Thirteen translations of the Imitatio Christi and three paraphrases seem to have been published between 1500 and 1700. Of the grand total of sixteen versions, nine were Catholic and seven Protestant. There can be little doubt that in addition to these printed versions a number of renderings were made, in whole or in part, which remained in manuscript. There is evidence, then, of the great and continuing popularity of this classic of the spiritual life, both with Catholic and Protestant readers. I intend to consider here the printed translations of the Imitatio with three questions in mind. What relationship is revealed between Catholic and Protestant translators? What attempt is made by Protestant translators to modify distinctively Catholic elements in the Imitatio? Is any general literary development apparent between 1500 and 1700? Conveniently, the answers to these questions can be divided into those appropriate for the sixteenth and those appropriate for the seventeenth century.

The idea for this paper came to me a dozen years ago while re-reading Will Herberg’s Protestant - Catholic - Jew, subtitled ‘An Essay in American Religious Sociology’. Mr Herberg made extensive use of survey data which, of course, are not available to the student of Elizabethan-Stuart England, but some of his most pertinent insights came from his analysis of manners of contemporary American speech. I began at that time to note and classify the ways in which Englishmen of this period described religious beliefs and attitudes. The conviction slowly formed that terminology not only flowed from religious thought and belief but in its turn influenced religious thought.

Fifteen years ago the present writers published a survey entitled ‘Ten Years of Recusant History’ (January issue, 1961). That article briefly described how this journal had evolved during its first ten years from a publication designed to supplement existing biographical works into ‘a periodical that would lay the foundations of a general history of Catholicism in these islands since the Reformation’.

This is a statement of aims which, from the vantage point of a quarter of a century’s experience, we see no reason to alter. While much excellent material, derived mainly from local records of all sorts, now appears in the flourishing crop of county recusant periodicals which have sprung up in our wake, the pages of Recusant History continue to offer extended space for the publication of long articles, or even series of articles, treating specific topics in full depth. We still believe that definitive studies of this sort, with full apparatus of sources and references, must form the necessary groundwork for any reliable general histories to be written in the future.

Such topics as we surveyed in 1961, for example biographies, family histories, recusant bibliography, and those wider questions concerning the status and fortunes of the whole Catholic body, have continued to be well represented in our pages during the ensuing fifteen years. But there has been growth as well as continuity. Looking back over the whole corpus of material published between 1961 and the end of 1975, we observe with pleasure that the previously under-cultivated period from 1700 onwards has received an amount of scholarly attention which fifteen years ago we did not dare to expect. Indeed, it has now been generally accepted that the boundaries of recusant history as a subject stretch onwards in time beyond those centuries when recusancy was a crime on the statute book. By a similar process the connotation of the word ‘recusant’ has been widened. It is perhaps not too much to claim that, by the expanded range of its subject matter, this journal has gone far towards validating the use of the word ‘recusancy’ as a general term covering post-Reformation English Catholicism even in its widest ramifications. It remains our aim to continue to explore and document its history and culture in all their rich variety.

