Large ‘folio’ editions of the Bible have been known since the age of printing began. Gutenberg’s magnificent editio princeps and such other editions as Cardinal Ximenes’s Complutensian Polyglot amply demonstrated the early concept that the Word of God should not only be inspiring but should also be presented in a physically impressive format. In England the Great Bible, the Bishops’ Bible and the original Authorized Version (AV) of 1611 followed this tradition.

The study of antiquarianism and particularly of the use of Anglo-Saxon precedents in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has belonged primarily to historians of Protestantism and parliament, to their studies of English Protestant antiquarians and English Protestant theories of common law, royal absolutism, constitutionalism, Laudian Anglicanism, and non-conforming Protestant resistance. Although it has been clear to everyone that Protestant interest in Saxonism was part and parcel of an anti-Catholic agenda, the Catholic side of this discourse has been virtually unexamined. The focus almost exclusively on Protestant Saxonism has isolated even Protestant thought from some of the contexts within which it developed and, more obviously, has all but occluded the importance of Saxonism to a range of Catholic arguments.

Thomas Habington of Hindlip (1560–1647), a Catholic gentleman, was the first historian of Worcestershire. Had it not been for the English Civil War, his Survey of Worcestershire would probably have been published in the 1640s. In fact it was not published until the 1890s, and then in a form and order which was very different from what he had intended. Others who worked on the history of the county (William Thomas, Bishop Charles Lyttelton, Peter Prattinton and, most importantly, T. R. Nash, whose ‘Collections’ for a history of the county appeared in 1781–2) did so on the basis of Habington’s unpublished manuscripts. In this article the genesis of the ‘Survey’ will be examined, the way in which his conception of its scope altered, his method of gathering materials, the additions he made to the work up to the time of his death in October 1647, and the relevance of his Catholicism to the Survey.

The accolade above, applied to Bishop Giffard in the 1720s, was bestowed by Edward Dicconson, then chaplain at Chillington Hall in Brewood, Staffs., the Giffards’ principal seat and hints at the combination of affection and veneration with which he was regarded by clergy and laity alike. The bishop, described by Archbishop Matthew as ‘a very old gentleman of delightful manners and deep piety’, was then about eighty years of age, having been born at Wolverhampton, probably in the opening year of the English Civil War, into a junior branch of that ancient family, referred to by Michael Greenslade as ‘perhaps the most considerable in the history of Staffordshire recusancy’. Frequently known as Joseph but increasingly as Bonaventure, the future bishop was the third of four sons of Andrew Giffard (youngest brother of Peter Giffard of Chillington) and his wife Katherine, daughter of Sir Walter Leveson, kt. of Wolverhampton, a place where the two families, also linked by earlier marriage, possessed substantial influence but which by the 1640s, as Dr Rowlands has shown, was hardly living down to its reputation as a hotbed of popery and a haven for ‘Rome’s snaky brood’, though in the following decade it was still ‘by many styled “Little Rome’”, echoing the title earlier applied to the Viscountess Montagu’s recusant establishment in Sussex.

In her essay Blessed Nicholas Owen: Jesuit Brother and maker of hiding holes—a summary of the material on the soon-to-be saint held in the possession of the office of the Vice-Postulation, Farm Street— Margaret Waugh first identified Walter Owen, an Oxford carpenter, as the father of Nicholas Owen. Michael Hodgetts, in his article The Owens of Oxford published in this journal in October 1999, laid out all the known facts about Walter Owen and his family but stressed there was no conclusive evidence to support this identification. Although Nicholas Owen’s relationship to the printer Henry Owen, a former apprentice of Joseph Barnes (founder of Oxford University Press), suggested some connection between Nicholas and the city of Oxford— the information that Henry Owen was ‘brother to that Oven [sic] who ripped out his own bowels in the Tower, being imprisoned for the Gunpowder Treason’ comes on the authority of both the government informer William Udall, and John Gee, writing in 1624—there was still nothing concrete to link Nicholas to Walter Owen.

Our earlier article discussed the family of Sir Robert Tyrwhitt (d. 1581) of Kettleby in Lincolnshire and the imprisonment of Sir Robert and several of his sons by the Privy Council in June 1580. The Council was acting on a report of Catholic activities associated with the wedding of Edmund, Lord Sheffield and Ursula Tyrwhitt at the Tyrwhitt family homes of Kettleby and Twigmore. Sir Robert’s son Goddard died in a London gaol, and Goddard’s elder brothers William and Robert were imprisoned for years in the Tower and elsewhere. We turn now to the next generation of the same family, and show that Sir Robert’s grandson and heir, Robert Tyrwhitt, became a strong supporter of John Gerard SJ and the Jesuits in England during the years c.1600 to early 1606. Fr Gerard’s autobiography strains to make this clear, within the necessary limits of discretion. But just as the identity of the Tyrwhitt martyr of 1580 was soon totally lost to view, so Gerard’s identification of ‘one of my main benefactors’ as a Tyrwhitt has remained undecoded—hidden, indeed, by loose translation, and inattention to the different ways one can be a ‘brother in law’.

