In 1834 the Rev. William Riddell warned Bishop Penswick to take care when dealing with the Catholic gentry on chaplaincy business because they could be ‘very ticklish and nice’. As the younger brother of a Northumbrian squire he was in a good position to know but, in any case, the Church had long been aware of lay susceptibilities in these matters. Some sixty years previously Bishop Challoner had reminded Bishop Walton that the gentry took particular exception to the clergy ‘meddling with their temporals’. Furthermore, as the northern bishops well knew, the relationship between a patron and his chaplain was far from amicable in an embarrassingly large number of cases in the eighteenth century. In 1786 Henry Rutter, a young chaplain in Northumberland, told his uncle Robert Banister, also a priest, that he had ‘a most despicable opinion of our Catholic nobility and gentry’. Banister was of a like mind, and theirs was not an uncommon view among the northern clergy at that time. It was, moreover, usually reciprocated.