The study of antiquarianism and particularly of the use of Anglo-Saxon precedents in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has belonged primarily to historians of Protestantism and parliament, to their studies of English Protestant antiquarians and English Protestant theories of common law, royal absolutism, constitutionalism, Laudian Anglicanism, and non-conforming Protestant resistance. Although it has been clear to everyone that Protestant interest in Saxonism was part and parcel of an anti-Catholic agenda, the Catholic side of this discourse has been virtually unexamined. The focus almost exclusively on Protestant Saxonism has isolated even Protestant thought from some of the contexts within which it developed and, more obviously, has all but occluded the importance of Saxonism to a range of Catholic arguments.

The Highland policies of the Society in Scotland for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SSPCK) have been much discussed. In light of subsequent efforts of Royal Bounty catechists directed to areas where ‘Popery and Ignorance do mostly prevail’, it is worth considering how questions of education and faith were regarded within the Catholic Highlands of Scotland. The geographical scope of what Archbishop Mario Conti, chairman of the Scottish Catholic Heritage Commission, has described as a ‘broad swathe’ from east to west can be seen in the Historic Catholic Sites brochure which accompanies this issue of Recusant History. ‘Popery’ was routinely linked with ignorance by Established Church ministers who sent reports, but these same reports emphasised ‘the number of small schools, which apparently were established, and the existence of women catechists, trained by the clergy as their own fore-runners, in early eighteenth-century Scotland.’

Post-Reformation Catholicism in England is popularly associated with the gentry before the Industrial Revolution and with the Irish urban proletariat afterwards. I have insufficient knowledge to comment on the social structure of post-eighteenth century Catholicism, but in my opinion historians, such as Professor Bossy, Mr. Aveling and, to a lesser extent, Dr. Haigh, have rightly emphasised the part played by the gentry in the expansion, or at least survival, of Roman Catholicism during the early seventeenth century. The gentry were arguably the most important social group in England and were best able to provide the necessary shelter and finance for the Catholic priests who operated in an intermittently hostile Protestant state. Indeed, I am inclined to agree with Professor Bossy that without the gentry there would have been no Catholic community. But community there was, and the gentry formed only part of it. It is the other part—the plebeian element—which is considered in this paper.

During the reign of Elizabeth I, English Catholicism experienced a degree of persecution that was meant to ensure the extirpation of the old faith. However, Elizabethan anti-Catholic laws had an ambiguous effect upon the recusant population of England. Although the Roman Catholic faith initially suffered greatly, yet by the end of the reign it was rising again with force. The unique vocation of Yorkshirewoman, Mary Ward (1585–1645), can be seen as an eloquent illustration of this new English Catholic spirit and as the embodiment of an English missionary determination to further the Catholic cause.

THE writings of the seventeenth-century English theologian, Henry Holden, played a small but significant part in the development of western religious thought in the centuries following his death. His most important work, Divinae fidei analysis, first printed in Latin at Paris in 1652 and afterwards translated and published in English, was several times reprinted in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and was later incorporated in two theological collections, J. P. Migne's Theologiae cursus completus (tom.6, 1839), and Josef Braun's Bibliotheca regularum fidei (tom.2, 1844). It influenced the thinking, in the nineteenth century, not only of avowed liberals such as Dôllinger and Acton, but also, in some degree, of moderate progressives like Newman. In recent years, specialist studies on different aspects of Holden's thought have appeared in English and in French. So far, however, no serious attempt has been made to revise his bibliography: we still have to rely, in large measure, on that published by Joseph Gillow more than a century ago. In this article I want to bring together material that has come to light since Gillow's time and to examine Holden's works afresh against the background of his life and the religious and political developments in England and France at that period. I shall devote particular attention to two themes that run through all his work. One is gallicanism, that amalgam of mediaeval theories limiting the authority of the papacy in relation to secular states and their rulers and national churches and their bishops. It will be seen that plans which Holden advanced in the 1640s for the reform of the Catholic Church in England along gallican lines are based largely on ideas developed in his Divinaefidei analysis published a few years later. The other is his analytical and critical approach to doctrine, aiming always to distinguish truths solidly based on Scripture and tradition from the mere speculations of theologians. It is an approach that had been made popular in France by the Catholic controversialist, François Véron, whose Régula fidei catholicae was first published at Paris in 1644 when Holden was probably already at work on his Divinae fidei analysis. It reveals itself in all Holden's writings and distinguishes him from many of the other Catholic apologists who were drawn into controversy with the Anglican divines of the post-Chillingworth era.

