The Queen's visit to Oxford in 1566 has been viewed largely through the prism of John Nichols’ The Progresses of Queen Elizabeth. This article returns to the manuscript sources, all of which survive. All make the disputations central; all but one were written by Catholics who subsequently suffered for their faith: Thomas Neale, John Bereblock and Miles Windsor. The Queen's visit clearly represented for Catholics in Oxford the last chance to try to win her favour. This article explores the complex tensions that existed in early Elizabethan Oxford: between the Calvinists who dominated Christ Church and Magdalen, and those still committed to the ‘old religion’. It highlights the continuities with pre-Reformation and Marian Oxford, arguing that Sir Thomas Pope and Sir Thomas White had engaged, with the Owens of Godstow, in a coherent programme to preserve as many of the monastic houses as they could. An exploration of the background of the three main witnesses reveals the presence of a determined Catholic resistance to the Earl of Leicester and his Vice-Chancellor, and the beginnings of alternative centres of learning in an ‘underground’ university of halls, taverns and farms that soon included many of the leading scholars: Thomas Neale, George Etheridge, Edmund Rainolds and John Case. It was while moving along this network that Edmund Campion was captured.

Anne Line ran a safe-house for Catholic priests in London during the 1590s, a time when such activities were a capital offence. She worked closely with two of the most hunted priests in England, the Jesuit superior Henry Garnet and his fellow Jesuit John Gerard, and was arrested and executed in February 1601. Although seemingly little known, it has been suggested that Shakespeare alludes to her in several works implying that the impact of her life and death on her contemporaries may have been underestimated. This fresh look at the documentary evidence seeks to clarify Anne Line's identity and the circumstances of her life up to the exile of her husband in 1586. Findings include; strong support for the suggestion that Anne Line was indeed the ‘Alice Higham’ who married Roger Line in 1583, the likely location of her childhood home near Maldon in Essex, connections to recusant networks through an aunt also called ‘Anne Line’, and evidence, previously overlooked, that Anne Line was closely related to Giles Aleyn, a Puritan landowner whose demands for increased rent from James Burbage for the site of his theatre in Shoreditch led to the founding of The Globe in Southwark.

This article examines the role of disputation in the conversion narrative of the clergyman and poet William Alabaster, written after he converted to Catholicism in the 1590s. Disputation, a mode of debate that had developed in the universities, is a preoccupation of the narrative, and is here used to place the work within the immediate history of religious disputation, and in the wider struggle over scholarship that accompanied post-Reformation religious controversy. The article asks why formal disputation was so important to religious writers and polemicists, drawing on Alabaster's perception of reason and its relationship to faith. It is asserted that the convert's eagerness for scholarly disputation arose from a fusion of religious with intellectual assurance: certainty in faith, and in the academic process. A comparison with examples taken from a long catalogue of works describing public, cross-confessional disputation is then used to enhance our understanding of Alabaster's influences; the building-blocks of his newfound religious identity. Taking Alabaster as its model, the article directs attention not only to the hitherto undervalued phenomenon of public or ‘professional’ religious disputation in post-Reformation England, but also to the role played by reason and scholarship in the thought and faith of Catholic—and Protestant—divines.

The first decade of James I's reign saw a wave of high-profile clerical conversions to the Church of Rome. Among the best-known cases are those of James Wadsworth, who travelled to Spain with Sir Charles Cornwallis's embassy in 1605, where, as William Bedell's biographer Alexander Clogie disgustedly recalled, he was ‘cheated out of his religion by the Jesuits and turned apostate’; Theophilus Higgons, a member of Christ Church, Oxford, who converted in 1607; his friend and Oxford contemporary Humphrey Leech, who followed him in 1609 and later joined the Society of Jesus; and Benjamin Carier, a royal chaplain and prebendary of Canterbury, who converted in 1613. As the work of Michael Questier has taught us, religious conversion was by no means an uncommon phenomenon in early modern England. Yet these cases had the potential to inflict serious damage on the Jacobean church, not only because they threatened to neutralise the propaganda advantages to be gained from Roman Catholic converts to the Church of England such as Marc’ Antonio de Dominis, but also because they drew unwelcome attention to doctrinal divisions within the Church of England over such issues as anti-popery and the theology of grace.

The cult of St Cuthbert was central to the regional identity of north-eastern England with its inhabitants termed the haliwerfolc, or ‘people of the saint’ (Cuthbert). The saint became crucial to the liturgical practices and celebrations of Durham's clerical and secular communities as well as being a guarantor of martial victories; usually against the Scots. However, with the cult of saints an early victim of the Reformation launched by Henry VIII in the 1530s, the outlook for St Cuthbert's legacy became increasingly uncertain. Attachment to the saint's memory became inextricably entwined with Durham's pre-Reformation history as commemoration of the cult, rather than the saint, took on more significance. This article looks at how St Cuthbert's historians and other antiquaries regularly manipulated his legend to satisfy different purposes and circumstances; so that completely different perspectives on Cuthbert and his cult have emerged over the centuries since the Reformation. But, throughout the changing interpretations of St Cuthbert's story his significance in Durham remains unchallenged.

The career of John Carmel Heenan (1905–1975) tends to be remembered for the period of his tenure as Archbishop of Westminster. This was a difficult time for Heenan, who having lived and ministered in an unchanging Church for over sixty years, took up the appointment in September 1963, at a time of rapid and unprecedented change in the Catholic Church in England and Wales following Vatican II. Contemporary commentators naturally gravitated to to the problems he faced in Westminster. Inevitably, in reviews rather than full-scale biographies, historians have concentrated on this later phase of his life. This paper examines one of Heenan's earlier achievements, that of his role of Superior of the Catholic Missionary Society from 1947 to 1951, and shows how his talents were placed at the disposal of the post-war Catholic community in an attempt to recover lapsed Catholics and attract converts to the faith.