WHEN Philip II of Spain sent his Armada to invade England in an attempt to cut off support for the Dutch rebels, he did so in the name of God and the Catholic faith. Elizabeth, in turn recognised the propaganda value of an identification of monarch, country and Protestant church at times of national crisis. It was widely believed that, as the Spaniards wanted to overthrow the Protestant church, the English Catholics must have been pro-Spain. Elizabeth had always regarded the Catholics as a danger to her government; it was now easy for her to portray them as traitors to their country. The attempts by Catholics to claim to be patriotic were, understandably, treated with scepticism. But this had not always been the case. The purpose of this article is to outline the struggle to monopolise patriotic propaganda which took place between the government and the English Catholics throughout Elizabeth’s reign.

Some time in the winter or spring of 1576-7, Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, lately back from a tour of the continent, was introduced by his friend Charles Arundell to a seminary priest, Richard Stephens, and became a Catholic. Stephens, an Oxford man recently returned from Douai, had already reconciled, with Arundell, his friends and relatives Lord Henry Howard, the late Duke of Norfolk's brother, and Francis Southwell. As bright young courtiers, they scarcely fall into the category of depressed gentlemen attracted to Rome by economic discontent; but they had about them a certain sense of “outness”, and shared a resentment against the successful Elizabethan families which was at least partly responsible for their conversion. It was less than five years since Norfolk's execution; and Burghley's wardship of Oxford had ended in a marriage to his daughter which was now, like the relations of the two men, severely strained. This discontent led naturally to the idea of upsetting the established system, both in society and in religion; this, they agreed, was what they would work for.

The congregations which I have chosen to study here are those of Alnwick, Ellingham, Haggerston, Berrington and Berwick; the materials used are those described in an earlier essay, published in Recusant History in April 1967. They are: the returns of papists of 1767 and 1780; the religious census of 1851, districts of Alnwick (no. 559), Belford (560) and Berwick (561); the registers of Roman Catholic estates for Northumberland (Surtees Society, cxxxi, 1918) and Durham (ibid., clxxiii, 1958); and the mission registers and allied documents. None of these last are published. They consist: for Alnwick, of the baptismal registers (including confirmations and some marriages), 1794-1840 (PRO R.G. 4, nos. 1572 and 3911); for Ellingham, of baptismal registers (confirmations, marriages, deaths), 1779-1840 (R.G. 4, nos. 2483 and 2915), and an almost complete set of annual Easter communion lists, 1811-40 (originals in R.C. presbytery, Seahouses, Northumberland); for Haggerston,of baptismal registers (some marriages), 1790-1830 (R.G. 4, no. 1802), a register of deaths, and of Easter communicants, 1834-56 (originals in R.C. presbytery, Lowick, Northumberland); for Berrington, of the baptismal register, 1804-16 (R.G. 4, no. 2482); for Berwick, of baptismal registers, 1804-40 (R.G. 4, no. 1402). For knowledge of, and access to, such of these mission records as are not deposited in the Public Record Office, and for numerous other kindnesses, I am deeply indebted to Fr. W. Vincent Smith of Lanchester. Co. Durham.

The beginning of serious French interest in the affairs of English Catholicism falls in the first years of the seventeenth century. Since the Reformation, French kings and their ministers had usually felt that Catholicism in England was, on political grounds, to be discouraged rather than advanced; from a more recent date, they had ceased to have a foreign policy at all. Interest in English Catholicism had been left to the Spaniards, who had coped with it as best they could. Two explanations can be offered why things began to take a different turn during the reign of Henri IV. The first is that the reconstruction of what Sully described as “la faction fran9oise dans la Chrestiente” carried with it almost automatically a revival of the anti-English posture traditionally associated with it; the combination is a familiar one.

