Excerpt from The Life of Luisa De Carvajal

Amidst that group Of holy priests and devoted religious, of indefatigable missionaries and devout women, who kept alive the faith in England during those glorious and terrible days, one humble and gentle figure has remained yet more unnoticed than those of the fellow labourers and sufl'erers with whom her lot was cast. It is that of a delicate, high born, timid lady - timid by nature, valiant through grace - a foreign, flower (as the writers Of that day would have said), transplanted in an English soil; the daughter Of a wealthy and noble Spanish house, linked by no one tie with our country except that of a passionate desire, growing at last into an irresistible vocation, to labour for the salvation of souls in England.

The name of Dona Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza is all but unknown in the land where she spent nine years in the exercise of every spiritual and temporal work of mercy towards her persecuted brethren in the faith, and died a victim, if not a martyr, to her apostolic zeal. The time seems arrived to tell the story of her wonderful life of love, penance, and toil; to study its details, and see how grace overcame the weakness Of nature, and by a providential training, prepared this chosen soul for the exercise of an extraordinary charity, leading her even in childhood to shadow forth, by a series of austerities and voluntary sufferings, the cross she was so bravely to carry in her maturer years. It was a strange vocation that brought a Spanish maiden, reared in all the grandeur and state befitting her rank, and keenly alive to the point of honour, ' as her biographer calls it - the sensitive pride of a chivalrous race - to dwell in a wretched abode in the dark streets of London, to haunt its prisons with her gentle presence, to stand at the foot of its scaffolds, cheering the dying, and burying the dead, with the finger of scorn pointed at her, and the hootings of the rabble dogging her footsteps, to reach, at last, a dungeon, from whence she issued only to linger on a bed of sickness, and die amongst strangers, far away from the sunny land of her birth. Soon after her death, in 1614, the process of Luisa de Carvajal's canonization was set on foot at Rome; miracles wrought in favour of those who invoked her, the efficacy of her relics, and the heroic sanctity ofher life and death, were abundantly attested, but for some unknown reason, the progress of the cause was not actively pursued, and since that time a sort of oblivion has been permitted to steal over the memory of this gentle saint.

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