The so-called ‘Bloody Questions’ were originally put to Edmund Campion and others who were charged with him in a mass trial of fourteen priests and one layman in 1581. Campion seems to have been the first to call them Bloody Questions. They have over the centuries been the subject of considerable controversy between Catholic and non-Catholic writers, and it is worthwhile looking at them again in some detail.

Professor Emmet Larkin of the University of Chicago is undoubtedly the most prolific historian of nineteenth century Irish Catholicism. The author of numerous volumes on the period 1850–91 and of several challenging essays he is perhaps best known for his original, stimulating and provocative article entitled ‘The Devotional Revolution in Ireland, 1850–75’ published in 1972. In that article Professor Larkin put forward the thesis that Archbishop Paul Cullen championed the consolidation of a ‘devotional revolution’ in post-Famine Ireland. Up to the 1840s, he claimed, there was only a small but perceptible change and increase in devotional practices in Ireland. The effects of the Famine were seen by him as the key to this ‘devotional revolution, bringing about a dramatic improvement in the ratio of priests to people through the death or emigration of the disadvantaged who were in any case disinterested in religion and least amenable to clerical control. Indeed ‘what achievement there was before the famine… was largely confined to that “respectable” class of Catholics typified by the Cullens and Mahers in Carlow who were economically better off’. The advent of the reforming Paul Cullen as papal legate to the Synod of Thurles, 1850, and subsequently as archbishop of the most important see, Dublin, from where he organised the church in an ultramontane fashion and introduced many Italian devotional practices to Ireland, coupled with the consequences of the Famine, had a decisive effect in shaping Irish Catholicism and accomplishing a post-Famine ‘devotional revolution’.

The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to what appears to be a developing gulf in the study of the Catholic community during the early seventeenth century. How do we determine whether an individual was or was not a Catholic? It looked for a time as if the conventional wisdom concerning Catholics and the Civil War was to maintain that they were, as a body, neutral. It is now hard to see how that view can be substantiated. By no means connected with that view, but threatening in the same way to establish itself as a dictum, is the idea that there can be no Catholicism without a recorded conviction for recusancy.

The recent appearance of the final volume of The Contemporary Printed Literature of the English Counter-Reformation between 1558 and 1640, an Annotated Catalogue, by A. F. Allison and D. M. Rogers, volume II, Works in English (ARCR II), represents the completion of the work of two scholarly lifetimes devoted to the study of early recusant printed books. To call it merely a catalogue, or even an annotated catalogue, is to underestimate the nature of the achievement. Perhaps the best way to evaluate it is to begin by tracing the history of its development.

Mary Ward (1585–1645) is known as the foundress of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, an Order of women which continues to educate thousands of girls around the world. During the first decades of the seventeenth century, her foundation was a religious venture which aimed to transform the Catholic mission of recovery into one that catered for women as well as men. It maintained clandestine satellites on English soil and opened colleges on the Continent, in towns such as St Omer (1611), Liège (1616), Cologne and Trier (1620–1), Rome (1622), Naples and Perugia (1623), Munich and Vienna (1627) and Pressburg and Prague (1628). There, it trained its own members and undertook the education of externs and boarders. The Institute's vocation was not only to maintain the faith where it was already present but also to propagate it; as such, it went far beyond the accepted sphere of the feminine apostolate and its members were often labelled as rebels who strove to shake off the shackles of post-Tridentine religious life. To some modern historians, Mary Ward was an ‘unattached, roving, adventurous feminist’; to others, she was a foundress whose initiative deliberately set out to lay tradition to rest and begin a new era for the women in the Church.

The extent of the achievement on the part of the Catholic community in developing its own poor schools in the last century in England can only be gauged in the light of the deprived social conditions out of which they came. So some brief mention of the plight of the majority of the Catholics is here given as an introduction to the work of the Catholic Poor School Committee (henceforth CPSC); the role of the religious orders is next considered, and the training colleges. Some indications of the growth conclude this paper.

