Hamlet has made the name of Elsinore, the Danish Helsingor, familiar to everyone. It is a small seaport at the narrowest part of the Sound, opposite the Swedish town of Helsingborg. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, its Baltic traffic was of great importance, and here, in 1580, two Englishmen met by accident.

In the early seventeenth century there appeared in print a small group of Catholic controversial works in English written by someone calling himself ‘John Brereley, Priest’. These works were celebrated in their day because of their immense erudition and also because they introduced into religious controversy a novel style of argument that soon became fashionable among Catholics and Protestants alike: that of proving a case mainly from the admissions and self-contradictions of the opposing side. The most important work in the group and the one that established ‘Brereley’s’ chief claim to fame was—to give it the title of its secohd edition by which it is always known—The Protestants apologie for the Roman church.

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.

In 1918, the late Mr Ernest Axon wrote an article on the Wardley skull in which he stated:

Robin Clifton has explored the ‘nature, extent and causes of the Protestant fear of Catholics’, and Dr Wiener has traced how ‘hatred of Catholics, once the private obsession of religious extremists, developed into a part of the national ideology’. But what was the attitude in Monmouthshire, which in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was culturally and ethnically a part of Wales? Attempts have been made to compare Catholicism in eighteenth-century Monmouthshire with that in other parts of the Western Vicariate, and to suggest a parallel with Lancashire. There may be some valid comparisons but for a variety of reasons Monmouthshire sits uneasily with any close identification with the English scene.

One of the more welcome aspects of recent studies of the English Civil War is the renewal of interest in the military history of the Northern Counties, through the work of B. G. Blackwood and more particularly P. R. Newman, both of whom have served, in the case of Lancashire, to illuminate Ernest Broxap’s pioneering tome of 1910. Newman has done a useful service in drawing attention to the active role in the fighting played by Northern Roman Catholics, who made substantial contributions to the Royalist war effort, a view which modifies the neutrality theory of Dr K. J. Lindley.

The Jesuit Provincial Thomas Whitbread (alias Harcourt), executed at Tyburn on 20 June 1679, was the most eminent ecclesiastical victim of the so-called ‘Popish Plot’, and has been beatified. Who exactly was he? There is apparently still some uncertainty. His parentage and early background are in one sense irrelevant to the dramatic public events at the close of his life. Nevertheless it is tantalising not to be able to ‘place’ an historical character. This paper re-examines the question with the aid of some scraps of fresh evidence.

It is sometimes stated that Mount St Bernard’s Abbey in the Charnwood Forest, Leicestershire, was the first Cistercian monastery to be established in England after the Reformation. But this is not so, for from 1794 to 1817, a Cistercian monastery flourished at Lulworth in Dorset, These monks, who came originally from La Trappe in France, were at the French Revolution expelled and found refuge in Switzerland. In 1794, Dom Augustine, the superior, determined to found a Cistercian house in Canada, and for that purpose several monks set out from Switzerland to Canada, travelling via England. On their arrival in London, however, they were persuaded by Thomas Weld of Lulworth Castle to remain in this country. Weld gave them a home in his park at Lulworth, where a monastery was shortly afterwards built and placed under the patronage of St Susan. Over the next few years these French Cistercians were joined by many English and Irish novices, but in 1817, they received a command from the British Government either to cease to receive British subjects or to leave the country. They chose the latter alternative and left England on 10 July 1817, over sixty in number, bound for Melleray in Brittany, where they took over the former monastery, still standing after the Revolution.