Dennis Flynn has written convincingly of the Catholic sympathies of Donne's middle years. But anyone who reads through the sermons, particularly those composed after 1618, cannot fail to be convinced that in the end Donne's Anglicanism was a mature and heartfelt commitment. To understand how a man with such rooted Catholic sympathies could find his spiritual home in the English Church, we must recognise how much he needed to be engaged with others in worship, in friendship and in love.

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.

Lord Ripon’s reception into the Catholic Church early in September 1874 caused a minor sensation in the world of politics and a howl of no-popery protest in the non-Catholic press. Ripon’s conversion took London society and even his closest friends by surprise. Victorians had long accustomed themselves to the steady drift of ritualists and Puseyites to Rome, but were puzzled when this wealthy nobleman, evangelical Anglican, ex-Christian-Socialist friend of F. D. Maurice, and Grand Master of the English Freemasons, was received into the Catholic Church on the Feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin on September 8, 1874.

In November 1591 a royal proclamation was published denouncing the activities of seminary priests and Jesuits which inspired a surprising number of Catholic authors to undertake its refutation. Robert Persons, Joseph Cresswell, Richard Verstegan, Thomas Stapelton, and Robert Southwell all attacked it in works printed in English or Latin; a short, anonymous tract on the subject survives in manuscript; and two Spanish writers also dealt with the proclamation, which had touched the honour of Philip II. There was perhaps something of a tradition among Catholic authors of writing refutations of royal proclamations, and the edict of 1591 was indeed strongly worded, but it is clear that its appearance was largely a welcome excuse for the authors of these books to publish their views, which ranged wide in their attacks on Elizabethan policy and formed part of a sustained Catholic propaganda campaign which reached its height at around this time. Robert Persons continued to discuss the proclamation, although at much less length, in two tracts published in 1592 and 1593, which deal with other subjects.

A year after the First Vatican Council of 1870 a five-volume edition of George Hay's works was published, and the opening words of Bishop John Strain's introduction left no doubt as to Hay's significance: ‘Since the religious revolution of the sixteenth century, to no man has the Catholic Church in Scotland been so much indebted as to Bishop Hay. He is preeminently her bishop of the last three hundred years.’ In 1874 James Stothert's Life of Bishop Hay was brought before the public by the Rev. J. F. S. Gordon, who felt moved to comment: ‘It is most dishonourable, not only to the Memory of this great Bishop, but to the Catholic Religion in Scotland, which he may be said to have kept alive during a dismal period, that not so much as a simple Stone marks his grave.’

‘In this embassy’, Antonio Foscarini reported to the Doge in Venice in 1611 from London, ‘there has always been an Englishman as interpreter, a Catholic, who has regularly attended the church without anyone hindering him. The same goes on in the French and Spanish embassies, to his Majesty's entire satisfaction.’ Little is known about this type of employment, aside from James's atypical toleration of an Englishman's public non-conformity. It can be of interest to see what sort of Englishman could be selected by a foreign power to serve in its embassy in seventeenth-century London. There can be more curiosity to learn what type of work he could in fact be called upon to do. Fortunately, sufficient evidence has survived in the case of at least one Englishman of clear recusant connections, Francis Fowler II, to make an attempt. Curiously, in preparing this study an unexpected problem emerged in the discovery of another Englishman of an identical name who lived in Madrid with some of the same duties to perform. This surprising career of a Francis Fowler I is also described here. From this pair of biographies it is hoped that fresh clues have been found about the family of the distinguished printer of early recusant books, John Fowler.

This paper is the final part of a trilogy dealing with Harvington Hall in Worcestershire from 1529 until 1923, when it passed into the ownership of the Archdiocese of Birmingham. The first part, ‘The Pakingtons of Harvington [1529–1631]’ by Lionel and Veronica Anderton Webster, appeared in Recusant History in April 1974; my sequel, ‘The Yates of Harvington, 1631–1696’, followed in October 1994.’ This third part appropriately appears in an issue of Recusant History to mark the ninetieth birthday of Fr. Geoffrey Holt, S.J., who over the years has published many studies of other country-house missions in the eighteenth century, and whose characteristic combination of scholarship, lucidity and human sympathy is a model of how such things ought to be done. He appreciates the problems and will, I hope, appreciate the result.

