bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Sins of the Fathers?: The Marriage of Mary Cornwallis
Authors: Weikel Ann
Published: July 2016

After 2 of ye clock after Midnight [15 December 1578] the Earle [of Bath] was awakened by Sir Thomas Kitson and brought barefooted and bare-legged out of his chamber; ye said Sir Thomas brought the Earl's doublet and hose after him, … and in this mean ye Earle was led in a Chappell in ye howse wheare ye saide Beddstaffe maker Atkinson was ready to marry him and his lordship being so heavy and possessed with such a strange Traunce like drowsiness; … They weare fayne to lift up his hand and to shake him when ye worde of binding weare spoken …
Nuns of the Jerningham Letters: The Hon. Catherine Dillon (1752–1797) and Anne Nevill (1754–1824), Benedictines at Bodney Hall
Authors: Mason Margaret J.
Published: July 2016

The Hon. Catherine Dillon and her cousin Anne Nevill were Benedictine nuns in the French community of Montargis, which came to Bodney Hall in Norfolk early in 1793. There, near the Bedingfelds at Oxburgh and somewhat further from the Jerninghams at Cossey, the nuns educated young ladies in ‘every branch of useful knowledge becoming the delicacy of their sex.’ Letters from Catherine Dillon (Sr. St. François) and Anne Nevill (Sr. Ste. Agnès de Ste. Thérèse), written from Bodney to Lady Jerningham and Lady Bedingfeld during the period 1795 to 1806, can be found in the Jerningham collection at the University of Birmingham and at the Stafford Record Office. Egerton Castle's two-volume Jerningham Letters, published in 1896, draws upon the large collection of letters written to Lady Bedingfeld, but does not include any letters from her aunt Sr. François or her cousin Sr. Thérèse. Sr. François Dillon was Lady Jerningham's only surviving sister. Sr. Thérèse Nevill was Lady Jerningham's cousin and a sister of Cosmas Nevill of Nevill Holt.
The Eirenics of John Henry Newman
Authors: Blehl Vincent Ferrer
Published: July 2016

David Brown (1803–97), a member of the Free Church of Scotland, Professor of Apologetics, Exegesis of the Gospels and Church History at the Free Church College, Aberdeen, was from 1876 to 1885 Principal of his college. A correspondence with Newman began when Brown sent Newman a copy of his work, Life of the Late John Duncan, LL.D., (Edinburgh, 1872). In a letter of 7 June 1872 to Newman, he remarked that the last chapter of the Grammar of Assent met some of Duncan's difficulties, and added, ‘towards you I feel as if in the light of such teaching I were at home, in the blessed Communion of Saints which transcends every earthly separation.’ This tone was maintained in Brown's subsequent letter, 2 October of the same year, which concluded with the words, ‘With esteem … I remain yours in bonds transcending every earthly separation.’
The English Recusants: Some Mediaeval Literary Links
Authors: Rogers David
Published: July 2016

[This article by the late David Rogers was written in 1982. He later read it as a paper at the English Benedictine Congregation History Symposium at Worth Abbey in 1990 and it was subsequently reproduced in typescript as part of the proceedings. The article demands a wider audience and permission to publish it in ‘Recusant History’ has been kindly granted by Dom Gregory Scott O.S.B. and by the Friends of the Bodleian, who hold the copyright in David Rogers's work. A section of the article was elaborated and published as ‘Anthony Batt: A Forgotten Benedictine Translator’ in G.A.M. Janssens & F.G.A.M. Aarts (eds.): ‘Studies in Seventeenth Century English Literature, History and Bibliography’, Amsterdam, 1984]:
The Infanta and the English Benedictine Nuns: Mary Percy's Memories In 1634
Authors: Arblaster Paul
Published: July 2016

In 1598 Philip II, King of Spain since 1559 and ruler of many other dominions, granted the ‘Burgundian’ segment of his inheritance (the Low Countries and the County of Burgundy) to his daughter Isabella as a dowry, and gave her in marriage to her cousin Albert, Archduke of Austria. The couple governed that part of the territory effectively under their control — the northern provinces having formed the Dutch Republic — as ‘sovereign princes’, essentially enjoying domestic autonomy under the protection of the Spanish army. They were responsible for the ‘northern’ policy of the Spanish monarchy, including day-to-day relations with England and the protection of the British Catholics. As sovereign princes they rebuilt the Church in the Southern Netherlands, patronised the reformed religious orders, and did much to establish the particular South Netherlandish identity which was eventually to lead to an independent Belgian state. In 1621 Albert died, and his childless widow's dowry reverted to her nephew Philip IV. Isabella remained in Brussels as Governess-General, enjoying greater independence than the title might suggest, both from her long career as co-sovereign and from the trust and admiration of her nephew the king. She died in 1633, the governship passing to another of her nephews, the Cardinal-Infant Don Ferdinand (1635–1641).
Lisbon College in the Nineteenth Century: The Story of a Relationship Between English Catholics and the Church Abroad
Authors: Williams Michael E.
Published: July 2016

