BAWDEN, WILLIAM (BALDWIN)

Jesuit priest; b. Cornwall, 1563; d. Saint-Omer, Flanders, Sept. 28, 1632. After five years' study at Oxford, he arrived at Douai on Dec. 31, 1582, and at Rome on Oct. 1, 1583. He took the college oath on May 31, 1584, and was ordained on April 16, 1588. After a year as penitentiary at St. Peter's, he entered the Society of Jesus in Flanders in 1590. He taught moral theology at Louvain. Then he set out for Spain disguised as a merchant in the winter of 1594 and 1595. He was captured at sea and taken to England. The Privy Council failed to identify him and exchanged him for an English prisoner in Spain. Bawden ministered for six months in Hampshire and then functioned in Rome as minister at the English College. At Brussels, he was vice-prefect of the English mission from about 1600 to 1610, being accused unjustly of complicity in the Gunpowder Plot. An ineffective attempt was made for his extradition, but in 1610 he was recognized and taken while traveling incognito through the Palatinate; he was surrendered to the English government, which kept him in the Tower until June 15, 1618, when he was released at the insistence of Count Gondomar, the Spanish ambassador. In 1622, after a year as rector of Louvain, he became rector of Saint-Omer, governing the college successfully until his death.

Bibliography: h. chadwick, St. Omers to Stonyhurst (London 1962). t. cooper, The Dictionary of National Biography from the Earliest Times to 1900 (London 1885–1900) 1:959–960. h. foley, ed., Records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus, 7 v. (London 1877–82) 3:501–520. j. gillow, A Literary and Biographical History or Bibliographical Dictionary of the English Catholics from 1534 to the Present Time (London–New York 1885–1902) 1:156–157. h. more, Historia Provinciae Anglicanae Societatis Jesu (Saint-Omer 1660) lib. 8:374–378. c. sommervogel et al., Bibliothèque de la Compagnie de Jésus (Brussels-Paris 1890–1932) 1:830.

[f. edwards]