THE FIRST VOLUME of Fr. Godfrey Anstruther's TheSeminary Priests: A Dictionary of the Secular Clergy of England and Wales, 1558-1850 appeared in 1968, and in subsequent years it was followed by three other volumes. For various reasons, Fr. Anstruther did not complete the fifth and final volume, although he had collected a great deal of material for it. His achievement was remarkable, all the more so because it was carried out single-handed, not with the assistance of a team of scholars, and he used a great range of source-material in foreign as well as in British archives. This major contribution to the history of post-Reformation Catholicism has not always received the credit it deserves, and it is a sad comment on the historical awareness of the English Catholic community that the volumes did not sell as well as they should have done. Inevitably in a work of such magnitude, there were a number of errors, but those who are ready to point out details which Fr. Anstruther got wrong must never forget how much he got right and how his monumental and much-used dictionary has provided scholars with a solid foundation on which to build.

ALTHOUGH THE LETTER which follows was printed in the very year in which it was written, and has been reprinted twice since, I do not hesitate to make it available again, seeing that the writer was the proto-matyr of the English Reformation, John Houghton, the last Prior of the London Charterhouse, canonized in 1970. The text of Houghton's letter and of the answer to it from his correspondent, a fellow-Carthusian at Cologne named Dietrich Loher (Loer), are preserved in a book by the latter, a small octavo volume issued at Cologne in 1532. Following its titlepage, which reads D. Dionysii Carthusiani, Doctoris extatici vita, simul & operum eius fidissimus catalogus. Coloniae excudebat Iaspar Gennepius. MDXXXII, there are seven pages containing the original Latin text of both letters. Today it has become a rare book, which is hardly to be found outside a few great libraries and therefore cannot be widely known or easily read. This is obviously the source from which, almost a century ago, Dom Lawrence Hendriks reprinted Houghton's letter as Appendix VI to his pioneer study, The London Charterhouse, its monks and its martyrs.’ Even this work is no longer within everyone's reach today. Hendriks, moreover, printed only the Latin text, without any indication where it came from, and devoted but a few lines in his Chapter VII to its general contents, remarking that this and a short letter written when Houghton was Prior of Beauvale ‘are the only authentic writings of Blessed John Houghton that have come down to us.’ Wishing to make once more available this precious evidence concerning the personality and preoccupations of the martyr-made all the more poignant for us by the realization that little more than two years and a half after the penning of this gracious and affectionate exchange of letters, Houghton in May 1535 was to undergo King Henry's specially savage butchery at Tyburn-I offer an English version of both letters, with some notes to place the correspondence in its historical setting. The Latin originals are reprinted as an Appendix to this article.

THERE EXISTS, in Harleian MS. 7553 of the British Library, a set of seventeen Spiritual1 Sonnettes to the honour of God and hys Sayntes by H. C.. In his 1812 edition of the manuscript, Thomas Park attributed these poems to the Elizabethan courtier-poet and later recusant Henry Constable on the grounds of the ‘regular Italian structure, and the sainted names of those addressed’.’ Three years later, in his Heliconia, Park substantiated his attribution by reference to Constable's known Roman Catholicism and to a recantation found at the end of his secular sonnet cycle Diana in Dyce MS. 44: ‘When I had ended this last sonet and found that such vayne poems as I had by idle houres writ did amounte iust to the climatericall number 63, me thought it was high tyme for my follie to die and to employe the remnant of my wit to other calmer thoughts lesse sweet and lesse bitter’. The Dyce manuscript-like the Harleian-is not in Constable's own hand, and one scholar has recently thrown doubt on the authenticity of the recantation. Nevertheless, the Spirituall Sonnettes have without question continued to be considered as Constable's following Park's broad biographical and stylistic outline. The Harleian manuscript appears to date from the early years of the seventeenth century, and this has been assumed to be the likely date of composition for the sonnets as well.

