[It is with great regret the journal records the death, in his ninetieth year, of the longest-serving Vice-President of the Catholic Record Society. Bishop Brian Foley, D.Litt., became Vice-President in 1978 after fourteen years as President. Throughout his priestly life he was a keen supporter of the historical enterprize of the CRS. His most recent book was a study of the Jubilee Years from 1300 to 1975, published in anticipation of the Great Jubilee of the millennium. In tribute to Bishop Foley, Recusant History reissues an article by him that first appeared in the Venerabile in 1989 (vol.29, no.3). Acknowledgement is made to the Rector of the English College in Rome and to the editor of the Venerabile for their kind permission to reproduce the article in its original form.]

By the time of the outbreak of the Civil Wars, may educated British Protestants considered Roman Catholicism to be an anti-religion; indeed, the Cambridge divine William Fulke went so far as to equate it with devil worship. Wealthy and powerful English Catholics attracted extreme hostility in moments of political crisis throughout the early modern period, but in 1642, fear of Roman Catholicism was even used to legitimate the terrible act of rebellion. Keith Lindley has emphasized the civil war neutrality of English Catholics, while many current historians, nervous of displays of religious prejudice, have portrayed the anti-Catholic fears of parliamentarians as cynical propaganda. Michael Finlayson has condemned anti-Catholicism as ‘irrational paranoia’, to be compared with anti-Semitism, which might, had it not been for the growth of liberal traditions in nineteenth-century England, have led to some sort of ‘Final Solution’.

The portraits in the Great Parlour of the Bar Convent, York, include two of identical size and frame. The sitters both bear the name of Bedingfield and share the same illustrious ancestry. Both were members of the Institute of Mary and are seen wearing the same religious habit. They successively held the office of Superior of the convent and together they experienced imprisonment in the city’s infamous Ousebridge Gaol. There the similarities end, for two more different characters would be far to seek. It is the purpose of this paper to examine them.

It was to be expected that at the court of a Catholic king and queen there would be from the beginning of the exile at Saint-Germain-en-Laye a royal chapel and an establishment of Catholic chaplains and that this would last as long as the court remained there. It continued in fact after the departure of James Edward to Lorraine in 1712 and Avignon in 1716 and for a while after the death of Queen Mary Beatrice in 1718. The priests of the English Jesuit Province—the subjects of this article—remained in office until 1720 or perhaps a year or two later. It may be presumed that they stayed on, after the court had ceased to be, to care for the Jacobite exiles who over the years had gathered round it.

The confessional state in England during the eighteenth century defined itself in terms of Trinitarian Protestantism. The exemption from the penal laws conferred by the Toleration Act of 1689 specifically excluded the Catholic religion and the public profession of Unitarianism. Each could lay claim to an history of martyrdom; just as Charles Butler enumerated 319 Catholic martyrs in England since the Reformation, Arians had been burned during the reign of James I and the denial of the Trinity featured prominently among the charges of blasphemy for which Thomas Aikenhead was executed at Edinburgh in 1697. While the proscriptions and penalties enacted against and sometimes inflicted upon Catholics far exceeded those for non-trinitarianism, the public excoriation of the latter was further enshrined in the Blasphemy Act of 1698. Legal toleration for Catholic worship in England was enacted in 1791, in Scotland in 1793; Unitarian worship was not legally tolerated until 1813 in Britain, until 1817 in Ireland.

It is more than twenty-five years since the English College Lisbon closed. While it may still be too soon to give a complete account of that closure, one can consider some of the events in its more recent history that preceded its final end. The closure cannot be attributed solely to the conditions obtaining in 1971 and the decline in the recruitment to the secular clergy of England and Wales. In that year vocations to the priesthood had not yet reached their lowest point. Moreover, throughout its 350 years Lisbon had not depended for its viability on enrolling a large number of students. It had always been a small college. Although its primary purpose was to prepare men for the priesthood it had frequently found itself having to fulfil other functions in addition to those of a seminary.

In 1849 John Ruskin published The Seven Lamps of Architecture and in the following year the English Catholic hierarchy was restored, involving the creation of a diocesan administration, made possible by toleration and made necessary by increasing numbers and influence. As Ruskin’s work broadened out from art and architecture to encompass the economy and society, his teaching was to have a profound and lasting effect on the thinking of leading English Catholics.

‘All this talk of socialism is just a ruse. The people are starving and we must not play the policeman for England.’ wrote Archbishop Thomas W. Croke of Cashel in 1880. His attitude was far more intelligent and realistic than The Tablet and its reactionary supporters. Irish bishops were desperately concerned about massive Irish emigration in the late nineteenth century: the threat to the faith at home, the possible loss of souls overseas and the Church’s inability to serve her people was worrying. However zealous in its defence, the Irish bishops remained powerless to halt English popular and government support for the destruction of the Temporal Power. They saw other priorities emerging: by 1880 the recovery of the Temporal Power was a forlorn hope. They must take the high moral ground of humanity rather than property.

The summer of 1908 was a summer of congresses in London. The decennial Pan-Anglican Congress assembled in July, the History of Religions Congress met in September, the Trades Union Congress held its annual meeting shortly thereafter, and the International Congress on Moral Education took place in October. None of these received as much newspaper attention as the Roman Catholic International Eucharistic Congress, which convened in England for the first time, from Wednesday 9 to Sunday 13, September. Many column inches were devoted to the preparations and proceedings; photographs were printed; and hundreds of readers’ letters were published afterwards. In reportage the newspapers differed slightly; in opinion, more so. Most of the proceedings were not controversial at all, consisting of liturgies, lectures on various aspects of Catholic belief concerning the Eucharist, and evening meetings in the Albert Hall. What excited the press and sections of the public was the proposed closing spectacular: a procession of the Blessed Sacrament through the streets around Westminster Cathedral.

Kenneth O. Morgan has argued that in 1945 it was ‘generally acknowledged that British society had undergone a massive transformation during the war years …’ The impact of World War Two on British society has been explored perceptively by Marwick and others. However, there has been little attempt to examine the impact of the war on the churches in Britain. This is especially the case with the Roman Catholic Church. The more general works have little to say of the Catholic church during this period. There have been some limited regional studies of Catholicism in the pre-war period but it is only for the post-war period, prior to and since the Second Vatican Council, that there has been any systematic attempt to examine structural changes in Catholicism. Hornsby-Smith in a series of enquiries has examined the social changes in the Catholic community in England since the Second Vatican Council. In a brief overview he described the Catholic church in England prior to the Council as having the characteristics of a ‘mechanistic’ organisation, namely a distinct hierarchical control structure, vertical relations between superiors and subordinates and an insistence on loyalty to the institution.