The papers of Sir John Bankes (1589-1644)1, which were deposited in the Bodleian Library in 1950, and have since been purchased by the Library, consist largely of documents written in Bankes’s own hand. They extend chronologically from 1626 through 1644, but are mostly concerned with events from 1634 to 1640 when Bankes served as Attorney General.

Prior Park, the stately home on the outskirts of Bath, was built for Ralph Allen, a famous citizen of that city, during the years 1735–1742. In 1830, when the estate had passed through many hands, and was in a very neglected state, it was bought by the Vicar-Apostolic of the Western District, Bishop Peter Baines, for £22,000. It was the bishop's intention to establish there a seminary, a boarding school and eventually, a Catholic University which would vie with Oxford and Cambridge. But things had gone sadly wrong. When Baines died in July, 1843, the establishment was in debt to the extent of some £40,000, with less than half the places in the school and the seminary occupied.

Before discussing more particularly the embassy on which Sir Anthony Standen was sent by James I in 1603, it has been thought well in the present article to narrate the story of this Elizabethan adventurer previous to that event.

Although the Institute of Mary Ward made no stable foundation in the north of England until the founding of the Bar Convent in 1686, recusant history testifies to a fairly constant presence of its members in Yorkshire in the period 1642 to 1686. It is the purpose of this paper to identity these members, to describe where possible their place of residence and to explain why they were there.

Plowden Hall, probably the house portrayed in the once widely-read novel John Inglesant by J. H. Shorthouse, is about four miles distant from the small town of Bishop's Castle in Shropshire. The family papers are still at the Hall, but the letters upon which this account is based were found at Archbishop's House, Westminster. They were written between 1747 and 1763 by three successive chaplains to the Plowden family. Very few such letters appear to have survived, and they provide invaluable and vivid details about the daily lives of priests on the English Mission. The letters were written to local Jesuit superiors of the Residence of S. Winifrid at Holywell in Flintshire. Until 1761 the Superior was Fr. John Williams, and after that Fr. Thomas Daniel or Watson.

When Francis, Cardinal Bourne died on New Years Day, 1935, his friend and erstwhile collaborator in successive national congresses, George Anstruther, assistant editor of The Tablet, a paper owned by the archdiocese, referred to Bourne's ‘greatness’ as being unlike that of a waterfall but more akin to a quiet river ‘broad and deep, bearing precious freights to safe havens’. The image was supported in a broadcast of Viscount FitzAlan about the deceased prelate in which he stressed that Bourne possessed a ‘rather cold and calm reserve’ concealing ‘a profound spirituality’. The editor of the Jesuit magazine The Month postulated ‘prudent ecclesiastical statesmanship’ had marked a long term of office of over thirty years and Bourne's regular correspondent, Archbishop Alban Goodier, testified to his having been ‘among the shyest of men, so shy, that to many he remained always hidden in his shell’. Indeed, rarely has a man's memory been tarnished so effectively by his friends, all with the most uplifting of motives. The secular press was less mealy-mouthed. The Times considered Bourne to have been ‘a statesmanlike champion of religious education’ and ‘a courageous opponent of all those modern movements and influences which are calculated, openly or swiftly, to sap the foundations of family life and, indeed, the whole structure of the community’.

For contemporaries, the Gunpowder Plot was ‘a mother… of all crimes’, and their sense of shock, and awe, in the face of so dreadful a treason was in no way diminished by the drama surrounding its discovery.2 The arrest of Guy Fawkes outside the cellars of Westminster, late on the night of 4 November 1605, caught King James I and his ministers completely off guard. A mass of documentary evidence for the fraught days following Fawkes's apprehension confirms that ignorance, embarrassment, even panic ran through the highest counsels in the land. While a deadly strike had clearly been frustrated, with just hours to spare, no one knew whether trouble might be expected from other conspirators in the capital, or indeed, from rebels and mischief-makers elsewhere in England. Military men rushed to court, and within a week a sizeable force had assembled there under the command of the Earl of Devonshire, prepared to face and to repel a phantom enemy.3 Open panic did of course subside, as administration and country alike began to measure and appreciate the danger, but anxiety was a long time dying. The extraordinary hysteria that swept London in the spring of 1606, on a rumour that the king had been assassinated, touched the court itself and serves as a reminder that, months after 5 November, many Englishmen in high positions still stood on their guard.4

