bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Fabrication of the Myth of Father Parsons
Authors: Houliston Victor
Published: July 2016

‘Father Persons’ has long been a legendary figure of controversy. We cannot even agree on the spelling of his name. Most of his contemporaries called him Parsons, especially if they were hostile, but his correspondence and other manuscript evidence make it quite clear he preferred Persons. The variant spellings would not affect the pronunciation of his name, but ‘Parsons’ is a reminder of the rumour that he was the bastard son of a Somerset parson. Parsons or Persons, he was notorious in his day as a traitorous plotter and irrepressible controversialist, but today he is virtually ignored by literary scholars. The story is told of a meeting in 1954, on a train from Cambridge to Oxford, between C. S. Lewis and A. L. Rowse. Rowse congratulated his fellow-traveller on the recent publication of his History of English Literature in the Sixteenth Century—a work that itself was to become, for other reasons, the centre of controversy—pausing only to register some surprise at his treatment of prose: ‘You praise Cardinal Allen, who is really negligible and wrote very little, but you do not even mention Robert Parsons, the Jesuit who wrote over thirty books and was one of the most considerable prose writers of the Elizabethan period. Why?’ To this piece of donnish one-upmanship, Lewis bluffed: ‘I did not think he was important enough to be included.’ He hadn't read Persons.
Magnifying Martyrdom: Annie Bonus's Beatrice and the Victorian Vision of the Early Church
Authors: Merchant Peter
Published: July 2016

Anna Kingsford, born Annie Bonus in September 1846, died at a young enough age to qualify for one of the most lovingly detailed of all nineteenth-century biographies. It appeared in January 1896, within eight years of her death. Its author, Edward Maitland, was in fact a prolific writer in several fields; but he never came closer than here to having an ideal subject to set before his Victorian readers. For not only had the culture of the nineteenth century already tended (with instruments as diverse as the national census and the personal diary) to reaffirm absolutely Samuel Johnson's famous axiom that ‘there has rarely passed a life of which a judicious and faithful narrative would not be useful' but Anna Kingsford had had one of those lives, peculiarly interesting to the Victorians, which the process of narration inevitably turns into histories of this or that set of religious opinions. She herself, in her final months of life, perceived as much; and it accordingly became ‘necessary’—or so she ventured to suggest—‘that I should not die without some sort of Apologia’.
A New Collection of English Recusant Manuscript Poetry from the Late-Sixteenth Century: Extraordinary Devotion in the Liturgical Season of ‘Ordinary Time’
Authors: Suarez Michael F.
Published: July 2016

At Yale University, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library's James Marshall and Marie-Louise Osborn Collection has recently acquired a fascinating manuscript of late sixteenth-century Roman Catholic devotional verse in English (Osborn Shelves a30). Following the liturgical year from Trinity Sunday to the feast of Saint Catherine on November 25th, these fifty-eight poems celebrate the solemnities, feasts, and memorials of the Roman liturgical calendar throughout the approximately twenty-six weeks comprising the major portion of ‘ordinary time’. Presumably, this collection would have had a companion volume, now lost, covering the period from Advent to Pentecost which includes the principal solemnities and great seasons of the liturgical year.
The Pastons of Horton and the Horton Court Library
Authors: Fendley John
Published: July 2016

The manor house of Horton Court, about three miles from Chipping Sodbury in Gloucestershire, was a focus of Catholicism when occupied in the eighteenth century by a recusant branch of the Paston family. The present writer's interest in its past has recently been kindled by the discovery that its library, whose catalogue survives, though the books have long been dispersed, contains many books by, or closely associated with, English Catholics of the penal times. One of the collections that went from it had probably been put together by Dr Edward Paston, a distinguished President of the English College at Douai, who died in 1714.
The Leslies of Balquhain and the Burial of Bishop Hay
Authors: Dean Ann , Roberts Alasdair
Published: July 2016

A year after the First Vatican Council of 1870 a five-volume edition of George Hay's works was published, and the opening words of Bishop John Strain's introduction left no doubt as to Hay's significance: ‘Since the religious revolution of the sixteenth century, to no man has the Catholic Church in Scotland been so much indebted as to Bishop Hay. He is preeminently her bishop of the last three hundred years.’ In 1874 James Stothert's Life of Bishop Hay was brought before the public by the Rev. J. F. S. Gordon, who felt moved to comment: ‘It is most dishonourable, not only to the Memory of this great Bishop, but to the Catholic Religion in Scotland, which he may be said to have kept alive during a dismal period, that not so much as a simple Stone marks his grave.’
The Wesleyans, The ‘Romanists’ and the Education Act Of 1870
Authors: Smith John T.
Published: July 2016

