Catholic Culture in Early Modern England

3. "Rich Embrodered Churchstuffe": The Vestments of Helena Wintour

 “Rich Embrodered Churchstuffe” The Vestments of Helena Wintour Sophie Holroyd In November  Jesuit Father George Grey wrote to his provincial to say that he had been to see Helena Wintour, daughter of Gunpowder Plotter Robert , at her home at Badgecourt on the family’s Worcestershire estates. The primary purpose of his visit had been to establish the extent of the bequests Wintour intended to make to the Jesuits in her will, but Grey also made particular mention of the way Wintour was spending her days: “She hath bene these many yeares, and is yet, piously employed in making rich embrodered Churchstuffe, which she designes for this particular Mission, or the intended College, not being willing it should be conveyed beyond Sea upon colour of safe custodie, least it should never returne againe. A parcell of curious worke I saw actually in fieri upon the frame; but I understand she hath severall whole suits ech of severall colours, to comply with the Rubrickes.”1 Considering how much recusant textile material was destroyed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it is extraordinary that Wintour’s “rich embrodered churchstuffe ” should have survived and that it can be attributed to her. Its survival is even more extraordinary given that on Wintour’s death in  the vestments were divided into two collections, both of which have come down to us more or less intact.  Comparatively little is known of Helena Wintour. She was born around , which would have made her about five years old at the time of her father’s execution for involvement in the Gunpowder Plot. Unusually, for the female members of the Plotters’ families, she remained in England. She never married but lived a quiet life of prayer and charitable works on the Cooksey estates that had been recovered for the family at some point after they were forfeited to the crown in .2 Apart from a little correspondence, scant mention in the correspondence of others, and a few documents of public record, Wintour left no textual trace behind. But where text has been erased, Wintour’s textiles speak for her. After a brief discussion of what little is known about vestments associated with the English recusants, this essay seeks to read Wintour’s design concept, her choices of embroidered liturgy, symbolism, and iconography. It begins by suggesting that Wintour used the undertaking to practice a personal form of Jesuit-led meditation on the Virgin Mary. Then it uses Henry Hawkins’s Jesuit emblem book Partheneia Sacra to read Wintour’s floral and other imagery as Marian emblems. Finally, the essay suggests that, although Wintour’s liturgical colors may “comply with the Rubrickes ” in the design details and especially in the textual relationship of embroidered liturgy to Tridentine liturgy, Helena Wintour used her vestments as a space in which to emphasize certain aspects of her religious experience. Invisible Stitches: The Catholic Recusants A report to Worcestershire High Sheriff Sir Richard Walsh, dated December , , records that in “a hollow place within a wall near unto the clock house” at Huddington, home of Helena Wintour’s father Robert, searchers had found “a cross gilt with the picture of Christ, and other pictures upon it, a chalice of silver partly gilt, with a little plate or cover to the said chalice, and certain boxes of singing bread, and all other ornaments fit for a Popish priest to say Mass in.”3 Their haul of church vestments, of “ornaments” associated with recusant Catholicism, was one of many that the recusant population of England suffered during the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. There remain a few scattered and tattered examples, such as an earlyseventeenth -century vestment associated with St. Edmund Arrowsmith and an early-sixteenth-century vestment decorated with a medieval orphrey used by the Sheldons at Beoley.4 Even vestments carried across to the Continent,  Sophie Holroyd or made there in the exiled religious houses to which many recusant women fled from religious persecution at home, were destroyed either in visitations or during the complicated continental peregrinations of the nuns, which mostly ended in the destruction of their houses during the French Revolution.5 Any study of recusant vestments must piece together the surviving (mostly partisan ) records of the making and use of vestments from official reports or from correspondence, diaries, autobiographies, and other written sources.6 In this context, Helena Wintour’s vestments as a surviving body are an outstanding exception. In...