During the reign of Elizabeth I Catholicism ceased to be the religion of the majority and became that of a small minority. In County Durham, the ecclesiastical settlement of 1559 met with little open opposition, except from a few of the leading clergy, but religious conservatism or ‘survivalism’ together with the ‘bastard-feudal Catholicism’ of the house of Neville remained strong until the Northern Rising of 1569. Thereafter Catholic recusancy emerged slowly amongst the former rebel gentry, under the influence of the Louvainists and seminary priests, but was contained by Government pressure. By the end of the reign the strains produced by persecution were shown in the conflicts amongst the Catholic clergy but ‘seigneurial Catholicism’ within the household régime remained the religion of a minority of the gentry and their dependants still associated with the house of Neville.

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.

How far were recusants affected financially by the Elizabethan penal statutes? Given that only a small proportion of fines was collected or reached the Exchequer, it may be that the question is scarcely worth discussing. It is nearly always assumed that Elizabethan Catholics suffered economic hardships; it has been suggested that their chief disability was not the fines but continuous exclusion from public office (1), and also that their plight was so desperate that they had no alternative save rebellion (2). Such conjectures can only be tested by examining the fortunes of recusant gentry at the local level; and Worcestershire, with its record of Catholic conspiracies culminating in the Gunpowder Plot, provides the right circumstances for such an examination.

‘Ireland was the only country where the Counter-Reformation succeeded against the will of the head of state.’ Why was this? Obviously, the English Government's neglect of education and the Catholic clergy's awareness of its importance was one reason. Obviously, too, the Counter-Reformation got under way in Ireland before the Reformation made a religious impact. Again, the quality of the reformed clergy sent to Ireland was poor and they made little effort to learn Gaelic or to translate the scriptures into the national language until very late in the century. But perhaps most important of all is the fact that in Gaelic Ireland the Reformation was inextricably linked with the expropriation of lands and the abolition of traditional rights and customs. Hence, defence of one's land and of one's religion became so intertwined as to be almost inseparable; and this, I suspect, rather than any appreciation of theological distinctions, was decisive. A number of the clergy of the Counter-Reformation, most of them educated in the Irish colleges on the Continent, were at pains not only to underline the ‘heresies’ in the new teaching and to instruct the people in the spirit of Tridentine Catholicism, but also to link the struggle against the ‘gall’, the English conqueror, with the European religious struggle.

The Queen does not seem to have made any permanent grant of the Englefield property before the attainder of Sir Francis, but by letters patent dated 10 December 1585 she granted a lease of the land formerly held by Plowden at Shiplake, and of some land in Berkshire, to Andrew Blunden and Plowden's two sons, Edmund and Francis, for their lives and the life of the survivor. A year later, by letters patent dated 8 August 1586, she granted to Humphrey Foster and George Fitton, a lease for forty years of substantial parts of the property of Sir Francis. The lease comprised land at Up Rossall, Udlington, Yagdon and Yeaton in Shropshire, extensive property at Englefield, Tidmarsh, Burghfield, Sindlesham, Tilehurst, Hartridge and elsewhere in Berkshire, and land at Shiplake except that granted to Blunden and the two Plowden brothers. It is quite possible, and even likely, that Foster and Fitton held this lease for the benefit of young Francis Englefield, as on 14 August 1587 they held a court baron in Shropshire ‘at the special instance of Francis Englefield’. If that were the case, it would explain young Englefield's subsequent attempts to exercise the rights of a beneficial owner, not only in respect of the land he inherited from his father but in respect of that of Sir Francis as well.

The reign of James I saw the recovery of Catholicism in Durham with the re-organisation of the clerical mission, influenced by the religious orders of the Counter-Reformation, and an increase in recusancy. Despite the initial disappointment of Catholic hopes of some measure of toleration from James, the application of the penal laws was eventually relaxed. The resulting safety allowed the establishment of a formal missionary organisation under the impulse of the revived religious orders, and permitted recusants to increase in numbers. Durham recusancy remained, however, limited to a minority of the gentry and their dependants consisting largely of a circle of families linked to the house of Neville.

During the two and a half centuries after the Reformation, at almost every political crisis, Catholics were confronted with the demand that they should bind themselves with an oath to deny some principle of their religion; and the consequences, if they refused, could be severe: loss of property, sometimes total, imprisonment, even death. It seems worth while therefore, to survey the various circumstances under which this trial took place.

The popular acceptance (among Protestants) of Titus Oates's allegations of a Popish Plot owed much to the apparent confirmation provided first by the murder of Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey and second by the discovery of Edward Coleman's letters. Godfrey's murder has challenged the ingenuity of both historians and the writers of detective fiction, but Coleman's letters have received far less attention. Yet their historical importance was considerable. Apart from apparently confirming Oates's story, they seemed to implicate James, Duke of York, in projects designed to bring in Catholicism and absolutism with the aid of Louis XIV and the Pope. They thus gave support and impetus to the movement to exclude James from the throne. One reason why most historians have made little sense of the letters is that they are often obscure and allusive and were not printed in a logical order. A second reason is that most historians have considered the letters only in relation to the Plot. This is true of Professor Kenyon, for example, who has produced much the best analysis so far. But the letters almost all date from 1674–76 and can be understood fully only in the context of the events of those years. In this article I shall use the letters and other evidence to try to give an account of Coleman's activities from the start of his correspondence in 1674 until his execution in 1678. In the process, I shall try to assess James's involvement in Coleman's intrigues.

