It seems beyond controversy to say that the most controversial subject of study for the Jacobethan period is the series of plots that occurred between 1571 and 1605. The word Jacobethan—not the writer’s—is a useful reminder of the essential continuity in important respects of the historical scene between 1558 and 1612. The continuity during this period was mainly supplied by the domination of the Cecils, father and son, William and Robert. In what would appear to be an unique occurrence of a virtual reign within two reigns in our island history, the Cecils, dominating the two monarchs with subtlety and discretion, pursued with skill, intelligence and determination the policy of turning England into a Protestant country. With their allies and subordinates in government, the aim was to turn the clock not back but into a direction from which it would never turn again.

The details of the Gunpowder Plot of November 1605 are well known. This article deals with one of the consequences of the failure of that Plot, the search at Hindlip, Worcestershire, in January 1606, and the sequel to that, as related by the man whose house at Hindlip was searched. It is now generally accepted that Fr. Henry Garnet, the Jesuit Superior, was aware of the Plot from information acquired in confession. The Jesuit Fr. Oswald Tesimond seems certainly to have been privy to the Plot. The authorities, determined to implicate the Jesuits, issued a proclamation against three Jesuits—Garnet, Tesimond and Fr. John Gerard (who was not privy to the Plot)—on 15 January 1605–6. Garnet was in hiding at Hindlip House, a house near Worcester belonging to Thomas Habington, from early December. The house had a large number of secret hiding places. It was searched in January 1606 by a local magistrate, Sir Henry Bromley of Holt, and Garnet, Fr. Edward Oldcorne alias Hall, S. J., and the Jesuit lay brothers Nicholas Owen (who had probably built most of the hides in the house) and Ralph Ashley were discovered. Three of them were later executed; Owen died in the Tower as the result of the torture to which he had been subjected.

Chaplains in penal times were on occasion employed as stewards, though perhaps not as frequently as is sometimes supposed; from the point of view of their employers this is not entirely surprising; on the one hand chaplains might reasonably be expected to be literate, numerate and honest; on the other hand the restrictions under which Catholic priests worked might well leave them a sufficiency of spare time for secular affairs. The interest of the letter which follows lies not in the mere fact of such a stewardship, but in the extraordinarily vivid picture it gives of what it was like for a professed Religious to be involved in running an estate—particularly when his employer was of questionable sanity. Some light is incidentally thrown on the history of Catholicism in Linton-on-Ouse.

Although the Institute of Mary Ward made no stable foundation in the north of England until the founding of the Bar Convent in 1686, recusant history testifies to a fairly constant presence of its members in Yorkshire in the period 1642 to 1686. It is the purpose of this paper to identity these members, to describe where possible their place of residence and to explain why they were there.

This branch of the Pigotts can be traced back to Adam Pigott (d.?1737), a London merchant, member of the Cutlers’ Company where his mark of a dolphin was registered in 1664, who was residing near Temple Gate in 1676. In 1678 Adam Pigott and James Allen negotiated a lease from the Duke of Bedford for the construction of Covent Garden Market, with the obligation to pave the area and construct houses and shops. Adam’s wife is not mentioned in his will and presumably predeceased him, but there were at least two sons, Nathaniel (1661–1737) who died shortly after his father, but through whom this story continues, and Adam (1673–1751) who entered the Society of Jesus at Watten, near St. Omer, was professed in 1694 and, after serving as chaplain at Calehill, Kent, the home of the Darell family, died at Crondon Park, Essex, the seat of the Petre and Mason families, on 30 April 1751. In common with virtually every priest of the period, Adam Pigott used an alias for security reasons, this alias being in many cases the mother’s maiden name. Adam Pigott’s alias was Griffin, which may therefore have been his mother’s original surname.