Over fifty years ago, Louise Imogen Guiney wrote: ‘Someone, firstin the field, should write a little book, which should be a scientific andauthentic study of Dr John Donne as a Catholic’. As Guiney pointed out, Donne’s Catholicism, even when he had ceased to practice it actively, and even after he became an Anglican minister, was a continuous influence on his life and writings. However, Donne’s biographers, those before and those since Guiney, have paid scant attention to Donne’s Catholicism, tending rather to see his life as a paradoxical development fromlibertine scepticism to Protestant fideism. Between these extremes, Donne’s religious development has usually been described in terms of riddles and contradictions, with no more than passing reference to its relativelyclear involvement in the spiritual conflict through which Catholicism was repressed in Tudor and Stuart English society. The most influential proponent of this paradoxical interpretation has undoubtedly been Izaak Walton, Donne’s friend, who inexplicably likened Donne’s rather protracted Anglican conversion to the comparatively spontaneous conversion of St Augustine. Augustus Jessopp later repeated Walton’s fundamental idea, that Donne had clean rejected Catholicism at about twenty, even though Jessopp observed that Donne was suspected by his father-in-law of Catholic sympathies as late as 1602. Edmund Gosse was the first of Donne’s biographers to acknowledge the weight of evidence illustrating Donne’s persistent Catholic sympathies; Gosse nevertheless concluded that Donne’s Catholicism had been easily corrupted in the worldly atmosphere of London in the 1590’s, that he had grown sceptical of religion altogether,and that he lapsed thereafter only occasionally into fits of Catholic religion. Very little evidence of this supposed libertine scepticism can be found. Donne was far from sharing the extraordinary sceptical atheism rumoured of Raleigh or Marlowe, and the theory that he even leaned in this directionhas little support other than weak inference from the cynical tone of some of his writings. On the contrary, Donne seems to have shared the common assumption of his time, and the main lesson of his Catholic education, that there is one true religion. But his biographers have persistently seen him (mechanically mentioning his Catholic background) as a profane writer of ‘conceited verses’ converted by saving grace into an Anglican preacher.

There was a time when recusant history was written almost entirely from documents and architectural evidence was ignored, except by authors like Camm and Squiers. But at least it could be argued then that papers were more perishable than brick and stone, and in more urgent need of recording and preservation. Less than twenty years ago, in 1958, the theme of the first Oxford Conference on recusant history was ‘The Vanishing Archive’. Today, a much graver threat is that of the vanishing building. An exhibition held in London recently to mark European Architectural Heritage Year included records of at least twenty-five recusant houses that have been demolished, and in the last three months there have been two more cases which illustrate the urgency of the problem.

At the end of 1975, the Secretary for the Environment allowed the demolition of almost two-thirds of Brough Hall, near Catterick in Yorkshire. The central block of the house is Elizabethan and contains a priest-hole; about 1730 it was given a classical front, and forty years later two balancing wings were added by Thomas Atkinson. Now the east wing and all the centre except one pedimented bay are to be pulled down. This will mean the destruction of a panelled Elizabethan hall, of a Georgian room running the length of the first floor, of the hide, and of the Elizabethan friezes on the second floor. If, as often happens, the house must be reduced in size for economic reasons, the centre block should be preserved and the wings removed, as, for instance, at Mertoun in Berwickshire and (with the reluctant sacrifice of the chapel by William Ireland) at Houghton Hall in Yorkshire.

The choice of houses for this fifth article was not easy. In the first of the series I argued that the building of priest-holes took place in three stages, divided roughly by the Armada and the Gunpowder Plot, the events which mark the beginning and the end of Nicholas Owen’s work. In the second, I discussed a group of hides from the early period, at Ufton, Mapledurham and Compton Wynyates. In the third and fourth I dealt with two groups of houses where there is evidence of Owen’s work: in East Anglia at Oxburgh, Braddocks and Sawston, and in Warwickshire and Worcestershire at Baddesley Clinton, Hindlip and Harvington. In the sixth (and last) article I shall deal with the most fully documented hides of the third period, namely those used by Charles II after the Battle of Worcester. But with such a wealth of material to draw on, which houses should go into the remaining article on the middle period ?

The third and fourth articles were illustrations of the work of two of the Jesuits who met at Baddesley Clinton in October 1591: John Gerard in East Anglia and Edward Oldcorne in Worcestershire. Even to complete the picture for these two priests would require another three articles. No county is richer in hiding-places than Worcestershire and the neighbouring parts of Warwickshire, and Oldcorne’s work extended much further afield, into Herefordshire and even into Wales.

