[It is with great regret the journal records the death, in his ninetieth year, of the longest-serving Vice-President of the Catholic Record Society. Bishop Brian Foley, D.Litt., became Vice-President in 1978 after fourteen years as President. Throughout his priestly life he was a keen supporter of the historical enterprize of the CRS. His most recent book was a study of the Jubilee Years from 1300 to 1975, published in anticipation of the Great Jubilee of the millennium. In tribute to Bishop Foley, Recusant History reissues an article by him that first appeared in the Venerabile in 1989 (vol.29, no.3). Acknowledgement is made to the Rector of the English College in Rome and to the editor of the Venerabile for their kind permission to reproduce the article in its original form.]

Thomas Penswick, titular Bishop of Europum, and Vicar Apostolic of the Northern District, died at his brother’s house, The Manor House, Ashton-in-Makerfield, Lancashire on 28th January 1836. He was aged sixty-three. His funeral in Liverpool was followed by his burial in the Catholic cemetery at Windleshaw, near St. Helens. He was succeeded by his coadjutor bishop, John Briggs. He inherited a district which stretched from the Scottish Border in the north to a line from the Humber to the Dee in the south. It encompassed the counties of Northumberland, Durham, Cumberland, Westmorland, Yorkshire, Lancashire, Cheshire and the Isle of Man, and although perhaps less in size geographically than the Western District, which took in the whole of Wales, it was nevertheless the largest in the number of missions, clergy and people. When Bishop Thomas Smith made his return to Propaganda in 1830, he reported 172 missions served by 115 secular priests, 31 Benedictines, 23 Jesuits or ‘Stonyhurst Priests’, 2 Franciscans and 1 Dominican, and an estimated Catholic population of 185,000. In addition there were three colleges, Ushaw, Ampleforth and Stonyhurst and four convents of nuns.

In 1577 a survey of Catholics was taken by the Archbishop of York and the Queen’s commissioners. It recorded the name, place of residence, status and worth of those who refused to conform. Dorothy Vavasour of York was noted in these records as being ‘worth nothing, but very wilful’. It is this statement that provides the inspiration for an examination of the women of Yorkshire, as a group that were vital to the survival of Catholicism, yet who are often ignored.

It seems beyond controversy to say that the most controversial subject of study for the Jacobethan period is the series of plots that occurred between 1571 and 1605. The word Jacobethan—not the writer’s—is a useful reminder of the essential continuity in important respects of the historical scene between 1558 and 1612. The continuity during this period was mainly supplied by the domination of the Cecils, father and son, William and Robert. In what would appear to be an unique occurrence of a virtual reign within two reigns in our island history, the Cecils, dominating the two monarchs with subtlety and discretion, pursued with skill, intelligence and determination the policy of turning England into a Protestant country. With their allies and subordinates in government, the aim was to turn the clock not back but into a direction from which it would never turn again.

By the time of the outbreak of the Civil Wars, may educated British Protestants considered Roman Catholicism to be an anti-religion; indeed, the Cambridge divine William Fulke went so far as to equate it with devil worship. Wealthy and powerful English Catholics attracted extreme hostility in moments of political crisis throughout the early modern period, but in 1642, fear of Roman Catholicism was even used to legitimate the terrible act of rebellion. Keith Lindley has emphasized the civil war neutrality of English Catholics, while many current historians, nervous of displays of religious prejudice, have portrayed the anti-Catholic fears of parliamentarians as cynical propaganda. Michael Finlayson has condemned anti-Catholicism as ‘irrational paranoia’, to be compared with anti-Semitism, which might, had it not been for the growth of liberal traditions in nineteenth-century England, have led to some sort of ‘Final Solution’.

William Turner in 1851 became the first Bishop of Salford, one of the original dioceses created when the English and Welsh Hierarchy was restored.

A study of the persistence of Catholic practices and traditions in the old counties of Cumberland and Westmorland highlights the great concern felt by Bishop Robinson of Carlisle (1598–1616) in regard to popish practices in his diocese at the end of Elizabeth’s reign and the beginning of that of James I. The incidence of such persistence in the Carlisle diocese, however, was slight in comparison with that of the Chester diocese in which lay the market town of Kendal in Westmorland. Here the continuance of Catholic practices was typified, not only by the persistent use of sites of old wayside crosses in funeral processions, but echoed in the townspeople’s equal determination to keep the long-established custom of the performance in their town of the Corpus Christi Play.

The details of the Gunpowder Plot of November 1605 are well known. This article deals with one of the consequences of the failure of that Plot, the search at Hindlip, Worcestershire, in January 1606, and the sequel to that, as related by the man whose house at Hindlip was searched. It is now generally accepted that Fr. Henry Garnet, the Jesuit Superior, was aware of the Plot from information acquired in confession. The Jesuit Fr. Oswald Tesimond seems certainly to have been privy to the Plot. The authorities, determined to implicate the Jesuits, issued a proclamation against three Jesuits—Garnet, Tesimond and Fr. John Gerard (who was not privy to the Plot)—on 15 January 1605–6. Garnet was in hiding at Hindlip House, a house near Worcester belonging to Thomas Habington, from early December. The house had a large number of secret hiding places. It was searched in January 1606 by a local magistrate, Sir Henry Bromley of Holt, and Garnet, Fr. Edward Oldcorne alias Hall, S. J., and the Jesuit lay brothers Nicholas Owen (who had probably built most of the hides in the house) and Ralph Ashley were discovered. Three of them were later executed; Owen died in the Tower as the result of the torture to which he had been subjected.