The Wesleyan Church in the second half of the nineteenth century exhibited a high degree of anti-Catholicism, a phenomenon which had intensified with the ‘Romanising’ influence of the Tractarian movement in the Church of England. To many Wesleyans Roman and Anglo-Catholicism seemed synonymous and the battleground of faith was to be elementary education. The conflict began earlier in the century. When in 1848 Roman Catholic schools made application to the government for grants similar to those offered to the Wesleyans there was an immediate split in Wesleyan ranks. At the Conference in Hull in 1848 Beaumont, Osborn and William Bunting attacked their leadership. They claimed that Methodists should not accept grants in common with Catholics. Jabez Bunting, the primary Wesleyan spokesman of his age, was however rather less critical of the Roman Catholic Church than he had been previously and clearly advocated the continuation of the grant:
John Bull and the Scarlet Woman: Charles Kingsley and Anti-Catholicism in Victorian Literature
Authors: Morris Kevin L.
Published: July 2016

In the Victorian period literature provided a national forum for the consideration of ideas in relation to society. Literary writings put flesh on the bones of the English anti-Catholic mind; more than the periodical, pamphlet or directly polemical literature, they vividly depict the emotions, the hidden agendas and the psychology from which sprang the age's rationalised attitudes and beliefs. When contemplating Catholicism, creative writers tended to be in a state of mental déshabillé, their feelings more visible, more unguarded than was the case with other sorts of writers, and therefore more revealing and expressive. As the classic Victorian literary anti-Catholic figure, Charles Kingsley provides the most apt focus for a sketch of the soul of the contemporary anti-Catholic tradition, especially since in his oeuvre its elements are uniquely forceful and comprehensive. A view of the fundamental motivations behind anti-Catholicism is, however, necessarily fragmentary and speculative, since their manifestations—passions, prejudices, assumptions, the national myth—where not wholly rational, either in Kingsley or in his society.
Anyone for Glasgow? The Strange Nomination of the Rt. Rev. Charles Eyre in 1868
Authors: Aspinwall Bernard
Published: July 2016

The Western District of Scotland in the 1860s saw some remarkable changes. The clash between two bishops, groups of priests and laity had contributed to a major crisis. Rival ethnic and political interests further complicated matters. An ecclesiastical, financial and political crisis seemed about to explode. In the circumstances the appointment of a new bishop to regulate an impossible situation was hardly unexpected. The appointment of Charles Eyre however was somewhat surprising.
Gilbert Talbot and the Talbot Case
Authors: Holt Geoffrey
Published: July 2016

In the 1740s the English Jesuit house at Liège where students of philosophy and theology were prepared for the priesthood was in financial difficulties. One of the main supports of the college was an annual pension from Bavaria but in the 1740s Bavaria was involved in war and the pension was frequently not paid. The number in the community had to be reduced, many students being charitably welcomed in other Jesuit houses in Europe. It was at this time when the finances of the English province were strained that two plans came up for consideration. One was to extend the apostolate of the Maryland English Jesuit mission in Pennsylvania; the other was to open at Boulogne a preparatory school for St. Omers College. The problem was how to obtain the necessary funds.
Spiritualism and Religion: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Critique of Christianity and a Roman Catholic Response
Authors: Kollar René
Published: July 2016

On 13 August 1919 an interview between Charles Dawbarn, a member of the press, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on the relationship between Christianity and Spiritualism appeared in the columns of The Daily Chronicle. Before the article appeared, Dawbarn had also asked the Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson, ,for an interview to give him the opportunity to state the position of Anglicanism in regard to Spiritualism. ‘It will be seen,’ he told the Archbishop, ‘that Sir Arthur blames the Church for cold comfort administered to those who mourn their dead and declares that windy words and dogmatic assertions prevail in the pulpit.’ Archbishop Davidson, however, refused this invitation. The article, ‘The Challenge of Spiritualism. Does It Confirm the Christian Doctrine of Immortality?,’ introduced Sir Arthur as ‘… the immortal literary figure … Sure we are that nothing but sincerity and a desire to serve humanity lies at the bottom of his missionary efforts for Spiritualism.’ Dawbarn noted that in the minds of many people Spiritualism did constitute a ‘challenge to the Churches, which has not been disregarded,’ and he drew attention to the words of Arthur Foley Winnington-Ingram, Bishop of London, at a recent Hyde Park meeting speaking about the influence of Spiritualism: ‘Many have been led astray.’ This statement appears to have been the occasion for the newspaper interview with Conan Doyle.
‘Between the Devil and the Deep Sea’: John Henry Newman and Richard Holt Hutton
Authors: Enright Edward J.
Published: July 2016

Newman’s correspondence is a rich harvest for understanding his thought, and the people with whom he corresponded were a fascinating group of individuals, many being influential thinkers in their own right. Among the latter was Richard Holt Hutton (1826–1897), journalist, critic, theologian, teacher and biographer. Son and grandson of Unitarian ministers, he eventually converted to an evangelical form of the Church of England, under the influence of F.W. Robertson and F.D. Maurice, having come to a deep belief in the Incarnation. With the previous experience as joint editor of The National Review and assistant editor of The Economist. Hutton was invited early in 1861 by Meredith Townsend, the new owner of The Spectator, a weekly newspaper with liberal leanings, to become joint editor and part proprietor. The Spectator became the forum in which Hutton was able to express his theological and literary-critical views for the remainder of his life. As this paper will show, the correspondence with Newman was another important means for Hutton to communicate his ideas, and, in conjunction with his critique of Newman he penned in other pieces, gives insight into the mind of an important Victorian, but also a new perspective from which to view Newman’s thought on such matters as revelation, the rôle of reason in coming to faith, and an infallible teaching authority.
Leander Jones's Mission to England, 1634–5.
Authors: Sitwell Gerard
Published: July 2016

The fact that in the year: 1634 the English Benedictine priest, Leander Jones, came to England on some sort of special mission connected with the Roman and Anglican Churches is comparatively widely known, and a number of writers have referred to it and even given some account of the mission, quoting to a greater or lesser extent from documents that Leander wrote in the course of it. There is not, however, complete agreement among these writers as to either the origin or the exact nature of the work that he was undertaking, and the accounts of it have all been incomplete and incidental. The purpose of this article is to attempt to discover from his own writings what in fact he was trying to do, and to trace, as far as may be, in the ensuing correspondence the reception which his efforts met with in Rome.
who Was John Norton, the Martyr?
Authors: Forster Ann M. C.
Published: July 2016

On the 9th August, 1600, after trial at the Summer Assizes at Durham, three men were hanged there: a priest named Thomas Palaser and two laymen, John Talbot, of Thornton-le-Street in Yorkshire, and John Norton, of Ravensworth, Co. Durham, in whose house the priest had been apprehended. The career of John Talbot has been ably reconstructed by Dom Hugh Bowler, O.S.B., in Biographical Studies. Of John Norton little is generally known beyond the bare facts of his capture and death, and the circumstance that Margaret Norton, his wife, who was also condemned to death, was reprieved and afterwards pardoned. I have taken up the study of Norton and abandoned it several times for lack of evidence, during the last few years. Now it seems best to put on record the facts that have emerged, incomplete though they be, in the hope that further information may be forthcoming.
Stephen Vallenger (1541–1591)
Authors: Petti Anthony
Published: July 2016

Of the many topicalities which fill the writings of the Elizabethan pamphleteers, Gabriel Harvey and Thomas Nashe, two concern the now almost unknown recusant poet and Cambridge tutor, Stephen Vallenger. In each allusion, as the subject of a long standing esoteric joke, he is referred to with obvious irony as “noble.” In Catholic eyes, at least, he merited the title, for he risked life imprisonment, if not worse, in an attempt to vindicate the cause for which Edmund Campion died, and when arrested, shielded his associates, taking full punishment upon himself.
English Catholics and the Papal Deposing Power 1570-1640
Authors: Clancy Thomas
Published: July 2016

If we survey the Jesuit writers on the deposing power during the period 1603-1640, we find that for the first seven years Persons is the only English Jesuit to treat of the subject and he touches on it in all his last four books. The fullest treatment is in A Treatise tending to Mitigation but neither there, nor in the other books is there anything more than an explanation of the points of contention, treated according to the system of Bellarmine. For a few years after Persons's death in 1610 the steady flow continued of Latin works by the Jesuit controversialists on the continent: Becanus, Gretser, Bellarmine, Lessius and others. Some of these works were translated into English, together with some of the works of the French Jesuits referred to in the previous article. After 1613 the decree of the Jesuit General Aquaviva, forbidding Jesuit writers to treat of the subject, took effect, and with the exception of the works of Thomas Fitzherbert against the defenders of the Oath of Allegiance the voice of the Jesuits, at least on the deposing power, was heard no more.
William Fleetwood, Recorder of the City, and Catholicism In Elizabethan London
Authors: Harris P. R.
Published: July 2016

For students of recusant history the main interest of William Fleetwood lies in the fact that a study of his career enables us to see the problem of Catholicism in Elizabethan England from the point of view of those who sought to crush it. For he was one of the most active of the officials engaged in hunting down Catholics in Elizabethan London.
Richard Smith, Richelieu and the French Marriage. The Political Context of Smith's Appointment as Bishop for England in 1624.
Authors: Allison A. F.
Published: July 2016

