Writing in the Cambridge Historical Journal in 1956, G.F.A. Best introduced his article on the religious difficulties of national education in England from 1800 to 1870 with the comment ‘the peculiar problems and difficulties in the way of achieving a national system of elementary education in nineteenth-century England [had] long been so obvious and notorious that a new attempt at an objective and comprehensive view must seem surprising and rash.’ He then justified his own article on the grounds that none of the works available did the subject justice because none told the whole story. In giving only fleeting mention to the educational claims of Roman Catholics, however, even Best omitted an essential of the great educational debate that was waged over England for much of the nineteenth century and that in its earlier phases found some of its more powerful voices in Manchester.

The Hon. Catherine Dillon and her cousin Anne Nevill were Benedictine nuns in the French community of Montargis, which came to Bodney Hall in Norfolk early in 1793. There, near the Bedingfelds at Oxburgh and somewhat further from the Jerninghams at Cossey, the nuns educated young ladies in ‘every branch of useful knowledge becoming the delicacy of their sex.’ Letters from Catherine Dillon (Sr. St. François) and Anne Nevill (Sr. Ste. Agnès de Ste. Thérèse), written from Bodney to Lady Jerningham and Lady Bedingfeld during the period 1795 to 1806, can be found in the Jerningham collection at the University of Birmingham and at the Stafford Record Office. Egerton Castle's two-volume Jerningham Letters, published in 1896, draws upon the large collection of letters written to Lady Bedingfeld, but does not include any letters from her aunt Sr. François or her cousin Sr. Thérèse. Sr. François Dillon was Lady Jerningham's only surviving sister. Sr. Thérèse Nevill was Lady Jerningham's cousin and a sister of Cosmas Nevill of Nevill Holt.

The final identification of what is known as the ‘Birthplace’ of Guy Fawkes has not only settled a question much disputed in York, but has led to the discovery of a number of small facts of wider significance.

It has been generally known since 1933 that Edward Fawkes, father of Guy, was a tenant of the Dean and Chapter, and that his house stood in Stonegate, for in that year the late Rev. Angelo Raine published a complete transcript of a lease made on 8 July 1579 by the Dean and Chapter to Edith Fawkes, widow, of a dwelling house in Stonegate late in her husband's tenure and occupation. Mr Raine was confident that further research would enable this house to be identified. The research has now been undertaken, and the house is found to have been on the northwest side of the street, and to be represented today by nos. 32-34 Stonegate (currently occupied by Mearas, carpet specialists, A. Simpson-East, tailor, and the Hong Kong Chinese Restaurant). All the premises appear to have been entirely rebuilt from the ground level since the sixteenth century.

None of the priest-holes described in the last article show the ingenuity which indicates the craftsmanship of St Nicholas Owen. The earliest dateable examples of his work are in East Anglia, at Oxburgh (c. 1589), Braddocks (1592) and Sawston (1593?). All of these are in remarkably good trim, and all can be documented from Gerard's Autobiography. But since I have already discussed these three houses elsewhere, I shall deal with them fairly briefly here, and then consider in more detail two houses in the west Midlands, Baddesley Clinton and Hindlip, where the hides can be dated to the same five years. The advantage of this procedure is that the well-authenticated examples from East Anglia can furnish a context for the discussion of Baddesley Clinton (where the identification is disputed) and Hindlip (where the house was demolished in 1814 and must be reconstructed from surviving documents).

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.

During the reign of Elizabeth I Catholicism ceased to be the religion of the majority and became that of a small minority. In County Durham, the ecclesiastical settlement of 1559 met with little open opposition, except from a few of the leading clergy, but religious conservatism or ‘survivalism’ together with the ‘bastard-feudal Catholicism’ of the house of Neville remained strong until the Northern Rising of 1569. Thereafter Catholic recusancy emerged slowly amongst the former rebel gentry, under the influence of the Louvainists and seminary priests, but was contained by Government pressure. By the end of the reign the strains produced by persecution were shown in the conflicts amongst the Catholic clergy but ‘seigneurial Catholicism’ within the household régime remained the religion of a minority of the gentry and their dependants still associated with the house of Neville.

The ancestry of Challoner's Abridgement of Christian Doctrine has been pretty well established by Mr Bernard Pickering in the Clergy Review of January, 1980 (Vol. 65, No. 1, pp. 6-15). The ancestry of the ‘Penny Catechism’, which is partly dependent on the Abridgement, also deserves further investigation. For a full investigation, a great deal of work would have to be done. What follows is the fruit of a re-reading of the first section of the Garden of the Soul called ‘Christian Doctrine: A Summary of Faith and Practice’ and the Meditations for Every Day in the Year. Whether or not Challoner revised his Abridgement does not seem to be known, but these two books seem to have been among the sources used by what I have called the Redactors (Cf. CR, April 1978, pp. 140-6). In what follows, AB stands for the Abridgement, GS for the Garden of the Soul and Med. for the Meditations. The numbering of AB is my own, for the original is without any, and I have used the ‘Penny Catechism’ in the edition of 1905, which will not have been touched since the redaction of the second half of the nineteenth century.

To examine Jacobitism only as a post-1688 phenomenon leads to an inevitable neglect of formative influences which help explain why antipathy to the Revolution was so strident in the first generation of Jacobites. Henry Joseph Johnston’s career demonstrates the strength of these influences. He was the seventh son of a Yorkshire Anglican clergyman, and the brother of the antiquary and Non-Juror Dr. Nathaniel Johnston, ‘the prince of Yorkshire collectors’. Henry Johnston had been converted from Anglicanism to Catholicism sometime between 1671 and 1674, and, taking the name Joseph in religion, was to be professed as a monk in 1675 at the English Benedictine priory at Dieulouard in Lorraine. Benedictine monasticism not only had an immediate attraction for a convert antiquarian but it was also to provide Johnston entrance into court circles.

