The primary focus of this article centres on the two decades that form the prelude to Catholic Emancipation although reference is made to activity outside this time frame and to cities other than London. Charitable endeavour is taken to include all individual voluntary effort to sustain and support Catholic churches, schools and other Catholic organisations in need of assistance. It also relates to assistance given to individuals in need of help. Such ‘endeavour’ also encompasses group and community-based voluntary activity. While it may seem unnecessary to define charitable endeavour, Mary J. Oates in a recent study on the Catholic philanthropic tradition in America heavily circumscribes what she means by the term, and excludes a number of subjects from her examination, thus:

In the monastic refectory at Downside the two portraits of the abbey’s great Victorian prelates, William Bernard Ullathorne and Francis Aidan Gasquet, dominate the scene, placed as they are above the abbot’s table on either side of the crucifix. Ullathorne, in the prime of life, looks alert and full of purpose. Gasquet, in decline, looks sour and tired. ‘The Cardinal,’ wrote the Venerabile obituarist, ‘used to walk down the corridor (of the English College) with tightly compressed lips and irritable-looking lines above his nose, while his eyes, which were partly hidden beneath frowning brows, scanned us searchingly the while: in a word, with none of that graciousness of age which is the common memory of all who knew him.’ Gasquet, the only English Cardinal to make a significant impact in the Roman curia in the twentieth century, remains an ambiguous character, now little known and if remembered at all associated with poor historical scholarship. Yet, Gasquet’s influence was considerable and owed much to his amiable personality and ready wit, his ability to make friends and to influence those in the highest echelons of church and state. Indeed, in 1903 Francis Aidan Gasquet was very nearly appointed as the first Benedictine Archbishop of Westminster. Instead, the somewhat colourless Francis Alphonsus Bourne succeeded Cardinal Vaughan and Gasquet had to be content with a life as varied and interesting as the church could offer.

For some Roman Catholic clergymen, the nineteenth century was an exciting age. On its very eve, Cardinal Ruffo led a pious bandit band in a crusade of slaughter through the southern Italian Parthenopean republic. In 1810, another priest, Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, under the banner of Our Lady of Guadalupe, began the revolution in Mexico. Luigi Menichini led the 1830 insurrection in Naples. Father Piotr Sćiegienny’s revolutionary activities in Poland earned him a quarter of a century’s exile in Siberia. Father Patrick Lavelle founded an Irish society which was a front for the revolutionary Fenians. The secular or ecclesiastical politician has a job to do, and in some places, the priesthood was forced into political roles, as in nineteenth-century Italy, Mexico, Poland and Ireland. But in spite of the international conflict between Catholicism and anticlericalism in Europe and South America, the ordinary Catholic priest was not primarily a political animal. Unless he served in the Curia or was a martyr-missionary in the South Seas or Central Africa, the priest’s life was the old hidden life of caring for the souls of the people of his parish and of preaching the gospel and administering the sacraments. Amid the tumult of the nations, this inner work continued on its quiet path, and in riches and poverty, and beside the allurements and excitements and man-made manipulations of secular and ecclesiastical politics, the priesthood was concerned with the essential tasks of the comfort of the stricken and the salvation of sinners, laid upon them by their Lord and Master.

This article re-considers Alexander Seton, First Earl of Dunfermline (1555–1622) in his cultural context, particularly in the light of the recently-discovered inventory of his private library. This sophisticated collection of continental books, with strong holdings in art, architecture and Catholic apologetics, offers new information on the intense private Catholicism of a statesman who conformed outwardly to Protestantism. The inventory casts light also on his work of building and decoration at Pinkie House, Musselburgh. The article concludes by raising the possibility of some kind of continuance at Pluscarden Priory in Moray after the reformation and under Seton’s protection, and that Seton’s daughter Sophia may have built a freestanding Catholic chapel on her marriage to David Lindsay, first Lord Balcarres.

In the summer of 1601 the English ambassador in France, Sir Ralph Winwood, warned Sir Robert Cecil against a merchant named Thomas James, who was ‘a hard and desperate Ruffian, who hath lived in great inwardness with Persons the Jesuit’. To assist in his capture, should he arrive in England, Winwood identified him to be of ‘a convenient stature, red beard, of the age of forty-five years’, born in Staffordshire ‘in a town called Noyall’ but subsequently raised in London where he had been a merchant’s apprentice.

The ‘inwardness’ between this Englishman and the Jesuit excites curiosity in itself, but Thomas James deserves investigation in his own right since he exemplifies the major contribution of the resourceful English layman to the survival of the Catholic mission during the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean period. The access of Catholics to the Continent was contingent on the well-placed merchant who facilitated the arrivals and departures of students, priests and other persons in search of asylum. As will be seen, the full confidence of the highly respected Duke of Medina Sidonia in the ability of Thomas James was to provide the Englishman with a unique status in Andalucia.

