This paper is concerned primarily with the people who sheltered and helped in various ways the priests without whom Catholicism could not have survived in Elizabethan England. The Marian priests were, of course, the first who needed harbouring, and some of them continued to be protected by the laity to the end of Elizabeth's reign and beyond. From 1574 the seminary priests began to come to this country, and in due course they as well as the Jesuits were singled out for special treatment as far as harbouring was concerned. In the fifteen-eighties and the fifteen-nineties the number of seminary priests at work in England seems to have fluctuated between 120 and 150 in any one year. The Elizabethan Jesuits active in this country were never more than three or four in any one year in the fifteen-eighties, and rarely more than twelve in the fifteen-nineties. Compared with the surviving Marian priests and the seminary priests, the Jesuits were very few, but they have left a great deal on record relating to harbouring, and historians sometimes give the impression that they organised the whole business.

WHEN Philip II of Spain sent his Armada to invade England in an attempt to cut off support for the Dutch rebels, he did so in the name of God and the Catholic faith. Elizabeth, in turn recognised the propaganda value of an identification of monarch, country and Protestant church at times of national crisis. It was widely believed that, as the Spaniards wanted to overthrow the Protestant church, the English Catholics must have been pro-Spain. Elizabeth had always regarded the Catholics as a danger to her government; it was now easy for her to portray them as traitors to their country. The attempts by Catholics to claim to be patriotic were, understandably, treated with scepticism. But this had not always been the case. The purpose of this article is to outline the struggle to monopolise patriotic propaganda which took place between the government and the English Catholics throughout Elizabeth’s reign.

THE instructions given to Robert Parsons and Edmund Campion upon their embarkation for England in 1580 left no doubt that, no matter what the English government might say, their tasks were the confirmation of the faith of the Catholics there and the recovery of those who, through ignorance, had lapsed. In order to attain these objectives, Father General Everard Mercurian urged the Jesuits to an exemplary life of extraordinary virtue. Amongst the more specific recommendations, the General exhorted the missionaries, in words that echoed the Society's Constitutions, to avoid ‘even the suspicion of avarice and greed.’ They were, therefore, neither to seek nor to accept any alms unless their need became extremely urgent. Even then, they should only ask one or two of their loyal friends for assistance. If the Jesuits could only turn to their friends as a last resort, if they could neither elicit nor accept alms from the people whom they served, one wonders how the General thought the mission's expenses would be met? For a document as reasonable and as thorough as the instructions, it is surprisingly naive about finances, a naiveté that would with experience give place to sophistication.

IT is well known that during the latter part of the reign of Elizabeth I prominent papists were, from time to time, imprisoned in castles or large houses. That was done whenever the privy council felt that there were dangers threatening England which would become more dangerous if influential papists were allowed to remain at liberty. It was a cheap way to restrain the liberty of papists, as the owners of the buildings used as prisons were required to put them into repair and maintain them at their own expense, while the prisoners were required to pay for their board and lodging. Although the practice is a commonplace, its origins and development are less well known.

After Pope Urban VIII had imposed silence on English Catholics by the brief Britannia in 1631, the controversy over the hierarchy begun by Kellison's Treatise of 1629 continued to engage the pens of French writers. Smith at Paris played a discreet but significant role in encouraging his French supporters and providing them with information. I propose to discuss the way the controversy developed in Part III of this article, to be published later. The present part (II) deals with certain general topics which together form the background to Smith's continuing involvement in it. These are his motives in going to France in 1631; the attempts made in England and in France to have him reinstated or replaced as bishop for England; his sources of income and the commendatory abbeys whose revenues enabled him to support English Catholic institutions at Paris; the history of the community of English priests at Arras College, and afterwards at Tournay College, in Paris, with both of which he was closely associated; and the foundation of the English Augustinian convent of Our Lady of Syon at Paris, where he spent his last years. Very little has ever been published about these matters. An understanding of them will enable the reader to see the events to be described in Part III in clearer perspective.

ON 6 November 1605, the earl of Salisbury wrote jubilantly to the English Ambassador in France, Sir Thomas Parry, that it had ‘pleased Almighty God, out of his singular goodness, to bring to light the most cruel and detestable practise against the person of his Majesty and the whole estate of the Realm that ever was conceived by the heart of man, at any time, or in any place whatsoever’. But, when he wrote this, Salisbury was fully aware that, though the Lord might have revealed the bare existence of the Gunpowder plot, it would be left to men to discover the details and the ramifications of a complex treason that had been long in the planning.

