Little is known of Ralph Buckland. Anstruther records that he was born in 1564, educated at the Merchant Taylors’ School and Magdalen College, Oxford, ordained in Rome in 1588 and sent as a ‘seminary priest’ to England where he was arrested and banished in 1606. He died in 1611 leaving behind him two works, both printed secretly in England, Seaven Sparkes of the Enkindled Soule (1604/5) and An Embassage to Heaven (1606–10). The earlier volume, a collection of original psalms, is a significant work from many points of view. It has literary value both as a poetic text and as a technical experiment, showing an early awareness of the mechanics of Hebrew prosody and current scholarly debate about its practice. It is also a poignant record of the predicament of the recusant Englishman around the time of the Gunpowder plot and an effective register of his state of mind.

WHEN COSMAS NEVILL II died on 1 June 1829 at the ripe old age of 81’ the family were within striking distance of having to quit their traditional home of Nevill Holt in the East Midlands, for only two more generations of Nevills were to reside there. The first of these was Cosmas II'S second son, Charles, the eldest son, Cosmas III, having predeceased him. While his father was alive, Charles Nevill seems to have preferred living in London to residence at Holt. In 1821 he married Lady Georgiana Bingham, youngest daughter of the second Earl of Lucan, and the couple then spent some time in Paris where their first child, Lavinia Elizabeth, was born on 23 January 1824. Subsequently she was conditionally baptised by a Catholic priest at Holt. Their next child, another daughter, Charlotte, was born in London on 10 March 1827 and the Register of Nevill Holt chapel does not mention her baptism. Though Cosmas II died in June 1829, Charles and Georgiana were in no great hurry to settle in the Leicestershire countryside, for their third child and heir, Cosmo George, was born in London on 3 June 1830 and was baptised by the Rev. Mr. Fryer. Their fourth child, Louisa, was also born there, on 21 September 1831, as was their fifth, Richard, on 15 December 1832. Their sixth and last child, William, was likewise born in London, on 21 April 1834.2

Dr. Mark Nicholls’s Investigating Gunpowder Plot published in May, 1991, is a useful reminder that Guy Fawkes: the Real Story of the Gunpowder Plot?, to name nothing else published in or near 1969, has by no means found universal acceptance as the more probable solution of the confused evidence surrounding this bizarre episode. This is not surprising. The last mentioned book was written for a wide audience. Thanks no doubt in large measure to the kindly influence of Lady Antonia Fraser it was chosen as the Book of the Month by PUNCH all those years ago. Evidently, such a choice, however desirable in itself, could not be regarded as the highest of recommendations by the world of Academe. Nevertheless, it must be insisted that the book was based on extensive research not only in this country but also abroad, notably in Rome, Florence, Spain, Holland and Belgium. Errors occurred which will need to be corrected in any future edition or new work. Dr. Nicholls, while attempting to refute the basic thesis, was fair enough to admit, ‘such views have found perhaps their most determined and skilful advocate in Fr. Francis Edwards’. But one hopes that an opposing view is based on more than skill, which could be mere forensic adroitness, and on determination which could be another word for obstinacy.

As we have seen (Biographical Studies, Vol. 3, no.2), Thomas went to Brussels in about 1621 and returned home to Walton in 1624 with his Flemish Catholic servant. There his father was alarmed by his open Catholicism and ordered him to leave home. He went to live in the extremely Catholic household of his mother's sister, Mrs Dorothy Lawson, at St Anthony's, Newcastle-on-Tyne. From St Anthony's-where he does not seem to have been noticed by juries— he passed to Naworth Castle, the Catholic stronghold of the convert Lord William Howard. On July 20th 1629 he marriedthere Alethea,younger daughter of Sir Philip Howard and granddaughter of Lord William. The young couple lived at Naworth until 1631 and their first two children were born there. The birth of their first son was duly recorded in the Walton church register. It is not clear what relations between Thomas and his father were like. No marriage settlement seems to survive amongst the extant Fairfax and Naworth papers. Later settlements of Thomas' property give no indication that he received any land as his wife's dowry. Alethea continued to receive a small allowance from her grandfather after her marriage. Her husband was given a rent-charge of £20 a year by his cousin, Lord Dunbar. On January 20th 1631, six months after the birth of Thomas’ son, Lord Fairfax set up a trust, consisting of his Protestant sons-in-law, Robert Stapleton of Wighill and Sir Thomas Layton of Sexhow to hold the Fairfax estates between his own death and the coming-of-age of his grandson. That is to say the 2nd Lord Fairfax was to be a mere life-tenant.

This paper is a tribute to two people whose perceptive and persevering research I have merely continued. Sister Francis Agnes Onslow, now of the Poor Clare Convent, Woodchester, using Franciscan sources more than ten years ago, thought that George Ravenscroft had been wrongly identified but was not able to prove her hypothesis because the Douai College diaries after 1654 are missing for a long period. The late Patrick Knell, working on the Ravenscroft family of Barnet, Herts, as an example of ‘schismatic’ Catholic parents who yet educated all their sons at Catholic colleges abroad, also correctly identified the glassman. The importance of this identification passed him by, however, because he was not familiar with the history of glass and did not think, in consequence, to cross-reference the recusant sources he was using with the State Papers Venetian in the Public Record Office. It is an indication of the limited sources used in the past by historians of art that, in spite of this information being available, it was possible for George Ravenscroft, the man who initiated English lead crystal in the third quarter of the seventeenth century, to remain wrongly identified for nearly fifty years.

