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?

When Bishop Challoner wrote his account of the martyr Bl. John Wall in the second volume of his Memoirs of Missionary Priests, which was published in 1742, he used as his authority transcripts of some documents which then belonged to the Douai seminary and wrote, “ John Wall … was born in Lancashire in 1620 of a gentleman's family, possessed at that time of about £500 a year, which, he and his elder brother William … entering into religion, was devolved to the third brother and by him enjoyed at the time of the execution of our confessor [i.e. in 1679]. Mr John was sent over young to the English College at Doway.”

Late in February of 1677/8, Edward Petre wrote about the approaching provincial congregation to his fellow Jesuit William Tunstall. He reminded Tunstall that, as one of the senior professed fathers of the English province, Tunstall ought to be present at the meeting and he relayed the provincial's instructions that the individual Jesuits be in London on 21 April so that the actual congregation could convene on the 24th. ‘Lest occasion should be given to suspect the designe,’ no one should either appear in London before 21 April or travel publicly around the city. If Tunstall were unable to attend, he was to inform the provincial as soon as possible so that another could be named in his stead.

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.

Political and economic circumstances in Europe and the Civil War (1642–1660) in England so reduced the funds of the English Benedictine nuns of Cambrai that they were unable to provide for the community. Against sound advice they went ahead with a filiation in Paris in 1651. Thanks to the contacts of Dame Clementia Cary and their chaplain, Dom Serenus Cressy, community life began in rented accommodation in 1652. They moved six times before being enabled to purchase their own property in 1664. This was made possible by the messieurs of Port Royal with whom the community continued to have close ties, although they never seem to have been tainted with Jansenism. Novices were always recruited from England and their dowries and associated gifts and bequests were essential, but the survival of several account books reveals the extent and variety of the support the community enjoyed in Paris.

In an 1885 article on ‘Roman Catholics and Parliamentary Representation,’ The Times suggested ‘it is a strange thing that although the Catholic Emancipation Bill was passed in 1829, very few members of that faith have succeeded in holding seats for English constituencies.’ During the past few decades a number of historians have published important studies of the electoral influence of Catholics in the nineteenth century, but most of these works have paid little attention to the Catholics who were Members of Pariliament. But any attempt to understand the Catholic contribution to public life in the nineteenth century surely requires an analysis of the Catholic M.P.s.

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.

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.

‘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.

“I am a Christian, who never changed that Religion, that I drank in with my milke: nor ever, I thanke God, was ashamed of my profession”, James declared in 1608, in his Apology for the Oath of Allegiance. Five years earlier he had reminded the members of his first English Parliament that as “I am no stranger to you in blood, no more am I a stranger to you in Faith, or in matters concerning the house of God. And although this my profession be according to mine education wherein (I thanke God) I sucked the milk of God’s trewth, with the milke of my nurse: yet do I here protest unto you, that I would never … have so firmly kept my first profession if I had not found it agreeable to all reason and to the rule of my conscience.”

The late Harold Laski, in a letter to O. W. Holmes, characterized Persons’s Jesuit’s Memorial as “the most cold-blooded plot for exterminating opponents known outside St. Bartholomew.” On the face of it, this tends to confirm the suspicion which was expressed by Holmes in this very correspondence, and which reviewers have voiced since the letters were published, that Laski often wrote about books of which he had a very imperfect knowledge. And yet there is a sense in which the Jesuit’s Memorial is cold blooded, iust as the whole Counter-Reformation was in a certain sense cold-blooded. Whenever the Church is faced with a new challenge she must tighten up her lines of discipline and ruthlessly prune certain: venerable practices and customs or at least establish an order of priority among them. Many view with distaste the mentality engendered by the Council of Trent. It would be well, however, to try and see what the Counter-Reformation was trying to do before we condemn it. And for a real insight into the Counter Reformation spirit few books can equal the Jesuit’s Memorial.

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.

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.

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.

Luigi Sturzo, the exiled founder of the suppressed Italian Christian Democrats, wrote in May 1942 that American Catholic papers prior to the American entry into the war had been sympathetic to Franco and even Mussolini as well as to Vichy France. After Pearl Harbor, these papers retained their sympathy for Vichy France.

The popular acceptance (among Protestants) of Titus Oates's allegations of a Popish Plot owed much to the apparent confirmation provided first by the murder of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey and second by the discovery of Edward Coleman's letters. Godfrey's murder has challenged the ingenuity of both historians and the writers of detective fiction, but Coleman's letters have received far less attention. Yet their historical importance was considerable. Apart from apparently confirming Oates's story, they seemed to implicate James, Duke of York, in projects designed to bring in Catholicism and absolutism with the aid of Louis XIV and the Pope. They thus gave support and impetus to the movement to exclude James from the throne. One reason why most historians have made little sense of the letters is that they are often obscure and allusive and were not printed in a logical order. A second reason is that most historians have considered the letters only in relation to the Plot. This is true of Professor Kenyon, for example, who has produced much the best analysis so far. But the letters almost all date from 1674–76 and can be understood fully only in the context of the events of those years. In this article I shall use the letters and other evidence to try to give an account of Coleman's activities from the start of his correspondence in 1674 until his execution in 1678. In the process, I shall try to assess James's involvement in Coleman's intrigues.

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’.

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.

In the reign of Queen Elizabeth, Thomas Jenison, late Auditor to her Majesty in Ireland, purchased estates in the parishes of Heighington and Coniscliffe in the County Palatine of Durham, and built himself a magnificent new mansion at Walworth just to the north of the Tees. Here, in 1603, his widow entertained King James I as he was journeying southward. This lady, Elizabeth Jenison, was daughter to Edward Birch, Groom Porter to Henry VIII. From her will, made in 1605, we learn that three of her sons, William “the elder,” John and Michael, were, to her grief, Catholics, while William “the younger,” Thomas and Elizabeth, wife of Sir George Freville, adhered to the religion of their mother. Possibly the father had heen Catholic: certainly he was in sympathy with Catholics abroad, for when Lady Stanley was arrested in Ireland after the surrender of Daventer hy her husband in 1586, she was advised to get in touch with Mr Jenison the Auditor.