In 1577 a survey of Catholics was taken by the Archbishop of York and the Queen’s commissioners. It recorded the name, place of residence, status and worth of those who refused to conform. Dorothy Vavasour of York was noted in these records as being ‘worth nothing, but very wilful’. It is this statement that provides the inspiration for an examination of the women of Yorkshire, as a group that were vital to the survival of Catholicism, yet who are often ignored.

A study of the persistence of Catholic practices and traditions in the old counties of Cumberland and Westmorland highlights the great concern felt by Bishop Robinson of Carlisle (1598–1616) in regard to popish practices in his diocese at the end of Elizabeth’s reign and the beginning of that of James I. The incidence of such persistence in the Carlisle diocese, however, was slight in comparison with that of the Chester diocese in which lay the market town of Kendal in Westmorland. Here the continuance of Catholic practices was typified, not only by the persistent use of sites of old wayside crosses in funeral processions, but echoed in the townspeople’s equal determination to keep the long-established custom of the performance in their town of the Corpus Christi Play.

In any study of the pamphlet literature of the later years of the reign of James VI & I it becomes impossible to distinguish between the dislike felt by his subjects for the Spanish ambassador, Don Diego Sarmiento de Acuña, Count Gondomar (1617), and disgust at any proposed alignment between England and Spain. It is clear that hatred for Spain was so deeply ingrained in the English psyche that it could be revived at any time and, if proof of this is needed, one only has to examine the anti-Spanish and anti-Catholic propaganda literature which flourished around the time of the proposed ‘Spanish Match’. In the first instance this paper will discuss the genre in general and this will be followed by a more detailed examination of the work of Thomas Scott and Thomas Middleton.

During the reign of Elizabeth I, English Catholicism experienced a degree of persecution that was meant to ensure the extirpation of the old faith. However, Elizabethan anti-Catholic laws had an ambiguous effect upon the recusant population of England. Although the Roman Catholic faith initially suffered greatly, yet by the end of the reign it was rising again with force. The unique vocation of Yorkshirewoman, Mary Ward (1585–1645), can be seen as an eloquent illustration of this new English Catholic spirit and as the embodiment of an English missionary determination to further the Catholic cause.

In the first part of this study, attention was focused primarily on three organisations; first, the Society of Charitable Sisters, founded in 1814, a society unique in Catholic affairs of the time, being a voluntary self regulating society of lay women, married and single, who devoted their lives to assisting the impoverished in London; second, the Catholic Club founded by W.E. Andrews, also in 1814, with the purpose of bringing together the Catholic artisan and working class Catholics to collaborate in raising funds for a variety of charities; third the evolution of Catholic libraries in London from 1822, which generated unexpected and fruitful diversification. What became clear from the study of these three groups and others connected to them was the range and variety of the charities and the fact that many of these were established and run by people from the working and artisan classes, a large proportion of whom were Irish.

Since the publication in 1964 of Conrad Charles’s article on the origins of parish missions and, in 1978, of Declan O’Sullivan’s list of Passionist missions in Staffordshire from 1842 to 1850, no historians have made a detailed study of the missionary activities of the Passionists in the mid-nineteenth century. Even Conrad Charles, within the parameters he had set himself, took only an overview of the parish missions given by the Passionists, while he also included material on the similar activities of the Rosminians and Redemptorists. The purpose of this present article is to analyse the nature and extent of the missionary apostolate of Dominic Barberi, the pioneer of the Passionist Mission to North West Europe, with particular reference to the impact of the Irish on his missionary activities in England.