This paper is a tribute to two people whose perceptive and persevering research I have merely continued. Sister Francis Agnes Onslow, now of the Poor Clare Convent, Woodchester, using Franciscan sources more than ten years ago, thought that George Ravenscroft had been wrongly identified but was not able to prove her hypothesis because the Douai College diaries after 1654 are missing for a long period. The late Patrick Knell, working on the Ravenscroft family of Barnet, Herts, as an example of ‘schismatic’ Catholic parents who yet educated all their sons at Catholic colleges abroad, also correctly identified the glassman. The importance of this identification passed him by, however, because he was not familiar with the history of glass and did not think, in consequence, to cross-reference the recusant sources he was using with the State Papers Venetian in the Public Record Office. It is an indication of the limited sources used in the past by historians of art that, in spite of this information being available, it was possible for George Ravenscroft, the man who initiated English lead crystal in the third quarter of the seventeenth century, to remain wrongly identified for nearly fifty years.

On the Great Staircase and in the Little Drawing Room at Coughton Court in Warwickshire hangs a family group of portraits which came from Harvington Hall in Worcestershire. The earliest, of Humphrey Pakington (1555-1631), is dated 1599 and shows him in an oval frame, with receding hair, goatee beard and dark, slightly protruding eyes. He is wearing a ruff and black doublet, and the long fingers of his left hand lightly grasp a pendent jewel. His lips are set in a straight line, and the general effect is one of woodensolemnity. Close by is the portrait by Cornelius Jansen of Humphrey’s second wife, Abigail Sacheverell, a much more vivid character. She is a podgy woman with a double chin, in a magnificently padded and slashed dress of blue and silver and an enormous lace collar set off by jewellery. Here, beyond doubt, was a capable and masterful woman, an impression which is confirmed by her surviving letters. The portrait is signed by Jansen above theleft sleeve, and is dated 1630, the year before Humphrey’s death. The series continues with two portraits of their elder daughter Mary Yate (one by the school of Jansen); with one of their younger daughter Anne Audley (also attributed to Jansen); with one of Sir John Yate, who married Mary; and with one by Adriaen van der Werff of Sir Charles Yate, son of Sir John and Mary. Finally, there is a portrait (school of Lely) of Sir Charles’s daughter, another Mary Yate, whose marriage to Sir Robert Throckmorton took the Harvington estates to the Throckmortons in 1696.

In the middle of the sixteenth century there were close ties between the families of Plowden, Englefield and Sandford. Since early in the century the Plowden family estate, Plowden Hall at Lydbury in Shropshire, had been in the possession of Humphrey Plowden, but at that time it appears to have been scarcely habitable. Humphrey Plowden and his wife lived in another house at Bishop’s Castle, which may have been Blunden Hall on the outskirts of the town; and it is probable that their eldest son, Edmund, who became the most celebrated lawyer of his day, was born there in 1518. When Humphrey Plowden died on 10 March 1558, Edmund succeeded to the family estate and he then began the repair and restoration of Plowden Hall. Among the Shropshire neighbours of the Plowdens were the Englefields, who owned large estates in the Isle of Up Rossall, near Shrewsbury. Plowden’s eldest sister, Margaret, had married Richard Sandford, an impoverished member of an old Shropshire family, and she and her husband were living at the Isle of Up Rossall on a small holding that formed part of the Englefield estates. Another of Plowden’s sisters, Jane, had married Richard Blunden who came from Bishop’s Castle, but he and his wife were then living at Burghfield, near Reading, in Berkshire. In 1569, Plowden bought property nearby which included the manor of Wokefield and other land at Stratfield Mortimer, Burghfield and Sulhampstead, and at some time he acquired an interest in Shiplake Court, the manor house at Shiplake which formed part of one of the Englefield manors in Oxfordshire.

