For students of recusant history the main interest of William Fleetwood lies in the fact that a study of his career enables us to see the problem of Catholicism in Elizabethan England from the point of view of those who sought to crush it. For he was one of the most active of the officials engaged in hunting down Catholics in Elizabethan London.

Many years ago there was published an English translation of La Persecution des Catholiques en Angleterre sous Charles II by the Comtesse R. de’Courson: a work which remains the only one devoted wholly to English Catholicism during that reign. Unfortunately, however, the title is misleading and the book is given up almost entirely to the two and a half years of the Popish Plot—not, in other words, to the reign of Charles II as a whole but merely to one-tenth of it—with the result that the reader is presented with an unbalanced and unduly depressing picture. A more judicious appraisal has been provided by a number of “background” works such as Archbishop Mathew's Catholicism in England, Mr. E. I. Watkin's Roman Catholicism in England from the Reformation to 1950 and, most recently, Miss. M. D. R. Leys's fascinating Catholics in England, 1529-1829, while an article published in The Dublin Review (Autumn, 1959) suggested that the pecuniary laws, so ferocious on paper, to which Catholics were theoretically subject, were in fact enforced only very spasmodically during the reign of Charles II. Clearly, in order to judge how rigorously the penal laws were enforced in Charles Il’s reign, it is necessary first to consider what exactly were these laws; to establish what was the legal position of the English Catholics at the Restoration and to discover what fresh enactments were passed in the course of the next twenty-five years. It is such an examination of the legal position of the English Catholics between 1660 and 1685 which will be attempted in the pages that follow.

In the “Catalogue of Popish Books” printed in his Foot out of the Snare, 1624, the gossipy but sometimes remarkably well-informed John Gee has the following entry: “The reformed Protestant, by Brerely. There was a printing house supprest some three yeers since in Lancashire, where all Brerely his workes, with many other Popish Pamphlets, were printed.” The “printing-house… in Lancashire” is undoubtedly the secret press associated with the Anderton family of Birchley Hall, near Wigan. A & R list sixteen books from this press, all printed between 1615 and 1621, including two by the unidentified author who used the pseudonym John Brereley, sometimes thought to be Lawrence Anderton. In 1956, when the A & R catalogue was published, the compilers knew of no extant copy of The Reformed Protestant. Since then, two copies have come to light, one in the library of the Marquess of Bute, the other in a collection of books formerly belonging to Burscough Catholic parish in Lancashire. The latter copy has been acquired by the British Museum. The description is as follows :