Thomas Argall was born in or around 1500, apparently at Lambeth where his parents, John and Emme Argall, held a house and a close on the Archbishop of Canterbury's estate. Both parents were dead by 1522, when Argall, as the only son, inherited this small property and a few household goods. His family was closely associated with the Church and included a relative, William Argall, who was a cleric and probably another relative who became vicar of New Shoreham, Sussex, in 1545. Argall followed a similar career, although he remained a layman, and entered the administration of Archbishop Warham.

The 150 years separating Southwell from Pope saw great changes in English Catholicism. In the later sixteenth century the Catholic faith was still native English, and the older poetical tradition of lyric religious meditation, which Southwell found flourishing about him when he returned from Rome in July 1586, blended readily in his own poetry with the newly passionate and ingenious devotion of the Counter-Reformation. The enterprise of reviving the Faith in England was vigorous and young, and the blood of the martyrs flowing in the very streets of London as once it had flowed in the streets of Rome must have made of the Church in its most deeply traditional and heroic aspect a present English reality. The passionate ingenuity of the Counter-Reformation; the plainness of the English religious and gnomic tradition; the edge of sober reality and depth given to meditation, even curious meditation, on the sufferings of Christ and the saints by the virtual certainty of the gallows; together with a rhetorical hold on the Faith deeper and older than the Counter-Reformation devotion he found in Italy, to be found rather together with the lives of the early martyrs in his breviary: all combined in Southwell's best poetry in a taut and assured style, full of balanced tensions. But as the years passed, England was not converted and the time of martyrdom ended. Where bloody persecution failed, exile and neglect began to succeed. A sense of the Church as thoroughly English and as in the fervour of its first centuries gradually disappeared. English Catholic devotion in the poetry of Crashaw became contemporary and sometimes uncontrollably ingenious and Continental, with martyrdom a metaphor, though exile a reality. In Dryden's poetry, the Church also appeared in very much its contemporary aspect, though expressing itself now not so much in devotional as in apologetic terms. Dryden's conversion was clearly genuine and his apologia sincere, but he had in his poetry an oddly restricted hold on the Faith, speaking of the Church's relation to other Christian sects often in political or social language. Dryden suffered willingly, however, for his belief, though not exile or martyrdom; whereas the suspicion with Pope is always that, though he remained a Catholic, his Catholicism was a social disability to be borne in much the same way as his physical disability. In the poetry of Pope, Catholicism is a remnant, contributing rather little to an assurance about final realities as impressive perhaps in its way as Southwell's.

Recent scholarship has challenged the Marxist and Whig-Liberal views which placed the Catholics solidly behind Charles I in the Civil War. Kieth Lindley, Martin J. Havran and others argue that they were hard hit by the taxation policies of Thorough in the 1630s, and that when the Civil Wars came they were too impoverished and politically alienated to risk life and property for the King. The story of Catholics in Warwickshire during the Civil War and Interregnum well illustrates these revisionist interpretations.

The lesson of the Popish Plot, that the law was almost powerless against perjury, was widely applied in political accusations, administrative disputes and criminal prosecutions, particularly in the 1690s when so many former Exclusionists were in office or Parliament. MPs such as John Arnold, who had employed suborned evidence against the Monmouthshire Jesuits in attempting to overthrow the pro-Catholic Marcher magnate, the Duke of Beaufort, found it too good a weapon not to use in every-day politics. The Catholics, however, were not the main sufferers; the destruction of their Court party at the Revolution made them comparatively insignificant. Oates's successors, remembering the impunity with which he had attacked the Queen, James and Danby, laid their charges of treason against ministers or opposition leaders. However, one late offshoot of the Plot has caused some difficulties in Catholic history; it is another reminder that the compilers of the official records combined ignorance with their anti-Catholicism, holding with one judge during the Plot, that ‘They have such secret contrivances among themselves … that where there are two men that positively tell you a thing that lies within their knowledge and swear it is true, it is scarce any improbability that should weigh against such an evidence’. Land or money given to ‘superstitious’ uses was legally forfeit to the Crown under the Chantries Act (1 Edw. VI, c.14), extended (by implication) to the support of foundations abroad under 27 Eliz., c.2, sect. 4 The official findings in this decade are so odd that usually they have wisely been ignored; yet local historians can be deceived or confused. This investigation provides a full explanation and a glimpse of the Catholic underworld on which anti-Catholicism largely depended.

