William Rogers (b c1646) was a convert Catholic who from obscure origins in the lesser gentry of Gloucestershire came to know many of the leading Catholic clergy and laymen of Restoration times, and became an enthusiastic, if unconventional, advocate of his Faith. Much that is known of him comes from the works of the Oxford antiquary Anthony Wood, and in particular from the letters written by Rogers which survive as part of Wood's voluminous correspondence in the Bodleian Library.

[This article by the late David Rogers was written in 1982. He later read it as a paper at the English Benedictine Congregation History Symposium at Worth Abbey in 1990 and it was subsequently reproduced in typescript as part of the proceedings. The article demands a wider audience and permission to publish it in ‘Recusant History’ has been kindly granted by Dom Gregory Scott O.S.B. and by the Friends of the Bodleian, who hold the copyright in David Rogers's work. A section of the article was elaborated and published as ‘Anthony Batt: A Forgotten Benedictine Translator’ in G.A.M. Janssens & F.G.A.M. Aarts (eds.): ‘Studies in Seventeenth Century English Literature, History and Bibliography’, Amsterdam, 1984]:

Queen Mary Tudor died on the night of 17 November 1558. A few hours later, across the river at Lambeth, her cousin, Reginald Pole, Cardinal Archbishop of Canterbury, followed her, victim of the ague which he had contracted in the summer. England again had a change of monarch, the third in less than twelve years. What was not clear at the time was whether there would be another change in religion. With hindsight, it is clear that the programme of reform which sought to reunite the English Church with the see of Rome and to revivify it with the Tridentine reforms with which Pole had been so closely involved, had died also on that November night. Parliament was in session when Mary died, and immediately Elizabeth was proclaimed queen by Nicholas Heath, Archbishop of York, in his capacity as Lord Chancellor; there was no dissent such as had accompanied the accession of the new Queen's half-sister. It soon became clear, however, that the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn was unlikely to retain the settlement of religion in the precise form in which it had been left by the daughter of Katharine of Aragon. On Christmas Day, the Queen ordered that the elevation of the Blessed Sacrament was not to take place during the Mass to be celebrated in her chapel by the Bishop of Carlisle, Owen Oglethorpe. His refusal to obey this command led the Queen to leave the chapel after the gospel had been read. Two days later, a royal proclamation restored the first liturgical changes of Henry VIII, ordering that the epistle and gospel of the Mass were thenceforward to be read in English, along with the litany which usually preceded the service. The coronation of Elizabeth should have been conducted by the senior surviving churchman, Heath of York; he had resigned the Chancellorship before the end of 1558, and declined to conduct the service. It was Oglethorpe, as bishop of a suffragan see of the Northern Province, who crowned the new Queen, with no other diocesan bishops present. The coronation Mass was sung by one of the Reformers, Dr. George Carewe, who omitted the elevation, and another Reformer preached the sermon.

At the beginning of his essay entitled ‘How To Be a Counter-Reformation Saint’, Peter Burke observes

In 1598 Philip II, King of Spain since 1559 and ruler of many other dominions, granted the ‘Burgundian’ segment of his inheritance (the Low Countries and the County of Burgundy) to his daughter Isabella as a dowry, and gave her in marriage to her cousin Albert, Archduke of Austria. The couple governed that part of the territory effectively under their control — the northern provinces having formed the Dutch Republic — as ‘sovereign princes’, essentially enjoying domestic autonomy under the protection of the Spanish army. They were responsible for the ‘northern’ policy of the Spanish monarchy, including day-to-day relations with England and the protection of the British Catholics. As sovereign princes they rebuilt the Church in the Southern Netherlands, patronised the reformed religious orders, and did much to establish the particular South Netherlandish identity which was eventually to lead to an independent Belgian state. In 1621 Albert died, and his childless widow's dowry reverted to her nephew Philip IV. Isabella remained in Brussels as Governess-General, enjoying greater independence than the title might suggest, both from her long career as co-sovereign and from the trust and admiration of her nephew the king. She died in 1633, the governship passing to another of her nephews, the Cardinal-Infant Don Ferdinand (1635–1641).

The Ransom Center's collection of Roman Catholic Recusant Literature (1558–1829) consists of close to 4,500 books and pamphlets printed in England during periods when Catholicism was proscribed. The collection includes volumes of church history, devotional works, and Bibles.

After 2 of ye clock after Midnight [15 December 1578] the Earle [of Bath] was awakened by Sir Thomas Kitson and brought barefooted and bare-legged out of his chamber; ye said Sir Thomas brought the Earl's doublet and hose after him, … and in this mean ye Earle was led in a Chappell in ye howse wheare ye saide Beddstaffe maker Atkinson was ready to marry him and his lordship being so heavy and possessed with such a strange Traunce like drowsiness; … They weare fayne to lift up his hand and to shake him when ye worde of binding weare spoken …

The figure of Cuthbert Wilks has intrigued me for many years. An English Benedictine and the principal clerical member of the English Catholic Cisalpine movement at the end of the eighteenth century, he was an opponent of Bishop Charles Walmesley, a monk from his own community. Cisalpinism, which demanded further religious and civil freedom for English Catholics, caused a deep cleavage within the English Catholic community.