The portraits in the Great Parlour of the Bar Convent, York, include two of identical size and frame. The sitters both bear the name of Bedingfield and share the same illustrious ancestry. Both were members of the Institute of Mary and are seen wearing the same religious habit. They successively held the office of Superior of the convent and together they experienced imprisonment in the city’s infamous Ousebridge Gaol. There the similarities end, for two more different characters would be far to seek. It is the purpose of this paper to examine them.

Chaplains in penal times were on occasion employed as stewards, though perhaps not as frequently as is sometimes supposed; from the point of view of their employers this is not entirely surprising; on the one hand chaplains might reasonably be expected to be literate, numerate and honest; on the other hand the restrictions under which Catholic priests worked might well leave them a sufficiency of spare time for secular affairs. The interest of the letter which follows lies not in the mere fact of such a stewardship, but in the extraordinarily vivid picture it gives of what it was like for a professed Religious to be involved in running an estate—particularly when his employer was of questionable sanity. Some light is incidentally thrown on the history of Catholicism in Linton-on-Ouse.

It was to be expected that at the court of a Catholic king and queen there would be from the beginning of the exile at Saint-Germain-en-Laye a royal chapel and an establishment of Catholic chaplains and that this would last as long as the court remained there. It continued in fact after the departure of James Edward to Lorraine in 1712 and Avignon in 1716 and for a while after the death of Queen Mary Beatrice in 1718. The priests of the English Jesuit Province—the subjects of this article—remained in office until 1720 or perhaps a year or two later. It may be presumed that they stayed on, after the court had ceased to be, to care for the Jacobite exiles who over the years had gathered round it.

In any study of the pamphlet literature of the later years of the reign of James VI & I it becomes impossible to distinguish between the dislike felt by his subjects for the Spanish ambassador, Don Diego Sarmiento de Acuña, Count Gondomar (1617), and disgust at any proposed alignment between England and Spain. It is clear that hatred for Spain was so deeply ingrained in the English psyche that it could be revived at any time and, if proof of this is needed, one only has to examine the anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic propaganda literature which flourished around the time of the proposed ‘Spanish Match’. In the first instance this paper will discuss the genre in general and this will be followed by a more detailed examination of the work of Thomas Scott and Thomas Middleton.

The clearest account of the foundation of the Oblates of St. Charles can be gleaned from Henry Edward Manning’s submission of 1860 to Pope Pius IX in response to complaints raised against the Oblates in that year by Archbishop George Errington, Wiseman’s coadjutor, and the Westminster diocesan chapter. He writes as follows:

With the consecration in Southwark Cathedral of James Brown as first Bishop of Shrewsbury, the restoration of the hierarchy in England and Wales was completed. Originally intending to leave several sees vacant for a time, Rome unexpectedly hurried him into office in the face of the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill, an attempt to prevent the new Roman Catholic bishops from assuming territorial titles. At 39, he was one of the youngest of the bishops. Brown came to his diocese from the world of education. In 1845 he had joined the staff of his old school at Sedgley Park, assuming the presidency of the college in 1848. These were years of reform: he supervised improvements to the buildings, reorganised the course of studies, and introduced an annual school retreat. Before returning to Sedgley Park, Brown had been on the staff at Oscott, staying on after his ordination to the priesthood there in 1837. He was thus a member of staff when the newly-consecrated Wiseman arrived to assume the presidency of Oscott in September 1840. One might surmise that, like others at Oscott, Brown was a little unsettled by Wiseman’s flamboyance and rather bemused by the stream of visitors the new president’s presence attracted. Brown was by this time prefect of studies, an office he accepted in 1839 and which he surrendered in 1844 to George Errington, Wiseman’s former vice-president in Rome, and who, at Wiseman’s request, had come to Oscott the previous year. Brown’s time as prefect of studies had witnessed the grant of a royal warrant allowing students from Oscott to enter for external examinations in the University of London.

The confessional state in England during the eighteenth century defined itself in terms of Trinitarian Protestantism. The exemption from the penal laws conferred by the Toleration Act of 1689 specifically excluded the Catholic religion and the public profession of Unitarianism. Each could lay claim to an history of martyrdom; just as Charles Butler enumerated 319 Catholic martyrs in England since the Reformation, Arians had been burned during the reign of James I and the denial of the Trinity featured prominently among the charges of blasphemy for which Thomas Aikenhead was executed at Edinburgh in 1697. While the proscriptions and penalties enacted against and sometimes inflicted upon Catholics far exceeded those for non-trinitarianism, the public excoriation of the latter was further enshrined in the Blasphemy Act of 1698. Legal toleration for Catholic worship in England was enacted in 1791, in Scotland in 1793; Unitarian worship was not legally tolerated until 1813 in Britain, until 1817 in Ireland.

Although the Institute of Mary Ward made no stable foundation in the north of England until the founding of the Bar Convent in 1686, recusant history testifies to a fairly constant presence of its members in Yorkshire in the period 1642 to 1686. It is the purpose of this paper to identity these members, to describe where possible their place of residence and to explain why they were there.