Robert Cecil, the first Earl of Salisbury and James I’s principal secretary of state, had every reason for regarding Hugh Owen with intense dislike. Born at Plas Du on the Lleyn peninsula in Caernarvonshire in 1538, he belonged to a family that was completely devoted and committed to the old faith. For some time until 1571, he was secretary to Henry Fitzallan, twelfth and last Earl of Arundel of his house. He left Wales for the Low Countries in 1571 looking for the freer life that the Marian exiles sought abroad under Mary I. It was alleged by some that this was a virtual admission that he had been involved in the recent Ridolfi plot. Lord Lumley who knew him was prepared to defend him from any implication in that conspiracy. In fact the plot, like most of the plots of the period, was more likely to have been a contrivance to get rid of rivals and opponents.

Among the most prominent Lincolnshire families in Tudor and Jacobean times were the Tyrwhitts of Kettleby and Twigmore. Other Lincolnshire branches of the family were seated at Scotter, Cammeringham and Stainfield. The Victoria County History of Lincolnshire says, ‘To follow various members of the Tyrwhitt family, whose names re-appear from first to last in connexion with Romanist sympathy, is to trace the history of recusancy in the county.’ But some important parts of the history of the Kettleby Tyrwhitts have been confused or overlooked by historians, and the record should be corrected. Here we shall focus on one of the sons of Sir Robert Tyrwhitt of Kettleby, a son who died in prison in 1580. In a further article we will identify a grandson of Sir Robert who gave John Gerard SJ much financial support from about 1598 until Gerard left England in 1606.

Since Henry Foley in 1877 published extensive extracts from a set of letters purporting to have been written from London to correspondents in Venice, between January 1601 and April 1603, ‘by Anthony Rivers S.J.’, a ‘socius of Fr. Henry Garnet S.J.’, historians have found these letters valuable evidence concerning Queen Elizabeth’s declining days, the government’s secret involvement in the Appellant controversy within the Catholic priesthood (1597–1602), the ‘inch thick’ paint reference in Hamlet, the possible originating circumstances of Twelfth Night, and other matters. But no Jesuit Anthony Rivers has ever been found, and Jesuit historians have speculated about the letter-writer’s identity: Philip Caraman at one time took him to be Fr. Anthony Hoskins S.J., and Francis Edwards recently argued for Fr. Henry Floyd S.J. But Hoskins was not sent to England until 1603, and Floyd was in prison for much of the time when the letters were retailing, in a weekly rhythm, many pages of first-hand observations of events in the Court and Council, sometimes if not always in three near-identical versions dispatched simultaneously to three separate addressees.

As an undergraduate, Gladstone was enchanted by the preaching of Richard Sibthorp, but was unsure whether he could be trusted as a sound guide. So in December 1829 he wrote to his theological mentor, Edward Craig, an episcopal minister in Edinburgh, seeking an opinion. In reply, Craig described Sibthorp as a ‘very judicious man.’ Few would have dissented.

At a time of major divisions in the Protestant religious world, Sibthorp had established a reputation as a conciliator. In 1827, when the British and Foreign Bible Society was being torn apart by the Apocryphal controversy, he had been trusted by both sides to visit the Continent and report on adherence to the Society's revised rules. In the same year, he became Clerical Secretary of the Religious Tract Society, an office he held until 1836. In an inter-denominational Society, disputes over what should be published were constantly threatening to boil over and Sibthorp played no small part in ensuring that it did not suffer the convulsions that almost wrecked the B.F.B.S.

A priest who often visited Alexander Pope in the mid-1730s once observed that the English Catholics had ‘not so good hands’ to defend their cause in the late seventeenth century. The poet briskly replied: ‘Sir, I beg your pardon, we had really some very clever men, engaged on our side …’ Then he mentioned Woodhead, but Spence misunderstood and wrote ‘Whitehead’. That Pope used the pronoun ‘we’ shows what side he was on, and that he gave the pre-eminence to Woodhead shows how well acquainted he was with the controversies of the last age, for Woodhead never signed his works, usually employing the initials R.H. In 1736, his first biographer Simon Berington would call him ‘this great, but almost unknown Man’.