One of the most popular and intriguing Catholic books of controversy in the late seventeenth century was Pax Vobis. It first appeared in the year 1679 with the following titlepage.

The Jacobite Court was established at Saint-Germain-en-Laye at the beginning of 1689, following the successful invasion of England by William of Orange. At the time few people expected the Court to remain there for long, but after James II’s defeat in Ireland (1690), and the failure of his planned invasion of England (1692), it became clear that there was little hope of an immediate restoration. In the event the Stuarts were to remain at Saint-Germain-en-Laye for a quarter of a century. James II himself died there in 1701. His son James III stayed until 1712, when he was obliged to leave France by the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht (1713). The Queen, Mary of Modena, continued to live at Saint-Germain, and presided over the Court, until her death there in May 1718.

Among the many families in Lancashire that remained so long loyal to the Catholic faith were the Scarisbricks of Scarisbrick Hall near Ormskirk, a centre of Catholicism throughout penal times and where there was even a Catholic school intermittently in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

The Hon. Catherine Dillon and her cousin Anne Nevill were Benedictine nuns in the French community of Montargis, which came to Bodney Hall in Norfolk early in 1793. There, near the Bedingfelds at Oxburgh and somewhat further from the Jerninghams at Cossey, the nuns educated young ladies in ‘every branch of useful knowledge becoming the delicacy of their sex.’ Letters from Catherine Dillon (Sr. St. François) and Anne Nevill (Sr. Ste. Agnès de Ste. Thérèse), written from Bodney to Lady Jerningham and Lady Bedingfeld during the period 1795 to 1806, can be found in the Jerningham collection at the University of Birmingham and at the Stafford Record Office. Egerton Castle's two-volume Jerningham Letters, published in 1896, draws upon the large collection of letters written to Lady Bedingfeld, but does not include any letters from her aunt Sr. François or her cousin Sr. Thérèse. Sr. François Dillon was Lady Jerningham's only surviving sister. Sr. Thérèse Nevill was Lady Jerningham's cousin and a sister of Cosmas Nevill of Nevill Holt.

In 1763, Francis Fortescue Turville inherited Husbands Bosworth Hall at Bosworth, Leicestershire, from his cousin Maria Aletha Fortescue. He inherited the estate directly, because his father had abandoned the Catholic religion and this debarred him from the bequest. The seat had been in the Fortescue family since 1630. In 1780 Francis Turville married Barbara Talbot, sister of the Earl of Shrewsbury. It was a marriage into a leading Catholic family and through his marriage, Francis Turville was connected with the most powerful Catholic families in the country, which had provided two vicars apostolic in the eighteenth century. But at Husbands Bosworth Hall, the Turvilles were by no means part of a larger Catholic community. Bosworth, and Leicestershire, were not strongly Catholic. With the exception of the Hastings family of Braunston and the Nevilles of Holt, both of which families sheltered missions, there were few notable Catholic families in the county; it has been estimated that Catholics made up less than five per cent of the population of the county of Leicestershire. This may have been one of the factors that influenced Francis Turville's decision to live abroad. Between 1784 and April 1789 Francis and Barbara Turville lived in Nancy in the Province of Lorraine. Although there is no explicit evidence, it seems probable that Francis Turville, like many Catholic gentry, moved to France in order to educate his son, George. One of the principal concerns of Catholic parents who sent their sons to be educated in France or the Netherlands was that they would return having lost all Englishness and connection with their family. This often led families to travel with their sons, or to send a trusted family member with them. It may also be that Francis Turville did not have a high regard for the lot of a Catholic gentleman in England. In 1786 it was reported to Turville that one of his neighbours, Mr. Saunders, ‘did not seem much to relish the description which you gave of the situation of a Roman Catholic gentleman in England. He could not conceive how the latter could be said to be oppressed’. While he was abroad, Turville maintained a correspondence with his chaplain, Thomas Potts, who remained at Husbands Bosworth Hall. This article seeks to indicate the nature of the relationship between Turville and his chaplain and to suggest that the rôles of a domestic chaplain were critical in maintaining the sense of an English Catholic community.