Founded in the seventeenth century the College of Saints Peter and Paul at Lisbon was for many years one of the overseas seminaries that provided for the education and formation of the secular clergy of England and Wales. When at the beginning of the nineteenth century seminaries began to be established in England the need for these foreign colleges grew less apparent. But the English bishops not only saw special reasons for continuing and strengthening the connection with Rome, but also decided to continue to support the two colleges in the Iberian Peninsula. There were similarities between the situations at Valladolid and Lisbon but the distinct histories of the Church in the two countries provided nuances and shades of difference that were sometimes not fully appreciated by the hierarchy. This article which uses hitherto unpublished material to be found in the archives of Lisbon College, treats of that College between the years 1807 and 1883 when the difficult conditions in Portugal called for special qualities in those English priests whose responsibility it was to maintain the College in being.
The Tichbornes, The Doughtys and Douglas Woodruff
Authors: Hughes Noel
Published: July 2016

Of what he called ‘The Great Fear of Popery’, Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote: ‘that fear … constantly renewed, had acquired a momentum of its own. It was the English equivalent of the great European witch-craze, and it would remain formidable for three centuries, a national neurosis which could be awakened again and again: in the myth of the great Irish massacre of 1641 (still repeated, over a century later, by John Wesley), in the great scare of the Popish Plot of 1678, in the fable of the Warming Pan in 1688, even, though with dwindling force, in the Gordon Riots of 1780 and the “Papal Aggression” of 1851, ‘(sic). He might have added the Tichborne trial to the list.
Samuel Wesley and the Missa De Spiritu Sancto
Authors: Olleson Philip
Published: July 2016

A good deal of attention has been paid in recent years to the relationships between Methodists and Catholics in England in the eighteenth century and, in particular, to John Wesley’s own dealings with Catholics and Catholicism. This article examines a link with Catholicism at the very heart of Methodism’s first family: the involvement of Samuel Wesley (1766–1837), the younger of the two musician sons of Charles Wesley, and the nephew of John. As will be seen below, Wesley converted in 1784, marking the occasion by composing an elaborate setting of the Ordinary of the Mass (the Missa de Spiritu Sancto) which he sent to Pope Pius VI. This article discusses the background to the composition of the Mass, its musical content, and the subsequent history of its autograph score. It is prompted by the publication of a performing edition of the work and by a subsequent performance (almost certainly the world première) in St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, on 10 September 1997, which was recorded and later broadcast on both Irish and British radio.
A Man of the Universal Church: Peter James Kenney, S.J., 1779–1841
Authors: Morrissey Thomas J.
Published: July 2016

Kenney, Peter James (1779–1841), was born in Dublin, probably at 28 Drogheda Street, on 7 July, 1779. His father, Peter, and his mother, formerly Ellen Molloy, ran a small business. Apart from Peter, the other known children were Anne Mary, who joined the convent of the Sisters of St. Clare, and an older brother, or half-brother, Michael, who set up an apothecary’s shop in Waterford.

Peter was born, therefore, in the decade which saw the American Revolution, the Suppression of the Jesuits and, in Ireland, the birth of Daniel O’Connell—destined to become ‘The Liberator’. The need to keep Ireland quiet during the American conflict, led to concessions to the Catholic population. The first of these was in 1778. Others followed when the French Revolution raised possibilities of unrest. In 1792 the establishment of Catholic colleges was allowed, and entry to the legal profession. These led to the founding of Carlow College and to Daniel O’Connell’s emergence as a lawyer. The following year the Irish parliament was obliged by the government to extend the parliamentary franchise to Catholics. Increased freedom, however, and the government’s connivance at the non-application of the penal laws, led to increased resentment against the laws themselves and, among middle-class Catholics, to a relishing of Edmund Burke’s celebrated reminder to the House of Commons in 1780, that ‘connivance is the relaxation of slavery, not the definition of liberty’.
The Owens of Oxford
Authors: Hodgetts Michael
Published: July 2016

During the last week of February 1606, the survival of Catholicism in England depended on whether Nicholas Owen could remain silent under prolonged and ruthless torture. A few months later, John Gerard wrote of him:

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.
Father William Barry: Priest and Novelist
Authors: Gilley Sheridan
Published: July 2016

For some Roman Catholic clergymen, the nineteenth century was an exciting age. On its very eve, Cardinal Ruffo led a pious bandit band in a crusade of slaughter through the southern Italian Parthenopean republic. In 1810, another priest, Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, under the banner of Our Lady of Guadalupe, began the revolution in Mexico. Luigi Menichini led the 1830 insurrection in Naples. Father Piotr Sćiegienny’s revolutionary activities in Poland earned him a quarter of a century’s exile in Siberia. Father Patrick Lavelle founded an Irish society which was a front for the revolutionary Fenians. The secular or ecclesiastical politician has a job to do, and in some places, the priesthood was forced into political roles, as in nineteenth-century Italy, Mexico, Poland and Ireland. But in spite of the international conflict between Catholicism and anticlericalism in Europe and South America, the ordinary Catholic priest was not primarily a political animal. Unless he served in the Curia or was a martyr-missionary in the South Seas or Central Africa, the priest’s life was the old hidden life of caring for the souls of the people of his parish and of preaching the gospel and administering the sacraments. Amid the tumult of the nations, this inner work continued on its quiet path, and in riches and poverty, and beside the allurements and excitements and man-made manipulations of secular and ecclesiastical politics, the priesthood was concerned with the essential tasks of the comfort of the stricken and the salvation of sinners, laid upon them by their Lord and Master.
Cardinal Gasquet (1846–1929): An English Roman
Authors: Bellenger Aidan
Published: July 2016