This article is concerned with one aspect of movement between religions in England at the end of the Jacobean period, namely the polemical use which could be made of the convert to Protestantism. The increasing likelihood of a successful conclusion of the Spanish Match negotiations had for some time been threatening the Protestant Establishment. In this climate, prominent changes of religion were of great interest to polemicists of both sides. As in Elizabeth’s reign, Protestants could attack the Church of Rome by focusing on the apostates from it. The point of reference from which this polemical use of conversion will be analysed is the best-selling vitriolic anti-Catholic tract written by the wavering Protestant minister John Gee, entitled The Foot out of the Snare. Gee is familiar to modern historians as a source on Roman Catholic priests in the 1620s but he is important also for the way in which he was employed as an anti-Catholic writer. His tract originated with the clerical group which gathered around Archbishop Abbot, clerics distinguished by their violent opposition to encroaching Roman Catholicism, evident in the likely success of the Spanish Marriage project and the conversions which had started to occur as the political climate changed. Gee’s tract may be used as a starting point to explore some of the politics and literature of conversion at this time.

Several books of Catholic origin enjoyed wide circulation among Protestant readers in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Such works were commonly subjected to editorial revision to suit Protestant sensibilities; a famous instance is Edmund Bunny's adaptation of Robert Persons’ The First Booke of the Christian Exercise, apperfeyning to resolution (1582). An instance less known but no less interesting is the Protestantized version of Robert Southwell's Short Rule of Good Life issued in 1620 by the London publisher William Barrett.

Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars has reinvigorated the debate over the nature of late mediaeval religious practice and belief, examining the ‘richness and complexity of the religious system by which men and women structured their experiences of the world, and their hopes and aspirations within and beyond it.’ Duffy questions the assumption that there was in that period a wide gulf between ‘popular’ and ‘élite’ religion. In so doing he has not only illuminated the religious practices and beliefs of late mediaeval England but he has stimulated discussion about the relationship between ‘popular’ and ‘élite’ religion in other periods. Duffy eschews the use of the term ‘popular religion’, which he argues carries questionable assumptions about the nature of ‘non-popular’ religion and about the gap between the two. He prefers ‘traditional religion’, on the grounds that it does greater justice to ‘the shared and inherited character of the religious beliefs and practices of the people…’ ‘Traditional religion’ while being rooted in inherited and shared beliefs was, nevertheless, capable of great flexibility and variety.

The Italian Alessandro Gavazzi was a remarkable character. Priest, patriotic propagandist and preacher, he exercised considerable influence in mid-nineteenth century Scotland. Born to a diplomatic and legal family, he was the son of a professor of law in the University of Bologna. After entering the Barnabite order at fifteen, he subsequently proved a remarkably popular preacher in Naples, Leghorn and Northern Italy before serving four years in Parma, 1841–44. He claimed to have preached 4,000 sermons in fifteen years. Later when a prison chaplain-general supervising some 5,000 inmates, his reading of Beccaria turned him to penal reform and the abolition of capital punishment. In Perugia, he was alienated by the reactionary clerical domination of the university. After further service in Spoleto, Assisi, Ancona and Pieve he was silenced for his fiery liberal views until after the election of Pius IX in June 1846.

Dr. Thomas Watson, bishop of Lincoln from 1557 until his deprivation in 1559, was, as A. F. Pollard describes him, ‘one of the chief catholic controversialists’ of Mary Tudor’s reign. ‘A man of acute parts’, according to Bishop Nicholas Ridley, Watson shaped the eucharistic thinking of English Catholics for a generation. Ten years after Watson’s deprivation, one Robert Crowley still felt the need to publish an answer to Watson’s two eucharistic sermons of 1554, since by them, Crowley believed, Catholics were yet ‘chiefly persuaded and stayed’ in their opinions.

It should be universally acknowledged that a good architect needs a good builder. Pugin, one of the greatest of the Gothic Revival architects, was able to satisfy this requirement when he employed George Myers who was to become one of the great Victorian contractors. Until the present day no-one has attempted to find out anything about this man on whom Pugin depended not only for his building, but also for the direction and organization of his team and the training of his craftsmen. Neither has anything been written about the other members of the team: John Hardman who made Pugin’s stained glass and metal work, nor Grace the interior decorator and maker of beautiful furniture, nor Minton who made the tiles, nor Thomas Earley who did the intricate painting in the churches and in the House of Lords. This article is a short account of the basic facts of the life of Myers and of some of the commissions he carried out for Pugin.

What a change has taken place in the general opinion in this Country with regard to Catholics, especially Priests, since the arrival of the emigrant Clergy! Their Conduct has been so exemplary—people who had been taught to consider them as the worst of characters begin now to be persuaded they are good Christians, and many own they had been much imposed on by their teachers with respect to the morals of Catholics—I doubt not many conversions will be wrought in consequence—at a little town we have many of these unfortunate people, if I may so style them, who suffer in so good a cause, whose sole defence is on providence—yet are in want of nothing so abundant as the charities they receive in all parts—in which I cannot but admire the goodness of God who abandons not those who quit all for his sake.

