In late December 1585, the abbey of Saint-Victor, on the south-eastern-edge of Paris, played host to a group of English Catholics. The journal of Guillaume Cotin, the community’s librarian, tells us that the English arrived in the run-up to the feast of the martyrdom of Saint Thomas of Canterbury. The feast itself, on 29 December, was marked by a high mass sung in honour of the saint, with a sermon [service] in English. Several supplementary masses were also celebrated by English priests. Apparently, in order to attend these celebrations, ‘English Catholics came in very great multitude’.

Recent discussion about confessional divisions in England before the Civil War concerns questions of toleration, loyalty, and politics. While the historiography of early modern Catholicism concentrates on matters of persecution, Michael Questier has demonstrated that the Catholic community in England was not as powerless, leaderless and frustrated as some have suggested. In particular, he portrays Anthony Browne, first Viscount Montague, as an influential Catholic who successfully projected a public persona of loyalism to a Protestant monarch. Catholic aristocrats faced a perpetual dilemma. On one hand they existed in confessional opposition to their monarch and society, on the other they were often servants of the Crown in their county or at Court and great landowners who seldom suffered complete social ostracism, or experienced the full penalties the law prescribed for Catholics. How did individual peers attempt to reconcile this paradox?

One can reasonably argue that the founding of Maryland, one of the original thirteen colonies in the New World, was the result of the close relationship between the Calvert family and the Stuarts. George Calvert (c. 1580–1632) was the son of Leonard, a prosperous but obscure cattle farmer, and his wife Alicia (née Crossland), ‘living in the little Yorkshire village of Kiplin in the valley of the Swale’. Whether he was born Catholic is a matter of some dispute. He matriculated, however, as a commoner at Trinity College, Oxford when he was thirteen or fourteen, and all who matriculated had to accept the thirty-nine articles of the Established Church. He received his bachelor’s degree in 1597, following which he travelled to Europe as part of ‘the grand tour’ typical of English educated gentlemen. The MA Oxford degree was granted in 1605 ‘on the occasion of the first visit of the new king… The master’s degree was conferred upon forty-three candidates, including many members of the nobility.’

Founded by William Allen in 1568 as a temporary haven for the English Catholic exiles, the English College at Douai, had given good service to the English Catholic community, but with the turmoil of Revolution, the execution of Louis XVI in January 1793, and the French declaration of war on England the following month, it became clear that the days of the College were numbered. Students, acting on advice from worried parents, made their way home to England as best they could. The story of these years is vividly preserved in a number of contemporary accounts. At first things went on generally as before: Douai was one of the last cities in the northern provinces of France to join the revolution but tension in the town was high. One of the first victims of the mob was the College printer, Charles Derbaix, a leading Douai bookseller who owned ‘The Golden Compasses’ (sub signo Circini aurei), in the Via Scholarum. Together with a local tradesman, accused of illicit dealings in corn, he was taken by the mob and hanged à la lanterne on suspicion of distributing loyalist propaganda.

How did Catholics in the first generation after the Relief Acts respond to their new freedom? The Midland District was a mosaic of missions of every kind, including urban, industrial, rural, aristocratic and plebeian. in piecing together the fragmentary remains of this mosaic, a picture emerges of the life of lay Catholics in many different contexts, and reveals something of their aspirations and outlook in the difficult years between 1791 and 1840.

From 12 April 1822 when John Henry Newman was elected a Fellow until 3 October 1845 when he tendered his resignation to Provost Hawkins, Oriel College was to be the centre of Newman's life. As Newman later recorded:

Newman went on to assert that but for Oriel, he would have been nobody, entirely lacking in influence. It was through Oriel (and the pulpit of the Oriel living of St. Mary the Virgin) that he was able to exert such a dominant religious and pastoral influence on his academic generation and those that followed. It was through Oriel that he would be in a position to emerge by 1833 as the well-known leader of that great movement of religious revival in the Church of England known as the ‘Oxford Movement’ or ‘Tractarianism’ (the name being coined in consequence of the series of Tracts for the Times published by Newman and his cohorts).