Post-Reformation Catholicism in England is popularly associated with the gentry before the Industrial Revolution and with the Irish urban proletariat afterwards. I have insufficient knowledge to comment on the social structure of post-eighteenth century Catholicism, but in my opinion historians, such as Professor Bossy, Mr. Aveling and, to a lesser extent, Dr. Haigh, have rightly emphasised the part played by the gentry in the expansion, or at least survival, of Roman Catholicism during the early seventeenth century. The gentry were arguably the most important social group in England and were best able to provide the necessary shelter and finance for the Catholic priests who operated in an intermittently hostile Protestant state. Indeed, I am inclined to agree with Professor Bossy that without the gentry there would have been no Catholic community. But community there was, and the gentry formed only part of it. It is the other part—the plebeian element—which is considered in this paper.

The Augustinian Convent of Our Lady of Syon (ancestor of the present St. Augustine’s Priory Ealing) was founded at Paris in 1634. After some early difficulties it made its home in 1638–39 on a site in the rue des Fossés Saint-Victor (now rue du Cardinal Lemoine) on the eastern outskirts of the city where it was to remain, with its school, for more than two hundred years. Almost alone among English Catholic institutions founded in France and Flanders during the penal times it weathered the storm of the French Revolution and remained throughout much of the nineteenth century on the site it had formerly occupied. During the Revolution it was suppressed as a Religious house, its property was sequestrated, many treasures were stolen and some early records lost. The buildings in the rue des Fossés Saint-Victor were used for a time as a prison in which nuns from various convents, as well as laywomen, were confined. Conditions became easier after the fall of Robespierre in 1794 and some of the nuns’ property was provisionally restored to them, but it was again seized under the Directory and those nuns who had survived the earlier ordeal were evicted. Reluctantly, they made preparations to follow the example of many other English Catholic institutions in France and on French-held territory and seek refuge in England.

This paper is concerned primarily with the people who sheltered and helped in various ways the priests without whom Catholicism could not have survived in Elizabethan England. The Marian priests were, of course, the first who needed harbouring, and some of them continued to be protected by the laity to the end of Elizabeth's reign and beyond. From 1574 the seminary priests began to come to this country, and in due course they as well as the Jesuits were singled out for special treatment as far as harbouring was concerned. In the fifteen-eighties and the fifteen-nineties the number of seminary priests at work in England seems to have fluctuated between 120 and 150 in any one year. The Elizabethan Jesuits active in this country were never more than three or four in any one year in the fifteen-eighties, and rarely more than twelve in the fifteen-nineties. Compared with the surviving Marian priests and the seminary priests, the Jesuits were very few, but they have left a great deal on record relating to harbouring, and historians sometimes give the impression that they organised the whole business.

In May 1629, the President of the English College at Douai, Matthew Kellison, published a book entitled: A treatiseof the hierarchie and diuers orders of the church against theanarchie of Caluin . In spite of the title, the main purpose of the book was not to defend Catholic teaching on the hierarchy against Calvin. Kellison wrote it is in response to an urgent appeal by Richard Smith, Bishop of Chalcedon, at a crucial moment in Smith's episcopate. During the four years in which he had been in England as bishop, Smith had met with mounting opposition from the regulars and from the Catholic nobility and gentry. Opposition from the laity was greatly strengthened by the publication in 1628 of a work by the President General of the English Benedictine Congregation, Rudesind Barlow, maintaining that the papal brief appointing Smith in 1625, properly interpreted, did not grant him the extensive powers he claimed. What Smith was asking of Kellison in 1629 was not a work in support of his claims in detail—he intended to write that himself—but a general treatise addressed to the lay Catholics explaining the theological basis on which those claims rested. Kellison, as President of the English College and a theologian of international repute, was the ideal man for the task. ‘In these circumstances,’ Kellison a letter two years later, describing how his book came to be written, ‘the Bishop and leading members of the clergy wrote to me urging me to produce a book on the dignity and authority of bishops. Because of my respect for them, and also because of my love for my country, I consented …’

This article examines the functional nature of English Benedictine poetry in order to understand the bespoke literary systems that flourished within convent settings. Even as form has emerged as a primary concern within scholarship on early modern women writers, so too are literary critics starting to show interest in the early modern convent as a site of literary production. Uniting these two scholarly strands, this article explores the formal implications of texts written by and for the six English Benedictine convents founded on the Continent during the early modern period. This analysis of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Benedictine poetics reveals that English cloisters on the Continent actively cultivated alternative approaches to textual production, developing monastic modes at odds with the secular literary system of the time. Poetry provides an ideal case study for this discussion of convent style due to its relatively high status among literary forms. By considering Benedictine theories of speech as well as the formal qualities of the verse that nuns read and wrote, this essay will outline how the English Benedictine convents on the Continent developed a distinctive literary system that rejected secular modes in favour of a poetics aligned with monastic humility.