Recent scholarship has challenged the Marxist and Whig-Liberal views which placed the Catholics solidly behind Charles I in the Civil War. Kieth Lindley, Martin J. Havran and others argue that they were hard hit by the taxation policies of Thorough in the 1630s, and that when the Civil Wars came they were too impoverished and politically alienated to risk life and property for the King. The story of Catholics in Warwickshire during the Civil War and Interregnum well illustrates these revisionist interpretations.

In an Apostolic Constitution, dated 8 May 1881, Pope Leo XIII sought to regulate the relationship between diocesan bishops and religious orders. In the words of Herbert Vaughan the Papal pronouncement ‘sums up and ends a recent controversy on matters of discipline affecting the working of the Church in Great Britain’. Romanos Pontifices represented a personal triumph for Vaughan. He had assiduously campaigned at Rome to have the freedom of religious orders restricted, and their operations subject to the supervision of the local bishop. The Pope’s document directs that members of religious orders may not open a house in any diocese without the explicit permission of the bishop. Nor, in future, would it be possible for a religious congregation to convert existing institutions to other use without the consent of the episcopal authorities. The ruling of the document was an adjudication affecting all religious orders, and demanded complete obedience to all its details. The only religious order mentioned by name was the Society of Jesus. It, too, was to be subject to this ordinance in spite of its claims to be exempt from such interference in the running of its affairs.

Pope John Paul II’s visit to Ireland in 1979 was an iconic moment in the history of twentieth-century Irish Catholicism. It has, however, received little detailed historical scrutiny. Based on state archival and hitherto unavailable diocesan material, this article contextualizes the visit by explaining the pastoral and leadership challenges that confronted the Irish hierarchy. Second, this article discusses how close the pope came to visiting Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles. This was of concern not just to the hierarchy but to the Irish and British governments. Third, the organization of the visit, which was closely tied to the pastoral concerns of the Irish bishops, is surveyed. Lastly, the pastoral impact of the visit is considered. If the Catholic hierarchy hoped that the papal visit might arrest the declining institutional influence of the Catholic Church, reverse a quiet but growing faith crisis, or hasten a cessation of violence in Northern Ireland, then those expectations were misplaced. Ultimately, the pastoral impulse of the 1979 papal visit to Ireland was to preserve rather than renew the Irish Catholic tradition at a time when Irish Catholics were fixed on future material advancement rather than fidelity to their spiritual past.

IN THE mid-seventeenth century the chapel of the Spanish embassy caused considerable concern to the authorities at Whitehall since they were frustrated in preventing scores of Londoners from attending it for masses and other Catholic devotions. This was a distinct issue from the traditional right of a Catholic diplomat in England to provide mass for his household or other compatriots,’ and from the custom of Sephardic Jews to gather in the embassy for Sabbath worship when they desired. While the practice of Londoners to attend mass secretly at the residences of various Catholic diplomats had developed early in the reign of Elizabeth and occasional arrests at their doors had acted as a deterrent, late in the reign of James I sizeable crowds began to frequent the Spanish embassy. John Chamberlain commented in 1621 that Gondomar had ‘almost as many come to his mass’ in the chapel of Ely House as there were attending ‘the sermon at St. Andrewes (Holborn) over against him’. Although Godomar left in 1622 and subsequently the embassy was closed for five years during the Anglo-Spanish War, it was later, from 1630 to 1655, that the Spanish chapel acquired not only a continuous popularity among Catholics of the area but also an unwelcome notoriety in the highest levels of government. This paper will suggest two primary factors which led to that development: the persistent ambition of the resident Spanish diplomats to provide a range of religious services unprecedented in number and character, and their successful adaptation to the hostile political conditions in the capital for a quarter of a century. The continuous Spanish diplomatic presence in London for this long period was in itself both unexpected and unique for it should be recalled that, for various reasons, all the other Catholic ambassadors, whether from France, Venice, Portugal, Savoy or the Empire, had to leave at different times and close their chapels. However, the site of the Spanish residence during these years by no means permanent since, as with other foreign diplomats, a new property was rented by each ambassador on arrival. There is, moreover, a wider significance in this inquiry because of the current evidence that by the eve of the Civil War the king was considered in the House of Commons to have been remiss in guarding his kingdom from a ‘Catholic inspired plot against church and state’, for while it has been well argued that a public disquiet over Henrietta-Maria's chapels at Somerset House and St. James's palace had by 1640 stimulated increasing suspicions of a Popish Plot, there were other protected chapels, particularly the Spanish, where scores of Londoners were seen to attend. Indeed, after the closure of the queen's chapels at Whitehall in 1642, the Spanish remained for the next thirteen years as silent evidence that Catholics seemed to be ‘more numerous’ and were acting ‘more freely than in the past’.

The 2nd. Viscount Montague, like his grandfather before him, was the recipient of several literary dedications. His material circumstances as a wealthy Sussex landowner, and his spiritual significance as one of the foremost Catholic peers, made him an appropriate patron for a number of writers at the beginning of the seventeenth century. At the same time, Montague was a well-known distributor of Catholic books, and a benefactor of ‘three score and six costly great volumes in folio all bought of set purpose and fayrly bound with his Armes’ to that ‘bulwark of extreme Protestantism’ the Bodleian Library.