What a change has taken place in the general opinion in this Country with regard to Catholics, especially Priests, since the arrival of the emigrant Clergy! Their Conduct has been so exemplary—people who had been taught to consider them as the worst of characters begin now to be persuaded they are good Christians, and many own they had been much imposed on by their teachers with respect to the morals of Catholics—I doubt not many conversions will be wrought in consequence—at a little town we have many of these unfortunate people, if I may so style them, who suffer in so good a cause, whose sole defence is on providence—yet are in want of nothing so abundant as the charities they receive in all parts—in which I cannot but admire the goodness of God who abandons not those who quit all for his sake.

In the first volume of his History of Monmouthshire, Sir Joseph Bradney admitted that ‘in Monmouthshire the principles of the old Catholic faith have never been lost to a large number of people. Many families of position in this district continued to adhere to the old doctrines.’ Thomas Richards, the most scrupulous of the historians of Welsh non-conformity, not only identified the Catholics of Wales as ‘the sons and grandsons of men who had never accepted the Protestant Reformation' but from his unrivalled knowledge of the sources for seventeenth-century religious history in the principality advanced two quite startling hypotheses. The first was that there is ‘positive proof of the silent growth of Popery during Propagation and Protectorate times’ (he pointed out that in 1676 the number of Catholics recorded in Monmouthshire was ‘within sixty-six of being equal to all other dissenters in [the county] gathered into one total’); the second, a result of his searching analysis of the so-called Compton Census, was that even the figure of 541 Roman Catholics in Monmouthshire—416 in the rural deanery of Abergavenny alone—was ‘too low’.

Allan Fea, Secret Chambers and Hiding-Places (1901, 1904, 1908), pp. 20-21, quotes Mathias Tanner, Societas Iesu Militans … sive … Vita et Mors … (Prague, 1675), p. 75 (should be p. 73), as saying that Nicholas Owen ‘with incomparable skill knew how to conduct priests to a place of safety along subterranean passages, to hide them between walls and bury them in impenetrable recesses, and to entangle them in labyrinths and a thousand windings’. But, although there are reasons for supposing that Owen may have converted the medieval sewer at Baddesley Clinton into a hiding-place, Fea and others who have followed him are incautious in quoting the first part of this sentence at its face value. Tanner's Latin is reminiscent of Aeneid V, 588-591, and should perhaps be taken rather as an elegant tribute to a craftsman worthy to be compared with Daedalus: