After his conversion to Roman Catholicism, the first major controversy in which Henry Edward Manning found himself involved as a member of his new church concerned the Roman Question, or the Temporal Power; that is, the political status and future of the Papal States. Now the question of the temporal power of the pope, and the amount of controversy it engendered, is one of those issues in nineteenth century church history whose significance it is difficult for us to understand. By the mid-nineteenth century, especially in relation to the movement for Italian unification, the temporal power of the popes looks to us like an historical anachronism. To Roman Catholics today, it is obvious that the ability of the church to preach the gospel has been enhanced and its mission in the world correspondingly facilitated by being disembarrassed of the burden of political control in central Italy. How to explain, then, the tremendous controversy the Roman Question aroused over so long a period in the second half of the nineteenth century, and the conviction, especially of the papacy's defenders, that the preservation of the Papal States was critical for the survival, not only of religion, but, as we shall see, of civilization in the West?

This article explores the possibility that poems preserved in the recusant coterie collection, Tixall Poetry may include verses written both by and for the Augustinian canonesses of St Monica’s, Louvain, and provide evidence for the cultural life of the convent. It then turns to a consideration of evidence for the cultivation of music, and argues for the practical importance of music to the lives of the canonesses. It explores the intense significance which the canonesses attached to the clothing ceremony, and suggests that one of the Tixall poems, ‘The Royal Nun’, an adaptation of two lyrics from Nathanael Lee’s play Theodosius (1680), perhaps by Herbert Aston, might have been used as the libretto for the music which, when possible, covered the hiatus in the clothing ceremony when the nun took off her bridal garments and assumed her habit.

Major changes in ecclesiastical government are seldom effected without disagreement or tension. The immediate background to the creation of the Diocese of Brentwood in 1917 bears ample testimony to this truth. Three areas of difficulty were especially evident in the decade before the separation of Essex from the Archdiocese of Westminster: the longstanding dispute between the dioceses of Westminster and Southwark; a clash of personalities between Archbishop Bourne and Bishop Amigo; and a protracted argument over the administration of St. John’s Seminary, Wonersh, the management of Southwark’s trust funds and the availability of funds for any new ecclesiastical territory.

The Lords Petre were always one of the most prominent of English Catholic families, and they were also one of the richest. Their landed estates had been built up in the middle of the sixteenth century by Sir William Petre, Secretary of State to three Tudor sovereigns. Sir William's son, John, was created a Baron in 1611, but in the early 17th century the family properties ceased to grow in size, partly because Catholicism excluded them from the profits of office, and partly because provision for younger sons offset such new acquisitions as were made. But even so the estates inherited by the third Lord Petre in 1637 were large enough to place him clearly in the ranks of the great landed magnates. In Essex he had a well-consolidated belt of land lying to the west and south-west of Chelmsford, and centred on the two family residences of Ingatestone Hall and Thorndon Hall. Altogether in Essex Petre had about 11,000 acres of freehold land and the lordship of seventeen manors, and these produced some £5,500 per annum or considerably more than half his total income from land. In addition he had a large estate on the opposite side of the country, in Devon. This lay in two distinct areas, one centred on Axminster and extending down the Axe valley and its tributaries, and the other in the southerly projection of the county on the southern edge of Dartmoor, where the principal possession was the vast moorland manor of South Brent. Besides the main estates in Essex and Devon, there were some isolated properties: the manor of Osmington down on the Dorset coast; Toddenham and Sutton in Gloucestershire; Kennett and Kentford on the Cambridgeshire-Suffolk border.

On 31 May 1964, Dr Anne Bieżanek travelled from Wallasey to Westminster Cathedral to attend Mass and receive Holy Communion. She was flanked by hoards of reporters, who over the previous six months had fueled extensive media coverage of her establishment of one of the first Catholic birth control clinics in the world, alongside her intertwined personal story of the physical and emotional strain caused by ten pregnancies. Repeatedly refused the sacraments by her local parish priest in consequence of these activities, and unable to gain satisfaction from the Bishop of Shrewsbury, Dr Bieżanek wrote to the Archbishop of Westminster to announce her intention to ‘resolve the issue’ through an ethical adjudication at the Communion rails.

As the first sustained exploration of this exceptional woman and her sensational life story, this article examines Dr Bieżanek’s private correspondence and public persona to illustrate the ways in which her idiosyncratic re-negotiation of spiritual and sexual politics was path breaking in articulating a ‘modern’ Catholic approach to love and sex and in anticipating the cacophony of such voices elicited by the Humanae Vitae encyclical in 1968. As such, it illustrates the form and force of contrasting and modulating Catholic discourses about love, marriage, and contraception in the post-war period and demonstrates the continuing and critical interplay of religion, infused with the insights of sexology and psychology, when negotiating the sexual and spiritual revolutions of the sixties.

