During the last week of February 1606, the survival of Catholicism in England depended on whether Nicholas Owen could remain silent under prolonged and ruthless torture. A few months later, John Gerard wrote of him:

‘Charges that he [John Sergeant] was a disciple of Blacklow [Thomas White] … rest on … unsatisfactory evidence.’ Godfrey Anstruther’s conclusion has not, so far as I know, been directly challenged; so this note aims belatedly to offer some evidence in support of Sergeant’s close Blackloist connections.

John Sergeant (1623–1707) is now usually remembered as the leading Catholic protagonist in the ‘Rule of Faith’ debates, though he has also been presented as an informer at the time of the so-called Popish Plot, and as a far from negligible philosopher. It will be argued here that, in both theology and philosophy, he was essentially a follower of Thomas White (1593–1676), leader of the influential faction of English Catholics who derived from his best-known alias their title of ‘Blackloists’; for Sergeant himself, in the words of Bishop Richard Russell quoted in the title, ‘everywhere proclaimed himself White’s disciple’.

Some of the multifarious literary activities of Captain John Stevens have received attention from specialists. His journal of the Irish wars of 1688–91, not published until 1912, is now generally recognised as being one of the most important primary sources for the campaign. His place in the history of travel writing, as the translator into English of classical works in Spanish and Portuguese on the history, geography and ethnology of the Iberian world, has been established by Dr. Colin Steele. His major contribution to English monastic history, as the translator and continuator of Sir Thomas Dugdale, though less well known, and deserving closer study, has been recognised by David Douglas. More recently a Portuguese scholar has paid tribute to him as one of the first writers to introduce the English reader to Portuguese history and literature. English Hispanists have acknowledged his prolific output as a translator of Spanish authors, notably Cervantes and Quevedo. More controversially, in Pat Rogers’s fascinating study of the literary underclass in London during the age of Pope and Swift, he is ignominiously—and, I shall argue, unjustly—indexed under the heading ‘Dunces and their allies’.

Schoolboy letters do not often survive, no doubt because they are notoriously uninformative; however the collection reproduced here can claim something more than mere scarcity value. It reveals a little of what it was like to be a schoolboy at Douai; the themes of pocket money, illness, injury, discontent, delayed correspondence, and the need for various items from home will be familiar to those who have ever written or received such letters; there is perhaps a greater degree of overt piety than would nowadays be expected. We do also see something of the means by which pupils were escorted to Douai (II, III), and something of the conveyance of Catholic books and objects of devotion from Douai to England (V, VI); there is information about Douai custom in the matter of leaving presents (XII). There is a letter from the boys’ father, and one each from Rev. Christopher Banks, from Rev. Francis Gage (the President), and from Rev. Thomas Lockwood, the latter in particular having composed a masterpiece of tact and concern.

In 1917 Shane Leslie published a general article in The Dublin Review, quoting extensive passages from the extant correspondence between Florence Nightingale and Henry Edward Manning, the bulk of it written in 1852 when Nightingale was considering conversion to Roman Catholicism. The letters are of great importance for understanding her character and eventual theological position. Although only Nightingale’s part of the correspondence is extant, it is of value, as well, to students of Manning and is of particular interest for the background it provides to disagreements between the Nightingale and Mary Stanley nursing contingents in the Crimea, 1854–1855.

Newman’s correspondence is a rich harvest for understanding his thought, and the people with whom he corresponded were a fascinating group of individuals, many being influential thinkers in their own right. Among the latter was Richard Holt Hutton (1826–1897), journalist, critic, theologian, teacher and biographer. Son and grandson of Unitarian ministers, he eventually converted to an evangelical form of the Church of England, under the influence of F.W. Robertson and F.D. Maurice, having come to a deep belief in the Incarnation. With the previous experience as joint editor of The National Review and assistant editor of The Economist. Hutton was invited early in 1861 by Meredith Townsend, the new owner of The Spectator, a weekly newspaper with liberal leanings, to become joint editor and part proprietor. The Spectator became the forum in which Hutton was able to express his theological and literary-critical views for the remainder of his life. As this paper will show, the correspondence with Newman was another important means for Hutton to communicate his ideas, and, in conjunction with his critique of Newman he penned in other pieces, gives insight into the mind of an important Victorian, but also a new perspective from which to view Newman’s thought on such matters as revelation, the rôle of reason in coming to faith, and an infallible teaching authority.

For some Roman Catholic clergymen, the nineteenth century was an exciting age. On its very eve, Cardinal Ruffo led a pious bandit band in a crusade of slaughter through the southern Italian Parthenopean republic. In 1810, another priest, Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, under the banner of Our Lady of Guadalupe, began the revolution in Mexico. Luigi Menichini led the 1830 insurrection in Naples. Father Piotr Sćiegienny’s revolutionary activities in Poland earned him a quarter of a century’s exile in Siberia. Father Patrick Lavelle founded an Irish society which was a front for the revolutionary Fenians. The secular or ecclesiastical politician has a job to do, and in some places, the priesthood was forced into political roles, as in nineteenth-century Italy, Mexico, Poland and Ireland. But in spite of the international conflict between Catholicism and anticlericalism in Europe and South America, the ordinary Catholic priest was not primarily a political animal. Unless he served in the Curia or was a martyr-missionary in the South Seas or Central Africa, the priest’s life was the old hidden life of caring for the souls of the people of his parish and of preaching the gospel and administering the sacraments. Amid the tumult of the nations, this inner work continued on its quiet path, and in riches and poverty, and beside the allurements and excitements and man-made manipulations of secular and ecclesiastical politics, the priesthood was concerned with the essential tasks of the comfort of the stricken and the salvation of sinners, laid upon them by their Lord and Master.

In the monastic refectory at Downside the two portraits of the abbey’s great Victorian prelates, William Bernard Ullathorne and Francis Aidan Gasquet, dominate the scene, placed as they are above the abbot’s table on either side of the crucifix. Ullathorne, in the prime of life, looks alert and full of purpose. Gasquet, in decline, looks sour and tired. ‘The Cardinal,’ wrote the Venerabile obituarist, ‘used to walk down the corridor (of the English College) with tightly compressed lips and irritable-looking lines above his nose, while his eyes, which were partly hidden beneath frowning brows, scanned us searchingly the while: in a word, with none of that graciousness of age which is the common memory of all who knew him.’ Gasquet, the only English Cardinal to make a significant impact in the Roman curia in the twentieth century, remains an ambiguous character, now little known and if remembered at all associated with poor historical scholarship. Yet, Gasquet’s influence was considerable and owed much to his amiable personality and ready wit, his ability to make friends and to influence those in the highest echelons of church and state. Indeed, in 1903 Francis Aidan Gasquet was very nearly appointed as the first Benedictine Archbishop of Westminster. Instead, the somewhat colourless Francis Alphonsus Bourne succeeded Cardinal Vaughan and Gasquet had to be content with a life as varied and interesting as the church could offer.