SCARAMPI, PIER FRANCESCO

Papal envoy to the Irish Catholic Confederacy (1643–45); b. Monferrato, Piedmont, 1596; d. Rome, Oct. 14, 1656. As the son of a noble family of the duchy of Monferrato, he first followed a military career, but at the age of forty, he joined the Roman Oratory. On April 18, 1643, Urban VIII named him special envoy to the Irish Catholics, who in the previous year had formed an armed confederacy to defend their religious and political rights and had sought help from the papacy and the Catholic European powers.

He arrived in Ireland in July and was immediately faced with a serious problem. Certain leaders of the Catholic Confederacy, in a search for political agreement with the Marquis of Ormond, King Charles I's Lord-Lieutenant in Ireland, were prepared to content themselves with an assurance that the King would permit them to practice their religion in private. Scarampi insisted that the right to free and public exercise of religion must be part of any political agreement, but in spite of his opposition, agreement was finally reached with the Marquis of Glamorgan, a special envoy from Charles I, in the late summer of 1645. This agreement conceded the demand for free and public exercise of religion, but the concession was to be kept secret. Scarampi opposed this compromise also.

Meanwhile, the new Pope, innocent x, decided to accredit a nuncio to the Confederates, and chose Giovanni Battista rinuccini, Archbishop of Fermo, who arrived in Ireland on Oct. 22, 1645. Scarampi was ordered to remain as his adviser. A crisis developed in the early summer of 1646 when the Supreme Council of the Confederation made public an agreement with Ormond that gave no guarantee of the public exercise of religion.

Rinuccini, supported by Scarampi, decided to use ecclesiastical authority to the full to have this peace rejected. They succeeded in their efforts, but over the next year differences of opinion developed between them. They were agreed that a guarantee of the public exercise of religion had to be part of any settlement between the Irish Catholics and Charles I, but Scarampi seems to have felt that Rinuccini's tactics were tending to identify the interests of the Church with the "Old Irish" political group, thereby forcing moderates of the other group, the Anglo Irish or "Old English," to identify themselves with the faction willing to reach agreement with the King without satisfactory guarantees for the Catholic religion.

After repeated requests, Scarampi was allowed to return to Rome, where he arrived on May 15, 1647, bringing with him five Irish seminarians, among them Oliver plunkett, the future martyr-archbishop of Armagh. Scarampi became superior of the Roman Oratory, and died while tending the sick in the pestilence that ravaged Rome in 1656.

Bibliography: m. j. hynes, The Mission of Rinuccini (Dublin 1932). s. kavanagh, ed., Commentarius Rinuccinianus, 6 v. (Dublin 1932–49). p. aringhi, Memorie storiche della vita del … P.F. Scarampi (Rome 1744). g. albion, Charles 1 and the Court of Rome (London 1935).

[p. j. corish]