THE CONSEQUENCE of the Cisapline attempt to ‘grapple with the social and intellectual transformation of the modern world” and to bring about a ‘revision of the pyramidal structure of the Tridentine Church” was the greater assimilation of English Catholics into contemporary society. Encouraged by a new sense of freedom, clergy and laity participated more actively in English public life’ and dismantled much of the closed élite community of the recusant period. This led to a brief phase in which both clergy and laity exercised their new-found freedoms, but which was dogged by disputes. Arguments raged between liberalism and authority, and between sectarian ideals and non-denominational activities. They were eventually resolved in a restoration, by 1850, of the pyramidal structure of the Tridentine Church, in which the role of the laity was subject to the authority and guidance of the clergy.

The last years of the English Conceptionist nuns, the Blue Nuns, were spent in a large corner house in Magdalen Street, Norwich, from which the cheerful abbess, Mother Bernard Green, wrote notes to their benefactress, Lady Jerningham, at Cossey. This community had for 140 years lived near the Bastille in Paris. It had seen the Duchess of Cleveland quête in its church, Mary of Modena at a profession; it had taught girls who grew up to be notable English Catholic ladies, including Lady Jerningham herself. It had suffered the deaths of too many of its small community during and after the Revolution. Like the Benedictines of Montargis and the Austins of Bruges, the refugee Blue nun community knew the charity of the Jerningham family, but unlike those two flourishing houses it died out before its benefactors did. For a brief period, 1800–1805, the Blue Nuns kept choir, taught catechism, made purses, and received visitors in Norwich.

IT has been commonplace in the literary criticism of the past thirty years to acknowledge the influence of the Counter-Reformation devotional tradition on English metaphysical poetry of the seventeenth century. The sonnets of William Alabaster, a little known recusant poet writing just before the dawn of the century, provide an early example of this influence. Even when Alabaster does not rise above his craftmanship, his poems offer insights into the cultural equipment and habits of mind of the age in which he lived, revealing how meditation could vivify rhetorical invention, injecting it with feeling and passion and transforming the persona of a lyric poem into a dramatic speaker.

IN AN ARTICLE on Joseph Creswell S. J. published in this periodical in 1979,’ I referred, in the section dealing with Creswell's activities as editor of books intended for the English mission, to a group of anonymous tracts which I said were written by the Catholic layman, Richard Verstegan. As these tracts had never before been claimed for Verstegan, such a statement clearly required justification. The article had already grown very long, however, and the question of the authorship of the tracts was only incidental to my main theme. I decided to publish the evidence for Verstegan in a separate article rather than try to cram it into an extended note. My object now is to redeem the pledge made in Note 202 of my earlier article.

This article explores the multiple and competing afterlives of the Jacobean martyr, Thomas Maxfield, who was executed at Tyburn in July 1616. It traces the evolution of his cult between the seventeenth and twenty-first centuries by exploring the migration of his relics alongside the movements of the written and printed texts recounting his life and death. It investigates the domestic and international politics in which these textual and material remains circulated and illuminates the making and metamorphosis of social memory in the English Counter Reformation. It sheds fresh light on how Maxfield’s relics served both to bind this imagined community together and to divide and fragment it. Highlighting the interweaving of devotion and scholarship, antiquarianism and piety, it also argues that relic collecting must be recognised as part of the wider contemporary enterprises of religious record-keeping and writing sacred history.

The English who, in the seventeenth century, went abroad in order to get to know the countries and peoples of Europe looked upon the presence of their countrymen and women in convents in Flanders and Brabant as one of their many subjects of inquiry. Protestant travellers who had little occasion to mix with Catholics at home and who had gone abroad to widen their horizons visited these houses as a matter of course. For them, as for the much smaller number who came to see relatives and acquaintances, the informal conversations must have been a welcome change after the ‘Compulsory’ visits to public buildings and all sorts of collections of curiosities in cities far away from home.

Exorcism was an integral part of the post-Reformation Catholic mission in England and, from the late sixteenth century, an ideological battleground between Catholic and Protestant. As in the Gospels, the obedience of demons was seen as the ultimate sign and supernatural seal of religious authority. Exorcism, unlike other aspects of Catholic mission, often brought recusant priests into direct contact with non-catholics and provided an unparalleled opportunity for conversions.

In the autumn of 1851, a group of philanthropists, magistrates, and prison officials sent out a circular inviting like-minded persons to a conference on ‘the Condition and Treatment of the “Perishing and Dangerous Classes” of Children and Juvenile Offenders.’ On December 9 and 10, this conference met in Birmingham and adopted a number of resolutions advocating that destitute and criminal children be sent to reformatory institutions instead of prison. It also appointed a committee to advance the reformatory cause, and this group subsequently presented the Birmingham Conference's resolutions to the Home Secretary (Sir George Grey).

