In between those two great humanist lawyers and lord chancellors, Sir Thomas More and Sir Francis Bacon, it may be maintained without undue exaggeration that there is a wide gap, even a yawning chasm, in the understanding of all too many scholars concerning the intellectual history of what has come to be known as ‘Early Modern England’. When we ask whose were the main intellectual and spiritual influences on the minds of Englishmen during the period, the names commonly offered for consideration are mostly those of foreigners such as Machiavelli and Montaigne, Erasmus and Rabelais, Luther and Calvin—if in English translation. Closer to home may be added the names of More himself, his adversary William Tyndale, John Foxe with his Book of Martyrs, and Richard Hooker with his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity.

The Darell family history provides a good illustration of the confused and conflicting religious loyalties in sixteenth and seventeenth century England. There were four branches of the family in southern England, all originally descended from William Darrell of Sesay, Yorkshire, in the early fifteenth century. The Pagham and Fulmere branches descended from William of Littlecote; the Calehill branch from John of Calehill by his first wife; and the Scotney branch from John of Calehill by his second wife, niece and heiress of Archbishop Chichele, who owned Scotney Castle. In this paper I am mainly concerned with the Calehill branch. Burton, in his life of Bishop Challoner, stated ‘they were always Catholics’ and he was followed by McGurk, but the head of the Calehill branch was not in fact a recusant until after 1694. From that time they were consistently Catholic.

Of the forty-two clandestine Catholic schools Beales lists as documented in the first quarter of the seventeenth century, none has been more graphically described or frequently recalled than the Jesuit school at Stanley Grange near West Hallam in south-east Derbyshire. Unmasked by Government in 1625, it survived there for a further decade before its abrupt suppression in 1635.

A few deliberately but tantalizingly vague references show that the school continued to operate on a small scale elsewhere in Derbyshire, under the aegis of the fledgling Jesuit College of the Immaculate Conception (CIC). From that time, and particularly since the foundation of Mount St. Mary’s College at Spinkhill by the CIC in 1842, there has been speculation as to whither this precursor school moved and how it fared after Stanley Grange. The most recent contribution is a significant reassessment by Hendrik Dijkgraaf in 2003 of the anonymous but painstaking editorial article in the Mount St. Mary’s magazine The Mountaineer for 1912, written in rebuttal of a suggestion that the school had remained at Stanley Grange into the mid-1640s.

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’.

The English Catholic apologist John Heigham (1568–1632) deserves to be better known in light of the significant historical consequences of his efforts in the field of Catholic apologetics. Heigham’s tract, The Gagge of the Reformed Gospel (1623) accused the Reformed Church in England of heresy and innovation and summoned the readers back to the Roman Catholic Church. This work was answered by Richard Montagu (1577–1641), the future bishop of Chichester and Norwich in his book, A New Gagg for an Old Goose (1624). Montagu’s book provoked a storm of controversy within the Church of England because the author simultaneously replied to Heigham’s Catholic arguments and attacked Calvinism within the Church of England, which he labelled ‘Puritanism’. A series of books attacking Montagu were then published by English Calvinists who accused Montagu of popery and of betrayal of the Reformed cause. These disputes contributed to the Calvinist/Arminian division within the Anglican Church, a religious controversy that was one of the contributing causes of the English Civil War. Thus the seed planted by Heigham’s tract grew into a forest of religious controversies and ended in a war. This article summarizes the content of Heigham’s tract and the principal ideas of his Catholic apologetics, after recounting the main events of Heigham’s little known life. Then Montagu’s response will be surveyed and the reactions it spawned.

Recent discussion about confessional divisions in England before the Civil War concerns questions of toleration, loyalty, and politics. While the historiography of early modern Catholicism concentrates on matters of persecution, Michael Questier has demonstrated that the Catholic community in England was not as powerless, leaderless and frustrated as some have suggested. In particular, he portrays Anthony Browne, first Viscount Montague, as an influential Catholic who successfully projected a public persona of loyalism to a Protestant monarch. Catholic aristocrats faced a perpetual dilemma. On one hand they existed in confessional opposition to their monarch and society, on the other they were often servants of the Crown in their county or at Court and great landowners who seldom suffered complete social ostracism, or experienced the full penalties the law prescribed for Catholics. How did individual peers attempt to reconcile this paradox?

Few people today realise that Manchester was used in Elizabethan England as a place where obstinate recusants might be imprisoned both as a warning to others and in the hope that their conformity to the religious laws of the realm might be obtained. Three places were used to hold the captives. The first was the disused chapel on the only bridge that then existed between Manchester and Salford, the second was Radcliffe Hall or Pool Fold Lodge near the present day Cross Street Chapel, and the third was the House of Correction built between Hunt’s Bank and the sandstone bluff on which stood the former collegiate buildings, today the home of Chetham’s Library and world famous School of Music.

