On 29 May 1660, Anthony Wood purchased a newly-published broadsheet, headed ‘A Catalogue of the Lords, Knights and Gentlemen (of the Catholick Religion) that were Slain in the late Warr in Defence of their King and Country’. It contained in excess of 200 names, and covered not only those who had lost their lives as a result of the Civil Wars, but also those who had lost estates or had been plundered vigorously by enemy forces. It was the first martyrology to greet the restoration of Charles II, preceding by almost three years the pamphlet entitled ‘The Royal Martyrs’ which listed both Catholic and Protestant activists who had suffered in the royal cause. J. C. H. Aveling has stated that ‘After 1660, Catholic peers and gentry all maintained loudly that they had been strong Royalists’, and his implied doubts concerning these claims (he seems to regard allusions in heraldic visitations as largely spurious) reflect the conventional view of those recent scholars who have gone into the matter of Catholic activism.

The Ecclesiastical Province of Cambrai may sound unfamiliar to modern readers. The bishopric of Cambrai dates to the sixth century but only became an archdiocese and, consequently, the centre of a church province in the sixteenth century. The elevation of the see resulted from the heavily contested reorganization of the diocesan map of the Low Countries by King Philip II in 1559. The new province included the medieval sees of Arras, Cambrai and Tournai, as well as the newly created bishoprics of Saint-Omer and Namur. Its borders were established to encompass the French-speaking Walloon provinces in the south of the Low Countries, territories that are now divided between France and Belgium.1 In the early modern period, this area was already a border and transit zone between France, the Low Countries, the Holy Roman Empire and the British Isles. The province’s history in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was deeply marked by recurrent and devastating warfare between the kings of Spain and France, eventually resulting in the transfer of significant territory to France.2 However, the Province of Cambrai was also the scene of frequent cross-border mobility, and a safe haven for Catholic exiles originating from the British Isles, France and other parts of the Low Countries.

The role of religion in history is an inherently difficult topic. Historians have rightly approached it with caution. Nevertheless, excessive caution has sometimes impaired our understanding of both individuals and broad historical developments. Ignoring personal religious experiences, especially when they have followed deliberate conversions, may be more dangerous to the truth than imperfectly assessing those experiences. I am not proposing an interdisciplinary approach, although that too is needed. Rather, I am suggesting that the religious experience of individuals be more fully incorporated, where possible, into traditional historical writings. It is in this spirit that I here examine the 1896 conversion, from agnosticism to Catholicism, of the influential London banker, Bertram Wodehouse Currie.

The accolade above, applied to Bishop Giffard in the 1720s, was bestowed by Edward Dicconson, then chaplain at Chillington Hall in Brewood, Staffs., the Giffards’ principal seat and hints at the combination of affection and veneration with which he was regarded by clergy and laity alike. The bishop, described by Archbishop Matthew as ‘a very old gentleman of delightful manners and deep piety’, was then about eighty years of age, having been born at Wolverhampton, probably in the opening year of the English Civil War, into a junior branch of that ancient family, referred to by Michael Greenslade as ‘perhaps the most considerable in the history of Staffordshire recusancy’. Frequently known as Joseph but increasingly as Bonaventure, the future bishop was the third of four sons of Andrew Giffard (youngest brother of Peter Giffard of Chillington) and his wife Katherine, daughter of Sir Walter Leveson, kt. of Wolverhampton, a place where the two families, also linked by earlier marriage, possessed substantial influence but which by the 1640s, as Dr Rowlands has shown, was hardly living down to its reputation as a hotbed of popery and a haven for ‘Rome’s snaky brood’, though in the following decade it was still ‘by many styled “Little Rome’”, echoing the title earlier applied to the Viscountess Montagu’s recusant establishment in Sussex.

John King, Bishop of London, died on Good Friday, 30th March, 1621: “The next day at night he was buried priuately in Paules”. Shortly afterwards, as John Chamberlain tells us in a letter to a friend, it was commonly reported among Catholics that he had died a Catholic: “Wold you thincke the papists were so impudent as to publish that the late bishop of London died a Romish Catholike, and yt goes for current among them, of wch there is no manner of ground nor shadow but that out of charitie (both before and in his sicknes) he relieued some priests that were in prison and want: but this is one of their vsuall courses wch thay haue learned of the father of lies’. And before the year was out the claim had been made and answered in print: the affair, in short, rose to such proportions that Chamberlain's question, however rhetorical in intent, seems to deserve some attempt at an answer. Was it papist impudence? or is there any reason to suppose that Bishop King did die professing himself a Catholic?

