bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Parentage and Family of the Martyr Blessed John Wall, O.F.M.
Authors: Trappes-Lomax T. B.
Published: July 2016

When Bishop Challoner wrote his account of the martyr Bl. John Wall in the second volume of his Memoirs of Missionary Priests, which was published in 1742, he used as his authority transcripts of some documents which then belonged to the Douai seminary and wrote, “ John Wall … was born in Lancashire in 1620 of a gentleman's family, possessed at that time of about £500 a year, which, he and his elder brother William … entering into religion, was devolved to the third brother and by him enjoyed at the time of the execution of our confessor [i.e. in 1679]. Mr John was sent over young to the English College at Doway.”
The Exile of Dr. William Gifford From Lille In 1606
Authors: Hicks L.
Published: July 2016

In 1595 Dr. William Gifford was appointed Dean of the collegiate Church of St. Peter, Lille, in the Spanish Netherlands. Eleven years later, by express order of the Archduke Albert, he was summarily exiled from the Netherlands and ordered never to return during the lifetime of the Archduke. In consequence, Gifford left Lille in July 1606, retired to Rheims in France and, a few months later, resigned his post as dean. Various reasons, in the course of time, have been suggested as the cause of his exile, but the real reason, which can be found by studying the contemporary documents, has still to be stated.
Some Notes on Catholic Education Abroad, C.1760, from the Correspondence of the Nevills Of Holt
Authors: Elliott B.
Published: July 2016

There is preserved in the Leicestershire Record Office the correspondence of the Nevills of Holt, one of the most important recusant families of that county. For many years their home was the headquarters of the Jesuit mission in Leicestershire and the East Midlands. At the beginning of the 18th century, the financial position of the head of the family, Sir Henry Nevill, was desperate, for the family had never recovered from the fines imposed on it during the Civil War. To improve the state of his finances, Sir Henry had arranged the marriage of his heiress, Mary Nevill, to a Florentine banker, Count Migliorucci.
The Reports of William Udall, Informer, 1605–1612. Part I
Authors: Harris P. R.
Published: July 2016

Even in a modern state with an efficient police force considerable use is made of informers. Indeed the most successful detective is often the one who has the best contacts with members of the underworld who are prepared to provide information in return for cash or for favours. The more primitive the machinery for preserving order in a state the greater the need for such informers. It is no wonder therefore that men of this kind proliferated in Elizabethan and Jacobean England.
The Constables of Everingham the Fortunes of a Catholic Royalist Family During the Civil War and Interregnum1
Authors: Roebuck Peter
Published: July 2016

Of the three major branches of the Yorkshire family of Constable, one, the Constables of Flamborough, was Parliamentarian and Puritan at the outbreak of the Civil War; the other two, those of Burton Constable and Everingham, were Royalist and Catholic. This article is concerned with the fortunes of the Everingham branch, who, by 1642, were owners of substantial amounts of landed property in both Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. Their house at Middle Rasen in Lincolnshire, where they spent most of their time before the War, was surrounded by an estate of 3000 acres, while the Yorkshire estate consisted of 3000 acres in and around Everingham in the East Riding, 1000 acres at Drax in the West Riding, land in Holderness and a house in York.
The Conversion of Bishop King: A Question of Evidence
Authors: Davidson Alan
Published: July 2016

John King, Bishop of London, died on Good Friday, 30th March, 1621: “The next day at night he was buried priuately in Paules”. Shortly afterwards, as John Chamberlain tells us in a letter to a friend, it was commonly reported among Catholics that he had died a Catholic: “Wold you thincke the papists were so impudent as to publish that the late bishop of London died a Romish Catholike, and yt goes for current among them, of wch there is no manner of ground nor shadow but that out of charitie (both before and in his sicknes) he relieued some priests that were in prison and want: but this is one of their vsuall courses wch thay haue learned of the father of lies’. And before the year was out the claim had been made and answered in print: the affair, in short, rose to such proportions that Chamberlain's question, however rhetorical in intent, seems to deserve some attempt at an answer. Was it papist impudence? or is there any reason to suppose that Bishop King did die professing himself a Catholic?
St Alban’s College, Valladolid and the Events of 1767
Authors: Williams Michael E.
Published: July 2016

This article is based on documents in the National Historical Archive in Madrid and concerns the expulsion of the Jesuits from St. Alban’S College Valladolid. The connection with English Catholicism may appear at first to be remote since, although nominally an English college, there were only two English students resident at this time and the Jesuit staff who administered the college together with the servants were all Spaniards. But the English Vicars Apostolic, however critical they may have been towards the Jesuits, continued to regard the three colleges at Valladolid, Madrid and Seville as English, their purpose being to prepare priests to serve on the home mission in England and Wales. The response to the events of 1767 was swift and the colleges, although lost to the Jesuits, were retained for England since the three were merged into the one college at Valladolid and placed under the direction of the English secular clergy. There had been a precedent in the French government’s seizure of the English College at St. Omer in 1762, but the way in which His Catholic Majesty Charles III engineered
the expulsion of the Jesuits from his kingdoms was remarkable for its thoroughness.
A Catholic Community: Shrewsbury. Part II: 1850–1920
Authors: Phillips Peter
Published: July 2016

