Thomas Argall was born in or around 1500, apparently at Lambeth where his parents, John and Emme Argall, held a house and a close on the Archbishop of Canterbury's estate. Both parents were dead by 1522, when Argall, as the only son, inherited this small property and a few household goods. His family was closely associated with the Church and included a relative, William Argall, who was a cleric and probably another relative who became vicar of New Shoreham, Sussex, in 1545. Argall followed a similar career, although he remained a layman, and entered the administration of Archbishop Warham.

It is not often that a full-length work on recusant history appears in a foreign language, and for this reason the Reverend Bruno Navarra's book in Italian, Filippo Michele Ellis: Segni e la sua Diocesi nei primi del ‘700 (Roma, Centro Studi del Lazio [1973], Piazza Montecitorio, 115), should be brought to the attention of Recusant History readers. This book on Philip Michael Ellis, O.S.B., first Vicar Apostolic of the Western District, and later Bishop of Segni in Italy, should be most welcome to anyone interested in English Catholicism during the time of James II and the early years of the eighteenth century. There has been a noticeable lack of biographical research, either general or particular, on those involved in the organization of the English Catholic Church at the end of the seventeenth century. Perhaps the time has come for a more specific picture of this period; to a very limited degree Navarra has filled some of the lacuna.

One of the most ‘anonymous’ of all Catholic tracts published in the late sixteenth century is that entitled: The copie of a double letter sent by an Englishe gentleman from beyond the seas, to his frende in London, containing the true aduises of the cause, and maner of the death, of one Richard Atkins, executed by fire in Rome, the seconde of August 1581. It was issued without the name of the author and without any indication as to where or by whom it was printed. The printer has been identified from typographical evidence as Jean Foigny of Rheims, but up till now there has been no positive identification of the author. In this note I want to show that there is conclusive evidence for stating that the tract was written by Father Robert Persons, S.J., using material sent to him from Rome by his fellow-Jesuit Father William Good.

The 150 years separating Southwell from Pope saw great changes in English Catholicism. In the later sixteenth century the Catholic faith was still native English, and the older poetical tradition of lyric religious meditation, which Southwell found flourishing about him when he returned from Rome in July 1586, blended readily in his own poetry with the newly passionate and ingenious devotion of the Counter-Reformation. The enterprise of reviving the Faith in England was vigorous and young, and the blood of the martyrs flowing in the very streets of London as once it had flowed in the streets of Rome must have made of the Church in its most deeply traditional and heroic aspect a present English reality. The passionate ingenuity of the Counter-Reformation; the plainness of the English religious and gnomic tradition; the edge of sober reality and depth given to meditation, even curious meditation, on the sufferings of Christ and the saints by the virtual certainty of the gallows; together with a rhetorical hold on the Faith deeper and older than the Counter-Reformation devotion he found in Italy, to be found rather together with the lives of the early martyrs in his breviary: all combined in Southwell's best poetry in a taut and assured style, full of balanced tensions. But as the years passed, England was not converted and the time of martyrdom ended. Where bloody persecution failed, exile and neglect began to succeed. A sense of the Church as thoroughly English and as in the fervour of its first centuries gradually disappeared. English Catholic devotion in the poetry of Crashaw became contemporary and sometimes uncontrollably ingenious and Continental, with martyrdom a metaphor, though exile a reality. In Dryden's poetry, the Church also appeared in very much its contemporary aspect, though expressing itself now not so much in devotional as in apologetic terms. Dryden's conversion was clearly genuine and his apologia sincere, but he had in his poetry an oddly restricted hold on the Faith, speaking of the Church's relation to other Christian sects often in political or social language. Dryden suffered willingly, however, for his belief, though not exile or martyrdom; whereas the suspicion with Pope is always that, though he remained a Catholic, his Catholicism was a social disability to be borne in much the same way as his physical disability. In the poetry of Pope, Catholicism is a remnant, contributing rather little to an assurance about final realities as impressive perhaps in its way as Southwell's.

Bernard Burder, Abbot of the Cistercian Abbey of Mount St Bernard's, Leicestershire, from 1853 to 1858 is largely forgotten today; but for a few years in the middle of the last century his activities were important, and to a considerable extent, anticipated those of Archbishop Manning in the field of reformatory education. Burder's spiritual progress was similar to Newman's: he began life as a nonconformist, was then converted to Anglicanism and finally joined the Catholic Church one year after Newman. That same year, 1846, he entered Mount St Bernard's and on the death of its first Abbot, Dom Bernard Palmer, in 1853, was, in December of that year, elected to succeed him.

