The process of depriving Catholic martyrs of their lives inevitably involved the lay authorities in some expense. This is borne out graphically by the Newcastle Chamberlains’ Accounts of the early 1590s, which relate to the sufferings of Joseph Lambton and Edward Waterson, who were executed at Newcastle, and John Ingram, who died across the river in Gateshead. The details of their torments are well established. Lambton—who was born in May 1568 and was probably the youngest of all the martyrs—and Waterson were captured at Newcastle at about the same time and condemned to death at the assizes held on 20 July 1592. The execution, which was set for Saturday 22 July, was postponed until the Monday ‘in order to avoid a crowd of people’. In the event Lambton suffered alone and his execution ‘was one of the most horrible on record’. The task of hanging and dismembering Lambton's body was given to a man condemned for felony at the same assizes: he was offered a reprieve in exchange for performing the gruesome duty. The job was badly botched and a French surgeon was called in and paid twenty shillings to complete it. Waterson was given a temporary reprieve. It is recorded that the sheriff took one of the quarters of Lambton's body to Waterson ‘hoping to frighten him into submission but Waterson only kissed it’. Indeed, Waterson was made of stern stuff. His date of birth is not known but he was born in London and brought up a protestant. After travelling in Turkey he was ordained at Rheims in March 1592 and sent to England two months later. After his reprieve in July 1592 Waterson escaped but was soon recaptured. He refused to be cowed and languish quietly in his cell: the Newcastle chamberlains had to lay out money to repair ‘the door that the priest burnt in prison’. He was executed on 8 January 1593 by John Litherington, a fellow prisoner, although the grisly task of quartering the body fell to the serjeant, William Fever.

Martyrs were the first saints and some were among the most popular saints of the Middle Ages. Because it was the manner of their death that won them their place in heaven, martyrs were a special case; unlike other saints, evidence of heroic virtue in life and miracles were not required. Like the early martyrs, many sixteenth-century English martyrs were immediately recognized as saints by their co-religionists, without reference to judicial processes. But the status of martyr was not popularly accorded automatically to Catholics who died on account of their faith. Despite Southwell's ‘Epitaph’: ‘A Queen I liu'd, now dead I am a Saint/Once MARIE calde; my name now Martir is’, Mary, Queen of Scots, was not generally acclaimed as a martyr, even by Catholics.

The mission at Burton Park in West Sussex has been most recently discussed by Fr. Geoffrey Holt in Recusant History 13 (1975). A few amplifications and corrections can, however, be made from sources not known to him.

First, the position within the Elizabethan house of the chapel that served the mission until the early nineteenth century can be identified from a local newspaper report of 1826. Successive manor houses at Burton occupied the same site, pace the speculations reported by Fr. Holt. A curious feature of that site was that at one time it straddled the boundary between Burton and Barlavington parishes (Fig. 1); the medieval house was evidently in the former and expanded eastwards into the latter. The Elizabethan house, which survived until the early nineteenth century, had at least two courtyards, of which the westemmost lay eighty metres south of Burton parish church and had an elaborate frontispiece, known from a drawing by Grimm. The east end of the house was rebuilt in the eighteenth century by the Venetian architect Giacomo Leoni, with a fine classical façade and a notable saloon and drawing room, but in 1826 the building was largely destroyed by fire caused by a servant girl's carelessness. The report of the event in the Brighton Herald states that the chapel was at the west end, which together with the centre of the building was the part that was burnt.

Just prior to their departure for England in the spring of 1580, Robert Persons and Edmund Campion received an explanatio from Pope Gregory XIII suspending the sentence of excommunication against Queen Elizabeth in the bull Regnans in Excelsis. The explanatio decreed that English Catholics were not bound to implement the sentence of deposition against Elizabeth rebus sic stantibus, that is, under the present circumstances. The two priests hoped that this faculty would allay the English government's fear that they had come to foment rebellion in England. But the explanatio produced the opposite result. Lord Burghley and the government seized upon the conditional nature of the decree to argue that any future profession of Catholic loyalty must be disregarded out of hand. Rome's strategy, therefore, had backfired. The rebus sic stantibus declaration had given the Persons/Campion mission a fatal taint of treachery and treason.