In the monastic refectory at Downside the two portraits of the abbey’s great Victorian prelates, William Bernard Ullathorne and Francis Aidan Gasquet, dominate the scene, placed as they are above the abbot’s table on either side of the crucifix. Ullathorne, in the prime of life, looks alert and full of purpose. Gasquet, in decline, looks sour and tired. ‘The Cardinal,’ wrote the Venerabile obituarist, ‘used to walk down the corridor (of the English College) with tightly compressed lips and irritable-looking lines above his nose, while his eyes, which were partly hidden beneath frowning brows, scanned us searchingly the while: in a word, with none of that graciousness of age which is the common memory of all who knew him.’ Gasquet, the only English Cardinal to make a significant impact in the Roman curia in the twentieth century, remains an ambiguous character, now little known and if remembered at all associated with poor historical scholarship. Yet, Gasquet’s influence was considerable and owed much to his amiable personality and ready wit, his ability to make friends and to influence those in the highest echelons of church and state. Indeed, in 1903 Francis Aidan Gasquet was very nearly appointed as the first Benedictine Archbishop of Westminster. Instead, the somewhat colourless Francis Alphonsus Bourne succeeded Cardinal Vaughan and Gasquet had to be content with a life as varied and interesting as the church could offer.
English Catholics and the French Marriage 1577–81
Authors: Bossy J. A.
Published: July 2016

Some time in the winter or spring of 1576-7, Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, lately back from a tour of the continent, was introduced by his friend Charles Arundell to a seminary priest, Richard Stephens, and became a Catholic. Stephens, an Oxford man recently returned from Douai, had already reconciled, with Arundell, his friends and relatives Lord Henry Howard, the late Duke of Norfolk's brother, and Francis Southwell. As bright young courtiers, they scarcely fall into the category of depressed gentlemen attracted to Rome by economic discontent; but they had about them a certain sense of “outness”, and shared a resentment against the successful Elizabethan families which was at least partly responsible for their conversion. It was less than five years since Norfolk's execution; and Burghley's wardship of Oxford had ended in a marriage to his daughter which was now, like the relations of the two men, severely strained. This discontent led naturally to the idea of upsetting the established system, both in society and in religion; this, they agreed, was what they would work for.
The Embassy of Sir Anthony Standen in 1603 Part II
Authors: Hicks L.
Published: July 2016

Contrary to the expectation of many, James VI of Scotland ascended the English throne in a peaceful manner, and for the time b~ing, at least, was welcomed. None of the rival claimants in England had sufficient force or following to offer any effective resistance, even had they so desired. In fact, the people as a whole, however much they differed one from the other in religion, appear to have accepted his accession with hope, for diverse and, indeed, contrary reasons. James’s re-establishment of episcopacy in Scotland and the dominant position of Sir Robert Cecil gave assurance to the upholders of the established state church that there would be no change in the religious policy pursued by the late queen. As for the Puritans, James’s connection with the late Earl of Essex, who had had their support, might raise hopes in them of less harsh treatment than had been meted out to them in the latter years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. Catholics, on the other hand, hoped for milder courses on account of their former attitude to Mary, Queen of Scots, and of the promises the new king had made in Scotland not to persecute them but to allow them liberty of conscience. They knew, too, his earlier friendly relations with the Catholic Scottish earls and ascribed the persecution of their coreligionists in Scotland rather to the fierce bigotry of the Kirk than to James himself. Their hopes, too, were increased by the fact that the new king’s wife, Anne of Denmark, was a Catholic, having been received into the Church a few years previously by a Scottish Jesuit.
The Supposed Source Of Persons's “Christian Directory”
Authors: Driscoll J.P.
Published: July 2016

From the time of its first appearance in 1582 until the present day there has been confusion as to the sources of Robert Persons’s Christian Directory. Gaspar Loarte and Luis de Granada have each been represented as the principal source used by Persons who has come to be regarded as little more than a translator or editor. In the case of Loarte, Persons himself was indirectly responsible for the confusion. A study of the Christian Directory and its contents, however, reveals that Persons did not borrow from Loarte at all and that if he borrowed from Granada it was only in a very minor way.
The Catholic Recusancy of the Yorkshire Fairfaxes
Authors: Aveling Hugh
Published: July 2016

The Fairfaxes were a definitely Catholic family from 1636 and it is difficult to think that they had no chaplain in the 1630's and 1640's. The considerable donation by Abigail, wife of the 5th Viscount to the funds of the Northern District may indicate that the first chaplains were secular priests. It may also be significant that the first Fairfaxes to go abroad to school went to St. Omer (apparently) and Douai and none to St. Gregory's Douai, before the 1670's. The 2nd Viscount and his wife made no gifts to Benedictines. In 1690 Charles Fairfax of York was trustee of many secular clergy funds. (Leeds Dioc. MSS Hogarth MS.) The extant Yorkshire secular clergy records seem to contain, however, no evidence of a regular secular Gilling or Walton mission or fund.
Antony Munday in Rome
Authors: Kenny Anthony
Published: July 2016