The Haydock Bibles were a series of self-interpreting editions of the Douay Version with annotations compiled chiefly by Rev. George Leo Haydock. The first edition was published in serialized form over the years 1811 to 1814 by Father Haydock's brother, Thomas. It enjoyed great popularity and was frequently reprinted in a series of British and American editions. According to standard Bible bibliographies, the latest known editions were published in the 1880's. The purpose of this article is to provide a brief historical account of editions in this important series and to describe a 1910 reprint of the final edition recently located by the author. This copy establishes that the Haydock Bible series lasted longer than was generally known.

John Champion, a Jesuit, was at Sawston Hall near Cambridge, the home of the Huddleston family, from 1730 or earlier until his death in 1776. It is possible from a study of the Huddleston papers deposited in the Cambridgeshire Record Office and of other contemporary documents to discover something of his life as a family chaplain—a life that was probably typical of the lives of other priests of the time.

John Henry Newman’s establishment of Oratorian houses in London and Birmingham in 1849 seemed like an auspicious event for English Catholics. The houses were filled with Oxford converts who were eager to minister to the laity and furnish intellectual support for the Faith. Unfortunately, only six years after the houses were founded the Oratorians became enmeshed in bitter feud. The Oratories had been developing along different lines. Father Frederick Faber was a zealous ultramontane; he and his London associates embraced all things Roman. Newman and his Birmingham confreres experimented with Roman devotions but were never comfortable with them. Newman sympathized with the ‘old Catholics’ and retained cordial relations with many Anglicans. As the Oratories were drifting apart so too were Newman and Faber. While they had been close friends when the Oratories were established, Newman became increasingly critical and suspicious of Faber.

In October 1970, amidst jubilant celebrations at St Peter's in Rome, Pope Paul VI canonised forty English and Welsh martyrs as saints. Auberon Waugh called it ‘the biggest moment for English Catholicism since Catholic emancipation in 1829’. It marked the culmination of a long campaign which had begun in earnest in the mid-nineteenth century under Cardinals Wiseman and Manning, shortly after the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy. By 1935 nearly two hundred Reformation martyrs had been beatified, but only two of these had been canonised, John Fisher and Thomas More—the first Englishmen to be made saints since John of Bridlington in 1401. After the hiatus of the Second World War, the cause was revived in 1960 seeking the canonisation of another forty English martyrs. All were Roman Catholics executed under the Tudor and Stuart monarchs or the Puritan Commonwealth, ranging from Carthusian monks who fell foul in 1535 of Henry VIII's Act of Supremacy, to seminary priests who were caught up in the ‘Popish Plot’ against Charles II in 1679. All but six of the forty had been hung, drawn and quartered, many of them on the gallows at Tyburn.

The Queen's visit to Oxford in 1566 has been viewed largely through the prism of John Nichols’ The Progresses of Queen Elizabeth. This article returns to the manuscript sources, all of which survive. All make the disputations central; all but one were written by Catholics who subsequently suffered for their faith: Thomas Neale, John Bereblock and Miles Windsor. The Queen's visit clearly represented for Catholics in Oxford the last chance to try to win her favour. This article explores the complex tensions that existed in early Elizabethan Oxford: between the Calvinists who dominated Christ Church and Magdalen, and those still committed to the ‘old religion’. It highlights the continuities with pre-Reformation and Marian Oxford, arguing that Sir Thomas Pope and Sir Thomas White had engaged, with the Owens of Godstow, in a coherent programme to preserve as many of the monastic houses as they could. An exploration of the background of the three main witnesses reveals the presence of a determined Catholic resistance to the Earl of Leicester and his Vice-Chancellor, and the beginnings of alternative centres of learning in an ‘underground’ university of halls, taverns and farms that soon included many of the leading scholars: Thomas Neale, George Etheridge, Edmund Rainolds and John Case. It was while moving along this network that Edmund Campion was captured.

