Nicholas Owen, the master-builder of priest-holes, latibulorum egregius artifex, died of torture in the Tower on the night of 1–2 March 1606. A few months later, the Jesuit John Gerard, who owed his life at least four times to hides constructed by Owen, wrote in his Narrative of the Gunpowder Plot:

The early school at Ampleforth was built on the Catholic educational tradition established in continental exile. It was also, in its first three decades, an ambitious and innovative enterprise achieving a degree of success, from the perspectives of educational attainment and social prominence, that was not matched in its history until the twentieth century and its emergence as a major school within the English public school tradition. In its early years, however, Ampleforth was far removed from the Anglican schools that were to develop this tradition.

The school at Ampleforth was not originally intended to educate boys other than those intended for the religious life. The plan of the President of the English Benedictine Congregation, Fr. Bede Brewer, was that Ampleforth should be an exclusively monastic community, while Catholic lay boys were to be educated in Lancashire at the Benedictine school established earlier at Parbold. The Parbold school was derived from a small school for the sons of the gentry founded in 1789 by Fr. Gregory Cowley at Vernon Hall. The last Prior of Dieulouard, Fr. Richard Marsh, had taken control of this school in 1797 and then moved it, and the Community of St. Laurence, to Parbold in 1802. When subsequent plans to move the community again, this time to Yorkshire, were being made, Brewer had written, ‘I wish the school in Lancashire to continue as it is established though on a different plan. I would not admit to Ampleforth any boys other than such as the parents are willing, if they have a vocation, to take the Church.’ The beginnings of Ampleforth as a school for intending religious can be seen in a letter of 1803 from Brewer to Mrs. Metcalfe regarding the education of her sons, John and Edward, both of whom did join the community. The letter details the financial provisions for the arrangement. In total £450 was to be paid, ‘but in case the said sons or either of them should not choose or not be judged by the Master of Ampleforth Lodge School proper and fit to enter on any ecclesiastical state of life, or if the school should be discontinued or could not maintain itself at the present state of its pensions… this will be deducted at the rate of £25 per annum from the time entered into the school.’

My introduction to Francis Edwards came with a warning—like a pack of cigarettes. But it was not the surgeon general who cautioned me but another American Jesuit, Dennis Linehan. I was a scholastic, visiting Farm Street for the first time in June of 1977, as I investigated British doctoral programmes in history. Before Father Linehan introduced me to Francis, he advised me to avoid certain subjects: the identity of the author of the Shakespearian plays, the Cecils, William and Robert, and, most important, the Gunpowder Plot! Anyone who believes that events from four centuries ago can no longer arouse emotions, never sat at dinner with Francis Edwards and Kempie Webb as the conversation inevitably turned to the plot! Each defended his position with passion and certainty.

On the morning of Wednesday 22 May 1538, the Observant Franciscan John Forest was dragged on a hurdle through the streets of London from prison in Newgate to his execution at Spittalfields. Henry VIII's efficient propaganda machine had been in action for days in advance and a large crowd had gathered to witness the event. it began at eight o'clock and reached its climax, the burning of Forest, three hours later.

Mary Ward (1585–1645) is known as the foundress of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, an Order of women which continues to educate thousands of girls around the world. During the first decades of the seventeenth century, her foundation was a religious venture which aimed to transform the Catholic mission of recovery into one that catered for women as well as men. It maintained clandestine satellites on English soil and opened colleges on the Continent, in towns such as St Omer (1611), Liège (1616), Cologne and Trier (1620–1), Rome (1622), Naples and Perugia (1623), Munich and Vienna (1627) and Pressburg and Prague (1628). There, it trained its own members and undertook the education of externs and boarders. The Institute's vocation was not only to maintain the faith where it was already present but also to propagate it; as such, it went far beyond the accepted sphere of the feminine apostolate and its members were often labelled as rebels who strove to shake off the shackles of post-Tridentine religious life. To some modern historians, Mary Ward was an ‘unattached, roving, adventurous feminist’; to others, she was a foundress whose initiative deliberately set out to lay tradition to rest and begin a new era for the women in the Church.

