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.

It is more than twenty-five years since the English College Lisbon closed. While it may still be too soon to give a complete account of that closure, one can consider some of the events in its more recent history that preceded its final end. The closure cannot be attributed solely to the conditions obtaining in 1971 and the decline in the recruitment to the secular clergy of England and Wales. In that year vocations to the priesthood had not yet reached their lowest point. Moreover, throughout its 350 years Lisbon had not depended for its viability on enrolling a large number of students. It had always been a small college. Although its primary purpose was to prepare men for the priesthood it had frequently found itself having to fulfil other functions in addition to those of a seminary.

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.

This branch of the Pigotts can be traced back to Adam Pigott (d.?1737), a London merchant, member of the Cutlers’ Company where his mark of a dolphin was registered in 1664, who was residing near Temple Gate in 1676. In 1678 Adam Pigott and James Allen negotiated a lease from the Duke of Bedford for the construction of Covent Garden Market, with the obligation to pave the area and construct houses and shops. Adam’s wife is not mentioned in his will and presumably predeceased him, but there were at least two sons, Nathaniel (1661–1737) who died shortly after his father, but through whom this story continues, and Adam (1673–1751) who entered the Society of Jesus at Watten, near St. Omer, was professed in 1694 and, after serving as chaplain at Calehill, Kent, the home of the Darell family, died at Crondon Park, Essex, the seat of the Petre and Mason families, on 30 April 1751. In common with virtually every priest of the period, Adam Pigott used an alias for security reasons, this alias being in many cases the mother’s maiden name. Adam Pigott’s alias was Griffin, which may therefore have been his mother’s original surname.

William Hogarth was born on 25 March 1786 of a small landowning family in Dodding Green, near Kendal, in Westmorland. He and his older brother Robert were among the earliest students, in 1796, to enter the new northern seminary of Crook Hall, established in 1794 on its removal from Douai in northern France, in the bloody aftermath of the French Revolution. He and his contemporaries such as George Brown, the first Bishop of Liverpool, felt themselves to be foundationers, the very inaugurators of the next stage of the tradition. The Ushaw discipline was a strong one: rising at six, meditation in chapel until 7am, then Mass to 7.30, then study until breakfast at a quarter to nine, school from 9.30, dinner at 1.00, study at 3.00, prayer at 7.00 till supper, second prayers at 9.15, and then bed. There were two play days a week. The simple austerity of this life, pursued over thirteen impressionable years from the age of ten, left its mark. On the other hand, Hogarth or his fellow future bishop George Brown recorded his enormous educational debt to his brilliant young preceptor, the historian John Lingard: ‘I learned more in one month’, the writer recalled, ‘than I had done in six, under my former pedagogue; and I also remember that, while he [Lingard] was listening to me translating Latin into English, he was turning over the leaves of a large folio, and making notes for his history, and yet nothing escaped him of what I was reading.’

In 1849 John Ruskin published The Seven Lamps of Architecture and in the following year the English Catholic hierarchy was restored, involving the creation of a diocesan administration, made possible by toleration and made necessary by increasing numbers and influence. As Ruskin’s work broadened out from art and architecture to encompass the economy and society, his teaching was to have a profound and lasting effect on the thinking of leading English Catholics.

Refugees, displaced persons and enemy aliens, either individually or in groups, are, regrettably, well known to the early twenty-first century. Resettlement arrangements, counselling and aid appeals are also well-used practices. In May 1795 sixteen women, many elderly, reached Woolton in south Lancashire three weeks after leaving France. They were homeless, virtually destitute and had suffered the trauma and hardship of incarceration for eighteen months in a French prison. The women had little control over their immediate destination, were dependent on the philanthropy of others, and within a few short weeks were at work teaching in a school to earn their livelihoods. They also had to live within a neighbourhood totally unfamiliar with nuns and religious communities. The Benedictine convent of Our Lady of Consolation from Cambrai in northern France had been relocated to Woolton.

Among the bishops of the restored hierarchy of 1850, the name of Joseph William Hendren holds a special place for three reasons. On his appointment as Vicar Apostolic of the Western District in 1848, he was the last of the Vicars Apostolic in England and Wales to be nominated prior to the restoration; he was the only member of the restored hierarchy to be the first bishop of two new sees—Clifton, in 1850, and Nottingham in 1851; and the duration of his episcopal career was the shortest of any of his confrères around the time of the restoration.

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.

The primary focus of this article centres on the two decades that form the prelude to Catholic Emancipation although reference is made to activity outside this time frame and to cities other than London. Charitable endeavour is taken to include all individual voluntary effort to sustain and support Catholic churches, schools and other Catholic organisations in need of assistance. It also relates to assistance given to individuals in need of help. Such ‘endeavour’ also encompasses group and community-based voluntary activity. While it may seem unnecessary to define charitable endeavour, Mary J. Oates in a recent study on the Catholic philanthropic tradition in America heavily circumscribes what she means by the term, and excludes a number of subjects from her examination, thus:

‘All this talk of socialism is just a ruse. The people are starving and we must not play the policeman for England.’ wrote Archbishop Thomas W. Croke of Cashel in 1880. His attitude was far more intelligent and realistic than The Tablet and its reactionary supporters. Irish bishops were desperately concerned about massive Irish emigration in the late nineteenth century: the threat to the faith at home, the possible loss of souls overseas and the Church’s inability to serve her people was worrying. However zealous in its defence, the Irish bishops remained powerless to halt English popular and government support for the destruction of the Temporal Power. They saw other priorities emerging: by 1880 the recovery of the Temporal Power was a forlorn hope. They must take the high moral ground of humanity rather than property.

