The register of the Hill Chapel, Goosnargh, Lancashire, from 1777 to 1856 was published in C.R.S. 31, with historical notes by the Rev. R. L. Smith. Amongst the Hill Chapel papers deposited at the Lancashire Record Office in May 1956 by the Rev. A. Richardson are two foolscap sheets recording baptisms between 1770 (when the chapel was founded) and 1777.

This article examines the vernacular translations of the famous catechisms prepared by the Dutch Jesuit Peter Canisius which circulated in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Britain. The various editions and adaptations of Canisius produced for English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish readers are texts in which anti-Protestant identity formation converges with the task of basic indoctrination. These include Laurence Vaux’s popular catechism of 1567, the traditionalist character of which is reassessed. Shedding light on the reception and domestication of the literature of the European Counter Reformation, these books illustrate how catechesis was revived and harnessed as a clerical tool for cultivating polemical resistance and as a device for inculcating saving knowledge and redeeming piety in those young in faith as well as in years. Recusant clergy, seminary priests and Jesuits tackled the task of restoring England to its traditional allegiance to Rome as if they were planting the faith in a pagan land and they utilised the same techniques and strategies as their colleagues in the newly discovered world. A study of Canisius’s catechisms highlights the fluid boundary between conversion and reconciliation in contemporary minds; illuminates the intertwining of the histories of evangelical mission and confessionalisation in the context of the British Isles; and helps to reintegrate minority Catholic communities back into our picture of the global movement for religious outreach and renewal.

In the reign of Elizabeth I we find Christopher Maire of the family of Maire or Meire in Cheshire married to a Moresby of Cumberland and living in the city of Durham. In 1572 he bought the manor of Hutton in the parish of Monkhesledon of William Wyvell of Patrick Brompton in Yorkshire; some years later he made the further purchase, from Robert Aske, of Hardwick-by-the-Sea, in the same parish.

When the subject of German Liberal Catholicism is raised alongside Gladstone's name, one is initially directed to the Munich historian and theologian, Ignaz von Döllinger (1799–1890). Few biographies of Gladstone omit a description of his first meeting with the German historian on September 30, 1845. The initial contact between the two men was certainly significant in Gladstone's career, but what is often not related is the full context of that meeting. Too often the incident is framed by their later meeting and correspondence, the Vaticanism controversies, and Döllinger's own opposition to the declaration of papal infallibility. At the end of his career, Gladstone himself interpreted their relationship in light of their later association, writing: ‘Nothing ever so much made me anglican versus Roman as reading in Döllinger over forty years ago the history of the fourth century and Athanasius contra mundum.’

Since Henry Foley in 1877 published extensive extracts from a set of letters purporting to have been written from London to correspondents in Venice, between January 1601 and April 1603, ‘by Anthony Rivers S.J.’, a ‘socius of Fr. Henry Garnet S.J.’, historians have found these letters valuable evidence concerning Queen Elizabeth’s declining days, the government’s secret involvement in the Appellant controversy within the Catholic priesthood (1597–1602), the ‘inch thick’ paint reference in Hamlet, the possible originating circumstances of Twelfth Night, and other matters. But no Jesuit Anthony Rivers has ever been found, and Jesuit historians have speculated about the letter-writer’s identity: Philip Caraman at one time took him to be Fr. Anthony Hoskins S.J., and Francis Edwards recently argued for Fr. Henry Floyd S.J. But Hoskins was not sent to England until 1603, and Floyd was in prison for much of the time when the letters were retailing, in a weekly rhythm, many pages of first-hand observations of events in the Court and Council, sometimes if not always in three near-identical versions dispatched simultaneously to three separate addressees.

Very little attention has been given to the bibliography of the English Franciscans in penal times though their literary output was considerable in relation to their numbers. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that, as far as the English Province is concerned, Franciscan bibliography begins and ends with Luke Wadding in the seventeenth century. The elementary processes of collecting and sifting evidence have not been carried out, since Wadding’s time, and in the few later works of reference which mention individual Franciscan writings there is a great deal of confusion. I shall try, in the present study, to record what evidence there is concerning English books by members of the order between 1559 and 1640 and I shall add some notes on other books which have Franciscan associations. A number of English versions of Franciscan works in other languages were made during this period by Englishmen who were not themselves Franciscans. Some of them present bibliographical prob1ems which I cannot profess to answer, but it seems desirable that whatever evidence exists concerning them should he published.

