How far were recusants affected financially by the Elizabethan penal statutes? Given that only a small proportion of fines was collected or reached the Exchequer, it may be that the question is scarcely worth discussing. It is nearly always assumed that Elizabethan Catholics suffered economic hardships; it has been suggested that their chief disability was not the fines but continuous exclusion from public office (1), and also that their plight was so desperate that they had no alternative save rebellion (2). Such conjectures can only be tested by examining the fortunes of recusant gentry at the local level; and Worcestershire, with its record of Catholic conspiracies culminating in the Gunpowder Plot, provides the right circumstances for such an examination.

The reign of James I saw the recovery of Catholicism in Durham with the re-organisation of the clerical mission, influenced by the religious orders of the Counter-Reformation, and an increase in recusancy. Despite the initial disappointment of Catholic hopes of some measure of toleration from James, the application of the penal laws was eventually relaxed. The resulting safety allowed the establishment of a formal missionary organisation under the impulse of the revived religious orders, and permitted recusants to increase in numbers. Durham recusancy remained, however, limited to a minority of the gentry and their dependants consisting largely of a circle of families linked to the house of Neville.

During the two and a half centuries after the Reformation, at almost every political crisis, Catholics were confronted with the demand that they should bind themselves with an oath to deny some principle of their religion; and the consequences, if they refused, could be severe: loss of property, sometimes total, imprisonment, even death. It seems worth while therefore, to survey the various circumstances under which this trial took place.

The escape of Charles II after the Battle of Worcester presents the historian of priest-holes with an unfamiliar and agreeable problem. Instead of there being too little evidence, there is if anything too much. The Boscobel Tracts (Hughes's convenient title for the various printed and manuscript accounts of the affair) are together as long as Gerard's Narrative and Autobiography; and they describe a period of only six weeks instead of eighteen years. From them it is possible to plot the complicated movements of the King and of the other characters in the story, not merely day by day but often hour by hour. The Boscobel episode, like the Battle of Hastings and Guy Fawkes, is familiar to everybody; for three hundred years the sign of the Royal Oak has been a common one in English towns and villages, however remote from the course of the young King's wanderings. But despite that, curiously little has been written about the hides to which Charles owed his safety at Boscobel, Moseley, Trent and Heale, although the Tracts furnish a good deal of useful, if discreetly-worded, information about them.

The Venerable English College in Rome was a product of the Counter-Reformation, which transformed the old English Hospice into a seminary second only to Douai in its importance for the mission. The nineteenth century was also a period of great vigour, when its alumni exercised considerable influence on the development of the Catholicism of the ‘Second Spring’ from their positions in the restored hierarchy, and when there grew up a style of seminary administration and of ‘Englishness abroad’ which was to last well into the present century and vestiges of which still remain.

I would like to thank Professor Phillips for pointing out my error in listing as one the two account books from the Cavendish of Holker papers, DDCa/1/1 and DDCa/1/106. The oversight was not intentional and I apologize for any confusion it may have caused.

James I proclaimed his first English parliament on 11 January 1603-04. He directed electors to eschew ‘any partial respects or factious combination’, and also to avoid returning ‘any persons either noted for their superstitious blindness one way, or for their turbulent humours other ways’. According to the Venetian Ambassador, it was ‘combination[s]’ of ‘Catholics’ and ‘Puritans’ that the King had particularly in mind. In the event the royal directive was imperfectly followed, At least thirteen elections were contested. Among them was the election for the shire of Worcester. As this study will show, the outcome of the Worcestershire parliamentary election was determined by the interaction of precisely such factional groupings as James had hoped to deter. As much is evident, both from the surviving correspondence of several of the leading participants, and from the records of the Star Chamber suit to which the election subsequently gave rise. The election is cited by Derek Hirst as an example of how ‘the issue of the danger to Protestantism could move people at all times’. But it was at times of extraordinary political activity, such as Parliamentary elections, that anti-Catholic feeling became particularly intense. This study will examine this proposition by reference to the Worcestershire election. It will also offer a reconsideration of Elliot Rose's interpretation of the political attitudes of English Catholics at the opening of the seventeenth century.

The Haggerstons, now at Ellingham but formerly of Haggerston, can trace their lineage back to Sir Hugh de Hagardeston, who was living in 1290. A landed family of some social distinction in Northumberland, they persevered throughout the times of persecution, not infrequently at great cost, and afforded others on their estates the occasion to observe their religious practices. That the Catholic faith did not disappear in this remote and sparsely populated county was, indeed, largely due to families such as theirs: Derwentwaters, Swinburnes, Selbys, Widdringtons, Charltons, Thorntons, Claverings, and later Silvertops. Neither Newcastle nor Berwick nor Alnwick nor Morpeth could boast of a thriving recusant community; the strength of Catholicism was in the country areas, on and around the estates of these families.

All societies are propped up by conscious and subconscious mythologies about their own origins, and about their mission within the larger world community. Anglo-Saxon mythology about its origins and development, and the position of Roman Catholicism in relation to this mythology, made entering into diplomatic relations with the Sovereign of the Roman States and head of the Roman Catholic Church a very long and delicate process. English Protestants regarded Catholicism as a mixture of anathema, superstition, and papal despotism; and everything that was English and precious was opposed to that terrible and oppressive Romanism which the genius of England had overthrown. England was a model for the world of constitutional liberty, of law and order, or prosperity and mortality; Romanism represented little other than the perversion of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. England prided itself on the literary, social, economic, and political accomplishments of English civilisation; Romanism conjured up images of immoral monks with vast wealth, Babington and Guy Fawkes, Titus Oates and Jesuitical casuistry, James II and monarchical tyranny. England was proud of her constitutional heritage, a heritage with deep roots in the forests of Germany; from the same Germany came the messiah who freed England from the idolatry of Rome; and on the throne of England sat a German constitutional monarch, bound by oath to uphold the Protestant succession. Roman Catholicism was linked with indolent Italians, immoral Frenchmen, and barbarous Irish; with craftiness, and the horrors of the confessional box. Memories of the Armada and Bloody Mary's persecutions, visions of Huguenots burning on St Bartholomew's Day, were still vivid in popular consciousness, and Foxe's Book of Martyrs was high on the best-seller lists.