COLEMAN, WALTER

Franciscan, missionary, and poet; b. Cannock, Staffordshire, date unknown; d. London, England, 1645. Coleman (Colman) was certainly the younger son of Walter Coleman (b. c. 1566) and his wife, Dorothy, of Cannock, Staffordshire, a community whose 400 inhabitants were described in 1604 as virtually all Catholic. He entered the English College, Douai, Sept. 19, 1616. Later he was educated in France. He went back to England for a time, but returned to Douai, where he entered the English Franciscans of the Strict Observance in 1625, receiving the religious name Christopher à Santa Clara. He was sent to England as a missionary and imprisoned, probably in late 1627, but later released. He spent several more years as a missionary and was then rearrested, imprisoned at length, and finally brought to trial at the Old Bailey with six other priests in Dec. 1641. He was sentenced to death, but Charles I, at the behest of the French ambassador, commuted the sentence; Coleman was returned to prison at Newgate, where he died after a lengthy illness. In 1633 he published a poem in 262 stanzas, entitled La Dance Machabre, or Death's Duell, a rare work that has been virtually unnoticed by literary historians; its dedication to Queen Henrietta Maria is in French.

Bibliography: The Victoria History of the County of Stafford, ed. l. m. midgley (London 1959), for references to the Coleman family. e. h. burton and t. l. williams, eds., The Douay College Diaries (Publications of the Catholic Record Society 10; 1911). t. cooper, The Dictionary of National Biography from the Earliest Times to 1900, 63 v. (London 1885–1900) 4:852. j. gillow, A Literary and Biographical History or Bibliographical Dictionary of the English Catholics from 1534 to the Present time, 5 v. (London-New York 1885–1902; repr. New York 1961) 1:536–538.

[h. s. reinmuth, jr.]