Anthony à Wood lists amongst Jonson’s publications ‘His Motives. --- Printed 1622. Oct.’ (Wood, 1691-2, 2.509). No copies of this work are known to survive, nor is it mentioned by Jonson or any of his contemporaries. To judge by its title, His Motives is likely to have been a conversion narrative, in which the author sought to explain his motives for shifting to or from the Catholic faith. (On this familiar genre, see Murray, 2007 and 2009; on the phenomenon of conversion, see Questier, 1996.) Published a dozen years after his re-conversion to the Church of England in 1610, His Motives may have offered an account of Jonson’s reasons for ultimately rejecting the Church of Rome. By the 1620s, however, Jonson was even-handed in his religious views: ‘For any religion, as being versed in both’, as William Drummond had observed in 1619 (Informations, 561). His ‘humble gleanings in divinity’ which perished in the fire of 1623 were drawn ‘after the fathers, and those wiser guides/ Whom faction had not drawn to study sides’ (‘An Execration upon Vulcan’, The Underwood, 43.102-4). It is possible that His Motives was equally balanced in its analysis, examining the reasons also for Jonson’s original conversion to Catholicism in 1598, and providing a longer perspective on the fluctuations of his spiritual life (on which, see Crowley, 1998, and Donaldson, 2011, chs. 11 and 14).

The absence of surviving copies does not in itself mean that the publication never existed, for such treatises, being frequently controversial, were notoriously subject to loss. Jonson’s friend William Alabaster wrote an account of his conversion to Catholicism in 1597 entitled Seven Motives, which he attempted to convey to the Earl of Essex in the hope (it was said) of attracting him also to Rome. Alabaster’s manuscript was intercepted by the authorities and has now disappeared, but its nature can be deduced from two printed replies, by John Racster (An Answer to W. Alabaster His Motives, 1598) and Roger Fenton (Alabaster’s Seven Motives Removed and Confuted, 1599), which quote extensively from it. During his time at the English College in Rome Alabaster wrote another account of his conversion, which survives today in the archives of the College (‘Alabaster’s Conversion’, V. E. C. Liber 1394; the text has been edited by Dana F. Sutton, 1997). This account, once mistakenly attributed to Father Robert Persons, then Rector of the English College, was seemingly designed as ‘propaganda for English consumption’ – an application thwarted by Alabaster’s disconcerting subsequent changes of faith, culminating in his formal return to the Church of England in 1611 (Alabaster, ed. Sutton, 1997, ix, xviii; see also Murray, 2007, and ODNB, ‘William Alabaster’).

Alabaster was widely believed to have been converted to the Church of Rome in 1597 by the Yorkshireman and former Jesuit, Father Thomas Wright, who has been identified as the unnamed priest who persuaded Ben Jonson himself to convert the following year (Stroud, 1947; CWBJ Life, 1.xciv, Informations, 188-90). In the surviving narrative of his conversion, however, Alabaster attributes his change of faith not to any direct arguments by Wright but rather to an inspirational reading of a book that Wright had happened to lend him, Refutation of Several Sundry Reprehensions (Paris, 1583), by the Catholic controversialist William Rainolds. Since any attempt to convert an English subject to Catholicism was a treasonable offence under an Elizabethan statute of 1581, Alabaster could well have been seeking in this way to avoid directly incriminating Father Wright, who had been interrogated by the authorities for his suspected role in relation to Alabaster’s change of religion and his association with Essex. By 1622 there would have been no danger to Father Wright had Jonson chosen to publish a fuller account of the circumstances of his own conversion to Rome nearly a quarter of a century earlier. Wright was now a respected figure who was shortly to be named as one of the nineteen canons attendant on the new Catholic bishop in England, whose appointment James himself had approved. As it turned out, Wright was to die just a few months later, without having taken up this position.

The absence of any reference to Jonson’s His Motives by any commentator other than Wood, seventy years after the supposed publication of the work, must naturally cast doubt on its very existence. Yet Jonson continued to take a close, if at times wary, interest in questions of religion during the last decade or two of his life, and it is entirely possible that he did compose a spiritual autobiography of this kind in 1622, during this more settled and reflective period of his life. Had the work survived, it might have significantly enlarged our understanding of the nature of Jonson’s spiritual life.