The attitude of the Jesuits, as of all Catholic recusants at this time, was conditioned by being a persecuted minority. Maintaining their faith, they were also concerned to win over the persecutors. So Jesuit writings combine counter-attack and apologetic in ways not contradictory but certainly complex. Theirs was a special difficulty. They avoided politics, but many of their confrères on the continent, notably Robert Persons, favoured a military solution since the prevailing régime in England had from the outset rejected any peaceful overture. They relied on the Spaniards for a successful invasion. This never happened. Treason not prospering remained treason. But from about 1601 and the abortive Spanish effort at Kinsale, even the Catholics on the continent realised that there could be no forceful answer to the recusant dilemma.

In 1999 the Bodleian Library acquired a tract volume containing an hitherto unrecorded and unknown publication of William Carter. The item itself has been fully described by Geoffrey Groom in the Bodleian Library Record (Oct. 1999) and to celebrate the acquisition I gave a short talk to the Friends of the Bodleian Library on the subject of Carter's career: the present article is a considerably expanded version of that talk.

It has become customary to regard John Lingard as the last, and perhaps finest, of the cisalpine historians, a case powerfully developed in the pages of Joseph Chinnici's The English Catholic Enlightenment, and elsewhere. One of the last generation of students to be trained at the English College, Douai, Lingard would here have been introduced to the Gallican writings of Claude Fleury and his contemporaries which gave shape to English cisalpinism. The first edition of his History of England (1819–1830) was written at least partially with the intention of paving the way for Catholic emancipation which the cisalpine Catholics had so long struggled to achieve. At the same time, this work succeeded in offering a far more forthright challenge to the Protestant reading of English history, fashioned so cogently in the early decades of the eighteenth century, than Lingard's cisalpine forebears would have been prepared to make: Lingard was moving on and is better understood as belonging to a period of transition for the Catholic community in England. Revisions in later editions bring Lingard's intentions even more to the fore. Never quite at ease with figures such as John Milner and Nicholas Wiseman, his onetime pupil and future Cardinal, and certainly not accepting their strident ultramontanism, Lingard is closer to them in his historical studies than sometimes he, or they, realised.

Nineteenth century London, like many towns and cities in Britain, experienced phenomenal population growth. At the centre of the British Empire, and driven by free trade and industry, it achieved extraordinary wealth, but this wealth was confined to the City and to the West End. East London, however, consisted of ‘an expanse of poverty and wretchedness as appalling as, and in many ways worse than the horrors of the industrial North’. There was clear evidence of the lack of urban planning, as factories were established close to the immense dock buildings constructed near Stratford. Toxic materials such as paint and varnish were produced in large chemical works owned by the German chemist, Rudolf Hersel, as were matches by the firm Bryant and May, and rubber, tar and iron for the building trade by various industrialists. Social historians have viewed the poverty of mid-nineteenth century London's East End as a symbol of urban disintegration in which skilled artisans were reduced to sweated, lowly-paid, labourers. Their homes, built close to the industrial sectors, were erected hastily and cheaply, and lacked proper hygienic and sanitary facilities, so that slum conditions prevailed. Moreover, this housing had to be demolished frequently to make way for new roads and railways, thus creating great hardship for an already destitute people.