During Penal times there took place three executions of seminary priests in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and one in Gateshead. Three of these were in successive years, 1592, 1593 and 1594, and Tyneside is fortunate in the wealth of documentation it possesses for these Elizabethan martyrs. The jewel of this collection is still among the City Archives in Newcastle, in the 1590- 1596 (Payments) volume of Chamberlains’ Accounts, which contains two complete execution-bills, unique for Elizabethan England, as well as part of a third, and the imprisonment expenses of the Northumbrian layman George Errington, martyred at York in 1596.

The title of this paper is taken from a work written in 434 A.D.: the Commonitorium of Vincent of Lerins. Leech considered this a ‘golden book’; we will see later the significance of Vincent for Leech, while Leech's life will perhaps illuminate his own age. Calling himself ‘Peregrinus’, Vincent wrote: ‘whereas I was at one time involved in the manifold and deplorable tempests of secular warfare, I have now at length, under Christ's auspices, cast anchor in the harbour of religion’. His aim was to pass on the teaching of the Fathers and to give guidance ‘for distinguishing the truth of the catholic faith from the falsehood of heretical pravity.’

The Stuart artefacts described in this article have not previously been examined as an entity, and many are relatively unfamiliar to scholars. This paper will consider this unique collection of relics and discuss their significance within the personal as well as national and international contexts of their origins. That significance rests largely in their royal provenance, which was valued by the custodians at the English Jesuit College of St Omers, the predecessor of Stonyhurst College, founded to educate English Catholic boys in 1593. The Stuart cause, from Mary Queen of Scots to Charles Edward Stuart represented the best hope of English Catholics for a formal restoration of the faith. Relics, such as Mary Queen of Scots’ Thorn, were powerful symbols of tenacity and hope, providing an unbroken thread from the Passion of Christ to the martyred Queen, the more valued as the College gained its own seventeenth-century martyrs. Artefacts which arrived at Stonyhurst College after 1794 were valued for their romantic association with the failed Stuart cause. The creation of the Stuart Parlour in 1911and the adoption of the Borrodale tartan as part of the girls’ uniform in the 1990s demonstrate the significance these objects possess well into the twentieth century.

This article presents a narrative description of the state of music in the Scottish Catholic Church from the Reformation up to the publication of George Gordon’s collection of church music c.1830. For the first two hundred years after the Reformation, Scottish Catholics worshipped in virtual silence owing to the oppressive penal laws then in force. In the late eighteenth century religious toleration increased and several members of the clergy and other interested parties attempted to reintroduce singing into the worship of the Scottish Catholic Church. In this they were thwarted by the ultra-cautious attitude of the Vicar-Apostolic for the Lowland District, Bishop George Hay, who refused to allow any music in Catholic churches in case it should inflame Protestant opinion. Only after his retirement could the reintroduction take place, and the speed at which it was achieved bears witness to the enthusiasm and commitment of Scottish clergy and laity for church music. Research in this area is long overdue, and it is hoped that this article will form a basis for further investigations.

The true identity of the fourteenth-century anchoress Julian of Norwich has been lost to history. Yet in the seventeenth century Catholic and Protestant polemicists created different ‘Julians’ to construct and contrast their own confessional positions. This article traces the different identities prescribed to Julian and argues that they allow us fresh insight into some of the most prevalent religious and political issues of Restoration England. It begins by tracing the positive reception of Julian’s theology among the Benedictine nuns of Paris and Cambrai, including the role of Augustine Baker in editing Julian’s text. It then explores how the Benedictine Serenus Cressy and the Anglican Edward Stillingfleet created different identities for Julian in their ongoing polemical battles in the Restoration period. For Cressy, Julian was proof of the strength of Catholic devotional and spiritual traditions, while Stillingfleet believed she was evidence of the religious melancholy encouraged by monasticism. By exploring these identities, this article offers new perspective on issues of Catholic loyalty, enthusiasm, sectarianism and doctrinal authority.

