The history of English Roman Catholicism from the end of the sixteenth century right through to the nineteenth has as one of its main features the rivalries between seculars and regulars, especially between the seculars and the Jesuits. As this dispute primarily, but not exclusively, concerns the clergy it is most clearly seen in the history of those colleges which provided clergy for the English mission. The early history of the English College in Rome is not only the story of English and Welsh rivalry, but of frequent objections to the Jesuit administration and accusations by the seculars of the enticement of students to join the Society. Similar cases are to be found in the history of Saint Alban’s College Valladolid, but in this college there is an added dimension. Not only did the seculars complain about the Jesuits but the Jesuits complained of students being enticed away to the Benedictines. Later, a certain amount of bitterness arose out of the establishment of a college directed by the seculars in Lisbon. The Jesuits considered that they should have been placed in charge. What is more, there were even quarrels among the catholics detained in Wisbech castle. The ‘stirs’ there bore a remarkable resemblance to those at the college in Rome. As Aveling remarks about English Roman Catholicism ‘Historians have been defeated by its immense complexities of ecclesiastical intrigue and embarrassed by its sheer ferocity’. The quarrels not only provoke a feeling of distaste in the modern mind — why couldn’t these people resolve their differences and get on with their spiritual mission? They also instil puzzlement – are these disputes to be explained solely as political intrigue and in-fighting within the Catholic party? If so, how could such a cause appear attractive or plausible? How could such a house divided against itself, stand? I want to suggest that there is an element often overlooked which, although not explaining fully these intrigues and dissensions, nevertheless might help us to understand better what was going on. This can be called the positive attraction of the ascetic ideal. Bossy has stated in reference to the history of the English Catholic community ‘martyrology pointed this subject historiographically speaking up a cul-de-sac’. I want to suggest that cul-de-sac or no, the consideration of martyrdom and of life as a preparation for martyrdom is a path that can lead to a vantage point from which one can view this clerical back biting and contentiousness in a clearer light. Evenett in his Birbeck Lectures in 1951 pleaded for a better integration of the history of spirituality into ecclesiastical history and in particular devoted some space to a consideration of the origins of the Catholic revival in Spain. He pointed out the overlap of those who abandoned the world with those who remained in it, reforming its practice. Speaking of the Carthusians of the sixteenth century he said ‘A larger interest and practical usefulness in the external affairs of the Church were manifest by them at this period than we are accustomed to associate with modern Parkminster or Miraflores’. Following these lines let us turn to certain aspects of Spanish spirituality and its relationship to England.

In this paper I shall discuss two letters apparently sent in 1399 by the University of Oxford to Richard II, in answer to the king’s request for advice on whether to withdraw obedience from pope Boniface IX in an endeavour to end the great schism. There has been a controversy about which letter represents the official view of the university, and this argument has largely arisen, I suspect, because hitherto one of the letters has been studied in its printed form which is incomplete and does not give a true idea of its arguments. I will also consider how these letters are to be seen in the context of the final stages of Richard II’s policy on the schism.

To begin, as is natural, by considering the sedes episcopales of early England is to realise how little we know of its significant places—even to use the word ‘town’ is to beg a question. It is certain that some sedes were established at major centres of authority. Bede used metropolis to describe London and Canterbury and by that he meant the capital of a kingdom. Gregory the Great was probably wise in selecting London as the seat of an archbishop, an intention in which he seems to have persisted even after he was informed of English conditions. Not only was it the capital of a kingdom but it had geographical advantages which Canterbury could not rival. Even though Canterbury was established as the archbishops’ sedes there are indications that already from the seventh century they were using London as a meeting place, and perhaps as a dwelling place, at least on occasion. No major council of the early English church was held at or near Canterbury. York’s position in the north probably resembled that of London in the south. Our view of it has been transformed by Phillips’s excavations, which have shown that the great headquarters building of the legionary fortress was maintained and used, at least in part, until well after the conversion period.