Unlike the Northern and South-Western counties, Kent has not attracted much recusant study, largely because there was nothing like the same degree of loyalty to the old religion as there was in those parts. Kent's proximity to the seat of government, the general absence of wealthy Catholic landowners, and especially the well-used ways to the Kent coast—all proved deterrents to overt ‘papistry’. The immediate danger of official disapproval appears to have been a greater reason for the comparative lack of recusancy than the alleged fact that the Marian persecution had caused a hatred of Catholicism in the shire of Kent. Whether or not the old religion was to flourish in the village communities depended, in Kent as elsewhere, on the encouragement of the local landed gentry.

The embassy of don Diego Sarmiento de Acuña during the later half of the reign of James I has remained the topic of considerable debate as to its influence over the politics and attitudes of the first Stuart monarch. It is time, perhaps, to move the discussion to an opposite quarter by asking whether there were any English efforts to sway the ambassador, and if so, what impact did they have on the embassy's performance. One interesting example of this is the evidence that English Catholics approached Sarmiento upon his arrival in the summer of 1613 with a new suggestion for a closer liaison. The court of King James had been already alerted to this prospect by a letter of Sir John Digby from Madrid of the preceeding year. Here he noted that there had been dissatisfaction among the Catholics of his acquaintance over the unproductive performance of don Alonso de Velasco previously on their behalf. He offered as a forecast about his successor: ‘And hereupon it hath been held fitt, that the succeeding ambassadour who is to come shortly into England, should rather take the course of Intelligence and dependency of our English papists on the king of Spaine transferred unto him by don Pedro [de Zufiiga] then by don Alonso de Velasco …’ Digby expected that a large sum of money was to be available to the next envoy to ‘revive and reestablish the meanes of Intelligence’ that were available as before.

I am not one to follow in my own footnotes, but a number of correspondents have wondered how the shockingly poor relations between the Catholic gentry and their chaplains described in ‘Priests and Patrons in the Eighteenth Century’ (Recusant History Vol. 20, No. 2 pp. 207–22) could have arisen. One instance might be ascribed to the overbearing demeanour of a squire, or his wife, another to a clash of temperament, and yet another to a differing perception of the proper rôle of a chaplain, but the lack of cordiality between the clergy and the gentry was so widespread that a predisposition to incompatibility might reasonably be suspected. This paper traces the origins of their antipathy to the experience each gained of the other in early life, particularly during their schooldays.

Of the many topicalities which fill the writings of the Elizabethan pamphleteers, Gabriel Harvey and Thomas Nashe, two concern the now almost unknown recusant poet and Cambridge tutor, Stephen Vallenger. In each allusion, as the subject of a long standing esoteric joke, he is referred to with obvious irony as “noble.” In Catholic eyes, at least, he merited the title, for he risked life imprisonment, if not worse, in an attempt to vindicate the cause for which Edmund Campion died, and when arrested, shielded his associates, taking full punishment upon himself.

In 1849 John Ruskin published The Seven Lamps of Architecture and in the following year the English Catholic hierarchy was restored, involving the creation of a diocesan administration, made possible by toleration and made necessary by increasing numbers and influence. As Ruskin’s work broadened out from art and architecture to encompass the economy and society, his teaching was to have a profound and lasting effect on the thinking of leading English Catholics.

‘Ultramontanism’, a term which can be used simply to describe a particular attitude towards the Papacy, is frequently used to describe certain kinds of devotional practice, and is sometimes used in connection with other aspects of Catholicism, such as attitudes towards poverty, charity and Protestants, and the growth of authoritarianism in the Church. The second half of the nineteenth century is portrayed as the period during which the Ultramontane clergy took control of the Catholic Church from the hands of the old English clergy and laity, symbolised in the appointment of the Ultramontane Manning to Westminster in 1865 rather than the old English Bishop Clifford: ‘the victory of Ultramontanism and Romanisation’. If this was true of England as a whole, then it must surely be true of Yorkshire, where in 1861 the ‘thoroughly Roman’ Robert Cornthwaite became Bishop of Beverley? Ultramontanism, in all its guises, certainly had an important influence on the Catholic Church in Yorkshire during this period, but there is also evidence of a continued attachment to old English attitudes and practices, even as late as the 1890s. What took place in Yorkshire was not the triumph of Ultramontanism but a gradual acceptance and assimilation of two different kinds of Catholicism, as the gentry who had formerly dominated the Yorkshire Church, and the old English clergy who served them, came to terms with the most Ultramontane of the English bishops and the younger priests who followed his example.

