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.

Jonn Donne's modern biographers have had to redress an imbalance in the laconic account of his Catholic background given by his earliest biographer, Izaak Walton. For example, Baird D. Whitlock introduced the story that the priest Thomas Heywood, Donne's grand-uncle, was ‘executed’ for his faith in 1574, when Donne was two years old. Whitlock found this story in A. W. Reed's Early Tudor Drama, where Reed presumed that ‘Sir Thomas Heywood the Parson’, as he is named in his brother Richard's will, was also the subject of a note inscribed on another document relating to Richard Heywood: ‘ye 14th of June 1574, a fryar who was akin was executed’. Though this note is the only evidence of Thomas Heywood's purported execution, the story has been accepted by Donne's biographers since Whitlock, despite various contrary evidence.

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.

During the Archpriest Controversy, altogether eighteen books were printed on behalf of the Appellant priests. On the other side, in defence of the Archpriest Blackwell, barely a third of this number of pamphlets appeared. The first of these anti-Appellant works to arrive in England—in the summer of 1601—was entitled The copy of a letter written to a very worshipful Catholic gentleman in England, of grief conceived about some scandalous dissension and books set forth tending to the disgracing one of another by such as labour in the same cause, know from its running-title as An epistle of pious grief. A small tract of fifty pages, written by ‘S.N.’, it is now so rare that only one copy is known to survive.

1981 marks the bicentenary of the death of Bishop Challoner, but 200 years later there is still disagreement about the date of his baptism. Fr L. E. Whatmore has argued convincingly that the Bishop was baptized at Chiddingly in Sussex, the son of Richard Challoner and Grace Willard. But he points out that two different dates have been given for the date of the ceremony. He quotes W. H. Challen's statement that the baptism took place on 29 November 1691 and the then Vicar of Chiddingly's assertion that it took place on 12 October 1691. In fact, both dates are supported by documentary evidence, and it is the original documents that are in error. An examination of the original Parish Register for Chiddingly at the East Sussex Record Office, and of the Bishop's Transcripts for Chiddingly in the West Sussex Record Office explains the difference. In the Register, which was quoted by the Vicar, the entry in the list of baptisms for 1691 reads: ‘October ye 12 Richard ye son of Richard Chalender’. On the other hand, the same event recorded in the Transcripts, and quoted by Challen, reads: ‘November ye 29th. Richard the son of Richard Challoner was baptised’. Which document gives the correct date?

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.

The following report on English religious houses in Flanders was sent to Secretary of State Sunderland on 7 January 1707/8. When the Earl of Sunderland left office in 1710, he took this account, along with virtually all departmental papers, with him and it has remained in his private collection from that time to the present. As the covering letter reveals, it was prepared by John Macky on his own initiative. His purpose was to reveal the size and wealth of the English Catholic community residing in religious houses in the Low Countries. In particular, he stressed the income which came to these institutions from Britain. This was to substantiate his proposal to remove these bodies by cutting off this flow of money.

This work is the product of team research carried out by a group of Extramural Department students of the University of Birmingham, using locally available primary and secondary material. None of the group were professional historians, though some have pursued private research on aspects of local history, and all had been prepared by a term's lectures on the Catholic Revival in Birmingham, 1650-1850.

P. R. Newman has done a useful service in tabulating the returns in the Durham Protestations (Recusant History [October 1979], pp. 148-52). Unfortunately, he has omitted the sixty-eight names of persons refusing to sign in the parish of Lanchester, a parish which on the showing of the Protestation itself had an 18% recusancy among its adult males. The inclusion of these would raise Mr Newman's figure of 452 men refusing the Protestation (excluding known non-Catholics) to 520, and the percentage in the county to just under 3.2. An even more accurate percentage might be obtained if the affirmative signatures from Bishop Auckland, a parish which failed to list the refusers, were subtracted from the total. If that were done, the percentage would rise to just over 3.2. Also it may be reasonably assumed that the percentage would be higher still if the whole adult population were taken into account. For, as the lists of prosecutions and more general indications suggest, women were more faithful and persevering adherents of the old religion than men. However, the two-to-one ratio which might be inferred from an examination of the presentments to the Sessions and the church courts probably overstates the true proportion. For this two reasons may be adduced. First, in the early Elizabethan years, when many were uncertain as to where they stood, numerous waverers allowed or perhaps encouraged their wives to take a stand for Catholicism while they themselves made at least an outward show of conformity when that was deemed necessary for the preservation of their families and possessions. Secondly, churchwardens, when pressed for presentments, apparently found that to name widows and spinsters along with vagrants gave rise to less local trouble than the naming of their fellows. Even so, though the proportion of women recusants may have been rather less than the prosecutions suggest, there can be little doubt that they outnumbered men sufficiently for one to speculate that the Catholic adult population may well have been of the order of 3.5%.