Antony Munday, in his book The English Romayne Life, described the customs of the English College in Rome and narrated the mutiny of the English scholars against their first Rector, the Welshman Dr. Morus Clynnog. He claimed to base his account on his own stay in the College, as ‘the Pope's scholar,’ during the troubles. However, in all the records of this over-documented squabble, no trace has hitherto been found of his name: it is absent, for example, from the earliest published list of English College scholars in the Liber Ruber or College diary. For this reason, it has sometimes been doubted whether Munday was ever in the College at all.
The Death of Thomas More, Secular Priest, Great-Grandson of St. Thomas More
Authors: Shanahan D.
Published: July 2016

After the death of the Archpriest George Birkhead the secular priest John Colleton and his fellow assistants wrote to the Pope on 28 July 1614, to submit a list of suitable condidates from whom a bishop for England might be chosen. The names put forward included those of William Bishop and Richard Smith, who were each later to receive the appointment, and William Harrison, who in fact was made Archpriest in 1615. The list of suggestions ended thus: “Lastly we should like to add ... the name of Mr. Thomas More, our Agent, a most acceptable man, both because of his own merits and because of the most glorious memory of his great-grandfather, the famous More, who with the Cardinal elect of Rochester, first suffered an illustrious martyrdom for refusing the oath of supremacy: were it not that he is the only man we have or can hope to have who can afford from his own resources to act for us out there.” It was a name to be proud of and a relationship he did not hesitate to proclaim. When, with his brother Henry, he arrived at the English College in Rheims in 1583, aged 18 years, they were registered as “Thomas and Henry More, brothers, great grand-children of the most holy martyr Thomas More.” He went on to Rome in 1587, but the registers of the English College there and those of Valladolid, where he arrived in 1591, contain no reference to his ancestry. After some sixteen years of activity on the English Mission he accompanied Richard Smith out to Rome in 1609 intending to put the case for the appointment of a bishop to rule once more the church in England in place of an archpriest. He swore he would not return until they had succeeded, and he kept his oath. He spent the next seven years in Rome as Clergy Agent, and a further five years in Spain, trying to get help for the seminaries and eventually helping to establish the new seminary in Lisbon. When in 1623 William Bishop was appointed bishop for England, Thomas More was made by him Archdeacon of Hertfordshire and Northamptonshire, and he may have then returned home to England, but in May 1624, after the death of William Bishop he was made special agent to go to Rome for the purpose of securing the appointment of another bishop, and was back in Rome in August. He died there in the following year. The story of his last illness and death is considered worth telling now for the first time because it is so extraordinarily well documented by manuscripts in the Westminster Archives, the Archbishop of Birmingham's Archives and the Archives of the Old Brotherhood.
English Catholicism Under Charles II: The Legal Position
Authors: Williams J. A.
Published: July 2016

Many years ago there was published an English translation ofLa Persecution des Catholiques en Angleterre sous Charles IIby the Comtesse R. de’Courson: a work which remains the only one devoted wholly to English Catholicism during that reign. Unfortunately, however, the title is misleading and the book is given up almost entirely to the two and a half years of the Popish Plot—not, in other words, to the reign of Charles II as a whole but merely to one-tenth of it—with the result that the reader is presented with an unbalanced and unduly depressing picture. A more judicious appraisal has been provided by a number of “background” works such as Archbishop Mathew'sCatholicism in England,Mr. E. I. Watkin'sRoman Catholicism in England from the Reformation to 1950and, most recently, Miss. M. D. R. Leys's fascinatingCatholics in England, 1529-1829,while an article published inThe Dublin Review(Autumn, 1959) suggested that the pecuniary laws, so ferocious on paper, to which Catholics were theoretically subject, were in fact enforced only very spasmodically during the reign of Charles II. Clearly, in order to judge how rigorously the penal laws were enforced in Charles Il’s reign, it is necessary first to consider what exactly were these laws; to establish what was the legal position of the English Catholics at the Restoration and to discover what fresh enactments were passed in the course of the next twenty-five years. It is such an examination of the legal position of the English Catholics between 1660 and 1685 which will be attempted in the pages that follow.
Brereley's Reformed Protestant
Authors: Allison A. F.
Published: July 2016

In the “Catalogue of Popish Books” printed in his Foot out of the Snare, 1624, the gossipy but sometimes remarkably well-informed John Gee has the following entry: “The reformed Protestant, by Brerely. There was a printing house supprest some three yeers since in Lancashire, where all Brerely his workes, with many other Popish Pamphlets, were printed.” The “printing-house… in Lancashire” is undoubtedly the secret press associated with the Anderton family of Birchley Hall, near Wigan. A & R list sixteen books from this press, all printed between 1615 and 1621, including two by the unidentified author who used the pseudonym John Brereley, sometimes thought to be Lawrence Anderton. In 1956, when the A & R catalogue was published, the compilers knew of no extant copy of The Reformed Protestant. Since then, two copies have come to light, one in the library of the Marquess of Bute, the other in a collection of books formerly belonging to Burscough Catholic parish in Lancashire. The latter copy has been acquired by the British Museum. The description is as follows :
The Exclusion of Catholics from the Lord Chancellorship, 1673–1954
Authors: Grady F. J.
Published: July 2016