The names of Dr. Thomas Vavasour and of his wife Dorothy are not uncommon in the chronicles of English Catholic recusancy and in related studies. The poignancy of their story—of a husband and wife practising their religion in the face of persecution and ending their lives in different prisons after a long period of enforced separation—and the relative richness of the relevant sources have together assured them at least a passing mention in such diverse works as Aveling’s studies of Yorkshire recusancy, Cliffe’s account of the Yorkshire gentry, and Claire Cross’ biography of Henry Hastings, third earl of Huntingdon. Although Thomas Vavasour has been described as ‘a very shadowy figure’, he and his wife are in fact among the best documented of the early lay recusants. It is all the more surprising, then, that no attempt has previously been made to bring together the disparate sources to give a reasonably full and coherent account of Thomas Vavasour’s career and family. This article aims to fill that gap. Its attempt to do so is greatly facilitated by the availability in print of much of the basic documentation.

In 1701, William Nicholls, an Anglican clergyman of Salsey in Sussex, published his English translation, ‘purged of Popish errors’, of Francis de Sales’ Introduction to a Devout Life. He prefaced it by an essay on ‘The Rise and Progress of Spiritual Books’, in which he wrote:

The canonisation of John Boste may have awakened some interest in the story of his fellow-prisoner, John Ingram, who was the third and last of the seminary priests to be executed on Tyneside during the reign of Elizabeth I. Such an interest is easy to gratify, since Ingram is one of the best documented of the English Martyrs. As with his two predecessors, Joseph Lambton and Edward Waterson, we have both an account by Holtby of the martyr's trial and execution, and some evidence of the latter in the same Newcastle Account Book; but in this case, these sources can be rounded out by a series of official letters and, most unusually, Ingram's own letters and epigrams.

He was born in 1565, at Stoke Edith, Herefordshire, a county noted for the strong Catholicism of its gentry. His parents, Richard and Anne Ingram, however, seem to have been non-Catholics at that time since John needed a dispensation from heresy, when he was sent to Douai in 1579.

The history of British Catholic involvement in the First World War is a curiously neglected subject, particularly in view of the massive and ongoing popular and academic interest in the First World War, an interest which has led to the publication of several studies of the impact of the war on Britain’s Protestant churches and has even seen a recent work on religion in contemporary France appear in an English translation. Moreover, and bearing in mind the partisan nature of much denominational history, the subject has been ignored by Catholic historians despite the fact that the war has often been regarded by non-Catholics as a ‘good’ war for British Catholicism, an outcome reflected in a widening diffusion of Catholic influences on British religious life and also in a significant number of conversions to the Catholic Church. However, if some standard histories of Catholicism in England are to be believed, the popular Catholic experience of these years amount to no more than an irrelevance next to the redrawing of diocesan boundaries and the codification of canon law.

The Augustinian Convent of Our Lady of Syon (ancestor of the present St. Augustine’s Priory Ealing) was founded at Paris in 1634. After some early difficulties it made its home in 1638–39 on a site in the rue des Fossés Saint-Victor (now rue du Cardinal Lemoine) on the eastern outskirts of the city where it was to remain, with its school, for more than two hundred years. Almost alone among English Catholic institutions founded in France and Flanders during the penal times it weathered the storm of the French Revolution and remained throughout much of the nineteenth century on the site it had formerly occupied. During the Revolution it was suppressed as a Religious house, its property was sequestrated, many treasures were stolen and some early records lost. The buildings in the rue des Fossés Saint-Victor were used for a time as a prison in which nuns from various convents, as well as laywomen, were confined. Conditions became easier after the fall of Robespierre in 1794 and some of the nuns’ property was provisionally restored to them, but it was again seized under the Directory and those nuns who had survived the earlier ordeal were evicted. Reluctantly, they made preparations to follow the example of many other English Catholic institutions in France and on French-held territory and seek refuge in England.

