In a recent article in this periodical on the identity of the early seventeenth-century controversialist who wrote under the pseudonym ‘John Brereley’, I published some biographical notes on the Jesuit, Lawrence Anderton (1575-1643) who is sometimes mistakenly credited with authorship of the ‘Brereley’ books. These notes included new evidence on a hitherto very obscure phase of Anderton’s career, the five or six years after he left Cambridge in 1597 to become a Catholic and go abroad to study for the priesthood. I was able to show that he studied at the English College at Seville and returned to England, a priest but not yet a Jesuit, a few years later. The date of his return seemed to be determined by an entry in the College accounts stating that his viaticum was collected on 24 March 1603. Of his life at the College, however, I could discover nothing beyond the fact that, while there, he went by the alias Lawrence Rigby or Ribe. Since publishing my article I have come across a piece of evidence which throws a little further light on his career at the College and which also suggests that he left Seville to come on the mission a few months earlier than the date of the viaticum would seem to indicate.

Bishop John Milner once observed, ‘a detailed history of the converts to and the apostates from the Catholic Church … would form a most interesting and useful work.” Since that time more attention has been paid to Jesuit converts than to Jesuit apostates. This article seeks to redress, if ever so slightly, the balance. A look at the underside of one portion of the Society before the Suppression reveals new aspects of her life and history.

As is well known, the Spanish Inquisition was originally established to investigate suspected cases of reversion to Judaism by baptised Spaniards, but in the century of the Reformation it naturally came to extend its jurisdiction over heretics of all kinds, native and foreign; and many English Protestants who landed on Spanish soil were dismayed to find themselves the objects of its attention. Most of them were sailors or merchants, visiting willingly or by accident those Spanish territories which fell under the jurisdiction of the Inquisition Court in the Canary Islands, some details of which have already been published. The records of this court survived the massive destruction of Inquisition archives in the early nineteenth century; so too did the records of the court at Toledo, which had jurisdiction over most of Central Spain, and which despite its inland position also found itself dealing with a number of Lutherans, Calvinists and Anglicans. In view of the general opinion that Calvinism represented a tougher line in the Reformation, it is interesting to see that all the Calvinists and Anglicans accepted reconciliation with the papacy, while most of the Lutherans resisted the pressures of the Inquisition and were condemned.

As we approach Alabaster's sonnets’ our expectation is enhanced not by the promise of poetic greatness but by the prospect of exploring pure instances of the kind of poetry born in the convergence of rhetoric and meditation. We will focus first on a sequence of sonnets remarkable for their rhetorical techniques; then we will consider a group of sonnets each of which has meditation as its subject. In all the poems, however, it will be apparent that Alabaster as poet is simultaneously rhetor and meditator.

IN THE CHANCEL of Dumbleton Church, Gloucestershire, there is a monument bearing the following inscription:

From 12 April 1822 when John Henry Newman was elected a Fellow until 3 October 1845 when he tendered his resignation to Provost Hawkins, Oriel College was to be the centre of Newman's life. As Newman later recorded:

Newman went on to assert that but for Oriel, he would have been nobody, entirely lacking in influence. It was through Oriel (and the pulpit of the Oriel living of St. Mary the Virgin) that he was able to exert such a dominant religious and pastoral influence on his academic generation and those that followed. It was through Oriel that he would be in a position to emerge by 1833 as the well-known leader of that great movement of religious revival in the Church of England known as the ‘Oxford Movement’ or ‘Tractarianism’ (the name being coined in consequence of the series of Tracts for the Times published by Newman and his cohorts).

Between the late-twelfth and early-sixteenth centuries, much music (both liturgical and non-liturgical) was written in honour of St Thomas of Canterbury. However, in the 1530s his cult became a major target for reformers and, in 1538, Henry VIII (1491-1547) ordered the destruction of his shrine and the obliteration of all music written in his honour. This article will examine how music composed to memorialise St Thomas was treated during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. It explores the process of self-censorship prompted by Henry’s proclamation on the cult of St Thomas that led to his erasure from liturgical books in England. It analyses the attempts by reformers to discredit music concerning St Thomas, particularly by radical reformer John Bale (1495-1563). Finally, it examines music that was composed by Catholics for St Thomas during the Counter-Reformation and asks what it can tell us about the state of the cult in the late sixteenth century. This approach results in an overview of St Thomas’ cult during the later sixteenth century and contributes to our understanding of changing conceptions of the saint by Catholic communities in the post-Reformation world.

