The study of antiquarianism and particularly of the use of Anglo-Saxon precedents in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has belonged primarily to historians of Protestantism and parliament, to their studies of English Protestant antiquarians and English Protestant theories of common law, royal absolutism, constitutionalism, Laudian Anglicanism, and non-conforming Protestant resistance. Although it has been clear to everyone that Protestant interest in Saxonism was part and parcel of an anti-Catholic agenda, the Catholic side of this discourse has been virtually unexamined. The focus almost exclusively on Protestant Saxonism has isolated even Protestant thought from some of the contexts within which it developed and, more obviously, has all but occluded the importance of Saxonism to a range of Catholic arguments.

Our earlier article discussed the family of Sir Robert Tyrwhitt (d. 1581) of Kettleby in Lincolnshire and the imprisonment of Sir Robert and several of his sons by the Privy Council in June 1580. The Council was acting on a report of Catholic activities associated with the wedding of Edmund, Lord Sheffield and Ursula Tyrwhitt at the Tyrwhitt family homes of Kettleby and Twigmore. Sir Robert’s son Goddard died in a London gaol, and Goddard’s elder brothers William and Robert were imprisoned for years in the Tower and elsewhere. We turn now to the next generation of the same family, and show that Sir Robert’s grandson and heir, Robert Tyrwhitt, became a strong supporter of John Gerard SJ and the Jesuits in England during the years c.1600 to early 1606. Fr Gerard’s autobiography strains to make this clear, within the necessary limits of discretion. But just as the identity of the Tyrwhitt martyr of 1580 was soon totally lost to view, so Gerard’s identification of ‘one of my main benefactors’ as a Tyrwhitt has remained undecoded—hidden, indeed, by loose translation, and inattention to the different ways one can be a ‘brother in law’.

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’.

When J. M. Turner came to make his sketches of Stonyhurst Hall and the neighbouring church at Great Mitton, for the first time in 1799, he was immediately struck by the melancholia and faded splendour of that part of ‘darkest’ rural Lancashire. Perched high upon the brow of Longridge, the mansion commanded sweeping views of the valley beneath, of Pendle Hill and of the distant market town of Clitheroe; while the thirteenth century church of All Hallows—almost lost in the folds of the countryside—sat squatly on the borders of Lancashire and Yorkshire, at the confluence of the Rivers Calder, Ribble and Hodder, and served as a stubborn reminder of an earlier and less secular age. Relatively untouched by the forces of industrialisation, these buildings proved a delight to the Gothic imagination of the young artist.

A previous article gave an account of the difficulties besetting Lisbon College at the beginning of the twentieth century. These were due both to the unsettled state of Portugal where the new Republic was hostile to the Church and to the failure of Mgr James Warwick to win the support of his staff in revitalising the college after the long and rather monochrome presidency of William Hilton. Warwick’s failure led to an unfortunate difference of opinion among the staff of the college and in the absence of an Apostolic Nuncio in Lisbon, the traditional Protector of the College and the court of appeal, Cardinal Bourne sent Mgr Bernard Ward of Old Hall, Ware, to make an official visitation and report on the state of affairs in Lisbon.