On the morning of Wednesday 22 May 1538, the Observant Franciscan John Forest was dragged on a hurdle through the streets of London from prison in Newgate to his execution at Spittalfields. Henry VIII's efficient propaganda machine had been in action for days in advance and a large crowd had gathered to witness the event. it began at eight o'clock and reached its climax, the burning of Forest, three hours later.

Richard Verstegan is still a neglected writer, not because his works lack intrinsic merit or historical importance, but more fundamentally, because much uncertainty remains about the extent of his authorship.

Despite the importance attributed to Southwell in Louis Martz’s The Poetry of Meditation, his Latin poetry—overlooked in Leicester Bradner’s Musae Anglicanae and the subject of a solitary unsatisfactory discussion in Pierre Janelle’s Robert Southwell the Writer—has received little attention. Such neglect is not unusual. Barbara Lewalski’s Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric—a spacious enough volume—disposes of Herbert’s important Latin collection Passio Discerpta in an endnote. This is despite a number of recent studies emphasising the position of Neo-Latin as a modern language alongside and correspondent with the vernacular, acting ‘as a sort of John the Baptist to the vernacular’, or ‘drinking from the same streams’. It is, I think, indisputable that Martz and Lewalski would have needed to modify their arguments had they taken the Neo-Latin poetry of Southwell and Herbert into account in their respective studies. Martz would have found some part of ‘meditative structure’ attributable to the conventions of Latin elegiac writing rather than to Ignatian meditation. Similarly, Lewalski would have had to qualify her description of so much poetry as ‘lyric’ had she considered its relation to Latin elegiac and epigrammatic writing.

By the time of the outbreak of the Civil Wars, may educated British Protestants considered Roman Catholicism to be an anti-religion; indeed, the Cambridge divine William Fulke went so far as to equate it with devil worship. Wealthy and powerful English Catholics attracted extreme hostility in moments of political crisis throughout the early modern period, but in 1642, fear of Roman Catholicism was even used to legitimate the terrible act of rebellion. Keith Lindley has emphasized the civil war neutrality of English Catholics, while many current historians, nervous of displays of religious prejudice, have portrayed the anti-Catholic fears of parliamentarians as cynical propaganda. Michael Finlayson has condemned anti-Catholicism as ‘irrational paranoia’, to be compared with anti-Semitism, which might, had it not been for the growth of liberal traditions in nineteenth-century England, have led to some sort of ‘Final Solution’.

THE instructions given to Robert Parsons and Edmund Campion upon their embarkation for England in 1580 left no doubt that, no matter what the English government might say, their tasks were the confirmation of the faith of the Catholics there and the recovery of those who, through ignorance, had lapsed. In order to attain these objectives, Father General Everard Mercurian urged the Jesuits to an exemplary life of extraordinary virtue. Amongst the more specific recommendations, the General exhorted the missionaries, in words that echoed the Society's Constitutions, to avoid ‘even the suspicion of avarice and greed.’ They were, therefore, neither to seek nor to accept any alms unless their need became extremely urgent. Even then, they should only ask one or two of their loyal friends for assistance. If the Jesuits could only turn to their friends as a last resort, if they could neither elicit nor accept alms from the people whom they served, one wonders how the General thought the mission's expenses would be met? For a document as reasonable and as thorough as the instructions, it is surprisingly naive about finances, a naiveté that would with experience give place to sophistication.

On 31 May 1964, Dr Anne Bieżanek travelled from Wallasey to Westminster Cathedral to attend Mass and receive Holy Communion. She was flanked by hoards of reporters, who over the previous six months had fueled extensive media coverage of her establishment of one of the first Catholic birth control clinics in the world, alongside her intertwined personal story of the physical and emotional strain caused by ten pregnancies. Repeatedly refused the sacraments by her local parish priest in consequence of these activities, and unable to gain satisfaction from the Bishop of Shrewsbury, Dr Bieżanek wrote to the Archbishop of Westminster to announce her intention to ‘resolve the issue’ through an ethical adjudication at the Communion rails.

