My introduction to Francis Edwards came with a warning—like a pack of cigarettes. But it was not the surgeon general who cautioned me but another American Jesuit, Dennis Linehan. I was a scholastic, visiting Farm Street for the first time in June of 1977, as I investigated British doctoral programmes in history. Before Father Linehan introduced me to Francis, he advised me to avoid certain subjects: the identity of the author of the Shakespearian plays, the Cecils, William and Robert, and, most important, the Gunpowder Plot! Anyone who believes that events from four centuries ago can no longer arouse emotions, never sat at dinner with Francis Edwards and Kempie Webb as the conversation inevitably turned to the plot! Each defended his position with passion and certainty.

The attitude of the Jesuits, as of all Catholic recusants at this time, was conditioned by being a persecuted minority. Maintaining their faith, they were also concerned to win over the persecutors. So Jesuit writings combine counter-attack and apologetic in ways not contradictory but certainly complex. Theirs was a special difficulty. They avoided politics, but many of their confrères on the continent, notably Robert Persons, favoured a military solution since the prevailing régime in England had from the outset rejected any peaceful overture. They relied on the Spaniards for a successful invasion. This never happened. Treason not prospering remained treason. But from about 1601 and the abortive Spanish effort at Kinsale, even the Catholics on the continent realised that there could be no forceful answer to the recusant dilemma.

The late Professor Geoffrey Dickens in his book, The English Reformation, condemned the Marian church for ‘failing to discover’ the verve and creativity of the Counter-Reformation; on the other hand, Dr Lucy Wooding has praised the Marian church for its adherence to the views of the great religious reformer Erasmus and its insularity from the counter-reforming Catholicism of Europe in her book Rethinking Catholicism in Reformation England. However, by studying the Latin and English catechetical, homiletic, devotional and controversial religious texts printed during the Catholic renewal in England in the reign of Mary Tudor (1553–58) and the decrees of Cardinal Reginald Pole's Legatine Synod in London (1555–56), a very different picture emerges. Rooted in the writings of St John Fisher—which also influenced the pivotal decrees of the Council of Trent (1545–63) on justification and the Eucharist—Marian authors presented a theological synthesis that concurred with Trent's determinations. This article will focus on three pivotal Reformation controversies: the intrepretation of scripture, justification, and the Eucharist.

On 11 August 1553, having received a pardon from Queen Mary, Stephen Gardiner, bishop of Winchester, returned to the house at Southwark where his household had reassembled, ready for the work ahead. Gardiner's household was a formidable political and ideological instrument. It had been forged during his battles with Archbishop Thomas Cranmer in the 1540s and early 1550s. It was Gardiner's household which defended him at his trial in the winter of 1550 and supported him through his confinement until 1553. Key individuals, especially Thomas Watson, assisted him in the theological contest with Cranmer which he carried on from the Tower of London. At Mary's accession in 1553, these men began a constant round of preaching engagements, visitations, work in Parliament, and formal disputations, and three, Watson, John White and James Brooks, took up places on the episcopal bench. Of the artefacts of this work that remain to us, some of the most significant are the printed political treatises, books of sermons, and school textbooks produced by Gardiner's household. These items offer a window into the intellectual culture and ideology of the Lord Chancellor's household at a time when Gardiner had more control over national life than ever before in his long career. A study of the ideological literature published by Gardiner's household falls naturally into three areas: material connected with the parliament of April 1554, material which promoted popular engagement with the Fathers of the Church, and material connected with St John's College, Cambridge, and John Fisher. It is this last area that will be the focus of this paper.

‘One must not wait for better times but create them’. Such was the message that the young Francis Tregian (1574–1617) received from the teaching of Dr William Allen, president of Douai. In such a way he lived his life, preserving his faith and later struggling, in adverse political conditions, to improve the fortunes of his family. Was he also able to copy several important music manuscripts, including the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book? This article is yet another examination of a problem much discussed for over a hundred years.

For contemporaries, the Gunpowder Plot was ‘a mother… of all crimes’, and their sense of shock, and awe, in the face of so dreadful a treason was in no way diminished by the drama surrounding its discovery.2 The arrest of Guy Fawkes outside the cellars of Westminster, late on the night of 4 November 1605, caught King James I and his ministers completely off guard. A mass of documentary evidence for the fraught days following Fawkes's apprehension confirms that ignorance, embarrassment, even panic ran through the highest counsels in the land. While a deadly strike had clearly been frustrated, with just hours to spare, no one knew whether trouble might be expected from other conspirators in the capital, or indeed, from rebels and mischief-makers elsewhere in England. Military men rushed to court, and within a week a sizeable force had assembled there under the command of the Earl of Devonshire, prepared to face and to repel a phantom enemy.3 Open panic did of course subside, as administration and country alike began to measure and appreciate the danger, but anxiety was a long time dying. The extraordinary hysteria that swept London in the spring of 1606, on a rumour that the king had been assassinated, touched the court itself and serves as a reminder that, months after 5 November, many Englishmen in high positions still stood on their guard.4

In 1614 Charles Boscard published at St Omer The Life and Death of Mr. Edmund Geninges Priest, Crowned with Martyrdome at London, the 10. day of November, in the yeare M.D.XCI, a book which John Hungerford Pollen called ‘the most sumptuous, artistic, and, typographically speaking, the most interesting literary monument to our martyrs which our poor persecuted church was ever able to set forth’. This beautiful little book's most striking feature is a set of twelve handsome engravings by Martin Bas of Douay, one before each chapter illustrating an episode in the martyr's life. It also harbours an important allusion to King Lear, and hence to William Shakespeare.

The world of the late seventeenth century was a very different one from that of a hundred years earlier. Religious tensions seemed to have fallen into the background. A new London was rising out of the fire of 1666 around the slowly growing walls of Wren's Cathedral, the foundation stone of which was laid in 1675; this was the age of Dryden, Pepys, and Isaac Newton. For the most part Catholics and Protestants got on together as neighbours, not asking too many questions. The penal laws, though still on the Statute Book, were disregarded. Yet for all its seeming modernity, there was a darker side to late seventeenth century English society. The world of the restored Stuart monarchy reflected a society lacking confidence, subject to scares and alarms. Popular fears of a restoration of Catholicism, a mood of discontent in the country, and political intrigue in Court and Parliament all contributed to what Lingard describes as ‘one of the most extraordinary occurrences in our domestic history’:1 the hysteria generated by a plot purported to have been uncovered by Titus Oates, information of which was given to Charles II by his laboratory assistant during his usual early morning walk one summer day in 1678.

A large collection of letters from John Thorpe, an English Jesuit resident in Rome from 1756 until his death in 1792, are in the British Jesuit archives in London. Those in this collection which date from 1756–67 were to John Jenison S.J. a student of theology at Liège and later chaplain at Wardour Castle, and those from 1781–92 to Charles Plowden S.J. chaplain at Ellingham in Northumberland and from 1784 at Lulworth Castle. This article uses the letters to Plowden written between 1784 and 1792.