Miles Pinckney
Male, Person Number3212, b. November 1599, d. 31 October 1674
| Relationship | Brother of Thomas Pinckney |
| Father | Martin Pinckney b. c 1563, d. Jan 1623 | |
| Mother | Ann Batmanson b. c 1565, d. a 1617 |
Birth, Marriages and Death | ||
| Birth* | Nov 1599 | Miles Pinckney was born in Nov 1599 at England, . |
| He was the son of Martin Pinckney and Ann Batmanson. | ||
| Baptism | 25 Nov 1599 | Miles Pinckney was baptized on 25 Nov 1599 at Brancepeth, England, . |
| Death* | 31 Oct 1674 | He died on 31 Oct 1674 at Monastery of Canonesses of St. Augustin, Rue des Fossés Saint Victor, Paris, France, , at age 74. |
Other Information | ||
| Anecdote* | Miles Pinkney (1599 - 1674) A Durham Priest In Counter-Reformation Paris By Dominic Bellenger Miles Pinkney, who was later to be better known by his alias, Thomas Carre or Car, was baptised on 25 November 1599 at St Brandon's Church, Brancepeth, County Durham. He was the eldest of the four known children of Martin Pinkney of East Brandon, and Anne Batmanson of Broomhall, members of respectable but not noble families. He was baptised as a Protestant, but was converted to Catholicism in his youth having witmessed an exorcism by a Catholic priest - a not uncommon event in the rural England of a period when such acticities were viewed by some 'as a principal skill of the missionary priest'. He decided to try his vocation to the priesthood and was admitted to the English College, Douai, on 16 June 1618. He received all his ecclesiastical education at Douai, and was ordained priest at Cambrai on 15 June 1625. He spent much of the remainder of his life on the Continent although he is said to have crossed the sea to England 'nearly sixty times' on business. He became procurator of his college on 3 October 1627 and was frequesntly consulted thereafter on financial matters concerning Douai. In 1644 he was made a member of the Chapter. Arras College, Paris, a centre for English Catholic polemical writers had become Pinkney's base by 1634. Arras College had been established in 1611 in part of a building in the faubourg S. Jacques belonging to the Benedictine abbey of St Vedast at Arras. Is was under the direction of Richard Smith (1567 - 1655), Bishop of Chalcedon, and under the patronage of Cardinal Richelieu. Paris, and Arras College in particular, provided a meeting place for the insular English Catholics and the wider world of Counter-Reformation Europe. Pinkney was one of the central figures in this recontre. He was a man of wide culture who delighted in books, painting, copper engraving and sculpture. A particular interest was poetry and he became a friend and collaborator of Richard Crashaw (c.1613 - 1649) who did so much to introduce baroque sensibility into English literature. Pinkney was responsible for editing and publishing Crashaw's "Carmen Deo Nostro" (Paris, 1632) with his own introductory verses: Was CAR the Crawshawe; or WAS Crashawe CAR, Since both within one name combined are? Yes, Car's Crashawe, he CAR; t'is love alone Which melts two harts, of both composing one. Pinkney, despite his literary interests, was a man of great practical abilities, and he left a permanent memorial to his endeavours in the English Convent of Augustinian Canonesses of Our Lady of Sion. This convent, founded in 1635, owed much of its early vitality to its first superior, Mary Tredway (1593 - 1677), an English nun in the French convent of Notre Dame de Beaulieu at Douai when she first met Pinkney, and to Bishop Smith, whose influence at court eased the community's foundation and early years, but it was Pinkney who provided both the spiritual direction and financial expertise which made it a success. He also gave it is special character; a community which would receive only English subjects, under the direct jurusdiction of the Archbishop of Paris, and with the secular priests acting as confessors. In his lifetime the convent on the Rue des Fosses-Saint-Victor established itself as one of the leading English Catholic schools for girls, and flourishes today at Ealing in the suburbs of London. Pinkney worked hard too, for the establishment of an English ecclesiastical college in Paris, a scheme which was eventually realised in St Gregory's College, but most of his energies were devoted to the convent where he lived until his death on 31 October 1674. "For 40 years he had taught us the way of God in truth and solid piety, and was at length broken and exhausted of an illness of