The Darell family history provides a good illustration of the confused and conflicting religious loyalties in sixteenth and seventeenth century England. There were four branches of the family in southern England, all originally descended from William Darrell of Sesay, Yorkshire, in the early fifteenth century. The Pagham and Fulmere branches descended from William of Littlecote; the Calehill branch from John of Calehill by his first wife; and the Scotney branch from John of Calehill by his second wife, niece and heiress of Archbishop Chichele, who owned Scotney Castle. In this paper I am mainly concerned with the Calehill branch. Burton, in his life of Bishop Challoner, stated ‘they were always Catholics’ and he was followed by McGurk, but the head of the Calehill branch was not in fact a recusant until after 1694. From that time they were consistently Catholic.

The English Catholic apologist John Heigham (1568–1632) deserves to be better known in light of the significant historical consequences of his efforts in the field of Catholic apologetics. Heigham’s tract, The Gagge of the Reformed Gospel (1623) accused the Reformed Church in England of heresy and innovation and summoned the readers back to the Roman Catholic Church. This work was answered by Richard Montagu (1577–1641), the future bishop of Chichester and Norwich in his book, A New Gagg for an Old Goose (1624). Montagu’s book provoked a storm of controversy within the Church of England because the author simultaneously replied to Heigham’s Catholic arguments and attacked Calvinism within the Church of England, which he labelled ‘Puritanism’. A series of books attacking Montagu were then published by English Calvinists who accused Montagu of popery and of betrayal of the Reformed cause. These disputes contributed to the Calvinist/Arminian division within the Anglican Church, a religious controversy that was one of the contributing causes of the English Civil War. Thus the seed planted by Heigham’s tract grew into a forest of religious controversies and ended in a war. This article summarizes the content of Heigham’s tract and the principal ideas of his Catholic apologetics, after recounting the main events of Heigham’s little known life. Then Montagu’s response will be surveyed and the reactions it spawned.

Robert Witham (1667–1738) was the seventh son of a prominent Yorkshire Catholic Recusant family. Little is known about his early life. He studied at Douay, where he was ordained a priest circa 1691, and remained as a teacher until circa 1698. He returned to England to serve as a priest in Cliffe and was promoted in 1711 to Vicar General of England’s Northern District. In 1714 he was appointed the twelfth president of Douay. He assumed the position in 1715 and remained there until his death. In administering Douay, he was faced with an unrelenting demand for the most resourceful diplomacy. He had to keep satisfied his superiors and benefactors in England and Rome, and deal with the liberalizing influences of French institutions. In addition, he was confronted with a series of financial crises, including the forfeiture of Catholic estates that followed the unsuccessful Stuart rising of 1715, followed by the ‘Mississippi Bubble’ that devastated the French economy and cost Douay most of its endowment. The frustrations of what he termed this ‘troublesome office’, caused him on three occasions to offer his resignation. Nonetheless, Witham proved to be one of Douay’s most successful presidents, sometimes considered its ‘second founder’, eliminating the College debt, increasing the number of students, and beginning an ambitious building programme.

The accounts kept by Sir Nicholas Shireburn of Stonyhurst with his goldsmith for the years 1697–1702 and the following years show that he was paying for the education at St. Omers College of two Shireburn ‘nephews’, Charles and Richard or ‘Dick’. The exact relationship is not known, ‘sons of a poor relation’, ‘distant relations’, ‘connected with the Shireburnes of Stonyhurst but the exact connection is uncertain’. When Charles Shireburn died in 1745 The Gentleman’s Magazine stated that he was related to the Dowager Duchess of Norfolk, Mary, daughter of Sir Nicholas Shireburn. The Extinct Baronetcies shows that some of the Shireburns of Stonyhurst in the sixteenth century had younger sons. Charles and Richard may have been descended from one of these.