When, in 1834 Lord Macauley called on Cardinal Wiseman at the Venerable English College in Rome, he was most surprised to find the cardinal's room fitted out in the English style and very like the rooms of a senior fellow of Trinity College, Oxford. On the same occasion Macauley was introduced to Lords Clifford and Shrewsbury and thought them not at all what he imagined Catholics of old family to be: proud and stately and with an air of being men of rank but not of fashion. John Henry Newman, too, had a notion that the old English Catholic gentry moved silently and sorrowfully about and lived in old-fashioned houses of gloomy appearance, closed in with high walls, iron gates and yew trees, cut off from the populous world around them. On his entry into ‘the narrow community of the English Catholics’, the other future cardinal, Henry Edward Manning, said he felt as if he ‘had got into St. James's Palace in 1687. It was as stately as the House of Lords …’ These reactions show that Macauley, Newman and Manning cannot have come across many English Catholic gentlemen before and that they had gained very little idea of the social history of English Catholicism, however much they may have learned about its political and ecclesiastical past. This paper will point out what they should, and might easily, have picked up.

The Life of Mother Margaret Mary Hallahan by Francis Raphael Drane O.S.D., was published in 1869 to foster the reputation for sanctity of the foundress of the Dominican Congregation of St. Catherine of Siena. Though it remains a masterpiece of nineteenth century English hagiographical literature, upon which all later biographical notices of Margaret Hallahan are based, its treatment of her life from 1802 to 1842 is chronologically inaccurate, uncritically anecdotal and narrowly defined. Although Margaret Hallahan lived until she was sixty-six the first forty years of her life occupy scarcely fifty pages of a biography which runs to almost five hundred and forty pages. The Life rarely connects these years with any wider historical context nor does it investigate closely the background of those with whom Margaret Hallahan was personally associated. Consequently a critical examination of the Life's treatment of these first forty years and its overt comparison with the manuscript sources upon which it is based is a much needed and long overdue exercise.

John Lingard's first major work, The Antiquities of the Anglo-Saxon Church was published in 1806 in Newcastle by Edward Walker. It was the only major work to come from the period of residence of the little community of northern exiles who had fled Douai in the aftermath of the French Revolution and who had eventually settled at Crook Hall in 1794, before the move up hill to the more permanent accommodation of Ushaw College in 1808. Lingard himself had left Douai on 21st February 1793, two days after the commissaires had taken possession of the English College. His task was to escort home in safety William Stourton, Lord Stourton's eldest son, and the two Oliviera brothers. For a time Lingard settled as tutor with the Stourtons, but after a meeting with Bishop Gibson in York the following summer, he joined the handful of northern exiles which had settled briefly at the Revd. Arthur Storey's private school at Tudhoe, just outside Durham. From there they moved for a few weeks to Pontop Hall before settling at Crook Hall on 15th Oct 1794. Lingard was ordained deacon at Crook towards the end of the same year and ordained priest in York the following April. At Crook, Lingard had become acting vice-president to the new President, Thomas Eyre; he was also Procurator and Prefect of Studies, jobs which he combined with the teaching of philosophy and with supervising the study of the senior boys forming the top two classes of Poetry and Rhetoric. When building started as Ushaw, he was also taken up with overseeing operations there.

Founded in the seventeenth century the College of Saints Peter and Paul at Lisbon was for many years one of the overseas seminaries that provided for the education and formation of the secular clergy of England and Wales. When at the beginning of the nineteenth century seminaries began to be established in England the need for these foreign colleges grew less apparent. But the English bishops not only saw special reasons for continuing and strengthening the connection with Rome, but also decided to continue to support the two colleges in the Iberian Peninsula. There were similarities between the situations at Valladolid and Lisbon but the distinct histories of the Church in the two countries provided nuances and shades of difference that were sometimes not fully appreciated by the hierarchy. This article which uses hitherto unpublished material to be found in the archives of Lisbon College, treats of that College between the years 1807 and 1883 when the difficult conditions in Portugal called for special qualities in those English priests whose responsibility it was to maintain the College in being.

Prior Park, the stately home on the outskirts of Bath, was built for Ralph Allen, a famous citizen of that city, during the years 1735–1742. In 1830, when the estate had passed through many hands, and was in a very neglected state, it was bought by the Vicar-Apostolic of the Western District, Bishop Peter Baines, for £22,000. It was the bishop's intention to establish there a seminary, a boarding school and eventually, a Catholic University which would vie with Oxford and Cambridge. But things had gone sadly wrong. When Baines died in July, 1843, the establishment was in debt to the extent of some £40,000, with less than half the places in the school and the seminary occupied.

In the autumn of 1851, a group of philanthropists, magistrates, and prison officials sent out a circular inviting like-minded persons to a conference on ‘the Condition and Treatment of the “Perishing and Dangerous Classes” of Children and Juvenile Offenders.’ On December 9 and 10, this conference met in Birmingham and adopted a number of resolutions advocating that destitute and criminal children be sent to reformatory institutions instead of prison. It also appointed a committee to advance the reformatory cause, and this group subsequently presented the Birmingham Conference's resolutions to the Home Secretary (Sir George Grey).