Catholic educational endeavour in England during the eighteenth century depended not only on the enterprise of individuals, but also on the fluctuations of the political situation and the degree of local complaisance. Schools were often ephemeral, though one or two founded during the century proved to be permanent, and in some recusant areas, notably in south Lancashire, Durham County, York, the North Riding and London, educational activity was persistent. Catholics had no counterpart in England for the standard offered in Grammar and Public Schools, Dissenting Academies and the Universities. They had to look for this education to their colleges and schools on theContinent, and their educational activities at home were usually designed to prepare boys for these further studies. It is against this background that this article attempts to assess the educational work of the secular priest, Simon George Bordley.

The earliest and the best known of the schools in Lancashire in the eighteenth century was that of ‘Dame Alice’ Harrison at Fernihalgh. Started in the early years of the century, the school continued until she retired shortly before her death in 1760. During her last years another well-known school, one for boys, had been started by Simon Bordley. Our knowledge of this school has been greatly increased by an account book kept by him from 1759 to 1771, and preserved at St Edmund’s College, Ware.The manuscript consists of a quire of paper folded into folio sheets and is in the original paper cover.

Each century since Cardinal Pole’s death in 1558 has produced itsown tribute of biographies; the recent development is a series of more detailed studies of the various aspects of Pole’s thought and career. A convenient point of departure is provided by the most recent life of Pole, the work of Dr Wilhelm Schenk. This was published in 1950, but the author had died in the previous June, and the work must have been done some years previously, so that it is in effect about twenty-five years old. During this quarter-century the early days of the Catholic Reform in Italy have been greatly studied, and among the works produced are biographies of quite a number of people who were among Pole’s friends or contacts in his earlier years. As this larger background comes into greater focus Pole himself is seen in new aspects; some old questions are answered, but new ones arise. Is he a mediaeval figure, or among the first of the new men? Was he the saintly character depicted by Beccadelli, or the carnifex et flagellum Ecclesiae Anglicanae as his successor at Canterbury, Archbishop Parker, thought? Are we to see him as a failure or a man who achieved much in an unpromising situation?

A number of Pole’s works became available in reprints in the early sixties, and this has facilitated recent studies. Of these the best known, and most considered, is undoubtedly the De Unitate? It has been the subject of two translations, and two dissertations which happily are complementary and together provide a deep and comprehensive analysis into its theology, political thought and significance. As the translations are published and available, attention here is directed to the two unpublished studies. The first of these, by Breifre V. Walker, was presented to University College, Dublin in 1972 for the degree of M.A., and is entitled ‘Cardinal Reginald Pole, Papal Primacy and Church Unity, 1529-1536’. When Pole went abroad in 1532 he was in effect escaping from the situation created by the King’s ‘Divorce’. Three years later Thomas Starkey, who had for a while been a member of Pole’s household in Italy, wrote at the King’s express command to ask for Pole’s opinion about the royal marriage, and the authority of the Pope. Starkey also suggested some answers and referred Pole to the works of Marsilius of Padua. The unexpected result was the De Untiate.

Catholicism owed its survival, in Sussex as elsewhere, largely to families of wealth and position who could support a chaplain. Burton Park (or Bodexton or Bodecton) was such a centre, at least from the late seventeenth century and maybe earlier. The house and estate, owned by the Gorings in the sixteenth century, passed in 1724 to the Biddulphs of Staffordshire and in 1835 from them tothe Wrights of Essex. On inheriting the property, Anthony George Wright added Biddulph to his name ; after the death of his son, Anthony John Wright-Biddulph, in 1895, the estate was sold. This essay is an account of the owners ; of the Jesuit chaplains between 1680 and 1780; and of the mission of which Burton wasthe centre.