During the second half of the eighteenth century the shipping industry of the port of Liverpool continued to expand, as it had done since about 1660, as the port’s trade increased and became more diversified, both geographically and in terms of the commodities which it handled. Though the surviving statistical evidence is not entirely reliable and statistics produced at different times during the period are not strictly comparable with each other, there being, for example, no system of general ship registration before 1786 from which statistics of vessels owned within the port could have been calculated, it does appear that during the second half of the eighteenth century the amount of shipping owned within the port more than doubled, if not trebled. In 1751, 220 vessels were reputedly owned there, while on 30 September 1793, 606 vessels were officially on the Liverpool shipping register. Several thousand vessels were owned within the port at different times and for varying lengths of time during the period under review, for example, in the period from August 1786, when the system of general ship registration commenced, to December 1799, 1,571 vessels were either registered for the first time under the 1786 Ship Registry Act at the port of Liverpool or, having been purchased by Liverpool owners, were transferred to the Liverpool register from the registers of other ports. Clearly, opportunities for employment as ships’ captains were considerable. Indeed, such was the size of the Liverpool shipping industry in the second half of the eighteenth century that more than 2,000 individuals found employment as such, including several—possibly between 100 and 150—who were Catholics, though a precise figure is impossible to calculate on account of the difficulty of identifying captains who were of this faith.

Born at the small Highland farm of Belachknockan in Glenlivet on 18 September 1805, Paul Maclachlan was the second of John Maclachlan and Helen Grant’s sons to be educated for the priesthood. There were already clergy kinsmen from Banffshire, a county which produced many priests for the increasingly industrial Lowlands of Scotland. Two James Maclachlans had attended the nearby seminary of Scalan, and Paul Maclachlan and his brother John, the older by nineteen months, were sent to the successor college of Aquhorties in Aberdeenshire. Paul, who won renown for his high intellectual qualities, entered the Lowland District seminary nine months ahead of his older brother on 17 March 1819. In January 1821 he was in the second class studying Caesar under the future Bishop James Kyle, while John was a year behind with the Rev. James Sinnott and Cornelius Nepos.

Richard Downey on becoming Catholic Archbishop of Liverpool in 1928 seems to have anticipated The Tablet’s admonition. Downey indeed seems to have begun his episcopate (1928–1953) with a determination to change the public perception of Catholicism in his diocese and in the city of Liverpool in particular. In late twentieth century terminology he engaged in a ‘re-branding exercise’. He withdrew support for a specifically Catholic political party in Liverpool, which had been favoured by his predecessor Archbishop Keating. He emphasised the civic commitment and the ‘Englishness’ of the Catholic community, moderating the impression that the Catholic community in Liverpool was essentially Irish. Thus although St. Patrick’s Day would continue to be celebrated, so would St. George’s Day. Additionally the blessings conferred on the world by the British Empire would be fulsomely acknowledged. Catholics would be seen to be part of the mainstream community contributing to its fullness and development. They would cease to be perceived as an alien irritant in the body politic.

Arthur Hinsley was born in 1865 at Carlton, near Selby, in Yorkshire. Educated and trained for the priesthood at St. Cuthbert’s College, Ushaw, and the Venerable English College, Rome, he was ordained for the Diocese of Leeds in 1893 and immediately returned to Ushaw as a professor. In 1898 he became a curate at St. Anne’s Church, Keighley and from 1900 to 1904 was the founding headmaster of St. Bede’s Grammar School, Bradford. Following a disagreement with Bishop William Gordon of Leeds he was incardinated into the Diocese of Southwark in late 1904 and served as rector at Sutton Park near Guildford and at Sydenham. In 1917 Hinsley was appointed Rector of the Venerabile and in 1928 was sent to Africa as Apostolic Visitor charged with assessing and reporting on the state of Catholic missionary education in the British colonies. While in Africa he remained Rector of the English College but resigned from this post in 1930 when he was appointed as the first Apostolic Delegate to the British colonies in Africa. He remained in Africa until an attack of paratyphoid forced him to retire and return to Rome in 1934. On his retirement he was given a sinecure as a Canon of St. Peter’s Basilica. Hinsley had been created a Domestic Prelate to Pope Benedict XV in 1917 when he was appointed to the Venerabile. In 1926 he was consecrated titular Bishop of Sebastopolis and when he returned to Africa in 1930 he became titular Archbishop of Sardis.