William Johnson, S. J., the writer of the two letters printed below, has hitherto escaped notice by English historians, including Foley, because he was a member of the Andalusian province of the Society of Jesus and spent all his religious life in Spain. He is not to be confused with an earlier William Johnson, also a Jesuit, who died at Malaga in 1614. Some details of the life of William Johnson II can be gleaned from the catalogues of the Andalusian province, from his official obituary, and from other archive sources. The historian of the Andalusian province, Juan de Santibañez, included Johnson in his series of brief biographies of its most distinguished sons, Varones ilustres de la Provincia de Andalucía de la Compañía de Jesús written not long after Johnson’s death in 1642. The work was never published but survives in manuscript.

St. Gregory’s was a small college belonging to the English secular clergy founded at Paris in the late seventeenth century. Its main purpose was to enable suitable ecclesiastics who had completed their training at Douai or the other colleges abroad to pursue advanced studies at the Sorbonne before working on the mission in England. Its founders hoped it would serve to produce a corps of highly qualified men to fill the leading administrative and teaching posts in the Catholic Church in England. It survived until 1786 when financial difficulties forced it to close—temporarily, as was at first thought. During the Revolution it suffered the fate of the other English Catholic institutions in France, and it never, in fact, reopened. Among the documents that have survived from its archives is a Register Book covering the whole period of its existence from its first beginnings in 1667 until it closed down over a century later. This Register Book, which records the arrival and departure of students, the stages in their university career, their promotion to holy orders, deaths occurring at the college, and occasional memoranda of events affecting the life of the community, was edited for the Catholic Record Society in 1917 by the late Monsignor Edwin Burton.

The Cistercian nuns of Holy Cross Abbey at Stapehill near Wimborne in Dorset have recently moved and settled in South Wales after more than 180 years in the house given to them in the nineteenth century by Lord Arundell of Wardour, so now is perhaps a suitable time for investigating the story of the place when it was a Jesuit centre for at least 135 years. One of the stations in the ‘College of St. Thomas of Canterbury’ or Hampshire district (which included Hampshire, Wiltshire and Sussex as well as Dorset), others in that part of the district being Lulworth, Wardour, Great Canford, Marnhull, Bonham and Odstock, it was sufficiently isolated and remote for a school to have existed there safely for some years.

Six Franciscan missioners left St. Bonaventure’s, Douai in 1629, on the first attempt to re-establish the Order of Friars Minor in England. All six were martyred or imprisoned during Charles I’s reign. Further groups were despatched during the Interregnum, including one in 1656. Among this group was Father Leo Randolph, whose father Randolph Ferrers owned the Warwickshire manor house of Wood Bevington, between Evesham and Stratford on Avon.

On April 13th, 1841, L’Univers published a letter from John Dobrée Dalgairns who had signed himself Un jeune membre de l’Université d’Oxford. The editorial caption read Du Mouvement Catholique au sein de l’Eglise Anglicane, and was accompanied by an enthusiastic foreword.

In a previous number of Recusant History, the present writer discussed the philosophy of knowledge of the Liberal Catholic periodical The Rambler. The philosophy of knowledge concept was used to examine ideas on the nature of mind and reason and on the value, use and limitations of reason, on the grounds that such ideas were the foundation for the reviewers’ speculations on education—one of the most vital of nineteenth century debates. Moreover, the philosophy of knowledge proved to be a useful vehicle for relating the world-view of the periodical writers to their discussions of education at all levels.

Among the companions of John Henry Newman at Littlemore at the time of his reception into communion with Rome in October 1845, perhaps the least remembered is John Walker. Indeed, Ambrose St. John, Richard Stanton, and Bernard Dalgairns followed Newman to the Oratory, yet Walker could never bring himself to do likewise. Often confused with Canon John Walker of Scarborough (one of Newman’s subsequent theological correspondents), ‘Dismal Johnny’, as he was dubbed by Manuel Johnson, the Radcliffe Observer, enjoyed a less than happy relationship with Newman. To recall the life of Walker is to shed some further light upon Newman’s own character, and to witness a reconciliation of estranged companions in old age.

Luigi Sturzo, the exiled founder of the suppressed Italian Christian Democrats, wrote in May 1942 that American Catholic papers prior to the American entry into the war had been sympathetic to Franco and even Mussolini as well as to Vichy France. After Pearl Harbor, these papers retained their sympathy for Vichy France.