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 Barrett Version of Robert Southwell's Short Rule of Good Life
Authors: Loomis Richard
Published: July 2016

Several books of Catholic origin enjoyed wide circulation among Protestant readers in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Such works were commonly subjected to editorial revision to suit Protestant sensibilities; a famous instance is Edmund Bunny's adaptation of Robert Persons’ The First Booke of the Christian Exercise, apperfeyning to resolution (1582). An instance less known but no less interesting is the Protestantized version of Robert Southwell's Short Rule of Good Life issued in 1620 by the London publisher William Barrett.
Dr. Caesar Clement, Chaplain to the Archduke Albert
Authors: Hoppe Harry R.
Published: July 2016

The future biographer of Dr. Caesar Clement, English Catholic exile and nephew of Margaret Clement, prioress of the convent of St. Ursula at Louvain, will have a nugget of information in the evidence that Clement was one of the chaplains in the Archduke Albert's chapel royal from at least 1602 through 1618, probably longer, a fact not known to the compiler of the DNB account, who mentions only that he was chaplain general to the Spanish army and dean of St. Gudule's in Brussels.
Henri IV, the Appellants and the Jesuits
Authors: Bossy John
Published: July 2016

The beginning of serious French interest in the affairs of English Catholicism falls in the first years of the seventeenth century. Since the Reformation, French kings and their ministers had usually felt that Catholicism in England was, on political grounds, to be discouraged rather than advanced; from a more recent date, they had ceased to have a foreign policy at all. Interest in English Catholicism had been left to the Spaniards, who had coped with it as best they could. Two explanations can be offered why things began to take a different turn during the reign of Henri IV. The first is that the reconstruction of what Sully described as “la faction fran9oise dans la Chrestiente” carried with it almost automatically a revival of the anti-English posture traditionally associated with it; the combination is a familiar one.
Seizure of the English College, Douai, and Imprisonment at Doullens, 1793–4. A Contemporary Narrative
Authors: Chadwick H.
Published: July 2016

The original of this narrative, kindly lent me by Lord Clifford of Chudleigh, to whom I make full and grateful acknowledgement, is a manuscript booklet of 41 pages, about 9 in. by 5 ½ in. The author, it seems clear. was Lewis Clifford, who with his twin brother Arthur was in the school year 1792/3 in the class of Poetry. These two boys were grandsons of the 3rd Baron: their father. the Hon. Thomas Clifford, of Tixall, Staffordshire, the youngest son, was married to Barbara. a daughter and co-heiress of the 5th and last Lord Aston of Forfar. She it was who inherited Tixall and at her marriage brought that estate into the Clifford family. The twins, aged 17 “le cinq du mois ventose de l’an troisieme” (23 February, 1795), after their release from Doullens reached London on the following March 3rd. and after a month or so at home spent the summer term—April to August—at Stonyhurst. Arthur then rejoined some of his former fellow prisoners at St. Edmund’s, Old Hall. Of Lewis one knows only that he died unmarried in 1806. For Arthur’s subsequent literary work. see the Dictionary of National Biography.
The Recusants of the Friarage, Yarm, Yorkshire
Authors: Wardell John W.
Published: July 2016

The present building bearing this name is a handsome three-storeyed mansion of medium size and rectangular shape, which stands in pleasant grounds at the south end of Yarm, in what was until recently a small enclave of High Worsall. The long east front of the house faces the Tees—from which it is separated by terraced lawns—and the rising ground crowned with woods on the Durham side of the river, while the main entrance on the west front is approached by a short drive from lodge gates on the Thirsk road. The south end of the house looks across ornamental lawns to a large walled kitchen garden, and at the north end there is a range of domestic buildings built a century earlier as an extension to the original house and narrower than the main building, while to the north of this there is a long courtyard flanked by stables and other outbuildings and having a lane leading to the south end of the High Street.
Four Catholic Congregations in Rural Northumberland 1750–1850
Authors: Bossy John
Published: July 2016

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.
Unknown Sonnets by Sir Toby Matthew
Authors: Petti Anthony G.
Published: July 2016

A poetry commonplace book in the Huntington Library (HM 198), comprising mainly the verse of notable English authors of the early 17th century, includes twenty-nine anonymous sonnets (vol. 2, ff. 88-95), most of them dedicated to the Saints and many highly personal in content. Although of considerable intrinsic merit, they seem to have been overlooked, possibly because of the relative importance of the numerous other poems in the volume and the fact that their authorship has never been established.
Bishop Tunstall’s Priests
Authors: Forster Ann
Published: July 2016

Cuthbert Ttinstall, last Catholic Bishop of Durham, exercised an episcopate of close on thirty years, at a period most momentous in the history of the Church in England. Appointed in 1529 and reckoning his pontifical years from 25 March, 1530, he died, in house confinement at Lambeth Palace, 15 November, 1559, three months after his final deprivation.
Priests and Patrons in the Eighteenth Century
Authors: Gooce Leo
Published: July 2016

In 1834 the Rev. William Riddell warned Bishop Penswick to take care when dealing with the Catholic gentry on chaplaincy business because they could be ‘very ticklish and nice’. As the younger brother of a Northumbrian squire he was in a good position to know but, in any case, the Church had long been aware of lay susceptibilities in these matters. Some sixty years previously Bishop Challoner had reminded Bishop Walton that the gentry took particular exception to the clergy ‘meddling with their temporals’. Furthermore, as the northern bishops well knew, the relationship between a patron and his chaplain was far from amicable in an embarrassingly large number of cases in the eighteenth century. In 1786 Henry Rutter, a young chaplain in Northumberland, told his uncle Robert Banister, also a priest, that he had ‘a most despicable opinion of our Catholic nobility and gentry’. Banister was of a like mind, and theirs was not an uncommon view among the northern clergy at that time. It was, moreover, usually reciprocated.
The Catholics in Worcestershire 1642–1651
Authors: Gilbert C. D.
Published: July 2016

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.
Recusant Houses in the Southern Netherlands as seen by British Tourists, c. 1650–1720
Authors: Van Strien C. D.
Published: July 2016

The English who, in the seventeenth century, went abroad in order to get to know the countries and peoples of Europe looked upon the presence of their countrymen and women in convents in Flanders and Brabant as one of their many subjects of inquiry. Protestant travellers who had little occasion to mix with Catholics at home and who had gone abroad to widen their horizons visited these houses as a matter of course. For them, as for the much smaller number who came to see relatives and acquaintances, the informal conversations must have been a welcome change after the ‘Compulsory’ visits to public buildings and all sorts of collections of curiosities in cities far away from home.
The Recusant Collection at the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin
Authors: Russell Beth M.
Published: July 2016

The Ransom Center's collection of Roman Catholic Recusant Literature (1558–1829) consists of close to 4,500 books and pamphlets printed in England during periods when Catholicism was proscribed. The collection includes volumes of church history, devotional works, and Bibles.
English Catholics and the Papal Deposing Power 1570–1640
Authors: Clancy Thomas
Published: July 2016

In historical narratives of the Tudor Period, disquisitions on the papal deposing power usually occur as comments on the events of the year 1570, when Pius V issued the BullRegnans in Excelsis,declaring Queen Elizabeth to be a usurper. Catholic opinion on the deposing power, however, underwent many fluctuations and changes of emphasis in the years that followed. It may be profitable, therefore, to trace the history of the ideas of the English Catholics about the temporal power of the Pope during the seventy years which followedRegnans in Excelsis.In the present article we shall follow the changes as they are reflected in the printed books of those years, and documentary evidence will only be adduced to explain and comment on published statements.
Mille Maeandris: Nicholas Owen, 1606–2006
Authors: Hodgetts Michael
Published: July 2016

Nicholas Owen, the master-builder of priest-holes, latibulorum egregius artifex, died of torture in the Tower on the night of 1–2 March 1606. A few months later, the Jesuit John Gerard, who owed his life at least four times to hides constructed by Owen, wrote in his Narrative of the Gunpowder Plot:

He might have made it almost an impossible thing for priests to escape, knowing the residences of most priests in England, and of all those of the Society, whom he might have taken as partridges in a net, knowing all their secret places which himself had made, and the like conveyances in most of the chief Catholics’ houses in England, and the means and manner how all such places were to be found, though made by others.
John Bede Brewer: Priest and Property
Authors: Hollinshead Janet E.
Published: July 2016

Rev. Dr John Bede Brewer OSB arrived to serve the Catholic mission in England in 1776. Like other contemporary English Catholic priests, he had been educated and trained abroad and, even though choosing to join a religious order, Brewer expected to be posted to serve for many years at some mission in England. An inevitable consequence of being spread rather thinly throughout the country was that quite frequently many priests were left much on their own resources in coping with their location and mission. During the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries a preponderance of missions had, of necessity, been based rurally in gentry or aristocratic households where protection and economic support were available. During the eighteenth century as industrialization, population movement and urban growth all took hold new demands, personal, financial and organizational, became apparent for the small cohort of English Catholic clergy. There were four vicars apostolic to superintend the Catholic Church in England but much was left to the initiative, effort and resources of individual priests, particularly as the Relief Acts of the later eighteenth century relaxed the penal laws and gave greater freedom to Catholic clergy.
Replanting Douai in the North of England, 1794–1808
Authors: Phillips Peter
Published: July 2016