Henry Hawkins deserves to be remembered if only because he lived to be an old man. After more than twenty-five years of active but unostentatious service as a Jesuit priest in the London area, he died on 14 August 1646 at the House of the English Tertian Fathers in Ghent, aged about seventy years. But apart from the achievement of keeping his body intact and relatively free for a quarter of a century on the English Mission, Hawkins should be known, too, for his literary works—two original and six substantial translations from Latin, French and Italian. From the earliest days of the English Catholic struggle for survival, the particular need of the isolated English ‘Papists’ for spiritual reading in order to sustain faith, had been recognized and many attempts were made to meet it. For Catholics at home, largely deprived of sacraments, worship and instruction through homily, it was one of the only ways of keeping in touch with the Church's devotional life and one of the few channels of encouragement. Hawkins's work is not apologetical; he does not try to supply the need for doctrinal instruction nor does he in any way enter the dogmatic or political conflict.

The Catholic clergy in post-Reformation England have often, it must be confessed, behaved more like flamingoes than croquet mallets, especially in the seemingly endemic disputes between the secular priests and the regulars. Some men are islands, and because Richard Smith was one of these, the dispute that centred on his personality became a precedent for at least one major quarrel that followed it. This being so, it may be worth recording the fact that the Benedictines, not the Jesuits, had the dusty glory of assuming the lion's share of opposition to the Bishop for the first five years of this dispute.

The Smith dispute itself was not without parentage, for its antecedents go back to the Appellant conflict of the 1590s, to the controversy between a section of the secular clergy and the Jesuits over the Oath of Allegiance (1606) and to the demand for the creation of bishops in England (1607-23). A party among the Benedictines favoured the Oath, against the Jesuits, and other monks supported the plea for bishops. But in time the Benedictine majority committed itself against the Oath. And in 1611-12 there was a curious anticipation of the Smith affair, in which high words were exchanged between Archpriest George Birkhead and Thomas Preston (for the Cassinese Benedictines) concerning the jurisdiction of the former over a delinquent monk. But the Anglo-Spanish monks supported Birkhead.

In the Folger Library in Washington is a large folio manuscript which Dr. James McManaway has recently established as compiled “by some one deeply interested in the affairs of Essex, perhaps by one of his clerks.” The identification of the clerk has yet to be made; a note in the top left corner of the manuscript's front cover “Die Veneris Julii 1, 1601 per me Ricardum Greeneum” is a promising lead, but a Richard Green has not as yet been discovered among the extant records concerning the Earl of Essex. Dr. Mc Manaway writes of this manuscript's contents as follows :

Searching for a phrase to describe the Spirit of the Age, the mid-Victorian writer might choose the ‘Age of Education’, or perhaps the ‘Age of Transition’; but Wilkie Collins preferred ‘The Age of the Periodical’. The high–status periodical, and education itself, could be seen as motive forces, determining, shaping, announcing and ushering in the ‘Age of Transition’. For the Liberal Catholics ofThe Rambler, the ‘Age of Transition’ could be an ‘Age of Opportunity’, witnessing the start of the reconversion of England; or it could be an ‘Age of Danger’, witnessing the slide of England into overt infidelity. Of the two motive forces, even the most complacent and self-satisfied review writer would admit the greater to be Education.

In any study of the pamphlet literature of the later years of the reign of James VI & I it becomes impossible to distinguish between the dislike felt by his subjects for the Spanish ambassador, Don Diego Sarmiento de Acuña, Count Gondomar (1617), and disgust at any proposed alignment between England and Spain. It is clear that hatred for Spain was so deeply ingrained in the English psyche that it could be revived at any time and, if proof of this is needed, one only has to examine the anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic propaganda literature which flourished around the time of the proposed ‘Spanish Match’. In the first instance this paper will discuss the genre in general and this will be followed by a more detailed examination of the work of Thomas Scott and Thomas Middleton.

This paper is a sequel to ‘The Pakingtons of Harvington’ by Lionel and Veronica Anderton Webster, which was published in Recusant History in April 1974. There they only had room to discuss in detail the century between the purchase of Chaddesley Corbett and Harvington by Sir John Pakington in 1529 and the death in 1631 of his great-nephew Humphrey III, who had built the Elizabethan Hall with its remarkable priest-holes and wall-paintings. In continuing the story I have had invaluable help from the Websters’ genealogical and legal notes, which Veronica passed on to me in the summer of 1991, the year before her death; but their references have been checked, a great deal has been added, and the structure, the inferences and any errors are mine. The paper therefore appears under my name with these acknowledgements, rather than as a joint publication. I hope that in due course the trilogy can be completed by another paper on The Throckmortons of Harvington, 1696–1923’.

The 2nd. Viscount Montague, like his grandfather before him, was the recipient of several literary dedications. His material circumstances as a wealthy Sussex landowner, and his spiritual significance as one of the foremost Catholic peers, made him an appropriate patron for a number of writers at the beginning of the seventeenth century. At the same time, Montague was a well-known distributor of Catholic books, and a benefactor of ‘three score and six costly great volumes in folio all bought of set purpose and fayrly bound with his Armes’ to that ‘bulwark of extreme Protestantism’ the Bodleian Library.