Refugees, displaced persons and enemy aliens, either individually or in groups, are, regrettably, well known to the early twenty-first century. Resettlement arrangements, counselling and aid appeals are also well-used practices. In May 1795 sixteen women, many elderly, reached Woolton in south Lancashire three weeks after leaving France. They were homeless, virtually destitute and had suffered the trauma and hardship of incarceration for eighteen months in a French prison. The women had little control over their immediate destination, were dependent on the philanthropy of others, and within a few short weeks were at work teaching in a school to earn their livelihoods. They also had to live within a neighbourhood totally unfamiliar with nuns and religious communities. The Benedictine convent of Our Lady of Consolation from Cambrai in northern France had been relocated to Woolton.

The primary focus of this article centres on the two decades that form the prelude to Catholic Emancipation although reference is made to activity outside this time frame and to cities other than London. Charitable endeavour is taken to include all individual voluntary effort to sustain and support Catholic churches, schools and other Catholic organisations in need of assistance. It also relates to assistance given to individuals in need of help. Such ‘endeavour’ also encompasses group and community-based voluntary activity. While it may seem unnecessary to define charitable endeavour, Mary J. Oates in a recent study on the Catholic philanthropic tradition in America heavily circumscribes what she means by the term, and excludes a number of subjects from her examination, thus:

This paper seeks to identify the developing pre-conversion outlooks of two clerical converts to Roman Catholicism using their own self-explanations as sources. William Maclaurin, an Episcopalian priest and dean of the diocese of Moray, explained himself in a series of letters to John Henry Newman during the 1840s. William Humphrey, a young Aberdonian serving in the diocese of Brechin, related his conversion of 1868 in a little devotional work published in 1896. Using these sources, I will investigate the pre-conversion understanding of Catholicism of these two converts and identify factors which prompted their conversion. What was it about the Catholic Church that was attractive to these potential converts, compared with their existing Anglican allegiance?

The Report of a Select Committee in 1835 gave the total of Catholic day schools in England as only 86, with the total for Scotland being 20. Catholic children had few opportunities for day school education. HMI Baptist Noel reported in 1840: ‘very few Protestant Dissenters and scarcely any Roman Catholics send their children to these [National] schools; which is little to be wondered at, since they conscientiously object to the repetition of the Church catechism, which is usually enforced upon all the scholars. Multitudes of Roman Catholic children, for whom some provision should be made, are consequently left in almost complete neglect, a prey to all the evils which follow profound ignorance and the want of early discipline.’ With the establishment of the lay dominated Catholic Institute of Great Britain in 1838 numbers rose to 236 in the following five years, although the number of children without Catholic schooling was still estimated to be 101,930. Lay control of Catholic schools diminished in the 1840s. In 1844, for example, Bishop George Brown of the Lancashire District in a Pastoral letter abolished all existing fund-raising for churches and schools and created his own district board which did not have a single lay member. The Catholic Poor School Committee was founded in 1847, with two laymen and eight clerics and the bishops requested that the Catholic Institute hand over all its educational monies to this new body and called for all future collections at parish level to be sent to it. Government grants were secured for Catholic schools for the first time in 1847. The great influx of Irish immigrants during the years of the potato famine (1845–8) increased the Catholic population and church leaders soon noted the great leakage among the poor. The only way to counteract this leakage was to educate the young under the care of the Church.

It is ironic that it should have been the leader of the church with the greatest proportion of working-class members who took up the most hostile stance to the General Strike of 1926. While Francis Bourne (1862–1935), Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, won the plaudits of the Establishment for his unambiguous denunciation of the strike, that cautious septuagenarian Randall Davidson, Archbishop of Canterbury, found himself cast in the unlikely role of the workers’ friend after his illstarred attempt to conciliate the two sides. Sheridan Gilley has highlighted another contrast: while in 1926 Bourne found himself sharply opposed to labour, in a 1918 pastoral letter he had been insistent that the Church should reach an accommodation with the ‘modern labour unrest’. While Gilley implies that his General Strike condemnation was uncharacteristic, Buchanan suggests that this was closer to expressing his ‘real political views’ than his 1918 statement. This article aims to provide a closer examination of the shift in Bourne’s attitude, and to consider the broader episcopal response to social and political questions during these fraught years.