Mary Ward was born in 1585 near Ripon, eldest child of a recusant family. She spent her whole life until the age of 21 in the intimate circle of Yorkshire Catholics, with her parents, her Wright grandparents at Ploughland in Holderness, Mrs. Arthington, née Ingleby, at Harewell Hall in Nidderdale, and finally with the Babthorpes of Babthorpe and Osgodby. Convinced of her religious vocation, but of course unable to pursue it openly in England, she spent some time as a Poor Clare in Saint-Omer in the Spanish Netherlands, first in a Flemish community, then in the English house that she helped to found. She was happy there, but was shown by God that he was calling her to ‘some other thing’. Exactly what it was to be was not yet clear, so she returned to England, spent some time in London working for the Catholic cause, and discovering that there was much for women to do—then returned to Saint-Omer with a small group of friends, other young women in their 20s, to start a school, chiefly for English Catholic girls, and through prayer and penance to find out more clearly what God was asking. Not surprisingly, given her early religious formation in English Catholic households, served by Jesuit missionaries, and her desire to work for her own country, the guidance that came was ‘Take the same of the Society’. She spent the rest of her life trying to establish a congregation for women which would live by the Constitutions of St. Ignatius, be governed by a woman general superior, under the Pope, not under diocesan bishops or a male religious order, and would be unenclosed, free to be sent ‘among the Turks or any other infidels, even to those who live in the region called the Indies, or among any heretics whatsoever, or schismatics, or any of the faithful’. There were always members working in the underground Church in England, and in Mary Ward's own lifetime there were ten schools, in Flanders and Northern France, Italy, Germany and Austria-Hungary. But her long struggle for approbation met with failure—Rome after the Council of Trent, which had insisted on enclosure for all religious women, was not yet ready for Jesuitesses. In 1631 Urban VIII banned her Institute by a Bull of Suppression, imprisoning Mary Ward herself for a time in the Poor Clare convent on the Anger in Munich. She spent the rest of her life doing all she could to continue her work, but when she died in Heworth, outside York, in 1645 and was buried in Osbaldwick churchyard, only a handful of followers remained together, some with her in England, 23 in Rome, a few in Munich, all officially laywomen. It is owing to these women that Mary Ward's Institute has survived to this day.

The 1688 Revolution was the culmination of an eighteen-year campaign against James and his co-religionists as idolaters of bread. The Test Acts of 1673 and 1678 required an oath against Transubstantiation for public employment, and the parliamentary debate in 1673 showed that the ground for this was idolatry. It was a strange accusation, because the age was more inclined to atheism than idolatry and because virtually all the Christian world—Catholics, Orthodox, and Lutherans—worshiped Christ as bodily present in the Sacrament. In three recent councils between 1639 and 1672, the Orthodox Churches had accepted the term transubstantiation and condemned Calvinist teaching on the Eucharist. Stranger still, the accusation of idolatry was being raised not by Puritans, but by Anglican churchmen and a Cavalier parliament. The first Test Act of 1673 (25 Charles II, c. 2) excluded Catholics from all civil and military employment under the Crown under penalty of £500 pounds and disability in law, unless they would take this oath against Transubstantiation: ‘I do believe that there is not any transubstantiation in the sacrament of the Lord's supper, or in the elements of bread and wine, at or after the consecration thereof by any person whatsoever’.

James Byres of Tonley (1734–1817) is a pivotal figure in many respects, whose life as a virtuoso has been the subject of exemplary scholarship in the fields of art history and the history of archaeology. For three decades, he was close to the centre of the circle of artists, antiquarians and art-dealers who guided and advised the grand tourists and student artists visiting Rome, then the unchallenged capital of the visual arts worldwide. His fortunes, and those of his family, are typical of those of the last generation of Aberdeenshire Catholics before the Relief Acts of the late eighteenth century and the death of Henry Benedict, Cardinal York, in 1807. Like many Scots, whose cultural or military achievements were enacted in continental exile, he is not particularly remembered nor celebrated in Scotland itself.

Apostasy among the English Catholic gentry in the late eighteenth century was not uncommon. In this period contemporary Catholic observers were concerned by what they perceived to be a great qualitative decrease of English Catholic gentry and they regarded apostasy as ‘a major and catastrophic cause of the decline’. Conformity to the established religion was a social virtue and was rewarded with social advantages; it was part and parcel of one's rise in the social scale and so was a great temptation for gentlemen outside the Anglican fold who were desirous of a service or parliamentary career. In almost every county in England many heads of old English Catholic families conformed. Indeed, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, of the twenty-four Catholic gentry families that existed in the Riding in. 1706 only twelve remained by 1780. Between the years 1754–1790 seven members of the House of Commons had renounced Roman Catholicism in order to pursue political careers and according to the contemporary Catholic priest Joseph Berington, by 1780 there were but 177 landed Catholic families in England ten of which had either died out or recently abjured their faith. Just a few conversions could have devastating consequences for Catholic communities. As David Butler points out, often ‘Catholic missions were over-dependent on the Catholic aristocracy and gentry for the continuance of Catholic worship’ and for Butler, in eighteenth-century London alone, if ‘just eight prominent families had apostatised … the Catholic missions would have lost about half of their numbers’.

Hilaire Belloc re-invented Manning's social teaching as a new political philosophy that shortly became known as Distributism. A tribute to his leadership by his close friend and fellow distributist, Gilbert Chesterton, reads that the world might one day wake up and find ‘a new democracy of distributists’:

The lifting of the ban on the attendance of Catholics at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge in 1895, although intended primarily for laymen, was soon extended and led to the establishment of St. Edmund's House, Cambridge, for the secular (diocesan) clergy and the opening of houses of study at Oxford for the Jesuits (1896) and Benedictines (1897). Many bishops, however, remained ambivalent in their attitude to these developments, fearing that secular universities were a danger to the faith and morals of Catholics, and insisted that laymen should be obliged to attend extra lectures or conferences in which ‘Philosophy, History, and Religion shall be treated with such amplitude and solidity as to furnish effectual protection against false and erroneous teaching’.

Ernest Oldmeadow, in the second volume of his biography—some have said hagiography—of Cardinal Bourne, begins the chapter in which he deals with the First World War with the following statement: