Dr. Thomas Watson, bishop of Lincoln from 1557 until his deprivation in 1559, was, as A. F. Pollard describes him, ‘one of the chief catholic controversialists’ of Mary Tudor’s reign. ‘A man of acute parts’, according to Bishop Nicholas Ridley, Watson shaped the eucharistic thinking of English Catholics for a generation. Ten years after Watson’s deprivation, one Robert Crowley still felt the need to publish an answer to Watson’s two eucharistic sermons of 1554, since by them, Crowley believed, Catholics were yet ‘chiefly persuaded and stayed’ in their opinions.

William Johnson, S. J., the writer of the two letters printed below, has hitherto escaped notice by English historians, including Foley, because he was a member of the Andalusian province of the Society of Jesus and spent all his religious life in Spain. He is not to be confused with an earlier William Johnson, also a Jesuit, who died at Malaga in 1614. Some details of the life of William Johnson II can be gleaned from the catalogues of the Andalusian province, from his official obituary, and from other archive sources. The historian of the Andalusian province, Juan de Santibañez, included Johnson in his series of brief biographies of its most distinguished sons, Varones ilustres de la Provincia de Andalucía de la Compañía de Jesús written not long after Johnson’s death in 1642. The work was never published but survives in manuscript.

St. Gregory’s was a small college belonging to the English secular clergy founded at Paris in the late seventeenth century. Its main purpose was to enable suitable ecclesiastics who had completed their training at Douai or the other colleges abroad to pursue advanced studies at the Sorbonne before working on the mission in England. Its founders hoped it would serve to produce a corps of highly qualified men to fill the leading administrative and teaching posts in the Catholic Church in England. It survived until 1786 when financial difficulties forced it to close—temporarily, as was at first thought. During the Revolution it suffered the fate of the other English Catholic institutions in France, and it never, in fact, reopened. Among the documents that have survived from its archives is a Register Book covering the whole period of its existence from its first beginnings in 1667 until it closed down over a century later. This Register Book, which records the arrival and departure of students, the stages in their university career, their promotion to holy orders, deaths occurring at the college, and occasional memoranda of events affecting the life of the community, was edited for the Catholic Record Society in 1917 by the late Monsignor Edwin Burton.

The Augustinian Convent of Our Lady of Syon (ancestor of the present St. Augustine’s Priory Ealing) was founded at Paris in 1634. After some early difficulties it made its home in 1638–39 on a site in the rue des Fossés Saint-Victor (now rue du Cardinal Lemoine) on the eastern outskirts of the city where it was to remain, with its school, for more than two hundred years. Almost alone among English Catholic institutions founded in France and Flanders during the penal times it weathered the storm of the French Revolution and remained throughout much of the nineteenth century on the site it had formerly occupied. During the Revolution it was suppressed as a Religious house, its property was sequestrated, many treasures were stolen and some early records lost. The buildings in the rue des Fossés Saint-Victor were used for a time as a prison in which nuns from various convents, as well as laywomen, were confined. Conditions became easier after the fall of Robespierre in 1794 and some of the nuns’ property was provisionally restored to them, but it was again seized under the Directory and those nuns who had survived the earlier ordeal were evicted. Reluctantly, they made preparations to follow the example of many other English Catholic institutions in France and on French-held territory and seek refuge in England.

Dr. Mark Nicholls’s Investigating Gunpowder Plot published in May, 1991, is a useful reminder that Guy Fawkes: the Real Story of the Gunpowder Plot?, to name nothing else published in or near 1969, has by no means found universal acceptance as the more probable solution of the confused evidence surrounding this bizarre episode. This is not surprising. The last mentioned book was written for a wide audience. Thanks no doubt in large measure to the kindly influence of Lady Antonia Fraser it was chosen as the Book of the Month by PUNCH all those years ago. Evidently, such a choice, however desirable in itself, could not be regarded as the highest of recommendations by the world of Academe. Nevertheless, it must be insisted that the book was based on extensive research not only in this country but also abroad, notably in Rome, Florence, Spain, Holland and Belgium. Errors occurred which will need to be corrected in any future edition or new work. Dr. Nicholls, while attempting to refute the basic thesis, was fair enough to admit, ‘such views have found perhaps their most determined and skilful advocate in Fr. Francis Edwards’. But one hopes that an opposing view is based on more than skill, which could be mere forensic adroitness, and on determination which could be another word for obstinacy.

Christopher Maire who was thus described by Alban Butler was the son of Christopher of Hartbushes near Hartlepool, County Durham, of a younger branch of the Maires of Hardwick likewise not far from Hartlepool. Christopher senior had married Frances Ingleby of Lawkland in Yorkshire and they had ten children—eight sons and two daughters. The daughters, Mary Euphrasia and Catherine Eugenia entered the convent of English Poor Clares at Dunkirk. Of the eight sons six were to become priests—two, Henry and William seculars, and four, Christopher, James, Peter and Thomas, Jesuits. The other two, George and John remained laymen and George married. Two sons of George and his wife Mary (Hussey) were also to become Jesuits—Edward and George.

This article is concerned with one aspect of movement between religions in England at the end of the Jacobean period, namely the polemical use which could be made of the convert to Protestantism. The increasing likelihood of a successful conclusion of the Spanish Match negotiations had for some time been threatening the Protestant Establishment. In this climate, prominent changes of religion were of great interest to polemicists of both sides. As in Elizabeth’s reign, Protestants could attack the Church of Rome by focusing on the apostates from it. The point of reference from which this polemical use of conversion will be analysed is the best-selling vitriolic anti-Catholic tract written by the wavering Protestant minister John Gee, entitled The Foot out of the Snare. Gee is familiar to modern historians as a source on Roman Catholic priests in the 1620s but he is important also for the way in which he was employed as an anti-Catholic writer. His tract originated with the clerical group which gathered around Archbishop Abbot, clerics distinguished by their violent opposition to encroaching Roman Catholicism, evident in the likely success of the Spanish Marriage project and the conversions which had started to occur as the political climate changed. Gee’s tract may be used as a starting point to explore some of the politics and literature of conversion at this time.

There is a legend, popularised by Lytton Strachey, that Henry Manning, on becoming a Catholic, studiously resolved to expunge from his mind all memories of his Anglican past. The letters of his young wife, Caroline, who had died only four years after their marriage, were to be destroyed; her grave to be left untended; all past associations of Lavington, Oxford, Harrow, Coombe Bank, and Copped Hall at Totteridge would be too much of a burden for him to bear on his journey to a position of active influence within the Roman Church; so, like Christian in the Pilgrim’s Progress, he willed that the burden should roll from his back that he should see it no more. The truth is very different. Caroline’s letters he took with him to Rome in 1851, where he was to begin his studies at the Accademia Ecclesiastica, only to discover to his profound grief, that the bag in which they were contained, had been stolen at Avignon. So devoted to her memory was he, that—on his deathbed— he amazed his successor in the See of Westminster, Herbert Vaughan, by extracting from beneath his pillow a ‘small, worn volume’, and handing it to him, saying ‘I leave it to you. Into this little book my dearest wife wrote her prayers and meditations. Not a day has passed since her death on which I have not prayed and meditated from this book. All the good I may have done, all the good I may have been, I owe to her. Take precious care of it’.

The Cistercian nuns of Holy Cross Abbey at Stapehill near Wimborne in Dorset have recently moved and settled in South Wales after more than 180 years in the house given to them in the nineteenth century by Lord Arundell of Wardour, so now is perhaps a suitable time for investigating the story of the place when it was a Jesuit centre for at least 135 years. One of the stations in the ‘College of St. Thomas of Canterbury’ or Hampshire district (which included Hampshire, Wiltshire and Sussex as well as Dorset), others in that part of the district being Lulworth, Wardour, Great Canford, Marnhull, Bonham and Odstock, it was sufficiently isolated and remote for a school to have existed there safely for some years.

Certainly, by the last quarter of the eighteenth century, plain-chant performance in England had become inelegantly laborious, a fact much bemoaned by would-be chant-lovers.

Six Franciscan missioners left St. Bonaventure’s, Douai in 1629, on the first attempt to re-establish the Order of Friars Minor in England. All six were martyred or imprisoned during Charles I’s reign. Further groups were despatched during the Interregnum, including one in 1656. Among this group was Father Leo Randolph, whose father Randolph Ferrers owned the Warwickshire manor house of Wood Bevington, between Evesham and Stratford on Avon.