The Papal Brief restoring the English hierarchy was promulgated on September 29th 1850. On October 25th the Shrewsbury Chronicle reprinted without comment a straight summary taken from the French Catholic paper, L’Univers. Soon enough anti-Catholic feeling, fanned to fury by Cardinal Wiseman’s provocative and flamboyant Letter from the Flaminian Gate, was unleashed across the length and breadth of the nation. In the next few weeks the Chronicle reprinted a whole series of letters on the controversy, an open letter from the Bishop of London to his clergy, John Russell’s open letter to the Bishop of Durham, endorsing the bishop’s remark that this example of ‘papal aggression’ was both ‘insolent and insidious’. Replies were also published: Bishop Ullathorne’s letter to The Times and an article in The Spectator both insisting on the spiritual nature of the issue, rather than presenting it as a threat to the constitution of the English Church and nation. These seemed to go unnoticed. An advertisement appeared from the clergy of Shrewsbury signed amongst others by the Archdeacon of Salop, and Kennedy (of Shorter Latin Primer fame), then Headmaster of the Schools. A petition was to be left for signing in Mr. Lake’s, in Market Square, protesting about the ‘illegal usurpation of power, insulting to our most gracious sovereign… openly intimating a design eventually to subjugate England to papal control’. The local papers seemed happy enough to encourage the debate.
‘An Able Mathematician’: Christopher Maire
Authors: Holt Geoffrey
Published: July 2016

Christopher Maire who was thus described by Alban Butler was the son of Christopher of Hartbushes near Hartlepool, County Durham, of a younger branch of the Maires of Hardwick likewise not far from Hartlepool. Christopher senior had married Frances Ingleby of Lawkland in Yorkshire and they had ten children—eight sons and two daughters. The daughters, Mary Euphrasia and Catherine Eugenia entered the convent of English Poor Clares at Dunkirk. Of the eight sons six were to become priests—two, Henry and William seculars, and four, Christopher, James, Peter and Thomas, Jesuits. The other two, George and John remained laymen and George married. Two sons of George and his wife Mary (Hussey) were also to become Jesuits—Edward and George.
Nuns and Vocations of the Unpublished Jerningham Letters: Charlotte Bedingfield, Augustinian Canoness (1802–1876), Louisa Jerningham, Franciscan Abbess (1808–1893), and Clementina Jerningham, Marquise de Ripert-Monclar (1810–1864)
Authors: Mason Margaret J.
Published: July 2016

Egerton Castle’s 1896 two-volume edition of The Jerningham Letters (1780–1843), Excerpts from the Correspondence and Diaries of the Honourable Lady Jerningham and of her Daughter Lady Bedingfield was based on the sixteen bound volumes of manuscript letters received and kept by Lady Bedingfield. These volumes are now housed at the University of Birmingham. Many of the letters from Lady Jerningham, her family and friends, were cut drastically for publication; a reader of the manuscript volumes will see Egerton Castle’s red and blue editorial marks on the letters themselves. Other letters, dealing with matchmaking, finances, family problems, the upbringing of children, and religious vocations, were omitted altogether. One striking omission is the series of letters from Lady Bedingfield’s youngest daughter Charlotte, ranging from the time in 1815 when she was a pensioner at Hammersmith making her first communion, to her announcement in 1824 that she had just been voted to her profession at Bruges. She called herself the happiest of Lady Bedingfield’s children and was an Augustinian Canoness at Bruges for over fifty years.
William Rogers and his Correspondence
Authors: Fendley John
Published: July 2016

William Rogers (b c1646) was a convert Catholic who from obscure origins in the lesser gentry of Gloucestershire came to know many of the leading Catholic clergy and laymen of Restoration times, and became an enthusiastic, if unconventional, advocate of his Faith. Much that is known of him comes from the works of the Oxford antiquary Anthony Wood, and in particular from the letters written by Rogers which survive as part of Wood's voluminous correspondence in the Bodleian Library.
Dom Joseph Cuthbert Wilks [1748–1829] and English Benedictine Involvement in the Cisalpine Stirs
Authors: Scott Geoffrey
Published: July 2016

The figure of Cuthbert Wilks has intrigued me for many years. An English Benedictine and the principal clerical member of the English Catholic Cisalpine movement at the end of the eighteenth century, he was an opponent of Bishop Charles Walmesley, a monk from his own community. Cisalpinism, which demanded further religious and civil freedom for English Catholics, caused a deep cleavage within the English Catholic community.
The Catholics, The Irish Delinquent and the Origins of Reformatory Schools in Nineteenth Century England and Scotland
Authors: Stack John A.
Published: July 2016

