The letters of Mary Knatchbull, abbess of the English Benedictine Convent in Ghent between 1650 and her death in 1696, are of considerable interest. They reveal a woman operating with significant influence in two discrete spheres: the enclosed cloister and the royalist court in exile. This article will consider briefly the religious career of Mary Knatchbull and her importance to the Benedictines of Ghent, before examining in detail her part in the restoration of Charles II. It examines the unexpressed dichotomy of seemingly irreconcilable rôles performed by a member of an enclosed Order who on the one hand, in fulfilling her vows, was submissive and obedient, and yet on the other, was able to communicate with senior royalist advisers confidently and involve herself in the strategic planning of the campaign for the return of Charles II to England. As abbess, Mary Knatchbull led her community effectively at a difficult time. Under her leadership the convent survived an expensive building programme, established a successful new house and maintained high standards of practice in the religious life of the convent. From conventual records, it is clear that she was considered one of the outstanding abbesses of the seventeenth century in the English Benedictine community. Her correspondence with the royalists ministers in exile shows her opinions were taken seriously. She was regarded as a competent organiser and she had extensive links covering Flanders, France and England that kept her in touch with developments of interest to the king. Hitherto her life has been little known and published writing has been largely devoted to her rôle as an abbess. Mary Knatchbull’s life challenges categorisation and shows the importance of flexibility of approach to understanding the rôle of women in the early modern period.

The early 1580’s saw a large increase in the publication of martyrologies concerning the sufferings and executions of Catholics in England; understandab1y so, in view of the mounting intensity of the persecution laws, in particular the statutes of 1581 and 1585, the numerous anti-Catholic proclamations, and the large scale executions, including those of Campion and his fellow missionaries in December 1581.

The beginning of serious French interest in the affairs of English Catholicism falls in the first years of the seventeenth century. Since the Reformation, French kings and their ministers had usually felt that Catholicism in England was, on political grounds, to be discouraged rather than advanced; from a more recent date, they had ceased to have a foreign policy at all. Interest in English Catholicism had been left to the Spaniards, who had coped with it as best they could. Two explanations can be offered why things began to take a different turn during the reign of Henri IV. The first is that the reconstruction of what Sully described as “la faction fran9oise dans la Chrestiente” carried with it almost automatically a revival of the anti-English posture traditionally associated with it; the combination is a familiar one.

The foundation of new English convents in exile placed demands on the early leaders regarding the furnishing of appropriate texts for the religious life for women at a time of limited resources and strict controls over printing Catholic texts in English. This article examines challenges facing the convents and external influences on the choice of titles, ranging from women’s reading experiences in their families to authors whose works appeared in libraries owned by both pious Catholic and Protestant lay women. It then considers how communities assembled collections of books in the first half of the exile period, concluding with an appendix giving some examples of surviving key texts found in convent libraries dating from the seventeenth century.

The lively interest which Englishmen took in the events and controversies which culminated in the assassination of Henry III of France in 1589, and the succession of Henry of Navarre to the throne, is mirrored in the stream of pamphlets issuing from the London printing-presses and relating to French affairs. At a rough count, at least a score of books and pamphlets relating to France still survive which appeared in London in that year 1589 alone. Several of these were translated from French by the busy publicist and publisher Edward Aggas. One undated translation which came from his pen was that of a celebrated treatise written under the initials E.D.L.I.C. (standing for Edmond de L'Allouette, Iuris-consulte) who is frequently identified with Pierre de Belloy. The French original which first appeared in 15893 is entitled: Apologie catholique contre les libelles … publiées par les Liguez … dépuis le decés de feu Monseigneur, frére unique du Roy.

This essay illuminates a little-known chapter in the history of English Catholicism by examining the controversies among the English Benedictine convent at Brussels between 1620 and 1623. The disputes began as a simple clash of personalities between Abbess Mary Percy and the house’s ordinary confessor Robert Chambers, and they culminated in allegations by pro-Jesuit nuns and confessors that Francis Ward, a second ordinary confessor, was attempting to seduce one of his penitents. These early clashes illustrate the cultural and gender politics of the Continental convents established for Englishwomen during the seventeenth century. By nature a female-oriented institution, the cloister encouraged women to attain monastic versions of stereotypical feminine virtues. Gender consequently provided a convenient means of understanding, evaluating, and politicizing monastic piety. As this paper will show, individuals who held little to no official power at Brussels used gender stereotypes to legitimize their interventions in the convent’s affairs. Nuns, confessors, and anonymous outsiders attempted to diminish the spiritual authority of Percy and Ward by raising the spectre of traditionally feminine vices. Within the woman-centred space of the Brussels convent, gender thus became an essential means of claiming moral authority and addressing larger concerns over monastic order and spiritual direction.1

The raid of Bishop Grindal’s commissioners on the study of John Stow, the eminent antiquary, which occasioned this catalogue of forty proscribed works, was indication of the growing hostility towards Catholics after the Northern Rebellion and a foreshadowing of their open persecution in the years to come. Similar searches became commonplace in the 1570s and 1580s but the Stow catalogue, reflecting his historical and antiquarian interests, is one of the most comprehensive which survive. Although it includes manuscripts of chronicles, suggesting that Stow’s historical interests were not immune from the imputation of religious bias, the large group of Catholic and Recusant works indicates one direction in which these interests might have developed further had he not become the subject of official investigation.