Founded by William Allen in 1568 as a temporary haven for the English Catholic exiles, the English College at Douai, had given good service to the English Catholic community, but with the turmoil of Revolution, the execution of Louis XVI in January 1793, and the French declaration of war on England the following month, it became clear that the days of the College were numbered. Students, acting on advice from worried parents, made their way home to England as best they could. The story of these years is vividly preserved in a number of contemporary accounts. At first things went on generally as before: Douai was one of the last cities in the northern provinces of France to join the revolution but tension in the town was high. One of the first victims of the mob was the College printer, Charles Derbaix, a leading Douai bookseller who owned ‘The Golden Compasses’ (sub signo Circini aurei), in the Via Scholarum. Together with a local tradesman, accused of illicit dealings in corn, he was taken by the mob and hanged à la lanterne on suspicion of distributing loyalist propaganda.
Investigating Gunpowder Plot
Authors: Nicholls Mark
Published: July 2016

ON 6 November 1605, the earl of Salisbury wrote jubilantly to the English Ambassador in France, Sir Thomas Parry, that it had ‘pleased Almighty God, out of his singular goodness, to bring to light the most cruel and detestable practise against the person of his Majesty and the whole estate of the Realm that ever was conceived by the heart of man, at any time, or in any place whatsoever’. But, when he wrote this, Salisbury was fully aware that, though the Lord might have revealed the bare existence of the Gunpowder plot, it would be left to men to discover the details and the ramifications of a complex treason that had been long in the planning.
In Vineam Domini: Bishop Briggs and His Visitations of the North
Authors: Bradley George
Published: July 2016

Thomas Penswick, titular Bishop of Europum, and Vicar Apostolic of the Northern District, died at his brother’s house, The Manor House, Ashton-in-Makerfield, Lancashire on 28th January 1836. He was aged sixty-three. His funeral in Liverpool was followed by his burial in the Catholic cemetery at Windleshaw, near St. Helens. He was succeeded by his coadjutor bishop, John Briggs. He inherited a district which stretched from the Scottish Border in the north to a line from the Humber to the Dee in the south. It encompassed the counties of Northumberland, Durham, Cumberland, Westmorland, Yorkshire, Lancashire, Cheshire and the Isle of Man, and although perhaps less in size geographically than the Western District, which took in the whole of Wales, it was nevertheless the largest in the number of missions, clergy and people. When Bishop Thomas Smith made his return to Propaganda in 1830, he reported 172 missions served by 115 secular priests, 31 Benedictines, 23 Jesuits or ‘Stonyhurst Priests’, 2 Franciscans and 1 Dominican, and an estimated Catholic population of 185,000. In addition there were three colleges, Ushaw, Ampleforth and Stonyhurst and four convents of nuns.
Educational Turmoil and Ecclesiastical Strife: the Episcopal Career of Joseph William Hendren, 1848–1853
Authors: Whitehead Maurice
Published: July 2016

Among the bishops of the restored hierarchy of 1850, the name of Joseph William Hendren holds a special place for three reasons. On his appointment as Vicar Apostolic of the Western District in 1848, he was the last of the Vicars Apostolic in England and Wales to be nominated prior to the restoration; he was the only member of the restored hierarchy to be the first bishop of two new sees—Clifton, in 1850, and Nottingham in 1851; and the duration of his episcopal career was the shortest of any of his confrères around the time of the restoration.
Bishop Thomas Grant as a Government Negotiator
Authors: Clifton Michael
Published: July 2016

Thomas Grant was born at Ligny-Les-Aires near Arras in France on November 25th 1816. His father was a sergeant in the British army and had just fought at Waterloo. He was at the time serving in the army of occupation following Napoleon’s defeat. For the first twelve years of his life Thomas followed his family to many assignments with the army. He grew accustomed to army life and this would serve him well when later he became a bishop. In 1829 he entered Ushaw seminary and from there was sent to the English College in Rome in 1836. He was ordained in 1841 and was created Doctor of Divinity immediately after his ordination. Already acclaimed for his great learning, he was named as secretary to Cardinal Acton. In his service he became proficient in canon law and the workings of the Roman curia. He became Rector of the English College in 1844 and was nominated to the see of Southwark in 1851. At that time he had not been in England since he left for Rome in 1836. Indeed he had only lived ten years in England altogether.
From Cambrai to Woolton: Lancashire’s First Female Religious House
Authors: Hollinshead Janet E.
Published: July 2016

