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.

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.

Between the years 1611 and 1620, a number of books supporting the Jacobean Oath of Allegiance were printed in London at the instigation of the English Government. The author's name on the title-pages of these books was given generally as “Roger Widdrington, an English Catholic”, sometimes simply as “Roger Widdrington”. Some of the books were in English, others were in Latin. Taken together, they represent what was probably the most learned and formidable defence of the Oath composed by any pen then active. At that time, the common opinion of those in a position to know, both in England and abroad, was that the name “Roger Widdrington” was a pseudonym which concealed the identity of the real author, the Benedictine priest, Thomas Preston. The modern accounts of his career given, for example, by Gillow (in his ‘Bibliographical Dictionary’) and by Thompson Cooper (in the ‘Dictionary of National Biography’) accept this traditional identification.

In the archives of Propaganda there is an evocative letter in which John Henry Newman urges the Cardinal Prefect not to grant permission for Catholic youths to attend Oxford or Cambridge. It is of significance because the views evinced are not those commonly associated with Newman in the years after 1865:

The figure of Cuthbert Wilks has intrigued me for many years. An English Benedictine and the principal clerical member of the English Catholic Cisalpine movement at the end of the eighteenth century, he was an opponent of Bishop Charles Walmesley, a monk from his own community. Cisalpinism, which demanded further religious and civil freedom for English Catholics, caused a deep cleavage within the English Catholic community.

The summer of 1908 was a summer of congresses in London. The decennial Pan-Anglican Congress assembled in July, the History of Religions Congress met in September, the Trades Union Congress held its annual meeting shortly thereafter, and the International Congress on Moral Education took place in October. None of these received as much newspaper attention as the Roman Catholic International Eucharistic Congress, which convened in England for the first time, from Wednesday 9 to Sunday 13, September. Many column inches were devoted to the preparations and proceedings; photographs were printed; and hundreds of readers’ letters were published afterwards. In reportage the newspapers differed slightly; in opinion, more so. Most of the proceedings were not controversial at all, consisting of liturgies, lectures on various aspects of Catholic belief concerning the Eucharist, and evening meetings in the Albert Hall. What excited the press and sections of the public was the proposed closing spectacular: a procession of the Blessed Sacrament through the streets around Westminster Cathedral.

When he arrived in France in the summer of 1631 Smith began to give all the help he could to the French writers who had taken up his cause. In doing so he put himself in a very delicate position as a member of Richelieu’s household for he was exacerbating the dissensions in the French Church that the Cardinal was intent upon healing because they posed a threat to national unity. Moreover, the writer to whom Smith chiefly looked for support, the Abbé de Saint-Cyran, was soon to become, for reasons partly political and partly doctrinal, the object of Richelieu’s implacable hostility. Smith had to proceed with great caution if he were not to lose the extraordinary advantages that the Cardinal’s patronage brought him. I propose now to follow the controversy as it developed in France during the 1630s, illustrating Smith’s rôle in it mainly from his private correspondence preserved among the papers of the English secular clergy in the archives of the Archdiocese of Westminster. The dossier is far from complete but enough has survived to allow us to trace with reasonable clarity moves that would otherwise have been totally obscure. The greater part of it consists of letters from Smith to the clergy’s Agent at Rome, Peter Fitton, between 1631 and 1634 (after which there is a gap in this series), and from Smith to the Secretary of the clergy in London, John Southcote, from 1631 until the latter’s death in 1637. There are also a number of letters from Southcote to Smith and to Fitton between 1631 and 1637, and a few to Smith from other members of the clergy, in particular Anthony Champney, formerly Vice-President of the English College at Douai and now chaplain to the English Benedictine nuns at Brussels. After 1637 the correspondence still extant becomes very sparse.

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.

The papers of Sir John Bankes (1589-1644)1, which were deposited in the Bodleian Library in 1950, and have since been purchased by the Library, consist largely of documents written in Bankes’s own hand. They extend chronologically from 1626 through 1644, but are mostly concerned with events from 1634 to 1640 when Bankes served as Attorney General.

Prior Park, the stately home on the outskirts of Bath, was built for Ralph Allen, a famous citizen of that city, during the years 1735–1742. In 1830, when the estate had passed through many hands, and was in a very neglected state, it was bought by the Vicar-Apostolic of the Western District, Bishop Peter Baines, for £22,000. It was the bishop's intention to establish there a seminary, a boarding school and eventually, a Catholic University which would vie with Oxford and Cambridge. But things had gone sadly wrong. When Baines died in July, 1843, the establishment was in debt to the extent of some £40,000, with less than half the places in the school and the seminary occupied.