Some of the multifarious literary activities of Captain John Stevens have received attention from specialists. His journal of the Irish wars of 1688–91, not published until 1912, is now generally recognised as being one of the most important primary sources for the campaign. His place in the history of travel writing, as the translator into English of classical works in Spanish and Portuguese on the history, geography and ethnology of the Iberian world, has been established by Dr. Colin Steele. His major contribution to English monastic history, as the translator and continuator of Sir Thomas Dugdale, though less well known, and deserving closer study, has been recognised by David Douglas. More recently a Portuguese scholar has paid tribute to him as one of the first writers to introduce the English reader to Portuguese history and literature. English Hispanists have acknowledged his prolific output as a translator of Spanish authors, notably Cervantes and Quevedo. More controversially, in Pat Rogers’s fascinating study of the literary underclass in London during the age of Pope and Swift, he is ignominiously—and, I shall argue, unjustly—indexed under the heading ‘Dunces and their allies’.

In late December 1585, the abbey of Saint-Victor, on the south-eastern-edge of Paris, played host to a group of English Catholics. The journal of Guillaume Cotin, the community’s librarian, tells us that the English arrived in the run-up to the feast of the martyrdom of Saint Thomas of Canterbury. The feast itself, on 29 December, was marked by a high mass sung in honour of the saint, with a sermon [service] in English. Several supplementary masses were also celebrated by English priests. Apparently, in order to attend these celebrations, ‘English Catholics came in very great multitude’.

This article explores how communities of female religious within the English sphere of influence in Ireland negotiated their survival, firstly in the aftermath of the Henrician dissolution campaigns of the late 1530s and 1540s and thereafter down to the early 1640s. It begins by examining the strategies devised by women religious in order to circumvent the state’s proscription of vocational living in the aftermath of the Henrician suppression campaigns. These ranged from clandestine continuation of conventual life to the maintenance of informal religious vows within domestic settings. It then moves on to consider the modes of migration and destinations of Irish women who, from the late sixteenth century onwards, travelled to the Continent in pursuit of religious vocations, an experience they shared with their English counterparts. Finally, it considers how the return to Ireland from Europe of Irish Poor Clare nuns in 1629 signalled the revival of monastic life for women religious on the island. The article traces the importance of familial and clerical patronage networks to the ongoing survival of Irish female religious communities and highlights their role in sustaining Catholic devotional practices, which were to prove vital to the success of the Counter-Reformation mission in seventeenth-century Ireland.

This paper is concerned primarily with the people who sheltered and helped in various ways the priests without whom Catholicism could not have survived in Elizabethan England. The Marian priests were, of course, the first who needed harbouring, and some of them continued to be protected by the laity to the end of Elizabeth's reign and beyond. From 1574 the seminary priests began to come to this country, and in due course they as well as the Jesuits were singled out for special treatment as far as harbouring was concerned. In the fifteen-eighties and the fifteen-nineties the number of seminary priests at work in England seems to have fluctuated between 120 and 150 in any one year. The Elizabethan Jesuits active in this country were never more than three or four in any one year in the fifteen-eighties, and rarely more than twelve in the fifteen-nineties. Compared with the surviving Marian priests and the seminary priests, the Jesuits were very few, but they have left a great deal on record relating to harbouring, and historians sometimes give the impression that they organised the whole business.

Rome’s decision to name an archpriest and to erect a highly irregular administrative structure, the archpresbyterate, surprised secular clergy and Jesuits who had advocated the establishment of bishops. Recent tension between Jesuits and secular clergy highlighted the need and importance of an hierarchical, ecclesiological office. But the appointment was made in such a way that some secular clergy questioned its legitimacy and authenticity. Until they ascertained that the decision had in fact been made by the pope, they withheld recognition of the archpriest. As they awaited a reply to their appeal, two Appellants, John Colleton and William Clarke, debated the matter with two Jesuit supporters of the archpriest, Henry Garnet and Edward Oldcorne who apparently failed to see the canonical issue involved, as they perceived anti-Jesuitism as the motivating factor.

John Bullaker, the author of the English Expositor, was the only son of William Bullaker, the noted grammarian and phonetist, and the father of the Venerable Thomas Bullaker, the Franciscan Martyr. Hitherto biographical information relating to John Bullaker has been hard to find, but the fact that he was a Catholic has meant that it has been possible to discover a certain amount about his career and whereabouts from the harassment he received from the ecclesiastical and civil authorities, because of his persistent recusancy. A study of his presentments for recusancy in the Act Books of the Deans of Chichester; the Detection Books; and the Miscellaneous Papers of the Consistory Court, in the Diocesan Record Office at Chichester, has brought to light a great deal of fresh information about the life of John Bullaker.