Refugees, displaced persons and enemy aliens, either individually or in groups, are, regrettably, well known to the early twenty-first century. Resettlement arrangements, counselling and aid appeals are also well-used practices. In May 1795 sixteen women, many elderly, reached Woolton in south Lancashire three weeks after leaving France. They were homeless, virtually destitute and had suffered the trauma and hardship of incarceration for eighteen months in a French prison. The women had little control over their immediate destination, were dependent on the philanthropy of others, and within a few short weeks were at work teaching in a school to earn their livelihoods. They also had to live within a neighbourhood totally unfamiliar with nuns and religious communities. The Benedictine convent of Our Lady of Consolation from Cambrai in northern France had been relocated to Woolton.
The English Roman Catholic Bishops and The Social Order, 1918–26
Authors: Aspden Kester
Published: July 2016

It is ironic that it should have been the leader of the church with the greatest proportion of working-class members who took up the most hostile stance to the General Strike of 1926. While Francis Bourne (1862–1935), Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, won the plaudits of the Establishment for his unambiguous denunciation of the strike, that cautious septuagenarian Randall Davidson, Archbishop of Canterbury, found himself cast in the unlikely role of the workers’ friend after his illstarred attempt to conciliate the two sides. Sheridan Gilley has highlighted another contrast: while in 1926 Bourne found himself sharply opposed to labour, in a 1918 pastoral letter he had been insistent that the Church should reach an accommodation with the ‘modern labour unrest’. While Gilley implies that his General Strike condemnation was uncharacteristic, Buchanan suggests that this was closer to expressing his ‘real political views’ than his 1918 statement. This article aims to provide a closer examination of the shift in Bourne’s attitude, and to consider the broader episcopal response to social and political questions during these fraught years.
Catholic Charitable Endeavour in London 1810–1840. Part II
Authors: Carter Brian
Published: July 2016

In the first part of this study, attention was focused primarily on three organisations; first, the Society of Charitable Sisters, founded in 1814, a society unique in Catholic affairs of the time, being a voluntary self regulating society of lay women, married and single, who devoted their lives to assisting the impoverished in London; second, the Catholic Club founded by W.E. Andrews, also in 1814, with the purpose of bringing together the Catholic artisan and working class Catholics to collaborate in raising funds for a variety of charities; third the evolution of Catholic libraries in London from 1822, which generated unexpected and fruitful diversification. What became clear from the study of these three groups and others connected to them was the range and variety of the charities and the fact that many of these were established and run by people from the working and artisan classes, a large proportion of whom were Irish.
The Library of Saint Alban’s English College Valladolid: Censorship and Acquisitions
Authors: Williams Michael E.
Published: July 2016

The English seminary of St. Alban Valladolid in Spain has an up to date theological library with books in both Spanish and English. As an establishment dating back to 1589 it also possesses many books of antiquarian interest. The older books belonging to the college owe their present arrangement to Edwin Henson. During World War II as Rector he was for several years the only permanent resident in the college and he spent much of his time cataloguing and indexing the archives and library. There are two rooms: the eighteenth century style Biblioteca or Big Library with 6765 volumes and the smaller enclosed repository known as the Pigskin Library (Biblioteca de Piel) containing 2881 volumes.
The Throckmortons of Harvington, 1696–1923
Authors: Hodgetts Michael
Published: July 2016

This paper is the final part of a trilogy dealing with Harvington Hall in Worcestershire from 1529 until 1923, when it passed into the ownership of the Archdiocese of Birmingham. The first part, ‘The Pakingtons of Harvington [1529–1631]’ by Lionel and Veronica Anderton Webster, appeared in Recusant History in April 1974; my sequel, ‘The Yates of Harvington, 1631–1696’, followed in October 1994.’ This third part appropriately appears in an issue of Recusant History to mark the ninetieth birthday of Fr. Geoffrey Holt, S.J., who over the years has published many studies of other country-house missions in the eighteenth century, and whose characteristic combination of scholarship, lucidity and human sympathy is a model of how such things ought to be done. He appreciates the problems and will, I hope, appreciate the result.
Interpreting The Council: Archbishop Manning and the Vatican Decrees Controversy
Authors: von Arx Jeffrey Paul
Published: July 2016