Plowden Hall, probably the house portrayed in the once widely-read novel John Inglesant by J. H. Shorthouse, is about four miles distant from the small town of Bishop's Castle in Shropshire. The family papers are still at the Hall, but the letters upon which this account is based were found at Archbishop's House, Westminster. They were written between 1747 and 1763 by three successive chaplains to the Plowden family. Very few such letters appear to have survived, and they provide invaluable and vivid details about the daily lives of priests on the English Mission. The letters were written to local Jesuit superiors of the Residence of S. Winifrid at Holywell in Flintshire. Until 1761 the Superior was Fr. John Williams, and after that Fr. Thomas Daniel or Watson.

Before discussing more particularly the embassy on which Sir Anthony Standen was sent by James I in 1603, it has been thought well in the present article to narrate the story of this Elizabethan adventurer previous to that event.

Nearly fifty years ago, Joseph Lefèvre, the distinguished editor of the correspondence of the Spanish court with the Low Countries, pointed out the unusual career of Henry Taylor. As an accredited diplomat at Whitehall for six years during the regime of the sovereign Archdukes, Taylor’s letters were sampled by Lefèvre for his perspective on the court of Charles I and for illustrations of the differences in policy between the Archduchess Isabella and her nephew Philip IV. While foreign princes occasionally employed Englishmen to represent their interests in London, it was striking that an English Catholic born in Douai would be selected during the period of the penal laws. Lefèvre’s study was hardly the full story, for Taylor’s diplomatic service to the Spanish crown was longer, more varied and more significant than has hitherto been recognized. Furthermore, his career as a chaplain at the court of the governor at Brussels, which ended in his promotion to be the dean of Antwerp cathedral, deserves attention. Because of his unusual background, it will not cause surprise that during more than thirty years in Spanish service he encountered at different times, and for particular political motives, suspicions and hostility that limited his achievement.

In his Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England, published in 1851, John Henry Newman examined the evidence against Catholicism of two witnesses: Joseph Blanco White and Maria Monk. Of Blanco he could speak from his own experience. He was, he said, ‘a man of great talent, various erudition and many most attractive points of character… I admired him for the simplicity and openness of his character, the warmth of his affections, the range of his information, his power of conversation, and an intellect refined, elegant and accomplished. I loved him from witnessing the constant sufferings bodily and mental, of which he was the prey, and for his expatriation on account of his religion… He was certainly most bitter-minded and prejudiced against everything in and connected with the Catholic Church; it was nearly the only subject on which he could not brook opposition; but this did not interfere with the confidence I placed in his honour and truth’. Newman went on to contrast Blanco’s character with that of Maria Monk. ‘Whatever the one said was true, as often as he spoke to facts he had witnessed, and was not putting out opinions or generalising on evidence; whatever the other said was, or was likely to be, false… Yet the truth spoken against us by the man of character is forgotten, and the falsehood spoken against us by the unworthy woman lives’.

When Francis, Cardinal Bourne died on New Years Day, 1935, his friend and erstwhile collaborator in successive national congresses, George Anstruther, assistant editor of The Tablet, a paper owned by the archdiocese, referred to Bourne's ‘greatness’ as being unlike that of a waterfall but more akin to a quiet river ‘broad and deep, bearing precious freights to safe havens’. The image was supported in a broadcast of Viscount FitzAlan about the deceased prelate in which he stressed that Bourne possessed a ‘rather cold and calm reserve’ concealing ‘a profound spirituality’. The editor of the Jesuit magazine The Month postulated ‘prudent ecclesiastical statesmanship’ had marked a long term of office of over thirty years and Bourne's regular correspondent, Archbishop Alban Goodier, testified to his having been ‘among the shyest of men, so shy, that to many he remained always hidden in his shell’. Indeed, rarely has a man's memory been tarnished so effectively by his friends, all with the most uplifting of motives. The secular press was less mealy-mouthed. The Times considered Bourne to have been ‘a statesmanlike champion of religious education’ and ‘a courageous opponent of all those modern movements and influences which are calculated, openly or swiftly, to sap the foundations of family life and, indeed, the whole structure of the community’.