At sunrise on 14 July 1586, the only three Jesuits then in England, William Weston, Henry Garnet and Robert Southwell, rode westwards out of London. They were making for Harleyford, a mansion on the north bank of the Thames, two miles upstream from Marlow and backed by the beechwoods of the Chilterns. There they lay hidden for a week, ‘discussing', as Weston cautiously wrote, ‘our future methods of work and the prospects that lay before us'. The owner of Harleyford, Robert Bold, was a keen musician, and in the mornings Mass was sung with a mixed choir, organ and other instruments, conducted by no less a master than William Byrd. Perhaps one or more of Byrd's own settings, especially the bare and haunting Mass for Three Voices, was first performed during this octave. Nearly the whole of the morning, says Weston, was taken up by Mass, preaching and confessions.

Section 9 of the Act of Supremacy, 1559, provided that ‘all and every Archebishoppe Bishoppe and all and every other Ecclesiasticall Person, and other Ecclesiastical Officer and Minister… and all and every Temporall Judge Justicer Mayor and other Laye or Temporall Officer and Minister’, and certain other persons should take an oath the form of which was set out in the section. The oath acknowledged the queen's ecclesiastical authority and renounced all foreign jurisdiction including that of the pope. Section 10 of the Act provided that if any person who was required to take the oath refused to do so, he should be deprived of ‘all and every Ecclesiasticall and Spiritual Promotion Benefice and Office, and every Temporall and Laye Promotion and Office’ which he had at the time of refusal, and should thereafter be disqualified for life from holding or exercising any such office or promotion.

The Act of Supremacy received the royal assent on 8 May 1559, soon after Easter, and immediately the surviving bishops of Mary's reign were faced with the prospect of taking the oath prescribed by the act. On 23 May 1559, a commission was issued to eighteen laymen authorizing and requiring them to administer the oath of supremacy to the bishops and others required by the act to take it.

In the summer of 1601 the English ambassador in France, Sir Ralph Winwood, warned Sir Robert Cecil against a merchant named Thomas James, who was ‘a hard and desperate Ruffian, who hath lived in great inwardness with Persons the Jesuit’. To assist in his capture, should he arrive in England, Winwood identified him to be of ‘a convenient stature, red beard, of the age of forty-five years’, born in Staffordshire ‘in a town called Noyall’ but subsequently raised in London where he had been a merchant’s apprentice.

The ‘inwardness’ between this Englishman and the Jesuit excites curiosity in itself, but Thomas James deserves investigation in his own right since he exemplifies the major contribution of the resourceful English layman to the survival of the Catholic mission during the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean period. The access of Catholics to the Continent was contingent on the well-placed merchant who facilitated the arrivals and departures of students, priests and other persons in search of asylum. As will be seen, the full confidence of the highly respected Duke of Medina Sidonia in the ability of Thomas James was to provide the Englishman with a unique status in Andalucia.

Anti-Catholicism and its most popular expression, anti-Popery, was a common phenomenon in an otherwise tolerant Victorian age. To the average Englishman this distrust of Catholicism merged into broader feelings of xenophobia — Catholicism was considered un-English, the faith of the immoral French, the corrupt Italians and the indolent Spanish. The fact that the Irish, who were currently flooding into England, were Catholic made it easier for normally tolerant and liberal Englishmen to maintain their religious prejudice. This anti-Catholicism was not confined to the lower classes, but rather was a truly popular phenomenon shared by individuals as diverse as Lord John Russell, Lord Palmerston and Lord Derby. Indeed the Queen herself was not above expressing anti-Catholic views. Twice during her long reign there were outbreaks of violence against the Catholics: in 1850 following the restoration of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in England, and a generation later over William E. Gladstone's pamphlets attacking the Vatican decrees.

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.

The canonisation of John Boste may have awakened some interest in the story of his fellow-prisoner, John Ingram, who was the third and last of the seminary priests to be executed on Tyneside during the reign of Elizabeth I. Such an interest is easy to gratify, since Ingram is one of the best documented of the English Martyrs. As with his two predecessors, Joseph Lambton and Edward Waterson, we have both an account by Holtby of the martyr's trial and execution, and some evidence of the latter in the same Newcastle Account Book; but in this case, these sources can be rounded out by a series of official letters and, most unusually, Ingram's own letters and epigrams.