In the autumn of 1851, a group of philanthropists, magistrates, and prison officials sent out a circular inviting like-minded persons to a conference on ‘the Condition and Treatment of the “Perishing and Dangerous Classes” of Children and Juvenile Offenders.’ On December 9 and 10, this conference met in Birmingham and adopted a number of resolutions advocating that destitute and criminal children be sent to reformatory institutions instead of prison. It also appointed a committee to advance the reformatory cause, and this group subsequently presented the Birmingham Conference's resolutions to the Home Secretary (Sir George Grey).
Bishop Turner, The Salford Diocese and Reformatory Provision 1854–1872
Authors: Lannon David
Published: July 2016

It is the intention in this article to show how the Catholic community of the Salford Diocese in general and their first Bishop, William Turner, in particular, responded to the challenge of the new reformatory legislation of 1854.
‘Haeres…Thomae More Cancellarii’: Fr Thomas More 1722–1795
Authors: Holt Geoffry
Published: July 2016

Fr Thomas More—the last descendant in the direct male line of St.Thomas More, Lord Chancellor of England—died on 20 May 1795 in Bath. He had been the Jesuit provincial superior at the time of the suppression of the Society in 1773.

Thomas More was the eldest of the five children of Thomas and Catherine (née Giffard) of Barnborough or Bamburg Hall in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Born on 19 September 1722, he was followed by Christopher, Bridget, Catherine and Mary. Both sons became Jesuits. Bridget married twice—Peter Metcalfe and Robert Dalton and had descendants; she died in 1797. Catherine died unmarried in 1786. Mary became Sister Mary Augustine of the Austin Canonesses at Bruges and died in 1807. Their home, Barnborough Hall, had been in the family since John, the only son of St. Thomas, had acquired it by his marriage to Anne Cresacre and it remained so until the nineteenth century.
Traditional Religion, Popular Piety, or Base Superstition? The Cause for the Beatification of Teresa Higginson
Authors: Davies John
Published: July 2016

Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars has reinvigorated the debate over the nature of late mediaeval religious practice and belief, examining the ‘richness and complexity of the religious system by which men and women structured their experiences of the world, and their hopes and aspirations within and beyond it.’ Duffy questions the assumption that there was in that period a wide gulf between ‘popular’ and ‘élite’ religion. In so doing he has not only illuminated the religious practices and beliefs of late mediaeval England but he has stimulated discussion about the relationship between ‘popular’ and ‘élite’ religion in other periods. Duffy eschews the use of the term ‘popular religion’, which he argues carries questionable assumptions about the nature of ‘non-popular’ religion and about the gap between the two. He prefers ‘traditional religion’, on the grounds that it does greater justice to ‘the shared and inherited character of the religious beliefs and practices of the people…’ ‘Traditional religion’ while being rooted in inherited and shared beliefs was, nevertheless, capable of great flexibility and variety.
John Gerard and the Gunpowder Plot
Authors: Allison A. F.
Published: July 2016

When the Gunpowder Plot came to light in November, 1605, the Government tried to implicate the leading Jesuits on the mission, among them John Gerard who was known to have been on friendly terms with several of the plotters. He was publicly named as a traitor, the hue and cry was raised, but through the kindness of friends he remained safely in hiding and was well looked after until, in May, 1606, he escaped to the continent. He never returned to England but spent the rest of his life teaching and performing spiritual duties at English colleges abroad. He was in charge of the Jesuit novices at Louvain from 1609 to 1614 and when the novitiate was transferred to Liège in 1614 he accompanied it, becoming the first rector of the new house. In 1627 he was made spiritual director of the English College at Rome, a post which he held until his death in 1637.
‘Casting Anchor in the Harbour of Religion’: The Peregrination of Humfrey Leech (1571–1629)
Authors: Coulton Barbara
Published: July 2016

The title of this paper is taken from a work written in 434 A.D.: the Commonitorium of Vincent of Lerins. Leech considered this a ‘golden book’; we will see later the significance of Vincent for Leech, while Leech's life will perhaps illuminate his own age. Calling himself ‘Peregrinus’, Vincent wrote: ‘whereas I was at one time involved in the manifold and deplorable tempests of secular warfare, I have now at length, under Christ's auspices, cast anchor in the harbour of religion’. His aim was to pass on the teaching of the Fathers and to give guidance ‘for distinguishing the truth of the catholic faith from the falsehood of heretical pravity.’
Walpole's Tax On Catholics
Authors: Cruickshanks Eveline
Published: July 2016

General Cadogan, who had succeeded the Duke of Marlborough as commander-in-chief of the Army asked for an increase of 10,000 men in the armed forces, after the discovery of the Atterbury Plot in 1722. Robert Walpole knew that additional taxation for the standing army was unpopular in Parliament and in the country at large. He, therefore, decided to impose a tax of £100,000 on Catholics to pay for it. This was over and above the double land tax which Catholics and Protestant Nonjurors had paid since 1689. The land tax at the time stood at 4s in the pound. The Atterbury Plot was a Tory Anglican plot, not a Catholic plot, as Walpole well knew. Walpole suspected, probably rightly, that Catholics were generous in sending money to the Stuart Court in Rome. He could not prove it and neither can we for the receipts of money in the Stuart papers in Windsor Castle do not reveal the names of the donors.
Robert Rodolph Suffield's Dominican Decade (1860–1870)
Authors: Cross Tony
Published: July 2016

Robert Suffield entered the Dominican novitiate at Woodchester on 31 July 1860 if not trailing clouds of glory, then with a shining reputation as a preacher. As Fr. Gonin, the Woodchester Prior, writes to the Dominican Master, ‘…ayant une renomée de Prédicateur’. Suffield had been chief organiser of a huge meeting in the Newcastle Town Hall on Monday 23 January that year to express sympathy with the difficulties and distress of the Pope. With the recent loss of the Romagna to the Piedmontese forces, the remainder of the shrinking Papal States was clearly menaced. A wave of sympathy swept through the Catholic world. Here in Newcastle, with its very large Irish immigrant population, feelings were running high.
The Catholic London District in the Eighteenth Century
Authors: Butler David
Published: July 2016

The London of Challoner consisted only of some seven square miles, one square mile of which was, of course, the City of London. It can all be put onto some eight pages of the present A–Z map of London, which at the time of writing consists of 141 pages. John Rocques's map of London, on a scale of 200 feet to the inch, which he began in 1738 and finished in 1747, in its London Topographical Society format of 1982, perfectly illustrates the London of both Challoner and Defoe. The western extremities were at Marylebone, Knightsbridge and Chelsea, the eastern at Stepney, Limehouse and Deptford, the northern at Tottenham Court and Bethnal Green, while the southern limits were at Kennington and Walworth Common. The population of London was assessed by Wrigley in 1990 as c. 575,000 in 1700, as c. 675,000 in 1750 and as c. 959,000 in 1801. The 1767 papist returns indicated that most London Catholics lived in the parishes of St James and St Giles, within Westminster. Schwarz has pointed out the considerable social segregation in London, middle-class areas being in the west and central parts, with the poorer areas in the south and east. The St Giles area around Seven Dials going east to Bow Street and Drury Lane is reputed to have contained a third of the capital's beggars and to have been a notoriously criminal quarter. The Catholic numbers in Westminster were 7,724, the City numbers 1,492, with the Middlesex out-parishes having more than 2,000. The 1767 total for London, including the parishes to the south and east, comes to 12,320, clearly too low, as is the accumulated total for the London District of around 15,800. This gives about 3,500 for the London District outside the capital while Challoner's own figures give us a Catholic population of 5,261. If the errors in enumeration were the same in both areas (a large assumption), this enables us to guess that the 1767 figures could be corrected to about 18,500 London Catholics and about 24,000 for the whole District.
Discovering Gunpowder Plot: The King's Book and the Dissemination of News
Authors: Nicholls Mark
Published: July 2016

For contemporaries, the Gunpowder Plot was ‘a mother… of all crimes’, and their sense of shock, and awe, in the face of so dreadful a treason was in no way diminished by the drama surrounding its discovery.2 The arrest of Guy Fawkes outside the cellars of Westminster, late on the night of 4 November 1605, caught King James I and his ministers completely off guard. A mass of documentary evidence for the fraught days following Fawkes's apprehension confirms that ignorance, embarrassment, even panic ran through the highest counsels in the land. While a deadly strike had clearly been frustrated, with just hours to spare, no one knew whether trouble might be expected from other conspirators in the capital, or indeed, from rebels and mischief-makers elsewhere in England. Military men rushed to court, and within a week a sizeable force had assembled there under the command of the Earl of Devonshire, prepared to face and to repel a phantom enemy.3 Open panic did of course subside, as administration and country alike began to measure and appreciate the danger, but anxiety was a long time dying. The extraordinary hysteria that swept London in the spring of 1606, on a rumour that the king had been assassinated, touched the court itself and serves as a reminder that, months after 5 November, many Englishmen in high positions still stood on their guard.4
The Letters from Rome of John Thorpe S.J. to Charles Plowden, S.J., 1784–92
Authors: Holt Geoffrey
Published: July 2016

A large collection of letters from John Thorpe, an English Jesuit resident in Rome from 1756 until his death in 1792, are in the British Jesuit archives in London. Those in this collection which date from 1756–67 were to John Jenison S.J. a student of theology at Liège and later chaplain at Wardour Castle, and those from 1781–92 to Charles Plowden S.J. chaplain at Ellingham in Northumberland and from 1784 at Lulworth Castle. This article uses the letters to Plowden written between 1784 and 1792.
The 1958 Conference In Context
Authors: Hodgetts Michael
Published: July 2016

The session before dinner was entitled ‘The Conference in Context’, meaning this one. What I want to say is also about ‘The Conference in Context’, meaning the first one, in 1958. When Timothy McCann and I were asked to mark the opening of the fiftieth Conference, we agreed that he would say something about people and I would say something about the questions which they discussed. But, rather than attempt in half an hour a survey of more than three hundred papers, not all of which I have heard or can remember, I want to focus on that first Conference, at Oxford in 1958, of which I am the only survivor here tonight. I was then still an undergraduate, and therefore short of cash. But I was already passionately interested in recusancy and reading manuscripts in Duke Humphrey when I ought to have been writing my next essay. So I did a deal with the Conference secretary, Anne See, that I could come for nothing if I would run the bar. That was obviously a vital contribution but on that occasion it was my only one: I was much too shy of the great experts around me to venture any opinions in discussion. All the same, I listened and learned, and there were three issues in that first conference which were to shape much of what was to come.
Fr. Charles Shireburn: An Early Eighteenth Century Jesuit
Authors: Holt Geoffrey
Published: July 2016

The accounts kept by Sir Nicholas Shireburn of Stonyhurst with his goldsmith for the years 1697–1702 and the following years show that he was paying for the education at St. Omers College of two Shireburn ‘nephews’, Charles and Richard or ‘Dick’. The exact relationship is not known, ‘sons of a poor relation’, ‘distant relations’, ‘connected with the Shireburnes of Stonyhurst but the exact connection is uncertain’. When Charles Shireburn died in 1745The Gentleman’s Magazinestated that he was related to the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, Mary, daughter of Sir Nicholas Shireburn.The Extinct Baronetciesshows that some of the Shireburns of Stonyhurst in the sixteenth century had younger sons. Charles and Richard may have been descended from one of these.
Fr. Sir Alexander Strachan S.J. Bart 1727–1793
Authors: Holt Geoffrey
Published: July 2016

The Scottish Mission of the Jesuits was until the end of the eighteenth century entirely separate from the English Province with its own superior, houses on the continent and funds. Scottish candidates for the Society were educated at various houses in Europe. In the year 1729, for example, there were twelve missionaries in Scotland (plus one travelling and one in England), there were seven priests in the Scots College at Douai, two in Paris, three in the Scots College at Valladolid and one in Prague. About five were studying in preparation for ordination to the priesthood in the houses of various provinces of the Society, as were four novices. It was not a large mission—there were only thirty-nine members in that year. The last member of the old Scottish Jesuit mission, Fr. John Pepper, died in 1810. Occasionally, individual Scottish Jesuits worked in England or lived in the houses of the English Jesuits on the continent. One among these was Alexander Strachan.
Harriet Martineau and Anti-Catholicism
Authors: Warren John
Published: July 2016

For the best-selling periodicalOnce a Week, Harriet Martineau wrote a pot-boiling story in 1861 called ‘Sister Anna’s Probation’. It tells the tale of an English squire’s daughter who devotedly takes the veil and, against the backdrop of the Henrician Reformation, emerges after a reasonably decorous series of vicissitudes to marry the honourable beau, Captain Fletcher. Together, they rescue a certain footstool belonging to Anna that had been appropriated by the abbess. Inside that footstool was concealed the very bible from which Anna had gained her first sense of the futility of the convent life and the oppressions of the Roman Catholic religion.
The Guild of the Pope’s Peace: A British Peace Movement in the First World War
Authors: Taouk Youssef
Published: July 2016

A little over two weeks after the commencement of the First World War, the Catholic Church was left without its universal shepherd at a time of immense upheaval. Pope Pius X died on 20 August 1914 and immediately, the cardinals of the Catholic Church made their way to Rome to elect his successor. In the conclave, the choice fell on Giacomo della Chiesa, Cardinal Archbishop of Bologna, who took the name of Benedict XV. Della Chiesa had been a student of Cardinal Mariano Rampolla, the Secretary of State under Leo XIII. His essential training had been in diplomacy and this made him well qualified to cope with the war. Immediately upon his accession, Benedict adopted a policy of impartiality and advocated an immediate peace by negotiation. His various peace efforts were ignored, however, and many Catholics in various European countries gave only lukewarm support or made clear an outright rejection of the Pope’s pronouncements on diplomacy. This article concentrates on the reaction of British Catholics, in particular, to Benedict XV’s peace appeals during the war, including his Peace Note of 1917.
Saints in Exile: The Cult of Saint Thomas of Canterbury and Elizabethan Catholics in France
Authors: Gibbons Katy
Published: July 2016

In late December 1585, the abbey of Saint-Victor, on the south-eastern-edge of Paris, played host to a group of English Catholics. The journal of Guillaume Cotin, the community’s librarian, tells us that the English arrived in the run-up to the feast of the martyrdom of Saint Thomas of Canterbury. The feast itself, on 29 December, was marked by a high mass sung in honour of the saint, with a sermon [service] in English. Several supplementary masses were also celebrated by English priests. Apparently, in order to attend these celebrations, ‘English Catholics came in very great multitude’.
‘The Eye of the Typhoon’: Shakespeare and the Religious Controversies of his Time
Authors: Milward Peter
Published: July 2016