The story of the relationship between Ulster and Scotland during the seventeenth century has long been dominated by the flow of people and ideas from Scotland to the north of Ireland. This, however, belies the prominent role that Ireland had in the social and cultural history of the Western Isles and Highlands of Scotland during that century. This paper argues that of even greater importance to the resurgence of Catholicism in the Scottish Gaidhealtachd than a Rome driven Counter-Reformation were the financial support and personnel provided by Ulster Catholics. In the face of aggressive Stuart policies, Catholicism was rejuvenated and became an ideological justification for asserting traditional rights in the face of government sanctioned, Protestant blessed, incursions in the Western Isles. Moreover, in the face of historiography that has argued for the continual disintegration of ClanDonald throughout the seventeenth century, this article explores the ways the clans and their neighbours inspired, funded and facilitated the revival of Catholicism in the Gaidhealtachd.

Cardinal Thomas Wolsey has seldom been associated with the University of Cambridge. But in a little-known episode, he was invited to follow John Fisher as chancellor of the University of Cambridge in 1514. Although Wolsey declined, his willingness to protect Cambridge’s evangelicals, even after he burned Martin Luther’s books in 1521, has been an overlooked phase in the history of the university and in the Reformation in England.

Historians are generally agreed that Lancashire was the most Catholic and the most Jacobite county in England at the time of the 1715 rebellion. Indeed, final confirmation of this connection would seem to have been established by Professor Paul Kléber Monod. In his book, Jacobitism and the English People 1688–1788, Monod has stated that ‘Lancashire had the largest [Catholic] recusant population in England’ at the end of the seventeenth century, and that of the 688 listed English Jacobite rebels captured at Preston in 1715, 366 were from Lancashire, 227 from Northumberland, 78 from other counties, six from Ireland and eleven from unidentified places. Monod also discovered the religious affiliations of four-fifths of the Lancashire rebels and noted that 76 per cent of them were Roman Catholics. With these vital statistics in our possession it would seem that there is no need for further research on Lancashire Catholicism and Jacobitism in the early eighteenth century. But certain questions, ignored or barely touched on by Monod and other historians, need answering. First, how many Catholics were there in Lancashire in about 1715, what was their geographical distribution and social composition, and how far were they dominated by the gentry? Secondly, what was the social composition of the various Lancashire Catholic groups: the active Jacobites, the passive Jacobites and those of unknown allegiance? Thirdly, how do the Catholic and Protestant Jacobite rebels of Lancashire compare from a social and political standpoint? Finally, and confining ourselves mainly to the Catholic gentry, how strong a link was there in Lancashire between the Royalism of the Civil Wars (1642–48) and the Jacobitism of the 1715 rebellion?

The Christian Cabala, a Christianised version of Jewish mysticism originating in Renaissance Italy, reached England in the early sixteenth century and was met with a variety of responses from English Catholics in the Reformation period. While ‘cabala’ was used as a slur by both Protestant and Catholic polemicists, Robert Persons drew positively from the work of the Italian cabalist Pietro Galatino, and in 1597 Sir Thomas Tresham, then a prisoner at Ely, described in detail a complex cabalistic design to decorate a window. While the Christian Cabala was only one source of inspiration for Tresham, he was sufficiently confident in his cabalistic knowledge to attempt manipulations of names of God in his designs for the window at Ely and to insert measurements of cabalistic significance in the gardens on his Lyveden estate. Persons’s and Tresham’s willingness to draw on Christian cabalism even after its papal condemnation suggests the intellectual independence of English Catholics, who were prepared to make use of esoteric traditions to bolster their faith. The evidence for experiments with cabalism by a few English Catholics highlights the need for further re-evaluation of the significance of esoteric traditions within the English Counter-Reformation and the eclectic nature of post-Reformation English Catholic mysticism.