On the morning of Wednesday 22 May 1538, the Observant Franciscan John Forest was dragged on a hurdle through the streets of London from prison in Newgate to his execution at Spittalfields. Henry VIII's efficient propaganda machine had been in action for days in advance and a large crowd had gathered to witness the event. it began at eight o'clock and reached its climax, the burning of Forest, three hours later.

English devotional literature appears to me to be stamped as distincdy with its national origin as with each writer's individuality. The same sturdy independence, down-to-earth commonsense, quiet humour and unostentatious tenderness recur in Aelfric and Bede, Rolle and Dame Julian, More and Baker, Newman and Knox. Even Chrysostom and Bernard, à Kempis and Luis of Granada speak with unmistakably English voices in the popular manuals compiled from continental sources. Post-Reformation English spirituality too, whether Catholic or Protestant, retains continuity with that of the Middle Ages. Solidly rooted in this native tradition is the work of John Gother (d.1704). His sixteen volumes of instructions, meditations and prayers justify study, not only for their intrinsic merit but also as samplings from which to trace the ‘English Way’ of devotion in much the same manner in which, some years ago, an ‘English Way’ of sanctity was analyzed through biographies of Mary Ward and other saintly English men and women, canonized and uncanonized.

Despite the importance attributed to Southwell in Louis Martz’s The Poetry of Meditation, his Latin poetry—overlooked in Leicester Bradner’s Musae Anglicanae and the subject of a solitary unsatisfactory discussion in Pierre Janelle’s Robert Southwell the Writer—has received little attention. Such neglect is not unusual. Barbara Lewalski’s Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric—a spacious enough volume—disposes of Herbert’s important Latin collection Passio Discerpta in an endnote. This is despite a number of recent studies emphasising the position of Neo-Latin as a modern language alongside and correspondent with the vernacular, acting ‘as a sort of John the Baptist to the vernacular’, or ‘drinking from the same streams’. It is, I think, indisputable that Martz and Lewalski would have needed to modify their arguments had they taken the Neo-Latin poetry of Southwell and Herbert into account in their respective studies. Martz would have found some part of ‘meditative structure’ attributable to the conventions of Latin elegiac writing rather than to Ignatian meditation. Similarly, Lewalski would have had to qualify her description of so much poetry as ‘lyric’ had she considered its relation to Latin elegiac and epigrammatic writing.

Richard Verstegan is still a neglected writer, not because his works lack intrinsic merit or historical importance, but more fundamentally, because much uncertainty remains about the extent of his authorship.

By the time of the outbreak of the Civil Wars, may educated British Protestants considered Roman Catholicism to be an anti-religion; indeed, the Cambridge divine William Fulke went so far as to equate it with devil worship. Wealthy and powerful English Catholics attracted extreme hostility in moments of political crisis throughout the early modern period, but in 1642, fear of Roman Catholicism was even used to legitimate the terrible act of rebellion. Keith Lindley has emphasized the civil war neutrality of English Catholics, while many current historians, nervous of displays of religious prejudice, have portrayed the anti-Catholic fears of parliamentarians as cynical propaganda. Michael Finlayson has condemned anti-Catholicism as ‘irrational paranoia’, to be compared with anti-Semitism, which might, had it not been for the growth of liberal traditions in nineteenth-century England, have led to some sort of ‘Final Solution’.

Major changes in ecclesiastical government are seldom effected without disagreement or tension. The immediate background to the creation of the Diocese of Brentwood in 1917 bears ample testimony to this truth. Three areas of difficulty were especially evident in the decade before the separation of Essex from the Archdiocese of Westminster: the longstanding dispute between the dioceses of Westminster and Southwark; a clash of personalities between Archbishop Bourne and Bishop Amigo; and a protracted argument over the administration of St. John’s Seminary, Wonersh, the management of Southwark’s trust funds and the availability of funds for any new ecclesiastical territory.