more than ten years". There are several existing portraits of Pinkney - at Ealing, at Ushaw and at Douai Abbey, in Berkshire. This last portrait, which was copied by L. Bulewski and piblished from an engraving in 1878, is one of several in the possession of the Benedictines of Woolhampton which formerly belonged to the suppressed Douai seminary. Pinkney's writings fall into three groups; controversy, English translations of spiritual classics, and introductions to the best of contemporary spirituality. His principal venture into controversy was his Occasional Discources (1646), the fruit of a correspondence with John Cosin (1592 - 1674), Bishop of Durham, who had been rector of Brancepeth from 1626 to 1640, and had become a leading spokesman of the Laudian party. More typical of his work was his popularisation of Thomas Kempis. Pinkney's version of the Imitation Christi (1636) was virtually a reissue of the translation made by the Jesuit, Anthony Hoskins (1568 - 1615), whose edition was the only one of the nine translations published in English in the seventeenth century to be taken directly from the Latin. Nevertheless Pinkney's Imitation has certain celebrity, especially as his introduction to the work became in its second edition of 1641 'an indignant defence' of Kempis' authorship. In his Meditations and Prayers (1664), further translations from the writer of the Imitatio, he took up again the question of authorship and showed himself to be one of the staunchest champions of Kempis, the Augustinian canon, against the Benedictine candidate for the authorship, Gersen. In general Pinkney stood against the claims of the religious orders, especially the Benedictines and Jesuits, to "superiority" in the Church. Many of Pinkney's translations were from fellow secular clergy who he saw, in line with much of Counter-Reformation teaching, as having the primary apostolic role. His "fine translation" of Frances de Sales' Treatise of the Love of God (1630), the first of his published works, and of Camus' Draught of Eternitie (1632) made much Salesian spirituality available to English readers. Although many of Pinkney's versions began life as translations for his cannonesses, they appear to have been assimilated into the spiritual inheritance of the English Catholic community and especially of the missionary priests. "It is easy to understand the attraction of the Salesian tradition for secular priests, with its insistence on the pursuit of a practical humane piety, and its emphasis on the vital role of the spiritual director". Pinkney's own spiritual direction found published form in his Sweet Thoughts of Juses and Marie (1658) which revealed how deeply influenced he was by the Salesian tradition. His major original work Pietas Parisiensis (1666) eulogised another of the leading continental reformers, St Vincent de Paul, and his disciples; most of the book is devoted to various aspects of Vincent's pioneer works in charity and evangelisation. It was, when it appreared, the fullest account, in English at least, of the work of renewal among the secular clergy being achieved at St Lazare and of his religious exercises conducted there. Not all the English clergy looked on Pinkney's writings and influence, with their strong support of new ways, with approval. George Leyburn (1600 - 1677), a contemporary of Pinkney's at Douai and President of the college from 1652 to 1670, described Pinkney as a man "of little learning", "much occupied in secular business" who had "never worked on he English Mission", and denounced him as a Jansenist. Jansenism was all too often used as a term of general abuse, and it is clear that whatever his theological limitations or inclinations, it was Pinkney's variety of spirituality which was, in the end, to become characteristic of English Catholicism. He was one of the forerunners in the process of the successful Englishing of the Counter-Reformation ideas embodied in the French devot tradition which reached its maturity in John Gother and its culmination in Richard Challoner. | |
| Reference* | Reference: Wikipedia. | |
| Name Variation | Miles Pinckney was also known as Thomas Carre. | |
| Name Variation | Miles Pinckney was also known as Pinkney. | |
| Note* | 1617 | He Mentioned in his Grandfather Thomas Batmanson's will in 1617. |
| Illness* | 1662 | He was ill with Being seized with a palsy he became almost unserviceable for nearly twelve years before his death in 1662. |
| Last Edited | 3 Apr 2022 |