Charles Butler's mother, née de Blandecque (anglice Blandyke), of a family established in Saint-Omer, was enthusiastically devoted to the Society of Jesus. His much-loved paternal uncle, Alban Butler, the hagiographer, had perhaps his own reasons for some measure of alienation from the regular clergy. In 1762, the French government expelled the Jesuits from France, and in 1766, when Charles was 16 years old, this uncle was put in charge of the English Jesuits’ college of St Omers, thus earning (I think it is not too much to say) a degree of obloquy amounting almost to the scale of vendetta, among a section of the recently-professed English Fathers.

From Henry's divorce to Elizabeth's accession, the most striking religious changes at the Inns of Court were external. As the Reformation progressed, church and chapel were stripped of their medieval ornamentation, in form as in fabric. Despite this outward transformation, there was remarkable continuity in personnel. Change occurred more by the natural process of admission, promotion, retirement and death than by compulsion. This did not mean that there was no regulation whatsoever. Members of the Inns were among those expected to obey the law—whether renouncing the Pope, acknowledging the Supremacy or maintaining uniformity. Nevertheless it is difficult to establish the extent to which religious observance was actually practised at the Inns. Bartlett Green of the Middle Temple, who was burnt for heresy in 1556, testified that he had not heard Mass during Mary's reign. Richard Allington, a barrister of Lincoln's Inn, was so engrossed in the worship of mammon that he fearfully confessed before his deathbed audience in 1561 to have ‘never wentte to churche atte tyme of commone prayere'. In 1569, several other members of the legal societies admitted they had rarely attended church since Elizabeth's accession, including Walter Norton of Gray's Inn, ‘by reason of his busines and clientes causes’. Despite the legal requirement, there is no sign of any campaign to enforce religious observance at the Inns or to coerce the legal profession as a whole.

Jonn Donne's modern biographers have had to redress an imbalance in the laconic account of his Catholic background given by his earliest biographer, Izaak Walton. For example, Baird D. Whitlock introduced the story that the priest Thomas Heywood, Donne's grand-uncle, was ‘executed’ for his faith in 1574, when Donne was two years old. Whitlock found this story in A. W. Reed's Early Tudor Drama, where Reed presumed that ‘Sir Thomas Heywood the Parson’, as he is named in his brother Richard's will, was also the subject of a note inscribed on another document relating to Richard Heywood: ‘ye 14th of June 1574, a fryar who was akin was executed’. Though this note is the only evidence of Thomas Heywood's purported execution, the story has been accepted by Donne's biographers since Whitlock, despite various contrary evidence.

During the Archpriest Controversy, altogether eighteen books were printed on behalf of the Appellant priests. On the other side, in defence of the Archpriest Blackwell, barely a third of this number of pamphlets appeared. The first of these anti-Appellant works to arrive in England—in the summer of 1601—was entitled The copy of a letter written to a very worshipful Catholic gentleman in England, of grief conceived about some scandalous dissension and books set forth tending to the disgracing one of another by such as labour in the same cause, know from its running-title as An epistle of pious grief. A small tract of fifty pages, written by ‘S.N.’, it is now so rare that only one copy is known to survive.

