To anyone who has studied English Catholic books of the early seventeenth century, the imprints, “Doway, for John Heigham” and “S. Omers, for John Heigham” have a familiar—not to say monotonous—ring. There are over sixty books in existence today, printed between 1609 and 1631, which bear one or other of these imprints. Yet very little is generally known about the man himself. The biographies of him which appear in works of reference tell us next to nothing about him and what they do tell us is for the most part incorrect. In this note I shall try to unravel some of the muddles which have arisen and set out briefly the main outline of his career in so far as it can be established from the evidence.

Among the many English musicians exiled for the Catholic Faith was Peter Philips the composer and organist. As is often the case with these musicians, little is generally known about him, and so I am taking the opportunity of using material which has come to light in recent months, in conjunction with the little information which was previously established, to attempt a biography of him, however incomplete. This new material comes from various sources, including the State Papers Holland for 1593, which are in the Public Record Office; a letter to Fr. Persons from Richard Verstegan in the Stonyhurst Archives; the Pilgrims’ Book at the English College Rome; and court accounts and a certificate of residence in the Archives Générales du Royaume, Brussels.

The period from 1655 to 1672 forms a convenient unit in Recusant history. After the death on 18 March 1655 of Richard Smith, Bishop of Chalcedon, there was a series of attempts by the English clergy to obtain from Rome the appointment of a bishop for England, which culminated in the issue of a brief for the consecration of Philip Howard OP on the 16 May 1672. In spite of this, Howard's consecration did not take place, and the English Catholics were without a form of episcopal government till 1685, when John Leyburne was appointed Vicar Apostolic. The reasons for this state of affairs have been the subject of some comment, not all of it well-informed, by those who have treated of English Catholic history in the seventeenth century. The purpose of the present study is to try to present, as objectively as possible, the course of events as it is reflected in the negotiations of the successive agents sent to Rome on behalf of the English clergy during the period 1655-72, to gether with the relevant background.

When Fr. Persons arrived in Rome towards the end of March 1597, he found the unruly students in the English College very averse to Spain and particularly enraged by the Book of Succession, “They loathed it,” he reported to Don Juan de Idiaquez, “and said a thousand evil things about it, though they had never seen or read it, based merely on ill-natured reports received from their partisans in Flanders, saying that it was greatly in favour of the claims of the King of Spain and the Lady Infanta against the King of Scotland and was the prelude to a conquest of England and that Fr. Persons had obtained signatures and oaths from some of the foremost Englishmen in Spain in Favour of the Infanta.”

Six years ago Biographical Studies began as an experimental publication. Our main intention then was to try and repair, by gradual stages, some of the omissions and errors in Gillow's Bibliographical Dictionary of the English Catholics, and we defined our terms of reference accordingly. It soon became apparent, however, that by insisting rigidly upon them, we should have to exclude much valuable work in the field of Recusant history for which there was no other organ of publication. With the permission of the Council of the Catholic Record Society, which took over editorial direction in 1953, we began tacitly to disregard our original terms of reference and to publish research on any aspect of Recusant history. Our new title, therefore, is not an indication of a break in policy but a formal endorsement of a change which has been gradually taking place for some time. We hope to publish in future, in addition to specialised biographical and bibliographical studies, some articles based on original research but more general in their scope than anything we have so far printed. We also want to relate the periodical more closely to the affairs of the Catholic Record Society, and from time to time we shall print a resumé of the Society's activities.

The C.R.S. has in preparation a number of volumes designed to throw light on several parts of Catholic history since the Reformation. The fifty-first volume to be issued will be The Wisbech Stirs (1595-1598), edited by Miss P. Renold. This brings together related documents from a number of sources including St. Paul's Cathedral Library, the Inner Temple, Westminster Cathedral Archives, and Stonyhurst College. This volume is in the press and will be issued to members in 1958.

Recusancy was the Elizabethan term for the refusal (Lat. recusare) to attend, in one's “parish church, chapel or usual place of common prayer”, the Edwardian services of the Church of England as established by the Act of Uniformity in 1559 (1 Eliz., cap. 2). Among the penalties prescribed by this same Act was a fine of 12d., to be levied by the churchwardens for every Sunday or festival on which a person omitted attendance. These forfeitures were allocated not to the Crown but “to the use of the poor of the parish”; consequently the Exchequer rolls, being concerned only with the revenue of the Crown, bear no record of them.

In the archives of the Vicariato di Roma are preserved the ordination books from 1505 onwards. Apart from an unfortunate gap, 1575-80, they run consecutively, but they do not by any means contain all the ordinations held in Rome. For the period 1603-25 there are 35 ordinations recorded in the Liber Ruber of the English College, Rome, which are not given in these books, and the reasoh is not clear. These books are not numbered, but are known by the year with which they begin. The only ones that concern us here are: (i) 1580-88; (ii) 1588-95; (iii) 1596-1601; (iv) 1602-08; (v) 1609-17; and an odd volume (which I here call Vic. 6) giving supplementary ordinations 1-6901612. After 1618 there are two series, Generales and Particulares, but the distinction is not rightly adhered to. The ordinationes generales were on the four Ember Saturdays and were invariably in the Lateran, die parish church of Rome. Then as now, orders were normally conferred by the vice-gerent, delegated by the cardinal-vicar. This office was held by Thomas Goldwell, exiled bishop of St Asaph, till his death in 1585 and nearly all orders, not only those of English students, were conferred by him. Later a few were conferred by Owen Lewis, Welsh bishop of Casano, and later still (especially for the English College) by cardinal Bellarmine. The ordinationes particulares were also sometimes in the Lateran, but mostly elsewhere. Goldwell ordained at S. Silvestro in Monte Quirinale, but more often in the chapel of the English College, even when no English students were involved. Until about 1600 the tonsure and the four minor orders were conferred on different days (usually fairly close together) but after 1600 there is a tendency to confer them all at once.

