Writing in the Cambridge Historical Journal in 1956, G.F.A. Best introduced his article on the religious difficulties of national education in England from 1800 to 1870 with the comment ‘the peculiar problems and difficulties in the way of achieving a national system of elementary education in nineteenth-century England [had] long been so obvious and notorious that a new attempt at an objective and comprehensive view must seem surprising and rash.’ He then justified his own article on the grounds that none of the works available did the subject justice because none told the whole story. In giving only fleeting mention to the educational claims of Roman Catholics, however, even Best omitted an essential of the great educational debate that was waged over England for much of the nineteenth century and that in its earlier phases found some of its more powerful voices in Manchester.

It is the intention in this article to show how the Catholic community of the Salford Diocese in general and their first Bishop, William Turner, in particular, responded to the challenge of the new reformatory legislation of 1854.

In the Victorian period literature provided a national forum for the consideration of ideas in relation to society. Literary writings put flesh on the bones of the English anti-Catholic mind; more than the periodical, pamphlet or directly polemical literature, they vividly depict the emotions, the hidden agendas and the psychology from which sprang the age's rationalised attitudes and beliefs. When contemplating Catholicism, creative writers tended to be in a state of mental déshabillé, their feelings more visible, more unguarded than was the case with other sorts of writers, and therefore more revealing and expressive. As the classic Victorian literary anti-Catholic figure, Charles Kingsley provides the most apt focus for a sketch of the soul of the contemporary anti-Catholic tradition, especially since in his oeuvre its elements are uniquely forceful and comprehensive. A view of the fundamental motivations behind anti-Catholicism is, however, necessarily fragmentary and speculative, since their manifestations—passions, prejudices, assumptions, the national myth—where not wholly rational, either in Kingsley or in his society.

The Western District of Scotland in the 1860s saw some remarkable changes. The clash between two bishops, groups of priests and laity had contributed to a major crisis. Rival ethnic and political interests further complicated matters. An ecclesiastical, financial and political crisis seemed about to explode. In the circumstances the appointment of a new bishop to regulate an impossible situation was hardly unexpected. The appointment of Charles Eyre however was somewhat surprising.

Orestes Brownson (1803–1876), preacher, journalist, editor, philosopher and controversialist, was born in Stockbridge, Vt., 16 September 1803. At the age of nineteen he became a Presbyterian, but two years later a Universalist. He married in 1827. From 1826 to 1831 Brownson preached in New Hampshire, Vermont and New York. He became a Unitarian, and was ordained a Unitarian minister in 1834. In 1836 he organized ‘The society for Christian Union and Progress’ and began to preach the ‘Church of the Future’. In the same year he became acquainted with Emerson, Alcott, Ripley and others who were labelled Transcendentalists. The latter were the dominant intellectual figures in American life until the middle of the century.

David Brown (1803–97), a member of the Free Church of Scotland, Professor of Apologetics, Exegesis of the Gospels and Church History at the Free Church College, Aberdeen, was from 1876 to 1885 Principal of his college. A correspondence with Newman began when Brown sent Newman a copy of his work, Life of the Late John Duncan, LL.D., (Edinburgh, 1872). In a letter of 7 June 1872 to Newman, he remarked that the last chapter of the Grammar of Assent met some of Duncan's difficulties, and added, ‘towards you I feel as if in the light of such teaching I were at home, in the blessed Communion of Saints which transcends every earthly separation.’ This tone was maintained in Brown's subsequent letter, 2 October of the same year, which concluded with the words, ‘With esteem … I remain yours in bonds transcending every earthly separation.’

Of what he called ‘The Great Fear of Popery’, Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote: ‘that fear … constantly renewed, had acquired a momentum of its own. It was the English equivalent of the great European witch-craze, and it would remain formidable for three centuries, a national neurosis which could be awakened again and again: in the myth of the great Irish massacre of 1641 (still repeated, over a century later, by John Wesley), in the great scare of the Popish Plot of 1678, in the fable of the Warming Pan in 1688, even, though with dwindling force, in the Gordon Riots of 1780 and the “Papal Aggression” of 1851, ‘(sic). He might have added the Tichborne trial to the list.

