The fickleness of historical reputations is well illustrated by the case of Thomas White, 1593–1676. A Catholic secular priest, a prolific writer, and a widely-known figure in his own life-time, White sank after his death into an oblivion, from which he has only recently been rescued. Admittedly, his scientific theories soon became unfashionable, and no doubt his 'extravagant' and 'heretical novelties' in theology contributed towards his disfavour amongst seventeenth-century fellow- Catholics. But it will be argued here that the main cause of White's historical eclipse was his short political treatise, The Grounds of Obedience and Government, published in 1655.

A great deal of attention has rightly been given to those Catholics who were put to death under Elizabeth I, but imprisonment as distinct from execution has not received the attention it deserves. Catholics sometimes sing about ‘our fathers chained in prisons dark’, but they are not always aware of what imprisonment meant to their ancestors. It is the purpose of this article to consider some aspects of this large and neglected subject, since imprisonment and the threat of imprisonment made a big impact on the Elizabethan Catholic community and must have discouraged a great many people from persevering in their religion when they contemplated what could at best be an irritating deprivation of liberty and at worst a long ordeal which might end in death.

In the following essay I have tried to put into practice some ideas about the investigation of English Catholic communities outlined in a paper which I gave to the recusant history conference in 1965. These were much indebted to the school of sociologie religieuse inaugurated in France by M. Gabriel le Bras; I have tried to adapt its approach and methods for use in the different conditions of an English nonconfortning body. The assumptions made are that the congregation is a major object of study in the history of any Christian tradition; and that congregations, being secial entities, may best be studied by methods, including statistical methods, proper to the study of societies. In applying these assumptions to the history of English Catholicism I do not claim to be doing something different from what historians of the subject have usually done, but to be asking about single cells questions which have traditionally been aimed at the body as a whole. How big was it, and was it getting bigger or smaller? Who belonged to it, and why? Where did its members live? What relations had they with one another, outside religious belief and practice? With how much enthusiasm, with what particular emphases did they believe and practise? How did they get on with the community at large? I have sought here to answer some of these questions for four congregations in rural Northumberland between the mid-eighteenth and the mid-nineteenth century: Hesleyside alias Bellingham, Biddlestone, Thropton and Callaly. I chose this period because materials of the sort one needs were available for it; and also because it is a period of peculiar importance in the history of English Catholicism, covering the transition from its ancient to its modem phase, and providing a point of departure for enquiry in either direction. There is little significance in the communities chosen. It is incidental that the region in question should have provided most of the English support and much of the English scenery for the rebellion of 1715, or that Biddlestone should have a small niche in literary history as the original of Osbaldistone Hall in Scott’s Rob Roy. One of the characteristics of this type of investigation is that it does not much matter where one begins. Another is, however, that the value of conclusions drawn depends on. the number of cases studied. I hope to pursue some myself, but should be most happy if others were inspired to do the same. One might, in this way, reach a more intimate and comprehensive understanding of the whole English Catholic community than has so far been achieved or, I suspect, is possible for any other religious community in the country.

During the year 1623, as a result of the diplomatic negotiations between England and Spain for the marriage of Prince Charles to the Infanta Maria, Catholics in England enjoyed, for the first time for many years, comparative freedom from the operation of the penal laws. In this period of relative tranquility, Pope Gregory XV, yielding to insistent demands by the leaders of the English secular clergy, decided to restore to the Church in England a measure of local episcopal rule. In doing so he broke away from the policy of his immediate predecessors. After the suppression of the English Catholic hierarchy by Queen Elizabeth at the beginning of her reign, successive popes had taken the English Catholics under their immediate protection and had rejected various appeals for the restoration of local bishops. But the restoration did not, in the event, produce the results for which the papacy hoped. William Bishop who was appointed bishop in 1623, died after rather less than a year in office. His successor, Richard Smith, appointed by Urban VIII in 1624, became involved in disputes with the Jesuit and Benedictine clergy on the mission and, after six years of strife, withdrew to France in 1631 and resigned his charge. Rome then reverted to her earlier policy. Though Smith later sought papal permission to return to England, it was refused. After his death at Paris in 1655, the English secular clergy petitioned Rome for another bishop, but without success. The Church in England was to remain without a bishop for another thirty years.