Dr Keith Lindley, in his article in Politics, Religion and The English Civil War (‘The Part Played by the Catholics’), resurrected the thorny issue of Catholic neutralism during the Civil War. Using statistical analyses based upon the records of the Committees for Advance of Money and for Compounding, he argued that for the most part Catholics kept themselves to themselves, avoiding both sides, and enduring the War with resignation. What he most certainly demonstrated, in the areas of the country he selected, was that the records he consulted do indeed convey that impression.

Shortly after his accession, James II introduced in England a scheme, already begun in Ireland, of dispensing Catholic army officers from the Test Act of 1673. This encroachment of the penal laws was controversial and James, therefore, turned to the courts for a legal opinion on his use of the royal prerogative. In Godden v. Hales (1686) the judges upheld the king’s right to dispense with the law in particular cases. Despite this decision, however, public and Service opinion remained hostile to the idea of placing Catholics in the armed forces. James took action against a clergyman, Samuel Johnson, who published a pamphlet addressed to all soldiers and sailors telling them not to associate with ‘idolatrous and bloody Papists who fight for the Mass book and to burn the Bible’.

The escape of Charles II after the Battle of Worcester presents the historian of priest-holes with an unfamiliar and agreeable problem. Instead of there being too little evidence, there is if anything too much. The Boscobel Tracts (Hughes's convenient title for the various printed and manuscript accounts of the affair) are together as long as Gerard's Narrative and Autobiography; and they describe a period of only six weeks instead of eighteen years. From them it is possible to plot the complicated movements of the King and of the other characters in the story, not merely day by day but often hour by hour. The Boscobel episode, like the Battle of Hastings and Guy Fawkes, is familiar to everybody; for three hundred years the sign of the Royal Oak has been a common one in English towns and villages, however remote from the course of the young King's wanderings. But despite that, curiously little has been written about the hides to which Charles owed his safety at Boscobel, Moseley, Trent and Heale, although the Tracts furnish a good deal of useful, if discreetly-worded, information about them.

Dr Galgano shows that the Papist Sir Thomas Preston continued his family's interest in operating their iron-mines, and points, interestingly, to the number of Papists amongst his ore customers. More importantly for historians of the iron-industry, he states (pp. 212–13) that, about 1664, Sir Thomas built a blast-furnace. Dr Galgano does not explain that this furnace would pre-date the first known ones in Cumbria (Cleator, c. 1695), and Furness (Backbarrow, 1711). Thus, Sir Thomas would be both an entrepreneur and an innovator. The question is, did Preston build a blastfurnace?

Charles Butler was born on 14 August 1750. His father, James, and his uncles Charles and Alban, the hagiographer, were by then the last male representatives of an old Catholic Northamptonshire family, connected with Plowdens and Jerninghams in closer kinship than with any others.

Many of the devotional works written for English Catholics, at home and in exile, assure the weary pilgrim that the battle will end and the soul will be at peace; or that in the midst of it there can be inner quietness; or that man must flee the conflict altogether and engage in a different kind of warfare, the Pauline struggle within oneself. The emphasis in all of them is that here is no abiding city, or state, or régime. This world was shown to be full of alarms and omens and disasters as well as vanities and temptations. Man's safety and peace lay in eschewing the world altogether, either literally or symbolically.

The Venerable English College in Rome was a product of the Counter-Reformation, which transformed the old English Hospice into a seminary second only to Douai in its importance for the mission. The nineteenth century was also a period of great vigour, when its alumni exercised considerable influence on the development of the Catholicism of the ‘Second Spring’ from their positions in the restored hierarchy, and when there grew up a style of seminary administration and of ‘Englishness abroad’ which was to last well into the present century and vestiges of which still remain.

I would like to thank Professor Phillips for pointing out my error in listing as one the two account books from the Cavendish of Holker papers, DDCa/1/1 and DDCa/1/106. The oversight was not intentional and I apologize for any confusion it may have caused.

Conformity Certificates are to be found among the Recorda of the King's Bench in the Public Record Office, London (Class K.B. 145). I have been asked by the Public Record Office to make it clear that these documents are not generally accessible to the public; indeed, they are not easy to consult, being dirty, crumpled and many torn, though in only one case was the name of a recusant completely lost, being torn off, without occurring again in the certificate. The greater part of the Recorda are writs to sheriffs or justices, but among them there are also to be found inquisitions, memoranda, some accounts for repairs to the King's Bench, recognizances of debts, copies of pleas coram Rege, depositions of witnesses, orders to commit the children of felons to the parish, accounts of misdemeanours, and Gaol Deliveries. Conformity Certificates form only a small part of the whole.

James I proclaimed his first English parliament on 11 January 1603-04. He directed electors to eschew ‘any partial respects or factious combination’, and also to avoid returning ‘any persons either noted for their superstitious blindness one way, or for their turbulent humours other ways’. According to the Venetian Ambassador, it was ‘combination[s]’ of ‘Catholics’ and ‘Puritans’ that the King had particularly in mind. In the event the royal directive was imperfectly followed, At least thirteen elections were contested. Among them was the election for the shire of Worcester. As this study will show, the outcome of the Worcestershire parliamentary election was determined by the interaction of precisely such factional groupings as James had hoped to deter. As much is evident, both from the surviving correspondence of several of the leading participants, and from the records of the Star Chamber suit to which the election subsequently gave rise. The election is cited by Derek Hirst as an example of how ‘the issue of the danger to Protestantism could move people at all times’. But it was at times of extraordinary political activity, such as Parliamentary elections, that anti-Catholic feeling became particularly intense. This study will examine this proposition by reference to the Worcestershire election. It will also offer a reconsideration of Elliot Rose's interpretation of the political attitudes of English Catholics at the opening of the seventeenth century.