The Queen's visit to Oxford in 1566 has been viewed largely through the prism of John Nichols’ The Progresses of Queen Elizabeth. This article returns to the manuscript sources, all of which survive. All make the disputations central; all but one were written by Catholics who subsequently suffered for their faith: Thomas Neale, John Bereblock and Miles Windsor. The Queen's visit clearly represented for Catholics in Oxford the last chance to try to win her favour. This article explores the complex tensions that existed in early Elizabethan Oxford: between the Calvinists who dominated Christ Church and Magdalen, and those still committed to the ‘old religion’. It highlights the continuities with pre-Reformation and Marian Oxford, arguing that Sir Thomas Pope and Sir Thomas White had engaged, with the Owens of Godstow, in a coherent programme to preserve as many of the monastic houses as they could. An exploration of the background of the three main witnesses reveals the presence of a determined Catholic resistance to the Earl of Leicester and his Vice-Chancellor, and the beginnings of alternative centres of learning in an ‘underground’ university of halls, taverns and farms that soon included many of the leading scholars: Thomas Neale, George Etheridge, Edmund Rainolds and John Case. It was while moving along this network that Edmund Campion was captured.

The imaginative life of Robert Southwell in Rome as a student and in England as a mission priest was energized by the figure of Mary Magdalen. From the translation of a Franciscan sermon to an extended meditative prose work, in poems and illustrative reference, he explored the complexity of her life, finding in it a depth of emotional experience in which he himself was immersed. Her torment of sorrow was seen reflected in the life of Catholics in England, in their suffering and in the strain of endless endurance. It is an irony that through his writing on Mary Magdalen’s witness to the Resurrection in the garden, Southwell’s message of comfort and hope introduced England to the ‘literature of tears’.

This article examines the involvement of young people in recusancy in Elizabethan England. It explores how two issues – the meaning of recusancy and the appeal of religion (specifically Catholicism) to youth – can illuminate each other. After looking at some of the evidence for the role of recusancy in juvenile experiences of Catholicism, the article focuses on three contrasting cases which illustrate young people's engagement with recusancy and Catholicism, and how it was interpreted by adult authorities, Catholic and Protestant: a case of recusant proselytising by the young men of a gentry household, as reported to the Privy Council; the alleged visions of fourteen-year-old Elizabeth Orton in Flintshire in 1581; and the autobiographical testimony of Robert Colton, a recusant youth imprisoned in London's Bridewell in 1595–6. It is argued that including recusancy will help us to better understand the complexity of youthful engagement with religion in early modern England, and also to appreciate the implications of recusancy.

Three humanist scholars, alumni of the Scottish Catholic college of St Andrew in the Spanish Netherlands, were recruited into the spy service of King James VI/I as intelligencers and couriers. As members of the ‘Republic of Letters’ Thomas Dempster, Thomas Reid and Thomas Seget were well placed to travel throughout Europe as well as correspond with fellow humanists at all the major courts. In doing so they were able to provide intelligence which helped James in his ambitions of becoming king of England and obtaining dynastic marriages for his children but they also pandered to his vain belief that he was a scholar of distinction. This paper attempts to show how their relationships to the King developed and what benefits these scholars derived from their service.

Political and economic circumstances in Europe and the Civil War (1642–1660) in England so reduced the funds of the English Benedictine nuns of Cambrai that they were unable to provide for the community. Against sound advice they went ahead with a filiation in Paris in 1651. Thanks to the contacts of Dame Clementia Cary and their chaplain, Dom Serenus Cressy, community life began in rented accommodation in 1652. They moved six times before being enabled to purchase their own property in 1664. This was made possible by the messieurs of Port Royal with whom the community continued to have close ties, although they never seem to have been tainted with Jansenism. Novices were always recruited from England and their dowries and associated gifts and bequests were essential, but the survival of several account books reveals the extent and variety of the support the community enjoyed in Paris.

The Stuart artefacts described in this article have not previously been examined as an entity, and many are relatively unfamiliar to scholars. This paper will consider this unique collection of relics and discuss their significance within the personal as well as national and international contexts of their origins. That significance rests largely in their royal provenance, which was valued by the custodians at the English Jesuit College of St Omers, the predecessor of Stonyhurst College, founded to educate English Catholic boys in 1593. The Stuart cause, from Mary Queen of Scots to Charles Edward Stuart represented the best hope of English Catholics for a formal restoration of the faith. Relics, such as Mary Queen of Scots’ Thorn, were powerful symbols of tenacity and hope, providing an unbroken thread from the Passion of Christ to the martyred Queen, the more valued as the College gained its own seventeenth-century martyrs. Artefacts which arrived at Stonyhurst College after 1794 were valued for their romantic association with the failed Stuart cause. The creation of the Stuart Parlour in 1911and the adoption of the Borrodale tartan as part of the girls’ uniform in the 1990s demonstrate the significance these objects possess well into the twentieth century.

Anne Line ran a safe-house for Catholic priests in London during the 1590s, a time when such activities were a capital offence. She worked closely with two of the most hunted priests in England, the Jesuit superior Henry Garnet and his fellow Jesuit John Gerard, and was arrested and executed in February 1601. Although seemingly little known, it has been suggested that Shakespeare alludes to her in several works implying that the impact of her life and death on her contemporaries may have been underestimated. This fresh look at the documentary evidence seeks to clarify Anne Line's identity and the circumstances of her life up to the exile of her husband in 1586. Findings include; strong support for the suggestion that Anne Line was indeed the ‘Alice Higham’ who married Roger Line in 1583, the likely location of her childhood home near Maldon in Essex, connections to recusant networks through an aunt also called ‘Anne Line’, and evidence, previously overlooked, that Anne Line was closely related to Giles Aleyn, a Puritan landowner whose demands for increased rent from James Burbage for the site of his theatre in Shoreditch led to the founding of The Globe in Southwark.

Whereas Graham Greene, in his well-known Introduction to Fr John Gerard’s Autobiography of a Hunted Priest (1952), expresses surprise that “the martyrs are quite silent” in Shakespeare’s plays, it is precisely the opposite that transpires from a careful reading of them, if only “between the lines”—according to the literal meaning of “intelligence”. The case of Lavinia in Titus Andronicus would have been immediately recognized by an Elizabethan audience with reference to the “lopping” of limbs of those who similarly suffered on what the dramatist elsewhere calls “Love’s Tyburn that hangs up simplicity”. Not a few scenes in such famous plays as Hamlet, Macbeth and The Merchant of Venice that clamour to be cut by an impatient producer have distinctly recusant implications, not least Hamlet’s famous but misunderstood soliloquy, “To be, or not to be,” which evidently refers not to modern existentialists but to Elizabethan recusants, for whom existence had been made intolerable by their cruel persecutors.

The story of the relationship between Ulster and Scotland during the seventeenth century has long been dominated by the flow of people and ideas from Scotland to the north of Ireland. This, however, belies the prominent role that Ireland had in the social and cultural history of the Western Isles and Highlands of Scotland during that century. This paper argues that of even greater importance to the resurgence of Catholicism in the Scottish Gaidhealtachd than a Rome driven Counter-Reformation were the financial support and personnel provided by Ulster Catholics. In the face of aggressive Stuart policies, Catholicism was rejuvenated and became an ideological justification for asserting traditional rights in the face of government sanctioned, Protestant blessed, incursions in the Western Isles. Moreover, in the face of historiography that has argued for the continual disintegration of ClanDonald throughout the seventeenth century, this article explores the ways the clans and their neighbours inspired, funded and facilitated the revival of Catholicism in the Gaidhealtachd.

Bryant Barrett (c.1715–1790) was a Catholic tradesman who managed to become affluent enough to be able to collect a library of nearly 2,000 volumes. His library catalogues are still extant and the aim of the present article is to analyse these in order to get an insight into the intellectual world of an eighteenth-century RC self-made man. There are a number of catalogues of institutional RC libraries and the occasional catalogue of an RC clergyman, but as far as we know the Barrett catalogues are a unique register of the books possessed by an ‘ordinary’ RC layman. The traditional picture of eighteenth-century English Catholic life is that of a dwindling community with a rather provincial and conservative outlook on life. Heroic martyrdom was a feature of the past: ordinary life entailed guarding against modern enlightenment views and – towards the end of the century – internal discussions about the concessions necessary to achieve Catholic emancipation. Barrett's library modifies this picture in a number of ways: it reveals an eminently practical man who was also an intellectual, someone interested in the past, loyal to his faith, knowledgeable about the latest developments in industry and science, intrigued by perspectives opening up through exploration and travel, fascinated with new developments and ideas. Barrett was a both a devout Roman Catholic and a well-read man of the world.