On 3 October 1875 the Diocese of Northampton, by direction of Francis Kerril Amherst, its bishop for the past seventeen years, marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Apostolic Constitution Universalis Ecclesiae. The clergy of the diocese, in addition to special liturgical celebrations on that day, were exhorted ‘to give some instruction … on the graces and blessings bestowed upon this country by the restoration of the Hierarchy’. Bishop Amherst presided at Northampton Cathedral, and shortly after at the third diocesan synod.

The summer of 1908 was a summer of congresses in London. The decennial Pan-Anglican Congress assembled in July, the History of Religions Congress met in September, the Trades Union Congress held its annual meeting shortly thereafter, and the International Congress on Moral Education took place in October. None of these received as much newspaper attention as the Roman Catholic International Eucharistic Congress, which convened in England for the first time, from Wednesday 9 to Sunday 13, September. Many column inches were devoted to the preparations and proceedings; photographs were printed; and hundreds of readers’ letters were published afterwards. In reportage the newspapers differed slightly; in opinion, more so. Most of the proceedings were not controversial at all, consisting of liturgies, lectures on various aspects of Catholic belief concerning the Eucharist, and evening meetings in the Albert Hall. What excited the press and sections of the public was the proposed closing spectacular: a procession of the Blessed Sacrament through the streets around Westminster Cathedral.

George Hilary Brown (1786–1856), Vicar Apostolic of the Lancashire District since its establishment in 1840, became the first bishop of the new diocese of Liverpool in 1850. He had been extremely reluctant to accept the vicariate, partly because of chronic ill-health and partly because of diffidence about his ability. From 1841 on Propaganda received a number of complaints about his absence from and neglect of his District, and when he was present he caused ill-feeling among his clergy: they thought he was a martinet and complained frequently to Rome about his decisions. For his part, Brown seemed to think he was fighting for episcopal rights against a recalcitrant clergy: in a later letter to Wiseman he claimed that all the bishops should be grateful to him because of his long battle against ‘Josephism and Pistoia’. This article examines two inter-connected quarrels he was involved in after 1850, one with his chapter, the other with his coadjutor. They illustrate some of the issues that arose from the restoration of the Hierarchy in 1850 as well as throwing light on the personality of the Bishop.

This paper seeks to identify the developing pre-conversion outlooks of two clerical converts to Roman Catholicism using their own self-explanations as sources. William Maclaurin, an Episcopalian priest and dean of the diocese of Moray, explained himself in a series of letters to John Henry Newman during the 1840s. William Humphrey, a young Aberdonian serving in the diocese of Brechin, related his conversion of 1868 in a little devotional work published in 1896. Using these sources, I will investigate the pre-conversion understanding of Catholicism of these two converts and identify factors which prompted their conversion. What was it about the Catholic Church that was attractive to these potential converts, compared with their existing Anglican allegiance?

The Report of a Select Committee in 1835 gave the total of Catholic day schools in England as only 86, with the total for Scotland being 20. Catholic children had few opportunities for day school education. HMI Baptist Noel reported in 1840: ‘very few Protestant Dissenters and scarcely any Roman Catholics send their children to these [National] schools; which is little to be wondered at, since they conscientiously object to the repetition of the Church catechism, which is usually enforced upon all the scholars. Multitudes of Roman Catholic children, for whom some provision should be made, are consequently left in almost complete neglect, a prey to all the evils which follow profound ignorance and the want of early discipline.’ With the establishment of the lay dominated Catholic Institute of Great Britain in 1838 numbers rose to 236 in the following five years, although the number of children without Catholic schooling was still estimated to be 101,930. Lay control of Catholic schools diminished in the 1840s. In 1844, for example, Bishop George Brown of the Lancashire District in a Pastoral letter abolished all existing fund-raising for churches and schools and created his own district board which did not have a single lay member. The Catholic Poor School Committee was founded in 1847, with two laymen and eight clerics and the bishops requested that the Catholic Institute hand over all its educational monies to this new body and called for all future collections at parish level to be sent to it. Government grants were secured for Catholic schools for the first time in 1847. The great influx of Irish immigrants during the years of the potato famine (1845–8) increased the Catholic population and church leaders soon noted the great leakage among the poor. The only way to counteract this leakage was to educate the young under the care of the Church.

Kenneth O. Morgan has argued that in 1945 it was ‘generally acknowledged that British society had undergone a massive transformation during the war years …’ The impact of World War Two on British society has been explored perceptively by Marwick and others. However, there has been little attempt to examine the impact of the war on the churches in Britain. This is especially the case with the Roman Catholic Church. The more general works have little to say of the Catholic church during this period. There have been some limited regional studies of Catholicism in the pre-war period but it is only for the post-war period, prior to and since the Second Vatican Council, that there has been any systematic attempt to examine structural changes in Catholicism. Hornsby-Smith in a series of enquiries has examined the social changes in the Catholic community in England since the Second Vatican Council. In a brief overview he described the Catholic church in England prior to the Council as having the characteristics of a ‘mechanistic’ organisation, namely a distinct hierarchical control structure, vertical relations between superiors and subordinates and an insistence on loyalty to the institution.