In the following essay I have tried to put into practice some ideas about the investigation of English Catholic communities outlined in a paper which I gave to the recusant history conference in 1965. These were much indebted to the school of sociologie religieuse inaugurated in France by M. Gabriel le Bras; I have tried to adapt its approach and methods for use in the different conditions of an English nonconfortning body. The assumptions made are that the congregation is a major object of study in the history of any Christian tradition; and that congregations, being secial entities, may best be studied by methods, including statistical methods, proper to the study of societies. In applying these assumptions to the history of English Catholicism I do not claim to be doing something different from what historians of the subject have usually done, but to be asking about single cells questions which have traditionally been aimed at the body as a whole. How big was it, and was it getting bigger or smaller? Who belonged to it, and why? Where did its members live? What relations had they with one another, outside religious belief and practice? With how much enthusiasm, with what particular emphases did they believe and practise? How did they get on with the community at large? I have sought here to answer some of these questions for four congregations in rural Northumberland between the mid-eighteenth and the mid-nineteenth century: Hesleyside alias Bellingham, Biddlestone, Thropton and Callaly. I chose this period because materials of the sort one needs were available for it; and also because it is a period of peculiar importance in the history of English Catholicism, covering the transition from its ancient to its modem phase, and providing a point of departure for enquiry in either direction. There is little significance in the communities chosen. It is incidental that the region in question should have provided most of the English support and much of the English scenery for the rebellion of 1715, or that Biddlestone should have a small niche in literary history as the original of Osbaldistone Hall in Scott’s Rob Roy. One of the characteristics of this type of investigation is that it does not much matter where one begins. Another is, however, that the value of conclusions drawn depends on. the number of cases studied. I hope to pursue some myself, but should be most happy if others were inspired to do the same. One might, in this way, reach a more intimate and comprehensive understanding of the whole English Catholic community than has so far been achieved or, I suspect, is possible for any other religious community in the country.

This paper will discuss the history of the College of St Francis Xavier, the Welsh territorial district of the English Province of the Society of Jesus, and the history of Jesuit association with its headquarters, the Cwm farms at Llanrothal, near Hereford. One of 12 territorial divisions created by the Society of Jesus upon the creation of the English Province by 1623, the College of St Francis Xavier and its extensive surviving library, now housed at Hereford Cathedral, is being analysed as part of a three-year project funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council [AHRC]. The article argues for a re-evaluation of the Welsh District and its importance to the successes of the English Jesuit Province, concluding that, far from being a small, local missionary outpost of the English Province of the Society of Jesus, the College of St Francis Xavier, or the Welsh District, was in fact a diverse, vibrant and crucially important lynchpin in the successes of the Jesuits in England and Wales.

Nobody will pretend that Henry Constable was more than a minor poet and an indifferent theologian; he is nonetheless a crucial figure in the history of English Catholicism, and it is most important that we should have a clear idea of his motives and opinions. Dr. Rogers has done us a great service by sorting out the bibliographical history of his Examen pacifique de la Doctrine des Huguenots, and dispelling a number of confusions which had accumulated around it. I propose to supplement his article by producing evidence which, except on a few points, will support and amplify his conclusions and suggest a more concrete biographical background to them.

It is now fifty-six years since I wrote my first piece for Recusant History, and I am happy to have survived to welcome its reincarnation. Since its foundation in 1951 as an addendum to Gillow’s Biographical Dictionary of English Catholics it has had an honourable career, getting into print a number of essential contributions to the history of Catholics in England, mainly between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. It has been a companion to the distinguished bibliographical work of Anthony Allison, David Rogers and Tom Birrell. It was a creation of laymen, which is to say that it was an attempt to transcend the efforts of a period when this history had been largely a monopoly of the clergy, and ran the risk of degenerating into feuds between rival sections of that body. This lay input was much strengthened by the effect of the 1944 Education Act, which produced numbers of students keen to make a mark in the field. In view of their education, they did not necessarily alter the terms in which questions were put, and when the modest journal was launched a degree of hegemony in the Catholic Record Society was being exercised by the Jesuit side, which ought to have but failed to put out the letters and papers of Robert Persons. It had an invitation to wider thoughts in the philo-Jesuit lectures on the Counter-Reformation of the Cambridge academic Outram Evennett, delivered also in 1951.1 As these were not published until 1968 the invitation was muffled, but something of it was in the atmosphere.