On October 16 1956 the Society inaugurated a series of public talks entitled Examples of Research Work. The purpose is to explain how specific pieces of historical research have been carried out. Each speaker describes the methods he used, the sources to which he went and the problems he had to solve. The first talk was given by Brigadier T.B. Trappes-Lomax C.B.E., who described the research which he had recently done on the visitation of the Midlands and the North by Bishop Leyburn in 1687.

As we have seen (Biographical Studies, Vol. 3, no.2), Thomas went to Brussels in about 1621 and returned home to Walton in 1624 with his Flemish Catholic servant. There his father was alarmed by his open Catholicism and ordered him to leave home. He went to live in the extremely Catholic household of his mother's sister, Mrs Dorothy Lawson, at St Anthony's, Newcastle-on-Tyne. From St Anthony's-where he does not seem to have been noticed by juries— he passed to Naworth Castle, the Catholic stronghold of the convert Lord William Howard. On July 20th 1629 he marriedthere Alethea,younger daughter of Sir Philip Howard and granddaughter of Lord William. The young couple lived at Naworth until 1631 and their first two children were born there. The birth of their first son was duly recorded in the Walton church register. It is not clear what relations between Thomas and his father were like. No marriage settlement seems to survive amongst the extant Fairfax and Naworth papers. Later settlements of Thomas' property give no indication that he received any land as his wife's dowry. Alethea continued to receive a small allowance from her grandfather after her marriage. Her husband was given a rent-charge of £20 a year by his cousin, Lord Dunbar. On January 20th 1631, six months after the birth of Thomas’ son, Lord Fairfax set up a trust, consisting of his Protestant sons-in-law, Robert Stapleton of Wighill and Sir Thomas Layton of Sexhow to hold the Fairfax estates between his own death and the coming-of-age of his grandson. That is to say the 2nd Lord Fairfax was to be a mere life-tenant.

Twenty-five years ago two scholars working independently published the results of their researches on the origin and early history of the late sixteenth century mystical treatise known as Breve compendio intorno alla perfezione cristiana. Marcel Viller S. J., in an article in Revue d'ascétique et de mystique (1931), settled the question of authorship and provided an invaluable account of the circumstances in which the treatise was composed. Jean Dagens, writing in Revue d'histoire ecclésiastique (1931) on Bérulle’s Bref discour de l'abnégation intérieure, which is based on the Breve compendio, discussed the history of the work in France. These two studies aroused considerable interest at the time and led to the publication of further articles and notes. Dagens summarises the results of this research in his chapter on the Bref discours in his recent extensive study, Bérulle et les origines de la restauration catholique, 1575–1611 (1952). After such thorough investigation it may seem doubtful whether any further really important discoveries are likely to be made, but within certain limits there is still scope for enquiry, and in the present note I want to discuss briefly an English translation of the Breve compendio, first published in 1612, which was unknown to Viller and Dagens. First it will be necessary to summarise what they say about the early history of the original work.

William Southerne, the last martyr to suffer under James I, lived and died during a period of disunion among the English Catholics. They were divided upon several issues: one of these was die lawfulness of taking the Oath of Allegiance. This Oath, introduced by Cecil in 1606, and condemned as unlawful by Pope Paul V the following year, was still favoured by a certain (small) section of the clergy in England. Ven. William Southerne was not of their number: his refusal to take the Oath was the determining factor which brought about his condemnation.

Of the Venerable Christopher Robinson, who died for his Faith in Carlisle (in what year we shall see later), practically nothing save the name of his betrayer has been recorded since the days of Bishop Challoner. Among the Knaresborough MSS. as Everingham is a 17th Century transcript of a letter of some ten large folio pages entitled: “The death of Mr. Boost written by Mr. Robinson priest, who shortly afterward dyed in the same glorious manner at Carlisle.” An extract from this document was given in Challoner and the text is now printed in full in C.R.S. But for the few known facts about the Martyr's own life we have depended almost entirely on Challoner's somewhat vague compilation of only eighteen lines.

The will of this martyr's father (John Talbot of Thorntonle Street, N.R. Yorks), to which reference has been made in a former article in this journal (Vol. II, p. 16), is printed in Surtees Soc., Vol. II; Wills and Inventories, pp. 369-371 (No. CCLXXX).

In 1639 Charles I was faced with rebellion in Scotland. On 16th January he summoned the peers to attend him at York by 1st April, with such forces of horse as their birth and honour required. Meanwhile his Catholic consort, Henrietta Maria, appealed to the leading priests in England to organize a nation-wide collection from Catholics in order to help finance the expedition and to make manifest the loyalty of the Catholic body. The superiors of the Catholic clergy, secular and regular, gave their support to the scheme, and a long list of “Advices and Motives” was drawn up, urging Catholics to subscribe. I have summarised this elsewhere. Copies of the “Advices and Motives” were sent to the clergy in various parts of the country, together with a circular letter, dated 4th April, 1639, bearing the signatures of the five superiors, Anthony Champney signing for the seculars, William Price for the Benedictines, Thomas Dade [Middleton, alias Dade] for the Dominicans, Francis Davenport for the Franciscans, and Henry More for the Jesuits. In the circular letter the superiors state that although the “Advices” are directed only to lay gentlemen, “yet we desire you (and we have answered for you) that you will employ yourself and all those that depend on you, sincerely to solicit and dispose all their minds, whom you have relation unto, as powerfully as you can, to contribute cheerfully and bountifully upon this occasion; which, as it is the first that ever we laboured in of this kind, so we hope in God it will be the last”.