Historians of early monasticism in Frankish Gaul either have little to say about the monastery founded by St Evroul or, like Dom Laporte, devote their attention to a discussion of the probable date of his life. The disappearance of almost all early documentary sources is one reason for this: there was certainly a break in the occupation of the site for perhaps half the century between the destruction of the monastery in the tenth century and its refoundation in 1050, and only one charter, dated 900, was rescued and copied in the eleventh century. The fact that there has been no systematic excavation of the site, so that archaeological evidence of buildings before the thirteenth-century church is lacking, is another. Early annals and reliable lives of other saints have nothing at all to say on the subject. The first historian to tackle it, Orderic Vitalis, writing in the early twelfth century, had to admit that he could discover nothing about the abbots for the four hundred years after St Evroul; and he had to draw on the memories and tales of the old men he knew, both in the monastery and in the villages round about. Needless to say he harvested a luxuriant crop of legends and traditions of all kinds. The problem of the modern historian is to winnow a few grains of historical truth out of the stories that he garnered, and the hagiographical traditions, some of which he did not know.

In the Lancet for 26 November 1904, there was a brief and caustic account of ‘curious psychological phenomena...in connexion with the religious upheaval in progress’ in Wales, in which ‘the chief instigator of this tumult’ [that is, Evan Roberts] is quoted as saying to a journalist who interviewed him for the Western Mail: ‘When I go out to the garden I see the devil grinning at me but I am not afraid of him. I go into the house, and when I go out again to the back I see Jesus Christ smiling at me.’ The Lancet also cited a description of the young revivalist by the same journalist: ‘His restlessness is marvellous, he is walking about all day with the springiness of a man treading on wires, his arms swaying unceasingly’; and referred to accounts of the revivalist lying on the floor at meetings for long intervals ‘weeping and writhing in agony’. The Lancet commented that if among the friends of the preacher there were any medical practitioners it would be a kindness on their part to point out to him ‘ the peril which menaces his intellectual equilibrium’. This judgement was shrewd for towards the end of 1906 Evan Roberts had broken down, and he never sufficiently recovered from the intense and prolonged nervous excitement of the revival period, but lived in retirement as a near recluse in England from 1906 to 1925, and thereafter in South Wales until his death in 1951. It is a sad story of a young former miner and blacksmith from the background of deep piety in the Welsh calvinist methodist chapel at the village of Loughor in Glamorgan, who was preparing himself for the ministry at a denominational preparatory school prior to theological college training - a man sincere, sensitive and deeply religious, earnestly praying for a revival of religion in Wales - who was caught up by the wave of intense religious emotion which the revival released and who found himself shining before the world in excited newspaper reports throughout Britain and Europe in a blaze of glory, fanned by journalists and religious publicists, as brief as it was excessive.

Gallicanism - the name given to the general theory that the Church, especially the Church in France, is free from the jurisdiction of the pope, while remaining Roman and Catholic - is familiar to most historians. The existence of such a thing as Anglo-Gallicanism, on the other hand, seems scarcely credible. Post-Reformation English Catholics present the image of a persecuted and retiring group of people, who, in order to preserve their corporate identity, became more Italianate in their culture than the Italians and in their theology more papalist than the popes; and of the majority of English Catholics this was true. But throughout their history there runs a thin red line of dissent, which passes from the Appellant priests in the late sixteenth century, via Blackloism in the seventeenth, to Charles Butler, Joseph Berington and the Catholic Committee at the dawn of emancipation. Gallicanism, and perhaps its English counterpart, were given a death-blow by Napoleon’s application of papal authority to the French bishops. But Anglo-Gallicanism was an unconscionably long time dying, for at Downside in the early nineteenth century William Bernard Ullathorne, later bishop of Birmingham, was taught theology from Gallican textbooks. In this tradition a prominent part, in terms of impact and literary output, was played by another Benedictine, Thomas Preston, alias Roger Widdrington.

Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right’. Randolph Churchill may never have uttered these emotive words during his visit to Ulster in 1886—they appeared in a public letter to a Glasgow Liberal unionist—but they undoubtedly expressed the belligerence and self-righteousness of the Ulster protestant resistance to the prospect of home rule for Ireland. Joseph Lee has observed correctly that ‘Orangemen did not need to be told that they were right or that they would fight’, but after 1886 it was not only Orangemen who made such claims, nor even opportunist tory politicians like Churchill, but protestant churchmen and solid middle class citizens and farmers who would previously have distanced themselves fastidiously from Orangeism. In this paper we shall examine the encouragement and support given by protestant churches and churchmen—Presbyterians in particular—to the movement to resist home rule by force in the period 1912–14.

When Christian missionaries penetrated sub-Saharan Africa during the nineteenth century, three main persecutions of their converts caught the attention of Europe. The earliest took place in Madagascar between 1837 and 1857, when several hundred converts attached to the London Missionary Society were killed. The last of the three occurred in the Buganda kingdom of East Africa and culminated on 3 June 1886 when some 26 Baganda Christians were burned on a single pyre. Both these persecutions took place in autocratic and expanding kingdoms whose modernising rulers had initially welcomed missionaries for their skills. In both kingdoms the missionaries converted younger members of the ruling class. In both, the deaths of the modernising rulers precipitated traditionalist reactions in which converts were killed more to discourage and control Christianity than to extirpate it. Both persecutions were bounded in time. Both failed, leading only to further Christian expansion, the capture of power by Christian modernisers, and their use of the authoritarian political institutions to create overtly Christian kingdoms.

Episcopal control proved to be a very mixed blessing for the mediaeval universities of northern Europe. When tempered with understanding and restraint, episcopal power was a most benevolent force which could serve to promote the best interests of nascent university structures. In so many instances, episcopal aid was a veritable sine qua non of university survival. For example, it is hard to imagine that the fifteenth-century Scottish universities could have survived at all without the sustained, enlightened treatment that they received at the hands of their episcopal sponsors. In this sense, the term ‘episcopal control’ bears misleading connotations. For the Scottish bishops had no thought of effecting a permanent episcopal stranglehold over the universities they had brought into being. On the contrary, they freely gave of their wealth and energies in the realization that adequate endowments and organizational maturity would inevitably bring full independent status to these university guilds. To this extent, the bishops who founded the universities of St Andrews (1413), Glasgow (1451), and Aberdeen (1494–5) are truly representative of the magnanimous and liberal episcopal outlook which pervaded the university scene in northern Europe towards the close of the mediaeval period. This contrasts strikingly with earlier episcopal attitudes. For in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries episcopal authority had all too often been channelled in a direction aggressively antithetical to the growth of the corporate independence of the university guilds. The notorious efforts of the bishop of Paris and the chancellor of Notre Dame to stifle the independence of the Parisian masters is but an extreme example of the kind of complete divorce that could arise between the academic guild and the ecclesiastical authorities.

In the drama of English church history in the nineteenth century, the reverend Mark Pattison, Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford, from 1861 to 1884, has hitherto been accorded a minor and somewhat transient role. He has appeared in two guises: first, as an Oxford Tractarian who, compelled by Newman’s secession in 1845 to choose between the Church of England and of Rome, opted for the former, but found his faith so unsettled by the process that he eventually lost it altogether; and secondly, as one of the contributors to that landmark—and landmine—of Anglican theology, Essays and Reviews. The argument of this paper is that his role was in fact both more constant and more considerable: an exploration of conflict between learning and religion, reason and faith; a conflict which in one way or another spanned his life, and in which reason did not merely criticise and challenge religion, but also aspired to replace it. In these two forms the conflict of learning and belief was, it need hardly be said, a key element in the so-called ‘Victorian crisis of faith’; insofar as Pattison’s career embodied it, he becomes a representative figure of the experience of his time, and so takes his stand, if not at the centre, then certainly in the foreground of the ecclesiastical stage.

