Catholicism owed its survival, in Sussex as elsewhere, largely to families of wealth and position who could support a chaplain. Burton Park (or Bodexton or Bodecton) was such a centre, at least from the late seventeenth century and maybe earlier. The house and estate, owned by the Gorings in the sixteenth century, passed in 1724 to the Biddulphs of Staffordshire and in 1835 from them tothe Wrights of Essex. On inheriting the property, Anthony George Wright added Biddulph to his name ; after the death of his son, Anthony John Wright-Biddulph, in 1895, the estate was sold. This essay is an account of the owners ; of the Jesuit chaplains between 1680 and 1780; and of the mission of which Burton wasthe centre.

The first decade of James I's reign saw a wave of high-profile clerical conversions to the Church of Rome. Among the best-known cases are those of James Wadsworth, who travelled to Spain with Sir Charles Cornwallis's embassy in 1605, where, as William Bedell's biographer Alexander Clogie disgustedly recalled, he was ‘cheated out of his religion by the Jesuits and turned apostate’; Theophilus Higgons, a member of Christ Church, Oxford, who converted in 1607; his friend and Oxford contemporary Humphrey Leech, who followed him in 1609 and later joined the Society of Jesus; and Benjamin Carier, a royal chaplain and prebendary of Canterbury, who converted in 1613. As the work of Michael Questier has taught us, religious conversion was by no means an uncommon phenomenon in early modern England. Yet these cases had the potential to inflict serious damage on the Jacobean church, not only because they threatened to neutralise the propaganda advantages to be gained from Roman Catholic converts to the Church of England such as Marc’ Antonio de Dominis, but also because they drew unwelcome attention to doctrinal divisions within the Church of England over such issues as anti-popery and the theology of grace.

In the Victorian period literature provided a national forum for the consideration of ideas in relation to society. Literary writings put flesh on the bones of the English anti-Catholic mind; more than the periodical, pamphlet or directly polemical literature, they vividly depict the emotions, the hidden agendas and the psychology from which sprang the age's rationalised attitudes and beliefs. When contemplating Catholicism, creative writers tended to be in a state of mental déshabillé, their feelings more visible, more unguarded than was the case with other sorts of writers, and therefore more revealing and expressive. As the classic Victorian literary anti-Catholic figure, Charles Kingsley provides the most apt focus for a sketch of the soul of the contemporary anti-Catholic tradition, especially since in his oeuvre its elements are uniquely forceful and comprehensive. A view of the fundamental motivations behind anti-Catholicism is, however, necessarily fragmentary and speculative, since their manifestations—passions, prejudices, assumptions, the national myth—where not wholly rational, either in Kingsley or in his society.

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.

Our earlier article discussed the family of Sir Robert Tyrwhitt (d. 1581) of Kettleby in Lincolnshire and the imprisonment of Sir Robert and several of his sons by the Privy Council in June 1580. The Council was acting on a report of Catholic activities associated with the wedding of Edmund, Lord Sheffield and Ursula Tyrwhitt at the Tyrwhitt family homes of Kettleby and Twigmore. Sir Robert’s son Goddard died in a London gaol, and Goddard’s elder brothers William and Robert were imprisoned for years in the Tower and elsewhere. We turn now to the next generation of the same family, and show that Sir Robert’s grandson and heir, Robert Tyrwhitt, became a strong supporter of John Gerard SJ and the Jesuits in England during the years c.1600 to early 1606. Fr Gerard’s autobiography strains to make this clear, within the necessary limits of discretion. But just as the identity of the Tyrwhitt martyr of 1580 was soon totally lost to view, so Gerard’s identification of ‘one of my main benefactors’ as a Tyrwhitt has remained undecoded—hidden, indeed, by loose translation, and inattention to the different ways one can be a ‘brother in law’.

Catholics in post-Reformation England faced new challenges in their resolution to remain faithful to Rome following the passage of anti-Catholic laws in the 1580s. These legislative attempts to root out Catholicism resulted in the creation of a clandestine community where private households became essential sites for the survival of Catholic worship. This article extends prior studies of the role of women in the English Catholic community by considering how marital status affected an individual’s ability to protect the ‘old faith’. By merging the study of widowhood with spatial analyses of Catholic households, I argue that early modern patriarchal structures provided specific opportunities inherent in widowhood that were unavailable to other men and women, whether married or single. While widowhood, in history and historiography, is frequently considered a weak, liminal, or potentially threatening status for women, in the harsh realities of a clandestine religious minority community, these weaknesses became catalysts for successful subversion of Protestant authority. Assisted by their legal autonomy, economic independence, and the manipulation of gendered cultural stereotypes, many Catholic widows used their households to harbour priests and outmanoeuvre searchers. This argument maintains that a broader interpretation of the role of women and marital status is essential to understanding the gendered nature of post-Reformation England.

