Monday, 14th October 2024

Luke Wadding

Luke Wadding OFM (1588-1657) is well known as the co-founder of the Irish College in Rome and as the originator of St Isidore’s. However, the Waterford-born Franciscan had other strings to his bow, as his extraordinary Roman career, stretching from the late 1610s until his death in 1657, reveals. The intelligence and quality of Wadding’s work on Duns Scotus and on the history of the Franciscans would, on their own, have catapulted him to international scholarly prominence in his own order. He had hardly commenced his studies in the Franciscan convent in Matozinhos in Portugal in 1605 when the elegance of his Latin drew the admiration of his superior.[1] In Lisbon a short time later he came to the attention of Antonio de Trejo OFM (d. 1635), Franciscan vicar general. The latter brought Wadding to Salamanca, where he met the new Franciscan minister general, Benignus of Genoa. De Trejo recognised Lombard’s theological abilities at an early stage. On the occasion of his own nomination as bishop of Cartagena and royal ambassador extraordinary to the Holy See, De Trejo employed Wadding as a theological advisor. When de Trejo travelled to Rome to petition Paul V to define the teaching of the Immaculate Conception as a dogma,[2] Wadding accompanied him.[3] Thus began an illustrious intellectual career in the service of the Franciscan order and of the Spanish monarchy.

In trying to appreciate Wadding’s networks it is easy to be dazzled by his meteoric rise on the international stage. However, it would be not only a shame but also an unforgivable historical oversight to ignore the fact that that Wadding was the youngest of a family of fourteen children, born to Walter Wadding and his wife Anatasia Lombard in 1588. The Waddings were a trading dynasty in the southern port city with strong continental connections. This was a levitical family with a vengeance. His mother was a relative of Peter Lombard, archbishop of Armagh from 1601. One of his brothers, Ambrose, became a Jesuit and died young in Bavaria. Five of his first cousins on the Wadding side were also Jesuits in Leuven and Castile. Other cousins were Augustinians, one a hermit in Coimbra, the second Patrick Comerford, was later bishop of Waterford. Two nephews became distinguished Franciscans: Bonaventure Baron and Francis Harold. He had a cousin, Andrew Weise who was a Knight of Malta and Grand Prior in England.

Given these ecclesiastical antecedents Wadding’s pursuit of the religious life is not entirely surprising. The circumstances in which he did so certainly are and they are tinged with tragedy. When as an adolescent he lost both his parents to a visitation of the plague, it was his merchant brother Matthew who looked after him. Subsequently, when he took his bookish fifteen-year old brother to Portugal on a trading trip, Matthew secured him a place in the fledgling Irish college in the city of Lisbon. A short time later Luke Wadding joined the Franciscans, integrating a set of dense family connections into the vast community network of the Seraphic order.

Wadding joined the Franciscans as the son of a Waterford merchant and the loyalties he inherited from his family, particularly his religion, his love of his city and his faithfulness to his people were grafted on to his sterling service to his order and to the Spanish monarchy. His older, regional loyalties were subsumed into rather than absorbed by his new responsibilities. This meant that his inherited sentiments inevitably shaped his attitudes, his politics and his interests as he served his order and his king. They also flavoured his work for the Irish Franciscan province, the Irish secular clergy and from the early 1640s, the Irish Catholic Confederation, formed to protect the interests of both Irish Catholics and Charles I against the English parliament and the Scots Covenanters. This gave his service a regional, an ethnic and a political specificity, which may have seemed, prima facie like an advantage but was, in fact, frequently the source of conflict, misunderstanding and frustration. As the offspring of a Waterford merchant of Norman origins, Wadding’s Ulster and Connaught confreres of Gaelic origin viewed him with a jaundiced eye. As a Spanish Franciscan he had to work hard to maintain good relations with relations and colleagues in competing religious orders, like the Jesuits, the Dominicans and also with the secular or diocesan clergy. As a servant of the king of Spain he found that he had to tread carefully in the fraught political atmosphere of Borghese, Barberini and Pamfili Rome. Complicating the picture was the growing French influence in Rome as Spanish power tended to wane. Needless to say, Wadding’s Spanish loyalties and Roman proclivities did not endear him James I who believed that Irish and English Catholics could give him, their lawful king, only half their hearts and part of their fealty.

Wadding’s first public experience of the complexity of conflicting loyalties and competing networks of influence came early in his career, before he founded the Roman colleges. It may come as a surprise that his advocacy of the definition of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception could be seen as anything other than a badge of honour. This was not the case in the mid 1610s, when the question of such a definition was highly politicised. The definition was erected into a political priority by the Spanish, who saw it as a test of their influence in Rome. Within Spain and in the church more generally, the definition pitted the interests of the Spanish Dominicans, who opposed it, against the Spanish Franciscans, who did not, in a sometimes bitter struggle to secure royal patronage and papal favour. By virtue of his membership of de Trejo’s embassy to Rome in 1618, Wadding garnered as many enemies among the Dominicans and he won admirers among his confreres. Thus when he arrived in the City in 1618 he joined an established set of allegiances not of his own making and certainly beyond his ken to control.

Despite the strength of Spanish influence in Borghese Rome, De Trejo’s mission to have the Immaculate Conception defined as a dogma failed. Following this Wadding remained on in Rome,[4] and when his Leuven-based Connaught-born confrere Hugh Bourke came to visit him, he was living in the convent of San Pietro in Montorio, the nerve centre of Spanish influence in the city.[5] His Spanish connections and his theological prowess earned him the attentions of the General of the Order. Wadding’s trading background seems to have given him a talent for management and a familiarity with book-keeping. In 1625 he was approached to take over responsibility of a poorly managed Franciscan property in the city. With an eye to the interests of the Irish Franciscans Wadding agreed on condition that the establishment would operate as a house of studies and retreat for the Irish province.[6] This became St Isidore’s, the second Spanish-supported Irish Franciscan college on the Continent, after St Anthony’s in Leuven, founded in 1607.[7]

As he consolidated the position of his new college, an irresistible opportunity arose for Wadding further to increase Irish Franciscan influence, especially in the struggle for prominence with the well-ensconced Jesuits. Back in 1623 Urban VIII had nominated Cardinal Ludovico Ludovisi protector of Ireland. This raised hopes that the pope would support an Irish secular foundation in Rome.[8] Ludovisi, however, either could not afford or did not desire to set up a separate Irish secular college. He adopted the expedient of providing an annual payment of 600 crowns from his property for the support of six Irish students who were to be housed in the English and Maronite colleges. This precocious experiment in multi-culturalism proved unsuccessful.[9] To remedy what can only be called a deteriorating security situation in the English and Maronite establishments, Wadding proposed to Ludovisi, not disinterestedly, that he rent a house near St Isidore’s for the Irish students. The Franciscans, he promised, would undertake supervision and management of the new institution. Ludovisi agreed, under certain conditions, and a house was rented on Monte Pincio in late 1627. The first students arrived the following year,[10] prompting Thomas Walsh, archbishop of Cashel to pen a letter of congratulation to Wadding.[11] Walsh, who at this stage was close to the Franciscans, was delighted with the project but it was, in fact, controversial from the beginning. This was because in Ireland relations between the secular clergy and the regulars, especially the Franciscans, had become tense, particularly as increasing clerical numbers made competition for scarce resources sharper. Thus many Irish seculars looked on Franciscan domination of the new Irish college with dismay and wondered if there would be any place in the long run for the secular clergy on the Irish mission. Would the pope hand everything over to the Jesuits and the Franciscans? Their apprehensions tended to deepen on the death of the first rector of the Irish pastoral college, the Killaloe secular, Eugene Callahan. Wadding controversially appointed a Franciscan to replace him, one Martin Walsh. He, in turn, was succeeded by the pugnacious John Punch. For some Irish seculars it seemed inappropriate to place yet another Irish secular college under the tutelage of the regular clergy.

If the Irish seculars believed that their apprehensions would translate into positive action by the papacy or Propaganda fide on their behalf they were mistaken. A compelling disincentive for such affirmative action was the pastoral college in Leuven, established in 1624. Run by Irish seculars with an input from the local Franciscans, this institution was frequently cited at Propaganda fide as an example of how not to manage a seminary. With such thinking predominating in the Curia and at Propaganda fide, Wadding must have believed that his position in the new Irish college was secure. However, Ludovisi’s death in late 1632 changed everything. To Wadding’s consternation the cardinal’s will entrusted the government of the college to the Jesuits. Given his personal investment in the institution, Wadding contested the will but his case was damaged by student complaints[12] and Irish lay preference for the Jesuits.[13] Petitions to leave the college in the care of the Franciscans[14] and to return it to the seculars[15] failed to sway the Rota, which found in favour of the Jesuits. The Jesuit take over of the Irish pastoral college in Rome confirmed Wadding’s tendency to associate, in the 1630s, 1640s and 1650s, with anti-Jesuit interests and networks in Rome, Spain and Flanders. These legal broils inevitably compromised Wadding’s standing with Jesuit supporters in the Curia. This was particularly so in the case of Francesco Albizzi, secretary to the special Irish committee at Propaganda Fide and assessor of the Holy Office. Wadding never quite won Albizzi’s confidence and his failure to integrate the assessor’s patronage network proved important in two later controversies, in which Wadding was deeply implicated: the treatment of the Irish nuncio, GianBattista Rinuccini by the Confederated Catholics of Ireland and the condemnation of the Dutch theologican Cornelius Jansen.

