The so-called ‘Bloody Questions’ were originally put to Edmund Campion and others who were charged with him in a mass trial of fourteen priests and one layman in 1581. Campion seems to have been the first to call them Bloody Questions. They have over the centuries been the subject of considerable controversy between Catholic and non-Catholic writers, and it is worthwhile looking at them again in some detail.

One of the liveliest debates in recent early modern Irish historiography has concerned the ‘failure’ of the Reformation in Ireland and when this occurred. Originally Professor Canny took issue with Dr. Brendan Bradshaw on this topic. Canny rejected Bradshaw’s thesis that the Reformation had failed in Ireland by 1558 and argued that counter-reformation catholicism only triumphed in the nineteenth century. Other contributions were then made to the debate by Dr. Alan Ford and later Karl Bottigheimer. Ford considered the 1590–1641 period as crucial, while Bottigheimer favoured the early seventeenth century as the key era. In the light of the work of Ford and Bottigheimer, Canny reconsidered the issue in an article published in 1986. He rejected what he believed to be Ford’s overly-pessimistic assessment that the Church of Ireland clergy soon despaired of the Reformation’s success in the seventeenth century. Instead, it is contended, Protestant clergy and laymen alike were optimistic that penal prosecution might still pave the way for considerable advances at this time. Moreover, Canny further argued that Ford was ‘mistaken in treating the clergy as an autonomous group and mistaken also in allowing excessive influence to ideology as the determinant of policy’.

Worcestershire in the early seventeenth century was not a county, by comparison with some others, with a large percentage of Roman Catholics. Many of the leading families in the county, however, were Catholic, for example the Talbots of Grafton (from 1618 Earls of Shrewsbury), the Sheldons of Beoley, the Habingtons of Hindlip, the Middlemores of King’s Norton (and Edgbaston in Warwickshire) and the Wintours of Huddington. All these families had suffered for the Catholic faith by way of recusancy fines and, in some cases, by imprisonment, loss of property and even by loss of life. In this last connection one might instance the deaths of the Carthusian monk Humphrey Middlemore in 1535, of Edward Habington in 1586, and of Robert and Thomas Wintour, the Gunpowder Plot conspirators. The Catholics of Worcestershire were powerful enough and organised enough to act as a group in connection with the 1601 and 1604 elections for the Knights of the Shire, though in neither case were they successful.

In a recent article Richard Langhorne’s disclosures to the Privy Council in July of 1679 and the Government’s subsequent failure to act on this information were discussed. One person named in this testimony was a Colonel Neville, who was accused of holding some money that belonged to the Society of Jesus. According to Langhorne, the Jesuit William Gilbert had deposited £100 with the colonel. Although Langhorne did not mention it, presumably the Society either received annual rents or held a mortgage as a security for the sum. A few months after Langhorne’s discovery on 12 November 1679, the Government issued a proclamation that offered a moiety to anyone who provided information that would lead to the discovery and confiscation of hidden resources of the Jesuits. The proclamation enumerated the estates both real and personal about which the Government already had information and against which legal action had been initiated. Among the personal estates was a £2500 mortgage charged upon the estate of a Henry Neville, Esq. In the article it was wondered if Henry Neville and Colonel Neville were the same man and if the amount specified by Langhorne was but a small portion of the total amount that he owed the Society of Jesus. Shortly after completion of the article, I rediscovered Bernard Elliott’s ‘A Leicestershire Recusant Family: The Nevills of Nevili Holt,’ an important study that I had inadvertently overlooked as I researched the topic. That work renewed my interest in the subject and prompted my return to the archives.