This article is based on the Archbishops’ Transcripts of the Induction and Ordination Records in Lambeth Palace Library and the Visitation Records in Canterbury Cathedral Library. In Archbishop Parker's Return of the Parishes and Households of the diocese of Canterbury in 1563 there is a list of parishes which I have used as a basis for the statistical analysis. In some details I have had to differ from it. Parker's total of churches and chapels in the diocese was 276; mine is 240. For example, the church of St Mary-in-the-Castle at Canterbury is useless for our purpose: it was falling into ruin and there is no Visitation Record about it, since the parish had been joined with St Mildred's. The same is true of St Nicholas, Harbledown; of Warden, Churchley and others ‘being decayed’ or not served; of chapels-of-ease, such as Staple, Egerton and Huckinge; of chapels which were really private; and of churches such as Maidstone, Detling, Loose and others which, being peculiars, were exempt from the Archdeacon's Visitation. For the purpose of this survey, I shall use the parishes listed in the 1563 Return which also have the relevant details in the Visitations from 1552 to October 1562. Of these there are 240.

The birth and parentage of Bishop Challoner have always been somewhat obscure. The first life by the Rev. James Barnard was published only three years after his death. But, though Barnard knew him for twenty years, his first chapter is disappointing. There are about fourteen pages on the marks of the Church and only about twelve lines on the early life of Challoner!

This article considers some of the men and women who served in the Privy Chamber of Elizabeth I and those men who held significant positions in her outer Chamber for evidence of Catholic beliefs, sympathies or family connections. It then discusses the careers of five men who at various times in Elizabeth’s reign were members of the Band of Gentlemen Pensioners. It will show that their court careers were decisively affected by their Catholic beliefs and connections and, in one case, by a temporary repudiation of Catholicism. Their careers witness both to a fluidity of religious identity that facilitated their advancement at Court and to a narrowing of this identity over the course of the reign.

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 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

Between July and October 1580, Robert Persons and Edmund Campion, who had landed at Dover in June, ‘passed through the most part of the shires of England, preaching and administering the sacraments in almost every gentleman's and nobleman's house that we passed by, whether he was Catholic or not, provided he had any Catholics in his house to hear us’. Between Christmas 1580 and Whitsun 1581 Campion went on a similar journey to the North, the itinerary of which can be recovered in fair detail from entries in the Acts of the Privy Council and from a summary of the subsequent examinations which was annotated by Lord Burghley. The mission of Campion and Persons (and of the dozen or so others who accompanied them from Rome) has rightly been regarded as a pivotal event in the story of Elizabethan recusancy. But no serious attempt has ever been made to reconstruct their itineraries in 1580.

During the second half of the eighteenth century the high levels of growth of Liverpool’s trade and shipping, which had commenced in the 1660s, continued to the extent that Liverpool became Britain’s second largest port after London, certainly by the end of the 1780s, by which date local merchants were trading to a lesser or greater extent with all parts of the known world with which they could legitimately trade. It was during the half century after 1750 that Liverpool came to dominate the British slave trade. Catholics participated in the mercantile and maritime activities of the port of Liverpool in the second half of the eighteenth century in a variety of capacities, for example as merchants engaged in overseas trade, brokers, shipbuilders, shipowners, seamen, including ships’ captains, owners of businesses concerned with the ancillary shipping trades such as coopering and ropemaking and practitioners of the processing of imported goods such as tobacco.

JOHN ABBOT, who abroad used the alias of Ashton (C.R.S. XXX, 105) and in England called himself John, or Augustine, Rivers, was born of a London family in 1588. Our chief authority for his early life is entry 289 in the Registers of the English College at Valladolid (C.R.S. XXX). From this we learn that he was aged 21 in 1609, a Londoner born of respectable but non-Catholic parents. A passage taken by Foley (VII, 1152) from the Annual Letter of the English Jesuit College of St. Omer for 1609 adds to our knowledge of his family: “The fathers … received many Protestants into the Church; among whom was an Oxford student of great talent belonging to the Aobot family (a family most hostile to the Catholic faith, two members having been its bitterest foes, viz. a bishop and a dean)”. This can only refer to George Abbot (1562–1633) who at the time of writing was Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry, in 16l0 was made Bishop of London, and in 1611 became Archbishop of Canterbury (D.N.B. I, 5), and to his brother Robert Abbot (1560–1617) who in 1609, though not apparently a dean, was chaplain in ordinary to King James and in that year was made Master of Balliol College, and later became Bishop of Salisbury (D.N.B. I, 24). Both brothers published noted anti-Catholic controversial works, and George as bishop was an active persecutor of Catholics. Since the brothers were of a Guildford family, their relationship to John Abbot may not have been close, but it is perhaps significant that all three went to Balliol.

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.

On 29 May 1660, Anthony Wood purchased a newly-published broadsheet, headed ‘A Catalogue of the Lords, Knights and Gentlemen (of the Catholick Religion) that were Slain in the late Warr in Defence of their King and Country’. It contained in excess of 200 names, and covered not only those who had lost their lives as a result of the Civil Wars, but also those who had lost estates or had been plundered vigorously by enemy forces. It was the first martyrology to greet the restoration of Charles II, preceding by almost three years the pamphlet entitled ‘The Royal Martyrs’ which listed both Catholic and Protestant activists who had suffered in the royal cause. J. C. H. Aveling has stated that ‘After 1660, Catholic peers and gentry all maintained loudly that they had been strong Royalists’, and his implied doubts concerning these claims (he seems to regard allusions in heraldic visitations as largely spurious) reflect the conventional view of those recent scholars who have gone into the matter of Catholic activism.

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.