The Jesuit mission to England so proudly announced by Edmund Campion in 1580 was a venture hesitantly undertaken by the Society of Jesus. There was careful, prayerful discernment not only before Father General Everard Mercurian decided in its favour but also throughout its subsequent growth and development. According to the Formula of the Institute, in a sense the Jesuit rule, the purpose and goal of the Society was twofold: the salvation and sanctification of both the individual Jesuits and of their fellow men and women. The entire thrust of Ignatian spirituality was the consideration of the first in so far as it advanced the second. Ignatius urged that all the ordinary practices and customs of religious life be considered in the context of the apostolate and either executed or modified in so far as they advanced the order’s goals. Because of the stress that Ignatius had placed on the Society’s works, he was reluctant to prescribe any universally binding spiritual practices. Indeed, among the wide powers granted to the General in the order’s Constitutions was that to grant dispensations ‘in particular cases which require such dispensation, while he takes account of the persons, places, times, and other circumstances.’

Hugh Owen was a Welshman, born at Plas Du in Caernarvonshire in 1538, who refused to forego his Catholic religious allegiance in the reign of Elizabeth I. Secretary to Henry, twelfth and last of the Fitzalan Earls of Arundel, he fled abroad at the time of the Ridolfi Plot in 1571. Although only on the fringe of it, he, no doubt, considered himself, with reason, to be in danger of implication. Certainly he appears to have been involved, about this time, in a project to secure the release of Mary, Queen of Scots, which would have made it extremely perilous for him to stay in England. By the 1580s he enjoyed the full confidence of the Duke of Parma, governor of the Spanish Netherlands, as the organiser of an intelligence network which enabled him to counteract in large measure the very effective system of espionage established by Sir Francis Walsingham. Parma passed him on to Archduke Albert, who described him as ‘diligent, very discreet and suitable for any business’.

In recent years, students of recusancy have begun to turn their attention to the inner life of the Catholic community, a development much to be welcomed; and it is understandable that for the most part the centre of interest has been what is called the spiritual life. Influences coming from St. Francis of Sales and St. Teresa of Avila have been traced, and Augustine Baker has rightly been the subject of much study. What needs further investigation, I believe, is the devotional life of the ordinary person, namely the gentry and their wives and daughters in their country houses, especially in the seventeenth century. There were also those who towards the end of the century increasingly lived in London and other towns without the support of the ‘patriarchal’ life of the greater families. No doubt, many were unlettered, and even if they could read they were probably unused to handling anything but the simplest of books. It would be interesting to know what vernacular prayers they knew and said, how they managed to ‘hear Mass’, as the phrase went, what they made of the sacrament of penance, and what notions about God and Jesus Christ they entertained. Perhaps the religious practice of the unlettered is now beyond recall, but something remains of the practice of those who used the many Primers and Manuals that are still extant.

At the Reformation, three possibilities faced English Catholics. They could continue to be Catholics and so suffer the penalties of the penal laws; they could conform to the Church of England; or they could adopt a middle course and become Church Papists. The Nevills of Nevill Holt, near Market Harborough in Leicestershire, went through all three phases. In the reign of Edward VI, Thomas Nevill I became a Protestant. His grandson, Thomas Nevill II, became a Church Papist under James I; and Thomas II’s son, Henry Nevill I, continued to be one at the time of the Civil War. But Henry l’s son William was definitely a Catholic and went into exile with King James II, while William’s son, Henry Nevill II, was an open Catholic under Charles II. Henry Nevill II’s descendants continued to be Catholics throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries until they left Nevill Holt in the late nineteenth century.

John Champion, a Jesuit, was at Sawston Hall near Cambridge, the home of the Huddleston family, from 1730 or earlier until his death in 1776. It is possible from a study of the Huddleston papers deposited in the Cambridgeshire Record Office and of other contemporary documents to discover something of his life as a family chaplain—a life that was probably typical of the lives of other priests of the time.

