Hamlet has made the name of Elsinore, the Danish Helsingor, familiar to everyone. It is a small seaport at the narrowest part of the Sound, opposite the Swedish town of Helsingborg. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, its Baltic traffic was of great importance, and here, in 1580, two Englishmen met by accident.

One of the problems left unresolved by historians who have treated of the troubled episcopate of Richard Smith concerns Smith’s claim to jurisdiction over the Catholic laity in England. Two questions have never been satisfactorily answered: What exactly was the nature of the jurisdiction that he claimed? and How did he set about trying to exercise it in practice? Anyone who has read the published histories that touch upon these questions will be aware that they aroused bitter and prolonged controversy but will have been left with no very clear idea of what Smith actually claimed the right to do and did.

In the early seventeenth century there appeared in print a small group of Catholic controversial works in English written by someone calling himself ‘John Brereley, Priest’. These works were celebrated in their day because of their immense erudition and also because they introduced into religious controversy a novel style of argument that soon became fashionable among Catholics and Protestants alike: that of proving a case mainly from the admissions and self-contradictions of the opposing side. The most important work in the group and the one that established ‘Brereley’s’ chief claim to fame was—to give it the title of its secohd edition by which it is always known—The Protestants apologie for the Roman church.

This index is an appendix to my series of articles in Recusant History (1972-77) and a supplement to Granville Squiers, Secret Hiding-Places (1933). The 177 houses listed below can therefore be divided into three groups. Twenty-eight, of which twenty-two were in Squiers, have been discussed before in Recusant History and are only dealt with briefly here. Another thirty-four are houses where Squiers now needs correcting or amplifying. The remaining 115 are not in Squiers at all but contain (or contained) something definite enough to justify recording. Houses in Squiers on which there is nothing much to add have been omitted here, and so have all but seven of the places listed in Winifred Haward’s two booklets, Secret Rooms of Yorkshire (1956) and Secret Rooms of North-West England (1964). Ninety-five other houses, none of them in Squiers or Haward, have been considered and discarded, either for lack of sufficient evidence or because the ‘hides’ are inauthentic examples of no interest.

Arising out of the comprehensive penal code outlined above were much Privy Council business and considerable work for the conciliar and Common Law courts, the courts of the Established Church and other enforcement-agencies. This section is concerned particularly with two classes of documentation (nearly all of it in the Public Record Office): the Registers, minutes and papers reflecting the Privy Council’s part in the treatment of Catholics and Catholicism, and the records of relevant proceedings in the principal secular law-courts—part only of a network whose other components will be discussed in due course and which is merely sketched in the next few lines.

Addressing the House of Commons in April 1640, Sir Benjamin Rudyerd looked back to the dissolution of the last Parliament in 1629. He blamed the English Catholics for what he saw as their role in it, ‘who now by the discontinuance of parliaments are come to that arrogancy and boldness that they intend [contend] who are the greatest subjects’. This warning would be repeated many times in the Parliamentary debates of 1640-42. The evidence most often cited in support of it was the Catholic or ‘Queen’s’ contribution of 1639, raised to help the King finance his expedition against the Scottish Covenanters.

In February 1747, Bishop William Laurence York, O.S.B., coadjutor since 1741 to the Vicar-Apostolic of the Western District, wrote to Propaganda lamenting that for the past eighteen months he had been ‘a fugitive from my ordinary residence, and have as yet no fixed abode’. The bishop’s ‘ordinary residence’ was the Bell-tree house in Bath whence he had fled at the time of the ‘Forty-five after the mayor had been handed a letter ostensibly implicating Dr York in Jacobite activity and promising him the see of Carlisle if the Young Pretender proved victorious (in one of the documents here printed Bath and Wells is mentioned in the same context!). The mayor advised him to withdraw from Bath for a time, and this he did. The documents which follow and which are among the uncalendared State Papers (Domestic) in the Public Record Office, shed a little light upon the sequel.

Documents relating to Catholics comprise both material issuing from the administrative side of the Chancery and reports, certificates, etc., received by it, as well as information registered in it for record-purposes. The first group, embracing grants of recusants’ forfeitures, pardons and various commissions concerning papists and priests, stems chiefly from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; the second runs from the mid-seventeenth century into the eighteenth and the third (Chancery-enrolments of Catholics’ deeds and, especially, wills) is predominantly Hanoverian.