There has been a tradition at Harvington Hall in Worcestershire that for twelve years (sometimes given as 1666-1678) it was the home of the martyr John Wall, who was hanged at Worcester in August 1679. The stock printed accounts are those of Dom Bede Camm, O.S.B., in Forgotten Shrines (1910, 1936), pp. 253-280, and in his Life of Blessed John Wall, The Martyr of Harvington Hall (1932, 1947). More recent views can be found in my “Blessed John Wall” (The Venerabile, May and November 1960), in Fr. Howard Docherty's “Blessed John Joachim Wall” (Westminster Cathedral Chronicle, August 1960), and in Mr. Frank Davets Blessed John Wall (Office of the Vice-Postulation, 1962).

The Fairfaxes were a definitely Catholic family from 1636 and it is difficult to think that they had no chaplain in the 1630's and 1640's. The considerable donation by Abigail, wife of the 5th Viscount to the funds of the Northern District may indicate that the first chaplains were secular priests. It may also be significant that the first Fairfaxes to go abroad to school went to St. Omer (apparently) and Douai and none to St. Gregory's Douai, before the 1670's. The 2nd Viscount and his wife made no gifts to Benedictines. In 1690 Charles Fairfax of York was trustee of many secular clergy funds. (Leeds Dioc. MSS Hogarth MS.) The extant Yorkshire secular clergy records seem to contain, however, no evidence of a regular secular Gilling or Walton mission or fund.

The strong association between prison writing and writing on walls, whether by graffiti or carving, is as true of Tudor and Stuart England as of other times and places. Yet even if prison-writers associated themselves with the idea of writing on a wall, they need not have done so in reality. This article considers the topos in the writings and afterlife of the Catholic priest, poet and martyr John Ingram, and asks whether it is to be taken at face value.

Ingram’s verse, composed in Latin and mostly epigrammatic, survives in two contemporary manuscripts. The notion that the author carved his verses with a blunt knife on the walls of the Tower of London while awaiting death derives from a previous editorial interpretation of a prefatory sentence within the more authoritative manuscript of the two, traditionally held to be autograph. However, though several Tudor and Stuart inscriptions survive to this day on the walls of the Tower of London, no portions of Ingram’s verse are among them, nor any inscriptions of similar length and complexity. Ingram might instead have written his verse down in the usual way, using wall-carving as a metaphor for the difficulty of writing verse when undergoing incarceration and torture.1

The late lamented Antony F. Allison published in Recusant History, May 1995, a characteristically richly researched article, ‘An English Gallican: Henry Holden, (1596/7–1662), Part I (to 1648)’, but alas did not live to produce the sequel which he planned, a draft of which does not seem to have survived. Shortly after the appearance of the article I wrote to congratulate him on the recent publication of the second (multilingual) edition of what is now commonly called A&R2, and to tell him that the Articles proposed to the Catholics of England, signed T. H., Paris, 2 April 1648, of which the authorship he convincingly attributed to Holden, said by the latter to have been printed by 13 September 1648, and extant in a single imperfect copy dated by George Thomason 2 April, otherwise only known from contemporaneous manuscript and later printed summaries, had been re-published in 1946, without identification of the author, by the late Professor C. E. Whiting of Durham University. Whiting reported that the manuscript he copied was from the library of the late Canon Whitley of Bedlington (Northumberland) and had been made available to him by Major J. D. Cowen, F.S.A. In 1947 Cowen gave it to Ushaw College Library, as coming from his late aunt, Miss A. J. Thompson of Whickham (Co. Durham). In the 1950s or 1960s I was shown it by the then Librarian of Ushaw, Fr. Bernard Payne, and recognised an inscription at the beginning as in the distinctive hand of John Cosin, the eminent Anglican divine who, after being a canon of Durham Cathedral, Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge, Dean of Peterborough, and exile in France 1644–60, finally became Bishop of Durham, 1660–72.

The process of depriving Catholic martyrs of their lives inevitably involved the lay authorities in some expense. This is borne out graphically by the Newcastle Chamberlains’ Accounts of the early 1590s, which relate to the sufferings of Joseph Lambton and Edward Waterson, who were executed at Newcastle, and John Ingram, who died across the river in Gateshead. The details of their torments are well established. Lambton—who was born in May 1568 and was probably the youngest of all the martyrs—and Waterson were captured at Newcastle at about the same time and condemned to death at the assizes held on 20 July 1592. The execution, which was set for Saturday 22 July, was postponed until the Monday ‘in order to avoid a crowd of people’. In the event Lambton suffered alone and his execution ‘was one of the most horrible on record’. The task of hanging and dismembering Lambton's body was given to a man condemned for felony at the same assizes: he was offered a reprieve in exchange for performing the gruesome duty. The job was badly botched and a French surgeon was called in and paid twenty shillings to complete it. Waterson was given a temporary reprieve. It is recorded that the sheriff took one of the quarters of Lambton's body to Waterson ‘hoping to frighten him into submission but Waterson only kissed it’. Indeed, Waterson was made of stern stuff. His date of birth is not known but he was born in London and brought up a protestant. After travelling in Turkey he was ordained at Rheims in March 1592 and sent to England two months later. After his reprieve in July 1592 Waterson escaped but was soon recaptured. He refused to be cowed and languish quietly in his cell: the Newcastle chamberlains had to lay out money to repair ‘the door that the priest burnt in prison’. He was executed on 8 January 1593 by John Litherington, a fellow prisoner, although the grisly task of quartering the body fell to the serjeant, William Fever.

