The Irish, noted a French traveller in 1644, ‘se nomment Ayrenake’. Is it all that noteworthy that those whom the traveller questioned should denote themselves as ‘Éireannach’ or Irish? The answer must be a cautious ‘yes’ because if the same question had been posed some forty years earlier the reply would most likely have been either ‘Gael’ or ‘English’ depending on the respondent's racial identity. This new patriotism which centred on love of one's native land and religion had been created over the preceding sixty years by the ‘Old’ (i.e. of pre-Reformation settler stock) English who found themselves increasingly estranged from Protestantism as espoused by the crown and by ‘New’ English officials and settlers. A more immediate impulse towards the fashioning of a new Irishness was the Protestant device of lumping all Irish Catholics together regardless of putative ethnicity. In the 1680s an Irish Protestant spokesman briskly summed up the outlook of his group; ‘If the most ancient and natural Irishman be a Protestant, no man takes him for other than an Englishman; and if a cockney be a Papist, he is reckoned in Ireland to be as much an Irishman as if he was born on Slevelogher.’ By then what had been a self-serving rhetorical commonplace was indisputably a reality. So, the ‘faith and fatherland’ patriotism was to an extent thrust on the Old English and was not necessarily hostile to the crown in general or to the Stuarts in particular. Far from it, the motto of the Confederation of Kilkenny (1642–9) ‘pro Deo, pro Rege, pro patria Hibernia unanimis’ shows how an earlier generation had tried to square this circle.

JOHN ABBOT, who abroad used the alias of Ashton (C.R.S. XXX, 105) and in England called himself John, or Augustine, Rivers, was born of a London family in 1588. Our chief authority for his early life is entry 289 in the Registers of the English College at Valladolid (C.R.S. XXX). From this we learn that he was aged 21 in 1609, a Londoner born of respectable but non-Catholic parents. A passage taken by Foley (VII, 1152) from the Annual Letter of the English Jesuit College of St. Omer for 1609 adds to our knowledge of his family: “The fathers … received many Protestants into the Church; among whom was an Oxford student of great talent belonging to the Aobot family (a family most hostile to the Catholic faith, two members having been its bitterest foes, viz. a bishop and a dean)”. This can only refer to George Abbot (1562–1633) who at the time of writing was Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry, in 16l0 was made Bishop of London, and in 1611 became Archbishop of Canterbury (D.N.B. I, 5), and to his brother Robert Abbot (1560–1617) who in 1609, though not apparently a dean, was chaplain in ordinary to King James and in that year was made Master of Balliol College, and later became Bishop of Salisbury (D.N.B. I, 24). Both brothers published noted anti-Catholic controversial works, and George as bishop was an active persecutor of Catholics. Since the brothers were of a Guildford family, their relationship to John Abbot may not have been close, but it is perhaps significant that all three went to Balliol.

There has been a tradition at Harvington Hall in Worcestershire that for twelve years (sometimes given as 1666-1678) it was the home of the martyr John Wall, who was hanged at Worcester in August 1679. The stock printed accounts are those of Dom Bede Camm, O.S.B., in Forgotten Shrines (1910, 1936), pp. 253-280, and in his Life of Blessed John Wall, The Martyr of Harvington Hall (1932, 1947). More recent views can be found in my “Blessed John Wall” (The Venerabile, May and November 1960), in Fr. Howard Docherty's “Blessed John Joachim Wall” (Westminster Cathedral Chronicle, August 1960), and in Mr. Frank Davets Blessed John Wall (Office of the Vice-Postulation, 1962).