‘Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.’ The carrying out of this injunction has been interpreted differently in different ages. Professor Rupp reminded us in an early book that sixteenth-century Puritans and Protestants were not Victorian Christians in period costume. Calvin and Knox would have been hounded by the Lord’s Day Observance Society if their views on Sunday games had been known to Victorian evangelicals. During the years 1770–1870 there was an increasing strictness and rigidity with regard to ‘the world’. First of all there was the question did the world belong to God or the devil. Most evangelicals in 1770 would have said that it belonged to God, but by Victorian times they were not so certain. Abner Brown, speaking of one parson’s wife, says: ‘When her fine manly boys came home for the holidays, she would not allow them to stand at the window of their father’s parsonage without making them turn their backs so as not to look at the romantic views by which the house was encircled, lest the loveliness of “ Satan’s earth” should alienate their affections from the better world to come.’ On the other hand Lord Mount Temple when censured by friends for attending the Queen’s fancy-dress ball replied: ‘This is God’s world by right, and not the devil’s. Our business is to subdue it to its lawful king, and not to abandon it to the enemy.’ With regard to pleasures and amusements there was a growing strictness; I was able to give an example of this with regard to the Venn family in John Venn and the Clapham Sect.

On his way to one of the early meetings of the church service society, Story met Charteris on the street, who asked what were their aims. He replied, ‘To restore the ring in marriage, the cross in baptism, and the denial of the cup to the laity’. Charteris fled in horror.

Before discussing the renaissance of public worship in the church of Scotland it is necessary to look at the background. The lineage of reformed worship can be traced from Diebold Schwarz’s translation of the Hagenau Missal into German in 1524 through Bucer and Calvin, both of whom desired weekly communion, to the Scottish Book of Common Order (1564). When the civil authorities forbade weekly communion, Bucer and Calvin did not prepare an order of service for Sunday morning, but rubricated the order for communion as to how it should end when there was no celebration of the supper: that is, the eucharist was the norm for public worship.

It is well known that the church of England, in the time of Charles I, showed a special interest in the eastern church. Archbishop Laud patronised Greek and oriental scholarship. As its chancellor, he enriched Oxford University with Greek and oriental manuscripts and made plans to print them. He projected a Greek press at Oxford and achieved one in London. He obliged the king’s printers to print three Greek texts. He also provided the learned press at Oxford with Arabic type. He then sent qualified scholars to the Ottoman empire in search of more manuscripts. Meanwhile he endowed the study of the Hebrew and Arabic tongues.

Although there were both urban and rural monastic communities in the Frankish kingdoms in the Carolingian period, far more is known about the landed monasteries in the countryside regarding both their internal organisation and the relationship between them and the rural community in which they lived and over which they were the lords. The statutes of Adalhard of Corbie for example provide information concerning the monastery both within the monastic community and on its estates, and show us the abbey as the centre of an agricultural region. The monasteries in the towns on the other hand are much less well-documented and the evidence for Carolingian towns themselves is both sparse and difficult to interpret. If a town is understood to be ‘a concentration of population larger than the neighbouring agricultural settlements in which there is a substantial non-agricultural population which may be concerned with defence, administration, religion, commerce or industry’, there are not very many Carolingian centres for which enough evidence survives to justify their being called towns. Valenciennes for example, described recently as une ville carolingienne, is mentioned in the sources occasionally as a portus and seems to have succeeded Farrars in importance in the region sometime in the eighth century. In the time of Charles the Bald it had a mint, and Charlemagne, Charles the Bald, Lothar I and Lothar II are all known to have issued charters from a royal palatium at Valenciennes. There were several churches and the abbey of St Salvius in the settlement, and it is likely that some trading activity went on. But other than that Valenciennes was a settlement which carried on some sort of economic activity, very little is known. The abbey of St Amand, a rural monastery nine miles from Valenciennes, achieved a far more influential and important position in the kingdom than the town of Valenciennes ever did.

In 1245 the General Chapter of the Cistercian Order gave reluctant approval to the establishment of a house of studies at Paris, and in so doing sanctioned a major breach with the traditions and practice of the Order. The new house grew rapidly. Accorded papal protection in 1246, it was already necessary to move to a more extensive site a year later. By 1250 student monks had been admitted to the new buildings of the Chardonnet, and, though its constitution continued to be the subject of capitular legislation, the new house was fully established, under the jurisdiction of the abbot of Clairvaux, but as a centre of studies for the whole Order. In January 1256, ten years after the decision of the General Chapter, Guy, abbot of l’Aumône, became the first cistercian to incept in theology and to receive the licence to teach.

