Elizabeth Heywood Donne Syminges Rainsford was born, c. 1544, into a proud recusant family; she was related on her mother’s side to Sir Thomas More, the first famous Catholic martyr of the English Reformation.
Elizabeth’s father, John Heywood, tried to gain admission to the Jesuit College at Antwerp in 1578, but was driven away by Protestant militants (taking revenge for the Catholic violence against the city two years earlier).
Her brother Ellis was with his father at the time. Her older and more famous brother, Jasper, a brilliant intellectual, became the second head of the Jesuit Mission for the reconversion of England. Elizabeth took her son John to visit him in Newgate Gaol.
By her first husband, John Donne, she had six chil- dren who survived their father.
After his death, she married and was widowed twice more: with her last husband, Richard Rains- ford, a fiercely devout Catholic, she left in 1595 and spent many years in Antwerp – reclaimed by Catholic Spain in 1585.
Of Elizabeth’s children, one was Anne, who was married twice: her first husband ran through all her money; her second husband was some kind of an in- former against Catholics.
Another was Henry, who died of the plague in prison for harbouring a priest (1593 – he was 19); it seems that, under the threat of torture,