The Scottish Mission of the Jesuits was until the end of the eighteenth century entirely separate from the English Province with its own superior, houses on the continent and funds. Scottish candidates for the Society were educated at various houses in Europe. In the year 1729, for example, there were twelve missionaries in Scotland (plus one travelling and one in England), there were seven priests in the Scots College at Douai, two in Paris, three in the Scots College at Valladolid and one in Prague. About five were studying in preparation for ordination to the priesthood in the houses of various provinces of the Society, as were four novices. It was not a large mission—there were only thirty-nine members in that year. The last member of the old Scottish Jesuit mission, Fr. John Pepper, died in 1810. Occasionally, individual Scottish Jesuits worked in England or lived in the houses of the English Jesuits on the continent. One among these was Alexander Strachan.

Exorcism was an integral part of the post-Reformation Catholic mission in England and, from the late sixteenth century, an ideological battleground between Catholic and Protestant. As in the Gospels, the obedience of demons was seen as the ultimate sign and supernatural seal of religious authority. Exorcism, unlike other aspects of Catholic mission, often brought recusant priests into direct contact with non-catholics and provided an unparalleled opportunity for conversions.

In the course of efforts to gather together all the documentation relating to Fr. Ignatius Spencer C.P. (1799–1864) in connection with the process of beatification, references were encountered to a document entitled: Reflectiones Propositionesque Pro Fidelium Sanctificatione. To this date the paper has not been found. Ignatius had entered the Passionist Congregation on 21 December 1846, his birthday, and since he was already a priest, he was rapidly entrusted with positions of responsibility in the Congregation. The paper in question was one of his concerns in the years 1854–1857. In his writings, mention can be found of its composition, and of the reception it received from various people. It may be possible to reconstruct to some extent the content of the missing document, although the reason for its disappearance must remain an open question.

Robert Witham (1667–1738) was the seventh son of a prominent Yorkshire Catholic Recusant family. Little is known about his early life. He studied at Douay, where he was ordained a priest circa 1691, and remained as a teacher until circa 1698. He returned to England to serve as a priest in Cliffe and was promoted in 1711 to Vicar General of England’s Northern District. In 1714 he was appointed the twelfth president of Douay. He assumed the position in 1715 and remained there until his death. In administering Douay, he was faced with an unrelenting demand for the most resourceful diplomacy. He had to keep satisfied his superiors and benefactors in England and Rome, and deal with the liberalizing influences of French institutions. In addition, he was confronted with a series of financial crises, including the forfeiture of Catholic estates that followed the unsuccessful Stuart rising of 1715, followed by the ‘Mississippi Bubble’ that devastated the French economy and cost Douay most of its endowment. The frustrations of what he termed this ‘troublesome office’, caused him on three occasions to offer his resignation. Nonetheless, Witham proved to be one of Douay’s most successful presidents, sometimes considered its ‘second founder’, eliminating the College debt, increasing the number of students, and beginning an ambitious building programme.

One can reasonably argue that the founding of Maryland, one of the original thirteen colonies in the New World, was the result of the close relationship between the Calvert family and the Stuarts. George Calvert (c. 1580–1632) was the son of Leonard, a prosperous but obscure cattle farmer, and his wife Alicia (née Crossland), ‘living in the little Yorkshire village of Kiplin in the valley of the Swale’. Whether he was born Catholic is a matter of some dispute. He matriculated, however, as a commoner at Trinity College, Oxford when he was thirteen or fourteen, and all who matriculated had to accept the thirty-nine articles of the Established Church. He received his bachelor’s degree in 1597, following which he travelled to Europe as part of ‘the grand tour’ typical of English educated gentlemen. The MA Oxford degree was granted in 1605 ‘on the occasion of the first visit of the new king… The master’s degree was conferred upon forty-three candidates, including many members of the nobility.’

The accounts kept by Sir Nicholas Shireburn of Stonyhurst with his goldsmith for the years 1697–1702 and the following years show that he was paying for the education at St. Omers College of two Shireburn ‘nephews’, Charles and Richard or ‘Dick’. The exact relationship is not known, ‘sons of a poor relation’, ‘distant relations’, ‘connected with the Shireburnes of Stonyhurst but the exact connection is uncertain’. When Charles Shireburn died in 1745 The Gentleman’s Magazine stated that he was related to the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, Mary, daughter of Sir Nicholas Shireburn. The Extinct Baronetcies shows that some of the Shireburns of Stonyhurst in the sixteenth century had younger sons. Charles and Richard may have been descended from one of these.

