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.

Hilaire Belloc re-invented Manning's social teaching as a new political philosophy that shortly became known as Distributism. A tribute to his leadership by his close friend and fellow distributist, Gilbert Chesterton, reads that the world might one day wake up and find ‘a new democracy of distributists’:

Anthony Wood (1632–1695), the Oxford biographer and historian, was accused of being a ‘papist’ from the early 1670s until his death on 29 November 1695. These accusations were given credence because Wood had many Catholic friends and acquaintances; had a genuine affection for manuscripts and monuments of the pre-reformation past; wrote bio-bibliographies of many noteworthy Catholics who were graduates of Oxford colleges or were associated with the university; had a view of the reformation that Gilbert Burnet, later the bishop of Salisbury, saw as ‘unseemly’; and never joined any campaign against Catholics before or after James II reigned in Great Britain. This essay deals with Wood's relationships with Catholics and his attitude towards Catholicism.

The lifting of the ban on the attendance of Catholics at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge in 1895, although intended primarily for laymen, was soon extended and led to the establishment of St. Edmund's House, Cambridge, for the secular (diocesan) clergy and the opening of houses of study at Oxford for the Jesuits (1896) and Benedictines (1897). Many bishops, however, remained ambivalent in their attitude to these developments, fearing that secular universities were a danger to the faith and morals of Catholics, and insisted that laymen should be obliged to attend extra lectures or conferences in which ‘Philosophy, History, and Religion shall be treated with such amplitude and solidity as to furnish effectual protection against false and erroneous teaching’.

Ernest Oldmeadow, in the second volume of his biography—some have said hagiography—of Cardinal Bourne, begins the chapter in which he deals with the First World War with the following statement:

In early 1687, an unnamed Jesuit enthusiastically wrote to a colleague at the Jesuit college in Fribourg about the influence of the Society of Jesus at the court of King James II, and of the wonderful progress of Catholicism in the kingdom. The letter merits re-publication:

A career in business was one of the few outlets open to Catholics in eighteenth century London, yet among such businessmen only Thomas Mawhood, the Smithfield woollen draper, and the publisher J. P. Coghlan have been studied in any depth. Bryant Barrett, who will be the subject of this article, is in a different category. His contacts with the wider world of Georgian society allowed him to cross boundaries of class and religion, and although he made his considerable fortune by supplying high society with its luxury fashion accessories, his private life was marked by unostentatious piety and a practical Christian ethos inspired in part by his mentor Richard Challoner. Though his two marriages brought him within the fold of the Catholic gentry, and his wealth earned him the status of a country squire, he remained true to his origins.

Professor Birrell has remarked that there is ‘an extensive literature on how to describe a book, but there is no literature whatever on how to describe a library or a library catalogue’. Well, what follows is an account of a library in a Northumbrian-Catholic-Jacobite peer's house, not, admittedly, a common category but one having some cultural and recusant interest nevertheless.