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.

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.

The Bishop's Palace at Ely was used as a prison for Catholics between 1577 and 1597, and between 1588 and 1597 was exclusively a prison for lay recusants. Its inmates included Abbot John Feckenham between 1577 and 1580 and Thomas Tresham, who was imprisoned in Ely four times. Unlike Wisbech Castle, however, the Palace at Ely's period as a prison for recusants has received little attention. This article draws on the documentary evidence for the Catholic prisoners in official records, as well as Tresham's extensive writings during his Ely imprisonment. It also draws on a newly discovered inventory of the Palace's contents in 1581, arguing that the prisoners, and Tresham in particular, were affected by their stay in Ely. It makes the case for the prisoners’ rich cultural life, as evidenced by the prison writings of Tresham and a fellow inmate, George Cotton, who used his time to translate Jesuit letters from Japan. The prisoners in the Bishop's Palace at Ely may have made less public noise than their fellow prisoners at Wisbech Castle, but like Wisbech, Ely was a focus of Catholic culture and resistance during the late Elizabethan period that deserves to be better understood.

The late lamented Antony F. Allison published in Recusant History, May 1995, a characteristically richly researched article, ‘An English Gallican: Henry Holden, (1596/7–1662), Part I (to 1648)’, but alas did not live to produce the sequel which he planned, a draft of which does not seem to have survived. Shortly after the appearance of the article I wrote to congratulate him on the recent publication of the second (multilingual) edition of what is now commonly called A&R2, and to tell him that the Articles proposed to the Catholics of England, signed T. H., Paris, 2 April 1648, of which the authorship he convincingly attributed to Holden, said by the latter to have been printed by 13 September 1648, and extant in a single imperfect copy dated by George Thomason 2 April, otherwise only known from contemporaneous manuscript and later printed summaries, had been re-published in 1946, without identification of the author, by the late Professor C. E. Whiting of Durham University. Whiting reported that the manuscript he copied was from the library of the late Canon Whitley of Bedlington (Northumberland) and had been made available to him by Major J. D. Cowen, F.S.A. In 1947 Cowen gave it to Ushaw College Library, as coming from his late aunt, Miss A. J. Thompson of Whickham (Co. Durham). In the 1950s or 1960s I was shown it by the then Librarian of Ushaw, Fr. Bernard Payne, and recognised an inscription at the beginning as in the distinctive hand of John Cosin, the eminent Anglican divine who, after being a canon of Durham Cathedral, Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge, Dean of Peterborough, and exile in France 1644–60, finally became Bishop of Durham, 1660–72.

The iron-mining by Sir Thomas Preston of The Manor in Furness, Bart., is an interesting interlude in Restoration economic and legal history. First, it attests to the existence of iron-mining in Furness long before the eighteenth century and provides valuable insights into mining conditions and operations. Secondly, when Sir Thomas, a Catholic, attempted to dispose of his properties, including the iron-mines, to the Jesuits and the poor of Dalton parish, his cousin, Thomas Preston of Holker, Esq., initiated proceedings in the Court of Exchequer, claiming that the estates were forfeit because they had been granted for superstitious uses. In this article, the iron-mines will be examined both as lucrative producers of haematite ore and as a focal point of legal controversy.

Sir Thomas Preston, second son of Sir John, was born in 1643. By 1665 he had succeeded to the family titles and estates after the deaths of his father and brother. He married twice, his second wife being Mary, the daughter of Caryll, Viscount Molyneux of Sefton, whose marriage portion was £4,000, with £2,000 paid in 1666 and the remainder in 1667. They had three children: Francis, who died an infant in 1672; Mary, who married William, Marquis of Powis; and Anne, who married Hugh, Lord Clifford of Chudleigh. Thus the 1660’s brought a happy marriage, children, and an improving financial position. The 1670’s brought the loss of his son and heir in 1672 and the sudden death of his second wife, after which Sir Thomas elected to abandon the world and enter the Society of Jesus. The two decades in his life are mirrored in the fate of his iron enterprise, which prospered in the ’sixties but then decayed rapidly.

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%.

Catholicism owed its survival, in Sussex as elsewhere, largely to families of wealth and position who could support a chaplain. Burton Park (or Bodexton or Bodecton) was such a centre, at least from the late seventeenth century and maybe earlier. The house and estate, owned by the Gorings in the sixteenth century, passed in 1724 to the Biddulphs of Staffordshire and in 1835 from them tothe Wrights of Essex. On inheriting the property, Anthony George Wright added Biddulph to his name ; after the death of his son, Anthony John Wright-Biddulph, in 1895, the estate was sold. This essay is an account of the owners ; of the Jesuit chaplains between 1680 and 1780; and of the mission of which Burton wasthe centre.

