The raid of Bishop Grindal’s commissioners on the study of John Stow, the eminent antiquary, which occasioned this catalogue of forty proscribed works, was indication of the growing hostility towards Catholics after the Northern Rebellion and a foreshadowing of their open persecution in the years to come. Similar searches became commonplace in the 1570s and 1580s but the Stow catalogue, reflecting his historical and antiquarian interests, is one of the most comprehensive which survive. Although it includes manuscripts of chronicles, suggesting that Stow’s historical interests were not immune from the imputation of religious bias, the large group of Catholic and Recusant works indicates one direction in which these interests might have developed further had he not become the subject of official investigation.

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.

A great deal of attention has rightly been given to those Catholics who were put to death under Elizabeth I, but imprisonment as distinct from execution has not received the attention it deserves. Catholics sometimes sing about ‘our fathers chained in prisons dark’, but they are not always aware of what imprisonment meant to their ancestors. It is the purpose of this article to consider some aspects of this large and neglected subject, since imprisonment and the threat of imprisonment made a big impact on the Elizabethan Catholic community and must have discouraged a great many people from persevering in their religion when they contemplated what could at best be an irritating deprivation of liberty and at worst a long ordeal which might end in death.

This volume has been eagerly awaited for many years by people who have been aware of this aspect of the authors’ activities, but it will be a revelation to many others who only know their previous joint work, commonly called A&R, A Catalogue of Catholic Books in English Printed Abroad or Secretly in England 1558–1640, published originally in Biographical Studies, 1956, the predecessor of Recusant History. That publication has long been available separately and its findings, though not all its information about locations of copies, have also been taken into the second edition of the Short Title Catalogue by Dr. K. F. Pantzer. Now the authors announce that they plan to publish as volume II of their new work an augmented revision of the English catalogue, but rearranged on the same lines as the volume under review. The assignment of fresh numbers to the entries in that revision, mentioned here, is a proprosai which has already aroused serious misgivings (to put it mildly) among habitual users of the established A&R references. They are conscious of the confusion caused by the late Donald Wing’s alteration of numbers for items in the second edition of volume I of his Short Title Catalogue 1641–1700, which are having to be reversed in the third edition. The reason for the proposed change to A&R is presumably that in this new work they are offering more of a subject than author-related handbook, although part I of the present volume is still arranged alphabetically under individual and institutional names (not all authors, yet mainly so) and is much longer (1428 items plus and minus afterthoughts) than part II, which is arranged chronologically by a number of historical episodes and amounts to only about 190 items.

One of the liveliest debates in recent early modern Irish historiography has concerned the ‘failure’ of the Reformation in Ireland and when this occurred. Originally Professor Canny took issue with Dr. Brendan Bradshaw on this topic. Canny rejected Bradshaw’s thesis that the Reformation had failed in Ireland by 1558 and argued that counter-reformation catholicism only triumphed in the nineteenth century. Other contributions were then made to the debate by Dr. Alan Ford and later Karl Bottigheimer. Ford considered the 1590–1641 period as crucial, while Bottigheimer favoured the early seventeenth century as the key era. In the light of the work of Ford and Bottigheimer, Canny reconsidered the issue in an article published in 1986. He rejected what he believed to be Ford’s overly-pessimistic assessment that the Church of Ireland clergy soon despaired of the Reformation’s success in the seventeenth century. Instead, it is contended, Protestant clergy and laymen alike were optimistic that penal prosecution might still pave the way for considerable advances at this time. Moreover, Canny further argued that Ford was ‘mistaken in treating the clergy as an autonomous group and mistaken also in allowing excessive influence to ideology as the determinant of policy’.

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 names of Dr. Thomas Vavasour and of his wife Dorothy are not uncommon in the chronicles of English Catholic recusancy and in related studies. The poignancy of their story—of a husband and wife practising their religion in the face of persecution and ending their lives in different prisons after a long period of enforced separation—and the relative richness of the relevant sources have together assured them at least a passing mention in such diverse works as Aveling’s studies of Yorkshire recusancy, Cliffe’s account of the Yorkshire gentry, and Claire Cross’ biography of Henry Hastings, third earl of Huntingdon. Although Thomas Vavasour has been described as ‘a very shadowy figure’, he and his wife are in fact among the best documented of the early lay recusants. It is all the more surprising, then, that no attempt has previously been made to bring together the disparate sources to give a reasonably full and coherent account of Thomas Vavasour’s career and family. This article aims to fill that gap. Its attempt to do so is greatly facilitated by the availability in print of much of the basic documentation.

Little is known of Ralph Buckland. Anstruther records that he was born in 1564, educated at the Merchant Taylors’ School and Magdalen College, Oxford, ordained in Rome in 1588 and sent as a ‘seminary priest’ to England where he was arrested and banished in 1606. He died in 1611 leaving behind him two works, both printed secretly in England, Seaven Sparkes of the Enkindled Soule (1604/5) and An Embassage to Heaven (1606–10). The earlier volume, a collection of original psalms, is a significant work from many points of view. It has literary value both as a poetic text and as a technical experiment, showing an early awareness of the mechanics of Hebrew prosody and current scholarly debate about its practice. It is also a poignant record of the predicament of the recusant Englishman around the time of the Gunpowder plot and an effective register of his state of mind.

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.

‘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).

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.