The eighteenth century abounds with colourful, eccentric figures, some famous and others known by but few readers. Sir John Dalrymple of Cranston, was such a person, curious in his interests and controversial in his activities even for his time. Historians of modern Roman Catholicism have long recognized that he played a part in the negotiations which led to the English Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1778, but they have mentioned him only in passing. Their sketchy references to his role usually derive in one way or another from Fr. James Stother’s account of the abortive negotiations for Scottish relief, which paralleled the more successful discussions on behalf of English and Irish Catholics. Stother’s chronicle, published over a century ago, remains by far the most extensive account of Sir John’s activities in print, although it is itself brief and discreet. Advancing projects for Catholic relief required caution at the very least, and the project for the Scots, beyond this, demanded secrecy, in so far as relief in the northern kingdom involved concessions to Catholics in return for their encouragement of troop enlistment in the controversial American war. Concealment by Sir John and his associates of the role he played at the time has led to neglect of that role by historians ever since.

The biography of Edmund Campion in the Dictionary of National Biography describes how, after a year of ministering to English Catholics, Campion was captured in Berkshire with three other priests on 17 July 1581, was brought to London, and was imprisoned in the Tower on Saturday 22 July. The DNB continues:

Despite the importance attributed to Southwell in Louis Martz’s The Poetry of Meditation, his Latin poetry—overlooked in Leicester Bradner’s Musae Anglicanae and the subject of a solitary unsatisfactory discussion in Pierre Janelle’s Robert Southwell the Writer—has received little attention. Such neglect is not unusual. Barbara Lewalski’s Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric—a spacious enough volume—disposes of Herbert’s important Latin collection Passio Discerpta in an endnote. This is despite a number of recent studies emphasising the position of Neo-Latin as a modern language alongside and correspondent with the vernacular, acting ‘as a sort of John the Baptist to the vernacular’, or ‘drinking from the same streams’. It is, I think, indisputable that Martz and Lewalski would have needed to modify their arguments had they taken the Neo-Latin poetry of Southwell and Herbert into account in their respective studies. Martz would have found some part of ‘meditative structure’ attributable to the conventions of Latin elegiac writing rather than to Ignatian meditation. Similarly, Lewalski would have had to qualify her description of so much poetry as ‘lyric’ had she considered its relation to Latin elegiac and epigrammatic writing.

A familiar theme in Parliamentary agitation from the 1580s onwards was the demand that, in the interests of national security, those Catholics owning weapons and armour should be dispossessed of all but a few of them until they conformed in religion. They were to be left only with sufficient swords, daggers, brown bills and pike-staves to defend their homes and families. Confiscated arms not already sold to an approved buyer had still to be shown at musters; but one of the marks of gentility was no longer assured to recusants accustomed, in Sir Thomas Tresham’s words, ‘daily [to] go armed with weapons as a badge of… vocation.’

Nearly fifty years ago, Joseph Lefèvre, the distinguished editor of the correspondence of the Spanish court with the Low Countries, pointed out the unusual career of Henry Taylor. As an accredited diplomat at Whitehall for six years during the regime of the sovereign Archdukes, Taylor’s letters were sampled by Lefèvre for his perspective on the court of Charles I and for illustrations of the differences in policy between the Archduchess Isabella and her nephew Philip IV. While foreign princes occasionally employed Englishmen to represent their interests in London, it was striking that an English Catholic born in Douai would be selected during the period of the penal laws. Lefèvre’s study was hardly the full story, for Taylor’s diplomatic service to the Spanish crown was longer, more varied and more significant than has hitherto been recognized. Furthermore, his career as a chaplain at the court of the governor at Brussels, which ended in his promotion to be the dean of Antwerp cathedral, deserves attention. Because of his unusual background, it will not cause surprise that during more than thirty years in Spanish service he encountered at different times, and for particular political motives, suspicions and hostility that limited his achievement.