1981 marks the bicentenary of the death of Bishop Challoner, but 200 years later there is still disagreement about the date of his baptism. Fr L. E. Whatmore has argued convincingly that the Bishop was baptized at Chiddingly in Sussex, the son of Richard Challoner and Grace Willard. But he points out that two different dates have been given for the date of the ceremony. He quotes W. H. Challen's statement that the baptism took place on 29 November 1691 and the then Vicar of Chiddingly's assertion that it took place on 12 October 1691. In fact, both dates are supported by documentary evidence, and it is the original documents that are in error. An examination of the original Parish Register for Chiddingly at the East Sussex Record Office, and of the Bishop's Transcripts for Chiddingly in the West Sussex Record Office explains the difference. In the Register, which was quoted by the Vicar, the entry in the list of baptisms for 1691 reads: ‘October ye 12 Richard ye son of Richard Chalender’. On the other hand, the same event recorded in the Transcripts, and quoted by Challen, reads: ‘November ye 29th. Richard the son of Richard Challoner was baptised’. Which document gives the correct date?

The following report on English religious houses in Flanders was sent to Secretary of State Sunderland on 7 January 1707/8. When the Earl of Sunderland left office in 1710, he took this account, along with virtually all departmental papers, with him and it has remained in his private collection from that time to the present. As the covering letter reveals, it was prepared by John Macky on his own initiative. His purpose was to reveal the size and wealth of the English Catholic community residing in religious houses in the Low Countries. In particular, he stressed the income which came to these institutions from Britain. This was to substantiate his proposal to remove these bodies by cutting off this flow of money.

This work is the product of team research carried out by a group of Extramural Department students of the University of Birmingham, using locally available primary and secondary material. None of the group were professional historians, though some have pursued private research on aspects of local history, and all had been prepared by a term's lectures on the Catholic Revival in Birmingham, 1650-1850.

P. R. Newman has done a useful service in tabulating the returns in the Durham Protestations (Recusant History [October 1979], pp. 148-52). Unfortunately, he has omitted the sixty-eight names of persons refusing to sign in the parish of Lanchester, a parish which on the showing of the Protestation itself had an 18% recusancy among its adult males. The inclusion of these would raise Mr Newman's figure of 452 men refusing the Protestation (excluding known non-Catholics) to 520, and the percentage in the county to just under 3.2. An even more accurate percentage might be obtained if the affirmative signatures from Bishop Auckland, a parish which failed to list the refusers, were subtracted from the total. If that were done, the percentage would rise to just over 3.2. Also it may be reasonably assumed that the percentage would be higher still if the whole adult population were taken into account. For, as the lists of prosecutions and more general indications suggest, women were more faithful and persevering adherents of the old religion than men. However, the two-to-one ratio which might be inferred from an examination of the presentments to the Sessions and the church courts probably overstates the true proportion. For this two reasons may be adduced. First, in the early Elizabethan years, when many were uncertain as to where they stood, numerous waverers allowed or perhaps encouraged their wives to take a stand for Catholicism while they themselves made at least an outward show of conformity when that was deemed necessary for the preservation of their families and possessions. Secondly, churchwardens, when pressed for presentments, apparently found that to name widows and spinsters along with vagrants gave rise to less local trouble than the naming of their fellows. Even so, though the proportion of women recusants may have been rather less than the prosecutions suggest, there can be little doubt that they outnumbered men sufficiently for one to speculate that the Catholic adult population may well have been of the order of 3.5%.

In a region of sparse population and little culture it is hardly surprising that organised religion has never been strong in Cumbria. During the Middle Ages the Church's main influence was via the several monastic settlements, particularly the powerful Furness Abbey, which possessed a real economic empire. The influence of the clergy was restricted when population was so dispersed and parishes so massive, and the conclusion must be that Roman Catholicism possessed only a tenuous hold at any point in its history. That the Cumbrians so easily and swiftly on the surface adopted the new Anglican Establishment of the sixteenth century did not reflect the attractions for the new faith or the coercion of authorities; it was simply that no Christian denomination was taken to heart by the native Cumbrians. By the mid-seventeenth century it has been estimated that there were about 500 Roman Catholics in the whole of Cumbria out of a population of towards 100,000. A number of prominent Cumbrians retained the old faith—the Stricklands of Sizergh (who suffered greatly for it) and most of the Howards of Corby and Naworth (who enjoyed considerable honours) and their households being the most prominent. Generally, the remaining Catholics were left alone, though in case of emergency their loyalty might be questioned.