The Jesuit mission to England so proudly announced by Edmund Campion in 1580 was a venture hesitantly undertaken by the Society of Jesus. There was careful, prayerful discernment not only before Father General Everard Mercurian decided in its favour but also throughout its subsequent growth and development. According to the Formula of the Institute, in a sense the Jesuit rule, the purpose and goal of the Society was twofold: the salvation and sanctification of both the individual Jesuits and of their fellow men and women. The entire thrust of Ignatian spirituality was the consideration of the first in so far as it advanced the second. Ignatius urged that all the ordinary practices and customs of religious life be considered in the context of the apostolate and either executed or modified in so far as they advanced the order’s goals. Because of the stress that Ignatius had placed on the Society’s works, he was reluctant to prescribe any universally binding spiritual practices. Indeed, among the wide powers granted to the General in the order’s Constitutions was that to grant dispensations ‘in particular cases which require such dispensation, while he takes account of the persons, places, times, and other circumstances.’

In the account of his missionary work, the Jesuit John Gerard (1564–1637) famously explained how, after a few years of penury in ‘Mass equipment’, Catholic houses had become so well equipped that priests were able to set about their work immediately upon their arrival. He recalled that in the last two years of his work (1604–06), he no longer needed to lodge in taverns but always found friendly dwellings to shelter him on his way. Most of these were run by women, whose prominence in the activity of harbouring was pointed out in many documents, including the minutes of the confession given to the Privy Council by the appellant priest Anthony Sherlock, who turned informer after his capture in 1606:

The English Catholic Church confronted in the Irish a manner of men utterly remote from its own experience. Its priests ministered to a devout gentry; they had now to serve a pious proletariat. The faith in England had survived in the country; the Irish flocked to the towns. English congregations were small, and mostly worshipped in manor chapels; the Irish multitudes would require cathedrals. The English Catholic squire resembled his heretical neighbours both in their virtues and their vices; and his exclusion from English public life had preserved in him the insular prejudice of a simpler age. Class, culture and a uniquely quietist traditional piety shut him off from the Irish poor, and created the distinctions which a common creed might alone hope to overcome.

In 1773 the four English Vicars Apostolic made detailed reports on the state of their districts to the Congregation de Propaganda Fide in Rome. A summary of tl1ese reports was published by Maziere Brady in 1877. This summary contains statistics for the number of priests and the number of Catholics in every county in England, and is valuable as providing the earliest detailed statistical picture of the English Catholic community to come from a Catholic source. It is not surprising, therefore, that it has frequently been quarried by historians.

The so-called ‘Bloody Questions’ were originally put to Edmund Campion and others who were charged with him in a mass trial of fourteen priests and one layman in 1581. Campion seems to have been the first to call them Bloody Questions. They have over the centuries been the subject of considerable controversy between Catholic and non-Catholic writers, and it is worthwhile looking at them again in some detail.

When, in 1834 Lord Macauley called on Cardinal Wiseman at the Venerable English College in Rome, he was most surprised to find the cardinal's room fitted out in the English style and very like the rooms of a senior fellow of Trinity College, Oxford. On the same occasion Macauley was introduced to Lords Clifford and Shrewsbury and thought them not at all what he imagined Catholics of old family to be: proud and stately and with an air of being men of rank but not of fashion. John Henry Newman, too, had a notion that the old English Catholic gentry moved silently and sorrowfully about and lived in old-fashioned houses of gloomy appearance, closed in with high walls, iron gates and yew trees, cut off from the populous world around them. On his entry into ‘the narrow community of the English Catholics’, the other future cardinal, Henry Edward Manning, said he felt as if he ‘had got into St. James's Palace in 1687. It was as stately as the House of Lords …’ These reactions show that Macauley, Newman and Manning cannot have come across many English Catholic gentlemen before and that they had gained very little idea of the social history of English Catholicism, however much they may have learned about its political and ecclesiastical past. This paper will point out what they should, and might easily, have picked up.

In the early seventeenth century there appeared in print a small group of Catholic controversial works in English written by someone calling himself ‘John Brereley, Priest’. These works were celebrated in their day because of their immense erudition and also because they introduced into religious controversy a novel style of argument that soon became fashionable among Catholics and Protestants alike: that of proving a case mainly from the admissions and self-contradictions of the opposing side. The most important work in the group and the one that established ‘Brereley’s’ chief claim to fame was—to give it the title of its secohd edition by which it is always known—The Protestants apologie for the Roman church.