The College of St Omers was founded in the Spanish Netherlands by Robert Persons S.J. in 1593 to provide an education for English Catholics. Those who wished to study for the priesthood would then proceed to one of the Jesuit-managed seminaries on the continent, among which was the College of St Gregory in Seville founded by Persons in 1592; many of its alumni joined the Society after ordination, as was the case with both William Appleby (hereafter WAp) and William Atkins (hereafter WAt); a full account of this institution can be found in CRS 73 (1992); cf. also WAt pp. 206–8. Intending students normally travelled by sea, as was the case with the twelve who set off in 1622 and were captured by Moorish pirates en route. The twelve ranged in age from adolescents to mature adults like WAp (aged 31) who had presumably been at St Omers for a period of probation rather than for the normal course of studies.

This article examines the role of disputation in the conversion narrative of the clergyman and poet William Alabaster, written after he converted to Catholicism in the 1590s. Disputation, a mode of debate that had developed in the universities, is a preoccupation of the narrative, and is here used to place the work within the immediate history of religious disputation, and in the wider struggle over scholarship that accompanied post-Reformation religious controversy. The article asks why formal disputation was so important to religious writers and polemicists, drawing on Alabaster's perception of reason and its relationship to faith. It is asserted that the convert's eagerness for scholarly disputation arose from a fusion of religious with intellectual assurance: certainty in faith, and in the academic process. A comparison with examples taken from a long catalogue of works describing public, cross-confessional disputation is then used to enhance our understanding of Alabaster's influences; the building-blocks of his newfound religious identity. Taking Alabaster as its model, the article directs attention not only to the hitherto undervalued phenomenon of public or ‘professional’ religious disputation in post-Reformation England, but also to the role played by reason and scholarship in the thought and faith of Catholic—and Protestant—divines.

This article examines the growing involvement of English Catholicism in the antislave trade and anti-slavery campaigns of the nineteenth century. Early in the century, Catholics in England were conspicuously absent from the Wilberforce-inspired crusade to eradicate the slave trade. By the end of the century, Catholics in England played a leading role in that continuing crusade. The article examines several events that led to growing Catholic participation as the century progressed, including the restoration of the hierarchy, the American Civil War, Herbert Vaughan’s missionary endeavours, the death of Charles Gordon in Khartoum, and the celebrated efforts of French Cardinal Charles Lavigerie to end the slave trade in northern Africa. This argument is placed within the greater context of papal encyclicals on the subject of slavery from the nineteenth century and earlier. The article surveys the work and words of Cardinals Wiseman, Manning and Vaughan, as well as the Catholic press, including the Tablet, the Dublin Review, and the Month.

Provost Skene’s House, Aberdeen, is home to a painted ceiling depicting scenes from the lives of both Christ and the Virgin. This decoration has intrigued scholars and visitors alike for around sixty years since it was renovated and unveiled to the public in the early 1950s. The ceiling, painted in the seventeenth century, has suffered a considerable amount of damage. Unfortunately, half of the original decorative scheme has been lost. In addition to this, panels that do survive have been modified slightly during restoration. This article examines some of the early-modern continental prints used as sources by the original painters in order to determine that they were Scottish, and not travelling artists from the Low Countries. It also reconstructs the majority of the historic layout of the ceiling, by examining pre-restoration photographs of lost details in conjunction with further early-modern print sources. The article will attempt to identify some of the images which have been lost from the ceiling and argue that the original cycle of images depicted The Mysteries of the Rosary. It will also examine how the painted ceiling, created in the aftermath of the Reformation, survived both the effects of anti-Catholic legislation in Scotland and time. Finally, the relationships between the patron and his local recusant community are discussed in conjunction with the significance of the deliberate inclusion of the IHS monogram within the ceiling’s design.

