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.

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.

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.