On 23rd November, 1584, the fifth Parliament of Queen Elizabeth introduced a bill against “Jesuits, seminary priests and such other like disobedient persons,” which proposed to order all Catholic priests ordained since the feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist, 1559, to leave the country within forty days after the end of the current session of Parliament or suffer pain of death for high treason, their aiders and abettors to be adjudged felons and condemned to death as felons. This bill passed its third reading in the House of Commons on December 19, 1584, but it was not taken up by the House of Lords until after the Christmas recess.

Among the archives of the Archbishop of Westminster is a four-page list of ‘Persons of Quality’ and their chaplains and of other Mass-centres, riding-missions, etc. marked in pencil ‘between 1695 and 1710—c. 1701’ possibly because the latter was the year when the Catholic eighth Duke of Norfolk, who heads the list, succeeded to the title. It is, however, possible to assign a more accurate date to this document, i.e. between 14 September 1704 when Sir Henry Arundell Bedingfield—born in 1689 and marked ‘yet minor’ in the list—succeeded to the baronetcy and 11 May 1706 when Lord Carrington died without issue. It may be that further investigation can narrow down the date still further. The document gives no indication of the purpose for which it was compiled though the tenor of its final page suggests that it was drawn up by a secular priest, probably a member of the Old Chapter. The contents of the document are summed-up in a note added in a later hand at the end: ‘This paper tells whether the family was served by a clergyman, that is a secular priest or by a regular viz. a Jesuit (underlined) or a Monk or a Friar’.

‘Ireland was the only country where the Counter-Reformation succeeded against the will of the head of state.’ Why was this? Obviously, the English Government's neglect of education and the Catholic clergy's awareness of its importance was one reason. Obviously, too, the Counter-Reformation got under way in Ireland before the Reformation made a religious impact. Again, the quality of the reformed clergy sent to Ireland was poor and they made little effort to learn Gaelic or to translate the scriptures into the national language until very late in the century. But perhaps most important of all is the fact that in Gaelic Ireland the Reformation was inextricably linked with the expropriation of lands and the abolition of traditional rights and customs. Hence, defence of one's land and of one's religion became so intertwined as to be almost inseparable; and this, I suspect, rather than any appreciation of theological distinctions, was decisive. A number of the clergy of the Counter-Reformation, most of them educated in the Irish colleges on the Continent, were at pains not only to underline the ‘heresies’ in the new teaching and to instruct the people in the spirit of Tridentine Catholicism, but also to link the struggle against the ‘gall’, the English conqueror, with the European religious struggle.

CHRISTOPHER HILL'S Economic Problems of the Church from Archbishop Whitgift to the Long parliament’ has long been the standard work on the financial composition of the post-Reformation English church. Over the past fifteen years, however, historians have taken a second look at the material covered by Hill and have begun to formulate new questions about it. Historians such as Felicity Heal and Rosemary O'Day have led new investigations into the economic conditions of the English church. Despite this renewed interest, no one has tackled the more difficult subject of recusant finances. Here is a world hidden behind aliases and secret trusts and one that remains almost totally unexplored. In a series of articles to appear in this journal, I shall venture ‘where angels fear to tread’ and attempt to make sense out of the complicated and confusing records of Jesuit financial activity. This article, which will serve as an introduction to the series, will be concerned with the constitutional development of the Society of Jesus, the spiritual exhortations to poverty as an evangelical counsel and a religious vow, and the legal entanglements of the penal laws in England. It is essential to remember that, first and foremost, the English Jesuits were religious bound by vows, specifically the vow of poverty. All financial activities and investments were restricted by that vow as it was then understood throughout the Society. Future articles will examine the income and the investments of the early Jesuit mission and its eventual subdivision into colleges and residences.

Among the most prominent Lincolnshire families in Tudor and Jacobean times were the Tyrwhitts of Kettleby and Twigmore. Other Lincolnshire branches of the family were seated at Scotter, Cammeringham and Stainfield. The Victoria County History of Lincolnshire says, ‘To follow various members of the Tyrwhitt family, whose names re-appear from first to last in connexion with Romanist sympathy, is to trace the history of recusancy in the county.’ But some important parts of the history of the Kettleby Tyrwhitts have been confused or overlooked by historians, and the record should be corrected. Here we shall focus on one of the sons of Sir Robert Tyrwhitt of Kettleby, a son who died in prison in 1580. In a further article we will identify a grandson of Sir Robert who gave John Gerard SJ much financial support from about 1598 until Gerard left England in 1606.

