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.

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 …

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 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.

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.

Writing in the Cambridge Historical Journal in 1956, G.F.A. Best introduced his article on the religious difficulties of national education in England from 1800 to 1870 with the comment ‘the peculiar problems and difficulties in the way of achieving a national system of elementary education in nineteenth-century England [had] long been so obvious and notorious that a new attempt at an objective and comprehensive view must seem surprising and rash.’ He then justified his own article on the grounds that none of the works available did the subject justice because none told the whole story. In giving only fleeting mention to the educational claims of Roman Catholics, however, even Best omitted an essential of the great educational debate that was waged over England for much of the nineteenth century and that in its earlier phases found some of its more powerful voices in Manchester.

The Wesleyan Church in the second half of the nineteenth century exhibited a high degree of anti-Catholicism, a phenomenon which had intensified with the ‘Romanising’ influence of the Tractarian movement in the Church of England. To many Wesleyans Roman and Anglo-Catholicism seemed synonymous and the battleground of faith was to be elementary education. The conflict began earlier in the century. When in 1848 Roman Catholic schools made application to the government for grants similar to those offered to the Wesleyans there was an immediate split in Wesleyan ranks. At the Conference in Hull in 1848 Beaumont, Osborn and William Bunting attacked their leadership. They claimed that Methodists should not accept grants in common with Catholics. Jabez Bunting, the primary Wesleyan spokesman of his age, was however rather less critical of the Roman Catholic Church than he had been previously and clearly advocated the continuation of the grant: