Of the forty-two clandestine Catholic schools Beales lists as documented in the first quarter of the seventeenth century, none has been more graphically described or frequently recalled than the Jesuit school at Stanley Grange near West Hallam in south-east Derbyshire. Unmasked by Government in 1625, it survived there for a further decade before its abrupt suppression in 1635.

A few deliberately but tantalizingly vague references show that the school continued to operate on a small scale elsewhere in Derbyshire, under the aegis of the fledgling Jesuit College of the Immaculate Conception (CIC). From that time, and particularly since the foundation of Mount St. Mary’s College at Spinkhill by the CIC in 1842, there has been speculation as to whither this precursor school moved and how it fared after Stanley Grange. The most recent contribution is a significant reassessment by Hendrik Dijkgraaf in 2003 of the anonymous but painstaking editorial article in the Mount St. Mary’s magazine The Mountaineer for 1912, written in rebuttal of a suggestion that the school had remained at Stanley Grange into the mid-1640s.

The Scottish Mission of the Jesuits was until the end of the eighteenth century entirely separate from the English Province with its own superior, houses on the continent and funds. Scottish candidates for the Society were educated at various houses in Europe. In the year 1729, for example, there were twelve missionaries in Scotland (plus one travelling and one in England), there were seven priests in the Scots College at Douai, two in Paris, three in the Scots College at Valladolid and one in Prague. About five were studying in preparation for ordination to the priesthood in the houses of various provinces of the Society, as were four novices. It was not a large mission—there were only thirty-nine members in that year. The last member of the old Scottish Jesuit mission, Fr. John Pepper, died in 1810. Occasionally, individual Scottish Jesuits worked in England or lived in the houses of the English Jesuits on the continent. One among these was Alexander Strachan.

In the course of efforts to gather together all the documentation relating to Fr. Ignatius Spencer C.P. (1799–1864) in connection with the process of beatification, references were encountered to a document entitled: Reflectiones Propositionesque Pro Fidelium Sanctificatione. To this date the paper has not been found. Ignatius had entered the Passionist Congregation on 21 December 1846, his birthday, and since he was already a priest, he was rapidly entrusted with positions of responsibility in the Congregation. The paper in question was one of his concerns in the years 1854–1857. In his writings, mention can be found of its composition, and of the reception it received from various people. It may be possible to reconstruct to some extent the content of the missing document, although the reason for its disappearance must remain an open question.

For the best-selling periodical Once a Week, Harriet Martineau wrote a pot-boiling story in 1861 called ‘Sister Anna’s Probation’. It tells the tale of an English squire’s daughter who devotedly takes the veil and, against the backdrop of the Henrician Reformation, emerges after a reasonably decorous series of vicissitudes to marry the honourable beau, Captain Fletcher. Together, they rescue a certain footstool belonging to Anna that had been appropriated by the abbess. Inside that footstool was concealed the very bible from which Anna had gained her first sense of the futility of the convent life and the oppressions of the Roman Catholic religion.

At first glance, the actions of Fr. Charles Bowden, a member of the Brompton Oratory in London, toward a troubled, adolescent, Roman Catholic girl, Eliza (in some reports referred to as Ellen) McDermot, would appear as a praiseworthy and unselfish example of Christian charity. Fr. Bowden, a young cleric, acted on information he allegedly learned from Miss McDermot in the confessional and worked to save her from a possible life of ruin on the London streets. Fr. Bowden eventually urged the young sixteen year old pregnant girl to seek refuge at a local convent where she would have the opportunity to repent and reform her life. McDermot followed his advice, but this seemingly innocent plan to save her soul fanned the flames of hatred against Catholicism and sisterhoods. Without informing her family, Miss McDermot secretly took up residence in a convent, and she did not reveal the location to her mother. When her family complained about this so-called ‘abduction’, critics of Roman Catholicism, and sisterhoods in particular, took their campaign to the public and attacked the actions of Fr. Bowden in letters to the press, graphic pamphlets, and speeches in Parliament. The case of Eliza McDermot quickly emerged as another example which illustrated the evils of Catholic convents, but it failed to capture public attention. Several reasons help to explain the short-lived notoriety of this story, especially the failure to prove that Bowden had broken any English laws.

William J. Walsh, a name no longer familiar to people, was in his lifetime so long and so vividly associated with the struggle for educational, social and political equality on behalf of the majority population in Ireland that his death seemed to mark the passing of an institution rather than of a man. For more than thirty years he was the leading voice of the Irish hierarchy, and his wide interests and penetrating intelligence found expression in many books and in an almost unending flow of letters to newspapers on topics as varied as education, theology, canon law, social justice, human rights, bimetallism, the environment, and arbitration. A poor preacher, he made the press his pulpit, so much so that irreverent Dublin wits termed him ‘Billy the lip’. His standing and influence was such that at his death the lord mayor of Dublin, Laurence O’Neill, felt moved to the extravagant observation that he was ‘the greatest archbishop of Dublin since St. Laurence O’Toole’. The remarkable fact that the coffin of an archbishop was draped in a tricolour, even as ‘the Troubles’ raged, spoke more emphatically than words how he was viewed by the nationalist population.

A little over two weeks after the commencement of the First World War, the Catholic Church was left without its universal shepherd at a time of immense upheaval. Pope Pius X died on 20 August 1914 and immediately, the cardinals of the Catholic Church made their way to Rome to elect his successor. In the conclave, the choice fell on Giacomo della Chiesa, Cardinal Archbishop of Bologna, who took the name of Benedict XV. Della Chiesa had been a student of Cardinal Mariano Rampolla, the Secretary of State under Leo XIII. His essential training had been in diplomacy and this made him well qualified to cope with the war. Immediately upon his accession, Benedict adopted a policy of impartiality and advocated an immediate peace by negotiation. His various peace efforts were ignored, however, and many Catholics in various European countries gave only lukewarm support or made clear an outright rejection of the Pope’s pronouncements on diplomacy. This article concentrates on the reaction of British Catholics, in particular, to Benedict XV’s peace appeals during the war, including his Peace Note of 1917.