In the first volume of his History of Monmouthshire, Sir Joseph Bradney admitted that ‘in Monmouthshire the principles of the old Catholic faith have never been lost to a large number of people. Many families of position in this district continued to adhere to the old doctrines.’ Thomas Richards, the most scrupulous of the historians of Welsh non-conformity, not only identified the Catholics of Wales as ‘the sons and grandsons of men who had never accepted the Protestant Reformation' but from his unrivalled knowledge of the sources for seventeenth-century religious history in the principality advanced two quite startling hypotheses. The first was that there is ‘positive proof of the silent growth of Popery during Propagation and Protectorate times’ (he pointed out that in 1676 the number of Catholics recorded in Monmouthshire was ‘within sixty-six of being equal to all other dissenters in [the county] gathered into one total’); the second, a result of his searching analysis of the so-called Compton Census, was that even the figure of 541 Roman Catholics in Monmouthshire—416 in the rural deanery of Abergavenny alone—was ‘too low’.

The present building bearing this name is a handsome three-storeyed mansion of medium size and rectangular shape, which stands in pleasant grounds at the south end of Yarm, in what was until recently a small enclave of High Worsall. The long east front of the house faces the Tees—from which it is separated by terraced lawns—and the rising ground crowned with woods on the Durham side of the river, while the main entrance on the west front is approached by a short drive from lodge gates on the Thirsk road. The south end of the house looks across ornamental lawns to a large walled kitchen garden, and at the north end there is a range of domestic buildings built a century earlier as an extension to the original house and narrower than the main building, while to the north of this there is a long courtyard flanked by stables and other outbuildings and having a lane leading to the south end of the High Street.

Although Catholics were marginalized and strongly associated with Jacobitism under the early Hanoverians, the reign of George III saw a gradual assimilation of Catholics into mainstream political culture. The Vicars Apostolic of Great Britain played a key role in this process by emphasizing passivity and loyalty. The bishop who most strongly personified this Jacobite to loyalist transition was George Hay (1729-1811). A convert to Catholicism from the Scottish Episcopalian faith, Hay served the Jacobite Army as a medic in 1745 and was imprisoned following that conflict. After his conversion and subsequent ordination, Hay became coadjutor of the Lowland District of Scotland in 1769 and was promoted to the Apostolic Vicarate in 1778. Hay actively engaged with many high-profile statesmen and political thinkers, including Edmund Burke. Most notably, he constructively utilized Jacobite political theology to criticise revolutionary ideology. His public involvement in politics was most remarkable during the American and French Revolutions, when he confidently deployed the full force of counterrevolutionary doctrines that formerly alienated Catholics from the Hanoverian state. However, since the Age of Revolution presented a stark duality between monarchy and republicanism, Hay’s expressions of passive obedience and non-resistance endeared him and the Catholic Church to the British establishment.

The iron-mining by Sir Thomas Preston of The Manor in Furness, Bart., is an interesting interlude in Restoration economic and legal history. First, it attests to the existence of iron-mining in Furness long before the eighteenth century and provides valuable insights into mining conditions and operations. Secondly, when Sir Thomas, a Catholic, attempted to dispose of his properties, including the iron-mines, to the Jesuits and the poor of Dalton parish, his cousin, Thomas Preston of Holker, Esq., initiated proceedings in the Court of Exchequer, claiming that the estates were forfeit because they had been granted for superstitious uses. In this article, the iron-mines will be examined both as lucrative producers of haematite ore and as a focal point of legal controversy.

Sir Thomas Preston, second son of Sir John, was born in 1643. By 1665 he had succeeded to the family titles and estates after the deaths of his father and brother. He married twice, his second wife being Mary, the daughter of Caryll, Viscount Molyneux of Sefton, whose marriage portion was £4,000, with £2,000 paid in 1666 and the remainder in 1667. They had three children: Francis, who died an infant in 1672; Mary, who married William, Marquis of Powis; and Anne, who married Hugh, Lord Clifford of Chudleigh. Thus the 1660’s brought a happy marriage, children, and an improving financial position. The 1670’s brought the loss of his son and heir in 1672 and the sudden death of his second wife, after which Sir Thomas elected to abandon the world and enter the Society of Jesus. The two decades in his life are mirrored in the fate of his iron enterprise, which prospered in the ’sixties but then decayed rapidly.