In between those two great humanist lawyers and lord chancellors, Sir Thomas More and Sir Francis Bacon, it may be maintained without undue exaggeration that there is a wide gap, even a yawning chasm, in the understanding of all too many scholars concerning the intellectual history of what has come to be known as ‘Early Modern England’. When we ask whose were the main intellectual and spiritual influences on the minds of Englishmen during the period, the names commonly offered for consideration are mostly those of foreigners such as Machiavelli and Montaigne, Erasmus and Rabelais, Luther and Calvin—if in English translation. Closer to home may be added the names of More himself, his adversary William Tyndale, John Foxe with his Book of Martyrs, and Richard Hooker with his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity.
Manchester’s New Fleet Prison or House of Correction and Other Gaols for Obstinate Recusants
Authors: Lannon David
Published: July 2016

Few people today realise that Manchester was used in Elizabethan England as a place where obstinate recusants might be imprisoned both as a warning to others and in the hope that their conformity to the religious laws of the realm might be obtained. Three places were used to hold the captives. The first was the disused chapel on the only bridge that then existed between Manchester and Salford, the second was Radcliffe Hall or Pool Fold Lodge near the present day Cross Street Chapel, and the third was the House of Correction built between Hunt’s Bank and the sandstone bluff on which stood the former collegiate buildings, today the home of Chetham’s Library and world famous School of Music.
Catholic Exorcism in Early Modern England: Polemic, Propaganda and Folklore
Authors: Young Francis
Published: July 2016

Exorcism was an integral part of the post-Reformation Catholic mission in England and, from the late sixteenth century, an ideological battleground between Catholic and Protestant. As in the Gospels, the obedience of demons was seen as the ultimate sign and supernatural seal of religious authority. Exorcism, unlike other aspects of Catholic mission, often brought recusant priests into direct contact with non-catholics and provided an unparalleled opportunity for conversions.
‘To Whom Should We Turn?’ Aspects of the Relationship Between the English and Welsh Hierarchy and Rome, 1880s–1920s
Authors: Doyle Peter
Published: July 2016

On 25 March 1882 Bishop Bernard O’Reilly, the third Bishop of Liverpool, wrote to the Cardinal Prefect of Propaganda as follows:

It causes me great grief that Your Eminence seems to regard my enterprises with little favour, indeed I would say that I seem to be altogether deprived of Your Eminence’s protection, since every complaint and testimony (against me) from any source is immediately accepted. Almost overcome with sorrow and burdened with work beyond my strength, to whom can I speak heart to heart if not to Your Eminence? Whose help and protection may I claim for myself and my Diocese if not yours?
The Real Arthur Brett
Authors: Ferris J. P.
Published: July 2016

‘IFICAN trust oaths, he is mine as much as I can expect any Papist to be’. With this double-edged compliment, Charles 1 silenced the misgivings of Secretary Windebank and in 1635 despatched Captain Arthur Brett to the Vatican, ostensibly as personal representative of Queen Henrietta Maria, but actually on ‘the greatest and most active employment your Majesty [the King] hath in foreign parts’. The purpose was to frustrate the Roman Catholic mission to England by establishing a mole in its headquarters, but it was never accomplished. On 30 January 1636 Brett reported that he was detained in England by adverse weather and ill-health, and on 17 March he died.’
Plebeian Catholics in the 1640s and 1650s1
Authors: Blackwood B. G.
Published: July 2016

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.
King James I Meets John Percy, S.J. (25 May, 1622.)
Authors: Wadkins Timothy H.
Published: July 2016

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.
Some Unpublished Accounts of the Martyrdom of Blessed Thomas Bullaker O.S.F. of Chichester in 1642
Authors: McCann Timothy J.
Published: July 2016

THOMAS Bullaker is one of the eighty-five martyrs who were beatified by Pope John Paul II on 22 November 1987. His biography necessarily involves an exercise in textual criticism. The most important sources for his life are two, more or less contemporary, accounts: theCertamen Seraphicum,written by his fellow Fransciscan Richard Mason, and published in 1649; and theHistoire de la Persecution presente des Catholiques en Angleterreof Le Sieur de Marsys, published in 1646. When Richard Mason wrote his account he had access to some writings of the martyr himself, which were kept in the archives of St. Bonaventure's at Douai, and were lost at the time of the French Revolution. His description of Bullaker's trials is largely based on the martyr's first hand testimony. De Marsys, a servant of the French Ambassador, who collected papers concerning sixteen of the martyrs, claimed to have been present at Bullaker's final trial and execution. A copy of a pamphlet entitledAn Exact Relation of the Apprehension, Examination, Execution and Confession of Thomas Bullaker,1642, which was sold in London on the day of Bullaker's execution, has survived among the Thomason Tracts in the British Library.
The Nonconformist and the Roman Catholic Church
Authors: Mayor Stephen H.
Published: July 2016

THIS article surveys the attitude of the Nonconformist, the best-known Free Church journal of the Victorian age, to the Roman Catholic Church. It was not necessarily representative of Dissenting opinion in general; indeed there is plenty of evidence that a good number of leading Nonconformists looked on it with disfavour; but clearly it represented one strand, and an important one, in the outlook of Victorian Nonconformity.
The Catholic Community in Walsall 1720–1824
Authors: Every George
Published: July 2016

