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 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’.

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’.

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.

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.