The foundation of St Isidore’s coincided with the death of Wadding’s cousin Peter Lombard, the archbishop of Armagh and most influential Irish ecclesiastic in Rome since the early 1600s. Wadding rapidly replaced him as the most important Irish clerical figure in the city and this entailed a significant reorientation of Irish interests in Rome, which up to then had been more or less dominated by Lombard and the secular clergy, with their Irish Jesuit allies. In marked contrast to Lombard, Wadding, because of his Spanish connections was associated with the northern lords[16] and the Ulster faction,[17] a link which, given his Norman background and Munster origins, was not entirely natural to him. Tensions between Lombard’s old guard and the emerging Wadding interest in Rome surfaced immediately after Lombard’s death, during the search for a successor in Armagh.[18] The O’Neill interest’s strong case for a native of the province was an implicit criticism of Lombard.[19] Florence Conry OFM, perhaps the most active clerical supporter of the Ulster lords,[20] gave Wadding detailed advice on how to represent the matter in Rome,[21] stressing the importance of humouring the Ulster lords and interpreting the appointment in a frankly political fashion. The Brussels nuncio, in his reports to Rome, relied on information supplied by the Irish Franciscans in Leuven. Thus he highlighted the ethnic dimensions of the appointment,[22] favouring a balance between what were referred to as ‘Old Irish’ and mixed race bishops on one side and ‘Anglo-Irish’ on the other side.[23] The Franciscan element of the Ulster lobby got its man in Hugh MacCaughwell but he did not survive to take his see, to the relief of many southern clergy.[24] Hugh O’Reilly (c.1581-1653), translated from Kilmore in 1628, succeeded him. The new incumbent promptly marked out his territory, warning Wadding, in 1629, to exercise caution in dealing with the affairs of the province.[25] The successful negotiation of these torturously complex ethnic, geographical and political allegiances was in the nature of things impossible and the wonder is not that Wadding eventually failed to reconcile them but that he did not fail sooner.

The supreme test of Wadding’s cultural tactfulness, political acumen and strategic intelligence came in the early 1640s when the Supreme Council of the Irish Catholic Confederates, in arms against the London parliament and their Irish lackeys, appointed him their Roman agent. The Confederation was a fissiparous entity at the best of times and it was perhaps inevitable that its Roman representative would sooner or later pay the price of its factious politics. Initially there was something approaching unity. Wadding, following instructions from the Supreme Council, lobbied for the appointment of an Irish nuncio.[26] There was even a possibility that Wadding himself might be appointed. However, given Albizzi’s existing doctrinal reservations concerning Wadding, born of the Jansenist affair, this was unlikely. In the event, the nuncio sent to Ireland was not quite the individual sought by the Confederates. GianBattista Rinuccini, the bishop of Fermo was an Italian prelate in the Tridentine mode and it is safe to say that until he went to Ireland he had never seen let alone spoken to a Protestant. Not only that but in line with most of his contemporaries in Rome and elsewhere, he disapproved of engaging with Protestants even in peace negotiations, as this involved, he believed, granting rights to error. While this was not an enormously inconvenient conviction to indulge in Italy, it had its difficulties in Ireland where the negotiation of a truce with the Protestant Earl of Ormond, the king’s lord lieutenant was a priority for the Confederated Catholics, many of whom were related to him. As it turned out, Rinuccini’s appointment was something of a strategic disaster for the Pamfili papacy and a debilitating limitation on the freedom of manoeuvre of the Confederates. Wadding spent a great part of his efforts in seeking to neutralise the consequences of Rinuccini’s Irish activities, without much success. Rinuccini and his mainly Ulster-based, Gaelic supporters saw Wadding as a pawn of the Munster and Leinster Old English and anglicised Irish elites.[27] His alleged role in procuring from Cardinal Giulio Roma (1584-1652) a letter critical of Rinuccini’s censures against his opponents, was another nail in the coffin of Ulster confidence in the Confederation’s Roman agent.[28] So too was his involvement in a scheme, supported by Pierre Marchant OFM, the Franciscan commissary general with responsibility for Ireland, to divide the Irish Franciscan province in two. From this time onwards Wadding was the object of sustained harassment from clergy associated with the Ulster and the Gaelic interest, many of them in his own order and from the late 1640s active not only in Ireland but also in Rome and even in St Isidore’s. Most significantly of all, the assessor of the Holy Office, Francesco Albizzi, who had played a key role in Rinucini’s appointment, developed doubts about Wadding’s politics and judgement.[29]

