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:

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.

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.

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.

Rev. Dr John Bede Brewer OSB arrived to serve the Catholic mission in England in 1776. Like other contemporary English Catholic priests, he had been educated and trained abroad and, even though choosing to join a religious order, Brewer expected to be posted to serve for many years at some mission in England. An inevitable consequence of being spread rather thinly throughout the country was that quite frequently many priests were left much on their own resources in coping with their location and mission. During the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries a preponderance of missions had, of necessity, been based rurally in gentry or aristocratic households where protection and economic support were available. During the eighteenth century as industrialization, population movement and urban growth all took hold new demands, personal, financial and organizational, became apparent for the small cohort of English Catholic clergy. There were four vicars apostolic to superintend the Catholic Church in England but much was left to the initiative, effort and resources of individual priests, particularly as the Relief Acts of the later eighteenth century relaxed the penal laws and gave greater freedom to Catholic clergy.

The events described and discussed in this article centre on St Joseph's Chapel, Bristol, which was opened in 1790 and was the first Catholic church to be built in the city since the Reformation.