The composition and policies of Charles Il’s Cabal ministry in the years 1667-73 provoked a vigorous reaction from the Pension Parliament. It forced the king to cancel his Declaration of Indulgence in March 1672 as being both unconstitutional and dangerous to the Church, for it implied a prerogative power to suspend Acts of Parliament and it facilitated the already alarming growth of Popery under the patronage of Louis XIV. In the following year, in order to make another Cabal impossible, Parliament passed an “Act for preventing dangers which may happen from Popish recusants”, commonly called the Test Act. By it, all Catholics holding office under the Crown were deprived by the simple device of demanding that they should take the oaths of Supremacy and Allegiance of Elizabeth and James I respectively; receive the Sacrament according to the usage of the Church of England, and make this Declaration :

“I, A.B., do declare that I do believe that there is not any transubstantiation in the sacrament of the Lord,s Supper, or in the elements of bread and wine at or after the consecration thereof by any person whatsoever”.
The Eyres of Hassop, and Some of Their Connections, from the Test Act to Emancipation
Authors: Meredith Rosamond
Published: July 2016

A previous study traced the career of Rowland Eyre the cavalier during the Civil War and Commonwealth (Recusant History, vol. 8, no. 1). The present account continues the story from the time of Charles II; the earlier history of the family will not be recapitulated.
Richard Smith’s Gallican Backers and Jesuit Opponents. Part III: The Continuation of the Controversy 1631–c. 1643
Authors: Allison Antony F.
Published: July 2016

When he arrived in France in the summer of 1631 Smith began to give all the help he could to the French writers who had taken up his cause. In doing so he put himself in a very delicate position as a member of Richelieu’s household for he was exacerbating the dissensions in the French Church that the Cardinal was intent upon healing because they posed a threat to national unity. Moreover, the writer to whom Smith chiefly looked for support, the Abbé de Saint-Cyran, was soon to become, for reasons partly political and partly doctrinal, the object of Richelieu’s implacable hostility. Smith had to proceed with great caution if he were not to lose the extraordinary advantages that the Cardinal’s patronage brought him. I propose now to follow the controversy as it developed in France during the 1630s, illustrating Smith’s rôle in it mainly from his private correspondence preserved among the papers of the English secular clergy in the archives of the Archdiocese of Westminster. The dossier is far from complete but enough has survived to allow us to trace with reasonable clarity moves that would otherwise have been totally obscure. The greater part of it consists of letters from Smith to the clergy’s Agent at Rome, Peter Fitton, between 1631 and 1634 (after which there is a gap in this series), and from Smith to the Secretary of the clergy in London, John Southcote, from 1631 until the latter’s death in 1637. There are also a number of letters from Southcote to Smith and to Fitton between 1631 and 1637, and a few to Smith from other members of the clergy, in particular Anthony Champney, formerly Vice-President of the English College at Douai and now chaplain to the English Benedictine nuns at Brussels. After 1637 the correspondence still extant becomes very sparse.
A Catholic Community: Shrewsbury. Part I: 1750–1850
Authors: Phillips Peter
Published: July 2016

Shrewsbury, like many towns of eighteenth century England, bears witness to the slow emergence of an urban Catholic community. The fact that its first Catholic chapel could be built as early as 1776, two years before the first Relief Act, and thus laying the community open to serious reprisals, is an indication of the easing of relations between the Catholic and his neighbours. It was not until 1791 that the building of chapels was permitted, but after 1778 most of the penal restraints were removed from the statute book. This, too, is a reflection of growing toleration rather than its cause, although it was prompted immediately by the need to recruit Catholic highlanders into the army. The ’45 could now be forgotten and the Catholic tended to be regarded as a somewhat quaint, though harmless, figure. This was a time of transition from country to town and perhaps the Catholic community, unencumbered by the social restraints of the establishment from which it had been excluded for so long, was to gain particularly from the change. The Catholic Brook family of Madeley Court, for example, felt free to turn its attention to industry, opening the first iron forge in Coalbrookdale, the cradle of the Industrial Revolution.
The Life and Death of a Victorian Seminary: The English College, Bruges
Authors: Foster Stewart
Published: July 2016

The foundation and fortunes of the English College at Bruges, and its contribution to Catholicism in this country, remains one of the least chronicled chapters in the development of seminary education in the nineteenth century. For fifteen years, from 1858 to 1873, the college, founded by Sir John Sutton (1820–1873), trained more than 120 priests for the Church in England, Wales and Scotland.
The Jesuit College, Manchester, 1875
Authors: Rafferty Oliver P.
Published: July 2016