Dr Keith Lindley, in his article in Politics, Religion and The English Civil War (‘The Part Played by the Catholics’), resurrected the thorny issue of Catholic neutralism during the Civil War. Using statistical analyses based upon the records of the Committees for Advance of Money and for Compounding, he argued that for the most part Catholics kept themselves to themselves, avoiding both sides, and enduring the War with resignation. What he most certainly demonstrated, in the areas of the country he selected, was that the records he consulted do indeed convey that impression.

Thirteen translations of the Imitatio Christi and three paraphrases seem to have been published between 1500 and 1700. Of the grand total of sixteen versions, nine were Catholic and seven Protestant. There can be little doubt that in addition to these printed versions a number of renderings were made, in whole or in part, which remained in manuscript. There is evidence, then, of the great and continuing popularity of this classic of the spiritual life, both with Catholic and Protestant readers. I intend to consider here the printed translations of the Imitatio with three questions in mind. What relationship is revealed between Catholic and Protestant translators? What attempt is made by Protestant translators to modify distinctively Catholic elements in the Imitatio? Is any general literary development apparent between 1500 and 1700? Conveniently, the answers to these questions can be divided into those appropriate for the sixteenth and those appropriate for the seventeenth century.

The idea for this paper came to me a dozen years ago while re-reading Will Herberg’s Protestant - Catholic - Jew, subtitled ‘An Essay in American Religious Sociology’. Mr Herberg made extensive use of survey data which, of course, are not available to the student of Elizabethan-Stuart England, but some of his most pertinent insights came from his analysis of manners of contemporary American speech. I began at that time to note and classify the ways in which Englishmen of this period described religious beliefs and attitudes. The conviction slowly formed that terminology not only flowed from religious thought and belief but in its turn influenced religious thought.

The period from 1655 to 1672 forms a convenient unit in Recusant history. After the death on 18 March 1655 of Richard Smith, Bishop of Chalcedon, there was a series of attempts by the English clergy to obtain from Rome the appointment of a bishop for England, which culminated in the issue of a brief for the consecration of Philip Howard OP on the 16 May 1672. In spite of this, Howard's consecration did not take place, and the English Catholics were without a form of episcopal government till 1685, when John Leyburne was appointed Vicar Apostolic. The reasons for this state of affairs have been the subject of some comment, not all of it well-informed, by those who have treated of English Catholic history in the seventeenth century. The purpose of the present study is to try to present, as objectively as possible, the course of events as it is reflected in the negotiations of the successive agents sent to Rome on behalf of the English clergy during the period 1655-72, to gether with the relevant background.

Nobody will pretend that Henry Constable was more than a minor poet and an indifferent theologian; he is nonetheless a crucial figure in the history of English Catholicism, and it is most important that we should have a clear idea of his motives and opinions. Dr. Rogers has done us a great service by sorting out the bibliographical history of his Examen pacifique de la Doctrine des Huguenots, and dispelling a number of confusions which had accumulated around it. I propose to supplement his article by producing evidence which, except on a few points, will support and amplify his conclusions and suggest a more concrete biographical background to them.

To anyone who has studied English Catholic books of the early seventeenth century, the imprints, “Doway, for John Heigham” and “S. Omers, for John Heigham” have a familiar—not to say monotonous—ring. There are over sixty books in existence today, printed between 1609 and 1631, which bear one or other of these imprints. Yet very little is generally known about the man himself. The biographies of him which appear in works of reference tell us next to nothing about him and what they do tell us is for the most part incorrect. In this note I shall try to unravel some of the muddles which have arisen and set out briefly the main outline of his career in so far as it can be established from the evidence.

Some time in the winter or spring of 1576-7, Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, lately back from a tour of the continent, was introduced by his friend Charles Arundell to a seminary priest, Richard Stephens, and became a Catholic. Stephens, an Oxford man recently returned from Douai, had already reconciled, with Arundell, his friends and relatives Lord Henry Howard, the late Duke of Norfolk's brother, and Francis Southwell. As bright young courtiers, they scarcely fall into the category of depressed gentlemen attracted to Rome by economic discontent; but they had about them a certain sense of “outness”, and shared a resentment against the successful Elizabethan families which was at least partly responsible for their conversion. It was less than five years since Norfolk's execution; and Burghley's wardship of Oxford had ended in a marriage to his daughter which was now, like the relations of the two men, severely strained. This discontent led naturally to the idea of upsetting the established system, both in society and in religion; this, they agreed, was what they would work for.