As the Catholic Confederation went into meltdown, the embattled Wadding became involved in an intractable theological controversy concerning the Dutch Augustinian theologian and bishop of Ypres, Cornelius Jansen. His great tome Augustinus had appeared in Leuven and Paris in the early 1640s to critical acclaim and trenchant criticism, the latter originating with the Leuven Jesuits. Wadding, like Florence Conry and Hugh Bourke, his Franciscan confreres had a penchant for Jansen’s interpretation of Augustine and for his moral rigorism.[30] Writing to Wadding about the Jansenist affair in Leuven, Bourke told him that he feared ‘grave confusions’ if Jansen’s doctrine was not given judicious consideration in Rome. Wadding was anxious to ensure that Jansen got a fair hearing in Rome. When the Cork-born Leuven theologian John Sinnich visited Wadding in late 1643 to drum up support for Jansen, he found him sympathetic. However, Wadding’s refusal to come out publicly for the Leuven delegation caused Sinnich to speculate whether on account of his oath of silence or his fear of offending Cardinal Barberini, who is all powerful in Rome or finally because, acting as agent of the Irish Catholics, he feared alientating Albizzi who was secretary of the congregation established for Irish affairs and who had composed the unfortunate bull in the first place.[31]

Wadding’s misgivings were real. He already knew how politicised the Jansen affair had become and how damaging to him a too public association with the Leuven Augustinians might be. Indeed the following year he had to react quickly to quash a rumour, prevalent in Leuven and Paris, that he was critical of papal authority.[32] By 1650 the anti-Jansenist tendency had succeeded in having five propositions allegedly contained in the Augustinus and supposedly heretical, referred from Paris to Rome for judgement. It seemed unlikely that the papal commission nominated to examine the propositions in April 1651 would favour the Jansenists. However, Luke Wadding’s presence on the commission offered them some slender hope.

Curiously, some time in the first half of 1651, Wadding was temporarily excluded from the commission.[33] This may have been connected with his controversial cooperation with Pierre Marchant in the recently failed attempt to divide the Irish Franciscans into two provinces.[34] However, the French Jansenist Saint-Amour believed that Wadding’s exclusion was due to his expressed conviction that Jansen’s work demanded a detailed examination and, once corrected, could be permitted to circulate freely.[35] As a commission member, Wadding was careful to give both sides a hearing. Saint-Amour met him at St Isidore’s for the first time in September 1651 and over the following two years had eight encounters with him. He also received member of the opposition.[36] His natural sympathies were for the Augustinians but he was completely lucid about court politics in Rome. According to Saint-Amour, Wadding was convinced that there was no hope of establishing a special congregation to deal with the problem. He also pointed out that the affair had now become inextricably connected with questions of papal infallibility. This was an aspect of the affair whose significance in Rome was not always appreciated by either the Paris or Leuven Jansenists.[37] Wadding eventually delivered his considered opinions on the propositions in two sets of vota, submitted between October 1652 and April 1653.[38] They reveal the complexity of his theological reflections, his desire to give the minority side a fair hearing and his willingness to accept the papal decision, whatever way it fell. His capacity to accept the 1653 papal condemnation of the five propositions is evidence of his richly complex attitude towards authority which the post-modern mind struggles to understand and can rather facetiously dismiss at best as intellectual capitulation at worst as political opportunism.

