Among the most prominent Lincolnshire families in Tudor and Jacobean times were the Tyrwhitts of Kettleby and Twigmore. Other Lincolnshire branches of the family were seated at Scotter, Cammeringham and Stainfield. The Victoria County History of Lincolnshire says, ‘To follow various members of the Tyrwhitt family, whose names re-appear from first to last in connexion with Romanist sympathy, is to trace the history of recusancy in the county.’ But some important parts of the history of the Kettleby Tyrwhitts have been confused or overlooked by historians, and the record should be corrected. Here we shall focus on one of the sons of Sir Robert Tyrwhitt of Kettleby, a son who died in prison in 1580. In a further article we will identify a grandson of Sir Robert who gave John Gerard SJ much financial support from about 1598 until Gerard left England in 1606.

Conformity Certificates are to be found among the Recorda of the King's Bench in the Public Record Office, London (Class K.B. 145). I have been asked by the Public Record Office to make it clear that these documents are not generally accessible to the public; indeed, they are not easy to consult, being dirty, crumpled and many torn, though in only one case was the name of a recusant completely lost, being torn off, without occurring again in the certificate. The greater part of the Recorda are writs to sheriffs or justices, but among them there are also to be found inquisitions, memoranda, some accounts for repairs to the King's Bench, recognizances of debts, copies of pleas coram Rege, depositions of witnesses, orders to commit the children of felons to the parish, accounts of misdemeanours, and Gaol Deliveries. Conformity Certificates form only a small part of the whole.

On 13 December 1605 there appeared in Durham Consistory Court before William James, the dean of Durham, and William Morton, John Barnes, and Robert Cooper, justices of the peace, the first of five witnesses in a trial which resulted from the Gunpowder Plot of 5 November 1605. The case concerned a recusant Catholic, Eleanor Jackson, the wife of Thomas Jackson of Bishop Auckland. The trial and tragic end of this unknown woman are of especial interest since they point to the intense search to uncover as many plotters as possible after the discovery of the Plot. Eleanor's unhappy story serves to emphasize both the fear which gripped the country and the hysteria which swept all England and enveloped the innocent or foolish in the aftermath of the Plot.

On 23rd November, 1584, the fifth Parliament of Queen Elizabeth introduced a bill against “Jesuits, seminary priests and such other like disobedient persons,” which proposed to order all Catholic priests ordained since the feast of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist, 1559, to leave the country within forty days after the end of the current session of Parliament or suffer pain of death for high treason, their aiders and abettors to be adjudged felons and condemned to death as felons. This bill passed its third reading in the House of Commons on December 19, 1584, but it was not taken up by the House of Lords until after the Christmas recess.

‘Ireland was the only country where the Counter-Reformation succeeded against the will of the head of state.’ Why was this? Obviously, the English Government's neglect of education and the Catholic clergy's awareness of its importance was one reason. Obviously, too, the Counter-Reformation got under way in Ireland before the Reformation made a religious impact. Again, the quality of the reformed clergy sent to Ireland was poor and they made little effort to learn Gaelic or to translate the scriptures into the national language until very late in the century. But perhaps most important of all is the fact that in Gaelic Ireland the Reformation was inextricably linked with the expropriation of lands and the abolition of traditional rights and customs. Hence, defence of one's land and of one's religion became so intertwined as to be almost inseparable; and this, I suspect, rather than any appreciation of theological distinctions, was decisive. A number of the clergy of the Counter-Reformation, most of them educated in the Irish colleges on the Continent, were at pains not only to underline the ‘heresies’ in the new teaching and to instruct the people in the spirit of Tridentine Catholicism, but also to link the struggle against the ‘gall’, the English conqueror, with the European religious struggle.