In an Apostolic Constitution, dated 8 May 1881, Pope Leo XIII sought to regulate the relationship between diocesan bishops and religious orders. In the words of Herbert Vaughan the Papal pronouncement ‘sums up and ends a recent controversy on matters of discipline affecting the working of the Church in Great Britain’. Romanos Pontifices represented a personal triumph for Vaughan. He had assiduously campaigned at Rome to have the freedom of religious orders restricted, and their operations subject to the supervision of the local bishop. The Pope’s document directs that members of religious orders may not open a house in any diocese without the explicit permission of the bishop. Nor, in future, would it be possible for a religious congregation to convert existing institutions to other use without the consent of the episcopal authorities. The ruling of the document was an adjudication affecting all religious orders, and demanded complete obedience to all its details. The only religious order mentioned by name was the Society of Jesus. It, too, was to be subject to this ordinance in spite of its claims to be exempt from such interference in the running of its affairs.
The Bloody Questions Reconsidered
Authors: McGrath Patrick
Published: July 2016

The so-called ‘Bloody Questions’ were originally put to Edmund Campion and others who were charged with him in a mass trial of fourteen priests and one layman in 1581. Campion seems to have been the first to call them Bloody Questions. They have over the centuries been the subject of considerable controversy between Catholic and non-Catholic writers, and it is worthwhile looking at them again in some detail.
Richard Langhorne and the ‘Nevills of Nevill Holt’: A Note
Authors: McCoog Thomas M.
Published: July 2016

In a recent article Richard Langhorne’s disclosures to the Privy Council in July of 1679 and the Government’s subsequent failure to act on this information were discussed. One person named in this testimony was a Colonel Neville, who was accused of holding some money that belonged to the Society of Jesus. According to Langhorne, the Jesuit William Gilbert had deposited £100 with the colonel. Although Langhorne did not mention it, presumably the Society either received annual rents or held a mortgage as a security for the sum. A few months after Langhorne’s discovery on 12 November 1679, the Government issued a proclamation that offered a moiety to anyone who provided information that would lead to the discovery and confiscation of hidden resources of the Jesuits. The proclamation enumerated the estates both real and personal about which the Government already had information and against which legal action had been initiated. Among the personal estates was a £2500 mortgage charged upon the estate of a Henry Neville, Esq. In the article it was wondered if Henry Neville and Colonel Neville were the same man and if the amount specified by Langhorne was but a small portion of the total amount that he owed the Society of Jesus. Shortly after completion of the article, I rediscovered Bernard Elliott’s ‘A Leicestershire Recusant Family: The Nevills of Nevili Holt,’ an important study that I had inadvertently overlooked as I researched the topic. That work renewed my interest in the subject and prompted my return to the archives.
‘Briefly, and in Confidence’: Private Views of Her Majesty’s Inspectors on English Catholic Elementary Schools, 1875
Authors: Whitehead Maurice
Published: July 2016

The advent of State intervention in education in the early Victorian period and the creation in 1839 of the Committee of Council on Education, a Select Committee of the Privy Council, brought with it new duties and responsibilities. One of the first tasks confronting the Committee of Council was to determine the manner in which the new grants of money to schools should be distributed. In June 1839 the Committee issued a Minute announcing that all future building grants to schools would involve the right of inspection:

The right of inspection will be required by the Committee in all cases; inspectors, authorised by Her Majesty in Council, will be appointed from time to time to visit schools to be henceforth aided by public money: the inspectors will not interfere with the religious instruction, or discipline, or management of the school, it being their object to collect facts and information, and to report the result of their inspections to the Committee of Council.
The English Augustinian Convent of Our Lady of Syon at Paris: Its Foundation and Struggle for Survival during the First Eighty Years, 1634–1713
Authors: Allison Antony F.
Published: July 2016

The Augustinian Convent of Our Lady of Syon (ancestor of the present St. Augustine’s Priory Ealing) was founded at Paris in 1634. After some early difficulties it made its home in 1638–39 on a site in the rue des Fossés Saint-Victor (now rue du Cardinal Lemoine) on the eastern outskirts of the city where it was to remain, with its school, for more than two hundred years. Almost alone among English Catholic institutions founded in France and Flanders during the penal times it weathered the storm of the French Revolution and remained throughout much of the nineteenth century on the site it had formerly occupied. During the Revolution it was suppressed as a Religious house, its property was sequestrated, many treasures were stolen and some early records lost. The buildings in the rue des Fossés Saint-Victor were used for a time as a prison in which nuns from various convents, as well as laywomen, were confined. Conditions became easier after the fall of Robespierre in 1794 and some of the nuns’ property was provisionally restored to them, but it was again seized under the Directory and those nuns who had survived the earlier ordeal were evicted. Reluctantly, they made preparations to follow the example of many other English Catholic institutions in France and on French-held territory and seek refuge in England.
A Bishop for Essex: Bernard Ward and the Diocese of Brentwood
Authors: Foster Stewart
Published: July 2016

Major changes in ecclesiastical government are seldom effected without disagreement or tension. The immediate background to the creation of the Diocese of Brentwood in 1917 bears ample testimony to this truth. Three areas of difficulty were especially evident in the decade before the separation of Essex from the Archdiocese of Westminster: the longstanding dispute between the dioceses of Westminster and Southwark; a clash of personalities between Archbishop Bourne and Bishop Amigo; and a protracted argument over the administration of St. John’s Seminary, Wonersh, the management of Southwark’s trust funds and the availability of funds for any new ecclesiastical territory.
English Catholics Without A Bishop 1655–1672
Authors: Birrell T.A.
Published: July 2016

