TWENTY YEARS AGO an article entitled ‘The Eyres of Hassop and some of their connections from the Test Act to Emancipation’ was published in two parts in Recusant History. A section was devoted to the Eyres of Norfolk. Their house in that county—Bury's or Bures or Berries Hall near Swaffham—was acquired by Thomas Eyre at some date shortly before 1688 and passed to three of his six sons, Henry, John and James, in succession, being sold after the death of the last in 1749. In recent years it has ceased to be a private house and is now a country hotel. There remain in the neighbourhood to remind the visitor of the family the monumental inscriptions in the nearby Holme Hale church to Mary, the wife of Thomas Eyre—‘She was very exemplary and eminent for her piety, charity and other virtues, and exchanged this life for a better the 28th of September 1710, Aet. 67’—and to two of her sons.

ON 20TH DECEMBER, 1906, the Liberal Government of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman withdrew from the Order Book the Education Bill which had received its First Reading on 9th April, 1906. The Bill had proposed a drastic revision in the generous settlement which the voluntary schools had welcomed with the passing of the 1902 Education Act. The new proposals had sought to make all public elementary schools into ‘council schools’ controlled by the Local Authority. The denominations would receive an agreed rental for the use of their school buildings, and the upkeep of these buildings would become the responsibility of the Local Authority. But the power to appoint the teachers would also pass to the Local Authority. The only concession to the denominations was the proposal that extended facilities for denominational instruction on each school day would be made available in certain elementary schools if three-quarters of the parents whose children attended the schools asked for them. Head-teachers would not be allowed to give the denominational instruction, but assistant teachers would be allowed to give the instruction if they volunteered to do so. Failing this, the denominations would be responsible for providing the teacher to give the instruction. The controversial Clause Four excluded from this concession elementary schools in areas in which the only school was a denominational school, and in areas with a population of less than 5,000.

WHEN Philip II of Spain sent his Armada to invade England in an attempt to cut off support for the Dutch rebels, he did so in the name of God and the Catholic faith. Elizabeth, in turn recognised the propaganda value of an identification of monarch, country and Protestant church at times of national crisis. It was widely believed that, as the Spaniards wanted to overthrow the Protestant church, the English Catholics must have been pro-Spain. Elizabeth had always regarded the Catholics as a danger to her government; it was now easy for her to portray them as traitors to their country. The attempts by Catholics to claim to be patriotic were, understandably, treated with scepticism. But this had not always been the case. The purpose of this article is to outline the struggle to monopolise patriotic propaganda which took place between the government and the English Catholics throughout Elizabeth’s reign.

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.

Almost a century ago Calthrop recognized that there were important recusants in some Lincolnshire county families. Interest has been revived recently by Martin and Finnis in an article on the Tyrwhitts of Kettleby, and more specifically on Goddard Tyrwhitt, who became a martyr in 1580 (see fig. 1 for location maps). Whilst the Tyrwhitts were at the top of the gentry hierarchy, the Forsetts of Bilsby near Alford, were practically at the bottom, so presenting some social contrasts with the former family. The Forsetts were newcomers to the county sometime in the mid- to late-fifteenth century and were minor manorial lords at Bilsby in the east Lincolnshire Marsh from the time their documentation begins with John Forsett in 1482 down to about 1600.

When, in 1905, G. W. E. Russell commented on converts to Catholicism in the period preceding the zenith of the Oxford Movement, he mentioned six names: three of these were the ‘Cambridge Converts’ Ambrose Phillipps [de Lisle], George Spencer and Kenelm Henry Digby. These permutations,’ he said, ‘were regarded as mere eccentricities, and no one dreamed that they were likely to have any effect upon the Church.’ Did they have any effect on Anglicanism via their point of contact, the Oxford Movement? What were their motives in respect of the Tractarians, and how did they relate to each other as a group? These converts—Spencer and Digby in particular have largely been ignored—illustrate the range of Catholic attitudes to Anglicanism, while Digby represents the main body of Catholic opinion, which was suspicious of Anglo-Catholicism.

Queen Mary Tudor died on the night of 17 November 1558. A few hours later, across the river at Lambeth, her cousin, Reginald Pole, Cardinal Archbishop of Canterbury, followed her, victim of the ague which he had contracted in the summer. England again had a change of monarch, the third in less than twelve years. What was not clear at the time was whether there would be another change in religion. With hindsight, it is clear that the programme of reform which sought to reunite the English Church with the see of Rome and to revivify it with the Tridentine reforms with which Pole had been so closely involved, had died also on that November night. Parliament was in session when Mary died, and immediately Elizabeth was proclaimed queen by Nicholas Heath, Archbishop of York, in his capacity as Lord Chancellor; there was no dissent such as had accompanied the accession of the new Queen's half-sister. It soon became clear, however, that the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn was unlikely to retain the settlement of religion in the precise form in which it had been left by the daughter of Katharine of Aragon. On Christmas Day, the Queen ordered that the elevation of the Blessed Sacrament was not to take place during the Mass to be celebrated in her chapel by the Bishop of Carlisle, Owen Oglethorpe. His refusal to obey this command led the Queen to leave the chapel after the gospel had been read. Two days later, a royal proclamation restored the first liturgical changes of Henry VIII, ordering that the epistle and gospel of the Mass were thenceforward to be read in English, along with the litany which usually preceded the service. The coronation of Elizabeth should have been conducted by the senior surviving churchman, Heath of York; he had resigned the Chancellorship before the end of 1558, and declined to conduct the service. It was Oglethorpe, as bishop of a suffragan see of the Northern Province, who crowned the new Queen, with no other diocesan bishops present. The coronation Mass was sung by one of the Reformers, Dr. George Carewe, who omitted the elevation, and another Reformer preached the sermon.

William Southerne, the last martyr to suffer under James I, lived and died during a period of disunion among the English Catholics. They were divided upon several issues: one of these was die lawfulness of taking the Oath of Allegiance. This Oath, introduced by Cecil in 1606, and condemned as unlawful by Pope Paul V the following year, was still favoured by a certain (small) section of the clergy in England. Ven. William Southerne was not of their number: his refusal to take the Oath was the determining factor which brought about his condemnation.

From the time of its first appearance in 1582 until the present day there has been confusion as to the sources of Robert Persons’s Christian Directory. Gaspar Loarte and Luis de Granada have each been represented as the principal source used by Persons who has come to be regarded as little more than a translator or editor. In the case of Loarte, Persons himself was indirectly responsible for the confusion. A study of the Christian Directory and its contents, however, reveals that Persons did not borrow from Loarte at all and that if he borrowed from Granada it was only in a very minor way.

At the Reformation, three possibilities faced English Catholics. They could continue to be Catholics and so suffer the penalties of the penal laws; they could conform to the Church of England; or they could adopt a middle course and become Church Papists. The Nevills of Nevill Holt, near Market Harborough in Leicestershire, went through all three phases. In the reign of Edward VI, Thomas Nevill I became a Protestant. His grandson, Thomas Nevill II, became a Church Papist under James I; and Thomas II’s son, Henry Nevill I, continued to be one at the time of the Civil War. But Henry l’s son William was definitely a Catholic and went into exile with King James II, while William’s son, Henry Nevill II, was an open Catholic under Charles II. Henry Nevill II’s descendants continued to be Catholics throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries until they left Nevill Holt in the late nineteenth century.

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.

This is the third and (barring further significant discoveries) the final part of my index, the first and second parts of which were published in Recusant History in October 1982 (nos. 1–177) and May 1998 (nos. 178–300). In Part II, for reasons of space and cost, I omitted, unless there was more to report on them, houses mentioned in my Secret Hiding-Places (1989) but not included in Part I. For reference and analysis, however, it is inconvenient to have a numbered list and a book, each including houses not in the other; and in any case there is now more to report on many of these houses. The one hundred houses in Part III (nos. 301–400) therefore include all sixty-nine of those that were mentioned, however briefly, in Hodgetts 1989 and were not included in Parts I or II. Among them is Scotney Old Castle in Kent (no. 320), which is one of only ten houses in the country where there is a surviving hide mentioned in an Elizabethan or Stuart account of a search. Forty-eight of the hundred were in Granville Squiers’ Secret Hiding-Places (1933).

