The Shrine of St. Winefride and Social Control in Early Modern England and Wales

In 1534, Henry VIII declared himself the supreme head of the Church of England. In the years that followed, his advisors carried out an agenda to reform the Church. In 1536, the Crown condemned pilgrimages and the veneration of saints’ shrines and relics. By the end of the seventeenth century, nearly every shrine in England and Wales had been destroyed or fell into disuse except for St. Winefride’s shrine in Holywell, Wales. The shrine has continued to be a pilgrimage destination to the present day without disruption. Contemporary scholars have credited the shrine’s survival to its connections with the Tudor and Stuart regimes, to the successful negotiation for its shared use as both a sacred and secular space, and to the missionary efforts of the Jesuits. Historians have yet to conduct a detailed study of St. Winefride’s role in maintaining social order in recusant communities. This article argues that the Jesuits and pilgrims at St. Winefride’s shrine cooperated to create an alternative concept of social order to the legal and customary orders of Protestant society. Introduction n August 29, 1687, the London Gazette reported that James II (r. 1685–8) “went this day to Holywell in Flintshire,” a small town tucked in the green hills of northeastern Wales, close to the border of England. While there, he performed the expected functions of a reigning monarch on an official visit. As the head of the Church of England, he met with “the Lord Bishop of St. Asaph and his Clergy with all dutiful Respect,” he greeted the local gentry who had gathered “to pay their Obedience to His Majesty,” and he “was pleased to Heal for the Evil”—that is, he laid his hands upon his subjects, regardless of birth or rank, in order to heal them of their illnesses, an ability traditionally believed to have been bestowed upon English monarchs by God, dating back to Edward the Confessor (r. 1042–66). The 1 Stephen Brogan, The Royal Touch in Early Modern England: Politics, Medicine and Sin (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2015), 61. London Gazette reported that the king was “met by multitudes of People on both ways, sounding forth Joyful and Loyal Acclamations.” This was, however, no ordinary royal visit, and James II was no ordinary king. He was the last Catholic king of an overwhelmingly Protestant land. He had come to Holywell that day not only as king, but as pilgrim. James II found time between his official duties to pay his respects at the shrine of St. Winefride, a natural spring housed in a gothic chapel just outside of the town of Holywell and a center of Catholic pilgrimage dating back nearly a thousand years. He had come to petition the saint to 2 London Gazette (September 1—September 5, 1687). O