BCCCAP00000000000000000000850

:214 F. X. MARTIN loyalty to Rome. Their outlook had a striking resemblance to that of English Catholics. This is exemplified in the case of Francis Nugent. Trumbull, the English ambassador at Brussels, stated of him in December 1617, 'certaine it is that he is borne of an ancyent familly in the English Pale and province of Leinster in Ireland' 6 • Nugent summed up his own political position when he informed Trumbull in October 1623: 'seeinge I am bound a vassal to His Majestie [James I of England], though I differ from him in pointes of relegion, I owe him all fidelity and service' 7 • To plan a Capuchin Mission to the British Isles (which then included Ireland) would spring obviously to Nugent's inventive mind. There is no reason to believe that Nugent's political beliefs were any different in 1598 from those he expressed in 1623. He had been sent to France in 1582 at the age of thirteen for a Catholic education, and after some years at Pont-a-Mousson in Lor– raine he passed to the University of Louvain where he became a lecturer in philosophy. He joined the Capuchins at Brussels in October 1591, and even before ordination as a priest in 1595 had gained a reputation as a rousing preacher. No sooner ordained than he was appointed superior of the new house at Bethune. At the same time he gave himself whole-heartedly to the mystical movement, and since he was never one to do things by halves he became one of its leaders among the friars in the Low Countries. He was suspected of unortho– dox mysticism, was sent to Rome in 1596, and after two trials by the Inquisition was finally declared innocent of heresy in August 1600. His next five years were spent energetically in France, where he was appointed successively superior at Alern_;on, guardian and pro– fessor of theology at Chartres and then at Angers. In 1604 he went to Paris as professor of theology and a definitor of the province. O'Connell, the seventeenth century Irish Capuchin historian, com– ments that no foreigner had in so short a time pursued so distin– guished a career in the province of Paris 8 • 3. - Benet of Canfield and John Chrysostom Campbell France was, politically speaking, less treasonable ground than the Low Countries on which English-speaking Catholics might gather. Paris, then as always since the Middle Ages, was a natural meeting place for refugees and wanderers. For almost twenty years before a Ibid., 207. z Ibid., 249 n.27. s R. O'CONNELL, O.F.M.Cap., Historia Missionis Hibemicae Capuccinorum, Troyes, Bib!. Municipale, MS 706, 40 (see Cat.gen.MSS bibl.publ.depart.France: Troyes II, Paris 1855, 297- 298); see MARTIN, op. cit., 83.