Dr. Mark Nicholls’s Investigating Gunpowder Plot published in May, 1991, is a useful reminder that Guy Fawkes: the Real Story of the Gunpowder Plot?, to name nothing else published in or near 1969, has by no means found universal acceptance as the more probable solution of the confused evidence surrounding this bizarre episode. This is not surprising. The last mentioned book was written for a wide audience. Thanks no doubt in large measure to the kindly influence of Lady Antonia Fraser it was chosen as the Book of the Month by PUNCH all those years ago. Evidently, such a choice, however desirable in itself, could not be regarded as the highest of recommendations by the world of Academe. Nevertheless, it must be insisted that the book was based on extensive research not only in this country but also abroad, notably in Rome, Florence, Spain, Holland and Belgium. Errors occurred which will need to be corrected in any future edition or new work. Dr. Nicholls, while attempting to refute the basic thesis, was fair enough to admit, ‘such views have found perhaps their most determined and skilful advocate in Fr. Francis Edwards’. But one hopes that an opposing view is based on more than skill, which could be mere forensic adroitness, and on determination which could be another word for obstinacy.

This article is concerned with one aspect of movement between religions in England at the end of the Jacobean period, namely the polemical use which could be made of the convert to Protestantism. The increasing likelihood of a successful conclusion of the Spanish Match negotiations had for some time been threatening the Protestant Establishment. In this climate, prominent changes of religion were of great interest to polemicists of both sides. As in Elizabeth’s reign, Protestants could attack the Church of Rome by focusing on the apostates from it. The point of reference from which this polemical use of conversion will be analysed is the best-selling vitriolic anti-Catholic tract written by the wavering Protestant minister John Gee, entitled The Foot out of the Snare. Gee is familiar to modern historians as a source on Roman Catholic priests in the 1620s but he is important also for the way in which he was employed as an anti-Catholic writer. His tract originated with the clerical group which gathered around Archbishop Abbot, clerics distinguished by their violent opposition to encroaching Roman Catholicism, evident in the likely success of the Spanish Marriage project and the conversions which had started to occur as the political climate changed. Gee’s tract may be used as a starting point to explore some of the politics and literature of conversion at this time.

Certainly, by the last quarter of the eighteenth century, plain-chant performance in England had become inelegantly laborious, a fact much bemoaned by would-be chant-lovers.

English Catholicism in the middle decades of the nineteenth century was an extremely complex phenomenon. In the years after 1829 English Catholics were determined to take their rightful place in society. No longer could they be regarded as politically inferior to their Protestant fellow countrymen. Now at last they were in a position to lay to rest the age-old charge that adherence to papism was evidence of disloyalty to the crown. Into this ideal picture of the union between solid English virtues and Roman obedience there intruded two factors designed to precipitate a shattering of the new found confidence of the Catholic aristocracy and middle classes. The converts, by their academic standing, exposed the lack of real educational attainments of the majority of the hereditary Catholics. They were regarded with suspicion by the old Catholics, and seemed to possess a ‘cockiness’ about their Catholicism which was anti-pathetical to the ‘timid retirement of the hereditary Catholics’. Their brand of Catholicism had none of the inhibitions of a bygone age. They were not afraid to make a scene nor to wash their religious laundry in public.

In an article published in The Month in 1908 Charles Plater claimed that there were three pressing needs which had to be met if English Catholic social action were to develop fruitfully. He admitted that there was no shortage of charitable institutions, and a long English Catholic tradition of charitable work, but claimed that in the main Catholics were apathetic when it came to social work. The three needs were, firstly, a need for experts, both clerical and lay, who could produce a sound social literature. These experts would form a Catholic equivalent of the British Institute of Social Service, to command the best advice and to foster local initiatives; with its help, Catholics could join in such bodies as anti-sweating leagues, housing schemes, temperance campaigns, and so on, and be sure of their ground. Secondly, there was a need for organised social study in all Catholic educational establishments, and for more or less informal study circles, so that interested and informed laypeople would be produced. Thirdly, there was a need to organise working-men’s study clubs to enable working-class Catholics to hold their own against socialist colleagues and so to form labour leaders. As Plater was to stress time and time again, working-men could only be reached by working-men. They would, he claimed, welcome the sense of power gained by this training and the self-improvement effected by it.