In 1850, during its first year of publication, Notes and Queries printed the enquiry of one ‘J.M.’, who asked for information about a treatise of equivocation to which he had found reference in a seventeenth-century book. A number of replies in subsequent issues provided bits of information about the treatise, and called attention to a manuscript copy in the Bodleian. This flurry of items in Notes and Queries seems to have prompted David Jardine (1794-1860), who later wrote a history of the Gunpowder Plot, to prepare an edition of the treatise, which was published in 1851. Jardine composed a preface, but since he could not establish who had written the work, and was not optimistic that the matter would ever be clarified, his account is far from complete. There did, however, exist documents that could identify the author, and exactly 100 years after the appearance of Jardine's edition, an article by A. F. Allison showed conclusively that the treatise had been written by Father Henry Garnet, S.J. Since the treatise played a significant part in the history of ‘equivocation’ in England, and was a subject of controversy at the time of the Gunpowder Plot, I believe it will be useful to provide an account of what is now known about the work.

On 29 May 1660, Anthony Wood purchased a newly-published broadsheet, headed ‘A Catalogue of the Lords, Knights and Gentlemen (of the Catholick Religion) that were Slain in the late Warr in Defence of their King and Country’. It contained in excess of 200 names, and covered not only those who had lost their lives as a result of the Civil Wars, but also those who had lost estates or had been plundered vigorously by enemy forces. It was the first martyrology to greet the restoration of Charles II, preceding by almost three years the pamphlet entitled ‘The Royal Martyrs’ which listed both Catholic and Protestant activists who had suffered in the royal cause. J. C. H. Aveling has stated that ‘After 1660, Catholic peers and gentry all maintained loudly that they had been strong Royalists’, and his implied doubts concerning these claims (he seems to regard allusions in heraldic visitations as largely spurious) reflect the conventional view of those recent scholars who have gone into the matter of Catholic activism.

Of the Catholic polemicists in England in the seventeenth century, few wrote more voluminously or earned more respect from their adversaries than Abraham Woodhead. His works are grave, erudite, and irenic in tone, reflecting their author's retired life of study after his conversion. His efforts to avoid the limelight have been successful, both in his own time and in ours; perhaps that is why no one, so far as I know, has yet subjected his books to the careful scrutiny and analysis which they deserve. There are several worthwhile theses in the history of theology to be written on Woodhead and the controversies in which he was engaged; perhaps the materials offered in this article will help a few scholars through the preliminaries to Woodhead study and encourage them to give us a theological pprtrait of this man whose historical portrait is so hard to draw.

In 1748, the London bookseller, W. Needham, published a work entitled Pious considerations on several important practical truths of the Christian religion. Divided into fifty-two chapters. Like many Catholic works at this time it contained no evidence of who had written it, and in the General Catalogue of the British Library and in the American National Union Catalog, Pious considerations is entered under its title only.

The ancestry of Challoner's Abridgement of Christian Doctrine has been pretty well established by Mr Bernard Pickering in the Clergy Review of January, 1980 (Vol. 65, No. 1, pp. 6-15). The ancestry of the ‘Penny Catechism’, which is partly dependent on the Abridgement, also deserves further investigation. For a full investigation, a great deal of work would have to be done. What follows is the fruit of a re-reading of the first section of the Garden of the Soul called ‘Christian Doctrine: A Summary of Faith and Practice’ and the Meditations for Every Day in the Year. Whether or not Challoner revised his Abridgement does not seem to be known, but these two books seem to have been among the sources used by what I have called the Redactors (Cf. CR, April 1978, pp. 140-6). In what follows, AB stands for the Abridgement, GS for the Garden of the Soul and Med. for the Meditations. The numbering of AB is my own, for the original is without any, and I have used the ‘Penny Catechism’ in the edition of 1905, which will not have been touched since the redaction of the second half of the nineteenth century.