When the Newcastle Chronicle in an editorial on ‘Irishmen in England’ in 1867 declared that ‘Tyneside is famous for itshospitality’, it was not merely voicing a random appeal for calm during the tense days of the Fenian scare. In spite of the fact that the North-East had by 1861 the fourth highest ratio of Irish to English in all England and Wales, the region had been, and continued to be, remarkably free from anti-Irish and anti-Catholic hostility. This was not because Irish immigration had been gradual: between 1841 and 1851 the Irish-born of Newcastle and County Durham—nearly all of whom were Catholic—had increased their numbers by over 200%. By the latter date, the Irish-born numbered over 25,000 and together with their English progeny comprised most of the 38,000 Catholics estimated to be in Newcastle and County Durham in 18525. In the 1830’s the Irish presence had been negligible, but by 1851 the Irish-born alone made up 5.1% of the total populationand 8% of Newcastle’s population. By 1861 a correspondent of the Nation reported of the Irish within a ten-mile radius of Newcastle that ‘except in London, Liverpool, and Manchester, there is no such Irish force to be met with in England’. Yet, despite this, only one anti-Irish riot of significance ever took place in Newcastle. This was during the No-Popery agitation of 1851 when a street preacher (by legend ‘Ranter Dick’) began a harangue in the midst of the dense population of Irish Catholics in the Newcastle slum of Sandgate. That the riotingwas never repeated nor matched elsewhere in the North-East, and that it wassoon rendered into a Geordie song more amusing than bitter, is only one of the many indications of the ephemeral nature of the No-Popery crusade in the North-East. Together with the evidence of bonhomie shown toward the Irish Catholics by, for example, Poor Law officials and city corporations, the region stands in contrast to those areas of England, Scotland and Wales where the Irish Catholics appear to have been surrounded by acrimony.

‘The abjuration of error ... is at all times a painful task.’
‘Let there be an end.’

The year 1796 was full of portent, both for the Church Universal and for its ‘little platoon’ in England. Bonaparte’s march through Italy seemed to threaten the Papacy with the fall which Berington had so complacently forecast. The refugee hordes of bedraggled French clergy gave point and substance to the general unease, and the Bampton lecturer for 1796 pressed home the parallels between the calamities afflicting the Church abroad, and those in England. Talking of the ‘circle of supremacy … fast contracting to the verge of a wretched territory’, and the ‘expiring pretensions of an anti-Christian vanity’, he praised Berington, Geddes and Throckmorton, who had ‘at length considered themselves as enfranchised from [Rome’s] spiritual domination’. The case of Bishop Berington, obstinate in his refusal to bow to the orthodox yoke and give the ‘full and open satisfaction’ demanded by Rome, brought the universal ills even nearer home. From Buckland rumours circulated that Berington’s ‘Decline and Fall’ of the Papacy was almost ready, and he was ‘on the point of attacking the Pope in his strongholds’. The Vicars girded themselves for battle. Late in 1795, Robert Plowden had published a Letter … upon Theological Inaccuracy, which had the effect of inflaming their zeal. In an attempt to clarify the meaning of the Oath, in 1790 a group of Cisalpine clergy had verbally approved a proposition stating that the Church had power ‘not to regulate by any outward co-action civil and temporal concerns of subjects and citizens, but to direct souls by persuasion in the concerns of eternal salvation’. This proposition, with the names of the clergy who approved it, appeared as Appendix IX of the third Blue Book. Plowden now claimed that it denied the power of the Church to absolve sins or to impose ecclesiastical censures; in support, he quoted the Bull Auctorem Fidei’s condemnation of similar propositions from the Synod of Pistoia. Plowden also condemned the ‘Staffordshire Creed’ as ‘contradictory to Catholic Faith’. Whatever the force of his arguments against the Staffordshire Creed, Plowden’s attack on the Blue Book propositions was a wanton reopening of old sores; James Archer described it as ‘a very stupid but, in my opinion, malicious pamphlet’. But the Vicars were in a warlike mood: they had already pored over the Bull Auctorem for its condemnation of positions ‘more or less analagous to the Throckmorton and Staffordshire clergy’s doctrine’. Plowden’s book roused them to action. Most of the ‘Blue Book clergy’ were in Douglass’ District, and urged on by Bishop Walmesley, he set about persuading them to retract. In July Douglass visited the Middle District and the Staffordshire Clergy and urged them to retract their ‘heretical’ creed; he also asked for their neutrality in the attempts to unseat Bishop Berington. But Joseph Berington had been busy rallying his colleagues, encouraging them to ‘speak out as [they] can’, and Douglass’ efforts were unavailing. John Kirk informed him that the Staffordshire Creed was ill-worded, not heretical, and that ‘should any violent measures be taken with [Bishop Berington] it is impossible his deposition should be tamely acquiesced in. Meetings must take place … and steps be taken.’