As a century-long series specially concerned with recusants convicted under the 1581 and later Acts, one class of documents merits particular attention: the Recusant Rolls of the Exchequer (1592-1691). Initially, however, penalties owing to the Crown for recusancy, as for other religious offences, were recorded on the Pipe Rolls of sheriffs’ accounts amid numerous unrelated items of royal revenue and it was not until the early 1590s, following a spate of convictions prompted by the Armada-crisis of 1588 (ensuing upon the more stringent anti-recusant legislation of the previous year) that special Rolls devoted to the thousands of recusancy-cases were inaugurated. Catholics penalised on other grounds usually appeared in the Pipe Rolls and after the cessation of the Recusant Rolls as a separate series the Clerks of the Pipe long continued to receive an allowance for ‘drawing down and charging recusants’ convictions’.

In 1918, the late Mr Ernest Axon wrote an article on the Wardley skull in which he stated:

Robin Clifton has explored the ‘nature, extent and causes of the Protestant fear of Catholics’, and Dr Wiener has traced how ‘hatred of Catholics, once the private obsession of religious extremists, developed into a part of the national ideology’. But what was the attitude in Monmouthshire, which in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was culturally and ethnically a part of Wales? Attempts have been made to compare Catholicism in eighteenth-century Monmouthshire with that in other parts of the Western Vicariate, and to suggest a parallel with Lancashire. There may be some valid comparisons but for a variety of reasons Monmouthshire sits uneasily with any close identification with the English scene.

The crisis referred to in the title of this article occurred in the General Chapter of the English Benedictine Congregation (E.B.C.) in 1717, when a certain Father Laurence Fenwick succeeded in getting himself elected quite unworthily as the President of the Congregation for the ensuing quadriennium. It is the purpose of this article to make some study of what is almost certainly the greatest crisis which the English Congregation has ever passed through, a crisis about which there is nothing in print. Whether it is possible to analyse Fenwick’s motives and find out what he was really trying to do remains to be seen, but no man could have manipulated the Chapter in the way that he did single-handed; he must have had accomplices in a scheme that was worked out in advance, and in fact a situation can be seen developing for some time of which no one is likely to have foreseen the outcome, but which was evidence of a very unsatisfactory state of affairs. There was marked unrest and discontent among certain members of the Congregation, which appears to have started soon after the Revolution of 1688. It cannot exactly be proved, but I hope to show that there is almost certainly a connection between these events, and that the root cause of the trouble in the English Benedictines was precisely the departure of James II from the throne and what this implied.

Ancillary to the Pipe and Recusant Rolls, whose data they both amplify and modify, are two series of Exchequer Memoranda: those of the Lord Treasurer’s and of the King’s (or Queen’s) Remembrancers. These record multifarious financial matters of concern to the Crown, of which recusancy-penalties were but one category; Catholics mulcted on other grounds also occur in these documents, cross-referenced with various Exchequer records—some of them prior to the 1581 recusancy legislation—and continue to appear in them long after the Recusant Rolls come to an end. However, it is via cross-references from the latter that the bulk of Catholic material in the Memoranda Rolls is to be found—particularly in the L.T.R. series, the Communia sections of which contain important records, or Recorda, giving details of recusancy-convictions, seizures and settlements, total or partial, and the grounds for discharges (e.g. payment, conformity, erroneous assessment, legal flaws) as well as much personal information. The significance of these and related documents in building-up ‘Exchequer Dossiers’ of individuals has been expertly demonstrated in two articles by the late Dom Hugh Bowler and more recently they have been drawn on to illuminate Elizabethan and seventeenth-century Catholicism in the West Midlands. To a certain extent derivative from the Lord Treasurer’s Remembrancer’s series are the Memoranda Rolls, just mentioned, of the King’s (or Queen’s) Remembrancer, which shed some light on recusancy cases—particularly ones initiated by Common Informers in the 1580s—though usually to a lesser degree than the former series.