The Lords Petre were always one of the most prominent of English Catholic families, and they were also one of the richest. Their landed estates had been built up in the middle of the sixteenth century by Sir William Petre, Secretary of State to three Tudor sovereigns. Sir William's son, John, was created a Baron in 1611, but in the early 17th century the family properties ceased to grow in size, partly because Catholicism excluded them from the profits of office, and partly because provision for younger sons offset such new acquisitions as were made. But even so the estates inherited by the third Lord Petre in 1637 were large enough to place him clearly in the ranks of the great landed magnates. In Essex he had a well-consolidated belt of land lying to the west and south-west of Chelmsford, and centred on the two family residences of Ingatestone Hall and Thorndon Hall. Altogether in Essex Petre had about 11,000 acres of freehold land and the lordship of seventeen manors, and these produced some £5,500 per annum or considerably more than half his total income from land. In addition he had a large estate on the opposite side of the country, in Devon. This lay in two distinct areas, one centred on Axminster and extending down the Axe valley and its tributaries, and the other in the southerly projection of the county on the southern edge of Dartmoor, where the principal possession was the vast moorland manor of South Brent. Besides the main estates in Essex and Devon, there were some isolated properties: the manor of Osmington down on the Dorset coast; Toddenham and Sutton in Gloucestershire; Kennett and Kentford on the Cambridgeshire-Suffolk border.

Worcestershire in the early seventeenth century was not a county, by comparison with some others, with a large percentage of Roman Catholics. Many of the leading families in the county, however, were Catholic, for example the Talbots of Grafton (from 1618 Earls of Shrewsbury), the Sheldons of Beoley, the Habingtons of Hindlip, the Middlemores of King’s Norton (and Edgbaston in Warwickshire) and the Wintours of Huddington. All these families had suffered for the Catholic faith by way of recusancy fines and, in some cases, by imprisonment, loss of property and even by loss of life. In this last connection one might instance the deaths of the Carthusian monk Humphrey Middlemore in 1535, of Edward Habington in 1586, and of Robert and Thomas Wintour, the Gunpowder Plot conspirators. The Catholics of Worcestershire were powerful enough and organised enough to act as a group in connection with the 1601 and 1604 elections for the Knights of the Shire, though in neither case were they successful.

On 31 May 1964, Dr Anne Bieżanek travelled from Wallasey to Westminster Cathedral to attend Mass and receive Holy Communion. She was flanked by hoards of reporters, who over the previous six months had fueled extensive media coverage of her establishment of one of the first Catholic birth control clinics in the world, alongside her intertwined personal story of the physical and emotional strain caused by ten pregnancies. Repeatedly refused the sacraments by her local parish priest in consequence of these activities, and unable to gain satisfaction from the Bishop of Shrewsbury, Dr Bieżanek wrote to the Archbishop of Westminster to announce her intention to ‘resolve the issue’ through an ethical adjudication at the Communion rails.

As the first sustained exploration of this exceptional woman and her sensational life story, this article examines Dr Bieżanek’s private correspondence and public persona to illustrate the ways in which her idiosyncratic re-negotiation of spiritual and sexual politics was path breaking in articulating a ‘modern’ Catholic approach to love and sex and in anticipating the cacophony of such voices elicited by the Humanae Vitae encyclical in 1968. As such, it illustrates the form and force of contrasting and modulating Catholic discourses about love, marriage, and contraception in the post-war period and demonstrates the continuing and critical interplay of religion, infused with the insights of sexology and psychology, when negotiating the sexual and spiritual revolutions of the sixties.

In 1850, during its first year of publication, Notes and Queries printed the enquiry of one ‘J.M.’, who asked for information about a treatise of equivocation to which he had found reference in a seventeenth-century book. A number of replies in subsequent issues provided bits of information about the treatise, and called attention to a manuscript copy in the Bodleian. This flurry of items in Notes and Queries seems to have prompted David Jardine (1794-1860), who later wrote a history of the Gunpowder Plot, to prepare an edition of the treatise, which was published in 1851. Jardine composed a preface, but since he could not establish who had written the work, and was not optimistic that the matter would ever be clarified, his account is far from complete. There did, however, exist documents that could identify the author, and exactly 100 years after the appearance of Jardine's edition, an article by A. F. Allison showed conclusively that the treatise had been written by Father Henry Garnet, S.J. Since the treatise played a significant part in the history of ‘equivocation’ in England, and was a subject of controversy at the time of the Gunpowder Plot, I believe it will be useful to provide an account of what is now known about the work.