This article offers a reading of nineteenth-century Roman Catholic theology through the sacred art produced by and for women religious. The practices and devotions that the article explores, however, are not those that drew from the institutional Church but rather from the legacies of mysticism, many of which were shaped in women’s religious communities. Scholars have proposed that mysticism was stripped of its intellectual legitimacy and relegated to the margins of theology by post-Enlightenment rationalism, thereby consigning female religious experience to the politically impotent private sphere. The article suggests, however, that, although the literature of women’s mysticism entered a period of decline from the end of the Counter-Reformation, an authoritative female tradition, expressed in visual and material culture, continued into the nineteenth century and beyond. The art that emerged from convents reflected the increasing visibility of women in the Roman Catholic Church and the burgeoning of folkloric devotional practices and iconography. This article considers two paintings as evidence that, by the nineteenth century, the aporias1 of Christian theology were consciously articulated by women religious though the art that they made: works which, in turn, shaped the creed and culture of the institutional Church. In so doing, the article contributes to the growing body of scholarship on the material culture of religion.

Anne Line ran a safe-house for Catholic priests in London during the 1590s, a time when such activities were a capital offence. She worked closely with two of the most hunted priests in England, the Jesuit superior Henry Garnet and his fellow Jesuit John Gerard, and was arrested and executed in February 1601. Although seemingly little known, it has been suggested that Shakespeare alludes to her in several works implying that the impact of her life and death on her contemporaries may have been underestimated. This fresh look at the documentary evidence seeks to clarify Anne Line's identity and the circumstances of her life up to the exile of her husband in 1586. Findings include; strong support for the suggestion that Anne Line was indeed the ‘Alice Higham’ who married Roger Line in 1583, the likely location of her childhood home near Maldon in Essex, connections to recusant networks through an aunt also called ‘Anne Line’, and evidence, previously overlooked, that Anne Line was closely related to Giles Aleyn, a Puritan landowner whose demands for increased rent from James Burbage for the site of his theatre in Shoreditch led to the founding of The Globe in Southwark.

Between c. 1572 and his execution in 1583, Edward Arden, a Catholic gentleman from Warwickshire, was involved in a lineage dispute with Ambrose and Robert Dudley, earls of Warwick and Leicester and two of the most powerful men in early modern England, over their shared ancestral claim to a Saxon known as Turchil. This article explores the significance of this dispute from a number of perspectives, including the ancestry of Edward Arden, the history of the Warwick and Leicester earldoms and Philip Sidney’s Defense of Leicester, in order to explore lineage as central to the prevailing ideology of power. It uses the clash between Arden and the Dudleys to present an environment in which Catholics were still part of the political mainstream and in which different political discourses led to conflict as well as consensus during the 1570s and early 1580s. Moreover, the article suggests that the activities of the heralds and the pedigrees they produced had a political function during this period which merits changing our approach to an underused manuscript source.

When J. M. Turner came to make his sketches of Stonyhurst Hall and the neighbouring church at Great Mitton, for the first time in 1799, he was immediately struck by the melancholia and faded splendour of that part of ‘darkest’ rural Lancashire. Perched high upon the brow of Longridge, the mansion commanded sweeping views of the valley beneath, of Pendle Hill and of the distant market town of Clitheroe; while the thirteenth century church of All Hallows—almost lost in the folds of the countryside—sat squatly on the borders of Lancashire and Yorkshire, at the confluence of the Rivers Calder, Ribble and Hodder, and served as a stubborn reminder of an earlier and less secular age. Relatively untouched by the forces of industrialisation, these buildings proved a delight to the Gothic imagination of the young artist.