The First Englishman known to have lived in the island was the Franciscan friar Andrew, who laboured in the North and lost his life at the hands of the Hindus in 1627 or 1628.’
This sentence occurs in Mr. H. W. Codrington’s Short History of Ceylon. It is a complete biography in one sentence. The brevity is, in a sense, as good as a comprehensive volume on Father Andrew O. F. M. Cap. The sentence gives us the substance of a saintly life and of a romance of missionary high adventure.
About Friar Andrew apparently, there would be no more to say even in a Long History of Ceylon. Because the scholars of these things are unaware that there is any more to say. For myself I know nothing more about the subject; I am, therefore, only too happy to write on it.
It is good to know that the first Englishman who came to Ceylon and lived here was a missionary priest, and not a commercial traveller or agent or a shop-walker or a rubber or tea planter Even though these came in later, the priest was in first. It is to the credit of England, thanks to Father Andrew, that the first English export to Ceylon was something we should not have dreamt of unless our students of history assured us.
It is good to think that a country which was staunchly and solidly Catholic for a thousand years managed to send us after all a living light of the gospel for the first thing. At The time the Catholic unity in England was broken; the colossal fiasco of the Reformation had been set on foot. But a Catholic majority still held on in the face of persecution and deadly peril. A vocation to the priesthood at the time was hardly a golden prospect. Possibly trained and ordained in the exile in France, Father Andrew somehow heard the call. Whether the choice of this island of the East Indies was deliberate or accidental, no one can say. If he were caught in England, the result would have been death. Nothing worse could befall him anywhere else, in the East Indies or the West. But it was not running away from danger. Adventure was in the air that season. The Elizabethan sea-dogs ventured out to booty. So the man of God also sis for the gospel’s sake.
The sea-robber is under no compulsion really to sally forth. But the carrier of the gospel is. To the ends of the earth is his commission. More or less within the span of the friars life, the sea-robber Drake had circumnavigated the world. There was then plenty of sea-faring to the most distant of the world’s places. With a lot of buccaneers the priest must have sailed, but alone in his innocence of the desire to bring any swag home.
Only the Recording Angel would know whether Fra Andreas was a young man or in mature manhood or in old age when he was blessed with Martyrdom in the kingdom of Jaffna. The chances, however, are that he was still on the happy side. The church, in her tragic English hour, had nevertheless her full quiver of eager young heroes dying to spend themselves and to be spent. These made sure that she would not be confounded when she talked with the enemy at the gate. Unless there were definite evidence to the contrary, there is nothing to discourage us from thinking the Franciscan to have come from that strong middle-class stock, the country’s backbone, which stood by the old Faith to the bitter end.
Whether countryman or townee, as a farer-forth on the seas, he would have known London. He would have known the doings of the Bloody Bess, in whose name the real sovereigns in England, the scoundrel Cecils, hacked at the Church and fattened grossly out of the plunder of Church property.
His holiest place in all London would have been the Tyburn tree, where, as a youngster he would have seen or heard of the hanging, drawing and quartering and all the unspeakable glory thereof.
He would not then have known that his own Tyburn would be elsewhere; in the northern kingdom of an island of the East Indies.
His name Andrew would have been his name in religion.
His family name is a blank: it may have been anyone of those strong, common English middle-class names, which strew the list of the English Martyrs, who died and to-day triumphantly survive the murderers who did them, to death.
He would have spent months at sea rounding Africa. He probably set foot on Indian soil before he came here. He may even have exercised the ministry their until he somehow realised that the greater need was Ceylons. In Ceylon it was the time between the Evangelisation of St. Francis Xavier and the revival under the Venerable Joseph Vaz.
The Portuguese era was drawing to its end. The Dutch Lutheran was in the offing, ready for his turn of work. In the Conquista of the Portuguese it was the second and disastrous Captain—Generalship of Constantino de Sa de Noronha. The most chivalrous of the Conquistadors, a fascinating man, was this Constantino ;but the Portuguese colonial machine was running down.
Their ecclesiastical governance was in no better case. Having tied Church to State they had inclined to take things easy, taking prosperity for granted. There was no persecution of the Church in Portugal. There was need of that salutary evil for quickening and vitalising.
Now here was Friar Andrew, in whose country the Church was going through fire and water. He was an answer of some sort to the need. He was welcome. His coming was probably more urgent then he himself knew.
Franciscans of other nations there certainly were, and in numbers, when this English son of the Povrello arrived in Ceilao. To him it must have been a thrill to wear the brown habit openly and be at large and free to minister. At home, in his own place they had proscribed it after it had flourished on the English landscape for centuries.
Here in the North of Ceylon the threat of martyrdom was intermittent, arising only from periodic commotions, in which the fanaticism of the unregenerate was unleashed for a time; away in the England of King William Cecil, Lord Burleigh, enemy of the Church and Chicago gangster, Indian thug and receiver-general of Catholic stolen property, the threat was all there all the time.
In one of these commotions, an attack by Sinhalese King’s Kandyan forces on the Tamil Kingdom in the Jaffna peninsula, Father Andrew was taken.
The attack was repulsed and the Portuguese victory was thought due to a miracle. The Portuguese first retired, then sallied forth to trounce the enemy. There is no knowing whether Father Andrew was stationed in those parts or moved with the army. The Portuguese historian and author of the Conquista, de Queyroz, conveys the latter impression and only spares a word to say that the tragedy vas due to the fact that the English friar and his Franciscan companion ‘did not retire in time.’
Spared one Tyburn, the Englishman was blessed with another. Gladly he paid the price. At the time Bess (the Bloody) was dead in England and her successor, the wisest fool in Christendom, priggish and Presbyterian son of his Catholic mother, was dead also.
It was the third year of the first Charles, his unhappy head already beginning to lie uneasy on his shoulders. One Oliver Williams (later known as Cromwell), who was to ease it by cutting that head off, was twenty nine years of age and making his pile in money and land to enable him to do the deed. And Milton, who was to speak of their confounded Roundheads as God’s Englishmen, was twenty. but unaware that God’s Englishman had died for God in the Northern territory in Ceylon.
English merchants come, collect their cash, and go. The English missionary came, served the Lord gratis, died for Him, and buried his bones in the soil. Knowing no details of the holy life of Friar Andrew, we know not also to mark the place…….
……………… But God knows.
