The recent appearance of the final volume of The Contemporary Printed Literature of the English Counter-Reformation between 1558 and 1640, an Annotated Catalogue, by A. F. Allison and D. M. Rogers, volume II, Works in English (ARCR II), represents the completion of the work of two scholarly lifetimes devoted to the study of early recusant printed books. To call it merely a catalogue, or even an annotated catalogue, is to underestimate the nature of the achievement. Perhaps the best way to evaluate it is to begin by tracing the history of its development.

William Allen is best remembered as the founder of those colleges at Douai and Rome which prepared men to go as missionary priests to England and so helped to preserve the faith there during the time of persecution. Because of his own personal qualities as a scholar, and his ability to work with others and meet the changing political situation, he became in his day the acknowledged leader of the English catholics. He maintained cordial relations with the Society of Jesus and was fully aware of the ecclesiastical scene on the continent of Europe. His resolute attitude towards heresy and insistence on the practice of the true faith even in the most difficult conditions, entitles him to be considered the father of recusancy. Yet Allen's reputation is not high outside Catholic circles. His involvement in the cause of Spain, especially at the time of the Armada, has led many to regard him as seriously misguided if not an outright traitor. This criticism has had its effect on Catholics since it has cast a shadow on his work and his claim that he never allowed his students to become engaged in politics has not always sounded totally convincing. Over a hundred years ago in his Introduction to the Douai Diaries T. F. Knox deliberately avoided any discussion of this matter saying, ‘his political action stands in no relation to his work for the seminary.’ This side of Allen's activity has often proved an embarrassment to his biographers who sometimes try and console themselves with the ungracious conclusion that Allen's political involvement was due to the machinations of Robert Persons. The fourth centenary of his death provides an opportunity to take another look at Allen's life and writings, paying particular attention to the context in which he lived before he went into exile, and from an appreciation of the situation under Mary Tudor to progress towards an understanding of his later work and activity on the continent, especially his relationship with Spain.

‘Father Persons’ has long been a legendary figure of controversy. We cannot even agree on the spelling of his name. Most of his contemporaries called him Parsons, especially if they were hostile, but his correspondence and other manuscript evidence make it quite clear he preferred Persons. The variant spellings would not affect the pronunciation of his name, but ‘Parsons’ is a reminder of the rumour that he was the bastard son of a Somerset parson. Parsons or Persons, he was notorious in his day as a traitorous plotter and irrepressible controversialist, but today he is virtually ignored by literary scholars. The story is told of a meeting in 1954, on a train from Cambridge to Oxford, between C. S. Lewis and A. L. Rowse. Rowse congratulated his fellow-traveller on the recent publication of his History of English Literature in the Sixteenth Century—a work that itself was to become, for other reasons, the centre of controversy—pausing only to register some surprise at his treatment of prose: ‘You praise Cardinal Allen, who is really negligible and wrote very little, but you do not even mention Robert Parsons, the Jesuit who wrote over thirty books and was one of the most considerable prose writers of the Elizabethan period. Why?’ To this piece of donnish one-upmanship, Lewis bluffed: ‘I did not think he was important enough to be included.’ He hadn't read Persons.

This paper is a sequel to ‘The Pakingtons of Harvington’ by Lionel and Veronica Anderton Webster, which was published in Recusant History in April 1974. There they only had room to discuss in detail the century between the purchase of Chaddesley Corbett and Harvington by Sir John Pakington in 1529 and the death in 1631 of his great-nephew Humphrey III, who had built the Elizabethan Hall with its remarkable priest-holes and wall-paintings. In continuing the story I have had invaluable help from the Websters’ genealogical and legal notes, which Veronica passed on to me in the summer of 1991, the year before her death; but their references have been checked, a great deal has been added, and the structure, the inferences and any errors are mine. The paper therefore appears under my name with these acknowledgements, rather than as a joint publication. I hope that in due course the trilogy can be completed by another paper on The Throckmortons of Harvington, 1696–1923’.

