In 1850, during its first year of publication, Notes and Queries printed the enquiry of one ‘J.M.’, who asked for information about a treatise of equivocation to which he had found reference in a seventeenth-century book. A number of replies in subsequent issues provided bits of information about the treatise, and called attention to a manuscript copy in the Bodleian. This flurry of items in Notes and Queries seems to have prompted David Jardine (1794-1860), who later wrote a history of the Gunpowder Plot, to prepare an edition of the treatise, which was published in 1851. Jardine composed a preface, but since he could not establish who had written the work, and was not optimistic that the matter would ever be clarified, his account is far from complete. There did, however, exist documents that could identify the author, and exactly 100 years after the appearance of Jardine's edition, an article by A. F. Allison showed conclusively that the treatise had been written by Father Henry Garnet, S.J. Since the treatise played a significant part in the history of ‘equivocation’ in England, and was a subject of controversy at the time of the Gunpowder Plot, I believe it will be useful to provide an account of what is now known about the work.

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.

From Henry's divorce to Elizabeth's accession, the most striking religious changes at the Inns of Court were external. As the Reformation progressed, church and chapel were stripped of their medieval ornamentation, in form as in fabric. Despite this outward transformation, there was remarkable continuity in personnel. Change occurred more by the natural process of admission, promotion, retirement and death than by compulsion. This did not mean that there was no regulation whatsoever. Members of the Inns were among those expected to obey the law—whether renouncing the Pope, acknowledging the Supremacy or maintaining uniformity. Nevertheless it is difficult to establish the extent to which religious observance was actually practised at the Inns. Bartlett Green of the Middle Temple, who was burnt for heresy in 1556, testified that he had not heard Mass during Mary's reign. Richard Allington, a barrister of Lincoln's Inn, was so engrossed in the worship of mammon that he fearfully confessed before his deathbed audience in 1561 to have ‘never wentte to churche atte tyme of commone prayere'. In 1569, several other members of the legal societies admitted they had rarely attended church since Elizabeth's accession, including Walter Norton of Gray's Inn, ‘by reason of his busines and clientes causes’. Despite the legal requirement, there is no sign of any campaign to enforce religious observance at the Inns or to coerce the legal profession as a whole.

It is not often that a full-length work on recusant history appears in a foreign language, and for this reason the Reverend Bruno Navarra's book in Italian, Filippo Michele Ellis: Segni e la sua Diocesi nei primi del ‘700 (Roma, Centro Studi del Lazio [1973], Piazza Montecitorio, 115), should be brought to the attention of Recusant History readers. This book on Philip Michael Ellis, O.S.B., first Vicar Apostolic of the Western District, and later Bishop of Segni in Italy, should be most welcome to anyone interested in English Catholicism during the time of James II and the early years of the eighteenth century. There has been a noticeable lack of biographical research, either general or particular, on those involved in the organization of the English Catholic Church at the end of the seventeenth century. Perhaps the time has come for a more specific picture of this period; to a very limited degree Navarra has filled some of the lacuna.

Dennis Flynn has written convincingly of the Catholic sympathies of Donne's middle years. But anyone who reads through the sermons, particularly those composed after 1618, cannot fail to be convinced that in the end Donne's Anglicanism was a mature and heartfelt commitment. To understand how a man with such rooted Catholic sympathies could find his spiritual home in the English Church, we must recognise how much he needed to be engaged with others in worship, in friendship and in love.

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.

On 29 May 1660, Anthony Wood purchased a newly-published broadsheet, headed ‘A Catalogue of the Lords, Knights and Gentlemen (of the Catholick Religion) that were Slain in the late Warr in Defence of their King and Country’. It contained in excess of 200 names, and covered not only those who had lost their lives as a result of the Civil Wars, but also those who had lost estates or had been plundered vigorously by enemy forces. It was the first martyrology to greet the restoration of Charles II, preceding by almost three years the pamphlet entitled ‘The Royal Martyrs’ which listed both Catholic and Protestant activists who had suffered in the royal cause. J. C. H. Aveling has stated that ‘After 1660, Catholic peers and gentry all maintained loudly that they had been strong Royalists’, and his implied doubts concerning these claims (he seems to regard allusions in heraldic visitations as largely spurious) reflect the conventional view of those recent scholars who have gone into the matter of Catholic activism.

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.

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 purpose of this paper is to draw attention to what appears to be a developing gulf in the study of the Catholic community during the early seventeenth century. How do we determine whether an individual was or was not a Catholic? It looked for a time as if the conventional wisdom concerning Catholics and the Civil War was to maintain that they were, as a body, neutral. It is now hard to see how that view can be substantiated. By no means connected with that view, but threatening in the same way to establish itself as a dictum, is the idea that there can be no Catholicism without a recorded conviction for recusancy.

The Catholic Record Society has just published the 1767 Returns of Papists for the diocese of Chester, which included Lancashire. For the chapelry of Broughton (pp. 144-6 in the C.R.S. volume) there is a similar return of Popish recusants made in 1676. It was compiled in response to the questions asked in the so-called Compton Census, an enquiry set up in 1676 by the Archbishop of Canterbury. It consists of nine folios listing all families in the chapelries of Broughton (including Haighton) and Barton in a first column, alongside which in a second column the names of suspected Popish recusants are repeated. To save space, the recusant names are printed here once only but in bold type. At the bottom of each folio except the first are totals for the two columns, with grand totals (636 and 192) at the end. There is a nil return for the third column, of Dissenters.

Of the Catholic polemicists in England in the seventeenth century, few wrote more voluminously or earned more respect from their adversaries than Abraham Woodhead. His works are grave, erudite, and irenic in tone, reflecting their author's retired life of study after his conversion. His efforts to avoid the limelight have been successful, both in his own time and in ours; perhaps that is why no one, so far as I know, has yet subjected his books to the careful scrutiny and analysis which they deserve. There are several worthwhile theses in the history of theology to be written on Woodhead and the controversies in which he was engaged; perhaps the materials offered in this article will help a few scholars through the preliminaries to Woodhead study and encourage them to give us a theological portrait of this man whose historical portrait is so hard to draw.

During the Archpriest Controversy, altogether eighteen books were printed on behalf of the Appellant priests. On the other side, in defence of the Archpriest Blackwell, barely a third of this number of pamphlets appeared. The first of these anti-Appellant works to arrive in England—in the summer of 1601—was entitled The copy of a letter written to a veryworshipful Catholic gentleman in England, of grief conceived about somescandalous dissension and books set forth tending to the disgracing oneof another by such as labour in the same cause, know from its running-title as An epistle of pious grief. A small tract of fifty pages, written by ‘S.N.’, it is now so rare that only one copy is known to survive.

Maude Domenica Petre (1863-1942) has long been associated with the Modernist movement in the Catholic Church, but for the most part she has remained in the background. Whatever has been written about her has usually been in connection with George Tyrrell, since as his close friend, biographer and literary executor, she is a key source of information about him. Apart from that, there is her own apparent desire to stay somewhat in the background. She tells us very little about herself in her writings, and even in her quasi-autobiography, My Way of Faith, written in 1936 when she was 73 and could look back on a long and full life, she is very reluctant to focus on herself. And yet, in her own right she was a remarkable woman. Apart from the books which she either edited or translated, she wrote more than fourteen books of her own on a variety of subjects, as well as numerous articles. This paper, then, will focus on Maude Petre herself, using her own writings and the Petre Papers which were presented to the British Library some time after her death.