In 1577 a survey of Catholics was taken by the Archbishop of York and the Queen’s commissioners. It recorded the name, place of residence, status and worth of those who refused to conform. Dorothy Vavasour of York was noted in these records as being ‘worth nothing, but very wilful’. It is this statement that provides the inspiration for an examination of the women of Yorkshire, as a group that were vital to the survival of Catholicism, yet who are often ignored.

A typical product of his class and generation, courtier, poet and man of learning, Henry Constable appeared to be well on the way to a successful career at Elizabeth's court when he decided (to use the words of a contemporary account) to lose all his heritage in order to save his soul. Part of that heritage was a vigorous Protestant patriotism which manifested itself, in his early years. More patriotic than Protestant perhaps, though it was precisely his interest in religion which led him to make his heavy decision. As for his patriotism, it remained undimmed in his later years but emerged in the form of an idealistic allegiance to a greater cause. He spent the rest of his days, in exile for the most part, in a variety of undertakings which reveal a single-minded dedication to the conversion of his country.

The study of antiquarianism and particularly of the use of Anglo-Saxon precedents in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has belonged primarily to historians of Protestantism and parliament, to their studies of English Protestant antiquarians and English Protestant theories of common law, royal absolutism, constitutionalism, Laudian Anglicanism, and non-conforming Protestant resistance. Although it has been clear to everyone that Protestant interest in Saxonism was part and parcel of an anti-Catholic agenda, the Catholic side of this discourse has been virtually unexamined. The focus almost exclusively on Protestant Saxonism has isolated even Protestant thought from some of the contexts within which it developed and, more obviously, has all but occluded the importance of Saxonism to a range of Catholic arguments.

Section 9 of the Act of Supremacy, 1559, provided that ‘all and every Archebishoppe Bishoppe and all and every other Ecclesiasticall Person, and other Ecclesiastical Officer and Minister… and all and every Temporall Judge Justicer Mayor and other Laye or Temporall Officer and Minister’, and certain other persons should take an oath the form of which was set out in the section. The oath acknowledged the queen's ecclesiastical authority and renounced all foreign jurisdiction including that of the pope. Section 10 of the Act provided that if any person who was required to take the oath refused to do so, he should be deprived of ‘all and every Ecclesiasticall and Spiritual Promotion Benefice and Office, and every Temporall and Laye Promotion and Office’ which he had at the time of refusal, and should thereafter be disqualified for life from holding or exercising any such office or promotion.

The Act of Supremacy received the royal assent on 8 May 1559, soon after Easter, and immediately the surviving bishops of Mary's reign were faced with the prospect of taking the oath prescribed by the act. On 23 May 1559, a commission was issued to eighteen laymen authorizing and requiring them to administer the oath of supremacy to the bishops and others required by the act to take it.

A poetry commonplace book in the Huntington Library (HM 198), comprising mainly the verse of notable English authors of the early 17th century, includes twenty-nine anonymous sonnets (vol. 2, ff. 88-95), most of them dedicated to the Saints and many highly personal in content. Although of considerable intrinsic merit, they seem to have been overlooked, possibly because of the relative importance of the numerous other poems in the volume and the fact that their authorship has never been established.

The negotiations between the Board of Education and the Roman Catholic authorities over what was to become the 1944 Education Act began in April 1941 when the Government's Green Book on educational reform was delivered to the Catholic hierarchy. They were to continue until the Government's proposals became law in 1944. There were three distinct phases in these negotiations, centred on the Green Book, the White Paper, and the Bill. The intention of this article is to examine the latter two phases.

After protracted negotiations on the Green Book there was near deadlock between the Board and the Catholic Church. R. A. Butler's aim in the Green Book, which he adopted when he became President of the Board of Education in July 1941, was to provide a national system of education, primary, secondary and further. There would be secondary education for all, children being transferred at the age of eleven to grammar, modern or technical schools. This raised the issue of the role of denominational schools, the so called ‘Dual System’. Essentially the voluntary bodies, if they were to continue to be part of the State system were offered two possibilities. Under the first they would receive 100% grant towards the maintenance and repair of buildings (in addition to the payment of teachers’ salaries) for which they would concede the appointment of teachers to the Local Education Authority (LEA) and accept an ‘agreed syllabus’ for religious education. The second possibility would allow the voluntary bodies to retain the appointment of teachers and the teaching of their own religious syllabus, but the Government grant in this case would be only 50%. Catholics felt that, in conscience, they could not accept the first option and that they were being penalised for their religious beliefs in regard to the second. They pressed, therefore, for 100% grant.