Some Wills of Penal Times

Extract

How did our Catholic forefathers live in penal days? Was life an unceasing nightmare? Was every other man they met a Topcliff? After the death of Elizabeth it would seem that persecution went by fits and starts. The protracted negotiations for the Spanish marriage, from 1617 to 1623, meant a decided lull in active measures against recusants, though when those negotiations were broken off there was a recrudescence of brutality. It was the same after the ill-fated rebellion of 1715, and a milder outbreak recurred in the Lord George Gordon riots. But such happenings tell us little of the ordinary life of Catholics at the time when persecution was not active.

A great deal of material is at hand now in the publications of the Catholic Record Society, also in several volumes brought out by Mr. John Orlebar Payne. As we peruse these records many curious facts emerge. Apostasies were, of course, numerous. This was inevitable when life became more and more burdensome day by day. Still it is sad to read that whereas in the year 1750 the Catholic congregation at Upton in Berkshire totalled ninety-eight exclusive of the members of the principal family there—Perkins— ‘it is curious to notice how many of the families whose names are there given still exist in the neighbourhood, although there is not now a single Catholic among them.’ The sequestration of estates was hard to bear and there is pathos in the will of John Purcell, of the Hays in Shropshire, who in 1729 said : ‘My will and desire is that the penal statutes be never taken against my mother or any of my brothers and sisters except my brother-in-law Thomas Penson so long, that is, as they do not seek to secure more than the annuities allowed them.’