On the morning of Wednesday 22 May 1538, the Observant Franciscan John Forest was dragged on a hurdle through the streets of London from prison in Newgate to his execution at Spittalfields. Henry VIII's efficient propaganda machine had been in action for days in advance and a large crowd had gathered to witness the event. it began at eight o'clock and reached its climax, the burning of Forest, three hours later.

In 1999 the Bodleian Library acquired a tract volume containing an hitherto unrecorded and unknown publication of William Carter. The item itself has been fully described by Geoffrey Groom in the Bodleian Library Record (Oct. 1999) and to celebrate the acquisition I gave a short talk to the Friends of the Bodleian Library on the subject of Carter's career: the present article is a considerably expanded version of that talk.

In the Royal Library of Belgium in Brussels is a manuscript which consists of over two hundred closely-written folios of English translations of Jesuit letters from Japan, or Japonia as it was then called, introduced with a prologue by the compiler ‘G.C.’, hinting fairly heavily that the translations were made in prison. Until recently rebound, the manuscript bore a Latin inscription on the pastedown, stating: ‘This book belongs to the English Benedictine Monastery of the Assumption of Our Lady in Brussels’. Although the contents of the volume are of interest in their own right, the concern of this article is with two men, Gabriel Colford and George Cotton, who have little in common except the initials ‘G.C.’ and the experience of imprisonment for religion.

The title of this paper is taken from a work written in 434 A.D.: the Commonitorium of Vincent of Lerins. Leech considered this a ‘golden book’; we will see later the significance of Vincent for Leech, while Leech's life will perhaps illuminate his own age. Calling himself ‘Peregrinus’, Vincent wrote: ‘whereas I was at one time involved in the manifold and deplorable tempests of secular warfare, I have now at length, under Christ's auspices, cast anchor in the harbour of religion’. His aim was to pass on the teaching of the Fathers and to give guidance ‘for distinguishing the truth of the catholic faith from the falsehood of heretical pravity.’

During the Thirty Years’ War, John Taylor served at the Habsburg courts in Brussels, Madrid, and Vienna. Although he figured prominently in Charles I's secret Habsburg foreign policy during the war and was one of the ‘persons of distinction’ included in the original Dictionary of National Biography, published information on Taylor is sparse. His story is especially compelling given his own and his family's connections with Continental Catholicism as well as his involvement, as a gentleman of indisputably Catholic background, in English diplomacy of the time.

General Cadogan, who had succeeded the Duke of Marlborough as commander-in-chief of the Army asked for an increase of 10,000 men in the armed forces, after the discovery of the Atterbury Plot in 1722. Robert Walpole knew that additional taxation for the standing army was unpopular in Parliament and in the country at large. He, therefore, decided to impose a tax of £100,000 on Catholics to pay for it. This was over and above the double land tax which Catholics and Protestant Nonjurors had paid since 1689. The land tax at the time stood at 4s in the pound. The Atterbury Plot was a Tory Anglican plot, not a Catholic plot, as Walpole well knew. Walpole suspected, probably rightly, that Catholics were generous in sending money to the Stuart Court in Rome. He could not prove it and neither can we for the receipts of money in the Stuart papers in Windsor Castle do not reveal the names of the donors.

Robert Suffield entered the Dominican novitiate at Woodchester on 31 July 1860 if not trailing clouds of glory, then with a shining reputation as a preacher. As Fr. Gonin, the Woodchester Prior, writes to the Dominican Master, ‘…ayant une renomée de Prédicateur’. Suffield had been chief organiser of a huge meeting in the Newcastle Town Hall on Monday 23 January that year to express sympathy with the difficulties and distress of the Pope. With the recent loss of the Romagna to the Piedmontese forces, the remainder of the shrinking Papal States was clearly menaced. A wave of sympathy swept through the Catholic world. Here in Newcastle, with its very large Irish immigrant population, feelings were running high.

The Italian Alessandro Gavazzi was a remarkable character. Priest, patriotic propagandist and preacher, he exercised considerable influence in mid-nineteenth century Scotland. Born to a diplomatic and legal family, he was the son of a professor of law in the University of Bologna. After entering the Barnabite order at fifteen, he subsequently proved a remarkably popular preacher in Naples, Leghorn and Northern Italy before serving four years in Parma, 1841–44. He claimed to have preached 4,000 sermons in fifteen years. Later when a prison chaplain-general supervising some 5,000 inmates, his reading of Beccaria turned him to penal reform and the abolition of capital punishment. In Perugia, he was alienated by the reactionary clerical domination of the university. After further service in Spoleto, Assisi, Ancona and Pieve he was silenced for his fiery liberal views until after the election of Pius IX in June 1846.