One of the most ‘anonymous’ of all Catholic tracts published in the late sixteenth century is that entitled: The copie of a double letter sent by an Englishe gentleman from beyond the seas, to his frende in London, containing the true aduises of the cause, and maner of the death, of one Richard Atkins, executed by fire in Rome, the seconde of August 1581. It was issued without the name of the author and without any indication as to where or by whom it was printed. The printer has been identified from typographical evidence as Jean Foigny of Rheims, but up till now there has been no positive identification of the author. In this note I want to show that there is conclusive evidence for stating that the tract was written by Father Robert Persons, S.J., using material sent to him from Rome by his fellow-Jesuit Father William Good.

The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to what appears to be a developing gulf in the study of the Catholic community during the early seventeenth century. How do we determine whether an individual was or was not a Catholic? It looked for a time as if the conventional wisdom concerning Catholics and the Civil War was to maintain that they were, as a body, neutral. It is now hard to see how that view can be substantiated. By no means connected with that view, but threatening in the same way to establish itself as a dictum, is the idea that there can be no Catholicism without a recorded conviction for recusancy.

In a recent, short monograph, Leslie Campion has attempted to link Edmund Campion to his namesake, the son of an Edmund Campion of Sawston, Cambs., who (Edmund Sr) died in 1544. The argument, though circumstantial, is plausible. However, one piece of additional evidence is not considered—nor could the author have been aware of it. This is the Oxford apprenticeship indenture of one Robert ‘Campian’ to Christopher Noke, freemason, made on 4 October 1579, which is printed below. There Robert is identified as the son of an Edmund Campian, late of London, stationer, deceased. This, of itself, would suggest that Robert was a brother of the Jesuit, and, indeed, the newly proposed Campion pedigree indicates a Robert Campion as an older brother of Edmund. Unfortunately, this would require our apprentice to be over 40 years old! A more likely candidate is a Robert Campian, aged ca 14 years, who made a deposition before the University (Vice-) Chancellor's court on 8 January 1573 regarding William Goodyere, Under Butler of St John's College. The connection to St John's is, of course, significant, as is the apprenticeship to Noke, who was suspected of recusancy in 1577. Thus, it is tempting to join the two Oxford Roberts together and to identify him as Edmund Campion's younger brother, but, if we do, then we must look for an Edmund Sr who lived into the later 1550s at least. Additional investigation would be needed to determine where (or whether) he could be grafted on to Leslie Campion's tree, but the name ‘Robert’ requires at least a reexamination of the Witham branch, and the author himself seems to allow this possibility (p. 55). As for Robert Campian, the apprentice freemason, he cannot be traced in later Oxford records in spite of the provision for his subsequent entrance into the craft guild and the freedom of the City.

Dennis Flynn has written convincingly of the Catholic sympathies of Donne's middle years. But anyone who reads through the sermons, particularly those composed after 1618, cannot fail to be convinced that in the end Donne's Anglicanism was a mature and heartfelt commitment. To understand how a man with such rooted Catholic sympathies could find his spiritual home in the English Church, we must recognise how much he needed to be engaged with others in worship, in friendship and in love.

The Catholic Record Society has just published the 1767 Returns of Papists for the diocese of Chester, which included Lancashire. For the chapelry of Broughton (pp. 144-6 in the C.R.S. volume) there is a similar return of Popish recusants made in 1676. It was compiled in response to the questions asked in the so-called Compton Census, an enquiry set up in 1676 by the Archbishop of Canterbury. It consists of nine folios listing all families in the chapelries of Broughton (including Haighton) and Barton in a first column, alongside which in a second column the names of suspected Popish recusants are repeated. To save space, the recusant names are printed here once only but in bold type. At the bottom of each folio except the first are totals for the two columns, with grand totals (636 and 192) at the end. There is a nil return for the third column, of Dissenters.

In the seventeenth century, one of the Catholic strongholds of Britain had lain on the southern Welsh borders, in those areas of north Monmouthshire and southern Herefordshire dependant on the Marquis of Worcester at Raglan, and looking to the Jesuit mission at Cwm. Abergavenny and Monmouth had been largely Catholic towns, while the north Monmouthshire countryside still merited the attention of fifteen priests in the 1670s—after the Civil Wars, and the damaging conversion to Protestantism of the heir of Raglan in 1667. Conspicuous Catholic strength caused fear, and the ‘Popish Plot’ was the excuse for a uniquely violent reaction, in which the Jesuit mission was all but destroyed. What happened after that is less clear. In 1780, Berington wrote that ‘In many [counties], particularly in the west, in south Wales, and some of the Midland counties, there is scarcely a Catholic to be found’. Modern histories tend to reflect this, perhaps because of available evidence. The archives of the Western Vicariate were destroyed in a riot in Bath in 1780, and a recent work like J. H. Aveling's The Handle and the Axe relies heavily on sources and examples from the north of England. This attitude is epitomised by Bossy's remark on the distribution of priests in 1773: ‘In Wales, the mission had collapsed’. However, the question of Catholic survival in eighteenth-century Wales is important. In earlier assessments of Catholic strength (by landholding, or number of recusants gaoled as a proportion of population) Monmouthshire had achieved the rare feat of exceeding the zeal of Lancashire, and Herefordshire was not far behind. If this simply ceased to exist, there was an almost incredible success for the ‘short, sharp’ persecution under Charles II. If, however, the area remained a Catholic fortress, then recent historians of recusancy have unjustifiably neglected it.

Recent work on the history of post-Reformation English Catholicism has emphasised the central importance of spirituality but has shown that devotion, like the English Catholic community itself, has been continually changing. Challoner's works, especially his Garden of the Soul, dominated the later eighteenth century but, though the title remained popular, the contents suffered revision. However, the contemporary work of his collaborator, Alban Butler's Lives of the Saints, with its meditation on each feast-day, remained virtually intact from its publication in 1756-59 until 1956.

In 1794, Thomas Cooper, the British radical who the previous August had judiciously emigrated to America to escape the repressive policies of the British government, returned to attend the trial for treason of his friend, Thomas Walker, the radical Manchester merchant in Lancaster. En route he called on Dr William Maxwell of Kirconnell, Dumfries. Unfortunately, these old friends did not meet, but at the end of the trial Cooper sent a very interesting letter to Maxwell.

Roman Catholic historians have frequently cited lack of Government recognition and support as the main cause for the failure of the Catholic University. As evidence of this, they have pointed to its medical faculty, the relative success of which they attribute to the possibility at that time of being recognised as a medical practitioner without holding a university degree. Yet, by 1859, the year of his resignation as Rector, Newman had come to the conclusion that the real problems lay elsewhere. In the same year, the Irish Bishops admitted openly that the granting or withholding of state recognition would not ultimately determine the success or failure of the University. In any event, they could easily have overcome the difficulties posed by the lack of a charter by affiliating their College to London University, merely for the purpose of taking London examinations and degrees. This they admitted in a letter to the Home Secretary, Sir George Grey. In 1857, the Roman Catholic College of St John the Evangelist, Sydney, Australia, did affiliate, for the purpose of obtaining degrees, to one of the new non-denominational state-erected universities of that colony. But Newman was too suspicious of London's alleged liberalism and Cullen too jealous of undiluted episcopal control over the Dublin establishment to tolerate such a notion. It is, therefore, towards the attitudes and roles of these two that one is led in considering why the Catholic University failed.