To conclude: there are two or three critical biographies of seventeenth century individuals which will have to be written before we can claim to have even a relatively adequate understanding of that Iron Century. Albizzi’s is one, Ormond’s another, and Wadding’s certainly a third. Wadding’s perhaps more that than the other two. Why? Well Wadding fascinates, not only by the range of his interests, the depths of his engagements and the wealth of his contacts but also by his extraordinary cultural, ethnic and political complexity. The protean human product of a particular family, place and time, he found himself thrown into the cauldron of Franciscan, Spanish and Roman affairs. He was obliged to decide who he was and what he stood for as a member of an international order, as a Spanish pensioner and as a representative of the Confederated Irish Catholics. Like so many early modern figures, the intimacy of his individual journey is hidden from us but hints lurk here and there in his 100 or so surviving letters that reveal, as through a glass darkly, the travails of the inner man. More generally, Wadding’s cultural experience is important. He had to leave Ireland to learn what Ireland was, revealing, yet again that identity is lived most creatively and vigorously when experienced at the edges, far from the security of kit and kin. His experience is powerfully pertinent to our own time. This makes the appropriate historical retrieval of his life and times a matter not only of historical interest but of civic good health. For drawing critically and creatively on the real lived experience of mould-breaking ancestors is the only way to ensure that we rise appropriately and humanely to the challenge of forging authentically contemporary Irish identities for our own changing times.

Published in Dáire Keogh & Albert McDonnell (Eds) The Irish College, Rome and its World (Dublin, 2008) pp14 – 23.


* A version of this article was delivered at the celebrations held to mark the completion of external renovation of the Irish College Rome, 2 June 2007, in the presence of Mrs Mary McAleese, president of Ireland.

[1] Manuel de Castro, ‘Wadding and the Iberian Peninsula’ in Franciscan Fathers (eds) Father Luke Wadding (Dublin, 1957), p. 124.

[2] C. Heaney, The Theology of Florence Conry OFM, (Drogheda, 1935), p. 41.

[3] M. Gonçalves Da Costa (ed.), Fontes inéditas Portuguesas para a História de Irlanda, (Braga, 1981), p. 142; Lucien Ceyssens, ‘Florence Conry, Hugh de Burgo, Luke Wadding and Jansenism’ in Franciscan Fathers (eds) Father Luke Wadding, p. 307; Manuel de Castro, ‘Wadding and the Iberian Peninsula’, pp 143-54.

[4] Gregory Cleary, Father Luke Wadding and St Isidore’s College (Rome, 1925), p. 158.

[5] Albert Hugh O’Donnell to Cardinal Protector, Leuven, 7 Oct. 1619, cited in Brendan Jennings (ed.), Wadding papers 1614-1638 (Dublin, 1953), pp 19-20.

[6] Cleary, Father Luke Wadding, p. 160, citing the decree of the General, 13 June 1625, reproduced in ibid., pp 175-77.

[7] Da Costa, Fontes inéditas Protuguesas, p. 152.

[8] Rothe to Lombard, 17 Sept. 1625, Franciscan Library Killiney [FLK], MS D III, pp 421-3 cited in HMC Franciscan, pp 80-2, p. 82.

[9] Cleary, Father Luke Wadding, p. 206.

[10] Six students were ready to return to the Irish mission in that year. See Eugene Callahan to Holy Office, Rome, before May 1628, Archivio della congregazione della fede, Stanza Storica, (ACDF SO), St St SS, 1c, f. 791r.

[11] Thomas Walsh to Wadding, Madrid, 20 Feb. 1628, FLK, MS D II, f. 3 cited in Wadding papers, pp 257-8.

[12] Archivio della congregazione di Propaganda Fide (APF), Scritture Antiche, vol. 14, ff 44-5 cited in Arch. Hib., xii, p. 186. Undated but probably post-1630.

[13] See Patrick J. Corish ‘The beginning of the Irish College, Rome’ in Franciscan Fathers Father Luke Wadding, pp 284-94.

[14] APF, Scritture Antiche, vol. 294, f. 428 cited in Arch. Hib., xii, (1946), p. 190.

[15] APF, Scritture Antiche, vol. 134, f. 58 cited in Arch. Hib., xii (1946), pp 192-3.

[16] In 1619, the earls requested promotion for Wadding to see of Waterford, FLK, MS D III, pp 208-9 cited in HMC Franciscan, p. 73; Tyrone to Urban VIII, Breda, 9 Feb. 1625, APF, SORCG 294, ff 23r-24v cited in Coll. Hib., viii (1965),  p. 9.

[17] This was far from unanimous. Concerns about Wadding’s influence surfaced in an anonymous submission to the Cardinal Protector. See ‘To the cardinal protector of Ireland concerning Fr Luke Wadding’, undated , APF, Lettere Antiche, vol. 14, ff 44-5 cited in Arch. Hib., xii (1946), pp 184-7.

