It will be very regrettable if, in this centenary year of Catholic Emancipation, some one competent does not undertake to write a Life of Charles Butler. The full story of his work for the advancement of the English Catholics should illuminate the whole condition of the Church in England in the last critical years of the penal laws, when an increasing number of Catholic families had abandoned the Faith, and when the prevailing philosophical tendencies brought new dangers to the small remnant that still remained steadfast. In Ireland, the persecution of the Church had been so thorough and vindictive that the Catholic population had been deprived of almost everything, and had practically nothing left to lose. But in England, the fact that the few Catholic families were mostly of the propertied class was a continual source of temptation to surrender.

Almost every year, as the second half of the eighteenth century wore on, some new case of apostasy would reduce still further the small number of devoted Catholic families, who still kept the faith alive and had gathered round them groups of dependents and retainers who attended Mass in the private chapels of the great houses. ‘In this year alone,’ wrote the Rev. Charles Berington in 1780, when Charles Butler had just reached his thirtieth year, ‘we have lost more by the defection of the two mentioned gentlemen (the heirs of the Duke of Norfolk and Lord Teynham) than we have gained by Proselytes since the Revolution.’