It is understandable that study of Southwell’s life should have had priority over the study of his poetry. This biographical bias is evident in the gaps and weaknesses of existing accounts of his poetry: shortcomings which, I would argue, are regrettable because his poetry could provide a better commentary on his life than the conventional assumptions of hagiography. His Latin poetry, which forms a substantial portion of his poetic output, has been overlooked both in Leicester Bradner’s history of Anglo-Latin poetry, and the more recent upsurge in Neo-Latin studies. A different kind of ignorance surrounds his English poetry. In his poetic masterpiece, ‘Saint Peters Complaint’, Southwell describes Christ’s glance as ‘In cyphred words, his misteries disclosing’. (The words are cyphered because they are zeroes, circles projected from Christ’s eyes. They are also cyphered in being encoded in an image.) The description may be aptly applied to the poem which also consists of ‘cyphered words’. The poem’s code is not difficult to penetrate, but nevertheless this essay represents the first attempt to give an account of the ‘high mysteries’ that it at once conceals and discloses; that is, to elucidate the cryptic aspect of the poem. This gap in the secondary literature exemplifies a more general charge that can be levelled against writers on Southwell: that they have tended to deprecate the mannerism or artifice of his work as somehow detracting from his sanctity, Typically, they present it as an external trapping or disguise which must be discarded in order to reveal the true, natural Southwell. I would maintain, however, that artifice is central to Southwell’s poetry, his conception of religion, and his life.

The Protestant societies engaged in evangelizing the Irish in London were mostly staffed by laymen, but had the enthusiastic aid and counsel of the Evangelical clergy, and were only some of the institutional strands in the Evangelical Vicar's encounter with urban poverty from the early 1830s, as the Evangelical urban parish was divided into units of manageable size, and developed lay forms of district-visiting to bring under parochial supervision the huge urban slum populations: or, as the Evangelicals put it themselves, as they brought a remedy to the material and spiritual destitution of the great godless cities, and to London, the greatest and least godly of any. The lay societies needed clerical approval, patronage and protection, and the Evangelical clergy worked as hard as their laymen.

IN May 1622 a series of private discussions on religion was held in London between representatives of the Anglican Church and the Jesuit, John Percy, alias Fisher. The occasion was the announcement by the Countess of Buckingham, mother of King James I’s favourite, George Villiers, Marquess (later Duke) of Buckingham, of her intention to become a Catholic. The King and the Marquess arranged the discussions which occupied three successive days, the 24th, 25th and 26th of May. Two eminent Anglican divines were enlisted to debate with Percy. On the first day the Anglican case was argued by Francis White, at this time a royal chaplain and later a bishop. He was opposed by Percy, in the presence of the Countess, the Marquess and Marchioness (Lady Catherine, who had also influenced her husband's decision to hold these discussions by declaring her intention to return to the Catholic faith in which she had been brought up), Bishop John Williams, (the Lord Keeper), and—possibly—the King. On the second day the King himself took the leading part in putting the Anglican case. On the third day the chief Anglican protagonist was William Laud, at this period Bishop of St. David's, who took the place of Francis White.

On 23rd November, 1584, the fifth Parliament of Queen Elizabeth introduced a bill against “Jesuits, seminary priests and such other like disobedient persons,” which proposed to order all Catholic priests ordained since the feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist, 1559, to leave the country within forty days after the end of the current session of Parliament or suffer pain of death for high treason, their aiders and abettors to be adjudged felons and condemned to death as felons. This bill passed its third reading in the House of Commons on December 19, 1584, but it was not taken up by the House of Lords until after the Christmas recess.

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.

‘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 to The Deputation of Angels, or The Angel-Guardian (1654, Wing D 1496).