The late Professor Geoffrey Dickens in his book, The English Reformation, condemned the Marian church for ‘failing to discover’ the verve and creativity of the Counter-Reformation; on the other hand, Dr Lucy Wooding has praised the Marian church for its adherence to the views of the great religious reformer Erasmus and its insularity from the counter-reforming Catholicism of Europe in her book Rethinking Catholicism in Reformation England. However, by studying the Latin and English catechetical, homiletic, devotional and controversial religious texts printed during the Catholic renewal in England in the reign of Mary Tudor (1553–58) and the decrees of Cardinal Reginald Pole's Legatine Synod in London (1555–56), a very different picture emerges. Rooted in the writings of St John Fisher—which also influenced the pivotal decrees of the Council of Trent (1545–63) on justification and the Eucharist—Marian authors presented a theological synthesis that concurred with Trent's determinations. This article will focus on three pivotal Reformation controversies: the intrepretation of scripture, justification, and the Eucharist.

In the Royal Library of Belgium in Brussels is a manuscript which consists of over two hundred closely-written folios of English translations of Jesuit letters from Japan, or Japonia as it was then called, introduced with a prologue by the compiler ‘G.C.’, hinting fairly heavily that the translations were made in prison. Until recently rebound, the manuscript bore a Latin inscription on the pastedown, stating: ‘This book belongs to the English Benedictine Monastery of the Assumption of Our Lady in Brussels’. Although the contents of the volume are of interest in their own right, the concern of this article is with two men, Gabriel Colford and George Cotton, who have little in common except the initials ‘G.C.’ and the experience of imprisonment for religion.

In a vigorous theological controversy, William Bishop, English Roman Catholic theologian educated at Oxford, Rheims, Rome, and Paris, took on William Perkins, the best-selling English Protestant writer of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The two writers were formidable champions of their respective religious traditions. As I will argue, this was a significant exchange, though the dispute has been little noticed by historians of the period. The issues the two writers discussed and the way they discussed them throw considerable light on the state of English religion in the early seventeenth century. Bishop emerges as a more powerful and effective spokesman for the Roman Catholicism of his day than has been heretofore recognised.

Friar Dominic, the title character of The Spanish Fryar (1681), is usually regarded as a ‘crude caricature of Catholicism,’ an advertisement for Dryden's Protestantism during the Popish Plot crisis of 1680. But there is another way of looking at him. One may ask, why does Dryden make this wicked priest a Dominican at a time when Jesuits are being singled out for vituperation? Why does he call him Friar Dominic, have him refer to Saint Dominic as a ‘sure Card’ who never fails ‘his Votaries,’ and plainly term him ‘this Jacobin’ (II.iii.2), another name for a Dominican? Evidently, he wants the reader to notice that his satire is aimed at one particular Order, not all Catholic Orders. As William Prynne noted long before, ‘no Protestants’ ever wrote ‘so bitterly against these Popish orders as themselves do one against the other.’ Dryden's choice seems odd, since Dominicans were a handful compared to the 120 Jesuits, 80 Benedictines and 55 Franciscans in the English mission. They were not even worth the historian's numbering. Besides this, Cardinal Philip Howard, Dryden's uncle by marriage, was an eminent Dominican under whose aegis Dryden would place two of his sons after the 1688 Revolution, when they went to Rome to serve the Pope.

On 11 August 1553, having received a pardon from Queen Mary, Stephen Gardiner, bishop of Winchester, returned to the house at Southwark where his household had reassembled, ready for the work ahead. Gardiner's household was a formidable political and ideological instrument. It had been forged during his battles with Archbishop Thomas Cranmer in the 1540s and early 1550s. It was Gardiner's household which defended him at his trial in the winter of 1550 and supported him through his confinement until 1553. Key individuals, especially Thomas Watson, assisted him in the theological contest with Cranmer which he carried on from the Tower of London. At Mary's accession in 1553, these men began a constant round of preaching engagements, visitations, work in Parliament, and formal disputations, and three, Watson, John White and James Brooks, took up places on the episcopal bench. Of the artefacts of this work that remain to us, some of the most significant are the printed political treatises, books of sermons, and school textbooks produced by Gardiner's household. These items offer a window into the intellectual culture and ideology of the Lord Chancellor's household at a time when Gardiner had more control over national life than ever before in his long career. A study of the ideological literature published by Gardiner's household falls naturally into three areas: material connected with the parliament of April 1554, material which promoted popular engagement with the Fathers of the Church, and material connected with St John's College, Cambridge, and John Fisher. It is this last area that will be the focus of this paper.

