.v. Archangelus Scotus; HILDEBRAND [VAN H00GLEDE], De Kapucijnen in de· Nederlanden en het prinsbisdom Luik I, Antwerpen 1945, 90, 112, 119, 172, 213, 272, 274, 413. " For Nugent see F.X. MARTIN, Friar Nugent; a study ,of Francis Lavalin Nugent (1569- 1635), agent of the Counter-Reformation, Rome-London 1962.