At the beginning of the seventeenth century the neighbouring parishes of West Bromwich, Sedgley and Wolverhampton in South Staffordshire were notorious for popery. Although they lay close together they differed from each other in economy and organisation. West Bromwich was a rural parish with available water power, Sedgley was a rural parish on the coal outcrop with metal working, quarrying and lime burning. Wolverhampton was an ancient Minster with a market town, a seignorial borough set in a large Foreign containing three chapelries and many hamlets.

In the 1740s the English Jesuit house at Liège where students of philosophy and theology were prepared for the priesthood was in financial difficulties. One of the main supports of the college was an annual pension from Bavaria but in the 1740s Bavaria was involved in war and the pension was frequently not paid. The number in the community had to be reduced, many students being charitably welcomed in other Jesuit houses in Europe. It was at this time when the finances of the English province were strained that two plans came up for consideration. One was to extend the apostolate of the Maryland English Jesuit mission in Pennsylvania; the other was to open at Boulogne a preparatory school for St. Omers College. The problem was how to obtain the necessary funds.

The above are strong words, even from a forthright Yorkshirewoman, and they are almost startling when one considers how submissive, personally, was their author to all authority in the Church. But, in this Memorial, Mary Ward describes the constitution she envisages for her Institute. The firm lines she draws are even more accentuated in her Third Plan of 1622: ‘We most humbly beg that the entire hierarchical structure of this work should depend entirely on the Holy See and not on any other authority’. Another document headed Reasons why we may not alter makes it clear that the proposals admit of no compromise. The genesis of this attitude is not far to seek. Mary Ward considered she had received divine intimation that she was to undertake some new work to the greater glory of God and for this she was to follow St. Ignatius’ Society of Jesus with its direct responsibility to the Holy See. Sr. Immolata Wetter points out that Mary Ward’s ideas were further sharpened by the contemporary situation of the Catholic Church in England: ‘adherence to the primacy of the Pope distinguished the English martyrs and confessors of the faith. For their loyalty to the Vicar of Christ these brave men and women suffered restrictions both in public and private life.

Anti-Catholicism, represented in the era of the eve of Emancipation by a rich genre of polemical literature focusing on the supposed ‘difficulties of Romanism’, has been the subject of much recent study; notably for the eighteenth century by Colin Haydon, and for the nineteenth, by Walter Amstein, Edward Norman, D. G. Paz, Walter Ralls, F. M. Wallis and John Wolffe. In contrast, English Catholic controversial writing against the Church of England, focusing on what one Catholic writer (in a conscious reversal of the stock Anglican polemical title) called the ‘difficulties of Protestantism’, with notable exceptions such as Sheridan Gilley, Leo Gooch and Brian Carter, 5 has been comparatively neglected for the half century prior to the dawn of the Oxford Movement in 1833.

Ever since the Reformation, and increasingly since the example set by Newman, the Church of England has had to contend with the lure of Rome; in every generation there have been clergymen who converted to the Roman Catholic Church, a group either statistically insignificant or a momentous sign of the future, depending on one’s viewpoint. From the nineteenth century Newman and Manning stand out. From the first two decades of the twentieth century among the figures best remembered are Robert Hugh Benson (1871–1914) and Ronald Arbuthnot Knox (1888–1957). They are remembered, not because they were more saintly or more scholarly than others, but because they were both writers and therefore are responsible for their own memorials. What is more, they both followed Newman in publishing an account of the circumstances of their conversion. This is a genre which continues to hold interest. The two works demonstrate, among other things, the continuing influence of Newman’s writings about the identity of the Church.