Contemporary Roman Catholics have realized in the last thirty-five years that when an ecumenical council has concluded, it is far from over. The interpretation of the decrees of the Second Vatican Council has become today as critical and controverted as the formulation of the decrees was during the Council itself. The present controversies centre on ecclesiology—the nature of the Church—and questions at issue concern continuity and innovation. Did Vatican II, and especially the Decree on the Church in the Modern World, reform the structure and the governance of the Church toward a greater degree of consultation, subsidiarity, decentralization—‘collegiality’, to use the expression of the Council itself? Or was the vision of the Council for the Church in basic continuity with the centralized, papal-monarchial Church of the First Vatican Council? Around these questions centres most of the contention that engages the Church today: debates having to do with the rôle of bishops’ conferences, the operation of the Roman curia, the relationship of the magisterium or teaching authority to theologians.
Recusancy and Declining Gentry Fortunes: Evidence Relating to the Forsetts Of Lincolnshire
Authors: Mills Dennis R.
Published: July 2016

Almost a century ago Calthrop recognized that there were important recusants in some Lincolnshire county families. Interest has been revived recently by Martin and Finnis in an article on the Tyrwhitts of Kettleby, and more specifically on Goddard Tyrwhitt, who became a martyr in 1580 (see fig. 1 for location maps). Whilst the Tyrwhitts were at the top of the gentry hierarchy, the Forsetts of Bilsby near Alford, were practically at the bottom, so presenting some social contrasts with the former family. The Forsetts were newcomers to the county sometime in the mid- to late-fifteenth century and were minor manorial lords at Bilsby in the east Lincolnshire Marsh from the time their documentation begins with John Forsett in 1482 down to about 1600.
Catholic Military Chaplains in the Crimean War
Authors: Hagerty James , Johnstone Tom
Published: July 2016

In the choir of the chapel at St Mary’s College, Oscott, is a stained glass window dedicated to the memory of Fr John Wheble, a military chaplain who died in the Crimean War. Whereas the four upper lights of the window depict scenes from the life of St John the Apostle, Fr Wheble’s patron saint, the four lower ones show Wheble setting sail for the Crimea, giving absolution to soldiers, attending the wounded at the Battle of the Alma, and his death on board the hospital ship Arabia on November 3, 1854. St Edmund’s College, Ware, also has a Crimean window and again Fr Wheble, a benefactor of the college, is depicted along with two alumni of the college, Fr Michael Canty and Fr Denis Sheehan, who also died in the Crimea.
Abraham Woodhead, ‘The Invisible Man’: His Impact on Dryden’s The Hind and the Panther
Authors: Gardiner Anne Barbeau
Published: July 2016

A priest who often visited Alexander Pope in the mid-1730s once observed that the English Catholics had ‘not so good hands’ to defend their cause in the late seventeenth century. The poet briskly replied: ‘Sir, I beg your pardon, we had really some very clever men, engaged on our side …’ Then he mentioned Woodhead, but Spence misunderstood and wrote ‘Whitehead’. That Pope used the pronoun ‘we’ shows what side he was on, and that he gave the pre-eminence to Woodhead shows how well acquainted he was with the controversies of the last age, for Woodhead never signed his works, usually employing the initials R.H. In 1736, his first biographer Simon Berington would call him ‘this great, but almost unknown Man’.
Public Opinion and the 1908 Eucharistic Congress
Authors: Horwood Thomas
Published: July 2016

The summer of 1908 was a summer of congresses in London. The decennial Pan-Anglican Congress assembled in July, the History of Religions Congress met in September, the Trades Union Congress held its annual meeting shortly thereafter, and the International Congress on Moral Education took place in October. None of these received as much newspaper attention as the Roman Catholic International Eucharistic Congress, which convened in England for the first time, from Wednesday 9 to Sunday 13, September. Many column inches were devoted to the preparations and proceedings; photographs were printed; and hundreds of readers’ letters were published afterwards. In reportage the newspapers differed slightly; in opinion, more so. Most of the proceedings were not controversial at all, consisting of liturgies, lectures on various aspects of Catholic belief concerning the Eucharist, and evening meetings in the Albert Hall. What excited the press and sections of the public was the proposed closing spectacular: a procession of the Blessed Sacrament through the streets around Westminster Cathedral.
Who was John Taylor the Diplomatist?
Authors: Trappes-Lomax M. R.
Published: July 2016

According to the Dictionary of National Biography, John Taylor, that “factious papist” and diplomatist, was born about 1600, and was the eldest son of John Taylor of Kingsnorth, Kent, by Anne daughter of William Austen of Goudhurst. It is true that Berry's Kentish Genealogies, pp. 162-3, to which DNB refers, gives John Taylor and Anne Austen a son John, but it gives the younger John's wife's name as Elizabeth whereas DNB calls her Jane, as indeed she calls herself (Cal. S. P. Dom., 1649-50, p. 208). Also, Berry mentions no brothers, while DNB states that he had a brother who was chaplain to the same Emperor to whom he was accredited as agent.