The Anglican Patronage of Monmouthshire Recusants in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Some Examples

Extract

In the first volume of his History of Monmouthshire, Sir Joseph Bradney admitted that ‘in Monmouthshire the principles of the old Catholic faith have never been lost to a large number of people. Many families of position in this district continued to adhere to the old doctrines.’ Thomas Richards, the most scrupulous of the historians of Welsh non-conformity, not only identified the Catholics of Wales as ‘the sons and grandsons of men who had never accepted the Protestant Reformation' but from his unrivalled knowledge of the sources for seventeenth-century religious history in the principality advanced two quite startling hypotheses. The first was that there is ‘positive proof of the silent growth of Popery during Propagation and Protectorate times’ (he pointed out that in 1676 the number of Catholics recorded in Monmouthshire was ‘within sixty-six of being equal to all other dissenters in [the county] gathered into one total’); the second, a result of his searching analysis of the so-called Compton Census, was that even the figure of 541 Roman Catholics in Monmouthshire—416 in the rural deanery of Abergavenny alone—was ‘too low’.