The last years of the English Conceptionist nuns, the Blue Nuns, were spent in a large corner house in Magdalen Street, Norwich, from which the cheerful abbess, Mother Bernard Green, wrote notes to their benefactress, Lady Jerningham, at Cossey. This community had for 140 years lived near the Bastille in Paris. It had seen the Duchess of Cleveland quête in its church, Mary of Modena at a profession; it had taught girls who grew up to be notable English Catholic ladies, including Lady Jerningham herself. It had suffered the deaths of too many of its small community during and after the Revolution. Like the Benedictines of Montargis and the Austins of Bruges, the refugee Blue nun community knew the charity of the Jerningham family, but unlike those two flourishing houses it died out before its benefactors did. For a brief period, 1800–1805, the Blue Nuns kept choir, taught catechism, made purses, and received visitors in Norwich.

IN AN ARTICLE on Joseph Creswell S. J. published in this periodical in 1979,’ I referred, in the section dealing with Creswell's activities as editor of books intended for the English mission, to a group of anonymous tracts which I said were written by the Catholic layman, Richard Verstegan. As these tracts had never before been claimed for Verstegan, such a statement clearly required justification. The article had already grown very long, however, and the question of the authorship of the tracts was only incidental to my main theme. I decided to publish the evidence for Verstegan in a separate article rather than try to cram it into an extended note. My object now is to redeem the pledge made in Note 202 of my earlier article.

IN May 1622 a series of private discussions on religion was held in London between representatives of the Anglican Church and the Jesuit, John Percy, alias Fisher. The occasion was the announcement by the Countess of Buckingham, mother of King James I’s favourite, George Villiers, Marquess (later Duke) of Buckingham, of her intention to become a Catholic. The King and the Marquess arranged the discussions which occupied three successive days, the 24th, 25th and 26th of May. Two eminent Anglican divines were enlisted to debate with Percy. On the first day the Anglican case was argued by Francis White, at this time a royal chaplain and later a bishop. He was opposed by Percy, in the presence of the Countess, the Marquess and Marchioness (Lady Catherine, who had also influenced her husband's decision to hold these discussions by declaring her intention to return to the Catholic faith in which she had been brought up), Bishop John Williams, (the Lord Keeper), and—possibly—the King. On the second day the King himself took the leading part in putting the Anglican case. On the third day the chief Anglican protagonist was William Laud, at this period Bishop of St. David's, who took the place of Francis White.

THE CONSEQUENCE of the Cisapline attempt to ‘grapple with the social and intellectual transformation of the modern world” and to bring about a ‘revision of the pyramidal structure of the Tridentine Church” was the greater assimilation of English Catholics into contemporary society. Encouraged by a new sense of freedom, clergy and laity participated more actively in English public life’ and dismantled much of the closed élite community of the recusant period. This led to a brief phase in which both clergy and laity exercised their new-found freedoms, but which was dogged by disputes. Arguments raged between liberalism and authority, and between sectarian ideals and non-denominational activities. They were eventually resolved in a restoration, by 1850, of the pyramidal structure of the Tridentine Church, in which the role of the laity was subject to the authority and guidance of the clergy.

The most insistent theme in Donne's writings is his sometimes trivial obsession with suicide and martyrdom. From his ‘Paradoxes’ to his last sermon this theme runs through his prose, and it is no less a constant preoccupation of his verse. That the Jacobeans in their melancholy were obsessed with death has often been observed; but Donne's obsession was a special one, a quintessence of Jacobean melancholy, distilled in him by a special circumstance of his life: he had been born a Catholic. Donne's personal rebellion against the trend of religion in his society was a lifelong struggle within him, though the seed of his rebelliousness grew in his words and deeds to be a trifling thing. This seed had been nurtured by his mother, who lived all her long life a stubborn Catholic, almost outliving her apostate son. She reared him to be a soldier for the Old Faith, bringing him into association with hunted and martyred priests, as if by their example he might learn to savour death. Somehow, this strange education led Donne not into the path of righteous fidelity, but to a bemused fascination with death by self-murder, a cavalier irony that is one of the hallmarks of his style.