He was born in 1565, at Stoke Edith, Herefordshire, a county noted for the strong Catholicism of its gentry. His parents, Richard and Anne Ingram, however, seem to have been non-Catholics at that time since John needed a dispensation from heresy, when he was sent to Douai in 1579.

‘It was merry Christmas at St. Geneviève. There was a Yule log blazing on every hearth in that wide domain, from the hall of the squire to the peasant's roof. The Buttery Hatch was open for the whole week from noon to sunset; all comers might take their fill, and each carry away as much bold beef, white bread, and jolly ale as a strong man could bear in a basket with one hand. For every woman a red cloak, and a coat of broadcloth for every man. All day long, carts laden with fuel and warm raiment were traversing the various districts, distributing comfort and dispensing cheer. For a Christian gentleman of high degree was Eustace Lyle. (Disraeli, 1844.)

The English priest had to serve the Irish in England, by virtue of his priesthood. But the English Catholic layman could stand aloof, and it has usually been alleged that the English laity in their cliquish callousness shunned and despised immigrant Catholic Irishmen, and refused to help the Church provide them with chapels and schools. The notorious Monsignor George Talbot's strictures upon their selfishness were especially fierce; indeed his letters have a social dimension which his detractors have conspired to ignore, for he assailed English Papists in the name of the Papist poor.

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 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.

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.

John Bullaker, the author of the English Expositor, was the only son of William Bullaker, the noted grammarian and phonetist, and the father of the Venerable Thomas Bullaker, the Franciscan Martyr. Hitherto biographical information relating to John Bullaker has been hard to find, but the fact that he was a Catholic has meant that it has been possible to discover a certain amount about his career and whereabouts from the harassment he received from the ecclesiastical and civil authorities, because of his persistent recusancy. A study of his presentments for recusancy in the Act Books of the Deans of Chichester; the Detection Books; and the Miscellaneous Papers of the Consistory Court, in the Diocesan Record Office at Chichester, has brought to light a great deal of fresh information about the life of John Bullaker.

‘Now at the word Order your pikes, you place the butt end of your pike by the outside of your right foot, your right hand holding it even with your eye and your thumb right up; then your left arm being set akimbo by your side you shall stand with a full body in a comely posture’. In this manner English soldiers of fortune, serving as pikemen in the wars of the Netherlands, were instructed in the art of war in the late sixteenth century. Musketeers were told that stray grains of powder disappeared at the command Blow off your loose corns, sometimes with a puff or two, sometimes with a ‘sudden strong blast’, but always in accordance with regulation. In general soldiers who wished to learn their profession had to look elsewhere than in England. In England no one could take them very seriously, not FalstafF the fraudulent Captain, not swaggering Pistol, nor Nym the impostor who affected military brevity. But those who did go abroad were equal to the best foreign professionals in experience and courage. Most of these English soldiers fought for the Dutch, on account of sympathy for them on religious grounds. But Elizabeth's aid was half-hearted and late in coming, for she despised the Dutch as rebels against their rightful, Spanish sovereign. This, together with the Earl of Leicester's mismanagement of his campaigns, were reasons why the English constantly deserted the Dutch to fight for Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma, the best commander in that very war-torn century. From about 1598, however, the situation improved for the Dutch, who, having thrown off their dependence on England, converted the English soldiers into mercenaries, bound by an oath of allegiance to their Dutch paymasters.

The embassy of don Diego Sarmiento de Acuña during the later half of the reign of James I has remained the topic of considerable debate as to its influence over the politics and attitudes of the first Stuart monarch. It is time, perhaps, to move the discussion to an opposite quarter by asking whether there were any English efforts to sway the ambassador, and if so, what impact did they have on the embassy's performance. One interesting example of this is the evidence that English Catholics approached Sarmiento upon his arrival in the summer of 1613 with a new suggestion for a closer liaison. The court of King James had been already alerted to this prospect by a letter of Sir John Digby from Madrid of the preceeding year. Here he noted that there had been dissatisfaction among the Catholics of his acquaintance over the unproductive performance of don Alonso de Velasco previously on their behalf. He offered as a forecast about his successor: ‘And hereupon it hath been held fitt, that the succeeding ambassadour who is to come shortly into England, should rather take the course of Intelligence and dependency of our English papists on the king of Spaine transferred unto him by don Pedro [de Zufiiga] then by don Alonso de Velasco …’ Digby expected that a large sum of money was to be available to the next envoy to ‘revive and reestablish the meanes of Intelligence’ that were available as before.