Bernard Burder, Abbot of the Cistercian Abbey of Mount St Bernard's, Leicestershire, from 1853 to 1858 is largely forgotten today; but for a few years in the middle of the last century his activities were important, and to a considerable extent, anticipated those of Archbishop Manning in the field of reformatory education. Burder's spiritual progress was similar to Newman's: he began life as a nonconformist, was then converted to Anglicanism and finally joined the Catholic Church one year after Newman. That same year, 1846, he entered Mount St Bernard's and on the death of its first Abbot, Dom Bernard Palmer, in 1853, was, in December of that year, elected to succeed him.

It was in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries that colleges were first established in the Iberian Peninsula for the provision of Catholic priests to serve on the English mission. The first to be opened was at Valladolid in 1589; this ‘was followed by Seville in 1592 and Madrid in 1611. They were supported by the alms of the faithful, taken under the protection of the Spanish Crown, and administered by the Society of Jesus. Smaller establishments, residences, were in existence at Lisbon and San Lucar de Barrameda (near Cadiz) serving as points of entry and departure for students and priests on their journeys between Spain and England. Eventually, in 1622, a College was established at Lisbon but from the beginning, this college differed from the others in that it was always administered by the English secular clergy and not by the Jesuits. The golden age of the Spanish colleges was in the first fifty or sixty years of their existence when they not only provided many missioners, including martyrs, but also exercised a political influence on the English Catholic scene by reason of their Jesuit administration and their situation in Spain. However, by the eighteenth century a decline had set in. There were complaints about the administration, and the recruitment of students was low so that few missioners returned to work in England. In fact, between 1739 and 1756 the College at Valladolid was closed to students while rebuilding took place. Partly because of the poor recruitment and partly because of their antipathy to the Jesuits, the Vicars Aṕostolic were dissatisfied and almost lost interest in these three colleges, relying on the establishments at Douai and Lisbon which were under the direction of the seculars.

‘I acknowledge this Doctrine is not commonly received by Protestants, who (I humbly conceive) might reject it chiefly in opposition to the See of Rome, wherein such a multitude of monsters do swim…’ This is how the Congregationalist divine, Robert Dingley (1619-1660) summarized the characteristic Protestant attitude to the Roman Catholic belief in guardian angels in the preface to The Deputation of Angels, or The Angel-Guardian (1654, Wing D 1496).

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.

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.

Around the main actors in the drama of the Oxford Movement there was a supporting cast of secondary figures which have remained in relative darkness; the increasing glow of attention focused on the central characters, Newman in particular, appears to have relegated them even further into obscurity. Samuel Francis Wood belonged to this group of people, and he is perhaps the most attractive of the personalities among them: loyal, generous, warm, affectionate towards his friends and passionate in the promotion of the causes he espoused. He was destined to be on most intimate terms of friendship with both Newman and Manning, acting as a bridge—together with the Wilberforces—between these two extraordinary personalities.

The Protestant societies engaged in evangelizing the Irish in London were mostly staffed by laymen, but had the enthusiastic aid and counsel of the Evangelical clergy, and were only some of the institutional strands in the Evangelical Vicar's encounter with urban poverty from the early 1830s, as the Evangelical urban parish was divided into units of manageable size, and developed lay forms of district-visiting to bring under parochial supervision the huge urban slum populations: or, as the Evangelicals put it themselves, as they brought a remedy to the material and spiritual destitution of the great godless cities, and to London, the greatest and least godly of any. The lay societies needed clerical approval, patronage and protection, and the Evangelical clergy worked as hard as their laymen.

Shrewsbury, like many towns of eighteenth century England, bears witness to the slow emergence of an urban Catholic community. The fact that its first Catholic chapel could be built as early as 1776, two years before the first Relief Act, and thus laying the community open to serious reprisals, is an indication of the easing of relations between the Catholic and his neighbours. It was not until 1791 that the building of chapels was permitted, but after 1778 most of the penal restraints were removed from the statute book. This, too, is a reflection of growing toleration rather than its cause, although it was prompted immediately by the need to recruit Catholic highlanders into the army. The ’45 could now be forgotten and the Catholic tended to be regarded as a somewhat quaint, though harmless, figure. This was a time of transition from country to town and perhaps the Catholic community, unencumbered by the social restraints of the establishment from which it had been excluded for so long, was to gain particularly from the change. The Catholic Brook family of Madeley Court, for example, felt free to turn its attention to industry, opening the first iron forge in Coalbrookdale, the cradle of the Industrial Revolution.

