In a recent work on English Catholic recusants the author describes ‘a small wave of conversions to Catholicism’ drawn from a wide spectrum of English Protestantism that began late in the reign of Charles II and increased in size after the accession of James II. One of the groups mentioned was a number of High Church Anglicans. My intention is to study one member of this group, the clergyman Mordaunt Webster whose career was centered primarily in the ‘enthusiastically Protestant region of East Anglia.’ Born in the village of Aldwinckle St. Peter, Northants, in 1637, he was the son of John Webster, rector of the local church, who during the Civil War served with the Royalist army and was ejected by Parliament from his Northamptonshire living and from another in Rutland.

The religion of Alexander Pope, like so many other aspects of his life, is characterized by ambiguity and equivocation. Many have seen his profession of the Catholic faith as shallow and insincere, not least those, like Warburton and Ruffhead, who proclaim his supposed insincerity as a sign of grace. A study of the family tradition within which Pope learned his religion sets the problem in a different light, and at the same time illustrates the complex ambiguities which must be borne in mind by anyone who wishes to look behind the solid statistics of convictions for recusancy into the obscure minds and hearts of those whom social status, deviousness, or sheer indecision conspired to shield from the penalties of their religious inclinations.

In seeking signs of vitality in the English Catholic Church of the early eighteenth century John Bossy notes first the publication of new books reformulating the position of Catholics in England, and also the growth of catechising, spearheaded by the introduction of several new editions of simplified catechisms. But he makes no mention of the problems, surely severe, which an underground organisation must face in printing and circulating its propaganda. The Church needed books rather than pamphlets or broadsheets, and the presses on which books were printed cannot have been either itinerant or easily hidden; rather, they would have needed the constant attendance of skilled compositors and pressmen, and a steady supply of bulky materials such as ink and paper.

It was in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries that colleges were first established in the Iberian Peninsula for the provision of Catholic priests to serve on the English mission. The first to be opened was at Valladolid in 1589; this ‘was followed by Seville in 1592 and Madrid in 1611. They were supported by the alms of the faithful, taken under the protection of the Spanish Crown, and administered by the Society of Jesus. Smaller establishments, residences, were in existence at Lisbon and San Lucar de Barrameda (near Cadiz) serving as points of entry and departure for students and priests on their journeys between Spain and England. Eventually, in 1622, a College was established at Lisbon but from the beginning, this college differed from the others in that it was always administered by the English secular clergy and not by the Jesuits. The golden age of the Spanish colleges was in the first fifty or sixty years of their existence when they not only provided many missioners, including martyrs, but also exercised a political influence on the English Catholic scene by reason of their Jesuit administration and their situation in Spain. However, by the eighteenth century a decline had set in. There were complaints about the administration, and the recruitment of students was low so that few missioners returned to work in England. In fact, between 1739 and 1756 the College at Valladolid was closed to students while rebuilding took place. Partly because of the poor recruitment and partly because of their antipathy to the Jesuits, the Vicars Aṕostolic were dissatisfied and almost lost interest in these three colleges, relying on the establishments at Douai and Lisbon which were under the direction of the seculars.

The extent of the achievement on the part of the Catholic community in developing its own poor schools in the last century in England can only be gauged in the light of the deprived social conditions out of which they came. So some brief mention of the plight of the majority of the Catholics is here given as an introduction to the work of the Catholic Poor School Committee (henceforth CPSC); the role of the religious orders is next considered, and the training colleges. Some indications of the growth conclude this paper.

The August Order was issued by the Poor Law Board on 23 August 1859 and made the provision of Religious Instruction for Catholic orphan pauper children obligatory on the Masters of all Workhouses. It was a significant concession to Roman Catholic, who had been demanding something like it for more than two decades. At the same time, its mandatory nature greatly offended and angered those Guardians who had ultra-Protestant sympathies and connections. The vigour and persistence of the ensuing agitation to have it repealed is almost without parallel in the history of nineteenth-century Protestant-Catholic relations in England and is worth examining in some detail.

It is now not far short of thirty years since, in the pages of the present journal, Antony Allison made his survey of ‘Franciscan Books in English 1559–1640’. In the course of his article he describes the work entitled The Life and Death of Edmund Geninges priest which appeared at St. Omers in 1614. He cited the prime authority of Luke Wadding, the great Franciscan historian, whose Scriptores Ordinis Minorum was published in 1650, that this anonymous account was by the martyr’s brother, John Gennings, who became a Franciscan about 1616, restored the Second Province of the English Friars, and was in fact still alive when Wadding wrote. Further analysing the book, Allison identifies ‘I. G. P’, to whom it is dedicated, as John Gennings Priest, and ‘I. W. P.’ who writes the dedication, as John Wilson Priest, who in 1614 had already for several years been manager of the press operating in the English Jesuit College at St. Omers.