This article compares and contrasts the 1580 texts A briefe discours contayning certayne reasons why Catholiques refuse to goe to Church by Robert Persons, and Gwssanaeth y Gwŷr Newydd by Robert Gwyn. Both books deal with church papism, and were written whilst the authors were in Rome together. Despite the simi-larity of theme, and the fact that the two most likely consulted each other about the work, many significant differences remain between the two texts. This article seeks to discuss these differences, and to assess what conclusions can be inferred from them as to the relative conditions of English and Welsh Catholicism, and the effect that this had on the authors’ work.

In a list of influential persons of about the year 1574, in a section devoted to Catholics, occur the names of Sir Nicholas Poyntz and his wife. The name of Sir Nicholas Poyntz also occurs in a list, dated 1580, of Catholics who had been arrested or confined to their houses or to the houses of Protestants. Challoner, writing of James Fen, gives incidental information about Sir Nicholas: “James Fenn … having … lost his wife, betook himself to the service of Sir Nicholas Poyntz, an eminent Catholic gentleman, whom he served in quality of steward … A learned and pious priest, who used to frequent Sir Nicholas's house, taking notice of the excellent qualifications … of Mr. Fenn … advised him to quit that worldly employ and go over to Rheims to the English College … Mr. Fenn took the counsel … and went over to Rheims, where he was made priest … in 1580.” The College diary does not record the year of his arrival at Rheims, but his studies for the priesthood probably lasted some four years. Sir Nicholas was therefore entertaining, if not harbouring, a priest in about 1575.

This article examines the functional nature of English Benedictine poetry in order to understand the bespoke literary systems that flourished within convent settings. Even as form has emerged as a primary concern within scholarship on early modern women writers, so too are literary critics starting to show interest in the early modern convent as a site of literary production. Uniting these two scholarly strands, this article explores the formal implications of texts written by and for the six English Benedictine convents founded on the Continent during the early modern period. This analysis of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Benedictine poetics reveals that English cloisters on the Continent actively cultivated alternative approaches to textual production, developing monastic modes at odds with the secular literary system of the time. Poetry provides an ideal case study for this discussion of convent style due to its relatively high status among literary forms. By considering Benedictine theories of speech as well as the formal qualities of the verse that nuns read and wrote, this essay will outline how the English Benedictine convents on the Continent developed a distinctive literary system that rejected secular modes in favour of a poetics aligned with monastic humility.

In an article by Fr. W. K. L. Webb, S.J. in Biographical Studies (Recusant History) vol. 2, pp. 216 ff, Roger Widdrington of Cartington, Northumberland, has been adequately cleared of the misconception which identified him as the author of works put out, under the alias of Roger Widdrington, by Thomas Preston. There is no need, therefore, to dwell further upon this point. The object of the present study is to present a picture of the real Roger Widdrington.

He was born c. 1572, the second son of Edward Widdrington of Swinburne Castle, near Hexham, and Ursula Carnaby. His parents appear to have conformed, and it was as a Protestant that he visited Durham city one day in July 1594, to witness the execution of a seminary priest, now known to us as St John Boste.

‘When the hangman, pulling out Mr. Boast's heart, showed it to the crowd, with a “Behold the heart of a traitor”, a voice was heard to the effect: “No, the heart of a servant of God”. At which Mr. Widdrington of Cartington, who heard the voice, was so struck, that he was thereupon reconciled to the Church’. (Account of the Rev. Mr. Yaxley, which he received from Widdrington Castle.)

Many years ago there was published an English translation of La Persecution des Catholiques en Angleterre sous Charles II by the Comtesse R. de’Courson: a work which remains the only one devoted wholly to English Catholicism during that reign. Unfortunately, however, the title is misleading and the book is given up almost entirely to the two and a half years of the Popish Plot—not, in other words, to the reign of Charles II as a whole but merely to one-tenth of it—with the result that the reader is presented with an unbalanced and unduly depressing picture. A more judicious appraisal has been provided by a number of “background” works such as Archbishop Mathew's Catholicism in England, Mr. E. I. Watkin's Roman Catholicism in England from the Reformation to 1950 and, most recently, Miss. M. D. R. Leys's fascinating Catholics in England, 1529-1829, while an article published in The Dublin Review (Autumn, 1959) suggested that the pecuniary laws, so ferocious on paper, to which Catholics were theoretically subject, were in fact enforced only very spasmodically during the reign of Charles II. Clearly, in order to judge how rigorously the penal laws were enforced in Charles Il’s reign, it is necessary first to consider what exactly were these laws; to establish what was the legal position of the English Catholics at the Restoration and to discover what fresh enactments were passed in the course of the next twenty-five years. It is such an examination of the legal position of the English Catholics between 1660 and 1685 which will be attempted in the pages that follow.