While looking on the internet for a modern English transcription of a letter sent by the Princess Mary Tudor (later Mary I) to her half brother young King Edward VI in August 1551, I found a book published in 1901, The History of Mary I, Queen of England As Found in the Public Records, Despatches (sic) of Ambassadors in Original Private Letters, and Other Contemporary Documents, written by J.M. Stone.

Additional searches helped me find out who J.M. Stone was: Jean Mary Stone, or as the Catholic Encyclopedia names her: Mary Jean Stone. It was common at that time for female authors to use their initials: like M. D. R. Leys (Mary Dorothy Rose) and R.J. Mitchell (Rosamond Joscelyne). The details of her biography, written by Geraldine Sidney Fladgate, are few and tantalizing. The gaps left in this sketch of her life beg to be filled with more information about a writer who wanted to share her talents and help Catholics understand their history.

 

From Brighton to Bavaria

She was born in 1853 in Brighton, Sussex, during the reign of Queen Victoria. Brighton is a great vacation spot in southeast England, home to the Royal Pavilion and spas for Britons taking the waters. The Crimean War began that year; Charlotte Bronte published her third novel, Villette, under the nom-de-plume Currer Bell; Charlotte M. Yonge, a supporter of the Oxford Movement and John Keble, published one of her most popular novels, The Heir of Redclyffe.

Jean Mary’s parents may not have been supporters of the Oxford Movement or other High Church Anglican efforts, because they sent their daughter to Europe for education at a Calvinist school in Paris and then to Aschaffenburg in Bavaria, where she studied French, German, and Italian. The purpose of her education on the Continent isn’t disclosed, but her parents must have believed in her academic abilities.

What they probably had trouble believing, and perhaps accepting, was that while their Calvinist daughter was in Bavaria, she began to be attracted to Catholicism. Fladgate mentions a detail: that Jean Mary found a "free atmosphere" in Catholicism she did not in Protestantism. She was received into the Church by none other than the Bishop of Mainz, Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler.

Bishop von Ketteler was a fierce opponent of Otto von Bismarck’s Kulturkampf policy against the Catholic Church in Germany; an initially reluctant supporter of the proclamation of the doctrine of Papal Infallibility at the First Vatican Council, and a great promoter of social justice, influencing Pope Leo XIII’s great encyclical Rerum Novarum. Since he died in 1877 that gives us an idea of when Jean Mary became a Catholic: at the latest when she was around 24 years old.

The comment about finding a "free atmosphere" in the Catholic Church reminds me of G.K. Chesterton’s statement that becoming or being a Catholic does not mean that an individual has given up her freedom and ability to think for herself, instead “It would be nearer to reality to say that [she] alone will have freedom, that [she] alone will have will, because [she] alone will believe in free will; that [she] alone will have reason, since ultimate doubt denies reason as well as authority; that [she] alone will truly act, because action is performed to an end.” (“The Skeptic as Critic” in The Thing)

 

From Bavaria to Battle

So Jean Mary Stone had found freedom, the will to “exchange Protestantism” for the Catholic Church; belief in free will; confidence in reason and authority, and the ability to act; therefore she returned to England a Catholic. How her parents and family responded I don’t know, but it must have been a surprise if not a shock. Since the former Oxford Movement leader John Henry Newman had become Catholic in 1845, many others who had supported the goals of that revival effort in the Church of England had followed him. While Newman and others would say they had joined “the one, true fold” of Christ, family and friends would call their action “crossing the Tiber,” “poping,” defection, and even betrayal.

Jean Mary had discovered Catholicism in Bavaria, not Oxford, but she came back to England to join the developing Catholic community of writers and researchers. She found some support from the Society of Jesus, which encouraged her to start writing about the history of Catholicism in Scotland and England.

She did not start with a book about the Jesuits in England however, but with a book about the Franciscan martyrs of the English Reformation era: Faithful Unto Death: An Account of the Sufferings of the English Franciscans during the 16th and 17th Centuries, from Contemporary Records (1892). Her next project, a biography of the Scottish convert, Eleanor Leslie, may have been inspired by the subject’s Jesuit connections: Leslie’s son Eric was a priest in the Society of Jesus. A reviewer in The Spectator did not respond very well to the book in 1899, noting that the book “has little interest for any but Catholic readers” and indeed, “The sentiment of the book is entirely foreign to the Protestant mind.”!

Jean Mary’s next big project was a sympathetic biography of Queen Mary I, popularly known as “Bloody Mary.” Her comments in the preface demonstrate that her knowledge of French, German, and Italian were helpful in archival research:

This material has proved to be extremely rich and abundant, especially as regards the archives of Venice, Austria, Belgium and England. The valuable papers formerly at Brussels have, it is true, disappeared, but fortunately we are provided with transcripts of them in the Record Office. 

Jean Mary hoped her work will change readers’ views about Mary:

At a time when prejudiced historical verdicts are being largely revised, and when it is universally admitted that history must be studied on broader and more discriminating lines than heretofore, the restatement of the case for our first Queen Regnant scarcely needs an apology.

Jean Mary wrote articles for the leading Catholic publications of the time and some of those articles were collected into two volumes: Reformation and Renaissance (1904) and Studies from Court and Cloister (1905). She also published a textbook for Catholic schools in 1907, The Church in English History, and was working on a biography of Reginald Cardinal Pole, the last Catholic archbishop of Canterbury when she died in Battle, not far from where she was born in Sussex, on May 3, 1908.

Jean Mary died near the ruins of Battle Abbey, the Benedictine house founded by William the Conqueror in reparation for the cruelty of the Norman conquest of England in 1066. William had the abbey built on the site of the Battle of Hastings. That abbey was dissolved by Henry VIII and given to one of his courtiers. Today its ruins are an English Heritage site with interactive historical exhibits and a tearoom. It was privately owned in Jean Mary’s day, but as an historian, she must have known its poignant significance.

 

The Writer’s Connection

So why have I been so intrigued by this sketch of Jean Mary Stone’s life and works? Because she was a writer, an historian, someone who wanted to communicate insights into the past, specifically the story of the Catholic Church, in a time and place antithetical to the Church’s belief and practice. And in the last paragraph of her preface to her study of Queen Mary I, Jean Mary expressed my view of studying history:

. . . unless we throw ourselves into the spirit, the views, the interests of that period [of history we are studying], we shall utterly fail to form a correct notion of its merits and its short-comings. The thoughts and opinions, the virtues and vices of the 16th century are not those of our own day, and the only way in which we can form a just estimate of them is by divesting ourselves of every preconceived notion, and by judging each individual case according to the standard which then prevailed. 

May the soul of J.M. Stone, Jean Mary, rest in the peace of Christ. Amen.