Toward the end of the summer of 1594 King Philip II received from the hands of Sir Francis Englefield at the Escorial an Información, or report, written by Joseph Creswell, S.J. concerning English matters of significance for his régime in Flanders. Creswell did not claim to be the sole author for, together with Englefield's name, he mentioned in his first sentence that two other English Jesuits, Robert Persons and William Holt had also contributed to it and that Hugh Owen, a veteran observer of English affairs at the court in Brussels, vouched for its contents. Since Flanders was the province where the larger number of English Catholics lived overseas during the last decade of the reign of Elizabeth, the document translated and edited here for the first time can shed light on the situation facing them at that period. There are some questions that deserve attention first, about its origins, the experiences of the author and his collaborators which prompted them to prepare it, and above all the political and diplomatic crisis which seemed to give urgency to the report.

Prevented by their refusal to take the Oath of Supremacy from being admitted to a degree at Oxford or Cambridge, Catholics—clerical or lay—who wished for higher education not infrequently attended foreign universities or colleges but there were those who achieved distinction in one branch or another of study without attending any institution of higher learning. One example of this was the subject of a recent article in Recusant History —the Jesuit astronomer Christopher Maire.

The validity of bringing together the works of writers who may have little in common other than their religious allegiance is not something which could be justified in every age, especially within the current ecumenical climate. Two anthologies of Catholic poets, Shane Leslie's of 1925 and Frank Sheed's of 1943 may appear to today's reader rather more revelatory of the taste and beliefs of the compilers and their periods than of the poets concerned. Yet it can be claimed that scrutiny of the religious poetry of Catholic writers of the first half of the seventeenth century has a validity which might be lacking in a later period. If religious poetry is indeed the expression of sincere conviction, it is to be expected that writers who have different beliefs will differ also in the forms of expression they give to them in their poetry. In the light of this, the question may be asked as to how, in the seventeenth century, the religious poetry written by Catholics differs from that written by Protestants. The study of a large number of minor writers of this period leads to the conclusion that in the seventeenth century the choice and treatment of subject matter seems to be more integrally related to religious conviction than is the case in later periods.

The manor house of Horton Court, about three miles from Chipping Sodbury in Gloucestershire, was a focus of Catholicism when occupied in the eighteenth century by a recusant branch of the Paston family. The present writer's interest in its past has recently been kindled by the discovery that its library, whose catalogue survives, though the books have long been dispersed, contains many books by, or closely associated with, English Catholics of the penal times. One of the collections that went from it had probably been put together by Dr Edward Paston, a distinguished President of the English College at Douai, who died in 1714.

The Haydock Bibles were a series of self-interpreting editions of the Douay Version with annotations compiled chiefly by Rev. George Leo Haydock. The first edition was published in serialized form over the years 1811 to 1814 by Father Haydock's brother, Thomas. It enjoyed great popularity and was frequently reprinted in a series of British and American editions. According to standard Bible bibliographies, the latest known editions were published in the 1880's. The purpose of this article is to provide a brief historical account of editions in this important series and to describe a 1910 reprint of the final edition recently located by the author. This copy establishes that the Haydock Bible series lasted longer than was generally known.

A year after the First Vatican Council of 1870 a five-volume edition of George Hay's works was published, and the opening words of Bishop John Strain's introduction left no doubt as to Hay's significance: ‘Since the religious revolution of the sixteenth century, to no man has the Catholic Church in Scotland been so much indebted as to Bishop Hay. He is preeminently her bishop of the last three hundred years.’ In 1874 James Stothert's Life of Bishop Hay was brought before the public by the Rev. J. F. S. Gordon, who felt moved to comment: ‘It is most dishonourable, not only to the Memory of this great Bishop, but to the Catholic Religion in Scotland, which he may be said to have kept alive during a dismal period, that not so much as a simple Stone marks his grave.’

The political threat posed by the growth of Fenianism in Ireland in the late 1850s and early 1860s has generally been underplayed by much present-day historiography. Even contemporaries were not disposed to see American Fenianism as much of a danger to the constitutional stability of Ireland. The Dublin police authorities decided to recall sub-inspector Thomas Doyle from his surveillance work in America in July 1860. By that time Doyle had sent dozens of reports on Irish-American revolutionary activity. On the basis of his reports the authorities knew that John O'Mahony and Michael Dohney, both of 1848 notoriety, were prominently involved in Phoenix and Fenian conspiracy. They also knew the general points of the ‘phoenix theory’ that England's difficulty was Ireland's opportunity, that men were being recruited and drilled in large numbers in the U.S. for a possible invasion of Ireland, that ‘O'Mahony's theory [was] … to root out the Government, to cut down the landlords, and to confiscate the land of Ireland’, and that John Mitchel had gone to Paris as an agent for the ‘phoenix confederacy’ in the U.S.