The State Papers (Domestic) at the P.R.O. are not an organic archive but a ‘voluminous conglomeration’ chiefly associated with the Secretaries of State: mainly letters, papers, etc., received by them. This huge collection, much of it calendared in a hundred volumes to the start of Anne’s reign, plus four of ‘Home Office papers’ for the beginning of George III’s, contains an abundance of essential source-material for the study of Catholicism in England from Elizabeth I’s reign onwards, so vast and varied that it is almost impossible to classify. It includes statements by spies and informers, petitions from papists, intercepted Catholic correspondence, prison and other lists, reports and queries from various officials, evidences of conformity (not necessarily the last word), details of travel-passes issued, for example, to Catholics anxious to go abroad during the ‘Popish Plot’ crisis, and of awards of recusancy-penalties to grantees; numerical and financial data; papers relating to Assizes, Sessions and ecclesiastical administration; tantalising items of unknown origin and relevance.

The letters from which the extracts that follow have been selected were all, with one exception, addressed to Edward Galloway, a Jesuit priest who was stationed in Norwich from c. 1759-74 and who was the superior of his Jesuit colleagues working as missionaries in Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridge and Essex. They form a collection known simply as ‘Galloway Letters’ in the Archives of the English Province of the Society of Jesus (AEPSJ). The letters contain much in the way of trivial matter submitted to Galloway for his information, approval or advice, and most of this has been omitted in making this selection, the primary object being to choose such letters and passages as concern those places in Suffolk at which Jesuit priests were stationed or which they used as bases at the time—Bury St Edmund’s, Coldham Hall, near Bury and Gifford’s Hall, near Stoke-by-Nayland, and also places they visited to minister to the scattered Catholics. The method adopted in presenting this selection is to give first the number of the letter in the collection preserved in the Jesuit Provincial Archives, then the passage chosen (retaining the original spelling but with some punctuation added), then editorial comment.

One of the more welcome aspects of recent studies of the English Civil War is the renewal of interest in the military history of the Northern Counties, through the work of B. G. Blackwood and more particularly P. R. Newman, both of whom have served, in the case of Lancashire, to illuminate Ernest Broxap’s pioneering tome of 1910. Newman has done a useful service in drawing attention to the active role in the fighting played by Northern Roman Catholics, who made substantial contributions to the Royalist war effort, a view which modifies the neutrality theory of Dr K. J. Lindley.

Official action against recusancy and other religious offences involving Catholics has left numerous traces in county and municipal records, particularly those of Quarter Sessions, although for two decades near the start of our period that court was deprived of the power to convict persistent recusants. Such offenders may still, however, be found in Sessions’ records during those years, usually en route for the Assizes, perhaps having been first ordered by the Justices to confer with an Anglican divine, and Catholics continued to occupy the attention of the Bench on other grounds, both judicial and administrative, among them Mass-going and possession of popish books on the one hand, certifying their places of abode on the other. J.P.s might also find themselves serving, not always congenially, on special local commissions with widening terms of reference which by 1591 were concerned with both recusants and seminary priests; these bodies, and the religious leanings of their members, have to be taken into account in the regional study of Elizabethan Catholicism. Investigation may uncover evidence of their activities—and of non-co-operation with them—in a variety of sources: returns to the central government, commissioners’ own papers (not necessarily preserved in the county to which they appertain) and the records of parochial, county and municipal authorities revealing liaison with churchwardens and Justices of the Peace, with here a Lord-Lieutenant and elsewhere the city fathers.

In a recent article in this periodical on the identity of the early seventeenth-century controversialist who wrote under the pseudonym ‘John Brereley’, I published some biographical notes on the Jesuit, Lawrence Anderton (1575-1643) who is sometimes mistakenly credited with authorship of the ‘Brereley’ books. These notes included new evidence on a hitherto very obscure phase of Anderton’s career, the five or six years after he left Cambridge in 1597 to become a Catholic and go abroad to study for the priesthood. I was able to show that he studied at the English College at Seville and returned to England, a priest but not yet a Jesuit, a few years later. The date of his return seemed to be determined by an entry in the College accounts stating that his viaticum was collected on 24 March 1603. Of his life at the College, however, I could discover nothing beyond the fact that, while there, he went by the alias Lawrence Rigby or Ribe. Since publishing my article I have come across a piece of evidence which throws a little further light on his career at the College and which also suggests that he left Seville to come on the mission a few months earlier than the date of the viaticum would seem to indicate.