The Jesuit Provincial Thomas Whitbread (alias Harcourt), executed at Tyburn on 20 June 1679, was the most eminent ecclesiastical victim of the so-called ‘Popish Plot’, and has been beatified. Who exactly was he? There is apparently still some uncertainty. His parentage and early background are in one sense irrelevant to the dramatic public events at the close of his life. Nevertheless it is tantalising not to be able to ‘place’ an historical character. This paper re-examines the question with the aid of some scraps of fresh evidence.

Two recent articles in Recusant History have drawn attention to the Protestation Returns, and used them as evidence for the size and strength of the Catholic community in the seventeenth century, as well as for evidence for the existence or non-existence of ‘Church Papists’. The purpose of this article is to move the discussion on towards an examination of the reliability of the Protestation Returns themselves as giving an accurate picture of the size of the Catholic community, and, in particular, to examine the evidence in the case of the parish of Midhurst in West Sussex, a well-known centre of recusancy.

Although some Anglican documentation with a bearing on Catholic recusancy and associated matters has appeared in print, the majority of these records remain unexplored including most of the act books of the ecclesiastical courts—‘among the more strikingly repulsive of all the relics of the past’—which perhaps have a special significance, despite their failings, for the first half of Elizabeth’s reign before the emergence of much relevant secular source-material. An indispensable guide to non-parochial archives is Dr Dorothy M. Owen’s The Records of the Established Church in England; for parish records there are W. E. Tate’s classic study, The Parish Chest (third edition, 1969) and the National Index of Parish Registers while the comprehensive Pilgrim Trust Survey of Ecclesiastical Archives, containing references to derivative and other published material, can be updated by more recent catalogues and lists of specific holdings. In addition to documentation to be looked-for almost throughout our period there are, to 1641, records relating to ecclesiastical commissions, diocesan and provincial (Canterbury and York). On sources for ecclesiastical commission business, especially in the southern province, there is much information in Roland G. Usher’s Rise and Fall of the High Commission (1913), valuably supplemented by Dr Philip Tyler’s revisionist Introduction to the 1968 reprint which calls attention to material not seen by Usher, notably the rediscovered act books of the York commission, a source for early Elizabethan Catholic survival and appertaining to parts of the country remote from its own jurisdiction (such as the distant diocese of Salisbury, whose own fragmentary act book likewise casts sidelights on other areas).

It is sometimes stated that Mount St Bernard’s Abbey in the Charnwood Forest, Leicestershire, was the first Cistercian monastery to be established in England after the Reformation. But this is not so, for from 1794 to 1817, a Cistercian monastery flourished at Lulworth in Dorset, These monks, who came originally from La Trappe in France, were at the French Revolution expelled and found refuge in Switzerland. In 1794, Dom Augustine, the superior, determined to found a Cistercian house in Canada, and for that purpose several monks set out from Switzerland to Canada, travelling via England. On their arrival in London, however, they were persuaded by Thomas Weld of Lulworth Castle to remain in this country. Weld gave them a home in his park at Lulworth, where a monastery was shortly afterwards built and placed under the patronage of St Susan. Over the next few years these French Cistercians were joined by many English and Irish novices, but in 1817, they received a command from the British Government either to cease to receive British subjects or to leave the country. They chose the latter alternative and left England on 10 July 1817, over sixty in number, bound for Melleray in Brittany, where they took over the former monastery, still standing after the Revolution.

This bibliography, like those in previous Newsletters, has been compiled largely from a search of periodicals, especially those taken by the Institute of Historical Research. The items listed cover the period from the accession of Elizabeth I to the first Vatican Council. The publications of the Catholic Record Society, the Catholic Archives Society and the local recusant societies (Essex Recusant, Kent Recusant History, London Recusant, Northern Catholic History, North-West Catholic History, Staffordshire Catholic History and Worcestershire Recusant) have not been included.