“The history of opinions is as instructive and amusing as the history of battles”, observed Sir John Throckmorton in 1792; and few periods of Catholic thought in England present a more warlike aspect than that in which Sir John lived and wrote. The last twenty years of the 18th century saw the English Catholic community torn asunder by disputes which, to contemporaries, seemed certain to end in schism with Rome, and so destroy the heritage of the martyr church. Laymen “rose against the sanctuary”; committees of gentry swapped anathemas with bishops; and from the Catholic publishing houses issued a blizzard of acrimonious pamphlet literature, ecclesiastical sedition and the authoritarian counterblasts it provoked. Behind these troubles lay the desire for emancipation, and a great uncertainty among Catholics as to what, and how much, of the Church's “separateness” could be surrendered, to a Protestant nation, for the privilege of recognition as men and citizens.

The social historian in quest of Victorian commentary on the Irish in London finds a surprising dearth of materials. There were Irish beggars everywhere in the city, and their tenements lay within a few yards of the most fashionable thoroughfares, but neither their revolutionary potentialities nor predilection for violence nor deplorable religion made much impact upon the Victorian imagination. As they hardly figured in the national life, so they have left few traces in the memoirs of their betters, and hardly appear in Victorian literature, even in the novels of Dickens, who also ignored them in his hearthside journals, though he was always exploring their rookeries. They make fleeting appearances in the romances of Kingsley, Disraeli and Mrs. Gaskell; and Carlyle and Bulwer Lytton thought them a nuisance, and said so. But these few Celtic birds of passage do not greatly enlarge one’s understanding of the Irish in London, and hardly make an English literary summer.

During Penal times there took place three executions of seminary priests in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and one in Gateshead. Three of these were in successive years, 1592, 1593 and 1594, and Tyneside is fortunate in the wealth of documentation it possesses for these Elizabethan martyrs. The jewel of this collection is still among the City Archives in Newcastle, in the 1590- 1596 (Payments) volume of Chamberlains’ Accounts, which contains two complete execution-bills, unique for Elizabethan England, as well as part of a third, and the imprisonment expenses of the Northumbrian layman George Errington, martyred at York in 1596.