The English Catholic Church confronted in the Irish a manner of men utterly remote from its own experience. Its priests ministered to a devout gentry; they had now to serve a pious proletariat. The faith in England had survived in the country; the Irish flocked to the towns. English congregations were small, and mostly worshipped in manor chapels; the Irish multitudes would require cathedrals. The English Catholic squire resembled his heretical neighbours both in their virtues and their vices; and his exclusion from English public life had preserved in him the insular prejudice of a simpler age. Class, culture and a uniquely quietist traditional piety shut him off from the Irish poor, and created the distinctions which a common creed might alone hope to overcome.

The public events which from 1787 occupied the minds of English Catholics, and which were properly inaugurated by the “Protestation”, had a secret prelude, in the year 1786. Before dealing with those events, therefore, it will be necessary to examine the circumstances which led to the formulation of that document.

For all but a handful of people, Tudor literature comprises the familiar galaxy of English authors beginning with Wyatt and ending gloriously with Shakespeare. It is generally agreed that the relative position of every writer of the period has long since been established. Surrey, Sidney, Spenser, Marlowe, Kyd, Lyly, Greene, Gascoigne, Nash and other lesser lights all have their place in the history of English literature, in university curricula, and in standard anthologies. Any suggestion that there are other potentially significant writers yet to be recognized is received with considerable surprise, if not outright scepticism.

In the last fifteen years of research into the history of Catholics in England it has become possible to discover much about their numbers and organisation, their political ideas and relations with the government, and their social and financial status. What still tends to be elusive is the nature and quality of their spiritual life. What follows is an attempt to see how far and under what conditions Catholics of Staffordshire in the eighteenth century carried out their religious duties.

This paper is based primarily on the Prefect of Studies Book which records the names of the staff and the students of the English College at Douai between the years 1750 and 1794. But before dealing with this period it is necessary to sketch in the background by giving a short account of the history of the College during the first half of the eighteenth century.

The Order of Friars Minim was founded by St Francis of Paula, whose birth took place in Calabria in 1416. The new friars received Papal approval in 1474. By the date of their founder’s death in 1507 they were organised in five provinces extending over Italy, France, Spain and Germany and were already setting out for the mission fields of the New World. But despite an extraordinarily rapid growth in the early sixteenth century, not a single one among more than 350 houses of the Order was to be found in England or Wales by the time that King Henry VIII began the spoliation of the monasteries. It was therefore only after Catholic men and women were forced to go abroad if they wished to give their lives to God in the cloister, that (as far as we know) the order received its first English subjects.

“The history of opinions is as instructive and amusing as the history of battles”, observed Sir John Throckmorton in 1792; and few periods of Catholic thought in England present a more warlike aspect than that in which Sir John lived and wrote. The last twenty years of the 18th century saw the English Catholic community torn asunder by disputes which, to contemporaries, seemed certain to end in schism with Rome, and so destroy the heritage of the martyr church. Laymen “rose against the sanctuary”; committees of gentry swapped anathemas with bishops; and from the Catholic publishing houses issued a blizzard of acrimonious pamphlet literature, ecclesiastical sedition and the authoritarian counterblasts it provoked. Behind these troubles lay the desire for emancipation, and a great uncertainty among Catholics as to what, and how much, of the Church's “separateness” could be surrendered, to a Protestant nation, for the privilege of recognition as men and citizens.

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.

In the seventeenth century the question of allegiance divided the English Catholics as effectively as birth control in the twentieth. It might be of interest, therefore, to attempt a statistical breakdown of the opinions of English Benedictines on James I’s Oath of Allegiance, since by the 1630’s the monks were numerically a force to be reckoned with. Such an attempt has not been made before. Moreover, some primary documents imply that the Benedictines as a body were in favour of the Oath. But since much of the evidence on the oath was mere hearsay, party accusations or deliberately misleading, it needs to be tested carefully.