Apostasy among the English Catholic gentry in the late eighteenth century was not uncommon. In this period contemporary Catholic observers were concerned by what they perceived to be a great qualitative decrease of English Catholic gentry and they regarded apostasy as ‘a major and catastrophic cause of the decline’. Conformity to the established religion was a social virtue and was rewarded with social advantages; it was part and parcel of one's rise in the social scale and so was a great temptation for gentlemen outside the Anglican fold who were desirous of a service or parliamentary career. In almost every county in England many heads of old English Catholic families conformed. Indeed, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, of the twenty-four Catholic gentry families that existed in the Riding in. 1706 only twelve remained by 1780. Between the years 1754–1790 seven members of the House of Commons had renounced Roman Catholicism in order to pursue political careers and according to the contemporary Catholic priest Joseph Berington, by 1780 there were but 177 landed Catholic families in England ten of which had either died out or recently abjured their faith. Just a few conversions could have devastating consequences for Catholic communities. As David Butler points out, often ‘Catholic missions were over-dependent on the Catholic aristocracy and gentry for the continuance of Catholic worship’ and for Butler, in eighteenth-century London alone, if ‘just eight prominent families had apostatised … the Catholic missions would have lost about half of their numbers’.

In late December 1585, the abbey of Saint-Victor, on the south-eastern-edge of Paris, played host to a group of English Catholics. The journal of Guillaume Cotin, the community’s librarian, tells us that the English arrived in the run-up to the feast of the martyrdom of Saint Thomas of Canterbury. The feast itself, on 29 December, was marked by a high mass sung in honour of the saint, with a sermon [service] in English. Several supplementary masses were also celebrated by English priests. Apparently, in order to attend these celebrations, ‘English Catholics came in very great multitude’.

How did Catholics in the first generation after the Relief Acts respond to their new freedom? The Midland District was a mosaic of missions of every kind, including urban, industrial, rural, aristocratic and plebeian. in piecing together the fragmentary remains of this mosaic, a picture emerges of the life of lay Catholics in many different contexts, and reveals something of their aspirations and outlook in the difficult years between 1791 and 1840.

(John Macky, 1707)

(John Macky, 1725)

This article examines the involvement of young people in recusancy in Elizabethan England. It explores how two issues – the meaning of recusancy and the appeal of religion (specifically Catholicism) to youth – can illuminate each other. After looking at some of the evidence for the role of recusancy in juvenile experiences of Catholicism, the article focuses on three contrasting cases which illustrate young people's engagement with recusancy and Catholicism, and how it was interpreted by adult authorities, Catholic and Protestant: a case of recusant proselytising by the young men of a gentry household, as reported to the Privy Council; the alleged visions of fourteen-year-old Elizabeth Orton in Flintshire in 1581; and the autobiographical testimony of Robert Colton, a recusant youth imprisoned in London's Bridewell in 1595–6. It is argued that including recusancy will help us to better understand the complexity of youthful engagement with religion in early modern England, and also to appreciate the implications of recusancy.

In the account of his missionary work, the Jesuit John Gerard (1564–1637) famously explained how, after a few years of penury in ‘Mass equipment’, Catholic houses had become so well equipped that priests were able to set about their work immediately upon their arrival. He recalled that in the last two years of his work (1604–06), he no longer needed to lodge in taverns but always found friendly dwellings to shelter him on his way. Most of these were run by women, whose prominence in the activity of harbouring was pointed out in many documents, including the minutes of the confession given to the Privy Council by the appellant priest Anthony Sherlock, who turned informer after his capture in 1606: