Richard Rowlands, born Richard Verstegan (c. 1550 – 1640), was an Anglo-Dutch antiquary, publisher, humorist and translator. Verstegan was born in East London the son of a cooper; his grandfather, Theodore Roland Verstegen, was a refugee from Guelders who arrived in England around the year 1500. A convert to the Catholic Church, Rowlands produced an English translation of the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary; the translation and primer prayer book that contained it remained among the most popular English Catholic devotionals for two centuries. Biography Under the patronym Rowlaunde, Richard went to Christ Church, Oxford, in 1564, where he may have studied early English history and the Anglo-Saxon language. Having become a Catholic, he left the university without a degree to avoid swearing the Oath of Supremacy. Thereafter he was indentured to a goldsmith, and in 1574 became a freeman of the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths. In 1576 he published a guidebook to Western Europe, translated from German, entitled The Post of the World. At the end of 1581 he secretly printed an account of the execution of Edmund Campion but was discovered and 'being apprehended, brake out of England'. In exile, he resumed the surname of Verstegen (Anglicized Verstegan) and, in 1585 or 1586, he moved to the Spanish Netherlands. With covert financial support from the Spanish Crown, Verstegan set up a residence, "in Antwerp near the bridge of the tapestry makers", as a publisher, engraver, "a valued secret agent of the Spanish party", and a smuggler of banned books as well as Roman Catholic priests and laity to and from the British Isles. Verstegan also used his many contacts throughout the strictly illegal and underground Catholic Church in England, Wales, and in Ireland to both write and publish accounts of the suffering of priests in England and of the Irish Catholic Martyrs. To the fury of the English Court, Verstegan's books made the whole of Catholic Europe aware of the religious persecution taking place under the rule of Queen Elizabeth I. While in Paris in 1588, Verstegan was briefly imprisoned by King Henri III at the insistence of the English Ambassador, but, as the recent French translation of his 1587 book Theatrum crudelitatum Hæreticorum nostri temporis had already heavily contributed to the ideology of the Catholic League during the French Wars of Religion, Verstegan had many influential sympathisers and protectors. At the insistence of both the