Egerton Castle’s 1896 two-volume edition of The Jerningham Letters (1780–1843), Excerpts from the Correspondence and Diaries of the Honourable Lady Jerningham and of her Daughter Lady Bedingfield was based on the sixteen bound volumes of manuscript letters received and kept by Lady Bedingfield. These volumes are now housed at the University of Birmingham. Many of the letters from Lady Jerningham, her family and friends, were cut drastically for publication; a reader of the manuscript volumes will see Egerton Castle’s red and blue editorial marks on the letters themselves. Other letters, dealing with matchmaking, finances, family problems, the upbringing of children, and religious vocations, were omitted altogether. One striking omission is the series of letters from Lady Bedingfield’s youngest daughter Charlotte, ranging from the time in 1815 when she was a pensioner at Hammersmith making her first communion, to her announcement in 1824 that she had just been voted to her profession at Bruges. She called herself the happiest of Lady Bedingfield’s children and was an Augustinian Canoness at Bruges for over fifty years.

Henry Manning has proved to be a figure of considerable interest for biographers, and versions of his life story have been committed to print in various different forms. First, came E. S. Purcell’s Life of Cardinal Manning: full of subtle insinuation and open attack, constructed around a cab load of pilfered papers, riddled with errors, and therefore, of course, immensely popular. Several other smaller works of some interest but no great merit appeared subsequently, but then came Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians: Purcell’s animus against Manning was transplanted into a man who had little to say for the Victorians and a great deal to say against them. The result was malicious, unfair, vitriolic, and even more popular. So Shane Leslie, when a fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, set out a few years later to write a fairer study and to restore the damage, but his book lacks sustained scholarly depth and, as I shall attempt to show in this study, cannot always be relied upon in its opinions.

Major changes in ecclesiastical government are seldom effected without disagreement or tension. The immediate background to the creation of the Diocese of Brentwood in 1917 bears ample testimony to this truth. Three areas of difficulty were especially evident in the decade before the separation of Essex from the Archdiocese of Westminster: the longstanding dispute between the dioceses of Westminster and Southwark; a clash of personalities between Archbishop Bourne and Bishop Amigo; and a protracted argument over the administration of St. John’s Seminary, Wonersh, the management of Southwark’s trust funds and the availability of funds for any new ecclesiastical territory.

On April 13th, 1841, L’Univers published a letter from John Dobrée Dalgairns who had signed himself Un jeune membre de l’Université d’Oxford. The editorial caption read Du Mouvement Catholique au sein de l’Eglise Anglicane, and was accompanied by an enthusiastic foreword.

English Catholicism in the middle decades of the nineteenth century was an extremely complex phenomenon. In the years after 1829 English Catholics were determined to take their rightful place in society. No longer could they be regarded as politically inferior to their Protestant fellow countrymen. Now at last they were in a position to lay to rest the age-old charge that adherence to papism was evidence of disloyalty to the crown. Into this ideal picture of the union between solid English virtues and Roman obedience there intruded two factors designed to precipitate a shattering of the new found confidence of the Catholic aristocracy and middle classes. The converts, by their academic standing, exposed the lack of real educational attainments of the majority of the hereditary Catholics. They were regarded with suspicion by the old Catholics, and seemed to possess a ‘cockiness’ about their Catholicism which was anti-pathetical to the ‘timid retirement of the hereditary Catholics’. Their brand of Catholicism had none of the inhibitions of a bygone age. They were not afraid to make a scene nor to wash their religious laundry in public.

Between 1845 and 1850 Manning, as Archdeacon of Chichester, published four volumes of collected sermons. They are not his only published sermons as an Anglican, but they are the ones with which this article will be concerned. They were published by the firm of William Pickering, whose list included the liturgical works of the Revd. William Maskell, chaplain to the High Church Henry Phillpotts, Bishop of Exeter, sermons by Manning’S nephew, W. H. Anderdon, and reprints of Bishop Wilson’s Sacra Privata and Lancelot Andrewes’ Preces Privatae, as well as Jeremy Taylor, George Herbert and Henry Vaughan. In 1882 as a Catholic Manning claimed that he had never been concerned that his Anglican sermons should be re-issued. ‘£250 was offered to me for an edition of the four volumes of Sermons. But I always refused. I wished my past, while I was in the twilight, to lie dead to me, and I to it.’ Yet, as Purcell points out, in 1865 he had consulted Dr. Bernard Smith in Rome about their re-issue. Smith’s verdict was negative. ‘These were the works of Dr. Manning, a Protestant. They were the fruits of the Anglican not of the Catholic Church.’ He was, nonetheless, impressed. ‘What I admired most in the perusal of these volumes was not the many strong Catholic truths I met with, but that almost Catholic unction of a St. Francis de Sales, or of a St. Teresa, that breathes through them all.’