A little over two weeks after the commencement of the First World War, the Catholic Church was left without its universal shepherd at a time of immense upheaval. Pope Pius X died on 20 August 1914 and immediately, the cardinals of the Catholic Church made their way to Rome to elect his successor. In the conclave, the choice fell on Giacomo della Chiesa, Cardinal Archbishop of Bologna, who took the name of Benedict XV. Della Chiesa had been a student of Cardinal Mariano Rampolla, the Secretary of State under Leo XIII. His essential training had been in diplomacy and this made him well qualified to cope with the war. Immediately upon his accession, Benedict adopted a policy of impartiality and advocated an immediate peace by negotiation. His various peace efforts were ignored, however, and many Catholics in various European countries gave only lukewarm support or made clear an outright rejection of the Pope’s pronouncements on diplomacy. This article concentrates on the reaction of British Catholics, in particular, to Benedict XV’s peace appeals during the war, including his Peace Note of 1917.

At the beginning of his essay entitled ‘How To Be a Counter-Reformation Saint’, Peter Burke observes

William Rogers (b c1646) was a convert Catholic who from obscure origins in the lesser gentry of Gloucestershire came to know many of the leading Catholic clergy and laymen of Restoration times, and became an enthusiastic, if unconventional, advocate of his Faith. Much that is known of him comes from the works of the Oxford antiquary Anthony Wood, and in particular from the letters written by Rogers which survive as part of Wood's voluminous correspondence in the Bodleian Library.

‘All this talk of socialism is just a ruse. The people are starving and we must not play the policeman for England.’ wrote Archbishop Thomas W. Croke of Cashel in 1880. His attitude was far more intelligent and realistic than The Tablet and its reactionary supporters. Irish bishops were desperately concerned about massive Irish emigration in the late nineteenth century: the threat to the faith at home, the possible loss of souls overseas and the Church’s inability to serve her people was worrying. However zealous in its defence, the Irish bishops remained powerless to halt English popular and government support for the destruction of the Temporal Power. They saw other priorities emerging: by 1880 the recovery of the Temporal Power was a forlorn hope. They must take the high moral ground of humanity rather than property.

A previous study traced the career of Rowland Eyre the cavalier during the Civil War and Commonwealth (Recusant History, vol. 8, no. 1). The present account continues the story from the time of Charles II; the earlier history of the family will not be recapitulated.

It was to be expected that at the court of a Catholic king and queen there would be from the beginning of the exile at Saint-Germain-en-Laye a royal chapel and an establishment of Catholic chaplains and that this would last as long as the court remained there. It continued in fact after the departure of James Edward to Lorraine in 1712 and Avignon in 1716 and for a while after the death of Queen Mary Beatrice in 1718. The priests of the English Jesuit Province—the subjects of this article—remained in office until 1720 or perhaps a year or two later. It may be presumed that they stayed on, after the court had ceased to be, to care for the Jacobite exiles who over the years had gathered round it.

The most famous apology for freedom of the press, Milton’s Areopagitica, published in 1644, left no echo among its contemporaries and passed without notice in its own day. But a serious and detailed discussion of this question arose a few years later following on the publication in 1652 of an anonymous pamphlet entitled A Beacon set on fire. Of particular interest to the readers of this review is the evidence this controversy gives us about Catholic publishing during the 1650s. In the narrative of the controversy which follows we shall stress how the existence of clandestine Catholic publishing in England influenced the history of freedom of the press.

Six Franciscan missioners left St. Bonaventure’s, Douai in 1629, on the first attempt to re-establish the Order of Friars Minor in England. All six were martyred or imprisoned during Charles I’s reign. Further groups were despatched during the Interregnum, including one in 1656. Among this group was Father Leo Randolph, whose father Randolph Ferrers owned the Warwickshire manor house of Wood Bevington, between Evesham and Stratford on Avon.

