This paper is concerned primarily with the people who sheltered and helped in various ways the priests without whom Catholicism could not have survived in Elizabethan England. The Marian priests were, of course, the first who needed harbouring, and some of them continued to be protected by the laity to the end of Elizabeth's reign and beyond. From 1574 the seminary priests began to come to this country, and in due course they as well as the Jesuits were singled out for special treatment as far as harbouring was concerned. In the fifteen-eighties and the fifteen-nineties the number of seminary priests at work in England seems to have fluctuated between 120 and 150 in any one year. The Elizabethan Jesuits active in this country were never more than three or four in any one year in the fifteen-eighties, and rarely more than twelve in the fifteen-nineties. Compared with the surviving Marian priests and the seminary priests, the Jesuits were very few, but they have left a great deal on record relating to harbouring, and historians sometimes give the impression that they organised the whole business.

After Pope Urban VIII had imposed silence on English Catholics by the brief Britannia in 1631, the controversy over the hierarchy begun by Kellison's Treatise of 1629 continued to engage the pens of French writers. Smith at Paris played a discreet but significant role in encouraging his French supporters and providing them with information. I propose to discuss the way the controversy developed in Part III of this article, to be published later. The present part (II) deals with certain general topics which together form the background to Smith's continuing involvement in it. These are his motives in going to France in 1631; the attempts made in England and in France to have him reinstated or replaced as bishop for England; his sources of income and the commendatory abbeys whose revenues enabled him to support English Catholic institutions at Paris; the history of the community of English priests at Arras College, and afterwards at Tournay College, in Paris, with both of which he was closely associated; and the foundation of the English Augustinian convent of Our Lady of Syon at Paris, where he spent his last years. Very little has ever been published about these matters. An understanding of them will enable the reader to see the events to be described in Part III in clearer perspective.

Bishop John Milner once observed, ‘a detailed history of the converts to and the apostates from the Catholic Church … would form a most interesting and useful work.” Since that time more attention has been paid to Jesuit converts than to Jesuit apostates. This article seeks to redress, if ever so slightly, the balance. A look at the underside of one portion of the Society before the Suppression reveals new aspects of her life and history.

Walsall in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a large parish containing a small borough. The borough claimed to be ‘by prescription’, but it had charters including one given by King Charles the First in 1627. This secured to the corporation ‘of the borough and foreign of Walsall’ authority in the parts of the parish outside the borough. These, called ‘the foreign’, had a vestry meeting of their own at the chapel-of-ease at Bloxwich. They supported their own poor through churchwardens and overseers elected there, but they were obliged to contribute to the repair and improvement of the parish church where they were married and in whose churchyard they were buried until 1733.

After his conversion to Roman Catholicism, the first major controversy in which Henry Edward Manning found himself involved as a member of his new church concerned the Roman Question, or the Temporal Power; that is, the political status and future of the Papal States. Now the question of the temporal power of the pope, and the amount of controversy it engendered, is one of those issues in nineteenth century church history whose significance it is difficult for us to understand. By the mid-nineteenth century, especially in relation to the movement for Italian unification, the temporal power of the popes looks to us like an historical anachronism. To Roman Catholics today, it is obvious that the ability of the church to preach the gospel has been enhanced and its mission in the world correspondingly facilitated by being disembarrassed of the burden of political control in central Italy. How to explain, then, the tremendous controversy the Roman Question aroused over so long a period in the second half of the nineteenth century, and the conviction, especially of the papacy's defenders, that the preservation of the Papal States was critical for the survival, not only of religion, but, as we shall see, of civilization in the West?