The most insistent theme in Donne's writings is his sometimes trivial obsession with suicide and martyrdom. From his ‘Paradoxes’ to his last sermon this theme runs through his prose, and it is no less a constant preoccupation of his verse. That the Jacobeans in their melancholy were obsessed with death has often been observed; but Donne's obsession was a special one, a quintessence of Jacobean melancholy, distilled in him by a special circumstance of his life: he had been born a Catholic. Donne's personal rebellion against the trend of religion in his society was a lifelong struggle within him, though the seed of his rebelliousness grew in his words and deeds to be a trifling thing. This seed had been nurtured by his mother, who lived all her long life a stubborn Catholic, almost outliving her apostate son. She reared him to be a soldier for the Old Faith, bringing him into association with hunted and martyred priests, as if by their example he might learn to savour death. Somehow, this strange education led Donne not into the path of righteous fidelity, but to a bemused fascination with death by self-murder, a cavalier irony that is one of the hallmarks of his style.

Bernard Burder, Abbot of the Cistercian Abbey of Mount St Bernard's, Leicestershire, from 1853 to 1858 is largely forgotten today; but for a few years in the middle of the last century his activities were important, and to a considerable extent, anticipated those of Archbishop Manning in the field of reformatory education. Burder's spiritual progress was similar to Newman's: he began life as a nonconformist, was then converted to Anglicanism and finally joined the Catholic Church one year after Newman. That same year, 1846, he entered Mount St Bernard's and on the death of its first Abbot, Dom Bernard Palmer, in 1853, was, in December of that year, elected to succeed him.

Addressing the House of Commons in April 1640, Sir Benjamin Rudyerd looked back to the dissolution of the last Parliament in 1629. He blamed the English Catholics for what he saw as their role in it, ‘who now by the discontinuance of parliaments are come to that arrogancy and boldness that they intend [contend] who are the greatest subjects’. This warning would be repeated many times in the Parliamentary debates of 1640-42. The evidence most often cited in support of it was the Catholic or ‘Queen’s’ contribution of 1639, raised to help the King finance his expedition against the Scottish Covenanters.

On 13 December 1605 there appeared in Durham Consistory Court before William James, the dean of Durham, and William Morton, John Barnes, and Robert Cooper, justices of the peace, the first of five witnesses in a trial which resulted from the Gunpowder Plot of 5 November 1605. The case concerned a recusant Catholic, Eleanor Jackson, the wife of Thomas Jackson of Bishop Auckland. The trial and tragic end of this unknown woman are of especial interest since they point to the intense search to uncover as many plotters as possible after the discovery of the Plot. Eleanor's unhappy story serves to emphasize both the fear which gripped the country and the hysteria which swept all England and enveloped the innocent or foolish in the aftermath of the Plot.

CHRISTOPHER HILL'S Economic Problems of the Church from Archbishop Whitgift to the Long parliament’ has long been the standard work on the financial composition of the post-Reformation English church. Over the past fifteen years, however, historians have taken a second look at the material covered by Hill and have begun to formulate new questions about it. Historians such as Felicity Heal and Rosemary O'Day have led new investigations into the economic conditions of the English church. Despite this renewed interest, no one has tackled the more difficult subject of recusant finances. Here is a world hidden behind aliases and secret trusts and one that remains almost totally unexplored. In a series of articles to appear in this journal, I shall venture ‘where angels fear to tread’ and attempt to make sense out of the complicated and confusing records of Jesuit financial activity. This article, which will serve as an introduction to the series, will be concerned with the constitutional development of the Society of Jesus, the spiritual exhortations to poverty as an evangelical counsel and a religious vow, and the legal entanglements of the penal laws in England. It is essential to remember that, first and foremost, the English Jesuits were religious bound by vows, specifically the vow of poverty. All financial activities and investments were restricted by that vow as it was then understood throughout the Society. Future articles will examine the income and the investments of the early Jesuit mission and its eventual subdivision into colleges and residences.

Among the archives of the Archbishop of Westminster is a four-page list of ‘Persons of Quality’ and their chaplains and of other Mass-centres, riding-missions, etc. marked in pencil ‘between 1695 and 1710—c. 1701’ possibly because the latter was the year when the Catholic eighth Duke of Norfolk, who heads the list, succeeded to the title. It is, however, possible to assign a more accurate date to this document, i.e. between 14 September 1704 when Sir Henry Arundell Bedingfield—born in 1689 and marked ‘yet minor’ in the list—succeeded to the baronetcy and 11 May 1706 when Lord Carrington died without issue. It may be that further investigation can narrow down the date still further. The document gives no indication of the purpose for which it was compiled though the tenor of its final page suggests that it was drawn up by a secular priest, probably a member of the Old Chapter. The contents of the document are summed-up in a note added in a later hand at the end: ‘This paper tells whether the family was served by a clergyman, that is a secular priest or by a regular viz. a Jesuit (underlined) or a Monk or a Friar’.