The title of this paper is taken from a work written in 434 A.D.: the Commonitorium of Vincent of Lerins. Leech considered this a ‘golden book’; we will see later the significance of Vincent for Leech, while Leech's life will perhaps illuminate his own age. Calling himself ‘Peregrinus’, Vincent wrote: ‘whereas I was at one time involved in the manifold and deplorable tempests of secular warfare, I have now at length, under Christ's auspices, cast anchor in the harbour of religion’. His aim was to pass on the teaching of the Fathers and to give guidance ‘for distinguishing the truth of the catholic faith from the falsehood of heretical pravity.’

‘Those who establish religious foundations are very closely linked with the life their benefaction has made possible. Their influence takes from day to day its part in the life of the foundation.’ So wrote the pseudonymous Robert Sencourt in 1948 as the start of an article about the Empress Eugénie. This present article will explore the elements in Eugénie's character and past life which motivated her to make such an unusual foundation as a mausoleum-abbey at Farnborough, her establishment of its church and house, the relationship between her and its clergy, and the lives of the religious communities (first Premonstratensian, then Benedictine) that staffed the abbey from its foundation until her grand funeral there, which provides the climax of the article.

The London of Challoner consisted only of some seven square miles, one square mile of which was, of course, the City of London. It can all be put onto some eight pages of the present A–Z map of London, which at the time of writing consists of 141 pages. John Rocques's map of London, on a scale of 200 feet to the inch, which he began in 1738 and finished in 1747, in its London Topographical Society format of 1982, perfectly illustrates the London of both Challoner and Defoe. The western extremities were at Marylebone, Knightsbridge and Chelsea, the eastern at Stepney, Limehouse and Deptford, the northern at Tottenham Court and Bethnal Green, while the southern limits were at Kennington and Walworth Common. The population of London was assessed by Wrigley in 1990 as c. 575,000 in 1700, as c. 675,000 in 1750 and as c. 959,000 in 1801. The 1767 papist returns indicated that most London Catholics lived in the parishes of St James and St Giles, within Westminster. Schwarz has pointed out the considerable social segregation in London, middle-class areas being in the west and central parts, with the poorer areas in the south and east. The St Giles area around Seven Dials going east to Bow Street and Drury Lane is reputed to have contained a third of the capital's beggars and to have been a notoriously criminal quarter. The Catholic numbers in Westminster were 7,724, the City numbers 1,492, with the Middlesex out-parishes having more than 2,000. The 1767 total for London, including the parishes to the south and east, comes to 12,320, clearly too low, as is the accumulated total for the London District of around 15,800. This gives about 3,500 for the London District outside the capital while Challoner's own figures give us a Catholic population of 5,261. If the errors in enumeration were the same in both areas (a large assumption), this enables us to guess that the 1767 figures could be corrected to about 18,500 London Catholics and about 24,000 for the whole District.

‘One must not wait for better times but create them’. Such was the message that the young Francis Tregian (1574–1617) received from the teaching of Dr William Allen, president of Douai. In such a way he lived his life, preserving his faith and later struggling, in adverse political conditions, to improve the fortunes of his family. Was he also able to copy several important music manuscripts, including the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book? This article is yet another examination of a problem much discussed for over a hundred years.

During the Thirty Years’ War, John Taylor served at the Habsburg courts in Brussels, Madrid, and Vienna. Although he figured prominently in Charles I's secret Habsburg foreign policy during the war and was one of the ‘persons of distinction’ included in the original Dictionary of National Biography, published information on Taylor is sparse. His story is especially compelling given his own and his family's connections with Continental Catholicism as well as his involvement, as a gentleman of indisputably Catholic background, in English diplomacy of the time.