The Catholic clergy in post-Reformation England have often, it must be confessed, behaved more like flamingoes than croquet mallets, especially in the seemingly endemic disputes between the secular priests and the regulars. Some men are islands, and because Richard Smith was one of these, the dispute that centred on his personality became a precedent for at least one major quarrel that followed it. This being so, it may be worth recording the fact that the Benedictines, not the Jesuits, had the dusty glory of assuming the lion's share of opposition to the Bishop for the first five years of this dispute.

The Smith dispute itself was not without parentage, for its antecedents go back to the Appellant conflict of the 1590s, to the controversy between a section of the secular clergy and the Jesuits over the Oath of Allegiance (1606) and to the demand for the creation of bishops in England (1607-23). A party among the Benedictines favoured the Oath, against the Jesuits, and other monks supported the plea for bishops. But in time the Benedictine majority committed itself against the Oath. And in 1611-12 there was a curious anticipation of the Smith affair, in which high words were exchanged between Archpriest George Birkhead and Thomas Preston (for the Cassinese Benedictines) concerning the jurisdiction of the former over a delinquent monk. But the Anglo-Spanish monks supported Birkhead.

The Protestant societies engaged in evangelizing the Irish in London were mostly staffed by laymen, but had the enthusiastic aid and counsel of the Evangelical clergy, and were only some of the institutional strands in the Evangelical Vicar's encounter with urban poverty from the early 1830s, as the Evangelical urban parish was divided into units of manageable size, and developed lay forms of district-visiting to bring under parochial supervision the huge urban slum populations: or, as the Evangelicals put it themselves, as they brought a remedy to the material and spiritual destitution of the great godless cities, and to London, the greatest and least godly of any. The lay societies needed clerical approval, patronage and protection, and the Evangelical clergy worked as hard as their laymen.

The embassy of don Diego Sarmiento de Acuña during the later half of the reign of James I has remained the topic of considerable debate as to its influence over the politics and attitudes of the first Stuart monarch. It is time, perhaps, to move the discussion to an opposite quarter by asking whether there were any English efforts to sway the ambassador, and if so, what impact did they have on the embassy's performance. One interesting example of this is the evidence that English Catholics approached Sarmiento upon his arrival in the summer of 1613 with a new suggestion for a closer liaison. The court of King James had been already alerted to this prospect by a letter of Sir John Digby from Madrid of the preceeding year. Here he noted that there had been dissatisfaction among the Catholics of his acquaintance over the unproductive performance of don Alonso de Velasco previously on their behalf. He offered as a forecast about his successor: ‘And hereupon it hath been held fitt, that the succeeding ambassadour who is to come shortly into England, should rather take the course of Intelligence and dependency of our English papists on the king of Spaine transferred unto him by don Pedro [de Zufiiga] then by don Alonso de Velasco …’ Digby expected that a large sum of money was to be available to the next envoy to ‘revive and reestablish the meanes of Intelligence’ that were available as before.