In May 1629, the President of the English College at Douai, Matthew Kellison, published a book entitled: A treatiseofthe hierarchie and diuers orders of the church against theanarchie of Caluin. In spite of the title, the main purpose of the book was not to defend Catholic teaching on the hierarchy against Calvin. Kellison wrote it is in response to an urgent appeal by Richard Smith, Bishop of Chalcedon, at a crucial moment in Smith's episcopate. During the four years in which he had been in England as bishop, Smith had met with mounting opposition from the regulars and from the Catholic nobility and gentry. Opposition from the laity was greatly strengthened by the publication in 1628 of a work by the President General of the English Benedictine Congregation, Rudesind Barlow, maintaining that the papal brief appointing Smith in 1625, properly interpreted, did not grant him the extensive powers he claimed. What Smith was asking of Kellison in 1629 was not a work in support of his claims in detail—he intended to write that himself—but a general treatise addressed to the lay Catholics explaining the theological basis on which those claims rested. Kellison, as President of the English College and a theologian of international repute, was the ideal man for the task. ‘In these circumstances,’ Kellison a letter two years later, describing how his book came to be written, ‘the Bishop and leading members of the clergy wrote to me urging me to produce a book on the dignity and authority of bishops. Because of my respect for them, and also because of my love for my country, I consented …’

IN AN ARTICLE on Joseph Creswell S. J. published in this periodical in 1979,’ I referred, in the section dealing with Creswell's activities as editor of books intended for the English mission, to a group of anonymous tracts which I said were written by the Catholic layman, Richard Verstegan. As these tracts had never before been claimed for Verstegan, such a statement clearly required justification. The article had already grown very long, however, and the question of the authorship of the tracts was only incidental to my main theme. I decided to publish the evidence for Verstegan in a separate article rather than try to cram it into an extended note. My object now is to redeem the pledge made in Note 202 of my earlier article.

CHRISTOPHER HILL'S Economic Problems of the Church from Archbishop Whitgift to the Long parliament’ has long been the standard work on the financial composition of the post-Reformation English church. Over the past fifteen years, however, historians have taken a second look at the material covered by Hill and have begun to formulate new questions about it. Historians such as Felicity Heal and Rosemary O'Day have led new investigations into the economic conditions of the English church. Despite this renewed interest, no one has tackled the more difficult subject of recusant finances. Here is a world hidden behind aliases and secret trusts and one that remains almost totally unexplored. In a series of articles to appear in this journal, I shall venture ‘where angels fear to tread’ and attempt to make sense out of the complicated and confusing records of Jesuit financial activity. This article, which will serve as an introduction to the series, will be concerned with the constitutional development of the Society of Jesus, the spiritual exhortations to poverty as an evangelical counsel and a religious vow, and the legal entanglements of the penal laws in England. It is essential to remember that, first and foremost, the English Jesuits were religious bound by vows, specifically the vow of poverty. All financial activities and investments were restricted by that vow as it was then understood throughout the Society. Future articles will examine the income and the investments of the early Jesuit mission and its eventual subdivision into colleges and residences.

IN THE CHANCEL of Dumbleton Church, Gloucestershire, there is a monument bearing the following inscription:

IN THE mid-seventeenth century the chapel of the Spanish embassy caused considerable concern to the authorities at Whitehall since they were frustrated in preventing scores of Londoners from attending it for masses and other Catholic devotions. This was a distinct issue from the traditional right of a Catholic diplomat in England to provide mass for his household or other compatriots,’ and from the custom of Sephardic Jews to gather in the embassy for Sabbath worship when they desired. While the practice of Londoners to attend mass secretly at the residences of various Catholic diplomats had developed early in the reign of Elizabeth and occasional arrests at their doors had acted as a deterrent, late in the reign of James I sizeable crowds began to frequent the Spanish embassy. John Chamberlain commented in 1621 that Gondomar had ‘almost as many come to his mass’ in the chapel of Ely House as there were attending ‘the sermon at St. Andrewes (Holborn) over against him’. Although Godomar left in 1622 and subsequently the embassy was closed for five years during the Anglo-Spanish War, it was later, from 1630 to 1655, that the Spanish chapel acquired not only a continuous popularity among Catholics of the area but also an unwelcome notoriety in the highest levels of government. This paper will suggest two primary factors which led to that development: the persistent ambition of the resident Spanish diplomats to provide a range of religious services unprecedented in number and character, and their successful adaptation to the hostile political conditions in the capital for a quarter of a century. The continuous Spanish diplomatic presence in London for this long period was in itself both unexpected and unique for it should be recalled that, for various reasons, all the other Catholic ambassadors, whether from France, Venice, Portugal, Savoy or the Empire, had to leave at different times and close their chapels. However, the site of the Spanish residence during these years by no means permanent since, as with other foreign diplomats, a new property was rented by each ambassador on arrival. There is, moreover, a wider significance in this inquiry because of the current evidence that by the eve of the Civil War the king was considered in the House of Commons to have been remiss in guarding his kingdom from a ‘Catholic inspired plot against church and state’, for while it has been well argued that a public disquiet over Henrietta-Maria's chapels at Somerset House and St. James's palace had by 1640 stimulated increasing suspicions of a Popish Plot, there were other protected chapels, particularly the Spanish, where scores of Londoners were seen to attend. Indeed, after the closure of the queen's chapels at Whitehall in 1642, the Spanish remained for the next thirteen years as silent evidence that Catholics seemed to be ‘more numerous’ and were acting ‘more freely than in the past’.

‘IFICAN trust oaths, he is mine as much as I can expect any Papist to be’. With this double-edged compliment, Charles 1 silenced the misgivings of Secretary Windebank and in 1635 despatched Captain Arthur Brett to the Vatican, ostensibly as personal representative of Queen Henrietta Maria, but actually on ‘the greatest and most active employment your Majesty [the King] hath in foreign parts’. The purpose was to frustrate the Roman Catholic mission to England by establishing a mole in its headquarters, but it was never accomplished. On 30 January 1636 Brett reported that he was detained in England by adverse weather and ill-health, and on 17 March he died.’

THE SOCIETY for Promoting Christian Knowledge was established in 1698. From its inception, one of its aims was to combat the spread of Catholicism in Britain and elsewhere. At the end of the seventeenth century, the Counter-Reformation seemed to be enjoying great successes: as one of the Society's memorials noted, ‘the progress of Popery … by little and little ruins the Reformed Religion all over Europe’. This occurred, the memorial went on, because the Protestants had little regard for their own defence. The remedy was to form a ‘union of Protestants’, with a council to organize its correspondence among those of the reformed faith in all parts of the continent; and to put a stop the activity of Popish priests, though ‘without Persecution and violence’. A bulwark, it was argued, was unquestionably needed against so formidable and zealous a body as the Congregation de Propaganda Fide. The Crown was to be informed of these designs and the Society was soon given a watching brief on ‘the practices of priests to pervert His Majesty's subjects’.

FATHER JOHN MUSH, biographer of Saint Margaret Clitherow, the quater-centenary of whose martyrdom has been commemorated this year, recorded within three months of her death that after her condemnation her kinsfolk and friends ‘laboured much’ to persuade her to claim a respite on account of a pregnancy of which she was uncertain. He had no need to identify these anxious and distressed persons, for his earliest readers in York and its neighbourhood would be aware of their identity. When, however, his True Report began to spread secretly in manuscript to other parts of the country where its subject was unknown, the circumstances of the saint's life and the almost unique nature of her constancy were less well understood and appreciated. Fr. Mush tells us that Margaret, whose mother was ‘a rich widow’, had ‘many worldly friends’; her maternal kinsfolk, it has now been discovered, were among the élite of York at a time when the Queen's Council in the North Parts, which had its headquarters in that city, was one of the most active instruments in the country for the suppression of the ‘old religion’.

MUCH recent research has examined Catholicism in early Stuart England and some has discussed the contribution of anti-Catholicism to the outbreak of the Civil War—but how well-founded were the fears underlying the rhetoric which surfaced in parliament? This paper1 addresses one aspect of that question by looking at certain financial features of Catholic non-conformity (as demonstrated by absence from Anglican services and/or refusal of the oath of allegiance) in the first half of James I’s reign, chiefly between 1606 and 1612. The significance of this period is that it begins just after the attempt to blow up king and parliament and ends with the death of Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury who, during his term of office as Lord Treasurer from 1608 onwards, was grappling with an intractable royal indebtedness which he managed to curtail but not to cure and whose own effectiveness waned following the failure of the Great Contract in 1610.2

