Robert Cecil, the first Earl of Salisbury and James I’s principal secretary of state, had every reason for regarding Hugh Owen with intense dislike. Born at Plas Du on the Lleyn peninsula in Caernarvonshire in 1538, he belonged to a family that was completely devoted and committed to the old faith. For some time until 1571, he was secretary to Henry Fitzallan, twelfth and last Earl of Arundel of his house. He left Wales for the Low Countries in 1571 looking for the freer life that the Marian exiles sought abroad under Mary I. It was alleged by some that this was a virtual admission that he had been involved in the recent Ridolfi plot. Lord Lumley who knew him was prepared to defend him from any implication in that conspiracy. In fact the plot, like most of the plots of the period, was more likely to have been a contrivance to get rid of rivals and opponents.

Since Henry Foley in 1877 published extensive extracts from a set of letters purporting to have been written from London to correspondents in Venice, between January 1601 and April 1603, ‘by Anthony Rivers S.J.’, a ‘socius of Fr. Henry Garnet S.J.’, historians have found these letters valuable evidence concerning Queen Elizabeth’s declining days, the government’s secret involvement in the Appellant controversy within the Catholic priesthood (1597–1602), the ‘inch thick’ paint reference in Hamlet, the possible originating circumstances of Twelfth Night, and other matters. But no Jesuit Anthony Rivers has ever been found, and Jesuit historians have speculated about the letter-writer’s identity: Philip Caraman at one time took him to be Fr. Anthony Hoskins S.J., and Francis Edwards recently argued for Fr. Henry Floyd S.J. But Hoskins was not sent to England until 1603, and Floyd was in prison for much of the time when the letters were retailing, in a weekly rhythm, many pages of first-hand observations of events in the Court and Council, sometimes if not always in three near-identical versions dispatched simultaneously to three separate addressees.

Seven of these letters were written to John Darell, SJ. who was rector and headmaster of St. Omers College from September 1752 till May 1759. Three are from a fellow-Jesuit, Bernard Baker in London, one is from John Darell’s sister, Olivia, who was a nun at the English convent of the Canonesses of St. Augustine at Bruges and three are from John Darell’s eldest brother, Philip, of Calehill in Kent.

In addition to his major work on the English Jesuit province as a whole during the 18th century, Geoffrey Holt has made many valuable contributions to more local studies. One such is his article on ‘Jesuits in Montgomeryshire, 1670–1873’, published in 1993. In it he noted the Jesuit practice of depositing funds with a wealthy family of the district, as with a bank. Thus the funds of the Residence of St. Winefrid (North Wales) were deposited with the Marquess of Powis. Sebastian Redford, the Jesuit chaplain at Powis Castle in the 1740’s, had reason to complain of the Marquess’ dilatoriness in paying the interest due, and feared that the Society might come to regret having entrusted large sums to a family ‘whose circumstances are more and more on the decline’. His fears were justified.

Jesuit archives refer to Bristol as ‘a very ancient mission’ of the Society of Jesus and as ‘one of the Society’s first class missions’. This article traces briefly the early development of the Society in that part of the old Western District which included Bristol and which for their own administrative purposes the Jesuits called the College (District) of St. Francis Xavier, and then seeks to show how in the first half of the eighteenth century they established a permanent mission in Bristol itself—a city strongly Protestant, by the standards of the time wealthy and cosmopolitan in character, and for a while second in importance only to London.

The English seminary of St. Alban Valladolid in Spain has an up to date theological library with books in both Spanish and English. As an establishment dating back to 1589 it also possesses many books of antiquarian interest. The older books belonging to the college owe their present arrangement to Edwin Henson. During World War II as Rector he was for several years the only permanent resident in the college and he spent much of his time cataloguing and indexing the archives and library. There are two rooms: the eighteenth century style Biblioteca or Big Library with 6765 volumes and the smaller enclosed repository known as the Pigskin Library (Biblioteca de Piel) containing 2881 volumes.

This paper is the final part of a trilogy dealing with Harvington Hall in Worcestershire from 1529 until 1923, when it passed into the ownership of the Archdiocese of Birmingham. The first part, ‘The Pakingtons of Harvington [1529–1631]’ by Lionel and Veronica Anderton Webster, appeared in Recusant History in April 1974; my sequel, ‘The Yates of Harvington, 1631–1696’, followed in October 1994.’ This third part appropriately appears in an issue of Recusant History to mark the ninetieth birthday of Fr. Geoffrey Holt, S.J., who over the years has published many studies of other country-house missions in the eighteenth century, and whose characteristic combination of scholarship, lucidity and human sympathy is a model of how such things ought to be done. He appreciates the problems and will, I hope, appreciate the result.

Thomas Weld (1750–1810), of Lulworth in Dorset, is remembered today principally on three counts: his rôle as the founder of Stonyhurst College in 1794; his benefactions to religious orders at the height of the French revolution as they fled from political upheaval and danger in continental Europe; and his friendship with George III, including his hosting of several visits of the king to Lulworth Castle in the 1790s. Weld’s munificence in making available his Lancashire seat, Stonyhurst, to the English ex-Jesuit ‘Gentlemen of Liège’ has received attention from historians. In contrast, his own education as a young man, at the hands of the English and French Jesuits in continental Europe, has hitherto received little more than passing notice.

The common ground trodden by Father John Morris of the Society of Jesus and members of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary was at first a shared interest in the acts of the English martyrs. This widened to a study of the history of the Institute and Father Morris’s involvement in its current problems—the removal of the Church’s three-century old ban, the vexed question of Mary Ward’s title of foundress, the desirability of union of all the members, and the drawing up of the constitutions acceptable to all. These intellectual explorations and their practical application led him to the Bar Convent in York, to Haverstock Hill and Ascot in the south, and to Nymphenburg, Altötting and Augsburg in Germany.

In the haphazard circumstances of the English mission, the Society of Jesus offered the virtues of discipline and organisation, the methodical self-programming of the Spiritual Exercises, and a record of missionary success from China to Peru’. The healthy survival of Catholicism in Lancashire through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries owed a great deal to the active ministry of the Jesuits and by the 1770s they were running fifteen missions in the county. After the suppression of the Society in 1773 they continued to run these as ex-Jesuits but the years of the suppression became increasingly difficult. One important issue concerned the ownership of the Society’s funds and property: the Vicars Apostolic believed these should continue to be applied to the purposes for which they had originally been entrusted to the Society, that is the good of religion in the various Districts; some of the ex-Jesuits, however, believed they were the obvious inheritors and should control and benefit from the accumulated funds.

Contemporary Roman Catholics have realized in the last thirty-five years that when an ecumenical council has concluded, it is far from over. The interpretation of the decrees of the Second Vatican Council has become today as critical and controverted as the formulation of the decrees was during the Council itself. The present controversies centre on ecclesiology—the nature of the Church—and questions at issue concern continuity and innovation. Did Vatican II, and especially the Decree on the Church in the Modern World, reform the structure and the governance of the Church toward a greater degree of consultation, subsidiarity, decentralization—‘collegiality’, to use the expression of the Council itself? Or was the vision of the Council for the Church in basic continuity with the centralized, papal-monarchial Church of the First Vatican Council? Around these questions centres most of the contention that engages the Church today: debates having to do with the rôle of bishops’ conferences, the operation of the Roman curia, the relationship of the magisterium or teaching authority to theologians.