The fickleness of historical reputations is well illustrated by the case of Thomas White, 1593–1676. A Catholic secular priest, a prolific writer, and a widely-known figure in his own life-time, White sank after his death into an oblivion, from which he has only recently been rescued. Admittedly, his scientific theories soon became unfashionable, and no doubt his 'extravagant' and 'heretical novelties' in theology contributed towards his disfavour amongst seventeenth-century fellow- Catholics. But it will be argued here that the main cause of White's historical eclipse was his short political treatise, The Grounds of Obedience and Government, published in 1655.

In his Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England, published in 1851, John Henry Newman examined the evidence against Catholicism of two witnesses: Joseph Blanco White and Maria Monk. Of Blanco he could speak from his own experience. He was, he said, ‘a man of great talent, various erudition and many most attractive points of character… I admired him for the simplicity and openness of his character, the warmth of his affections, the range of his information, his power of conversation, and an intellect refined, elegant and accomplished. I loved him from witnessing the constant sufferings bodily and mental, of which he was the prey, and for his expatriation on account of his religion… He was certainly most bitter-minded and prejudiced against everything in and connected with the Catholic Church; it was nearly the only subject on which he could not brook opposition; but this did not interfere with the confidence I placed in his honour and truth’. Newman went on to contrast Blanco’s character with that of Maria Monk. ‘Whatever the one said was true, as often as he spoke to facts he had witnessed, and was not putting out opinions or generalising on evidence; whatever the other said was, or was likely to be, false… Yet the truth spoken against us by the man of character is forgotten, and the falsehood spoken against us by the unworthy woman lives’.

‘Ultramontanism’, a term which can be used simply to describe a particular attitude towards the Papacy, is frequently used to describe certain kinds of devotional practice, and is sometimes used in connection with other aspects of Catholicism, such as attitudes towards poverty, charity and Protestants, and the growth of authoritarianism in the Church. The second half of the nineteenth century is portrayed as the period during which the Ultramontane clergy took control of the Catholic Church from the hands of the old English clergy and laity, symbolised in the appointment of the Ultramontane Manning to Westminster in 1865 rather than the old English Bishop Clifford: ‘the victory of Ultramontanism and Romanisation’. If this was true of England as a whole, then it must surely be true of Yorkshire, where in 1861 the ‘thoroughly Roman’ Robert Cornthwaite became Bishop of Beverley? Ultramontanism, in all its guises, certainly had an important influence on the Catholic Church in Yorkshire during this period, but there is also evidence of a continued attachment to old English attitudes and practices, even as late as the 1890s. What took place in Yorkshire was not the triumph of Ultramontanism but a gradual acceptance and assimilation of two different kinds of Catholicism, as the gentry who had formerly dominated the Yorkshire Church, and the old English clergy who served them, came to terms with the most Ultramontane of the English bishops and the younger priests who followed his example.

Aelred Calyle (1874–1955) devoted his entire life as an Anglican to the establishment of Benedictine monasticism in the Church of England. Monastic life had attracted him early: as a medical student in London he joined a brotherhood in 1893; he often visited Buckfast Abbey, where he almost converted to Roman Catholicism; and in 1898 he took private vows of poverty, chastity and obedience according to the Rule of Saint Benedict. In the same year, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Frederick Temple, sanctioned his solemn profession as an Anglican Benedictine monk. Four years later, Temple also signed a charter which commissioned Carlyle to found an Anglican monastery and appointed him as its abbot. With the approbation of William Maclagan, the Archbishop of York, Bishop Charles Grafton ordained him a priest on 15 November 1904, in his American diocese of Fond- du-Lac. Along with archiepiscopal sanction and orders, Carlyle also enjoyed the patronage of Lord Halifax, the prominent Anglo-Catholic. In 1902, Carlyle accepted Halifax’s invitation to settle at his estate at Painsthorpe in Yorkshire.