This paper is a tribute to two people whose perceptive and persevering research I have merely continued. Sister Francis Agnes Onslow, now of the Poor Clare Convent, Woodchester, using Franciscan sources more than ten years ago, thought that George Ravenscroft had been wrongly identified but was not able to prove her hypothesis because the Douai College diaries after 1654 are missing for a long period. The late Patrick Knell, working on the Ravenscroft family of Barnet, Herts, as an example of ‘schismatic’ Catholic parents who yet educated all their sons at Catholic colleges abroad, also correctly identified the glassman. The importance of this identification passed him by, however, because he was not familiar with the history of glass and did not think, in consequence, to cross-reference the recusant sources he was using with the State Papers Venetian in the Public Record Office. It is an indication of the limited sources used in the past by historians of art that, in spite of this information being available, it was possible for George Ravenscroft, the man who initiated English lead crystal in the third quarter of the seventeenth century, to remain wrongly identified for nearly fifty years.

During the last week of February 1606, the survival of Catholicism in England depended on whether Nicholas Owen could remain silent under prolonged and ruthless torture. A few months later, John Gerard wrote of him:

The strong association between prison writing and writing on walls, whether by graffiti or carving, is as true of Tudor and Stuart England as of other times and places. Yet even if prison-writers associated themselves with the idea of writing on a wall, they need not have done so in reality. This article considers the topos in the writings and afterlife of the Catholic priest, poet and martyr John Ingram, and asks whether it is to be taken at face value.

Ingram’s verse, composed in Latin and mostly epigrammatic, survives in two contemporary manuscripts. The notion that the author carved his verses with a blunt knife on the walls of the Tower of London while awaiting death derives from a previous editorial interpretation of a prefatory sentence within the more authoritative manuscript of the two, traditionally held to be autograph. However, though several Tudor and Stuart inscriptions survive to this day on the walls of the Tower of London, no portions of Ingram’s verse are among them, nor any inscriptions of similar length and complexity. Ingram might instead have written his verse down in the usual way, using wall-carving as a metaphor for the difficulty of writing verse when undergoing incarceration and torture.1

After retiring from a successful diplomatic career in 1966, Sir John Richmond (1909-90) and his wife Diana (1914-97) settled in Durham, where he had accepted a lectureship in Modern Near East History at the University’s School of Oriental Studies. Following the Six-Day War in June 1967, the Richmonds became increasingly concerned at the suffering of Palestinians living in the occupied territories and the strong media bias prevalent at that time. They were instrumental in founding the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding (CAABU) and over the next few years devoted themselves to campaigning on behalf of Palestinians. In addition to monitoring and criticising the secular newspapers, the Richmonds—who were both converts to Catholicism—took a close interest in the leading Catholic papers: The Tablet, The Catholic Herald and The Universe. They engaged in extensive correspondence with their editors—both on the newspaper pages and in private—as well as involving a wider circle of influential Catholic writers and clergy. This article, drawing heavily from the Richmond Papers held at Exeter University’s Special Collections, examines the motives and methods of the Richmonds’ campaign, and attempts to assess whether or not their efforts achieved their aim of changing attitudes.

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).

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.

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.

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.

Information about the early years of St. Gregory's College in Seville has never been abundant. The archives of the College which passed into the custody of the Rector of St. Albans in Valladolid were only fragments of a much larger series of records. There is no “Liber Ruber” or anything comparable to the diaries of Douai, instead only scattered documents survive: account books of monthly expenses for food and necessities, minute books of faculty consultations on college discipline and student behaviour, records of land transferrals and rentals, copies of depositions connected with legal disputes, and various miscellaneous letters. It was from this variety of sources that in 1932 Canon Henson first compiled a “Tentative List of the Students of the English College, Seville”. He drew upon the college archives, Foley's Records of the English Province, Knox's Douai Diaries and other printed memoirs, particularly the volumes of the Catholic Record Society. On completion there were entries for four hundred and twenty-seven students, who covered the entire history of the college from 1591 to the suppression of the Jesuit order in the eighteenth century. Subsequently Canon Henson prepared a larger revised list which he hoped would form the basis for a volume comparable to his studies of St. Alban's in Valladolid and St. George's in Madrid. In 1955, when I visited Valladolid, Canon Henson very graciously lent the portion dealing with the first fifteen years of the college to me to assist my research into the Elizabethan Catholics in Spain, with the suggestion that I add to it any further names and information that might be found. Canon Henson died on February 1, 1961, after a lengthy illness. In 1955 this list contained ninety-six entries; at present it is increased to one hundred and forty-two. I have found reasons, however, to change some of his original identifications. It is to be hoped that by this publication other researchers will be prompted to offer further additions. I would like to acknowledge the generous hospitality of the present Rector of St. Albans, Msgr. David Greenstock, who permitted me to review the entire list in the college library's manuscripts.