Everyone has his favourite squibs to illuminate the animosity of the devotees of the Christian application of modern knowledge towards the partisans of religious revival. R. B. Aspland, the unitarian, summed them all up succinctly in the early nineteenth century in his case against Wesleyanism. ‘Wine’, he declared, ‘is the beverage of the gentleman, spirits of the herd. So with religion’. Something of this edge had been there from the beginning, long before attitudes had been struck and the French Revolution had become a divider of spirits everywhere. Much of the fascination of the Turretini correspondence is provided by the conscious sense of intellectual superiority of the Swiss fathers of rational orthodoxy. ‘We are here much occupied with the scandalous affairs of Toggenburg’, writes Jean Gaspard Escher with an almost audible turn of the nose. ‘These are mountain people rather like Vaudois, Miquelets or Camisards’, and their murderous politics were of the Ulster variety. Neither the Toggenburgers, nor the Vaudois or Camisards were part of the history of religious revival, but they were very like Protestant minorities from Central Europe who were; the Salzburgers, for example. ‘The majority of these men’, writes Escher of the latter, ‘can neither read nor write; their fundamental doctrine is that worship is due to God alone and that salvation is by Jesus Christ. This doctrine fills them with a horror of popery: . . . they are ill-instructed in the other articles of religion. They know by heart some fine passages of scripture and some Lutheran hymns to which they hold’. Pastorally, if not confessionally, the mountain men were a different cup of tea from the practitioners of polite learning; but as late as 1800 it was possible to turn American methodists and baptists out in droves to vote for the deist Jefferson, and it is the purpose of this paper to suggest that the fate of the revivalist and that of the men of enlightenment was more closely linked at an early stage than the text-book categories usually suggest.

In, a book of 1567 on the lives and actions of past popes and cardinals written by Girolamo Garimberto, in the section on avarice, is to be found this judgement on Cardinal Francesco Armellini (1470–1528). ‘He truly is to be considered rich who is content to live with what he has, while he who is unhappy with what he has accumulated may be considered poor; and measured in these terms one can say that Francesco Armellini was very poor indeed.’ Given his posthumous, and indeed his contemporary reputation, of which this passage is entirely typical, Francesco Armellini would appear to be an ideal figure through which to approach the general subject of the Church and wealth in this period.

Even quite eminent Tractarians tended to think that, however impossible things might be in the Church of England, the colonies provided the sort of field where they could create the kind of Church in which they really believed. That Church would follow patristic patterns, of course, would be free from the nexus of establishment, and would be governed by synods. As regards South Africa they nourished particularly high hopes. Robert Gray, the first Bishop of Cape Town, was campaigning for synodical government, the creation of ecclesiastical courts to replace the Erastian Privy Council, and to check and outlaw the heresy of Bishop Colenso. It looked so very much as though this were a situation—heresiarchs and councils locked in battle—straight out of the pages of early church history. So when Gray lost his case against Colenso in the Privy Council in 1855, Dr Pusey wrote in a letter to the Churchman, ‘It is no loss to us that it is discovered that the Queen had no power to give the temporal powers which the former legal advisers of the Crown thought she could.. .The Church in South Africa, then, is free.’

My motives in choosing this subject are: to respond to the invitation of our chairman; to expound the conviction that the persistence of French Catholicism through the crises of the Reformation was largely the result of the voluntary association of French Catholics; and to try to discover whether there was anything in Catholic theological or pastoral teaching of the period which might have given these associations a theoretical perspective, or grounded them in some kind of associative conception of the Church. I add that, despite the very considerable importance of the subject, one might even claim its decisive importance for the outcome of the wars of religion in Europe as a whole, it has (with some shining exceptions) not received very much attention from historians, and that in England essential texts and studies are hard to come by.