In 1595 Dr. William Gifford was appointed Dean of the collegiate Church of St. Peter, Lille, in the Spanish Netherlands. Eleven years later, by express order of the Archduke Albert, he was summarily exiled from the Netherlands and ordered never to return during the lifetime of the Archduke. In consequence, Gifford left Lille in July 1606, retired to Rheims in France and, a few months later, resigned his post as dean. Various reasons, in the course of time, have been suggested as the cause of his exile, but the real reason, which can be found by studying the contemporary documents, has still to be stated.

Several books of Catholic origin enjoyed wide circulation among Protestant readers in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Such works were commonly subjected to editorial revision to suit Protestant sensibilities; a famous instance is Edmund Bunny's adaptation of Robert Persons’ The First Booke of the Christian Exercise, apperfeyning to resolution (1582). An instance less known but no less interesting is the Protestantized version of Robert Southwell's Short Rule of Good Life issued in 1620 by the London publisher William Barrett.

There is preserved in the Leicestershire Record Office the correspondence of the Nevills of Holt, one of the most important recusant families of that county. For many years their home was the headquarters of the Jesuit mission in Leicestershire and the East Midlands. At the beginning of the 18th century, the financial position of the head of the family, Sir Henry Nevill, was desperate, for the family had never recovered from the fines imposed on it during the Civil War. To improve the state of his finances, Sir Henry had arranged the marriage of his heiress, Mary Nevill, to a Florentine banker, Count Migliorucci.

The future biographer of Dr. Caesar Clement, English Catholic exile and nephew of Margaret Clement, prioress of the convent of St. Ursula at Louvain, will have a nugget of information in the evidence that Clement was one of the chaplains in the Archduke Albert's chapel royal from at least 1602 through 1618, probably longer, a fact not known to the compiler of the DNB account, who mentions only that he was chaplain general to the Spanish army and dean of St. Gudule's in Brussels.