Rev. Dr John Bede Brewer OSB arrived to serve the Catholic mission in England in 1776. Like other contemporary English Catholic priests, he had been educated and trained abroad and, even though choosing to join a religious order, Brewer expected to be posted to serve for many years at some mission in England. An inevitable consequence of being spread rather thinly throughout the country was that quite frequently many priests were left much on their own resources in coping with their location and mission. During the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries a preponderance of missions had, of necessity, been based rurally in gentry or aristocratic households where protection and economic support were available. During the eighteenth century as industrialization, population movement and urban growth all took hold new demands, personal, financial and organizational, became apparent for the small cohort of English Catholic clergy. There were four vicars apostolic to superintend the Catholic Church in England but much was left to the initiative, effort and resources of individual priests, particularly as the Relief Acts of the later eighteenth century relaxed the penal laws and gave greater freedom to Catholic clergy.

For contemporaries, the Gunpowder Plot was ‘a mother… of all crimes’, and their sense of shock, and awe, in the face of so dreadful a treason was in no way diminished by the drama surrounding its discovery.2 The arrest of Guy Fawkes outside the cellars of Westminster, late on the night of 4 November 1605, caught King James I and his ministers completely off guard. A mass of documentary evidence for the fraught days following Fawkes's apprehension confirms that ignorance, embarrassment, even panic ran through the highest counsels in the land. While a deadly strike had clearly been frustrated, with just hours to spare, no one knew whether trouble might be expected from other conspirators in the capital, or indeed, from rebels and mischief-makers elsewhere in England. Military men rushed to court, and within a week a sizeable force had assembled there under the command of the Earl of Devonshire, prepared to face and to repel a phantom enemy.3 Open panic did of course subside, as administration and country alike began to measure and appreciate the danger, but anxiety was a long time dying. The extraordinary hysteria that swept London in the spring of 1606, on a rumour that the king had been assassinated, touched the court itself and serves as a reminder that, months after 5 November, many Englishmen in high positions still stood on their guard.4

General Cadogan, who had succeeded the Duke of Marlborough as commander-in-chief of the Army asked for an increase of 10,000 men in the armed forces, after the discovery of the Atterbury Plot in 1722. Robert Walpole knew that additional taxation for the standing army was unpopular in Parliament and in the country at large. He, therefore, decided to impose a tax of £100,000 on Catholics to pay for it. This was over and above the double land tax which Catholics and Protestant Nonjurors had paid since 1689. The land tax at the time stood at 4s in the pound. The Atterbury Plot was a Tory Anglican plot, not a Catholic plot, as Walpole well knew. Walpole suspected, probably rightly, that Catholics were generous in sending money to the Stuart Court in Rome. He could not prove it and neither can we for the receipts of money in the Stuart papers in Windsor Castle do not reveal the names of the donors.

The events described and discussed in this article centre on St Joseph's Chapel, Bristol, which was opened in 1790 and was the first Catholic church to be built in the city since the Reformation.

In 1614 Charles Boscard published at St Omer The Life and Death of Mr. Edmund Geninges Priest, Crowned with Martyrdome at London, the 10. day of November, in the yeare M.D.XCI, a book which John Hungerford Pollen called ‘the most sumptuous, artistic, and, typographically speaking, the most interesting literary monument to our martyrs which our poor persecuted church was ever able to set forth’. This beautiful little book's most striking feature is a set of twelve handsome engravings by Martin Bas of Douay, one before each chapter illustrating an episode in the martyr's life. It also harbours an important allusion to King Lear, and hence to William Shakespeare.

Robert Suffield entered the Dominican novitiate at Woodchester on 31 July 1860 if not trailing clouds of glory, then with a shining reputation as a preacher. As Fr. Gonin, the Woodchester Prior, writes to the Dominican Master, ‘…ayant une renomée de Prédicateur’. Suffield had been chief organiser of a huge meeting in the Newcastle Town Hall on Monday 23 January that year to express sympathy with the difficulties and distress of the Pope. With the recent loss of the Romagna to the Piedmontese forces, the remainder of the shrinking Papal States was clearly menaced. A wave of sympathy swept through the Catholic world. Here in Newcastle, with its very large Irish immigrant population, feelings were running high.

The Italian Alessandro Gavazzi was a remarkable character. Priest, patriotic propagandist and preacher, he exercised considerable influence in mid-nineteenth century Scotland. Born to a diplomatic and legal family, he was the son of a professor of law in the University of Bologna. After entering the Barnabite order at fifteen, he subsequently proved a remarkably popular preacher in Naples, Leghorn and Northern Italy before serving four years in Parma, 1841–44. He claimed to have preached 4,000 sermons in fifteen years. Later when a prison chaplain-general supervising some 5,000 inmates, his reading of Beccaria turned him to penal reform and the abolition of capital punishment. In Perugia, he was alienated by the reactionary clerical domination of the university. After further service in Spoleto, Assisi, Ancona and Pieve he was silenced for his fiery liberal views until after the election of Pius IX in June 1846.

The world of the late seventeenth century was a very different one from that of a hundred years earlier. Religious tensions seemed to have fallen into the background. A new London was rising out of the fire of 1666 around the slowly growing walls of Wren's Cathedral, the foundation stone of which was laid in 1675; this was the age of Dryden, Pepys, and Isaac Newton. For the most part Catholics and Protestants got on together as neighbours, not asking too many questions. The penal laws, though still on the Statute Book, were disregarded. Yet for all its seeming modernity, there was a darker side to late seventeenth century English society. The world of the restored Stuart monarchy reflected a society lacking confidence, subject to scares and alarms. Popular fears of a restoration of Catholicism, a mood of discontent in the country, and political intrigue in Court and Parliament all contributed to what Lingard describes as ‘one of the most extraordinary occurrences in our domestic history’:1 the hysteria generated by a plot purported to have been uncovered by Titus Oates, information of which was given to Charles II by his laboratory assistant during his usual early morning walk one summer day in 1678.

A large collection of letters from John Thorpe, an English Jesuit resident in Rome from 1756 until his death in 1792, are in the British Jesuit archives in London. Those in this collection which date from 1756–67 were to John Jenison S.J. a student of theology at Liège and later chaplain at Wardour Castle, and those from 1781–92 to Charles Plowden S.J. chaplain at Ellingham in Northumberland and from 1784 at Lulworth Castle. This article uses the letters to Plowden written between 1784 and 1792.