Walsall in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a large parish containing a small borough. The borough claimed to be ‘by prescription’, but it had charters including one given by King Charles the First in 1627. This secured to the corporation ‘of the borough and foreign of Walsall’ authority in the parts of the parish outside the borough. These, called ‘the foreign’, had a vestry meeting of their own at the chapel-of-ease at Bloxwich. They supported their own poor through churchwardens and overseers elected there, but they were obliged to contribute to the repair and improvement of the parish church where they were married and in whose churchyard they were buried until 1733.
Sir Alexander Colepeper of Bedgebury
Authors: Parmiter Geoffrey de C.
Published: July 2016

The Colepepers were a prolific and moderately distinguished family that had been settled in Kent and Sussex since the thirteenth century. The name is spelt variously as Colepeper, Colepepyr, Culpeper and Culpepper, but as Sir Alexander, the subject of this essay, signed his name ‘Colepeper’ or ‘Colepepyr’ and used the first spelling in his record of his troubles, the first spelling has been adopted.
‘The Known Style of a Dedication is Flattery’: Anthony Browne, 2nd. Viscount Montague of Cowdray and his Sussex Flatterers
Authors: McCann Timothy J.
Published: July 2016

The 2nd. Viscount Montague, like his grandfather before him, was the recipient of several literary dedications. His material circumstances as a wealthy Sussex landowner, and his spiritual significance as one of the foremost Catholic peers, made him an appropriate patron for a number of writers at the beginning of the seventeenth century. At the same time, Montague was a well-known distributor of Catholic books, and a benefactor of ‘three score and six costly great volumes in folio all bought of set purpose and fayrly bound with his Armes’ to that ‘bulwark of extreme Protestantism’ the Bodleian Library.
The Escape of Thomas Tichborne
Authors: Rogers David
Published: July 2016

The two documents here transcribed as the core of a fuller account than any hitherto compiled of the escape from Government custody of a future martyr, the priest Ven. Thomas Tichborne, have in fact been in print since 1897. But though their previous editor, J. C. Jeaffreson, noted that these papers afforded new information unknown to Challoner when the latter published his brief account of the escape, yet Catholic historians who have written since the documents were printed have not been aware of them. Accordingly, since they first appeared in a context which Catholic writers have, not surprisingly, overlooked, there are grounds for republishing both documents freshly transcribed from the original manuscripts (now in the present writer's possession) and for elucidating them with the aid of notes and two sketch-maps, to retell more vividly a small incident played out in the streets of Elizabethan London, which cost two Catholics their lives.
Some Papers of A ‘Riding Priest’, Thomas Roydon (1662–1741)
Authors: Foley Brian C.
Published: July 2016

A search for information concerning Dodding Green, the historic chapel in Cumbria, has lately brought to light some papers of a ‘riding’ priest. The CRS has published numerous registers of the eighteenth century but not, I think, one kept by a priest who served what was termed a ‘Circuit’. One such priest was Thomas Roydon who travelled for some twenty years between house-chapels in Westmorland and less frequently into north Lancashire and to Brough in Yorkshire. The papers of his which have been recovered consist of a composite register of deaths, baptisms, marriages and ‘reconciliations’. Together with this were found two catalogues of deaths and baptisms which are based on the register but extend beyond it and make additions to it. Two notebooks of his were also found. One of these was kept by the priest, as he writes: ‘during the time when the Gentry were dispersed or in prison’. The other notebook contains his accounts of the administration of funds for a priest who was an uncle of his. Finally, a few long letters of Roydon's were found which are mainly concerned with fees due to Douai college and also the fund on which he was maintained as a travelling priest.
William Leslie, Henry Howard and Lord Arlington 1666–67
Authors: Birrell T. A.
Published: July 2016

In a previous article in Recusant History (Jan. 1958), passing reference was made to two substantial documents by William Leslie (about 20,000 words in all) in Public Record Office: ‘A Relation of the Cardinals of the Court of Rome’ and ‘Concerning the affairs of Rome in relation to England’ (PRO SP 9/203/7, 8 and 9). They are part of the archives of Henry Bennet, Lord Arlington, Secretary of State 1662-74, and have been endorsed by Arlington's secretary, Joseph Williamson, in the form: ‘This was a copy of a paper written to Mr Henry Howard of Norfolk 1667 by one Leslie, a Scottish priest at Rome, and by him for his own discharge communicated to my Lord Arlington, with renunciation of all such correspondences for the future.’
Richard Langhorne and the Popish Plot1
Authors: McCoog Thomas M.
Published: July 2016

Late in February of 1677/8, Edward Petre wrote about the approaching provincial congregation to his fellow Jesuit William Tunstall. He reminded Tunstall that, as one of the senior professed fathers of the English province, Tunstall ought to be present at the meeting and he relayed the provincial's instructions that the individual Jesuits be in London on 21 April so that the actual congregation could convene on the 24th. ‘Lest occasion should be given to suspect the designe,’ no one should either appear in London before 21 April or travel publicly around the city. If Tunstall were unable to attend, he was to inform the provincial as soon as possible so that another could be named in his stead.
William Turner, First Bishop of Salford, Pastor and Educator
Authors: Lannon David
Published: July 2016

The Bolton Catholics are now subject to the Bishop of the Diocese of Salford, the Right Rev. William Turner, D.D., consecrated July 25th, 1851. His residence is at Bishop’s House, 24 Crescent, Salford. He is a divine whose life is humble, watchful and exemplary; and whose endeavours are continually exerted for the education of his flock in Christian piety, in morality, and in virtue.

