Thomas Argall was born in or around 1500, apparently at Lambeth where his parents, John and Emme Argall, held a house and a close on the Archbishop of Canterbury's estate. Both parents were dead by 1522, when Argall, as the only son, inherited this small property and a few household goods. His family was closely associated with the Church and included a relative, William Argall, who was a cleric and probably another relative who became vicar of New Shoreham, Sussex, in 1545. Argall followed a similar career, although he remained a layman, and entered the administration of Archbishop Warham.

The 150 years separating Southwell from Pope saw great changes in English Catholicism. In the later sixteenth century the Catholic faith was still native English, and the older poetical tradition of lyric religious meditation, which Southwell found flourishing about him when he returned from Rome in July 1586, blended readily in his own poetry with the newly passionate and ingenious devotion of the Counter-Reformation. The enterprise of reviving the Faith in England was vigorous and young, and the blood of the martyrs flowing in the very streets of London as once it had flowed in the streets of Rome must have made of the Church in its most deeply traditional and heroic aspect a present English reality. The passionate ingenuity of the Counter-Reformation; the plainness of the English religious and gnomic tradition; the edge of sober reality and depth given to meditation, even curious meditation, on the sufferings of Christ and the saints by the virtual certainty of the gallows; together with a rhetorical hold on the Faith deeper and older than the Counter-Reformation devotion he found in Italy, to be found rather together with the lives of the early martyrs in his breviary: all combined in Southwell's best poetry in a taut and assured style, full of balanced tensions. But as the years passed, England was not converted and the time of martyrdom ended. Where bloody persecution failed, exile and neglect began to succeed. A sense of the Church as thoroughly English and as in the fervour of its first centuries gradually disappeared. English Catholic devotion in the poetry of Crashaw became contemporary and sometimes uncontrollably ingenious and Continental, with martyrdom a metaphor, though exile a reality. In Dryden's poetry, the Church also appeared in very much its contemporary aspect, though expressing itself now not so much in devotional as in apologetic terms. Dryden's conversion was clearly genuine and his apologia sincere, but he had in his poetry an oddly restricted hold on the Faith, speaking of the Church's relation to other Christian sects often in political or social language. Dryden suffered willingly, however, for his belief, though not exile or martyrdom; whereas the suspicion with Pope is always that, though he remained a Catholic, his Catholicism was a social disability to be borne in much the same way as his physical disability. In the poetry of Pope, Catholicism is a remnant, contributing rather little to an assurance about final realities as impressive perhaps in its way as Southwell's.

Recent scholarship has challenged the Marxist and Whig-Liberal views which placed the Catholics solidly behind Charles I in the Civil War. Kieth Lindley, Martin J. Havran and others argue that they were hard hit by the taxation policies of Thorough in the 1630s, and that when the Civil Wars came they were too impoverished and politically alienated to risk life and property for the King. The story of Catholics in Warwickshire during the Civil War and Interregnum well illustrates these revisionist interpretations.

The lesson of the Popish Plot, that the law was almost powerless against perjury, was widely applied in political accusations, administrative disputes and criminal prosecutions, particularly in the 1690s when so many former Exclusionists were in office or Parliament. MPs such as John Arnold, who had employed suborned evidence against the Monmouthshire Jesuits in attempting to overthrow the pro-Catholic Marcher magnate, the Duke of Beaufort, found it too good a weapon not to use in every-day politics. The Catholics, however, were not the main sufferers; the destruction of their Court party at the Revolution made them comparatively insignificant. Oates's successors, remembering the impunity with which he had attacked the Queen, James and Danby, laid their charges of treason against ministers or opposition leaders. However, one late offshoot of the Plot has caused some difficulties in Catholic history; it is another reminder that the compilers of the official records combined ignorance with their anti-Catholicism, holding with one judge during the Plot, that ‘They have such secret contrivances among themselves … that where there are two men that positively tell you a thing that lies within their knowledge and swear it is true, it is scarce any improbability that should weigh against such an evidence’. Land or money given to ‘superstitious’ uses was legally forfeit to the Crown under the Chantries Act (1 Edw. VI, c.14), extended (by implication) to the support of foundations abroad under 27 Eliz., c.2, sect. 4 The official findings in this decade are so odd that usually they have wisely been ignored; yet local historians can be deceived or confused. This investigation provides a full explanation and a glimpse of the Catholic underworld on which anti-Catholicism largely depended.

Charles Butler's mother, née de Blandecque(anglice Blandyke), of a family established in Saint-Omer, was enthusiastically devoted to the Society of Jesus. His much-loved paternal uncle, Alban Butler, the hagiographer, had perhaps his own reasons for some measure of alienation from the regular clergy. In 1762, the French government expelled the Jesuits from France, and in 1766, when Charles was 16 years old, this uncle was put in charge of the English Jesuits’ college of St Omers, thus earning (I think it is not too much to say) a degree of obloquy amounting almost to the scale of vendetta, among a section of the recently-professed English Fathers.