St. Gregory’s was a small college belonging to the English secular clergy founded at Paris in the late seventeenth century. Its main purpose was to enable suitable ecclesiastics who had completed their training at Douai or the other colleges abroad to pursue advanced studies at the Sorbonne before working on the mission in England. Its founders hoped it would serve to produce a corps of highly qualified men to fill the leading administrative and teaching posts in the Catholic Church in England. It survived until 1786 when financial difficulties forced it to close—temporarily, as was at first thought. During the Revolution it suffered the fate of the other English Catholic institutions in France, and it never, in fact, reopened. Among the documents that have survived from its archives is a Register Book covering the whole period of its existence from its first beginnings in 1667 until it closed down over a century later. This Register Book, which records the arrival and departure of students, the stages in their university career, their promotion to holy orders, deaths occurring at the college, and occasional memoranda of events affecting the life of the community, was edited for the Catholic Record Society in 1917 by the late Monsignor Edwin Burton.

In 1595 Dr. William Gifford was appointed Dean of the collegiate Church of St. Peter, Lille, in the Spanish Netherlands. Eleven years later, by express order of the Archduke Albert, he was summarily exiled from the Netherlands and ordered never to return during the lifetime of the Archduke. In consequence, Gifford left Lille in July 1606, retired to Rheims in France and, a few months later, resigned his post as dean. Various reasons, in the course of time, have been suggested as the cause of his exile, but the real reason, which can be found by studying the contemporary documents, has still to be stated.

It is not surprising that Henry Edward Manning had strong opinions about the Kulturkampf, Otto von Bismarcks effort in the early 1870’s to bring the Roman Catholic Church in Germany under the control of the State. As head of the Catholic Church in England, it appropriately fell to Manning to condemn what most British Catholics would have seen as the persecution of their Church in the new German Empire. Moreover, Manning knew personally the bishops involved in the conflict with Bismarck from their time together at the Vatican Council. Indeed, he was well acquainted with some of them who had played important rôles, either for or against, in the great controversies of the Council that led to the definition of Papal Infallibility. MiecisIaus Ledochowski, Archbishop of Gnesen and Posen, imprisoned and expelled from his see by the German government in 1874, had, together with Manning, been a prominent infallibilist. Paulus Melchers, Archbishop of Cologne, and leader of the German inopportunists, suffered the same penalty. The bishops of Breslau, Trier and Paderborn, all of whom had played significant rôles at the Council, the first two against, the latter for the definition, were either imprisoned, expelled, or both. Manning considered these men to have suffered for the cause of religious liberty, and could not understand the indifference of British politicians, especially of liberals like Gladstone, to their fate.

Professor Birrell has remarked that there is ‘an extensive literature on how to describe a book, but there is no literature whatever on how to describe a library or a library catalogue’. Well, what follows is an account of a library in a Northumbrian-Catholic-Jacobite peer's house, not, admittedly, a common category but one having some cultural and recusant interest nevertheless.

St Alban’s English College in Valladolid, established at the height of the Catholic Reformation for the training of English secular clergy under the rule of Spanish Jesuits, underwent an alteration in its management after the expulsion of the religious order from Spain in 1767. As part of this process, numerous valuable archival records were produced which have not, thus far, been studied. This article analyses a portion of these documents: the surviving manuscript inventories of the library. It also considers the series of governmental orders issued by the Spanish authorities as part of the process of expulsion and examines how these orders shaped the production of the library inventories. It offers an overview of the contents of the catalogues, with descriptions of some of those specific book entries that make these inventories unique. The study of these archival documents provides insight into, and understanding of, a key moment in the College history: its shift from Spanish Jesuit control to an English secular one and the difficulties that the Spanish authorities faced because of this change in the College’s national identity.

Kenney, Peter James (1779–1841), was born in Dublin, probably at 28 Drogheda Street, on 7 July, 1779. His father, Peter, and his mother, formerly Ellen Molloy, ran a small business. Apart from Peter, the other known children were Anne Mary, who joined the convent of the Sisters of St. Clare, and an older brother, or half-brother, Michael, who set up an apothecary’s shop in Waterford.

Peter was born, therefore, in the decade which saw the American Revolution, the Suppression of the Jesuits and, in Ireland, the birth of Daniel O’Connell—destined to become ‘The Liberator’. The need to keep Ireland quiet during the American conflict, led to concessions to the Catholic population. The first of these was in 1778. Others followed when the French Revolution raised possibilities of unrest. In 1792 the establishment of Catholic colleges was allowed, and entry to the legal profession. These led to the founding of Carlow College and to Daniel O’Connell’s emergence as a lawyer. The following year the Irish parliament was obliged by the government to extend the parliamentary franchise to Catholics. Increased freedom, however, and the government’s connivance at the non-application of the penal laws, led to increased resentment against the laws themselves and, among middle-class Catholics, to a relishing of Edmund Burke’s celebrated reminder to the House of Commons in 1780, that ‘connivance is the relaxation of slavery, not the definition of liberty’.