[18] For a summary of the tractations see ‘Informatio circa episcopatus Angliae et Hiberniae’ (1628) ACDF, SO St St SS 1d, ff 573r-575v.

[19] Memorial to Holy Office on succession to Armagh [1625], ACDF, SO St St SS 1d, ff 341r-342r.

[20] Guidi di Bagno to Cardinal S Onofrio, Brussels, 24 Oct. 1626, Archivio Segreto Vaticano [ASV], Nunziatura di Fiandra, 15, f. 225rv cited in Coll. Hib., i (1958), p. 61.

[21] Conry to Wadding, Madrid, 3 Aug. 1627, FLK, MS DIII, pp 857-9 cited in HMC Franciscan, pp 104-6.

[22] See Nuncio to ?, Brussels, 21 Feb. 1626, FLK, MS D III pp 640-9 cited in HMC Franciscan, pp 87-92.

[23] ibid. Roche de Cruce OP was named as unsuitable (HMC Franciscan, p. 92).

[24] Paul Harris, the English-born Dublin secular, accused him of framing an order to have friars appointed to livings in Armagh, a measure cut short by his death. See Paul Harris, Fratres (Dublin, 1634), p. 73.

[25] O’Reilly to Wadding, 10 Mar. 1629, FLK, MS DII, f. 53 cited in HMC Franciscan, p. 9.

[26] See Canice Mooney, ‘Was Wadding a patriotic Irishman’ in Franciscan Fathers (eds) Father Luke Wadding, pp 48-64.

[27] On Wadding’s role see Canice Mooney, ‘Was Wadding a patriotic Irishman?’ in Franciscan Fathers (eds) Father Luke Wadding, pp 56-8. Bellings revisited this conversation in Feb. 1647 when he defended his support of the Ormond peace before the new Supreme Council. See his Annotationes in R.P.F. Ioannis Ponci… (Paris, 1654), pp 182-3.

[28] See Canice Mooney, ‘Was Wadding a patriotic Irishman’, pp 50-1; Ó hAnnracháin, Catholic reformation, p. 209. Roma had written a strong letter of support to the Supreme Council, 17 Mar. 1646, mentioning a meeting with Bellings.

[29] The council had been set up in 1643 (Com. Rin., i, p. 399). On Wadding’s exclusion, see Hynes, Mission of Rinuccini, p. 264, note 2.

[30] Despite his Spanish education and his residence in Spanish Flanders, he was considered to be pro-French. See Castel Rodrigo to Felipe IV, Brussels, 1 June 1645 in Lonchay and Cuvelier (eds), Correspondance des Pays-Bas en xviiie siècle (Brussels, 1930), pp 258, 531.

[31] ‘Sed nihil extorquere potuimus speciale, sive quia verebatur offendere Cardinalem Barberinum, qui omnia tunc Romae poterat, sive denique quia, cum agens ipse esset catholicorum Hiberniae, cavebat alienare a se animum assessoris Albisii, qui secretaries erat Congregationis pro Hibernicis negotiis institutae, quique infaustam Bullam compilaverat’, Sinnich, ‘Verslag’, pp 57-8.

[32] Wadding to Patrick Brenan, Rome, between 26 June and 23 Sept. 1644, Archives de l’archevêché, Malines, Musée Bellarmin, C 29 cited in Ceyssens, ‘Conry, de Burgo, Wadding and Jansenism’, p. 368.

[33] Rapin claimed that Wadding was in Spanish pay and that he sold his vote to the Jansenists in exchange for money to build his library. See Rapin, Mémoires, i, 328, ii, 40; Ceyssens, ‘Conry, de Burgo, Wadding and Jansenism’, pp 372-4.

[34] Despite his sidelining, Wadding remained abreast of the Lorraine negotiations at the time by Viscount Taaffee in Brussels. See Bichi to the secretariate of State, Brussels, 11 Feb., 1651, ASV, Nun. di Fiandra, 35, f. 36r-v cited in Coll. Hib.,  i (1958), p. 78.

[35] Saint-Amour, Journal, p. 74.

[36] On Mulard, see Lucien Ceyssens, ‘François Mulard, premier deputé royal antijanséniste à Rome’ in Revue d’histoire de l’Eglise de France, xli, (1955), pp 185-210.

[37] Ceyssens, ‘Conry, de Burgo, Wadding and Jansenism’, p. 379.

[38] For Wadding’s conclusions see FLK, MS D10, pp 99-217.