This Chronicle opens in 1702, the first year of the long rule of Abbess Mary of the Holy Cross, elected the previous December by 42 votes out of 64. She proved an outstanding superior whose works (printed and MS.) gain her a niche in Gillow's Bibliographical Dictionary, whose life drew a written tribute from Bishop Bonaventure Giffard and whose teachings inspired a book by Alban Butler. After the dissensions of the previous decade she restored spiritual health and harmony to the community and placed it on a more flourishing footing than for many years, receiving to profession thirty-four religious in 25 years (1707–32). Abbess Howard—if that was indeed her surname— entered into association with other religious houses by mutual agreement to participate in good works, prayers and merits: with the Benedictine Abbey of St. Amand at Rouen, whose Abbess was a great friend; with that of Val de Grace in Paris where she herself had lived and been converted; in 1711 with the Carmelites and in 1714 (a renewal of a former association) with the Capuchins. In addition the community's friend and benefactor M. de Tot had in 1703 founded a confraternity in honour of Our Lady and St. Joseph which some of the English nobility joined, including Lady Middleton and Lady Strickland.

NOT FAR from Cadiz there is an English property that has remained Catholic for close on five hundred years. Its history goes back to pre-reformation days, indeed to the thirteenth century when the port of Sanlucar de Barrameda was recaptured from the Moors by the Guzman family who later became the Dukes of Medina Sidonia. Strategically Sanlucar was an important port because it was at the mouth of the Guadalquivir and as well as capturing the Seville trade it also commanded the traffic from the Mediterranean to Northern Europe and eventually it was the point of departure for ships leaving for the New World. Among the various nations using the port the English were conspicuous and their merchants were granted various privileges by the Dukes of Medina Sidonia during the fifteenth century. By the early sixteenth century there is evidence of a sizeable colony in the town; in fact the English were the largest single group of foreigners and many English names appear in the baptismal registers as both parents and godparents. At least one of them held high public office in the town. On the accession of Henry VIII to the throne of England, the situation further improved as he abandoned the neutrality of his father and allied himself with Spain against France. So it was that in 1517 a new charter of privileges for the English merchants in Sanlucar was drafted. A grant of land by the river was made so as to provide a chapel and a burial place for Englishmen. The chapel was dedicated to St. George and it was to be looked after by a confraternity. The chaplain was to be appointed by the Bishops of London, Winchester and Exeter, since it was from these dioceses that most of the merchants came. Although there have been rebuildings, this site has remained English ever since.

Post-Reformation Catholicism in England is popularly associated with the gentry before the Industrial Revolution and with the Irish urban proletariat afterwards. I have insufficient knowledge to comment on the social structure of post-eighteenth century Catholicism, but in my opinion historians, such as Professor Bossy, Mr. Aveling and, to a lesser extent, Dr. Haigh, have rightly emphasised the part played by the gentry in the expansion, or at least survival, of Roman Catholicism during the early seventeenth century. The gentry were arguably the most important social group in England and were best able to provide the necessary shelter and finance for the Catholic priests who operated in an intermittently hostile Protestant state. Indeed, I am inclined to agree with Professor Bossy that without the gentry there would have been no Catholic community. But community there was, and the gentry formed only part of it. It is the other part—the plebeian element—which is considered in this paper.

ON 20TH DECEMBER, 1906, the Liberal Government of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman withdrew from the Order Book the Education Bill which had received its First Reading on 9th April, 1906. The Bill had proposed a drastic revision in the generous settlement which the voluntary schools had welcomed with the passing of the 1902 Education Act. The new proposals had sought to make all public elementary schools into ‘council schools’ controlled by the Local Authority. The denominations would receive an agreed rental for the use of their school buildings, and the upkeep of these buildings would become the responsibility of the Local Authority. But the power to appoint the teachers would also pass to the Local Authority. The only concession to the denominations was the proposal that extended facilities for denominational instruction on each school day would be made available in certain elementary schools if three-quarters of the parents whose children attended the schools asked for them. Head-teachers would not be allowed to give the denominational instruction, but assistant teachers would be allowed to give the instruction if they volunteered to do so. Failing this, the denominations would be responsible for providing the teacher to give the instruction. The controversial Clause Four excluded from this concession elementary schools in areas in which the only school was a denominational school, and in areas with a population of less than 5,000.