John Crosse of Liverpool has been hailed by several historians (see below, p. 37) as an example of a ‘Roman Catholic actively opposing Ship Money’ in part because Catholics typically were financially stretched by the demands of compositions. Few individuals have been identified in that role, thus assuring Crosse a permanent place in history. But how justified is this assessment of a man whom recent research reveals as a more complex character than is allowed by the convenient stereotype allotted to him? Who exactly was he?

Anti-Catholicism and its most popular expression, anti-Popery, was a common phenomenon in an otherwise tolerant Victorian age. To the average Englishman this distrust of Catholicism merged into broader feelings of xenophobia — Catholicism was considered un-English, the faith of the immoral French, the corrupt Italians and the indolent Spanish. The fact that the Irish, who were currently flooding into England, were Catholic made it easier for normally tolerant and liberal Englishmen to maintain their religious prejudice. This anti-Catholicism was not confined to the lower classes, but rather was a truly popular phenomenon shared by individuals as diverse as Lord John Russell, Lord Palmerston and Lord Derby. Indeed the Queen herself was not above expressing anti-Catholic views. Twice during her long reign there were outbreaks of violence against the Catholics: in 1850 following the restoration of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in England, and a generation later over William E. Gladstone's pamphlets attacking the Vatican decrees.

Literary writings had a significant, if elusive and subtle, rôle to play in securing the position of the English Catholic community in the especially vulnerable period 1829–1850. It is questionable that the Catholic press and Catholic apologists and polemicists played so large a part in calming the anti-Catholic frenzy so evident in the 1820s as the subsequent more literary products of Catholics and those non-Catholics who were intrigued by Catholicism. Holmes remarks that in this period ‘most Catholic apologists attempted the fruitless and unending task of answering specific objections and those books or pamphlets which survive are merely gathering dust on the shelves of Catholic libraries’. It took greater art to get behind the defences of John Bull's anti-Catholic fortress mentality. The rôle of literature was to affect the perceptions and sympathies of the intelligentsia rather than political conditions: at the beginning of this period people felt with Dr. Arnold that ‘the [Anglican] Church, as it now stands, no human power can save'; while at its end, people could hold the expectation ‘that Popery will in a few years become the popular religion of these realms’. This sense of the seriousness of the Catholic presence was established mostly, of course, by Catholicism's actual presence; but that was amplified and consolidated in the mind of the educated public by literature, substantially in a positive direction.

William Johnson, S. J., the writer of the two letters printed below, has hitherto escaped notice by English historians, including Foley, because he was a member of the Andalusian province of the Society of Jesus and spent all his religious life in Spain. He is not to be confused with an earlier William Johnson, also a Jesuit, who died at Malaga in 1614. Some details of the life of William Johnson II can be gleaned from the catalogues of the Andalusian province, from his official obituary, and from other archive sources. The historian of the Andalusian province, Juan de Santibañez, included Johnson in his series of brief biographies of its most distinguished sons, Varones ilustres de la Provincia de Andalucía de la Compañía de Jesús written not long after Johnson’s death in 1642. The work was never published but survives in manuscript.

On Henry Nevill II’s death at the ripe old age of 85 on 28 June 1728, the terms of his will were duly carried out. In it he arranged that ‘his youngest daughter, the Lady Mary Countess Migliorucci, should have the custody and management of his said son during his insanity, not doubting but she will see him taken all imaginable care of and used with that tenderness and regard that is due to be had for one in his unfortunate circumstance’. Then he left to his grandson, Cosmas Henry Joseph Count Migliorucci (whom he desired to take the surname of Nevill) the sum of £5,000. Next, he left to his eldest daughter, Margaret Conyers, the sum of £2,000 and to his Conyers grand-daughters, Harriet and Elizabeth, £300 apiece. To his youngest daughter, the Countess Mary Migliorucci, he left £10,000 in trust. On her father’s death, Lady Mary Migliorucci faced several problems. The first was to carry out her father’s instruction to take care of her idiot brother and for this she was allowed £200. It would seem, however, that his care fell mainly on the shoulders of Henry Milton, the bailiff of Nevill Holt, for Lady Mary spent most summers at her London house in Queen’s Square, near Ormond Street, Thus, on 3 June 1729, Milton wrote to her that ‘Mr. N. is in good health’.

This paper deals with six documents concerning plans for the invasion of England which were put forward by Dr. Morys Clynnog in 1575 and 1576. First noted by Arnold Oscar Meyer, they have never been studied in detail. This is due in part to the lack of background material, for it is still possible to uphold Meyer’s verdict of half-a-century ago that “the diplomatic history of these plans of invasion is still far from being complete”. The Elizabethan exiles had no concerted plan of action, and each group pursued its own policies. Those that come within the scope of this survey are those of: Dr. William Allen and Sir Francis Englefield; Dr. Nicholas Sander; Thomas Goldwell Bishop of St. Asaph and Dr. Nicholas Morton; Prior Shelley, and Dr. Morys Clynnog together with Dr. Owen Lewis. The point may be illustrated by a document of 1572. Soon after the election of Pope Gregory XIII, Allen and twelve other English exiles wrote from Louvain to Cardinal Morone, the Protector of England, enclosing a memorial for the Pope, asking for Papal intervention to help English Catholics. They asked Morone to discuss the matter with Thomas Goldwell, Bishop of St. Asaph, Nicholas Sander and Nicholas Morton. Goldwell and Morton had been active in English affairs in the pontificate of Pius V. On the part of the exiles in the Low Countries, no mention was made of Dr. Owen Lewis, who as a canon lawyer was at this time pursuing a highly successful career in the diocese of Cambrai; nor did Allen suggest that Cardinal Morone should take the advice of Morys Clynnog, a Welsh exile in Rome who was high in his favour. These omissions suggest that the two Welsh exiles stood somewhat apart from Allen and his co-signatories in 1572. Clynnog, after the death of his patron Cardinal Pole in 1558, had attached himself to Cardinal Morone. He became involved in a violent quarrel in Rome with Morton in 1565, in which Morone’s support had enabled him to gain a victory over Morton and his followers in the English Hospice. There is evidence that this feud was still vigorous in 1579, and that Morton had as an ally Thomas Goldwell, Bishop of St. Asaph: and by that date Owen Lewis had ranged himself with Morys Clynnog. Lewis arrived in Rome in the summer of 1574, on legal business from Cambrai. In less than a year he had become a Papal Referendary, an office which gave him direct access to the Pope. He was thus well placed to play a leading part in the politics of the English exiles. The documents discussed in this paper lend support to the view that he embarked on his first essay in statecraft very soon after his arrival in Rome, and that the invasion-projects which now exist in the handwriting of Morys Clynnog were, in effect, proposals which had the backing of Owen Lewis, and which had among their objectives the conferring on him of a Cardinal’s hat.

When the Gunpowder Plot came to light in November, 1605, the Government tried to implicate the leading Jesuits on the mission, among them John Gerard who was known to have been on friendly terms with several of the plotters. He was publicly named as a traitor, the hue and cry was raised, but through the kindness of friends he remained safely in hiding and was well looked after until, in May, 1606, he escaped to the continent. He never returned to England but spent the rest of his life teaching and performing spiritual duties at English colleges abroad. He was in charge of the Jesuit novices at Louvain from 1609 to 1614 and when the novitiate was transferred to Liège in 1614 he accompanied it, becoming the first rector of the new house. In 1627 he was made spiritual director of the English College at Rome, a post which he held until his death in 1637.

Charles Butler's mother, née de Blandecque (anglice Blandyke), of a family established in Saint-Omer, was enthusiastically devoted to the Society of Jesus. His much-loved paternal uncle, Alban Butler, the hagiographer, had perhaps his own reasons for some measure of alienation from the regular clergy. In 1762, the French government expelled the Jesuits from France, and in 1766, when Charles was 16 years old, this uncle was put in charge of the English Jesuits’ college of St Omers, thus earning (I think it is not too much to say) a degree of obloquy amounting almost to the scale of vendetta, among a section of the recently-professed English Fathers.

‘One must not wait for better times but create them’. Such was the message that the young Francis Tregian (1574–1617) received from the teaching of Dr William Allen, president of Douai. In such a way he lived his life, preserving his faith and later struggling, in adverse political conditions, to improve the fortunes of his family. Was he also able to copy several important music manuscripts, including the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book? This article is yet another examination of a problem much discussed for over a hundred years.