Recent scholarship has challenged the Marxist and Whig-Liberal views which placed the Catholics solidly behind Charles I in the Civil War. Kieth Lindley, Martin J. Havran and others argue that they were hard hit by the taxation policies of Thorough in the 1630s, and that when the Civil Wars came they were too impoverished and politically alienated to risk life and property for the King. The story of Catholics in Warwickshire during the Civil War and Interregnum well illustrates these revisionist interpretations.

The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to what appears to be a developing gulf in the study of the Catholic community during the early seventeenth century. How do we determine whether an individual was or was not a Catholic? It looked for a time as if the conventional wisdom concerning Catholics and the Civil War was to maintain that they were, as a body, neutral. It is now hard to see how that view can be substantiated. By no means connected with that view, but threatening in the same way to establish itself as a dictum, is the idea that there can be no Catholicism without a recorded conviction for recusancy.

In a recent, short monograph, Leslie Campion has attempted to link Edmund Campion to his namesake, the son of an Edmund Campion of Sawston, Cambs., who (Edmund Sr) died in 1544. The argument, though circumstantial, is plausible. However, one piece of additional evidence is not considered—nor could the author have been aware of it. This is the Oxford apprenticeship indenture of one Robert ‘Campian’ to Christopher Noke, freemason, made on 4 October 1579, which is printed below. There Robert is identified as the son of an Edmund Campian, late of London, stationer, deceased. This, of itself, would suggest that Robert was a brother of the Jesuit, and, indeed, the newly proposed Campion pedigree indicates a Robert Campion as an older brother of Edmund. Unfortunately, this would require our apprentice to be over 40 years old! A more likely candidate is a Robert Campian, aged ca 14 years, who made a deposition before the University (Vice-) Chancellor's court on 8 January 1573 regarding William Goodyere, Under Butler of St John's College. The connection to St John's is, of course, significant, as is the apprenticeship to Noke, who was suspected of recusancy in 1577. Thus, it is tempting to join the two Oxford Roberts together and to identify him as Edmund Campion's younger brother, but, if we do, then we must look for an Edmund Sr who lived into the later 1550s at least. Additional investigation would be needed to determine where (or whether) he could be grafted on to Leslie Campion's tree, but the name ‘Robert’ requires at least a reexamination of the Witham branch, and the author himself seems to allow this possibility (p. 55). As for Robert Campian, the apprentice freemason, he cannot be traced in later Oxford records in spite of the provision for his subsequent entrance into the craft guild and the freedom of the City.

Maude Domenica Petre (1863-1942) has long been associated with the Modernist movement in the Catholic Church, but for the most part she has remained in the background. Whatever has been written about her has usually been in connection with George Tyrrell, since as his close friend, biographer and literary executor, she is a key source of information about him. Apart from that, there is her own apparent desire to stay somewhat in the background. She tells us very little about herself in her writings, and even in her quasi-autobiography, My Way of Faith, written in 1936 when she was 73 and could look back on a long and full life, she is very reluctant to focus on herself. And yet, in her own right she was a remarkable woman. Apart from the books which she either edited or translated, she wrote more than fourteen books of her own on a variety of subjects, as well as numerous articles. This paper, then, will focus on Maude Petre herself, using her own writings and the Petre Papers which were presented to the British Library some time after her death.

The lesson of the Popish Plot, that the law was almost powerless against perjury, was widely applied in political accusations, administrative disputes and criminal prosecutions, particularly in the 1690s when so many former Exclusionists were in office or Parliament. MPs such as John Arnold, who had employed suborned evidence against the Monmouthshire Jesuits in attempting to overthrow the pro-Catholic Marcher magnate, the Duke of Beaufort, found it too good a weapon not to use in every-day politics. The Catholics, however, were not the main sufferers; the destruction of their Court party at the Revolution made them comparatively insignificant. Oates's successors, remembering the impunity with which he had attacked the Queen, James and Danby, laid their charges of treason against ministers or opposition leaders. However, one late offshoot of the Plot has caused some difficulties in Catholic history; it is another reminder that the compilers of the official records combined ignorance with their anti-Catholicism, holding with one judge during the Plot, that ‘They have such secret contrivances among themselves … that where there are two men that positively tell you a thing that lies within their knowledge and swear it is true, it is scarce any improbability that should weigh against such an evidence’. Land or money given to ‘superstitious’ uses was legally forfeit to the Crown under the Chantries Act (1 Edw. VI, c.14), extended (by implication) to the support of foundations abroad under 27 Eliz., c.2, sect. 4 The official findings in this decade are so odd that usually they have wisely been ignored; yet local historians can be deceived or confused. This investigation provides a full explanation and a glimpse of the Catholic underworld on which anti-Catholicism largely depended.

Charles Butler's mother, née de Blandecque (anglice Blandyke), of a family established in Saint-Omer, was enthusiastically devoted to the Society of Jesus. His much-loved paternal uncle, Alban Butler, the hagiographer, had perhaps his own reasons for some measure of alienation from the regular clergy. In 1762, the French government expelled the Jesuits from France, and in 1766, when Charles was 16 years old, this uncle was put in charge of the English Jesuits’ college of St Omers, thus earning (I think it is not too much to say) a degree of obloquy amounting almost to the scale of vendetta, among a section of the recently-professed English Fathers.

Dennis Flynn has written convincingly of the Catholic sympathies of Donne's middle years. But anyone who reads through the sermons, particularly those composed after 1618, cannot fail to be convinced that in the end Donne's Anglicanism was a mature and heartfelt commitment. To understand how a man with such rooted Catholic sympathies could find his spiritual home in the English Church, we must recognise how much he needed to be engaged with others in worship, in friendship and in love.

It is not unusual, when reading about Modernism, to notice references to the ‘Ward Family Papers’. De la Bedoyère and Barmann both had access to the von Hugel letters from the Ward Family Papers when they wrote their studies of the Baron; Laubacher's study of development of dogma in Tyrrell used his letters to Ward, the originals of which have recently been found. Ward's involvement in the Synthetic Society heightened interest in the papers for what they might yield about various late-nineteenth-century thinkers. Finally, no one has been sure how many of the papers and documents used by Maisie Ward still exist and how many of them might contain more information. I spent the summer of 1976 sorting, classifying and arranging the Ward Family Papers, a task made easier by the methodical work of Thomas Michael Loome some years ago. I classified the papers stored in London, surveyed the Ward material now housed on the Isle of Wight and retrieved some items that had been stored at Crosby, near Liverpool. The present Wilfrid Ward has, at his house on the Isle of Wight, the library of Wilfrid Ward with his annotations, and two small minute books of the Synthetic Society. The book collection may or may not be complete, and Ward's notes in them are not many and seldom legible. There is nothing else at the Isle of Wight house except personal family papers, the letters of Ward and his wife, some of the papers of Josephine Ward and her letters to various other people, and the letters of some of the children. The papers of Maisie Ward and Leo Ward (Wilfrid's children) are housed with the Sheed and Ward collection, still in private hands. The papers and letters from Crosby have been added to the London papers.

The Catholic Record Society has just published the 1767 Returns of Papists for the diocese of Chester, which included Lancashire. For the chapelry of Broughton (pp. 144-6 in the C.R.S. volume) there is a similar return of Popish recusants made in 1676. It was compiled in response to the questions asked in the so-called Compton Census, an enquiry set up in 1676 by the Archbishop of Canterbury. It consists of nine folios listing all families in the chapelries of Broughton (including Haighton) and Barton in a first column, alongside which in a second column the names of suspected Popish recusants are repeated. To save space, the recusant names are printed here once only but in bold type. At the bottom of each folio except the first are totals for the two columns, with grand totals (636 and 192) at the end. There is a nil return for the third column, of Dissenters.

From Henry's divorce to Elizabeth's accession, the most striking religious changes at the Inns of Court were external. As the Reformation progressed, church and chapel were stripped of their medieval ornamentation, in form as in fabric. Despite this outward transformation, there was remarkable continuity in personnel. Change occurred more by the natural process of admission, promotion, retirement and death than by compulsion. This did not mean that there was no regulation whatsoever. Members of the Inns were among those expected to obey the law—whether renouncing the Pope, acknowledging the Supremacy or maintaining uniformity. Nevertheless it is difficult to establish the extent to which religious observance was actually practised at the Inns. Bartlett Green of the Middle Temple, who was burnt for heresy in 1556, testified that he had not heard Mass during Mary's reign. Richard Allington, a barrister of Lincoln's Inn, was so engrossed in the worship of mammon that he fearfully confessed before his deathbed audience in 1561 to have ‘never wentte to churche atte tyme of commone prayere'. In 1569, several other members of the legal societies admitted they had rarely attended church since Elizabeth's accession, including Walter Norton of Gray's Inn, ‘by reason of his busines and clientes causes’. Despite the legal requirement, there is no sign of any campaign to enforce religious observance at the Inns or to coerce the legal profession as a whole.