Though Kenelm Henry Digby, a romantic convert, is a minor figure within the story of the development of nineteenth-century English Catholicism, his name is recalled in passing in many of the text books; and so, perhaps, some seventy years after Bernard Holland’s sketchy biography of him, there is room for a reassessment of his place within Victorian Catholicism, in which milieu his name was well-known, his books widely read, and his person much-loved. In W. G. Roe’s estimate, his writings ‘made a considerable contribution, if not to the thought, at least to the atmosphere of the Catholic revival.’ He was interesting as the first man to use the widespread fascination with the Middle Ages for the purpose of Catholic apologetic. When so distinguished a figure as Lord Acton noted his influence, and a contributor to the Dublin Review suggested in 1843 that Digby’s writings had helped to reduce anti-Catholic prejudice, it is of interest to reconstruct his views on, and his contribution to, English Catholicism. The task is difficult, for he was and remains an elusive figure, somewhat isolated, uncontroversial, obsessively restless and given to writing numerous volumes of poor prose and terrible meditative poetry, which, despite their autobiographical nature, are frustratingly unrevealing.

One of the most important and influential Catholic laymen of the nineteenth century was Ambrose Phillipps who in 1862 added de Lisle to his name and so is usually known as Ambrose Phillipps de Lisle. Born in 1809 an Anglican, he was received into the Catholic Church in 1825. In 1833 he married Laura Clifford, a member of one of the oldest recusant families in England and, although they were destined to have a large family, it did not impede their efforts to promote the conversion of the Midlands to Catholicism. Laura was born in Germany at Mecklenberg-Schwerin on 26 October 1811, where her father, Thomas Clifford, fourth son of Hugh, fourth Lord Clifford, was chamberlain to the Duke of Mecklenberg-Schwerin. Thomas died when Laura was only five years old and her mother did not live much longer, dying in 1822, when Laura was eleven. In 1823, Lord Clifford of Ugbrooke and Chudleigh in Devon became her guardian and entrusted her education to the Canonesses of the Holy Sepulchre at New Hall, near Chelmsford, Essex. She remained there until 27 June 1829 when she returned to live with her guardian at Ugbrooke. In 1831, she met Ambrose and two years later they married on 25 July 1833 at St. James’ Spanish Place, while the civil ceremony took place at St. George’s, Hanover Square.

The Papal Brief restoring the English hierarchy was promulgated on September 29th 1850. On October 25th the Shrewsbury Chronicle reprinted without comment a straight summary taken from the French Catholic paper, L’Univers. Soon enough anti-Catholic feeling, fanned to fury by Cardinal Wiseman’s provocative and flamboyant Letter from the Flaminian Gate, was unleashed across the length and breadth of the nation. In the next few weeks the Chronicle reprinted a whole series of letters on the controversy, an open letter from the Bishop of London to his clergy, John Russell’s open letter to the Bishop of Durham, endorsing the bishop’s remark that this example of ‘papal aggression’ was both ‘insolent and insidious’. Replies were also published: Bishop Ullathorne’s letter to The Times and an article in The Spectator both insisting on the spiritual nature of the issue, rather than presenting it as a threat to the constitution of the English Church and nation. These seemed to go unnoticed. An advertisement appeared from the clergy of Shrewsbury signed amongst others by the Archdeacon of Salop, and Kennedy (of Shorter Latin Primer fame), then Headmaster of the Schools. A petition was to be left for signing in Mr. Lake’s, in Market Square, protesting about the ‘illegal usurpation of power, insulting to our most gracious sovereign… openly intimating a design eventually to subjugate England to papal control’. The local papers seemed happy enough to encourage the debate.

Although the Irish accounted for a large proportion of the English Roman Catholic Church during the opening decades of the twentieth century, the Church ‘was led by Englishmen too and mostly pretty local ones.’ Bourne, McIntyre, Leighton Williams, Henshaw, Thorman, and Singleton represent a few of the native sons who eventually became prelates of their local sees. Likewise, Thomas Wulstan Pearson (1870–1938), born in Preston, was appointed the first bishop of the Diocese of Lancaster in 1925. Dom Wulstan had previously served in the Benedictine parish in Liverpool, an assignment which he cherished. Asked to leave this northern post to become the first prior of Downside Abbey’S foundation at Ealing, he unsuccessfully tried to resist. Reluctantly and with serious reservations he followed his abbot’s wishes and moved south. His years as the superior of this young priory, however, represent a traumatic break with the sense of personal fulfulment he experienced in Liverpool, but the barren and trying years also served to strengthen his longing and commitment to the pastoral ministry.