Some time in the winter or spring of 1576-7, Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, lately back from a tour of the continent, was introduced by his friend Charles Arundell to a seminary priest, Richard Stephens, and became a Catholic. Stephens, an Oxford man recently returned from Douai, had already reconciled, with Arundell, his friends and relatives Lord Henry Howard, the late Duke of Norfolk's brother, and Francis Southwell. As bright young courtiers, they scarcely fall into the category of depressed gentlemen attracted to Rome by economic discontent; but they had about them a certain sense of “outness”, and shared a resentment against the successful Elizabethan families which was at least partly responsible for their conversion. It was less than five years since Norfolk's execution; and Burghley's wardship of Oxford had ended in a marriage to his daughter which was now, like the relations of the two men, severely strained. This discontent led naturally to the idea of upsetting the established system, both in society and in religion; this, they agreed, was what they would work for.

The late Harold Laski, in a letter to O. W. Holmes, characterized Persons’s Jesuit’s Memorial as “the most cold-blooded plot for exterminating opponents known outside St. Bartholomew.” On the face of it, this tends to confirm the suspicion which was expressed by Holmes in this very correspondence, and which reviewers have voiced since the letters were published, that Laski often wrote about books of which he had a very imperfect knowledge. And yet there is a sense in which the Jesuit’s Memorial is cold blooded, iust as the whole Counter-Reformation was in a certain sense cold-blooded. Whenever the Church is faced with a new challenge she must tighten up her lines of discipline and ruthlessly prune certain: venerable practices and customs or at least establish an order of priority among them. Many view with distaste the mentality engendered by the Council of Trent. It would be well, however, to try and see what the Counter-Reformation was trying to do before we condemn it. And for a real insight into the Counter Reformation spirit few books can equal the Jesuit’s Memorial.

The College attached to the English Benedictine monastery at Dieulouard in Lorraine never consisted of more than a tiny number of students, mostly postulants. The pensioners’ “Apartments” in 1756 contained only eight rooms and a library.

William Wigges, Confessor of the Faith, is recorded in Catholic history as a priest, ordained at Douai in 1582, imprisoned in the Clink in 1584, transferred to Newgate in 1585, and brought to trial on July 5 in that year. He was acquitted of High Treason, but was sentenced to imprisonment for life, and incarcerated in Wisbech Castle, dying in prison not earlier than in 1595. From early days he was confused with William Way, as in John Wilson’s English Martyrology of 1608, and was included in lists of martyrs from 1590 onwards, William Way having been executed at Kingston in 1588.