THE PERPETUAL Curate of Allendale, an active participant in the Jacobite rebellion of 1715 who later turned king's evidence, said of William, fourth Lord Widdrington, a leading rebel, ‘it had been happy for him, and so we thought would have been better for us, if he had stayed at home’.’ The comment referred both to Widdrington's military incompetence and to the ruin of his house consequent upon his attainder. For Widdrington was one of the wealthiest Northumbrian Catholics, with estates in Lincolnshire, Northumberland and Durham, none of which was heavily mortgaged or encumbered with major debt, as so many northern Catholic estates were. Moreover, his estates at Stella and Winlaton (in the north-west Durham parish of Ryton) incorporated coal-bearing lands which were ripe for development. The shallow coal seams in Whickham and Gateshead, east of Ryton, were virtually worked out and, in order to satisfy the increasingly demanding London market, northern coal-owners were about to extend operations. Widdrington's estate in north-west Durham lay in the middle of the expanding coalfield and would undoubtedly yield substantial profits. As a result of his involvement in the, ‘Fifteen, however, Widdrington forfeited what was described by an acquisitive coal-owning competitor as this ‘very improvable estate’, and, of course, any future profits its coal-mines might earn. Widdrington was fortunate, even so, in having agents in Durham who were prepared to do all in their power to ensure that he did not lose everything. Albert Silvertop and Joseph Dunn, fellow-Catholics and experienced colliery managers (or ‘viewers’), rightly supposed that whoever took over the Stella estate would work quickly to exhaust its coal reserves before the property could be restored, for the entailed estate would revert to Widdrington's heir at his death. Silvertop and Dunn therefore embarked on a remarkable campaign to deprive the new ownership of the benefits the estate promised. The struggle that ensued was long, and often bloody; it became a trial of strength between the powerful coal magnates and independent entrepreneurs, but it also developed into a contest between Protestants and Catholics in which the Catholics were conspicuous for their aggression in defence of their property and reckless in their defiance of possible repercussions under the penal laws.

IN VOLUME 14 of the Catholic Record Society, in an introductory survey mainly devoted to the foundation and history of the English Poor Clares of Gravelines, brief mention is made of their daughter-houses: Aire (established 1629), Rouen (1644) and Dunkirk (1652). Today all four houses are represented by St. Clare's Abbey, Darlington, where are preserved four manuscript volumes relating to the Rouen community: a Register of death-bills’ and three books of annals whose contents adhere closely to chronological order and which are titled ‘Rouen I’ (covering most years of the period 1644 to 1701), ‘Rouen II’ (1702–69) and ‘French Revolution’ (1791–1857).

WHEN THE BISHOPS of the French Church were confronted with the final form of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in 1790 they presented an almost united front of opposition to the new order. Their ideological and social solidarity remained substantially intact in the protracted exile which, with the victory of the revolutionary party, was the almost inevitable consequence of their shared refusal. This was nowhere more apparent than in London where the largest single concentration of exiled bishops gathered. But, given the general concord, there was a subtle variety of response, a continuation of the debate leading up to the Civil Constitution in which many of the bishops had taken part, to the events beginning with the Civil Constitution and ending with the Napoleonic Concordat, which throws some light on the attitudes of these men to their office of bishop. This paper focuses attention on four of the London bishops: La Marche, Dillon, Thémines and Boisgelin; and suggests, from their example, four possible views of, or approaches to, the episcopate.

TWENTY YEARS AGO an article entitled ‘The Eyres of Hassop and some of their connections from the Test Act to Emancipation’ was published in two parts in Recusant History. A section was devoted to the Eyres of Norfolk. Their house in that county—Bury's or Bures or Berries Hall near Swaffham—was acquired by Thomas Eyre at some date shortly before 1688 and passed to three of his six sons, Henry, John and James, in succession, being sold after the death of the last in 1749. In recent years it has ceased to be a private house and is now a country hotel. There remain in the neighbourhood to remind the visitor of the family the monumental inscriptions in the nearby Holme Hale church to Mary, the wife of Thomas Eyre—‘She was very exemplary and eminent for her piety, charity and other virtues, and exchanged this life for a better the 28th of September 1710, Aet. 67’—and to two of her sons.