Hugh Owen was a Welshman, born at Plas Du in Caernarvonshire in 1538, who refused to forego his Catholic religious allegiance in the reign of Elizabeth I. Secretary to Henry, twelfth and last of the Fitzalan Earls of Arundel, he fled abroad at the time of the Ridolfi Plot in 1571. Although only on the fringe of it, he, no doubt, considered himself, with reason, to be in danger of implication. Certainly he appears to have been involved, about this time, in a project to secure the release of Mary, Queen of Scots, which would have made it extremely perilous for him to stay in England. By the 1580s he enjoyed the full confidence of the Duke of Parma, governor of the Spanish Netherlands, as the organiser of an intelligence network which enabled him to counteract in large measure the very effective system of espionage established by Sir Francis Walsingham. Parma passed him on to Archduke Albert, who described him as ‘diligent, very discreet and suitable for any business’.

A great deal of attention has rightly been given to those Catholics who were put to death under Elizabeth I, but imprisonment as distinct from execution has not received the attention it deserves. Catholics sometimes sing about ‘our fathers chained in prisons dark’, but they are not always aware of what imprisonment meant to their ancestors. It is the purpose of this article to consider some aspects of this large and neglected subject, since imprisonment and the threat of imprisonment made a big impact on the Elizabethan Catholic community and must have discouraged a great many people from persevering in their religion when they contemplated what could at best be an irritating deprivation of liberty and at worst a long ordeal which might end in death.

Martyrs were the first saints and some were among the most popular saints of the Middle Ages. Because it was the manner of their death that won them their place in heaven, martyrs were a special case; unlike other saints, evidence of heroic virtue in life and miracles were not required. Like the early martyrs, many sixteenth-century English martyrs were immediately recognized as saints by their co-religionists, without reference to judicial processes. But the status of martyr was not popularly accorded automatically to Catholics who died on account of their faith. Despite Southwell's ‘Epitaph’: ‘A Queen I liu'd, now dead I am a Saint/Once MARIE calde; my name now Martir is’, Mary, Queen of Scots, was not generally acclaimed as a martyr, even by Catholics.

In the following essay I have tried to put into practice some ideas about the investigation of English Catholic communities outlined in a paper which I gave to the recusant history conference in 1965. These were much indebted to the school of sociologie religieuse inaugurated in France by M. Gabriel le Bras; I have tried to adapt its approach and methods for use in the different conditions of an English nonconfortning body. The assumptions made are that the congregation is a major object of study in the history of any Christian tradition; and that congregations, being secial entities, may best be studied by methods, including statistical methods, proper to the study of societies. In applying these assumptions to the history of English Catholicism I do not claim to be doing something different from what historians of the subject have usually done, but to be asking about single cells questions which have traditionally been aimed at the body as a whole. How big was it, and was it getting bigger or smaller? Who belonged to it, and why? Where did its members live? What relations had they with one another, outside religious belief and practice? With how much enthusiasm, with what particular emphases did they believe and practise? How did they get on with the community at large? I have sought here to answer some of these questions for four congregations in rural Northumberland between the mid-eighteenth and the mid-nineteenth century: Hesleyside alias Bellingham, Biddlestone, Thropton and Callaly. I chose this period because materials of the sort one needs were available for it; and also because it is a period of peculiar importance in the history of English Catholicism, covering the transition from its ancient to its modem phase, and providing a point of departure for enquiry in either direction. There is little significance in the communities chosen. It is incidental that the region in question should have provided most of the English support and much of the English scenery for the rebellion of 1715, or that Biddlestone should have a small niche in literary history as the original of Osbaldistone Hall in Scott’s Rob Roy. One of the characteristics of this type of investigation is that it does not much matter where one begins. Another is, however, that the value of conclusions drawn depends on. the number of cases studied. I hope to pursue some myself, but should be most happy if others were inspired to do the same. One might, in this way, reach a more intimate and comprehensive understanding of the whole English Catholic community than has so far been achieved or, I suspect, is possible for any other religious community in the country.

The English Catholic Church confronted in the Irish a manner of men utterly remote from its own experience. Its priests ministered to a devout gentry; they had now to serve a pious proletariat. The faith in England had survived in the country; the Irish flocked to the towns. English congregations were small, and mostly worshipped in manor chapels; the Irish multitudes would require cathedrals. The English Catholic squire resembled his heretical neighbours both in their virtues and their vices; and his exclusion from English public life had preserved in him the insular prejudice of a simpler age. Class, culture and a uniquely quietist traditional piety shut him off from the Irish poor, and created the distinctions which a common creed might alone hope to overcome.