In the first volume of his History of Monmouthshire, Sir Joseph Bradney admitted that ‘in Monmouthshire the principles of the old Catholic faith have never been lost to a large number of people. Many families of position in this district continued to adhere to the old doctrines.’ Thomas Richards, the most scrupulous of the historians of Welsh non-conformity, not only identified the Catholics of Wales as ‘the sons and grandsons of men who had never accepted the Protestant Reformation' but from his unrivalled knowledge of the sources for seventeenth-century religious history in the principality advanced two quite startling hypotheses. The first was that there is ‘positive proof of the silent growth of Popery during Propagation and Protectorate times’ (he pointed out that in 1676 the number of Catholics recorded in Monmouthshire was ‘within sixty-six of being equal to all other dissenters in [the county] gathered into one total’); the second, a result of his searching analysis of the so-called Compton Census, was that even the figure of 541 Roman Catholics in Monmouthshire—416 in the rural deanery of Abergavenny alone—was ‘too low’.

P. R. Newman has done a useful service in tabulating the returns in the Durham Protestations (Recusant History [October 1979], pp. 148-52). Unfortunately, he has omitted the sixty-eight names of persons refusing to sign in the parish of Lanchester, a parish which on the showing of the Protestation itself had an 18% recusancy among its adult males. The inclusion of these would raise Mr Newman's figure of 452 men refusing the Protestation (excluding known non-Catholics) to 520, and the percentage in the county to just under 3.2. An even more accurate percentage might be obtained if the affirmative signatures from Bishop Auckland, a parish which failed to list the refusers, were subtracted from the total. If that were done, the percentage would rise to just over 3.2. Also it may be reasonably assumed that the percentage would be higher still if the whole adult population were taken into account. For, as the lists of prosecutions and more general indications suggest, women were more faithful and persevering adherents of the old religion than men. However, the two-to-one ratio which might be inferred from an examination of the presentments to the Sessions and the church courts probably overstates the true proportion. For this two reasons may be adduced. First, in the early Elizabethan years, when many were uncertain as to where they stood, numerous waverers allowed or perhaps encouraged their wives to take a stand for Catholicism while they themselves made at least an outward show of conformity when that was deemed necessary for the preservation of their families and possessions. Secondly, churchwardens, when pressed for presentments, apparently found that to name widows and spinsters along with vagrants gave rise to less local trouble than the naming of their fellows. Even so, though the proportion of women recusants may have been rather less than the prosecutions suggest, there can be little doubt that they outnumbered men sufficiently for one to speculate that the Catholic adult population may well have been of the order of 3.5%.

On 29 May 1660, Anthony Wood purchased a newly-published broadsheet, headed ‘A Catalogue of the Lords, Knights and Gentlemen (of the Catholick Religion) that were Slain in the late Warr in Defence of their King and Country’. It contained in excess of 200 names, and covered not only those who had lost their lives as a result of the Civil Wars, but also those who had lost estates or had been plundered vigorously by enemy forces. It was the first martyrology to greet the restoration of Charles II, preceding by almost three years the pamphlet entitled ‘The Royal Martyrs’ which listed both Catholic and Protestant activists who had suffered in the royal cause. J. C. H. Aveling has stated that ‘After 1660, Catholic peers and gentry all maintained loudly that they had been strong Royalists’, and his implied doubts concerning these claims (he seems to regard allusions in heraldic visitations as largely spurious) reflect the conventional view of those recent scholars who have gone into the matter of Catholic activism.

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.

In her essay Blessed Nicholas Owen: Jesuit Brother and maker of hiding holes—a summary of the material on the soon-to-be saint held in the possession of the office of the Vice-Postulation, Farm Street— Margaret Waugh first identified Walter Owen, an Oxford carpenter, as the father of Nicholas Owen. Michael Hodgetts, in his article The Owens of Oxford published in this journal in October 1999, laid out all the known facts about Walter Owen and his family but stressed there was no conclusive evidence to support this identification. Although Nicholas Owen’s relationship to the printer Henry Owen, a former apprentice of Joseph Barnes (founder of Oxford University Press), suggested some connection between Nicholas and the city of Oxford— the information that Henry Owen was ‘brother to that Oven [sic] who ripped out his own bowels in the Tower, being imprisoned for the Gunpowder Treason’ comes on the authority of both the government informer William Udall, and John Gee, writing in 1624—there was still nothing concrete to link Nicholas to Walter Owen.