[This article by the late David Rogers was written in 1982. He later read it as a paper at the English Benedictine Congregation History Symposium at Worth Abbey in 1990 and it was subsequently reproduced in typescript as part of the proceedings. The article demands a wider audience and permission to publish it in ‘Recusant History’ has been kindly granted by Dom Gregory Scott O.S.B. and by the Friends of the Bodleian, who hold the copyright in David Rogers's work. A section of the article was elaborated and published as ‘Anthony Batt: A Forgotten Benedictine Translator’ in G.A.M. Janssens & F.G.A.M. Aarts (eds.): ‘Studies in Seventeenth Century English Literature, History and Bibliography’, Amsterdam, 1984]:

‘Father Persons’ has long been a legendary figure of controversy. We cannot even agree on the spelling of his name. Most of his contemporaries called him Parsons, especially if they were hostile, but his correspondence and other manuscript evidence make it quite clear he preferred Persons. The variant spellings would not affect the pronunciation of his name, but ‘Parsons’ is a reminder of the rumour that he was the bastard son of a Somerset parson. Parsons or Persons, he was notorious in his day as a traitorous plotter and irrepressible controversialist, but today he is virtually ignored by literary scholars. The story is told of a meeting in 1954, on a train from Cambridge to Oxford, between C. S. Lewis and A. L. Rowse. Rowse congratulated his fellow-traveller on the recent publication of his History of English Literature in the Sixteenth Century—a work that itself was to become, for other reasons, the centre of controversy—pausing only to register some surprise at his treatment of prose: ‘You praise Cardinal Allen, who is really negligible and wrote very little, but you do not even mention Robert Parsons, the Jesuit who wrote over thirty books and was one of the most considerable prose writers of the Elizabethan period. Why?’ To this piece of donnish one-upmanship, Lewis bluffed: ‘I did not think he was important enough to be included.’ He hadn't read Persons.

One of the problems left unresolved by historians who have treated of the troubled episcopate of Richard Smith concerns Smith’s claim to jurisdiction over the Catholic laity in England. Two questions have never been satisfactorily answered: What exactly was the nature of the jurisdiction that he claimed? and How did he set about trying to exercise it in practice? Anyone who has read the published histories that touch upon these questions will be aware that they aroused bitter and prolonged controversy but will have been left with no very clear idea of what Smith actually claimed the right to do and did.

In May 1629, the President of the English College at Douai, Matthew Kellison, published a book entitled: A treatiseofthe hierarchie and diuers orders of the church against theanarchie of Caluin. In spite of the title, the main purpose of the book was not to defend Catholic teaching on the hierarchy against Calvin. Kellison wrote it is in response to an urgent appeal by Richard Smith, Bishop of Chalcedon, at a crucial moment in Smith's episcopate. During the four years in which he had been in England as bishop, Smith had met with mounting opposition from the regulars and from the Catholic nobility and gentry. Opposition from the laity was greatly strengthened by the publication in 1628 of a work by the President General of the English Benedictine Congregation, Rudesind Barlow, maintaining that the papal brief appointing Smith in 1625, properly interpreted, did not grant him the extensive powers he claimed. What Smith was asking of Kellison in 1629 was not a work in support of his claims in detail—he intended to write that himself—but a general treatise addressed to the lay Catholics explaining the theological basis on which those claims rested. Kellison, as President of the English College and a theologian of international repute, was the ideal man for the task. ‘In these circumstances,’ Kellison a letter two years later, describing how his book came to be written, ‘the Bishop and leading members of the clergy wrote to me urging me to produce a book on the dignity and authority of bishops. Because of my respect for them, and also because of my love for my country, I consented …’

English devotional literature appears to me to be stamped as distincdy with its national origin as with each writer's individuality. The same sturdy independence, down-to-earth commonsense, quiet humour and unostentatious tenderness recur in Aelfric and Bede, Rolle and Dame Julian, More and Baker, Newman and Knox. Even Chrysostom and Bernard, à Kempis and Luis of Granada speak with unmistakably English voices in the popular manuals compiled from continental sources. Post-Reformation English spirituality too, whether Catholic or Protestant, retains continuity with that of the Middle Ages. Solidly rooted in this native tradition is the work of John Gother (d.1704). His sixteen volumes of instructions, meditations and prayers justify study, not only for their intrinsic merit but also as samplings from which to trace the ‘English Way’ of devotion in much the same manner in which, some years ago, an ‘English Way’ of sanctity was analyzed through biographies of Mary Ward and other saintly English men and women, canonized and uncanonized.

