There is a well-known passage in Lord Macaulay’s History, in which he describes the Catholic country gentleman of penal days. The typical Catholic squire (so he tells us) ‘if he differed from the neighbouring squires, differed from them by being somewhat more clownish than they. The disabilities under which he lay prevented his mind from expanding. His fields, his greyhounds, his gun occupied almost all his thoughts.’ This has always struck us as an entirely mistaken idea. For, so far from the Catholic squire being more insular than his fellows, he was from the very nature of the case usually far less so. In most instances he had had a foreign education, and consequently some opportunities for foreign travel. His uncles or younger brothers (denied a career in their own land) might be in the service of the Catholic princes of France, Spain, or Austria, while sisters and cousins would perhaps have entered English religious houses on the Continent. Among his correspondents would probably be relatives whose Jacobite proclivities had made them exiles abroad. He could hardly help being something of a linguist, and from time to time would receive parcels of foreign books and journals and scraps of international gossip; and (more likely than not) his domestic chaplain and family tutor—a daily companion—would be a man of scholarly tastes and literary ability. His outlook would as a natural consequence be altogether wider and more cosmopolitan than that of his neighbours.

One Catholic family of penal days in which the characteristics we have in mind were markedly prominent in many of its members was that of the Swinburnes of Capheaton in Northumberland.