As the first sustained exploration of this exceptional woman and her sensational life story, this article examines Dr Bieżanek’s private correspondence and public persona to illustrate the ways in which her idiosyncratic re-negotiation of spiritual and sexual politics was path breaking in articulating a ‘modern’ Catholic approach to love and sex and in anticipating the cacophony of such voices elicited by the Humanae Vitae encyclical in 1968. As such, it illustrates the form and force of contrasting and modulating Catholic discourses about love, marriage, and contraception in the post-war period and demonstrates the continuing and critical interplay of religion, infused with the insights of sexology and psychology, when negotiating the sexual and spiritual revolutions of the sixties.

Worcestershire in the early seventeenth century was not a county, by comparison with some others, with a large percentage of Roman Catholics. Many of the leading families in the county, however, were Catholic, for example the Talbots of Grafton (from 1618 Earls of Shrewsbury), the Sheldons of Beoley, the Habingtons of Hindlip, the Middlemores of King’s Norton (and Edgbaston in Warwickshire) and the Wintours of Huddington. All these families had suffered for the Catholic faith by way of recusancy fines and, in some cases, by imprisonment, loss of property and even by loss of life. In this last connection one might instance the deaths of the Carthusian monk Humphrey Middlemore in 1535, of Edward Habington in 1586, and of Robert and Thomas Wintour, the Gunpowder Plot conspirators. The Catholics of Worcestershire were powerful enough and organised enough to act as a group in connection with the 1601 and 1604 elections for the Knights of the Shire, though in neither case were they successful.

The Jesuit mission to England so proudly announced by Edmund Campion in 1580 was a venture hesitantly undertaken by the Society of Jesus. There was careful, prayerful discernment not only before Father General Everard Mercurian decided in its favour but also throughout its subsequent growth and development. According to the Formula of the Institute, in a sense the Jesuit rule, the purpose and goal of the Society was twofold: the salvation and sanctification of both the individual Jesuits and of their fellow men and women. The entire thrust of Ignatian spirituality was the consideration of the first in so far as it advanced the second. Ignatius urged that all the ordinary practices and customs of religious life be considered in the context of the apostolate and either executed or modified in so far as they advanced the order’s goals. Because of the stress that Ignatius had placed on the Society’s works, he was reluctant to prescribe any universally binding spiritual practices. Indeed, among the wide powers granted to the General in the order’s Constitutions was that to grant dispensations ‘in particular cases which require such dispensation, while he takes account of the persons, places, times, and other circumstances.’

The Lords Petre were always one of the most prominent of English Catholic families, and they were also one of the richest. Their landed estates had been built up in the middle of the sixteenth century by Sir William Petre, Secretary of State to three Tudor sovereigns. Sir William's son, John, was created a Baron in 1611, but in the early 17th century the family properties ceased to grow in size, partly because Catholicism excluded them from the profits of office, and partly because provision for younger sons offset such new acquisitions as were made. But even so the estates inherited by the third Lord Petre in 1637 were large enough to place him clearly in the ranks of the great landed magnates. In Essex he had a well-consolidated belt of land lying to the west and south-west of Chelmsford, and centred on the two family residences of Ingatestone Hall and Thorndon Hall. Altogether in Essex Petre had about 11,000 acres of freehold land and the lordship of seventeen manors, and these produced some £5,500 per annum or considerably more than half his total income from land. In addition he had a large estate on the opposite side of the country, in Devon. This lay in two distinct areas, one centred on Axminster and extending down the Axe valley and its tributaries, and the other in the southerly projection of the county on the southern edge of Dartmoor, where the principal possession was the vast moorland manor of South Brent. Besides the main estates in Essex and Devon, there were some isolated properties: the manor of Osmington down on the Dorset coast; Toddenham and Sutton in Gloucestershire; Kennett and Kentford on the Cambridgeshire-Suffolk border.