THE writings of the seventeenth-century English theologian, Henry Holden, played a small but significant part in the development of western religious thought in the centuries following his death. His most important work, Divinae fidei analysis, first printed in Latin at Paris in 1652 and afterwards translated and published in English, was several times reprinted in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and was later incorporated in two theological collections, J. P. Migne's Theologiae cursus completus (tom.6, 1839), and Josef Braun's Bibliotheca regularum fidei (tom.2, 1844). It influenced the thinking, in the nineteenth century, not only of avowed liberals such as Dôllinger and Acton, but also, in some degree, of moderate progressives like Newman. In recent years, specialist studies on different aspects of Holden's thought have appeared in English and in French. So far, however, no serious attempt has been made to revise his bibliography: we still have to rely, in large measure, on that published by Joseph Gillow more than a century ago. In this article I want to bring together material that has come to light since Gillow's time and to examine Holden's works afresh against the background of his life and the religious and political developments in England and France at that period. I shall devote particular attention to two themes that run through all his work. One is gallicanism, that amalgam of mediaeval theories limiting the authority of the papacy in relation to secular states and their rulers and national churches and their bishops. It will be seen that plans which Holden advanced in the 1640s for the reform of the Catholic Church in England along gallican lines are based largely on ideas developed in his Divinaefidei analysis published a few years later. The other is his analytical and critical approach to doctrine, aiming always to distinguish truths solidly based on Scripture and tradition from the mere speculations of theologians. It is an approach that had been made popular in France by the Catholic controversialist, François Véron, whose Régula fidei catholicae was first published at Paris in 1644 when Holden was probably already at work on his Divinae fidei analysis. It reveals itself in all Holden's writings and distinguishes him from many of the other Catholic apologists who were drawn into controversy with the Anglican divines of the post-Chillingworth era.

THE FIRST VOLUME of Fr. Godfrey Anstruther's The Seminary Priests: A Dictionary of the Secular Clergy of England and Wales, 1558-1850 appeared in 1968, and in subsequent years it was followed by three other volumes. For various reasons, Fr. Anstruther did not complete the fifth and final volume, although he had collected a great deal of material for it. His achievement was remarkable, all the more so because it was carried out single-handed, not with the assistance of a team of scholars, and he used a great range of source-material in foreign as well as in British archives. This major contribution to the history of post-Reformation Catholicism has not always received the credit it deserves, and it is a sad comment on the historical awareness of the English Catholic community that the volumes did not sell as well as they should have done. Inevitably in a work of such magnitude, there were a number of errors, but those who are ready to point out details which Fr. Anstruther got wrong must never forget how much he got right and how his monumental and much-used dictionary has provided scholars with a solid foundation on which to build.

This article explores how communities of female religious within the English sphere of influence in Ireland negotiated their survival, firstly in the aftermath of the Henrician dissolution campaigns of the late 1530s and 1540s and thereafter down to the early 1640s. It begins by examining the strategies devised by women religious in order to circumvent the state’s proscription of vocational living in the aftermath of the Henrician suppression campaigns. These ranged from clandestine continuation of conventual life to the maintenance of informal religious vows within domestic settings. It then moves on to consider the modes of migration and destinations of Irish women who, from the late sixteenth century onwards, travelled to the Continent in pursuit of religious vocations, an experience they shared with their English counterparts. Finally, it considers how the return to Ireland from Europe of Irish Poor Clare nuns in 1629 signalled the revival of monastic life for women religious on the island. The article traces the importance of familial and clerical patronage networks to the ongoing survival of Irish female religious communities and highlights their role in sustaining Catholic devotional practices, which were to prove vital to the success of the Counter-Reformation mission in seventeenth-century Ireland.

In 1701, William Nicholls, an Anglican clergyman of Salsey in Sussex, published his English translation, ‘purged of Popish errors’, of Francis de Sales’ Introduction to a Devout Life. He prefaced it by an essay on ‘The Rise and Progress of Spiritual Books’, in which he wrote:

The history of British Catholic involvement in the First World War is a curiously neglected subject, particularly in view of the massive and ongoing popular and academic interest in the First World War, an interest which has led to the publication of several studies of the impact of the war on Britain’s Protestant churches and has even seen a recent work on religion in contemporary France appear in an English translation. Moreover, and bearing in mind the partisan nature of much denominational history, the subject has been ignored by Catholic historians despite the fact that the war has often been regarded by non-Catholics as a ‘good’ war for British Catholicism, an outcome reflected in a widening diffusion of Catholic influences on British religious life and also in a significant number of conversions to the Catholic Church. However, if some standard histories of Catholicism in England are to be believed, the popular Catholic experience of these years amount to no more than an irrelevance next to the redrawing of diocesan boundaries and the codification of canon law.

Over fifty years ago, Louise Imogen Guiney wrote: ‘Someone, firstin the field, should write a little book, which should be a scientific andauthentic study of Dr John Donne as a Catholic’. As Guiney pointed out, Donne’s Catholicism, even when he had ceased to practice it actively, and even after he became an Anglican minister, was a continuous influence on his life and writings. However, Donne’s biographers, those before and those since Guiney, have paid scant attention to Donne’s Catholicism, tending rather to see his life as a paradoxical development fromlibertine scepticism to Protestant fideism. Between these extremes, Donne’s religious development has usually been described in terms of riddles and contradictions, with no more than passing reference to its relativelyclear involvement in the spiritual conflict through which Catholicism was repressed in Tudor and Stuart English society. The most influential proponent of this paradoxical interpretation has undoubtedly been Izaak Walton, Donne’s friend, who inexplicably likened Donne’s rather protracted Anglican conversion to the comparatively spontaneous conversion of St Augustine. Augustus Jessopp later repeated Walton’s fundamental idea, that Donne had clean rejected Catholicism at about twenty, even though Jessopp observed that Donne was suspected by his father-in-law of Catholic sympathies as late as 1602. Edmund Gosse was the first of Donne’s biographers to acknowledge the weight of evidence illustrating Donne’s persistent Catholic sympathies; Gosse nevertheless concluded that Donne’s Catholicism had been easily corrupted in the worldly atmosphere of London in the 1590’s, that he had grown sceptical of religion altogether,and that he lapsed thereafter only occasionally into fits of Catholic religion. Very little evidence of this supposed libertine scepticism can be found. Donne was far from sharing the extraordinary sceptical atheism rumoured of Raleigh or Marlowe, and the theory that he even leaned in this directionhas little support other than weak inference from the cynical tone of some of his writings. On the contrary, Donne seems to have shared the common assumption of his time, and the main lesson of his Catholic education, that there is one true religion. But his biographers have persistently seen him (mechanically mentioning his Catholic background) as a profane writer of ‘conceited verses’ converted by saving grace into an Anglican preacher.

In 1580 Robert Persons and Edmund Campion led the first Jesuit mission for the conversion of England. Their success in stirring up a new zeal among English Catholics and in reconciling sympathisers to the church greatly alarmed the government. The result was an intensification of the persecution of Catholics, which culminated in the passing of the statute against recusants in the Parliament of 1581. From this time those who withdrew the Queen’s subjects from their allegiance, or converted them to Catholicism for that intent, together with those who willingly allowed themselves to be so withdrawn, were judged to be traitors. The penalties against those who remained Catholics and refused to conform were drastically increased. A fine of £20 a month could now be imposed for non-attendance at church.

MUCH recent research has examined Catholicism in early Stuart England and some has discussed the contribution of anti-Catholicism to the outbreak of the Civil War—but how well-founded were the fears underlying the rhetoric which surfaced in parliament? This paper1 addresses one aspect of that question by looking at certain financial features of Catholic non-conformity (as demonstrated by absence from Anglican services and/or refusal of the oath of allegiance) in the first half of James I’s reign, chiefly between 1606 and 1612. The significance of this period is that it begins just after the attempt to blow up king and parliament and ends with the death of Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury who, during his term of office as Lord Treasurer from 1608 onwards, was grappling with an intractable royal indebtedness which he managed to curtail but not to cure and whose own effectiveness waned following the failure of the Great Contract in 1610.2