The Wesleyan Church in the second half of the nineteenth century exhibited a high degree of anti-Catholicism, a phenomenon which had intensified with the ‘Romanising’ influence of the Tractarian movement in the Church of England. To many Wesleyans Roman and Anglo-Catholicism seemed synonymous and the battleground of faith was to be elementary education. The conflict began earlier in the century. When in 1848 Roman Catholic schools made application to the government for grants similar to those offered to the Wesleyans there was an immediate split in Wesleyan ranks. At the Conference in Hull in 1848 Beaumont, Osborn and William Bunting attacked their leadership. They claimed that Methodists should not accept grants in common with Catholics. Jabez Bunting, the primary Wesleyan spokesman of his age, was however rather less critical of the Roman Catholic Church than he had been previously and clearly advocated the continuation of the grant:

The following is a list, supplied by Dr. A.P. Lewis, Curatorial Officer, The Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts, of major manuscript collections relating to the history of Roman Catholicism which have been deposited in record repositories in 1996. Readers should note that some deposits may not be fully listed and the appearance of a collection in this digest does not necessarily mean that it will be available for research. Further enquiries regarding access should be addressed to the staff of the relevant repository. The complete text base of the Commission's Accessions to Repositories, together with thirty-two other digests covering a range of historical themes, is available via the Commission's website (http://www.hmc.gov.uk).

When Francis, Cardinal Bourne died on New Years Day, 1935, his friend and erstwhile collaborator in successive national congresses, George Anstruther, assistant editor of The Tablet, a paper owned by the archdiocese, referred to Bourne's ‘greatness’ as being unlike that of a waterfall but more akin to a quiet river ‘broad and deep, bearing precious freights to safe havens’. The image was supported in a broadcast of Viscount FitzAlan about the deceased prelate in which he stressed that Bourne possessed a ‘rather cold and calm reserve’ concealing ‘a profound spirituality’. The editor of the Jesuit magazine The Month postulated ‘prudent ecclesiastical statesmanship’ had marked a long term of office of over thirty years and Bourne's regular correspondent, Archbishop Alban Goodier, testified to his having been ‘among the shyest of men, so shy, that to many he remained always hidden in his shell’. Indeed, rarely has a man's memory been tarnished so effectively by his friends, all with the most uplifting of motives. The secular press was less mealy-mouthed. The Times considered Bourne to have been ‘a statesmanlike champion of religious education’ and ‘a courageous opponent of all those modern movements and influences which are calculated, openly or swiftly, to sap the foundations of family life and, indeed, the whole structure of the community’.

When the new English bishops met at the first Provincial Council in 1852 they decided that they should each hold a diocesan synod before 1854 to promulgate the decrees of the Council, and thereafter annually. These diocesan synods have usually been written off by historians as being of little interest, merely reaffirming and applying Provincial decrees. While this may be true of much of synodal legislation, the importance of the synods went beyond their strictly legal function: they played a part in establishing episcopal authority and in impressing on the clergy that the restoration of the hierarchy had not been merely a palace revolution. Many of the English missionary clergy had felt let down by the Restoration of 1850: they had petitioned Rome for a canonical hierarchy to replace the vicars apostolic in the hope that the new bishops would be less arbitrary in their rule and that they themselves would have their rights confirmed; in this context they were particularly keen on their supposed right to be consulted by the bishops in a range of matters. The events described in this article, which occurred in the new diocese of Liverpool, were perhaps the last organised attempt to get some of those rights recognised.

The lives of many converts in nineteenth-century England underwent quite significant, and often drastic change as a result of their decision to enter into full communion with the Catholic Church. Social ostracism, rejection by family and friends, and acceptance of the loss of professional advancement were counted among the risks of ‘going over’ to Rome. Conversion brought with it a discontinuity with the past; yet the Catholic careers of many of those received into the Church exhibit a remarkable continuity with the subject's non-Catholic past, if not in matters of doctrine and worship, then certainly in the field of social and apostolic goals. Father George Bampfield, educator of the poor and lower middle classes, and pioneer of Catholic evangelization in Hertfordshire and North Middlesex, is one such example. His career, in both its Anglican and Catholic spheres, represents the realisation, in albeit very changed circumstances, of a vision first glimpsed and a commitment made within the bosom of the Establishment.

The following digest of major accessions to repositories during 1995, relating to Roman Catholicism after the Reformation, has been supplied by Dr. A. P. Lewis, Curatorial Officer, The Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts. The Historical Manuscripts Commission seeks each year to collect information relating to manuscript accessions from over 250 repositories and record offices throughout the British Isles. This information is then published on the Internet via the Commission's website (http://www.hmc.gov.uk) and in a series of thematic digests which appear in a wide range of learned journals and newsheets. It is also added to the indexes to the National Register of Archives (NRA), which are available for public consultation in the Commission's search room at Quality House, Quality Court, Chancery Lane, London WC2A 1 HP, and via the Commission's website. The Commission will also answer limited and specific postal and e-mail enquiries. Readers of Recusant History should be aware that the manuscript collections noted in the following digest represent a very small part of the collected information available in the NRA.

The fifth volume in Patrick O’Sullivan’s ground-breaking series The Irish World Wide (1996) is devoted to Irish religion. In his choice of contributors and contributions, the editor has achieved a careful balance between Catholic and Protestant, the latter being a category often too ill-researched to appear in such collections. O’Sullivan’s introduction opens with a retelling of the tale of a confused sixteenth-century Irish Catholic lad who conformed to Protestantism in England, became a sailor and fell victim to the Mexican Inquisition. The introduction concludes with another American tale, also told in Janice Tranter's essay on the Sisters of St Jospeh in Australia, of a Sister from the order who was executed by Shining Path guerillas in Peru. Yet another moving narrative is Anne-Maree (sic) Whitaker’s story of the Irish convict priests and rebels who founded the Catholic Church in Australia.

Exactly forty years after the pioneer bibliographical enterprise of Allison and Rogers, later extended by Thomas Clancy, three Dutch academics and an English Benedictine historian have continued the work by listing details and locations of vernacular Catholic publications, now no longer clandestine, between 1701 and 1800.

When the subject of German Liberal Catholicism is raised alongside Gladstone's name, one is initially directed to the Munich historian and theologian, Ignaz von Döllinger (1799–1890). Few biographies of Gladstone omit a description of his first meeting with the German historian on September 30, 1845. The initial contact between the two men was certainly significant in Gladstone's career, but what is often not related is the full context of that meeting. Too often the incident is framed by their later meeting and correspondence, the Vaticanism controversies, and Döllinger's own opposition to the declaration of papal infallibility. At the end of his career, Gladstone himself interpreted their relationship in light of their later association, writing: ‘Nothing ever so much made me anglican versus Roman as reading in Döllinger over forty years ago the history of the fourth century and Athanasius contra mundum.’

Newman and Manning failed signally to achieve a relation of mutual peace and concord during life. But the re-discovery, in recent scholarship, of the sharpness and fertility of Manning's theological mind, is bringing about, if not a posthumous pax anglica between them, then at any rate a greater parity of intellectual esteem on the part of modern students. The collection of essays By Whose Authority? Newman, Manning and the Magisterium (1996), edited by the distinguished editor of Recusant History, and largely the fruit of symposia of 1993^ at the ‘International Institute for the Advancement of Newman Research’ at the University of Freiburg, is a major contribution to this process. As its title suggests, its common thread is ecclesiology, and notably the issue of Christian authority so central to any doctrine of the Church, since such doctrine cannot evade the question of where the exousia (‘powerful authority’) given by Christ to the apostles is now to be found — if anywhere — on earth.