At the beginning of his essay entitled ‘How To Be a Counter-Reformation Saint’, Peter Burke observes

Among the many families in Lancashire that remained so long loyal to the Catholic faith were the Scarisbricks of Scarisbrick Hall near Ormskirk, a centre of Catholicism throughout penal times and where there was even a Catholic school intermittently in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

In 1763, Francis Fortescue Turville inherited Husbands Bosworth Hall at Bosworth, Leicestershire, from his cousin Maria Aletha Fortescue. He inherited the estate directly, because his father had abandoned the Catholic religion and this debarred him from the bequest. The seat had been in the Fortescue family since 1630. In 1780 Francis Turville married Barbara Talbot, sister of the Earl of Shrewsbury. It was a marriage into a leading Catholic family and through his marriage, Francis Turville was connected with the most powerful Catholic families in the country, which had provided two vicars apostolic in the eighteenth century. But at Husbands Bosworth Hall, the Turvilles were by no means part of a larger Catholic community. Bosworth, and Leicestershire, were not strongly Catholic. With the exception of the Hastings family of Braunston and the Nevilles of Holt, both of which families sheltered missions, there were few notable Catholic families in the county; it has been estimated that Catholics made up less than five per cent of the population of the county of Leicestershire. This may have been one of the factors that influenced Francis Turville's decision to live abroad. Between 1784 and April 1789 Francis and Barbara Turville lived in Nancy in the Province of Lorraine. Although there is no explicit evidence, it seems probable that Francis Turville, like many Catholic gentry, moved to France in order to educate his son, George. One of the principal concerns of Catholic parents who sent their sons to be educated in France or the Netherlands was that they would return having lost all Englishness and connection with their family. This often led families to travel with their sons, or to send a trusted family member with them. It may also be that Francis Turville did not have a high regard for the lot of a Catholic gentleman in England. In 1786 it was reported to Turville that one of his neighbours, Mr. Saunders, ‘did not seem much to relish the description which you gave of the situation of a Roman Catholic gentleman in England. He could not conceive how the latter could be said to be oppressed’. While he was abroad, Turville maintained a correspondence with his chaplain, Thomas Potts, who remained at Husbands Bosworth Hall. This article seeks to indicate the nature of the relationship between Turville and his chaplain and to suggest that the rôles of a domestic chaplain were critical in maintaining the sense of an English Catholic community.

John Lingard's first major work, The Antiquities of the Anglo-Saxon Church was published in 1806 in Newcastle by Edward Walker. It was the only major work to come from the period of residence of the little community of northern exiles who had fled Douai in the aftermath of the French Revolution and who had eventually settled at Crook Hall in 1794, before the move up hill to the more permanent accommodation of Ushaw College in 1808. Lingard himself had left Douai on 21st February 1793, two days after the commissaires had taken possession of the English College. His task was to escort home in safety William Stourton, Lord Stourton's eldest son, and the two Oliviera brothers. For a time Lingard settled as tutor with the Stourtons, but after a meeting with Bishop Gibson in York the following summer, he joined the handful of northern exiles which had settled briefly at the Revd. Arthur Storey's private school at Tudhoe, just outside Durham. From there they moved for a few weeks to Pontop Hall before settling at Crook Hall on 15th Oct 1794. Lingard was ordained deacon at Crook towards the end of the same year and ordained priest in York the following April. At Crook, Lingard had become acting vice-president to the new President, Thomas Eyre; he was also Procurator and Prefect of Studies, jobs which he combined with the teaching of philosophy and with supervising the study of the senior boys forming the top two classes of Poetry and Rhetoric. When building started as Ushaw, he was also taken up with overseeing operations there.

In the Victorian period literature provided a national forum for the consideration of ideas in relation to society. Literary writings put flesh on the bones of the English anti-Catholic mind; more than the periodical, pamphlet or directly polemical literature, they vividly depict the emotions, the hidden agendas and the psychology from which sprang the age's rationalised attitudes and beliefs. When contemplating Catholicism, creative writers tended to be in a state of mental déshabillé, their feelings more visible, more unguarded than was the case with other sorts of writers, and therefore more revealing and expressive. As the classic Victorian literary anti-Catholic figure, Charles Kingsley provides the most apt focus for a sketch of the soul of the contemporary anti-Catholic tradition, especially since in his oeuvre its elements are uniquely forceful and comprehensive. A view of the fundamental motivations behind anti-Catholicism is, however, necessarily fragmentary and speculative, since their manifestations—passions, prejudices, assumptions, the national myth—where not wholly rational, either in Kingsley or in his society.