Historians are generally agreed that Lancashire was the most Catholic and the most Jacobite county in England at the time of the 1715 rebellion. Indeed, final confirmation of this connection would seem to have been established by Professor Paul Kléber Monod. In his book, Jacobitism and the English People 1688–1788, Monod has stated that ‘Lancashire had the largest [Catholic] recusant population in England’ at the end of the seventeenth century, and that of the 688 listed English Jacobite rebels captured at Preston in 1715, 366 were from Lancashire, 227 from Northumberland, 78 from other counties, six from Ireland and eleven from unidentified places. Monod also discovered the religious affiliations of four-fifths of the Lancashire rebels and noted that 76 per cent of them were Roman Catholics. With these vital statistics in our possession it would seem that there is no need for further research on Lancashire Catholicism and Jacobitism in the early eighteenth century. But certain questions, ignored or barely touched on by Monod and other historians, need answering. First, how many Catholics were there in Lancashire in about 1715, what was their geographical distribution and social composition, and how far were they dominated by the gentry? Secondly, what was the social composition of the various Lancashire Catholic groups: the active Jacobites, the passive Jacobites and those of unknown allegiance? Thirdly, how do the Catholic and Protestant Jacobite rebels of Lancashire compare from a social and political standpoint? Finally, and confining ourselves mainly to the Catholic gentry, how strong a link was there in Lancashire between the Royalism of the Civil Wars (1642–48) and the Jacobitism of the 1715 rebellion?

The letter given below is translated from the original in the archives of Propaganda and is presented here for the interesting light it casts upon the progress of the mission in the Isle of Man in the early eighteenth century. The original document is also reproduced. 18 July 1727

I am not one to follow in my own footnotes, but a number of correspondents have wondered how the shockingly poor relations between the Catholic gentry and their chaplains described in ‘Priests and Patrons in the Eighteenth Century’ (Recusant History Vol. 20, No. 2 pp. 207–22) could have arisen. One instance might be ascribed to the overbearing demeanour of a squire, or his wife, another to a clash of temperament, and yet another to a differing perception of the proper rôle of a chaplain, but the lack of cordiality between the clergy and the gentry was so widespread that a predisposition to incompatibility might reasonably be suspected. This paper traces the origins of their antipathy to the experience each gained of the other in early life, particularly during their schooldays.

Literary writings had a significant, if elusive and subtle, rôle to play in securing the position of the English Catholic community in the especially vulnerable period 1829–1850. It is questionable that the Catholic press and Catholic apologists and polemicists played so large a part in calming the anti-Catholic frenzy so evident in the 1820s as the subsequent more literary products of Catholics and those non-Catholics who were intrigued by Catholicism. Holmes remarks that in this period ‘most Catholic apologists attempted the fruitless and unending task of answering specific objections and those books or pamphlets which survive are merely gathering dust on the shelves of Catholic libraries’. It took greater art to get behind the defences of John Bull's anti-Catholic fortress mentality. The rôle of literature was to affect the perceptions and sympathies of the intelligentsia rather than political conditions: at the beginning of this period people felt with Dr. Arnold that ‘the [Anglican] Church, as it now stands, no human power can save'; while at its end, people could hold the expectation ‘that Popery will in a few years become the popular religion of these realms’. This sense of the seriousness of the Catholic presence was established mostly, of course, by Catholicism's actual presence; but that was amplified and consolidated in the mind of the educated public by literature, substantially in a positive direction.

Ever since the purchase of the Manor of Ingatestone in 1539, the Petre family has played a prominent part not only in the history of the Catholic community in Essex, but in the life of the Church further afield. Sir William Petre, the founder of the Essex line, and two of his descendants have merited the attention of a biographer, while there has also been a substantial periodical literature associated with the family. However, no such detailed study has yet been written on perhaps the most intriguing member of the family, the little-known thirteenth Baron of Writtle, Monsignor Lord William Joseph Petre. The present article seeks to shed light on the early part of the career of this pioneer of Catholic liberal education and the first Catholic priest to take his seat in the House of Lords since the Reformation. The focal point of Petre's earlier years was the monastery and school of St. Gregory's, Downside.

In his inaugural lecture on the study of history, delivered at Cambridge in 1895, Lord Acton exhorted his students to ‘try others by the final maxim that governs your own lives, and to suffer no man and no cause to escape the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on wrong … If we lower our standard in history, we cannot uphold it in Church and State.’

This was Acton in his seventh decade, some seven years before his death. As a young man in his mid twenties, writing for The Rambler, which at that time Acton and his circle of liberal catholics hoped to use as the vehicle for educating their co-religionists into harmonizing their ancient faith with contemporary science and scholarship, he struck a very different note. This was the Acton who distinguished between Catholic and Protestant intolerance, excusing the former as the product of ‘external circumstances,’ while condemning the latter as an ‘imperative precept and a part of its doctrine.’ Acton was not, at any point in his life, a conventional thinker, and just as his later view of the historian as moral judge was, and remains, controversial, so his earlier reading of ecclesiastical history was disputed by friend and foe.