The Ecclesiastical Province of Cambrai may sound unfamiliar to modern readers. The bishopric of Cambrai dates to the sixth century but only became an archdiocese and, consequently, the centre of a church province in the sixteenth century. The elevation of the see resulted from the heavily contested reorganization of the diocesan map of the Low Countries by King Philip II in 1559. The new province included the medieval sees of Arras, Cambrai and Tournai, as well as the newly created bishoprics of Saint-Omer and Namur. Its borders were established to encompass the French-speaking Walloon provinces in the south of the Low Countries, territories that are now divided between France and Belgium.1 In the early modern period, this area was already a border and transit zone between France, the Low Countries, the Holy Roman Empire and the British Isles. The province’s history in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was deeply marked by recurrent and devastating warfare between the kings of Spain and France, eventually resulting in the transfer of significant territory to France.2 However, the Province of Cambrai was also the scene of frequent cross-border mobility, and a safe haven for Catholic exiles originating from the British Isles, France and other parts of the Low Countries.

This article considers some of the men and women who served in the Privy Chamber of Elizabeth I and those men who held significant positions in her outer Chamber for evidence of Catholic beliefs, sympathies or family connections. It then discusses the careers of five men who at various times in Elizabeth’s reign were members of the Band of Gentlemen Pensioners. It will show that their court careers were decisively affected by their Catholic beliefs and connections and, in one case, by a temporary repudiation of Catholicism. Their careers witness both to a fluidity of religious identity that facilitated their advancement at Court and to a narrowing of this identity over the course of the reign.

‘Charges that he [John Sergeant] was a disciple of Blacklow [Thomas White] … rest on … unsatisfactory evidence.’ Godfrey Anstruther’s conclusion has not, so far as I know, been directly challenged; so this note aims belatedly to offer some evidence in support of Sergeant’s close Blackloist connections.

John Sergeant (1623–1707) is now usually remembered as the leading Catholic protagonist in the ‘Rule of Faith’ debates, though he has also been presented as an informer at the time of the so-called Popish Plot, and as a far from negligible philosopher. It will be argued here that, in both theology and philosophy, he was essentially a follower of Thomas White (1593–1676), leader of the influential faction of English Catholics who derived from his best-known alias their title of ‘Blackloists’; for Sergeant himself, in the words of Bishop Richard Russell quoted in the title, ‘everywhere proclaimed himself White’s disciple’.

Between July and October 1580, Robert Persons and Edmund Campion, who had landed at Dover in June, ‘passed through the most part of the shires of England, preaching and administering the sacraments in almost every gentleman's and nobleman's house that we passed by, whether he was Catholic or not, provided he had any Catholics in his house to hear us’. Between Christmas 1580 and Whitsun 1581 Campion went on a similar journey to the North, the itinerary of which can be recovered in fair detail from entries in the Acts of the Privy Council and from a summary of the subsequent examinations which was annotated by Lord Burghley. The mission of Campion and Persons (and of the dozen or so others who accompanied them from Rome) has rightly been regarded as a pivotal event in the story of Elizabethan recusancy. But no serious attempt has ever been made to reconstruct their itineraries in 1580.

The first decade of James I's reign saw a wave of high-profile clerical conversions to the Church of Rome. Among the best-known cases are those of James Wadsworth, who travelled to Spain with Sir Charles Cornwallis's embassy in 1605, where, as William Bedell's biographer Alexander Clogie disgustedly recalled, he was ‘cheated out of his religion by the Jesuits and turned apostate’; Theophilus Higgons, a member of Christ Church, Oxford, who converted in 1607; his friend and Oxford contemporary Humphrey Leech, who followed him in 1609 and later joined the Society of Jesus; and Benjamin Carier, a royal chaplain and prebendary of Canterbury, who converted in 1613. As the work of Michael Questier has taught us, religious conversion was by no means an uncommon phenomenon in early modern England. Yet these cases had the potential to inflict serious damage on the Jacobean church, not only because they threatened to neutralise the propaganda advantages to be gained from Roman Catholic converts to the Church of England such as Marc’ Antonio de Dominis, but also because they drew unwelcome attention to doctrinal divisions within the Church of England over such issues as anti-popery and the theology of grace.

In the Victorian period literature provided a national forum for the consideration of ideas in relation to society. Literary writings put flesh on the bones of the English anti-Catholic mind; more than the periodical, pamphlet or directly polemical literature, they vividly depict the emotions, the hidden agendas and the psychology from which sprang the age's rationalised attitudes and beliefs. When contemplating Catholicism, creative writers tended to be in a state of mental déshabillé, their feelings more visible, more unguarded than was the case with other sorts of writers, and therefore more revealing and expressive. As the classic Victorian literary anti-Catholic figure, Charles Kingsley provides the most apt focus for a sketch of the soul of the contemporary anti-Catholic tradition, especially since in his oeuvre its elements are uniquely forceful and comprehensive. A view of the fundamental motivations behind anti-Catholicism is, however, necessarily fragmentary and speculative, since their manifestations—passions, prejudices, assumptions, the national myth—where not wholly rational, either in Kingsley or in his society.

In 1639 Charles I was faced with rebellion in Scotland. On 16th January he summoned the peers to attend him at York by 1st April, with such forces of horse as their birth and honour required. Meanwhile his Catholic consort, Henrietta Maria, appealed to the leading priests in England to organize a nation-wide collection from Catholics in order to help finance the expedition and to make manifest the loyalty of the Catholic body. The superiors of the Catholic clergy, secular and regular, gave their support to the scheme, and a long list of “Advices and Motives” was drawn up, urging Catholics to subscribe. I have summarised this elsewhere. Copies of the “Advices and Motives” were sent to the clergy in various parts of the country, together with a circular letter, dated 4th April, 1639, bearing the signatures of the five superiors, Anthony Champney signing for the seculars, William Price for the Benedictines, Thomas Dade [Middleton, alias Dade] for the Dominicans, Francis Davenport for the Franciscans, and Henry More for the Jesuits. In the circular letter the superiors state that although the “Advices” are directed only to lay gentlemen, “yet we desire you (and we have answered for you) that you will employ yourself and all those that depend on you, sincerely to solicit and dispose all their minds, whom you have relation unto, as powerfully as you can, to contribute cheerfully and bountifully upon this occasion; which, as it is the first that ever we laboured in of this kind, so we hope in God it will be the last”.

Our earlier article discussed the family of Sir Robert Tyrwhitt (d. 1581) of Kettleby in Lincolnshire and the imprisonment of Sir Robert and several of his sons by the Privy Council in June 1580. The Council was acting on a report of Catholic activities associated with the wedding of Edmund, Lord Sheffield and Ursula Tyrwhitt at the Tyrwhitt family homes of Kettleby and Twigmore. Sir Robert’s son Goddard died in a London gaol, and Goddard’s elder brothers William and Robert were imprisoned for years in the Tower and elsewhere. We turn now to the next generation of the same family, and show that Sir Robert’s grandson and heir, Robert Tyrwhitt, became a strong supporter of John Gerard SJ and the Jesuits in England during the years c.1600 to early 1606. Fr Gerard’s autobiography strains to make this clear, within the necessary limits of discretion. But just as the identity of the Tyrwhitt martyr of 1580 was soon totally lost to view, so Gerard’s identification of ‘one of my main benefactors’ as a Tyrwhitt has remained undecoded—hidden, indeed, by loose translation, and inattention to the different ways one can be a ‘brother in law’.

In 1999 the Bodleian Library acquired a tract volume containing an hitherto unrecorded and unknown publication of William Carter. The item itself has been fully described by Geoffrey Groom in the Bodleian Library Record (Oct. 1999) and to celebrate the acquisition I gave a short talk to the Friends of the Bodleian Library on the subject of Carter's career: the present article is a considerably expanded version of that talk.