The lesson of the Popish Plot, that the law was almost powerless against perjury, was widely applied in political accusations, administrative disputes and criminal prosecutions, particularly in the 1690s when so many former Exclusionists were in office or Parliament. MPs such as John Arnold, who had employed suborned evidence against the Monmouthshire Jesuits in attempting to overthrow the pro-Catholic Marcher magnate, the Duke of Beaufort, found it too good a weapon not to use in every-day politics. The Catholics, however, were not the main sufferers; the destruction of their Court party at the Revolution made them comparatively insignificant. Oates's successors, remembering the impunity with which he had attacked the Queen, James and Danby, laid their charges of treason against ministers or opposition leaders. However, one late offshoot of the Plot has caused some difficulties in Catholic history; it is another reminder that the compilers of the official records combined ignorance with their anti-Catholicism, holding with one judge during the Plot, that ‘They have such secret contrivances among themselves … that where there are two men that positively tell you a thing that lies within their knowledge and swear it is true, it is scarce any improbability that should weigh against such an evidence’. Land or money given to ‘superstitious’ uses was legally forfeit to the Crown under the Chantries Act (1 Edw. VI, c.14), extended (by implication) to the support of foundations abroad under 27 Eliz., c.2, sect. 4 The official findings in this decade are so odd that usually they have wisely been ignored; yet local historians can be deceived or confused. This investigation provides a full explanation and a glimpse of the Catholic underworld on which anti-Catholicism largely depended.

In the seventeenth century, one of the Catholic strongholds of Britain had lain on the southern Welsh borders, in those areas of north Monmouthshire and southern Herefordshire dependant on the Marquis of Worcester at Raglan, and looking to the Jesuit mission at Cwm. Abergavenny and Monmouth had been largely Catholic towns, while the north Monmouthshire countryside still merited the attention of fifteen priests in the 1670s—after the Civil Wars, and the damaging conversion to Protestantism of the heir of Raglan in 1667. Conspicuous Catholic strength caused fear, and the ‘Popish Plot’ was the excuse for a uniquely violent reaction, in which the Jesuit mission was all but destroyed. What happened after that is less clear. In 1780, Berington wrote that ‘In many [counties], particularly in the west, in south Wales, and some of the Midland counties, there is scarcely a Catholic to be found’. Modern histories tend to reflect this, perhaps because of available evidence. The archives of the Western Vicariate were destroyed in a riot in Bath in 1780, and a recent work like J. H. Aveling's The Handle and the Axe relies heavily on sources and examples from the north of England. This attitude is epitomised by Bossy's remark on the distribution of priests in 1773: ‘In Wales, the mission had collapsed’. However, the question of Catholic survival in eighteenth-century Wales is important. In earlier assessments of Catholic strength (by landholding, or number of recusants gaoled as a proportion of population) Monmouthshire had achieved the rare feat of exceeding the zeal of Lancashire, and Herefordshire was not far behind. If this simply ceased to exist, there was an almost incredible success for the ‘short, sharp’ persecution under Charles II. If, however, the area remained a Catholic fortress, then recent historians of recusancy have unjustifiably neglected it.

In an article published in The Month in 1908 Charles Plater claimed that there were three pressing needs which had to be met if English Catholic social action were to develop fruitfully. He admitted that there was no shortage of charitable institutions, and a long English Catholic tradition of charitable work, but claimed that in the main Catholics were apathetic when it came to social work. The three needs were, firstly, a need for experts, both clerical and lay, who could produce a sound social literature. These experts would form a Catholic equivalent of the British Institute of Social Service, to command the best advice and to foster local initiatives; with its help, Catholics could join in such bodies as anti-sweating leagues, housing schemes, temperance campaigns, and so on, and be sure of their ground. Secondly, there was a need for organised social study in all Catholic educational establishments, and for more or less informal study circles, so that interested and informed laypeople would be produced. Thirdly, there was a need to organise working-men’s study clubs to enable working-class Catholics to hold their own against socialist colleagues and so to form labour leaders. As Plater was to stress time and time again, working-men could only be reached by working-men. They would, he claimed, welcome the sense of power gained by this training and the self-improvement effected by it.