The canonisation of John Boste may have awakened some interest in the story of his fellow-prisoner, John Ingram, who was the third and last of the seminary priests to be executed on Tyneside during the reign of Elizabeth I. Such an interest is easy to gratify, since Ingram is one of the best documented of the English Martyrs. As with his two predecessors, Joseph Lambton and Edward Waterson, we have both an account by Holtby of the martyr's trial and execution, and some evidence of the latter in the same Newcastle Account Book; but in this case, these sources can be rounded out by a series of official letters and, most unusually, Ingram's own letters and epigrams.

He was born in 1565, at Stoke Edith, Herefordshire, a county noted for the strong Catholicism of its gentry. His parents, Richard and Anne Ingram, however, seem to have been non-Catholics at that time since John needed a dispensation from heresy, when he was sent to Douai in 1579.

‘Now at the word Order your pikes, you place the butt end of your pike by the outside of your right foot, your right hand holding it even with your eye and your thumb right up; then your left arm being set akimbo by your side you shall stand with a full body in a comely posture’. In this manner English soldiers of fortune, serving as pikemen in the wars of the Netherlands, were instructed in the art of war in the late sixteenth century. Musketeers were told that stray grains of powder disappeared at the command Blow off your loose corns, sometimes with a puff or two, sometimes with a ‘sudden strong blast’, but always in accordance with regulation. In general soldiers who wished to learn their profession had to look elsewhere than in England. In England no one could take them very seriously, not FalstafF the fraudulent Captain, not swaggering Pistol, nor Nym the impostor who affected military brevity. But those who did go abroad were equal to the best foreign professionals in experience and courage. Most of these English soldiers fought for the Dutch, on account of sympathy for them on religious grounds. But Elizabeth's aid was half-hearted and late in coming, for she despised the Dutch as rebels against their rightful, Spanish sovereign. This, together with the Earl of Leicester's mismanagement of his campaigns, were reasons why the English constantly deserted the Dutch to fight for Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma, the best commander in that very war-torn century. From about 1598, however, the situation improved for the Dutch, who, having thrown off their dependence on England, converted the English soldiers into mercenaries, bound by an oath of allegiance to their Dutch paymasters.

Writing of the education of the English landed classes in the eighteenth century, Professor Mingay has said: ‘The Grand Tour which followed university became almost de rigueur, at least for the eldest sons of wealthy families’. The Tour was popular as a means of providing prospective heirs with the poise, taste and experience which were judged to be essential to their future station. Though it soon became primarily fashionable, it was designed as a climax to the educational process. As such, it could be very expensive. The cost was particularly onerous for recusant families, whose economies were generally less diversified and more vulnerable than those of their contemporaries. Nevertheless, as the case discussed here illustrates, though impecuniosity might leave its mark on a tour, it was only rarely sufficient to prevent it taking place. In this, as in so many other respects, recusants strove to maintain their social status, despite what was often a precarious financial and economic situation.

In March 1701, Sir Philip Constable, a leading Yorkshire recusanL, entered into an agreement with a Mr Janvers. In return for assisting Sir Philip's eldest son, Marmaduke, during a tour of ‘Flanders, France, Italy and co’, Janvers was to receive his travelling expenses plus £40 a year. The document reflects Sir Philip's impoverished position. Janvers was to accompany Marmaduke wherever Sir Philip ordered, spending money ‘carefully and savingly’, and to render an account of his expenditure whenever Sir Philip required him to do so.

In an article entitled ‘A Note on Some Eighteenth-Century Statistics’, published in Recusant History (Vol. 10, no. 1) in January 1969, the present writer attempted to come to some conclusions about the number of priests working in England and Wales in that century.

Reference to that article would show that in 1706 Dr Betham believed that there were only about 400 priests in the whole country. It was argued that the figure was an underestimate and that the true number may have been as high as 530 or 540, and that the figures given by the Vicars Apostolic in 1773 in their reports to Rome were also too low—380 to 390 instead of 410 to 420. It appeared, if these adjustments of the figures were sound, that the decline in the number of priests working in eighteenth-century England and Wales was quite steep between 1706 and 1773, from perhaps 530 or 540 to 410 or 420; and that, if the French refugee priests working in England and Wales are excluded, there was no increase at all from 1773 until after 1803 but rather a further, if less marked decline.