Parsons (or Persons), Robert (1546-1610)

English Jesuit and polemical writer. In 1574 he resigned his fellowship at Balliol College, Oxford University, entered the Society of Jesus in Rome, Italy, in 1575, and was ordained a priest three years later. He and Edmund Campion were selected to work on the English mission, directed chiefly from Douai, France. They landed at Dover, England, in 1580. Campion, however, was arrested and Parsons was forced to flee the country. He returned to Rome, from where he continued to direct the English mission, and later went to Spain, where he founded a number of institutions for training English priests. He played a considerable role in the policy which eventually led to the dispatch of the Spanish Armada for the invasion of Britain. His aim was to work for foreign intervention on behalf of English Catholics.

Parsons was born in Nether Stowey, Somerset, England. He was educated at Oxford University. Among his best-known controversial pamphlets are the A Brief Discourse concerning certain reasons why Catholics refuse to go to Church and a spiritual treatise, The Christian Directory.