The period from 1655 to 1672 forms a convenient unit in Recusant history. After the death on 18 March 1655 of Richard Smith, Bishop of Chalcedon, there was a series of attempts by the English clergy to obtain from Rome the appointment of a bishop for England, which culminated in the issue of a brief for the consecration of Philip Howard OP on the 16 May 1672. In spite of this, Howard's consecration did not take place, and the English Catholics were without a form of episcopal government till 1685, when John Leyburne was appointed Vicar Apostolic. The reasons for this state of affairs have been the subject of some comment, not all of it well-informed, by those who have treated of English Catholic history in the seventeenth century. The purpose of the present study is to try to present, as objectively as possible, the course of events as it is reflected in the negotiations of the successive agents sent to Rome on behalf of the English clergy during the period 1655-72, to gether with the relevant background.
John Crosse of Liverpool and Recusancy in Early Seventeenth-Century Lancashire
Authors: Dottie R. G.
Published: July 2016

John Crosse of Liverpool has been hailed by several historians (see below, p. 37) as an example of a ‘Roman Catholic actively opposing Ship Money’ in part because Catholics typically were financially stretched by the demands of compositions. Few individuals have been identified in that role, thus assuring Crosse a permanent place in history. But how justified is this assessment of a man whom recent research reveals as a more complex character than is allowed by the convenient stereotype allotted to him? Who exactly was he?
The Adventures of an Angel-Guardian in Seventeenth-Century England
Authors: Blom J. M.
Published: July 2016

‘I acknowledge this Doctrine is not commonly received by Protestants, who (I humbly conceive) might reject it chiefly in opposition to the See of Rome, wherein such a multitude of monsters do swim…’ This is how the Congregationalist divine, Robert Dingley (1619-1660) summarized the characteristic Protestant attitude to the Roman Catholic belief in guardian angels in the preface toThe Deputation of Angels, or The Angel-Guardian(1654, Wing D 1496).
Samuel Peploe and Catholicism in Preston, 1714
Authors: Haydon Colin M.
Published: July 2016

Samuel Peploe was vicar of Preston from 1700 to 1726 and bishop of Chester from 1726 to 1752. Today he is best remembered for a story—perhaps apocryphal—concerning his behaviour during the Jacobite rising of 1715. It is said that, when he was conducting a service, a group of rebels entered the church at Preston and threatened to kill him unless he ceased to pray for the ‘Hanoverian usurper’. Peploe supposedly replied ‘Soldier, I am doing my duty; do you do yours’; and continued his prayers. When this was reported to George I, he apparently remarked: ‘Peep-low, Peep-low is he called? But he shall peep high; I will make him a bishop’.
Catherine McAuley’s Theological and Literary Debt to Alonso Rodriguez: the ‘Spirit of the Institute’ Parallels
Authors: Sullivan Mary C.
Published: July 2016

In the early development of their spiritual and theological roots, the Sisters of Mercy are indebted to many Irish diocesan priests and to many religious orders active in Dublin and the surrounding area during the early nineteenth century, especially to those most supportive of Catherine McAuley and the first Sisters of Mercy prior to and following the founding of the Institute of Mercy in Baggot Street in 1831. Among the religious orders, the Carmelite Fathers on Clarendon Street, the Presentation Sisters on George’s Hill, the Dominican Fathers at Carlow College, the Irish Sisters of Charity (in the person of their founder, Mary Aikenhead), the Poor Clares, and the Irish Christian Brothers come immediately to mind. The theological debt of Catherine McAuley (1778–1841) and the Sisters of Mercy to the Society of Jesus, however, is fundamental and quite specific. The subsequent historical affiliations of the Sisters of Mercy with members of the Society of Jesus and the frequent consultations which many congregations of Sisters of Mercy have had, and continue to have, with various Jesuit advisers and spiritual directors have their earliest exemplar in the remarkably close association of Catherine McAuley with the classical religious writings of the well-known sixteenth-century Spanish Jesuit theologian, Alonso Rodriguez (1526–1616). This intellectual relationship is suggested by much in Catherine’s thought and writing, but, for the purpose of this article, most notably in the remarkable parallels that exist between Catherine’s only long essay and Rodriguez’s early seventeenth-century essay on the same general theme.
The Rambler, its Reviewers and a ‘Philosophy of Knowledge’
Authors: Warren John
Published: July 2016

Searching for a phrase to describe the Spirit of the Age, the mid-Victorian writer might choose the ‘Age of Education’, or perhaps the ‘Age of Transition’; but Wilkie Collins preferred ‘The Age of the Periodical’. The high–status periodical, and education itself, could be seen as motive forces, determining, shaping, announcing and ushering in the ‘Age of Transition’. For the Liberal Catholics ofThe Rambler, the ‘Age of Transition’ could be an ‘Age of Opportunity’, witnessing the start of the reconversion of England; or it could be an ‘Age of Danger’, witnessing the slide of England into overt infidelity. Of the two motive forces, even the most complacent and self-satisfied review writer would admit the greater to be Education.
Mary Ward's English Institute: The Apostolate As Self-Affirmation?
Authors: Lux-Sterritt Laurence
Published: July 2016