For the best-selling periodical Once a Week, Harriet Martineau wrote a pot-boiling story in 1861 called ‘Sister Anna’s Probation’. It tells the tale of an English squire’s daughter who devotedly takes the veil and, against the backdrop of the Henrician Reformation, emerges after a reasonably decorous series of vicissitudes to marry the honourable beau, Captain Fletcher. Together, they rescue a certain footstool belonging to Anna that had been appropriated by the abbess. Inside that footstool was concealed the very bible from which Anna had gained her first sense of the futility of the convent life and the oppressions of the Roman Catholic religion.

Founded by William Allen in 1568 as a temporary haven for the English Catholic exiles, the English College at Douai, had given good service to the English Catholic community, but with the turmoil of Revolution, the execution of Louis XVI in January 1793, and the French declaration of war on England the following month, it became clear that the days of the College were numbered. Students, acting on advice from worried parents, made their way home to England as best they could. The story of these years is vividly preserved in a number of contemporary accounts. At first things went on generally as before: Douai was one of the last cities in the northern provinces of France to join the revolution but tension in the town was high. One of the first victims of the mob was the College printer, Charles Derbaix, a leading Douai bookseller who owned ‘The Golden Compasses’ (sub signo Circini aurei), in the Via Scholarum. Together with a local tradesman, accused of illicit dealings in corn, he was taken by the mob and hanged à la lanterne on suspicion of distributing loyalist propaganda.

In 1910 W. Gordon Gorman identified 572 clergymen of the Church of England who had become Catholics in the previous sixty years. Of this number a large proportion had gone on to seek ordination, but the marital status of many precluded this possibility. In addition to the sacrifices that married convert clergymen had to make, those without extensive private means were also faced with the necessity of earning their living and supporting their wives and children. This article charts the fortunes of one of their number, the difficult path to Rome, and his subsequent attempts to be of service to his new Communion.

During the second half of the eighteenth century the shipping industry of the port of Liverpool continued to expand, as it had done since about 1660, as the port’s trade increased and became more diversified, both geographically and in terms of the commodities which it handled. Though the surviving statistical evidence is not entirely reliable and statistics produced at different times during the period are not strictly comparable with each other, there being, for example, no system of general ship registration before 1786 from which statistics of vessels owned within the port could have been calculated, it does appear that during the second half of the eighteenth century the amount of shipping owned within the port more than doubled, if not trebled. In 1751, 220 vessels were reputedly owned there, while on 30 September 1793, 606 vessels were officially on the Liverpool shipping register. Several thousand vessels were owned within the port at different times and for varying lengths of time during the period under review, for example, in the period from August 1786, when the system of general ship registration commenced, to December 1799, 1,571 vessels were either registered for the first time under the 1786 Ship Registry Act at the port of Liverpool or, having been purchased by Liverpool owners, were transferred to the Liverpool register from the registers of other ports. Clearly, opportunities for employment as ships’ captains were considerable. Indeed, such was the size of the Liverpool shipping industry in the second half of the eighteenth century that more than 2,000 individuals found employment as such, including several—possibly between 100 and 150—who were Catholics, though a precise figure is impossible to calculate on account of the difficulty of identifying captains who were of this faith.

At first glance, the actions of Fr. Charles Bowden, a member of the Brompton Oratory in London, toward a troubled, adolescent, Roman Catholic girl, Eliza (in some reports referred to as Ellen) McDermot, would appear as a praiseworthy and unselfish example of Christian charity. Fr. Bowden, a young cleric, acted on information he allegedly learned from Miss McDermot in the confessional and worked to save her from a possible life of ruin on the London streets. Fr. Bowden eventually urged the young sixteen year old pregnant girl to seek refuge at a local convent where she would have the opportunity to repent and reform her life. McDermot followed his advice, but this seemingly innocent plan to save her soul fanned the flames of hatred against Catholicism and sisterhoods. Without informing her family, Miss McDermot secretly took up residence in a convent, and she did not reveal the location to her mother. When her family complained about this so-called ‘abduction’, critics of Roman Catholicism, and sisterhoods in particular, took their campaign to the public and attacked the actions of Fr. Bowden in letters to the press, graphic pamphlets, and speeches in Parliament. The case of Eliza McDermot quickly emerged as another example which illustrated the evils of Catholic convents, but it failed to capture public attention. Several reasons help to explain the short-lived notoriety of this story, especially the failure to prove that Bowden had broken any English laws.

How did Catholics in the first generation after the Relief Acts respond to their new freedom? The Midland District was a mosaic of missions of every kind, including urban, industrial, rural, aristocratic and plebeian. in piecing together the fragmentary remains of this mosaic, a picture emerges of the life of lay Catholics in many different contexts, and reveals something of their aspirations and outlook in the difficult years between 1791 and 1840.