IN May 1622 a series of private discussions on religion was held in London between representatives of the Anglican Church and the Jesuit, John Percy, alias Fisher. The occasion was the announcement by the Countess of Buckingham, mother of King James I’s favourite, George Villiers, Marquess (later Duke) of Buckingham, of her intention to become a Catholic. The King and the Marquess arranged the discussions which occupied three successive days, the 24th, 25th and 26th of May. Two eminent Anglican divines were enlisted to debate with Percy. On the first day the Anglican case was argued by Francis White, at this time a royal chaplain and later a bishop. He was opposed by Percy, in the presence of the Countess, the Marquess and Marchioness (Lady Catherine, who had also influenced her husband's decision to hold these discussions by declaring her intention to return to the Catholic faith in which she had been brought up), Bishop John Williams, (the Lord Keeper), and—possibly—the King. On the second day the King himself took the leading part in putting the Anglican case. On the third day the chief Anglican protagonist was William Laud, at this period Bishop of St. David's, who took the place of Francis White.

Bishop John Milner once observed, ‘a detailed history of the converts to and the apostates from the Catholic Church … would form a most interesting and useful work.” Since that time more attention has been paid to Jesuit converts than to Jesuit apostates. This article seeks to redress, if ever so slightly, the balance. A look at the underside of one portion of the Society before the Suppression reveals new aspects of her life and history.

FOR nearly four hundred years the story of the betrayal, in York Castle, of four laymen and two women by a criminous clerk pretending a desire to become a Catholic, has been known from recollections of Lady Babthorpe; the precise particulars, however, were unknown to her. The discovery of a very remarkable letter, giving many new details, suggests that the patient reading of the catalogues of our national collections of manuscripts might, even now, throw light into other dark corners of recusant history.

The Colepepers were a prolific and moderately distinguished family that had been settled in Kent and Sussex since the thirteenth century. The name is spelt variously as Colepeper, Colepepyr, Culpeper and Culpepper, but as Sir Alexander, the subject of this essay, signed his name ‘Colepeper’ or ‘Colepepyr’ and used the first spelling in his record of his troubles, the first spelling has been adopted.

As we approach Alabaster's sonnets’ our expectation is enhanced not by the promise of poetic greatness but by the prospect of exploring pure instances of the kind of poetry born in the convergence of rhetoric and meditation. We will focus first on a sequence of sonnets remarkable for their rhetorical techniques; then we will consider a group of sonnets each of which has meditation as its subject. In all the poems, however, it will be apparent that Alabaster as poet is simultaneously rhetor and meditator.

In Richard Simpson's biography of Edmund Campion (1867) there is an account of conditions in England in 1580-1 which includes the following sentence:

Walsall in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a large parish containing a small borough. The borough claimed to be ‘by prescription’, but it had charters including one given by King Charles the First in 1627. This secured to the corporation ‘of the borough and foreign of Walsall’ authority in the parts of the parish outside the borough. These, called ‘the foreign’, had a vestry meeting of their own at the chapel-of-ease at Bloxwich. They supported their own poor through churchwardens and overseers elected there, but they were obliged to contribute to the repair and improvement of the parish church where they were married and in whose churchyard they were buried until 1733.

IN 1584 A brief introduction to the art of music, one of the earliest books in English on the theory of music, was published in London. William Bathe the author was then a student at St. John's College, Oxford. The young man's promise of a greatly improved system for the teaching of singing and music is not central to our purpose. His dedication of the work to Gerald Fitzgerald, 11th Earl of Kildare, was imprudent. This highlighting of his ‘uncle’, or more accurately granduncle, was intended to gain wider acceptance for his work but the ‘Wizard Earl’ was at that time lodged in the Tower suspected of complicity with Viscount Baltinglass in ‘actual rebellion’.

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?

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.

THOMAS Bullaker is one of the eighty-five martyrs who were beatified by Pope John Paul II on 22 November 1987. His biography necessarily involves an exercise in textual criticism. The most important sources for his life are two, more or less contemporary, accounts: the Certamen Seraphicum, written by his fellow Fransciscan Richard Mason, and published in 1649; and the Histoire de la Persecution presente des Catholiques en Angleterre of Le Sieur de Marsys, published in 1646. When Richard Mason wrote his account he had access to some writings of the martyr himself, which were kept in the archives of St. Bonaventure's at Douai, and were lost at the time of the French Revolution. His description of Bullaker's trials is largely based on the martyr's first hand testimony. De Marsys, a servant of the French Ambassador, who collected papers concerning sixteen of the martyrs, claimed to have been present at Bullaker's final trial and execution. A copy of a pamphlet entitled An Exact Relation of the Apprehension, Examination, Execution and Confession of Thomas Bullaker, 1642, which was sold in London on the day of Bullaker's execution, has survived among the Thomason Tracts in the British Library.

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.