In 1850, during its first year of publication, Notes and Queries printed the enquiry of one ‘J.M.’, who asked for information about a treatise of equivocation to which he had found reference in a seventeenth-century book. A number of replies in subsequent issues provided bits of information about the treatise, and called attention to a manuscript copy in the Bodleian. This flurry of items in Notes and Queries seems to have prompted David Jardine (1794-1860), who later wrote a history of the Gunpowder Plot, to prepare an edition of the treatise, which was published in 1851. Jardine composed a preface, but since he could not establish who had written the work, and was not optimistic that the matter would ever be clarified, his account is far from complete. There did, however, exist documents that could identify the author, and exactly 100 years after the appearance of Jardine's edition, an article by A. F. Allison showed conclusively that the treatise had been written by Father Henry Garnet, S.J. Since the treatise played a significant part in the history of ‘equivocation’ in England, and was a subject of controversy at the time of the Gunpowder Plot, I believe it will be useful to provide an account of what is now known about the work.

In the Royal Library of Belgium in Brussels is a manuscript which consists of over two hundred closely-written folios of English translations of Jesuit letters from Japan, or Japonia as it was then called, introduced with a prologue by the compiler ‘G.C.’, hinting fairly heavily that the translations were made in prison. Until recently rebound, the manuscript bore a Latin inscription on the pastedown, stating: ‘This book belongs to the English Benedictine Monastery of the Assumption of Our Lady in Brussels’. Although the contents of the volume are of interest in their own right, the concern of this article is with two men, Gabriel Colford and George Cotton, who have little in common except the initials ‘G.C.’ and the experience of imprisonment for religion.

The English seminary of St. Alban Valladolid in Spain has an up to date theological library with books in both Spanish and English. As an establishment dating back to 1589 it also possesses many books of antiquarian interest. The older books belonging to the college owe their present arrangement to Edwin Henson. During World War II as Rector he was for several years the only permanent resident in the college and he spent much of his time cataloguing and indexing the archives and library. There are two rooms: the eighteenth century style Biblioteca or Big Library with 6765 volumes and the smaller enclosed repository known as the Pigskin Library (Biblioteca de Piel) containing 2881 volumes.

On 13 December 1605 there appeared in Durham Consistory Court before William James, the dean of Durham, and William Morton, John Barnes, and Robert Cooper, justices of the peace, the first of five witnesses in a trial which resulted from the Gunpowder Plot of 5 November 1605. The case concerned a recusant Catholic, Eleanor Jackson, the wife of Thomas Jackson of Bishop Auckland. The trial and tragic end of this unknown woman are of especial interest since they point to the intense search to uncover as many plotters as possible after the discovery of the Plot. Eleanor's unhappy story serves to emphasize both the fear which gripped the country and the hysteria which swept all England and enveloped the innocent or foolish in the aftermath of the Plot.

The Archpriest Controversy, a dispute that took place from 1598 to 1602 over the necessity for an archpriest to enforce moral discipline among the English Catholic clergy, has been traditionally seen either as a struggle for hierarchical order within the Catholic Church or a serious ideological breach between the Jesuit faction and the Appellants. In contrast to recent historiography, this paper argues that the Appellants, secular clergy that opposed the archpriest, represented views of conservative English Catholics who believed they could reconcile their political loyalty to their monarch with their Catholicism. The Archpriest Controversy should be reconsidered as a critical moment in a chain of important events from the English Mission of 1580–81 to the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 that reaffirmed the inherently traditionalist nature of the Catholic community in England.

It is understandable that study of Southwell’s life should have had priority over the study of his poetry. This biographical bias is evident in the gaps and weaknesses of existing accounts of his poetry: shortcomings which, I would argue, are regrettable because his poetry could provide a better commentary on his life than the conventional assumptions of hagiography. His Latin poetry, which forms a substantial portion of his poetic output, has been overlooked both in Leicester Bradner’s history of Anglo-Latin poetry, and the more recent upsurge in Neo-Latin studies. A different kind of ignorance surrounds his English poetry. In his poetic masterpiece, ‘Saint Peters Complaint’, Southwell describes Christ’s glance as ‘In cyphred words, his misteries disclosing’. (The words are cyphered because they are zeroes, circles projected from Christ’s eyes. They are also cyphered in being encoded in an image.) The description may be aptly applied to the poem which also consists of ‘cyphered words’. The poem’s code is not difficult to penetrate, but nevertheless this essay represents the first attempt to give an account of the ‘high mysteries’ that it at once conceals and discloses; that is, to elucidate the cryptic aspect of the poem. This gap in the secondary literature exemplifies a more general charge that can be levelled against writers on Southwell: that they have tended to deprecate the mannerism or artifice of his work as somehow detracting from his sanctity, Typically, they present it as an external trapping or disguise which must be discarded in order to reveal the true, natural Southwell. I would maintain, however, that artifice is central to Southwell’s poetry, his conception of religion, and his life.

The Protestant societies engaged in evangelizing the Irish in London were mostly staffed by laymen, but had the enthusiastic aid and counsel of the Evangelical clergy, and were only some of the institutional strands in the Evangelical Vicar's encounter with urban poverty from the early 1830s, as the Evangelical urban parish was divided into units of manageable size, and developed lay forms of district-visiting to bring under parochial supervision the huge urban slum populations: or, as the Evangelicals put it themselves, as they brought a remedy to the material and spiritual destitution of the great godless cities, and to London, the greatest and least godly of any. The lay societies needed clerical approval, patronage and protection, and the Evangelical clergy worked as hard as their laymen.