Mary Ward (1585–1645) is known as the foundress of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, an Order of women which continues to educate thousands of girls around the world. During the first decades of the seventeenth century, her foundation was a religious venture which aimed to transform the Catholic mission of recovery into one that catered for women as well as men. It maintained clandestine satellites on English soil and opened colleges on the Continent, in towns such as St Omer (1611), Liège (1616), Cologne and Trier (1620–1), Rome (1622), Naples and Perugia (1623), Munich and Vienna (1627) and Pressburg and Prague (1628). There, it trained its own members and undertook the education of externs and boarders. The Institute's vocation was not only to maintain the faith where it was already present but also to propagate it; as such, it went far beyond the accepted sphere of the feminine apostolate and its members were often labelled as rebels who strove to shake off the shackles of post-Tridentine religious life. To some modern historians, Mary Ward was an ‘unattached, roving, adventurous feminist’; to others, she was a foundress whose initiative deliberately set out to lay tradition to rest and begin a new era for the women in the Church.
William Bishop as Roman Catholic Theologian and Polemicist
Authors: Patterson W. Brown
Published: July 2016

In a vigorous theological controversy, William Bishop, English Roman Catholic theologian educated at Oxford, Rheims, Rome, and Paris, took on William Perkins, the best-selling English Protestant writer of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The two writers were formidable champions of their respective religious traditions. As I will argue, this was a significant exchange, though the dispute has been little noticed by historians of the period. The issues the two writers discussed and the way they discussed them throw considerable light on the state of English religion in the early seventeenth century. Bishop emerges as a more powerful and effective spokesman for the Roman Catholicism of his day than has been heretofore recognised.
Re-Imaging The Marian Catholic Church
Authors: Wizeman William
Published: July 2016

The late Professor Geoffrey Dickens in his book,The English Reformation,condemned the Marian church for ‘failing to discover’ the verve and creativity of the Counter-Reformation; on the other hand, Dr Lucy Wooding has praised the Marian church for its adherence to the views of the great religious reformer Erasmus and its insularity from the counter-reforming Catholicism of Europe in her bookRethinking Catholicism in Reformation England. However, by studying the Latin and English catechetical, homiletic, devotional and controversial religious texts printed during the Catholic renewal in England in the reign of Mary Tudor (1553–58) and the decrees of Cardinal Reginald Pole's Legatine Synod in London (1555–56), a very different picture emerges. Rooted in the writings of St John Fisher—which also influenced the pivotal decrees of the Council of Trent (1545–63) on justification and the Eucharist—Marian authors presented a theological synthesis that concurred with Trent's determinations. This article will focus on three pivotal Reformation controversies: the intrepretation of scripture, justification, and the Eucharist.
Re-Evaluating John Lingard's History of England
Authors: Phillips Peter
Published: July 2016

It has become customary to regard John Lingard as the last, and perhaps finest, of the cisalpine historians, a case powerfully developed in the pages of Joseph Chinnici's The English Catholic Enlightenment, and elsewhere. One of the last generation of students to be trained at the English College, Douai, Lingard would here have been introduced to the Gallican writings of Claude Fleury and his contemporaries which gave shape to English cisalpinism. The first edition of his History of England (1819–1830) was written at least partially with the intention of paving the way for Catholic emancipation which the cisalpine Catholics had so long struggled to achieve. At the same time, this work succeeded in offering a far more forthright challenge to the Protestant reading of English history, fashioned so cogently in the early decades of the eighteenth century, than Lingard's cisalpine forebears would have been prepared to make: Lingard was moving on and is better understood as belonging to a period of transition for the Catholic community in England. Revisions in later editions bring Lingard's intentions even more to the fore. Never quite at ease with figures such as John Milner and Nicholas Wiseman, his onetime pupil and future Cardinal, and certainly not accepting their strident ultramontanism, Lingard is closer to them in his historical studies than sometimes he, or they, realised.
Witham’s New Testament: A Review of its Text and a History of Editions
Authors: Ohlhausen Sidney K.
Published: July 2016

Robert Witham (1667–1738) was the seventh son of a prominent Yorkshire Catholic Recusant family. Little is known about his early life. He studied at Douay, where he was ordained a priest circa 1691, and remained as a teacher until circa 1698. He returned to England to serve as a priest in Cliffe and was promoted in 1711 to Vicar General of England’s Northern District. In 1714 he was appointed the twelfth president of Douay. He assumed the position in 1715 and remained there until his death. In administering Douay, he was faced with an unrelenting demand for the most resourceful diplomacy. He had to keep satisfied his superiors and benefactors in England and Rome, and deal with the liberalizing influences of French institutions. In addition, he was confronted with a series of financial crises, including the forfeiture of Catholic estates that followed the unsuccessful Stuart rising of 1715, followed by the ‘Mississippi Bubble’ that devastated the French economy and cost Douay most of its endowment. The frustrations of what he termed this ‘troublesome office’, caused him on three occasions to offer his resignation. Nonetheless, Witham proved to be one of Douay’s most successful presidents, sometimes considered its ‘second founder’, eliminating the College debt, increasing the number of students, and beginning an ambitious building programme.