The “Staffordshire Clergy” who achieved such unfortunate prominence in the disputes surrounding the Catholic Relief Acts have been alternately condemned as the irresponsible ene1nies of authority and upheld as the victims of those defenders of the Church who “have wrought incalculable mischief” by confusing “heterodoxy with immorality, a misinformed mind with a malicious will”.

George Hilary Brown (1786–1856), Vicar Apostolic of the Lancashire District since its establishment in 1840, became the first bishop of the new diocese of Liverpool in 1850. He had been extremely reluctant to accept the vicariate, partly because of chronic ill-health and partly because of diffidence about his ability. From 1841 on Propaganda received a number of complaints about his absence from and neglect of his District, and when he was present he caused ill-feeling among his clergy: they thought he was a martinet and complained frequently to Rome about his decisions. For his part, Brown seemed to think he was fighting for episcopal rights against a recalcitrant clergy: in a later letter to Wiseman he claimed that all the bishops should be grateful to him because of his long battle against ‘Josephism and Pistoia’. This article examines two inter-connected quarrels he was involved in after 1850, one with his chapter, the other with his coadjutor. They illustrate some of the issues that arose from the restoration of the Hierarchy in 1850 as well as throwing light on the personality of the Bishop.

Four Jerningham Augustinian canonesses from Bruges were at Cossey, the home of Sir William Jerningham (1736–1809), in the summer of 1794, and then lived at Hengrave Hall near Bury St. Edmunds Suffolk. They were Ann, Elizabeth, Edwardina, and Frances Henrietta Jerningham, Sir William's cousins. The sixteen bound volumes of correspondence received by Lady Bedingfield 1776–1833 and now at Birmingham University, from which Egerton Castle's Jerningham Letters were taken, include three unpublished letters from Elizabeth, Sister Mary Agnes Jerningham (1727–1807) and three unpublished letters from her American niece, Frances Henrietta, Sister Mary Sales Jerningham (1745–1824). Sister Mary Sales's 1803 letter to Lady Jerningham is now at the Stafford Record Office.

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.

Another Catholic who for a number of years was in business as a timber merchant, was Robert Watmough, who was born in 1762 or 1763, the son of Thomas Watmough, husbandman of Litherland, a village five miles north of Liverpool. Though much of Watmough’s career as a timber merchant falls into the early nineteenth century, he is mentioned here as he provides a link with another business connected with the operation of the port, namely shipbuilding. He was a partner for a number of years of John Dwerryhouse, who was possibly the leading local Catholic shipbuilder of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

In a previous article in Recusant History (Jan. 1958), passing reference was made to two substantial documents by William Leslie (about 20,000 words in all) in Public Record Office: ‘A Relation of the Cardinals of the Court of Rome’ and ‘Concerning the affairs of Rome in relation to England’ (PRO SP 9/203/7, 8 and 9). They are part of the archives of Henry Bennet, Lord Arlington, Secretary of State 1662-74, and have been endorsed by Arlington's secretary, Joseph Williamson, in the form: ‘This was a copy of a paper written to Mr Henry Howard of Norfolk 1667 by one Leslie, a Scottish priest at Rome, and by him for his own discharge communicated to my Lord Arlington, with renunciation of all such correspondences for the future.’

Thomas Seddon was born in Liverpool a decade before the impact of the great immigration of Irish families, fleeing before the famine blights of 1845 to 1849, had begun to pose insuperable difficulties upon the small remnant of native-born Roman Catholics. In the 1841 census, the Irish were estimated at some 2.2% of the total population of England, Wales and Scotland; ten years later the census recorded the number as having almost doubled. Edward St. John described graphically the condition of the Irish poor, depicting them as being ‘crowded into the wretched slums of our cities’ where they tried to keep body and soul together ‘on the starvation wages of casual labourers, under conditions that are past description’. Workhouses ‘were crowded with orphans and deserted children, who were therein more like animals than human creatures’.