Conformity Certificates are to be found among the Recorda of the King's Bench in the Public Record Office, London (Class K.B. 145). I have been asked by the Public Record Office to make it clear that these documents are not generally accessible to the public; indeed, they are not easy to consult, being dirty, crumpled and many torn, though in only one case was the name of a recusant completely lost, being torn off, without occurring again in the certificate. The greater part of the Recorda are writs to sheriffs or justices, but among them there are also to be found inquisitions, memoranda, some accounts for repairs to the King's Bench, recognizances of debts, copies of pleas coram Rege, depositions of witnesses, orders to commit the children of felons to the parish, accounts of misdemeanours, and Gaol Deliveries. Conformity Certificates form only a small part of the whole.

Mary’s endeavours to restore Catholicism in England have attracted much scholarly attention and not a little controversy, primarily because of her bloody response to the scale and persistence of the Protestant challenge she faced there. Her endeavours in Ireland, by contrast, have been relatively overlooked. Yet the Marian restoration in Ireland ought to be recognised as an integral part of Mary’s religious programme for her dominions. It offers interesting points of comparison for the implementation of the queen’s programme in England, and it was significant in its own right, not as a decisive watershed but, as a time when religious controversies were crystallised and definite decisions were made that proved significant in the subsequent survival of Catholicism as the religion of the people of Ireland.

The Archpriest Controversy, a dispute that took place from 1598 to 1602 over the necessity for an archpriest to enforce moral discipline among the English Catholic clergy, has been traditionally seen either as a struggle for hierarchical order within the Catholic Church or a serious ideological breach between the Jesuit faction and the Appellants. In contrast to recent historiography, this paper argues that the Appellants, secular clergy that opposed the archpriest, represented views of conservative English Catholics who believed they could reconcile their political loyalty to their monarch with their Catholicism. The Archpriest Controversy should be reconsidered as a critical moment in a chain of important events from the English Mission of 1580–81 to the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 that reaffirmed the inherently traditionalist nature of the Catholic community in England.

In the Royal Library of Belgium in Brussels is a manuscript which consists of over two hundred closely-written folios of English translations of Jesuit letters from Japan, or Japonia as it was then called, introduced with a prologue by the compiler ‘G.C.’, hinting fairly heavily that the translations were made in prison. Until recently rebound, the manuscript bore a Latin inscription on the pastedown, stating: ‘This book belongs to the English Benedictine Monastery of the Assumption of Our Lady in Brussels’. Although the contents of the volume are of interest in their own right, the concern of this article is with two men, Gabriel Colford and George Cotton, who have little in common except the initials ‘G.C.’ and the experience of imprisonment for religion.

After 1571 Catholic sacred objects were outlawed in England, and the possession of such objects could be prosecuted under the statute of praemunire. Despite this prohibition sacred objects including rosaries, blessed beads, and the agnus dei (wax pendants blessed by the pope) remained a critical part of Catholic devotion. This article examines the role of the agnus dei in English Catholic communities and the unique political connotations it acquired during the reign of Elizabeth I. It assesses the uses of these sacramentals in Catholic missions to England, their reception amongst Catholics, and the political significance of the agnus dei in light of the papal excommunication of Elizabeth I in 1570.

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

Dr. Thomas Watson, bishop of Lincoln from 1557 until his deprivation in 1559, was, as A. F. Pollard describes him, ‘one of the chief catholic controversialists’ of Mary Tudor’s reign. ‘A man of acute parts’, according to Bishop Nicholas Ridley, Watson shaped the eucharistic thinking of English Catholics for a generation. Ten years after Watson’s deprivation, one Robert Crowley still felt the need to publish an answer to Watson’s two eucharistic sermons of 1554, since by them, Crowley believed, Catholics were yet ‘chiefly persuaded and stayed’ in their opinions.

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.