Mary’s endeavours to restore Catholicism in England have attracted much scholarly attention and not a little controversy, primarily because of her bloody response to the scale and persistence of the Protestant challenge she faced there. Her endeavours in Ireland, by contrast, have been relatively overlooked. Yet the Marian restoration in Ireland ought to be recognised as an integral part of Mary’s religious programme for her dominions. It offers interesting points of comparison for the implementation of the queen’s programme in England, and it was significant in its own right, not as a decisive watershed but, as a time when religious controversies were crystallised and definite decisions were made that proved significant in the subsequent survival of Catholicism as the religion of the people of Ireland.

After 1571 Catholic sacred objects were outlawed in England, and the possession of such objects could be prosecuted under the statute of praemunire. Despite this prohibition sacred objects including rosaries, blessed beads, and the agnus dei (wax pendants blessed by the pope) remained a critical part of Catholic devotion. This article examines the role of the agnus dei in English Catholic communities and the unique political connotations it acquired during the reign of Elizabeth I. It assesses the uses of these sacramentals in Catholic missions to England, their reception amongst Catholics, and the political significance of the agnus dei in light of the papal excommunication of Elizabeth I in 1570.

Bernard Burder, Abbot of the Cistercian Abbey of Mount St Bernard's, Leicestershire, from 1853 to 1858 is largely forgotten today; but for a few years in the middle of the last century his activities were important, and to a considerable extent, anticipated those of Archbishop Manning in the field of reformatory education. Burder's spiritual progress was similar to Newman's: he began life as a nonconformist, was then converted to Anglicanism and finally joined the Catholic Church one year after Newman. That same year, 1846, he entered Mount St Bernard's and on the death of its first Abbot, Dom Bernard Palmer, in 1853, was, in December of that year, elected to succeed him.

‘I acknowledge this Doctrine is not commonly received by Protestants, who (I humbly conceive) might reject it chiefly in opposition to the See of Rome, wherein such a multitude of monsters do swim…’ This is how the Congregationalist divine, Robert Dingley (1619-1660) summarized the characteristic Protestant attitude to the Roman Catholic belief in guardian angels in the preface to The Deputation of Angels, or The Angel-Guardian (1654, Wing D 1496).

It was in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries that colleges were first established in the Iberian Peninsula for the provision of Catholic priests to serve on the English mission. The first to be opened was at Valladolid in 1589; this ‘was followed by Seville in 1592 and Madrid in 1611. They were supported by the alms of the faithful, taken under the protection of the Spanish Crown, and administered by the Society of Jesus. Smaller establishments, residences, were in existence at Lisbon and San Lucar de Barrameda (near Cadiz) serving as points of entry and departure for students and priests on their journeys between Spain and England. Eventually, in 1622, a College was established at Lisbon but from the beginning, this college differed from the others in that it was always administered by the English secular clergy and not by the Jesuits. The golden age of the Spanish colleges was in the first fifty or sixty years of their existence when they not only provided many missioners, including martyrs, but also exercised a political influence on the English Catholic scene by reason of their Jesuit administration and their situation in Spain. However, by the eighteenth century a decline had set in. There were complaints about the administration, and the recruitment of students was low so that few missioners returned to work in England. In fact, between 1739 and 1756 the College at Valladolid was closed to students while rebuilding took place. Partly because of the poor recruitment and partly because of their antipathy to the Jesuits, the Vicars Aṕostolic were dissatisfied and almost lost interest in these three colleges, relying on the establishments at Douai and Lisbon which were under the direction of the seculars.

Several books of Catholic origin enjoyed wide circulation among Protestant readers in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Such works were commonly subjected to editorial revision to suit Protestant sensibilities; a famous instance is Edmund Bunny's adaptation of Robert Persons’ The First Booke of the Christian Exercise, apperfeyning to resolution (1582). An instance less known but no less interesting is the Protestantized version of Robert Southwell's Short Rule of Good Life issued in 1620 by the London publisher William Barrett.

What a change has taken place in the general opinion in this Country with regard to Catholics, especially Priests, since the arrival of the emigrant Clergy! Their Conduct has been so exemplary—people who had been taught to consider them as the worst of characters begin now to be persuaded they are good Christians, and many own they had been much imposed on by their teachers with respect to the morals of Catholics—I doubt not many conversions will be wrought in consequence—at a little town we have many of these unfortunate people, if I may so style them, who suffer in so good a cause, whose sole defence is on providence—yet are in want of nothing so abundant as the charities they receive in all parts—in which I cannot but admire the goodness of God who abandons not those who quit all for his sake.