It is proposed in this article to discuss the English Catholic seminarists who apostatised between 1582 and 1596—that is, after the date when Catholics in England were required unequivocally to separate themselves totally from the Established Church but before the beginning of the Appellant Controversy. P. McGrath in a recent article has set out the basic biographical details of a number of the Elizabethan apostates. T. H. Clancy has dealt with Jesuit defectors from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries and gives interesting and useful statistics on apostates in general. Neither of them, however, makes any extensive attempt to assess the development or significance of these apostates’ changes of religion. McGrath expressed the hope that his ‘survey… of an important section of the Elizabethan clergy’ would ‘draw attention to the variety of motives influencing these men’ and ‘the need for further examination of their strange careers’. It is the intention of this article to explore further the importance of apostasy among the Elizabethan seminarists (seminary priests and students for the priesthood who never got as far as being ordained). Instead of concentrating, as McGrath and Clancy do, upon establishing who the apostates were, a comparative approach over a shorter period will be employed, using a wider range of source material, including the books of ‘motives’. The aim is to challenge the view that all clerical apostates were basically of similar significance, distinguished mainly by whether they remained with the Established Church or not. It will be argued here that the phenomenon grew more serious between 1580 and 1596. It is not enough to say of these apostates merely that there were bound to be ‘deviationists’ from the Allen-Persons line, or that they had the example of the Marian priests before them.

To examine Jacobitism only as a post-1688 phenomenon leads to an inevitable neglect of formative influences which help explain why antipathy to the Revolution was so strident in the first generation of Jacobites. Henry Joseph Johnston’s career demonstrates the strength of these influences. He was the seventh son of a Yorkshire Anglican clergyman, and the brother of the antiquary and Non-Juror Dr. Nathaniel Johnston, ‘the prince of Yorkshire collectors’. Henry Johnston had been converted from Anglicanism to Catholicism sometime between 1671 and 1674, and, taking the name Joseph in religion, was to be professed as a monk in 1675 at the English Benedictine priory at Dieulouard in Lorraine. Benedictine monasticism not only had an immediate attraction for a convert antiquarian but it was also to provide Johnston entrance into court circles.

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.

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.

With the publication of the Register, the name of the English College of SS Peter and Paul, Lisbon, can now be added to the list of those English establishments at Douai, Rome and Valladolid whose registers of students are available to the public in print. It is twenty years since the College ceased to take students and the property has been disposed of, but a full history remains to be written. As a prelude to this it is worth considering how there came to be a college there in the first place. The story is not at all simple since the foundation of the English seminary in Lisbon contrasts markedly with the setting up of similar colleges in neighbouring Spain. Within the five years, 1589 to 1594, Robert Persons S.J. had created colleges at Valladolid and Seville and a residence at Sanlucar, and in 1611 a legacy provided for the beginning of a further college in Madrid. But although there was a residence for English priests in Lisbon before 1594, it was only in 1622 that the Papal Brief for the foundation of an English seminary was issued. The first students did not arrive from Douai until 1628. Although he sent priests to Lisbon in 1596, Fr. Persons did not consider that the time was yet ripe for opening a college. When an English college was eventually founded nearly thirty years later, it was a further six years before any students arrived. Was there something special about conditions of life in Lisbon or was it simply that during the union of the two crowns of Portugal and Castile, Portuguese affairs did not command the immediate attention that was given to English Catholic establishments in Spain?

This article is based on documents in the National Historical Archive in Madrid and concerns the expulsion of the Jesuits from St. Alban’S College Valladolid. The connection with English Catholicism may appear at first to be remote since, although nominally an English college, there were only two English students resident at this time and the Jesuit staff who administered the college together with the servants were all Spaniards. But the English Vicars Apostolic, however critical they may have been towards the Jesuits, continued to regard the three colleges at Valladolid, Madrid and Seville as English, their purpose being to prepare priests to serve on the home mission in England and Wales. The response to the events of 1767 was swift and the colleges, although lost to the Jesuits, were retained for England since the three were merged into the one college at Valladolid and placed under the direction of the English secular clergy. There had been a precedent in the French government’s seizure of the English College at St. Omer in 1762, but the way in which His Catholic Majesty Charles III engineered the expulsion of the Jesuits from his kingdoms was remarkable for its thoroughness.

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’.

Though Kenelm Henry Digby, a romantic convert, is a minor figure within the story of the development of nineteenth-century English Catholicism, his name is recalled in passing in many of the text books; and so, perhaps, some seventy years after Bernard Holland’s sketchy biography of him, there is room for a reassessment of his place within Victorian Catholicism, in which milieu his name was well-known, his books widely read, and his person much-loved. In W. G. Roe’s estimate, his writings ‘made a considerable contribution, if not to the thought, at least to the atmosphere of the Catholic revival.’ He was interesting as the first man to use the widespread fascination with the Middle Ages for the purpose of Catholic apologetic. When so distinguished a figure as Lord Acton noted his influence, and a contributor to the Dublin Review suggested in 1843 that Digby’s writings had helped to reduce anti-Catholic prejudice, it is of interest to reconstruct his views on, and his contribution to, English Catholicism. The task is difficult, for he was and remains an elusive figure, somewhat isolated, uncontroversial, obsessively restless and given to writing numerous volumes of poor prose and terrible meditative poetry, which, despite their autobiographical nature, are frustratingly unrevealing.