The English seminary of St. Alban Valladolid in Spain has an up to date theological library with books in both Spanish and English. As an establishment dating back to 1589 it also possesses many books of antiquarian interest. The older books belonging to the college owe their present arrangement to Edwin Henson. During World War II as Rector he was for several years the only permanent resident in the college and he spent much of his time cataloguing and indexing the archives and library. There are two rooms: the eighteenth century style Biblioteca or Big Library with 6765 volumes and the smaller enclosed repository known as the Pigskin Library (Biblioteca de Piel) containing 2881 volumes.

The Archpriest Controversy, a dispute that took place from 1598 to 1602 over the necessity for an archpriest to enforce moral discipline among the English Catholic clergy, has been traditionally seen either as a struggle for hierarchical order within the Catholic Church or a serious ideological breach between the Jesuit faction and the Appellants. In contrast to recent historiography, this paper argues that the Appellants, secular clergy that opposed the archpriest, represented views of conservative English Catholics who believed they could reconcile their political loyalty to their monarch with their Catholicism. The Archpriest Controversy should be reconsidered as a critical moment in a chain of important events from the English Mission of 1580–81 to the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 that reaffirmed the inherently traditionalist nature of the Catholic community in England.

After 1571 Catholic sacred objects were outlawed in England, and the possession of such objects could be prosecuted under the statute of praemunire. Despite this prohibition sacred objects including rosaries, blessed beads, and the agnus dei (wax pendants blessed by the pope) remained a critical part of Catholic devotion. This article examines the role of the agnus dei in English Catholic communities and the unique political connotations it acquired during the reign of Elizabeth I. It assesses the uses of these sacramentals in Catholic missions to England, their reception amongst Catholics, and the political significance of the agnus dei in light of the papal excommunication of Elizabeth I in 1570.

The struggle of the English Catholics during the reigns of Queen Elizabeth and King James I to achieve toleration has already proved itself a challenging feature of Renaissance culture. It is surprising, therefore, that few of the personalities in this conflict have been studied in detail, especially the Catholic leaders who facilitated rather than resisted the submission of the Catholic population to the government. Perhaps a study of these men, who were subject to correction by the forces at either extreme, would lend to our comprehension of the period a degree of objectivity not to be found among the deluge of partisan accounts. At least their careers can complement, as biography always does history, the existing surveys (1), giving them continuity and human significance.

In the monastic refectory at Downside the two portraits of the abbey’s great Victorian prelates, William Bernard Ullathorne and Francis Aidan Gasquet, dominate the scene, placed as they are above the abbot’s table on either side of the crucifix. Ullathorne, in the prime of life, looks alert and full of purpose. Gasquet, in decline, looks sour and tired. ‘The Cardinal,’ wrote the Venerabile obituarist, ‘used to walk down the corridor (of the English College) with tightly compressed lips and irritable-looking lines above his nose, while his eyes, which were partly hidden beneath frowning brows, scanned us searchingly the while: in a word, with none of that graciousness of age which is the common memory of all who knew him.’ Gasquet, the only English Cardinal to make a significant impact in the Roman curia in the twentieth century, remains an ambiguous character, now little known and if remembered at all associated with poor historical scholarship. Yet, Gasquet’s influence was considerable and owed much to his amiable personality and ready wit, his ability to make friends and to influence those in the highest echelons of church and state. Indeed, in 1903 Francis Aidan Gasquet was very nearly appointed as the first Benedictine Archbishop of Westminster. Instead, the somewhat colourless Francis Alphonsus Bourne succeeded Cardinal Vaughan and Gasquet had to be content with a life as varied and interesting as the church could offer.