The history of British Catholic involvement in the First World War is a curiously neglected subject, particularly in view of the massive and ongoing popular and academic interest in the First World War, an interest which has led to the publication of several studies of the impact of the war on Britain’s Protestant churches and has even seen a recent work on religion in contemporary France appear in an English translation. Moreover, and bearing in mind the partisan nature of much denominational history, the subject has been ignored by Catholic historians despite the fact that the war has often been regarded by non-Catholics as a ‘good’ war for British Catholicism, an outcome reflected in a widening diffusion of Catholic influences on British religious life and also in a significant number of conversions to the Catholic Church. However, if some standard histories of Catholicism in England are to be believed, the popular Catholic experience of these years amount to no more than an irrelevance next to the redrawing of diocesan boundaries and the codification of canon law.

The Reverend George Dudley Ryder (1810–80), grandson of the Earl of Harrowby and son of England’s first evangelical bishop, had a promising career ahead of him in the Anglican Church. He was examined for matriculation by Newman at Oriel College, Oxford, in 1828 and soon joined the circle of Newman’s disciples: he was tutored by Newman, Richard Hurrell Froude and Robert Wilberforce, and was known as Froude’s protégé. A somewhat idle student, Ryder obtained a fourth class degree in classics in 1833 and the following January he was ordained by his father, Henry Ryder, Bishop of Lichfield. Many years later J.R. Bloxam, Newman’s curate at Littlemore, revealed that Ryder and some of his contemporaries had been refused testimonials for Holy Orders because they were known to be friends of Newman, while The Christian Observer alluded to Ryder’s advancement as an example of the abuse of Church patronage. Nevertheless Ryder’s ecclesiastical and aristocratic connections worked in his favour and he was installed as vicar of St. Werburgh, Hanbury, in Staffordshire in 1834.

When J. M. Turner came to make his sketches of Stonyhurst Hall and the neighbouring church at Great Mitton, for the first time in 1799, he was immediately struck by the melancholia and faded splendour of that part of ‘darkest’ rural Lancashire. Perched high upon the brow of Longridge, the mansion commanded sweeping views of the valley beneath, of Pendle Hill and of the distant market town of Clitheroe; while the thirteenth century church of All Hallows—almost lost in the folds of the countryside—sat squatly on the borders of Lancashire and Yorkshire, at the confluence of the Rivers Calder, Ribble and Hodder, and served as a stubborn reminder of an earlier and less secular age. Relatively untouched by the forces of industrialisation, these buildings proved a delight to the Gothic imagination of the young artist.

Seven of these letters were written to John Darell, SJ. who was rector and headmaster of St. Omers College from September 1752 till May 1759. Three are from a fellow-Jesuit, Bernard Baker in London, one is from John Darell’s sister, Olivia, who was a nun at the English convent of the Canonesses of St. Augustine at Bruges and three are from John Darell’s eldest brother, Philip, of Calehill in Kent.

Cardinal Manning argued that the Catholic Church had two services it should render to the world outside it; its first task was to save souls but secondly it should ‘ripen and elevate the social and political life of men . . .’ In 1890, however, he noted that none of the recent great works of charity had been initiated or promoted by Catholics. His successor Vaughan found that his main support in attempting to exercise social influence came, not from the English laity, but from the Irish (Catholic) M.P.s, fifty seven of whom had been returned to Parliament after the extension of the franchise in 1884. There were few English Catholics in Parliament and Bourne, after Vaughan, continued to rely on the Irish M.P.s. With the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1921 and the departure of the Irish M.P.s, one authority argues that Catholics were left with very few representatives in the House of Commons and that ‘politically since the withdrawal of the Irish members, the Catholic influence has, on the whole, been negligible.’

In addition to his major work on the English Jesuit province as a whole during the 18th century, Geoffrey Holt has made many valuable contributions to more local studies. One such is his article on ‘Jesuits in Montgomeryshire, 1670–1873’, published in 1993. In it he noted the Jesuit practice of depositing funds with a wealthy family of the district, as with a bank. Thus the funds of the Residence of St. Winefrid (North Wales) were deposited with the Marquess of Powis. Sebastian Redford, the Jesuit chaplain at Powis Castle in the 1740’s, had reason to complain of the Marquess’ dilatoriness in paying the interest due, and feared that the Society might come to regret having entrusted large sums to a family ‘whose circumstances are more and more on the decline’. His fears were justified.