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.

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’.

Many of the sixteenth century Protestant reformers denied the rôle and authority of the Roman Church as a mediating instrument between Christ and believers. There was specific theological objection to the legitimacy of a sacrament of holy orders with a divinely empowered hierarchy. In consequence, much of the Catholic reaction and reform was designed to re-establish and emphasise both dogmatically and practically true authority within the Church. Seminaries therefore, as planned by the Tridentine decree of 15 July 1563, belonged to an ecclesiological context. They were seedbeds, giving protection from hostile and indifferent society, where men were set apart to sink roots in the rich soil of clerical life, and only then to emeige to feed the Church.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Haydock Bibles were a series of self-interpreting editions of the Douay Version with annotations compiled chiefly by Rev. George Leo Haydock. The first edition was published in serialized form over the years 1811 to 1814 by Father Haydock's brother, Thomas. It enjoyed great popularity and was frequently reprinted in a series of British and American editions. According to standard Bible bibliographies, the latest known editions were published in the 1880's. The purpose of this article is to provide a brief historical account of editions in this important series and to describe a 1910 reprint of the final edition recently located by the author. This copy establishes that the Haydock Bible series lasted longer than was generally known.

The story of the relationship between Ulster and Scotland during the seventeenth century has long been dominated by the flow of people and ideas from Scotland to the north of Ireland. This, however, belies the prominent role that Ireland had in the social and cultural history of the Western Isles and Highlands of Scotland during that century. This paper argues that of even greater importance to the resurgence of Catholicism in the Scottish Gaidhealtachd than a Rome driven Counter-Reformation were the financial support and personnel provided by Ulster Catholics. In the face of aggressive Stuart policies, Catholicism was rejuvenated and became an ideological justification for asserting traditional rights in the face of government sanctioned, Protestant blessed, incursions in the Western Isles. Moreover, in the face of historiography that has argued for the continual disintegration of ClanDonald throughout the seventeenth century, this article explores the ways the clans and their neighbours inspired, funded and facilitated the revival of Catholicism in the Gaidhealtachd.

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.

In considering the period from 1559–1603, and the attitudes within the recusant community to the acceptance or rejection of the Elizabethan Settlement, the first major event giving extensive evidence of political attitudes in the northern region is the Rising of the Northern Earls, a crisis which, as elsewhere in Elizabethan England marked the watershed for the fortunes of Catholicism during the reign. An analysis, conducted at some length, of its causes, events and consequences is, indeed, indispensable to understanding Catholic survival in Elizabethan northern England.

John Henry Newman’s establishment of Oratorian houses in London and Birmingham in 1849 seemed like an auspicious event for English Catholics. The houses were filled with Oxford converts who were eager to minister to the laity and furnish intellectual support for the Faith. Unfortunately, only six years after the houses were founded the Oratorians became enmeshed in bitter feud. The Oratories had been developing along different lines. Father Frederick Faber was a zealous ultramontane; he and his London associates embraced all things Roman. Newman and his Birmingham confreres experimented with Roman devotions but were never comfortable with them. Newman sympathized with the ‘old Catholics’ and retained cordial relations with many Anglicans. As the Oratories were drifting apart so too were Newman and Faber. While they had been close friends when the Oratories were established, Newman became increasingly critical and suspicious of Faber.

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.

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’.

The above are strong words, even from a forthright Yorkshirewoman, and they are almost startling when one considers how submissive, personally, was their author to all authority in the Church. But, in this Memorial, Mary Ward describes the constitution she envisages for her Institute. The firm lines she draws are even more accentuated in her Third Plan of 1622: ‘We most humbly beg that the entire hierarchical structure of this work should depend entirely on the Holy See and not on any other authority’. Another document headed Reasons why we may not alter makes it clear that the proposals admit of no compromise. The genesis of this attitude is not far to seek. Mary Ward considered she had received divine intimation that she was to undertake some new work to the greater glory of God and for this she was to follow St. Ignatius’ Society of Jesus with its direct responsibility to the Holy See. Sr. Immolata Wetter points out that Mary Ward’s ideas were further sharpened by the contemporary situation of the Catholic Church in England: ‘adherence to the primacy of the Pope distinguished the English martyrs and confessors of the faith. For their loyalty to the Vicar of Christ these brave men and women suffered restrictions both in public and private life.