In a region of sparse population and little culture it is hardly surprising that organised religion has never been strong in Cumbria. During the Middle Ages the Church's main influence was via the several monastic settlements, particularly the powerful Furness Abbey, which possessed a real economic empire. The influence of the clergy was restricted when population was so dispersed and parishes so massive, and the conclusion must be that Roman Catholicism possessed only a tenuous hold at any point in its history. That the Cumbrians so easily and swiftly on the surface adopted the new Anglican Establishment of the sixteenth century did not reflect the attractions for the new faith or the coercion of authorities; it was simply that no Christian denomination was taken to heart by the native Cumbrians. By the mid-seventeenth century it has been estimated that there were about 500 Roman Catholics in the whole of Cumbria out of a population of towards 100,000. A number of prominent Cumbrians retained the old faith—the Stricklands of Sizergh (who suffered greatly for it) and most of the Howards of Corby and Naworth (who enjoyed considerable honours) and their households being the most prominent. Generally, the remaining Catholics were left alone, though in case of emergency their loyalty might be questioned.

In 1850, during its first year of publication, Notes and Queries printed the enquiry of one ‘J.M.’, who asked for information about a treatise of equivocation to which he had found reference in a seventeenth-century book. A number of replies in subsequent issues provided bits of information about the treatise, and called attention to a manuscript copy in the Bodleian. This flurry of items in Notes and Queries seems to have prompted David Jardine (1794-1860), who later wrote a history of the Gunpowder Plot, to prepare an edition of the treatise, which was published in 1851. Jardine composed a preface, but since he could not establish who had written the work, and was not optimistic that the matter would ever be clarified, his account is far from complete. There did, however, exist documents that could identify the author, and exactly 100 years after the appearance of Jardine's edition, an article by A. F. Allison showed conclusively that the treatise had been written by Father Henry Garnet, S.J. Since the treatise played a significant part in the history of ‘equivocation’ in England, and was a subject of controversy at the time of the Gunpowder Plot, I believe it will be useful to provide an account of what is now known about the work.

On 29 May 1660, Anthony Wood purchased a newly-published broadsheet, headed ‘A Catalogue of the Lords, Knights and Gentlemen (of the Catholick Religion) that were Slain in the late Warr in Defence of their King and Country’. It contained in excess of 200 names, and covered not only those who had lost their lives as a result of the Civil Wars, but also those who had lost estates or had been plundered vigorously by enemy forces. It was the first martyrology to greet the restoration of Charles II, preceding by almost three years the pamphlet entitled ‘The Royal Martyrs’ which listed both Catholic and Protestant activists who had suffered in the royal cause. J. C. H. Aveling has stated that ‘After 1660, Catholic peers and gentry all maintained loudly that they had been strong Royalists’, and his implied doubts concerning these claims (he seems to regard allusions in heraldic visitations as largely spurious) reflect the conventional view of those recent scholars who have gone into the matter of Catholic activism.

Of the Catholic polemicists in England in the seventeenth century, few wrote more voluminously or earned more respect from their adversaries than Abraham Woodhead. His works are grave, erudite, and irenic in tone, reflecting their author's retired life of study after his conversion. His efforts to avoid the limelight have been successful, both in his own time and in ours; perhaps that is why no one, so far as I know, has yet subjected his books to the careful scrutiny and analysis which they deserve. There are several worthwhile theses in the history of theology to be written on Woodhead and the controversies in which he was engaged; perhaps the materials offered in this article will help a few scholars through the preliminaries to Woodhead study and encourage them to give us a theological pprtrait of this man whose historical portrait is so hard to draw.