The Lords Petre were always one of the most prominent of English Catholic families, and they were also one of the richest. Their landed estates had been built up in the middle of the sixteenth century by Sir William Petre, Secretary of State to three Tudor sovereigns. Sir William's son, John, was created a Baron in 1611, but in the early 17th century the family properties ceased to grow in size, partly because Catholicism excluded them from the profits of office, and partly because provision for younger sons offset such new acquisitions as were made. But even so the estates inherited by the third Lord Petre in 1637 were large enough to place him clearly in the ranks of the great landed magnates. In Essex he had a well-consolidated belt of land lying to the west and south-west of Chelmsford, and centred on the two family residences of Ingatestone Hall and Thorndon Hall. Altogether in Essex Petre had about 11,000 acres of freehold land and the lordship of seventeen manors, and these produced some £5,500 per annum or considerably more than half his total income from land. In addition he had a large estate on the opposite side of the country, in Devon. This lay in two distinct areas, one centred on Axminster and extending down the Axe valley and its tributaries, and the other in the southerly projection of the county on the southern edge of Dartmoor, where the principal possession was the vast moorland manor of South Brent. Besides the main estates in Essex and Devon, there were some isolated properties: the manor of Osmington down on the Dorset coast; Toddenham and Sutton in Gloucestershire; Kennett and Kentford on the Cambridgeshire-Suffolk border.

Writing of the education of the English landed classes in the eighteenth century, Professor Mingay has said: ‘The Grand Tour which followed university became almost de rigueur, at least for the eldest sons of wealthy families’. The Tour was popular as a means of providing prospective heirs with the poise, taste and experience which were judged to be essential to their future station. Though it soon became primarily fashionable, it was designed as a climax to the educational process. As such, it could be very expensive. The cost was particularly onerous for recusant families, whose economies were generally less diversified and more vulnerable than those of their contemporaries. Nevertheless, as the case discussed here illustrates, though impecuniosity might leave its mark on a tour, it was only rarely sufficient to prevent it taking place. In this, as in so many other respects, recusants strove to maintain their social status, despite what was often a precarious financial and economic situation.

In March 1701, Sir Philip Constable, a leading Yorkshire recusanL, entered into an agreement with a Mr Janvers. In return for assisting Sir Philip's eldest son, Marmaduke, during a tour of ‘Flanders, France, Italy and co’, Janvers was to receive his travelling expenses plus £40 a year. The document reflects Sir Philip's impoverished position. Janvers was to accompany Marmaduke wherever Sir Philip ordered, spending money ‘carefully and savingly’, and to render an account of his expenditure whenever Sir Philip required him to do so.

A coarse logic rules throughout all English souls; if you have merit, can you not show it by your good clothes, and coach and horses? How can a man be a gentleman without a pipe of wine? … They are under the Jewish law, and read with sonorous emphasis that their days shall be long in the land, they shall have sons and daughters, flocks and herds, wine and oil. In exact proportion, is the reproach of poverty . … The last term of insult is, ‘a beggar’. Nelson said, ‘The want of fortune is a crime I can never get over!’ Sydney Smith said, ‘Poverty is infamous in England’. And one of their recent writers speaks, in reference to a private and scholastic life, of ‘the grave moral deterioration which follows an empty exchequer.’ … The two disgraces are … first, disloyalty to Church and State, and second, to be born poor.

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.)

English devotional literature appears to me to be stamped as distincdy with its national origin as with each writer's individuality. The same sturdy independence, down-to-earth commonsense, quiet humour and unostentatious tenderness recur in Aelfric and Bede, Rolle and Dame Julian, More and Baker, Newman and Knox. Even Chrysostom and Bernard, à Kempis and Luis of Granada speak with unmistakably English voices in the popular manuals compiled from continental sources. Post-Reformation English spirituality too, whether Catholic or Protestant, retains continuity with that of the Middle Ages. Solidly rooted in this native tradition is the work of John Gother (d.1704). His sixteen volumes of instructions, meditations and prayers justify study, not only for their intrinsic merit but also as samplings from which to trace the ‘English Way’ of devotion in much the same manner in which, some years ago, an ‘English Way’ of sanctity was analyzed through biographies of Mary Ward and other saintly English men and women, canonized and uncanonized.