David Brown (1803–97), a member of the Free Church of Scotland, Professor of Apologetics, Exegesis of the Gospels and Church History at the Free Church College, Aberdeen, was from 1876 to 1885 Principal of his college. A correspondence with Newman began when Brown sent Newman a copy of his work, Life of the Late John Duncan, LL.D., (Edinburgh, 1872). In a letter of 7 June 1872 to Newman, he remarked that the last chapter of the Grammar of Assent met some of Duncan's difficulties, and added, ‘towards you I feel as if in the light of such teaching I were at home, in the blessed Communion of Saints which transcends every earthly separation.’ This tone was maintained in Brown's subsequent letter, 2 October of the same year, which concluded with the words, ‘With esteem … I remain yours in bonds transcending every earthly separation.’

When Francis, Cardinal Bourne died on New Years Day, 1935, his friend and erstwhile collaborator in successive national congresses, George Anstruther, assistant editor of The Tablet, a paper owned by the archdiocese, referred to Bourne's ‘greatness’ as being unlike that of a waterfall but more akin to a quiet river ‘broad and deep, bearing precious freights to safe havens’. The image was supported in a broadcast of Viscount FitzAlan about the deceased prelate in which he stressed that Bourne possessed a ‘rather cold and calm reserve’ concealing ‘a profound spirituality’. The editor of the Jesuit magazine The Month postulated ‘prudent ecclesiastical statesmanship’ had marked a long term of office of over thirty years and Bourne's regular correspondent, Archbishop Alban Goodier, testified to his having been ‘among the shyest of men, so shy, that to many he remained always hidden in his shell’. Indeed, rarely has a man's memory been tarnished so effectively by his friends, all with the most uplifting of motives. The secular press was less mealy-mouthed. The Times considered Bourne to have been ‘a statesmanlike champion of religious education’ and ‘a courageous opponent of all those modern movements and influences which are calculated, openly or swiftly, to sap the foundations of family life and, indeed, the whole structure of the community’.

The following digest of major accessions to repositories during 1995, relating to Roman Catholicism after the Reformation, has been supplied by Dr. A. P. Lewis, Curatorial Officer, The Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts. The Historical Manuscripts Commission seeks each year to collect information relating to manuscript accessions from over 250 repositories and record offices throughout the British Isles. This information is then published on the Internet via the Commission's website (http://www.hmc.gov.uk) and in a series of thematic digests which appear in a wide range of learned journals and newsheets. It is also added to the indexes to the National Register of Archives (NRA), which are available for public consultation in the Commission's search room at Quality House, Quality Court, Chancery Lane, London WC2A 1 HP, and via the Commission's website. The Commission will also answer limited and specific postal and e-mail enquiries. Readers of Recusant History should be aware that the manuscript collections noted in the following digest represent a very small part of the collected information available in the NRA.

Exactly forty years after the pioneer bibliographical enterprise of Allison and Rogers, later extended by Thomas Clancy, three Dutch academics and an English Benedictine historian have continued the work by listing details and locations of vernacular Catholic publications, now no longer clandestine, between 1701 and 1800.

Without controversy ecclesiastical biography could scarcely exist and it is the exasperation of conflict unresolved and of continuing debate that adds piquancy to the genre. This is well illustrated by two substantial studies of churchmen that appeared before the public in the last year.* It is curious to note that only thirty-five years elapsed between the death of Luke Joseph Hooke, a man who attempted to interpret the method of the Enlightenment to Catholic orthodoxy in eighteenthcentury France, and the birth of Herbert Alfred Vaughan, a child destined to effect a curious amalgam of recusant fervour, ultramontane commitment and missionary enterprise.

In his new book James Arthur has chosen a title that is controversial but befits his central thesis*: Catholic schools are in crisis, under pressure from the unsympathetic secular State (to include both the Local Education Authority and central government’s Department for Education) and lacking coherent support and direction from the Catholic community (to include bishops, school trustees and governors and teachers). The author traces how this has come about but stops short of offering a detailed manifesto for how the decline might be arrested.