In 1595 Dr. William Gifford was appointed Dean of the collegiate Church of St. Peter, Lille, in the Spanish Netherlands. Eleven years later, by express order of the Archduke Albert, he was summarily exiled from the Netherlands and ordered never to return during the lifetime of the Archduke. In consequence, Gifford left Lille in July 1606, retired to Rheims in France and, a few months later, resigned his post as dean. Various reasons, in the course of time, have been suggested as the cause of his exile, but the real reason, which can be found by studying the contemporary documents, has still to be stated.

For students of recusant history the main interest of William Fleetwood lies in the fact that a study of his career enables us to see the problem of Catholicism in Elizabethan England from the point of view of those who sought to crush it. For he was one of the most active of the officials engaged in hunting down Catholics in Elizabethan London.

If we survey the Jesuit writers on the deposing power during the period 1603-1640, we find that for the first seven years Persons is the only English Jesuit to treat of the subject and he touches on it in all his last four books. The fullest treatment is in A Treatise tending to Mitigation but neither there, nor in the other books is there anything more than an explanation of the points of contention, treated according to the system of Bellarmine. For a few years after Persons's death in 1610 the steady flow continued of Latin works by the Jesuit controversialists on the continent: Becanus, Gretser, Bellarmine, Lessius and others. Some of these works were translated into English, together with some of the works of the French Jesuits referred to in the previous article. After 1613 the decree of the Jesuit General Aquaviva, forbidding Jesuit writers to treat of the subject, took effect, and with the exception of the works of Thomas Fitzherbert against the defenders of the Oath of Allegiance the voice of the Jesuits, at least on the deposing power, was heard no more.

By the very timely theft of Standen's letter to Persons, 27 December, 1603, the original was in the hands of Cecil before Standen ventured to go to Court. As soon as he appeared there, without being allowed to see either the King or Queen, he was taken to the Council Chamber, there to be questioned before several councillors, including Cecil himself. He was asked first, if he had ever directly or indirectly treated with a person of a religion different to that of the state, which he boldly denied; secondly, if he had ever been present publicly at Mass in Italy during his mission; and finally, if he had ever written to any religious and in particular to Persons. Once again he answered by a denial and especially as regards the Jesuit, whom he knew, he said, to be very disaffected to his Majesty. Thereupon Cecil showed him the actual letter of 27 December which he had written to Persons; and not being able to repudiate it, Standen fell upon his knees, begged for pardon and confessed to having rosaries and papal gifts for the Queen. He was, accordingly, sent first to the Fleet and thence to the Tower, and it was thought that he was in serious danger of his life.

During the year 1623, as a result of the diplomatic negotiations between England and Spain for the marriage of Prince Charles to the Infanta Maria, Catholics in England enjoyed, for the first time for many years, comparative freedom from the operation of the penal laws. In this period of relative tranquility, Pope Gregory XV, yielding to insistent demands by the leaders of the English secular clergy, decided to restore to the Church in England a measure of local episcopal rule. In doing so he broke away from the policy of his immediate predecessors. After the suppression of the English Catholic hierarchy by Queen Elizabeth at the beginning of her reign, successive popes had taken the English Catholics under their immediate protection and had rejected various appeals for the restoration of local bishops. But the restoration did not, in the event, produce the results for which the papacy hoped. William Bishop who was appointed bishop in 1623, died after rather less than a year in office. His successor, Richard Smith, appointed by Urban VIII in 1624, became involved in disputes with the Jesuit and Benedictine clergy on the mission and, after six years of strife, withdrew to France in 1631 and resigned his charge. Rome then reverted to her earlier policy. Though Smith later sought papal permission to return to England, it was refused. After his death at Paris in 1655, the English secular clergy petitioned Rome for another bishop, but without success. The Church in England was to remain without a bishop for another thirty years.

Some years ago the Rev. Gordon Huelin published an article on Catholicism in the diocese of London, based on the returns of papists (1706) then in St. Paul's Cathedral Library and now in the library of Guildhall and it may perhaps be of interest to examine the returns for another part of the country, namely Wiltshire, and see what light these documents, reinforced by data from other sources, can shed upon Catholicism in that county during the first decade of the eighteenth century.

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.

Many years ago there was published an English translation of La Persecution des Catholiques en Angleterre sous Charles II by the Comtesse R. de’Courson: a work which remains the only one devoted wholly to English Catholicism during that reign. Unfortunately, however, the title is misleading and the book is given up almost entirely to the two and a half years of the Popish Plot—not, in other words, to the reign of Charles II as a whole but merely to one-tenth of it—with the result that the reader is presented with an unbalanced and unduly depressing picture. A more judicious appraisal has been provided by a number of “background” works such as Archbishop Mathew's Catholicism in England, Mr. E. I. Watkin's Roman Catholicism in England from the Reformation to 1950 and, most recently, Miss. M. D. R. Leys's fascinating Catholics in England, 1529-1829, while an article published in The Dublin Review (Autumn, 1959) suggested that the pecuniary laws, so ferocious on paper, to which Catholics were theoretically subject, were in fact enforced only very spasmodically during the reign of Charles II. Clearly, in order to judge how rigorously the penal laws were enforced in Charles Il’s reign, it is necessary first to consider what exactly were these laws; to establish what was the legal position of the English Catholics at the Restoration and to discover what fresh enactments were passed in the course of the next twenty-five years. It is such an examination of the legal position of the English Catholics between 1660 and 1685 which will be attempted in the pages that follow.

Richard Verstegan is still a neglected writer, not because his works lack intrinsic merit or historical importance, but more fundamentally, because much uncertainty remains about the extent of his authorship.

After the death of the Archpriest George Birkhead the secular priest John Colleton and his fellow assistants wrote to the Pope on 28 July 1614, to submit a list of suitable condidates from whom a bishop for England might be chosen. The names put forward included those of William Bishop and Richard Smith, who were each later to receive the appointment, and William Harrison, who in fact was made Archpriest in 1615. The list of suggestions ended thus: “Lastly we should like to add ... the name of Mr. Thomas More, our Agent, a most acceptable man, both because of his own merits and because of the most glorious memory of his great-grandfather, the famous More, who with the Cardinal elect of Rochester, first suffered an illustrious martyrdom for refusing the oath of supremacy: were it not that he is the only man we have or can hope to have who can afford from his own resources to act for us out there.” It was a name to be proud of and a relationship he did not hesitate to proclaim. When, with his brother Henry, he arrived at the English College in Rheims in 1583, aged 18 years, they were registered as “Thomas and Henry More, brothers, great grand-children of the most holy martyr Thomas More.” He went on to Rome in 1587, but the registers of the English College there and those of Valladolid, where he arrived in 1591, contain no reference to his ancestry. After some sixteen years of activity on the English Mission he accompanied Richard Smith out to Rome in 1609 intending to put the case for the appointment of a bishop to rule once more the church in England in place of an archpriest. He swore he would not return until they had succeeded, and he kept his oath. He spent the next seven years in Rome as Clergy Agent, and a further five years in Spain, trying to get help for the seminaries and eventually helping to establish the new seminary in Lisbon. When in 1623 William Bishop was appointed bishop for England, Thomas More was made by him Archdeacon of Hertfordshire and Northamptonshire, and he may have then returned home to England, but in May 1624, after the death of William Bishop he was made special agent to go to Rome for the purpose of securing the appointment of another bishop, and was back in Rome in August. He died there in the following year. The story of his last illness and death is considered worth telling now for the first time because it is so extraordinarily well documented by manuscripts in the Westminster Archives, the Archbishop of Birmingham's Archives and the Archives of the Old Brotherhood.

There is preserved in the Leicestershire Record Office the correspondence of the Nevills of Holt, one of the most important recusant families of that county. For many years their home was the headquarters of the Jesuit mission in Leicestershire and the East Midlands. At the beginning of the 18th century, the financial position of the head of the family, Sir Henry Nevill, was desperate, for the family had never recovered from the fines imposed on it during the Civil War. To improve the state of his finances, Sir Henry had arranged the marriage of his heiress, Mary Nevill, to a Florentine banker, Count Migliorucci.

In the “Catalogue of Popish Books” printed in his Foot out of the Snare, 1624, the gossipy but sometimes remarkably well-informed John Gee has the following entry: “The reformed Protestant, by Brerely. There was a printing house supprest some three yeers since in Lancashire, where all Brerely his workes, with many other Popish Pamphlets, were printed.” The “printing-house… in Lancashire” is undoubtedly the secret press associated with the Anderton family of Birchley Hall, near Wigan. A & R list sixteen books from this press, all printed between 1615 and 1621, including two by the unidentified author who used the pseudonym John Brereley, sometimes thought to be Lawrence Anderton. In 1956, when the A & R catalogue was published, the compilers knew of no extant copy of The Reformed Protestant. Since then, two copies have come to light, one in the library of the Marquess of Bute, the other in a collection of books formerly belonging to Burscough Catholic parish in Lancashire. The latter copy has been acquired by the British Museum. The description is as follows :