A large collection of letters from John Thorpe, an English Jesuit resident in Rome from 1756 until his death in 1792, are in the British Jesuit archives in London. Those in this collection which date from 1756–67 were to John Jenison S.J. a student of theology at Liège and later chaplain at Wardour Castle, and those from 1781–92 to Charles Plowden S.J. chaplain at Ellingham in Northumberland and from 1784 at Lulworth Castle. This article uses the letters to Plowden written between 1784 and 1792.

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.

THE PERPETUAL Curate of Allendale, an active participant in the Jacobite rebellion of 1715 who later turned king's evidence, said of William, fourth Lord Widdrington, a leading rebel, ‘it had been happy for him, and so we thought would have been better for us, if he had stayed at home’.’ The comment referred both to Widdrington's military incompetence and to the ruin of his house consequent upon his attainder. For Widdrington was one of the wealthiest Northumbrian Catholics, with estates in Lincolnshire, Northumberland and Durham, none of which was heavily mortgaged or encumbered with major debt, as so many northern Catholic estates were. Moreover, his estates at Stella and Winlaton (in the north-west Durham parish of Ryton) incorporated coal-bearing lands which were ripe for development. The shallow coal seams in Whickham and Gateshead, east of Ryton, were virtually worked out and, in order to satisfy the increasingly demanding London market, northern coal-owners were about to extend operations. Widdrington's estate in north-west Durham lay in the middle of the expanding coalfield and would undoubtedly yield substantial profits. As a result of his involvement in the, ‘Fifteen, however, Widdrington forfeited what was described by an acquisitive coal-owning competitor as this ‘very improvable estate’, and, of course, any future profits its coal-mines might earn. Widdrington was fortunate, even so, in having agents in Durham who were prepared to do all in their power to ensure that he did not lose everything. Albert Silvertop and Joseph Dunn, fellow-Catholics and experienced colliery managers (or ‘viewers’), rightly supposed that whoever took over the Stella estate would work quickly to exhaust its coal reserves before the property could be restored, for the entailed estate would revert to Widdrington's heir at his death. Silvertop and Dunn therefore embarked on a remarkable campaign to deprive the new ownership of the benefits the estate promised. The struggle that ensued was long, and often bloody; it became a trial of strength between the powerful coal magnates and independent entrepreneurs, but it also developed into a contest between Protestants and Catholics in which the Catholics were conspicuous for their aggression in defence of their property and reckless in their defiance of possible repercussions under the penal laws.

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 SUPPRESSION of the Society of Jesus by Clement XIV in 1773 brought an abrupt end to Jesuit activity in many parts of the world. However, after 1773 many ex-Jesuits of the former English Province stationed in England, Wales, Maryland and Pennsylvania continued their work as chaplains and missionaries. On the continent the English ex-Jesuits, having been obliged to transfer their college from Saint-Omer first to Bruges and later to Liège, were protected by the prince bishop of the latter city in their work of educating boys. Even after the college's final migration to Stonyhurst in 1794 as a result of the upheaval of the French Revolution, the English ex-Jesuits continued operating without total loss of their pre-Suppression way of life.’

‘IFICAN trust oaths, he is mine as much as I can expect any Papist to be’. With this double-edged compliment, Charles 1 silenced the misgivings of Secretary Windebank and in 1635 despatched Captain Arthur Brett to the Vatican, ostensibly as personal representative of Queen Henrietta Maria, but actually on ‘the greatest and most active employment your Majesty [the King] hath in foreign parts’. The purpose was to frustrate the Roman Catholic mission to England by establishing a mole in its headquarters, but it was never accomplished. On 30 January 1636 Brett reported that he was detained in England by adverse weather and ill-health, and on 17 March he died.’

IN VOLUME 14 of the Catholic Record Society, in an introductory survey mainly devoted to the foundation and history of the English Poor Clares of Gravelines, brief mention is made of their daughter-houses: Aire (established 1629), Rouen (1644) and Dunkirk (1652). Today all four houses are represented by St. Clare's Abbey, Darlington, where are preserved four manuscript volumes relating to the Rouen community: a Register of death-bills’ and three books of annals whose contents adhere closely to chronological order and which are titled ‘Rouen I’ (covering most years of the period 1644 to 1701), ‘Rouen II’ (1702–69) and ‘French Revolution’ (1791–1857).

In eighteenth-century law and print, English Catholics were portrayed as entirely untrustworthy, and their exclusion from all aspects of English society encouraged. Yet, as many local studies have shown, there were numerous individual cases of relatively peaceful coexistence between Protestants and Catholics in this period. This article explores why this was the case by examining how Catholics overcame labels of untrustworthiness on a local level. Using the remarkable political influence of one high-status Catholic in the first half of the eighteenth century as a case study, it questions the utility of “pragmatism” as an explanation for instances of peaceful coexistence in this period. Instead it focuses on the role that deliberate Catholic resistance to legal disabilities played in allowing them to be considered as trustworthy individuals in their localities. The resulting picture of coexistence points towards a moderation of the historiographical emphasis on mutual compromise between confessions in favour of attention to the determined resilience of minority groups. In explaining this, this article makes the broader point that the influence of trust, long important in studies of early modern economic, political, and social relationships, is ripe for exploration in the context of interconfessional relations.

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.