Elizabeth Inchbald's A Simple Story (1791) was the first novel written by an English Catholic with Catholic characters. It was set in the world of the Catholic gentry, a world that Inchbald knew well from her upbringing in Suffolk on a farm adjacent to the estate of an ancient Catholic family. Inchbald herself acknowledged that one of the book's characters, the ex-Jesuit Sandford, was based on an individual from her childhood, and some effort has been made by Inchbald scholars (notably Patricia Sigl and Michael Tomko) to research her Catholic background and the Gage and Rookwood families whose history may have inspired aspects of the novel. However, the Gage family's papers have not been considered for the light they can throw on Inchbald and the eighteenth-century Catholic community in Suffolk. These sources contain references to the Simpson family and have the potential to enliven our understanding of the immediate environment of Inchbald's youth. This article corrects misconceptions transmitted by James Boaden and other biographers of Inchbald, proposes a new identity for the man who became the model for Sandford, and draws attention to possible correspondences between the circumstances and relationships of the Gage family and the characters in A Simple Story.

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.

The lives and work of eighteenth-century Scottish artists John and Cosmo Alexander, father and son, were dedicated to the Jacobite cause. They were men of a culture that was distinct to their own region, that of the north-east of Scotland, which from the late fifteenth century had been centred on the university circles of Aberdeen. In microcosm, the experiences of those in these circles reflected the oscillating tests of faith and fealty of that era. Assumed to be Catholics, and from a family which numbered at least one priest among its number, between them the Alexanders survived the turbulent times of the eighteenth-century Jacobite Risings. Both were wanted men after the 1746 Battle of Culloden. Drawing on local evidence, this paper explores the religious, political and social landscape surrounding the works with an Aberdeen connection produced by both John and Cosmo Alexander. All can be seen to demonstrate that the enduring bonds of faith and fealty, which, perforce, may not always have been openly displayed, could be reinforced through the subtle deployment of the painted image.

This paper challenges the idea that harmonious relations prevailed amongst Bath's various religious denominations during the ‘Age of Reform’, from the 1820s to the 1860s. It reveals instead that the public expression of anti-Catholic opinion was a regular feature of the city's political scene in this period. An anti-Catholic ‘crusade’, directed against such local targets as Prior Park and Downside colleges, and ‘Popery’ in general, was sustained by a variety of local organizations and national organizations that had branches in Bath, as well as prominent Tory activists resident in the city. Many Irish-born evangelical clergymen played a prominent role in this crusade. It is not surprising, given the prominence of Irish clergymen in Bath's anti-Catholic movement, that protests against the state endowment of Maynooth College were popular with the city's anti-Popery activists; furthermore, several proselytizing organizations whose principal aim was the conversion of Ireland's Catholics to the Protestant faith had a permanent base in Bath. The perceived iniquitous effects of ‘Popery’ in Ireland formed part of the anti-Catholic crusade's propaganda message. While the anti-Popery cause appealed particularly to the city's Church of England community, with many of its clergymen and prominent lay Anglicans to the fore of the anti-Catholic agitation, it attracted support from all sections of Protestant society.

The cult of St Cuthbert was central to the regional identity of north-eastern England with its inhabitants termed the haliwerfolc, or ‘people of the saint’ (Cuthbert). The saint became crucial to the liturgical practices and celebrations of Durham's clerical and secular communities as well as being a guarantor of martial victories; usually against the Scots. However, with the cult of saints an early victim of the Reformation launched by Henry VIII in the 1530s, the outlook for St Cuthbert's legacy became increasingly uncertain. Attachment to the saint's memory became inextricably entwined with Durham's pre-Reformation history as commemoration of the cult, rather than the saint, took on more significance. This article looks at how St Cuthbert's historians and other antiquaries regularly manipulated his legend to satisfy different purposes and circumstances; so that completely different perspectives on Cuthbert and his cult have emerged over the centuries since the Reformation. But, throughout the changing interpretations of St Cuthbert's story his significance in Durham remains unchallenged.