In Ripon Liberty only one [Catholic] gentry family survived this period [the eighteenth century] (the Trappes of Nidd) and in their case the main line died out and a cadet branch from Carlton succeeded them’; this fact of mere survival both justifies and permits setting this account before the reader. Christopher Trappes (XIa), the founder of the Carlton branch, would probably have remained single, if he had not found an heiress with just sufficient income for marriage; had he remained single, the Trappes family would have died out in 1761, and this history would have remained unwritten. As it is, there survives just enough material to show something of how one recusant family contrived to retain its identity through and after the penal times.

The Catholic population of the Thames Valley in the period 1660 to 1780 was scattered and small when compared with that of Lancashire or the North East of England. Yet, despite the community being dispersed and inhabiting an area close to the centre of government, the recusant population thrived, growing from an estimated 729 in 1676 to 1362 by 1767. The Thames Valley, for the purpose of this study is taken to include Berkshire, most of Oxfordshire and parts of South Buckinghamshire, North Surrey and Western Middlesex (see maps). The main centres of Catholicism throughout this period congregated around gentry households, such as the Stonors of Stonor Park in Oxfordshire and the Wollascots of Woolhampton in Berkshire.

During the second half of the eighteenth century the high levels of growth of Liverpool’s trade and shipping, which had commenced in the 1660s, continued to the extent that Liverpool became Britain’s second largest port after London, certainly by the end of the 1780s, by which date local merchants were trading to a lesser or greater extent with all parts of the known world with which they could legitimately trade. It was during the half century after 1750 that Liverpool came to dominate the British slave trade. Catholics participated in the mercantile and maritime activities of the port of Liverpool in the second half of the eighteenth century in a variety of capacities, for example as merchants engaged in overseas trade, brokers, shipbuilders, shipowners, seamen, including ships’ captains, owners of businesses concerned with the ancillary shipping trades such as coopering and ropemaking and practitioners of the processing of imported goods such as tobacco.