The years between Donne’s marriage in December 1601 and his ordination in January 1615 were the central period in his religious development during which, though he retained Catholic habits and sympathies, he began to refer to the Church of England as his church and ultimately took Anglican orders. Over forty years ago, G. R. Elliott pointed out how Donne’s biographers have slighted these middle years, portraying them as a merely dull hiatus between the libertine brilliance of Donne’s youth and hislater eloquent piety:

But Bald and earlier biographers have generally misunderstood Donne’s middle years, on account of their acceptance of the idea, first expressed by Walton, that at the time of his marriage Donne had long since discarded his Catholicism and was either a free-thinking sceptic or a convinced adherent to Anglicanism. This has obscured the character and crucial importance of the middle period, which (like the whole of Donne’s life and work) cannot be comprehended apart from the conflict between Protestantism and Catholicism that continued to polarise English religious life during the first decade of the seventeenth century.

The Englishmen who were members of the Italian or Cassinese Benedictine Congregation in the seventeenth century have been neglected, mainly because, unlike the Englishmen who joined Spanish monasteries, the Cassinese did not perpetuate themselves and thus did not produce historians who would keeptheir memory alive. This is a pity, since several of them are important figures: Robert Gregory Sayer (1560-1602), who gained an international reputation as a moral theologian, which, it has been claimed, remains unrivalled among Englishmen; Roland Thomas Preston (1567-1647), whose prolific literaryoutput against the papal deposing power at least assures him of a place in the history of Anglo-Gallicanism; and Robert Anselm Beech (1568-1634), who was the agent in Rome who negotiated the setting up of the Benedictine mission to England and defended it against attack.

The Anglo-Italians failed to perpetuate themselves because in 1616 they refused to unite with the other English monks, mainly in order to remain loyal to Preston, whom the others condemned for his writings. This article deals, first, with their attempt to found a community of their own at Paris, and, then, with their final years as a group. These two episodes have not been noticed before, and they have to be reconstructed entirely from manuscripts in the archives of the Archbishop of Westminster, the Abbey of S. Pietro at Perugia, the Congregation ‘de Propaganda Fide’ and the Vatican Library.

In 1701, William Nicholls, an Anglican clergyman of Salsey in Sussex, published his English translation, ‘purged of Popish errors’, of Francis de Sales’ Introduction to a Devout Life. He prefaced it by an essay on ‘The Rise and Progress of Spiritual Books’, in which he wrote:

John and Henry Donne matriculated from Hart Hall, Oxford, on 23 October 1584, aged 12 and 11 respectively. Their father’s sister was married to Robert Dawson, who kept the Blue Boar, on the corner of St Aldate’s and Blue Boar Lane, as a tenant of New College; and R. C. Bald writes that ‘no doubt they visited the Blue Boar Inn from time to time to see the members of the Dawson family’. But he does not include one clue to the Dawsons’ religious sympathies, and hence to the likelihood of the Catholic Donnes being both welcome and willing guests. In 1577, William Cole, Vice-Chancellor of the University, recorded of the parish of St Aldate’s: ‘There is one Henslowe, a master of arte of nyne or tenne yeres standing, once of Newe Colledge and expeld out of that house for poperie, who lyeth nowe at the signe of the Blewe Bore at one Daston’s and never commeth to the Churche. His host is wealthie; what he is I knowe not.’