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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It should be universally acknowledged that a good architect needs a good builder. Pugin, one of the greatest of the Gothic Revival architects, was able to satisfy this requirement when he employed George Myers who was to become one of the great Victorian contractors. Until the present day no-one has attempted to find out anything about this man on whom Pugin depended not only for his building, but also for the direction and organization of his team and the training of his craftsmen. Neither has anything been written about the other members of the team: John Hardman who made Pugin’s stained glass and metal work, nor Grace the interior decorator and maker of beautiful furniture, nor Minton who made the tiles, nor Thomas Earley who did the intricate painting in the churches and in the House of Lords. This article is a short account of the basic facts of the life of Myers and of some of the commissions he carried out for Pugin.

The foundation and fortunes of the English College at Bruges, and its contribution to Catholicism in this country, remains one of the least chronicled chapters in the development of seminary education in the nineteenth century. For fifteen years, from 1858 to 1873, the college, founded by Sir John Sutton (1820–1873), trained more than 120 priests for the Church in England, Wales and Scotland.

In an Apostolic Constitution, dated 8 May 1881, Pope Leo XIII sought to regulate the relationship between diocesan bishops and religious orders. In the words of Herbert Vaughan the Papal pronouncement ‘sums up and ends a recent controversy on matters of discipline affecting the working of the Church in Great Britain’. Romanos Pontifices represented a personal triumph for Vaughan. He had assiduously campaigned at Rome to have the freedom of religious orders restricted, and their operations subject to the supervision of the local bishop. The Pope’s document directs that members of religious orders may not open a house in any diocese without the explicit permission of the bishop. Nor, in future, would it be possible for a religious congregation to convert existing institutions to other use without the consent of the episcopal authorities. The ruling of the document was an adjudication affecting all religious orders, and demanded complete obedience to all its details. The only religious order mentioned by name was the Society of Jesus. It, too, was to be subject to this ordinance in spite of its claims to be exempt from such interference in the running of its affairs.