The congregations which I have chosen to study here are those of Alnwick, Ellingham, Haggerston, Berrington and Berwick; the materials used are those described in an earlier essay, published in Recusant History in April 1967. They are: the returns of papists of 1767 and 1780; the religious census of 1851, districts of Alnwick (no. 559), Belford (560) and Berwick (561); the registers of Roman Catholic estates for Northumberland (Surtees Society, cxxxi, 1918) and Durham (ibid., clxxiii, 1958); and the mission registers and allied documents. None of these last are published. They consist: for Alnwick, of the baptismal registers (including confirmations and some marriages), 1794-1840 (PRO R.G. 4, nos. 1572 and 3911); for Ellingham, of baptismal registers (confirmations, marriages, deaths), 1779-1840 (R.G. 4, nos. 2483 and 2915), and an almost complete set of annual Easter communion lists, 1811-40 (originals in R.C. presbytery, Seahouses, Northumberland); for Haggerston,of baptismal registers (some marriages), 1790-1830 (R.G. 4, no. 1802), a register of deaths, and of Easter communicants, 1834-56 (originals in R.C. presbytery, Lowick, Northumberland); for Berrington, of the baptismal register, 1804-16 (R.G. 4, no. 2482); for Berwick, of baptismal registers, 1804-40 (R.G. 4, no. 1402). For knowledge of, and access to, such of these mission records as are not deposited in the Public Record Office, and for numerous other kindnesses, I am deeply indebted to Fr. W. Vincent Smith of Lanchester. Co. Durham.

“I am a Christian, who never changed that Religion, that I drank in with my milke: nor ever, I thanke God, was ashamed of my profession”, James declared in 1608, in his Apology for the Oath of Allegiance. Five years earlier he had reminded the members of his first English Parliament that as “I am no stranger to you in blood, no more am I a stranger to you in Faith, or in matters concerning the house of God. And although this my profession be according to mine education wherein (I thanke God) I sucked the milk of God’s trewth, with the milke of my nurse: yet do I here protest unto you, that I would never … have so firmly kept my first profession if I had not found it agreeable to all reason and to the rule of my conscience.”

The social historian in quest of Victorian commentary on the Irish in London finds a surprising dearth of materials. There were Irish beggars everywhere in the city, and their tenements lay within a few yards of the most fashionable thoroughfares, but neither their revolutionary potentialities nor predilection for violence nor deplorable religion made much impact upon the Victorian imagination. As they hardly figured in the national life, so they have left few traces in the memoirs of their betters, and hardly appear in Victorian literature, even in the novels of Dickens, who also ignored them in his hearthside journals, though he was always exploring their rookeries. They make fleeting appearances in the romances of Kingsley, Disraeli and Mrs. Gaskell; and Carlyle and Bulwer Lytton thought them a nuisance, and said so. But these few Celtic birds of passage do not greatly enlarge one’s understanding of the Irish in London, and hardly make an English literary summer.

Plowden Hall, probably the house portrayed in the once widely-read novel John Inglesant by J. H. Shorthouse, is about four miles distant from the small town of Bishop's Castle in Shropshire. The family papers are still at the Hall, but the letters upon which this account is based were found at Archbishop's House, Westminster. They were written between 1747 and 1763 by three successive chaplains to the Plowden family. Very few such letters appear to have survived, and they provide invaluable and vivid details about the daily lives of priests on the English Mission. The letters were written to local Jesuit superiors of the Residence of S. Winifrid at Holywell in Flintshire. Until 1761 the Superior was Fr. John Williams, and after that Fr. Thomas Daniel or Watson.

This is not a family history of the Brandlings of Northumberland from their first appearance in history in the sixteenth century, for they were not a staunch Catholic family with a record of determined recusancy. The Brandlings had Catholic leanings in the mid-sixteenth century, and two of the family were recusants. By the early seventeenth century, however, the family appears to have conformed entirely. And then in the second half of the century the main branch and their cousins of Hoppen and Alnwick Whitehouse appear as Catholics, most probably as the result of Catholic marriages in the previous generation. A century later, and the main branch had conformed, and the junior branches had died out. The Brandlings were therefore a “fringe” recusant family, but even so they had a certain impact on the Catholic life of the North, and their history is not without interest for students of recusancy.

Many of the sixteenth century Protestant reformers denied the rôle and authority of the Roman Church as a mediating instrument between Christ and believers. There was specific theological objection to the legitimacy of a sacrament of holy orders with a divinely empowered hierarchy. In consequence, much of the Catholic reaction and reform was designed to re-establish and emphasise both dogmatically and practically true authority within the Church. Seminaries therefore, as planned by the Tridentine decree of 15 July 1563, belonged to an ecclesiological context. They were seedbeds, giving protection from hostile and indifferent society, where men were set apart to sink roots in the rich soil of clerical life, and only then to emeige to feed the Church.