Cuthbert Ttinstall, last Catholic Bishop of Durham, exercised an episcopate of close on thirty years, at a period most momentous in the history of the Church in England. Appointed in 1529 and reckoning his pontifical years from 25 March, 1530, he died, in house confinement at Lambeth Palace, 15 November, 1559, three months after his final deprivation.

The Dormer family, which amassed a fortune as wool merchants in the fifteenth century, was originally seated at West Wycombe, co. Bucks. Its ever-increasing wealth is reflected in a series of land purchases in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries which resulted in the formation of a very large property of some 30,000 acres with its centre at Wing, between Aylesbury and Leighton Buzzard, and detached portions at Eythorpe, five miles west of Aylesbury, at Peterley, near Great Missenden, and elsewhere. The marriage of Sir Robert Dormer, who died in 1552, to Jane Newdigate, brought to the Wing nucleus .the important addition of the manor of Ascott.

The choice of houses for this fifth article was not easy. In the first of the series I argued that the building of priest-holes took place in three stages, divided roughly by the Armada and the Gunpowder Plot, the events which mark the beginning and the end of Nicholas Owen’s work. In the second, I discussed a group of hides from the early period, at Ufton, Mapledurham and Compton Wynyates. In the third and fourth I dealt with two groups of houses where there is evidence of Owen’s work: in East Anglia at Oxburgh, Braddocks and Sawston, and in Warwickshire and Worcestershire at Baddesley Clinton, Hindlip and Harvington. In the sixth (and last) article I shall deal with the most fully documented hides of the third period, namely those used by Charles II after the Battle of Worcester. But with such a wealth of material to draw on, which houses should go into the remaining article on the middle period ?

The third and fourth articles were illustrations of the work of two of the Jesuits who met at Baddesley Clinton in October 1591: John Gerard in East Anglia and Edward Oldcorne in Worcestershire. Even to complete the picture for these two priests would require another three articles. No county is richer in hiding-places than Worcestershire and the neighbouring parts of Warwickshire, and Oldcorne’s work extended much further afield, into Herefordshire and even into Wales.

No century previous to the nineteenth was so assiduous in its cultivation of the diary to record the minutiae of daily life. Partly because the average nineteeth century family knew that death was a frequent visitor, the diary assumed an importance that a century later was lost, along with the reverence for death. In Newman's Obituary List we have that full development of his thought concerning the dead, which began with the demise of those he had loved in his youth and ended with his remembrance of them at the altar in his room at Edgbaston, surrounded by their pictures and memorial cards. It will be helpful to trace the development of that process because it illuminates the Evangelical and Tractarian understanding of prayer for the dead and provides a useful basis for current concepts which have frequently been over-laid either with sentimentality or with a tendency to demythologise the reality of the next life altogether.

The public events which from 1787 occupied the minds of English Catholics, and which were properly inaugurated by the “Protestation”, had a secret prelude, in the year 1786. Before dealing with those events, therefore, it will be necessary to examine the circumstances which led to the formulation of that document.

The August Order was issued by the Poor Law Board on 23 August 1859 and made the provision of Religious Instruction for Catholic orphan pauper children obligatory on the Masters of all Workhouses. It was a significant concession to Roman Catholic, who had been demanding something like it for more than two decades. At the same time, its mandatory nature greatly offended and angered those Guardians who had ultra-Protestant sympathies and connections. The vigour and persistence of the ensuing agitation to have it repealed is almost without parallel in the history of nineteenth-century Protestant-Catholic relations in England and is worth examining in some detail.

Contemporary Roman Catholics have realized in the last thirty-five years that when an ecumenical council has concluded, it is far from over. The interpretation of the decrees of the Second Vatican Council has become today as critical and controverted as the formulation of the decrees was during the Council itself. The present controversies centre on ecclesiology—the nature of the Church—and questions at issue concern continuity and innovation. Did Vatican II, and especially the Decree on the Church in the Modern World, reform the structure and the governance of the Church toward a greater degree of consultation, subsidiarity, decentralization—‘collegiality’, to use the expression of the Council itself? Or was the vision of the Council for the Church in basic continuity with the centralized, papal-monarchial Church of the First Vatican Council? Around these questions centres most of the contention that engages the Church today: debates having to do with the rôle of bishops’ conferences, the operation of the Roman curia, the relationship of the magisterium or teaching authority to theologians.

With a rich history of over four centuries behind it, St. Alban’s English College in Valladolid possesses bibliographical and documentary sources of an exceptional wealth. The present paper reports on the constitution of a team of researchers in the University of Valladolid permanently devoted to the study of such documentary holdings. Extensive reference is made, more particularly, to the preparation of a critical edition of one of the manuscripts kept in the College Archive: ‘A Sketch of the Ancient British History . . . ’, an ecclesiastical history of early Britain written by former College rector Philip Mark Perry (1720–1774).

The Papal Brief restoring the English hierarchy was promulgated on September 29th 1850. On October 25th the Shrewsbury Chronicle reprinted without comment a straight summary taken from the French Catholic paper, L’Univers. Soon enough anti-Catholic feeling, fanned to fury by Cardinal Wiseman’s provocative and flamboyant Letter from the Flaminian Gate, was unleashed across the length and breadth of the nation. In the next few weeks the Chronicle reprinted a whole series of letters on the controversy, an open letter from the Bishop of London to his clergy, John Russell’s open letter to the Bishop of Durham, endorsing the bishop’s remark that this example of ‘papal aggression’ was both ‘insolent and insidious’. Replies were also published: Bishop Ullathorne’s letter to The Times and an article in The Spectator both insisting on the spiritual nature of the issue, rather than presenting it as a threat to the constitution of the English Church and nation. These seemed to go unnoticed. An advertisement appeared from the clergy of Shrewsbury signed amongst others by the Archdeacon of Salop, and Kennedy (of Shorter Latin Primer fame), then Headmaster of the Schools. A petition was to be left for signing in Mr. Lake’s, in Market Square, protesting about the ‘illegal usurpation of power, insulting to our most gracious sovereign… openly intimating a design eventually to subjugate England to papal control’. The local papers seemed happy enough to encourage the debate.

Maude Domenica Petre (1863-1942) has long been associated with the Modernist movement in the Catholic Church, but for the most part she has remained in the background. Whatever has been written about her has usually been in connection with George Tyrrell, since as his close friend, biographer and literary executor, she is a key source of information about him. Apart from that, there is her own apparent desire to stay somewhat in the background. She tells us very little about herself in her writings, and even in her quasi-autobiography, My Way of Faith, written in 1936 when she was 73 and could look back on a long and full life, she is very reluctant to focus on herself. And yet, in her own right she was a remarkable woman. Apart from the books which she either edited or translated, she wrote more than fourteen books of her own on a variety of subjects, as well as numerous articles. This paper, then, will focus on Maude Petre herself, using her own writings and the Petre Papers which were presented to the British Library some time after her death.

The cult of St Cuthbert was central to the regional identity of north-eastern England with its inhabitants termed the haliwerfolc, or ‘people of the saint’ (Cuthbert). The saint became crucial to the liturgical practices and celebrations of Durham's clerical and secular communities as well as being a guarantor of martial victories; usually against the Scots. However, with the cult of saints an early victim of the Reformation launched by Henry VIII in the 1530s, the outlook for St Cuthbert's legacy became increasingly uncertain. Attachment to the saint's memory became inextricably entwined with Durham's pre-Reformation history as commemoration of the cult, rather than the saint, took on more significance. This article looks at how St Cuthbert's historians and other antiquaries regularly manipulated his legend to satisfy different purposes and circumstances; so that completely different perspectives on Cuthbert and his cult have emerged over the centuries since the Reformation. But, throughout the changing interpretations of St Cuthbert's story his significance in Durham remains unchallenged.