William Turner in 1851 became the first Bishop of Salford, one of the original dioceses created when the English and Welsh Hierarchy was restored.
‘Or Else We Shall Be Bound Hand and Foot’: Bishop James Brown and the Oversight of Seminaries
Authors: Phillips Peter
Published: July 2016

With the consecration in Southwark Cathedral of James Brown as first Bishop of Shrewsbury, the restoration of the hierarchy in England and Wales was completed. Originally intending to leave several sees vacant for a time, Rome unexpectedly hurried him into office in the face of the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill, an attempt to prevent the new Roman Catholic bishops from assuming territorial titles. At 39, he was one of the youngest of the bishops. Brown came to his diocese from the world of education. In 1845 he had joined the staff of his old school at Sedgley Park, assuming the presidency of the college in 1848. These were years of reform: he supervised improvements to the buildings, reorganised the course of studies, and introduced an annual school retreat. Before returning to Sedgley Park, Brown had been on the staff at Oscott, staying on after his ordination to the priesthood there in 1837. He was thus a member of staff when the newly-consecrated Wiseman arrived to assume the presidency of Oscott in September 1840. One might surmise that, like others at Oscott, Brown was a little unsettled by Wiseman’s flamboyance and rather bemused by the stream of visitors the new president’s presence attracted. Brown was by this time prefect of studies, an office he accepted in 1839 and which he surrendered in 1844 to George Errington, Wiseman’s former vice-president in Rome, and who, at Wiseman’s request, had come to Oscott the previous year. Brown’s time as prefect of studies had witnessed the grant of a royal warrant allowing students from Oscott to enter for external examinations in the University of London.
Chaplain and Steward: Francis Blakiston SJ (1617–93) at Linton-on-Ouse
Authors: Trappes-Lomax John
Published: July 2016

Chaplains in penal times were on occasion employed as stewards, though perhaps not as frequently as is sometimes supposed; from the point of view of their employers this is not entirely surprising; on the one hand chaplains might reasonably be expected to be literate, numerate and honest; on the other hand the restrictions under which Catholic priests worked might well leave them a sufficiency of spare time for secular affairs. The interest of the letter which follows lies not in the mere fact of such a stewardship, but in the extraordinarily vivid picture it gives of what it was like for a professed Religious to be involved in running an estate—particularly when his employer was of questionable sanity. Some light is incidentally thrown on the history of Catholicism in Linton-on-Ouse.
The Priest and the Elementary School in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century
Authors: Smith John T.
Published: July 2016

The Report of a Select Committee in 1835 gave the total of Catholic day schools in England as only 86, with the total for Scotland being 20. Catholic children had few opportunities for day school education. HMI Baptist Noel reported in 1840: ‘very few Protestant Dissenters and scarcely any Roman Catholics send their children to these [National] schools; which is little to be wondered at, since they conscientiously object to the repetition of the Church catechism, which is usually enforced upon all the scholars. Multitudes of Roman Catholic children, for whom some provision should be made, are consequently left in almost complete neglect, a prey to all the evils which follow profound ignorance and the want of early discipline.’ With the establishment of the lay dominated Catholic Institute of Great Britain in 1838 numbers rose to 236 in the following five years, although the number of children without Catholic schooling was still estimated to be 101,930. Lay control of Catholic schools diminished in the 1840s. In 1844, for example, Bishop George Brown of the Lancashire District in a Pastoral letter abolished all existing fund-raising for churches and schools and created his own district board which did not have a single lay member. The Catholic Poor School Committee was founded in 1847, with two laymen and eight clerics and the bishops requested that the Catholic Institute hand over all its educational monies to this new body and called for all future collections at parish level to be sent to it. Government grants were secured for Catholic schools for the first time in 1847. The great influx of Irish immigrants during the years of the potato famine (1845–8) increased the Catholic population and church leaders soon noted the great leakage among the poor. The only way to counteract this leakage was to educate the young under the care of the Church.
‘Worth Nothing, but Very Wilful’; Catholic Recusant Women of Yorkshire, 1536–1642
Authors: Bastow Sarah L.
Published: July 2016

In 1577 a survey of Catholics was taken by the Archbishop of York and the Queen’s commissioners. It recorded the name, place of residence, status and worth of those who refused to conform. Dorothy Vavasour of York was noted in these records as being ‘worth nothing, but very wilful’. It is this statement that provides the inspiration for an examination of the women of Yorkshire, as a group that were vital to the survival of Catholicism, yet who are often ignored.