The Irish, noted a French traveller in 1644, ‘se nomment Ayrenake’. Is it all that noteworthy that those whom the traveller questioned should denote themselves as ‘Éireannach’ or Irish? The answer must be a cautious ‘yes’ because if the same question had been posed some forty years earlier the reply would most likely have been either ‘Gael’ or ‘English’ depending on the respondent's racial identity. This new patriotism which centred on love of one's native land and religion had been created over the preceding sixty years by the ‘Old’ (i.e. of pre-Reformation settler stock) English who found themselves increasingly estranged from Protestantism as espoused by the crown and by ‘New’ English officials and settlers. A more immediate impulse towards the fashioning of a new Irishness was the Protestant device of lumping all Irish Catholics together regardless of putative ethnicity. In the 1680s an Irish Protestant spokesman briskly summed up the outlook of his group; ‘If the most ancient and natural Irishman be a Protestant, no man takes him for other than an Englishman; and if a cockney be a Papist, he is reckoned in Ireland to be as much an Irishman as if he was born on Slevelogher.’ By then what had been a self-serving rhetorical commonplace was indisputably a reality. So, the ‘faith and fatherland’ patriotism was to an extent thrust on the Old English and was not necessarily hostile to the crown in general or to the Stuarts in particular. Far from it, the motto of the Confederation of Kilkenny (1642–9) ‘pro Deo, pro Rege, pro patria Hibernia unanimis’ shows how an earlier generation had tried to square this circle.

Preaching in Edinburgh on 8 October 1885 at the clothing ceremony of two Mercy nuns, Fr. William Humphrey SJ, the convert-chaplain of the episcopalian bishop of Brechin, used the following extract from Psalm XLIV as his theme:

Anna Kingsford, born Annie Bonus in September 1846, died at a young enough age to qualify for one of the most lovingly detailed of all nineteenth-century biographies. It appeared in January 1896, within eight years of her death. Its author, Edward Maitland, was in fact a prolific writer in several fields; but he never came closer than here to having an ideal subject to set before his Victorian readers. For not only had the culture of the nineteenth century already tended (with instruments as diverse as the national census and the personal diary) to reaffirm absolutely Samuel Johnson's famous axiom that ‘there has rarely passed a life of which a judicious and faithful narrative would not be useful' but Anna Kingsford had had one of those lives, peculiarly interesting to the Victorians, which the process of narration inevitably turns into histories of this or that set of religious opinions. She herself, in her final months of life, perceived as much; and it accordingly became ‘necessary’—or so she ventured to suggest—‘that I should not die without some sort of Apologia’.

The negotiations between the Board of Education and the Roman Catholic authorities over what was to become the 1944 Education Act began in April 1941 when the Government's Green Book on educational reform was delivered to the Catholic hierarchy. They were to continue until the Government's proposals became law in 1944. There were three distinct phases in these negotiations, centred on the Green Book, the White Paper, and the Bill. The intention of this article is to examine the latter two phases.

After protracted negotiations on the Green Book there was near deadlock between the Board and the Catholic Church. R. A. Butler's aim in the Green Book, which he adopted when he became President of the Board of Education in July 1941, was to provide a national system of education, primary, secondary and further. There would be secondary education for all, children being transferred at the age of eleven to grammar, modern or technical schools. This raised the issue of the role of denominational schools, the so called ‘Dual System’. Essentially the voluntary bodies, if they were to continue to be part of the State system were offered two possibilities. Under the first they would receive 100% grant towards the maintenance and repair of buildings (in addition to the payment of teachers’ salaries) for which they would concede the appointment of teachers to the Local Education Authority (LEA) and accept an ‘agreed syllabus’ for religious education. The second possibility would allow the voluntary bodies to retain the appointment of teachers and the teaching of their own religious syllabus, but the Government grant in this case would be only 50%. Catholics felt that, in conscience, they could not accept the first option and that they were being penalised for their religious beliefs in regard to the second. They pressed, therefore, for 100% grant.