In the seventeenth century, one of the Catholic strongholds of Britain had lain on the southern Welsh borders, in those areas of north Monmouthshire and southern Herefordshire dependant on the Marquis of Worcester at Raglan, and looking to the Jesuit mission at Cwm. Abergavenny and Monmouth had been largely Catholic towns, while the north Monmouthshire countryside still merited the attention of fifteen priests in the 1670s—after the Civil Wars, and the damaging conversion to Protestantism of the heir of Raglan in 1667. Conspicuous Catholic strength caused fear, and the ‘Popish Plot’ was the excuse for a uniquely violent reaction, in which the Jesuit mission was all but destroyed. What happened after that is less clear. In 1780, Berington wrote that ‘In many [counties], particularly in the west, in south Wales, and some of the Midland counties, there is scarcely a Catholic to be found’. Modern histories tend to reflect this, perhaps because of available evidence. The archives of the Western Vicariate were destroyed in a riot in Bath in 1780, and a recent work like J. H. Aveling's The Handle andthe Axe relies heavily on sources and examples from the north of England. This attitude is epitomised by Bossy's remark on the distribution of priests in 1773: ‘In Wales, the mission had collapsed’. However, the question of Catholic survival in eighteenth-century Wales is important. In earlier assessments of Catholic strength (by landholding, or number of recusants gaoled as a proportion of population) Monmouthshire had achieved the rare feat of exceeding the zeal of Lancashire, and Herefordshire was not far behind. If this simply ceased to exist, there was an almost incredible success for the ‘short, sharp’ persecution under Charles II. If, however, the area remained a Catholic fortress, then recent historians of recusancy have unjustifiably neglected it.

In 1748, the London bookseller, W. Needham, published a work entitled Pious considerations on several important practical truths of the Christian religion. Divided into fifty-two chapters. Like many Catholic works at this time it contained no evidence of who had written it, and in the General Catalogue of the British Library and in the American National Union Catalog, Pious considerations is entered under its title only.

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.

The ancestry of Challoner's Abridgement of Christian Doctrine has been pretty well established by Mr Bernard Pickering in the Clergy Review of January, 1980 (Vol. 65, No. 1, pp. 6-15). The ancestry of the ‘Penny Catechism’, which is partly dependent on the Abridgement, also deserves further investigation. For a full investigation, a great deal of work would have to be done. What follows is the fruit of a re-reading of the first section of the Garden of the Soul called ‘Christian Doctrine: A Summary of Faith and Practice’ and the Meditations for Every Day in the Year. Whether or not Challoner revised his Abridgement does not seem to be known, but these two books seem to have been among the sources used by what I have called the Redactors (Cf. CR, April 1978, pp. 140-6). In what follows, AB stands for the Abridgement, GS for the Garden of the Soul and Med. for the Meditations. The numbering of AB is my own, for the original is without any, and I have used the ‘Penny Catechism’ in the edition of 1905, which will not have been touched since the redaction of the second half of the nineteenth century.

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.

Recent work on the history of post-Reformation English Catholicism has emphasised the central importance of spirituality but has shown that devotion, like the English Catholic community itself, has been continually changing. Challoner's works, especially his Garden of theSoul, dominated the later eighteenth century but, though the title remained popular, the contents suffered revision. However, the contemporary work of his collaborator, Alban Butler's Lives of theSaints, with its meditation on each feast-day, remained virtually intact from its publication in 1756-59 until 1956.

It is not unusual, when reading about Modernism, to notice references to the ‘Ward Family Papers’. De la Bedoyère and Barmann both had access to the von Hugel letters from the Ward Family Papers when they wrote their studies of the Baron; Laubacher's study of development of dogma in Tyrrell used his letters to Ward, the originals of which have recently been found. Ward's involvement in the Synthetic Society heightened interest in the papers for what they might yield about various late-nineteenth-century thinkers. Finally, no one has been sure how many of the papers and documents used by Maisie Ward still exist and how many of them might contain more information. I spent the summer of 1976 sorting, classifying and arranging the Ward Family Papers, a task made easier by the methodical work of Thomas Michael Loome some years ago. I classified the papers stored in London, surveyed the Ward material now housed on the Isle of Wight and retrieved some items that had been stored at Crosby, near Liverpool. The present Wilfrid Ward has, at his house on the Isle of Wight, the library of Wilfrid Ward with his annotations, and two small minute books of the Synthetic Society. The book collection may or may not be complete, and Ward's notes in them are not many and seldom legible. There is nothing else at the Isle of Wight house except personal family papers, the letters of Ward and his wife, some of the papers of Josephine Ward and her letters to various other people, and the letters of some of the children. The papers of Maisie Ward and Leo Ward (Wilfrid's children) are housed with the Sheed and Ward collection, still in private hands. The papers and letters from Crosby have been added to the London papers.

In 1794, Thomas Cooper, the British radical who the previous August had judiciously emigrated to America to escape the repressive policies of the British government, returned to attend the trial for treason of his friend, Thomas Walker, the radical Manchester merchant in Lancaster. Enroute he called on Dr William Maxwell of Kirconnell, Dumfries. Unfortunately, these old friends did not meet, but at the end of the trial Cooper sent a very interesting letter to Maxwell.

What a change has taken place in the general opinion in this Country with regard to Catholics, especially Priests, since the arrival of the emigrant Clergy! Their Conduct has been so exemplary—people who had been taught to consider them as the worst of characters begin now to be persuaded they are good Christians, and many own they had been much imposed on by their teachers with respect to the morals of Catholics—I doubt not many conversions will be wrought in consequence—at a little town we have many of these unfortunate people, if I may so style them, who suffer in so good a cause, whose sole defence is on providence—yet are in want of nothing so abundant as the charities they receive in all parts—in which I cannot but admire the goodness of God who abandons not those who quit all for his sake.

This work is the product of team research carried out by a group of Extramural Department students of the University of Birmingham, using locally available primary and secondary material. None of the group were professional historians, though some have pursued private research on aspects of local history, and all had been prepared by a term's lectures on the Catholic Revival in Birmingham, 1650-1850.

Roman Catholic historians have frequently cited lack of Government recognition and support as the main cause for the failure of the Catholic University. As evidence of this, they have pointed to its medical faculty, the relative success of which they attribute to the possibility at that time of being recognised as a medical practitioner without holding a university degree. Yet, by 1859, the year of his resignation as Rector, Newman had come to the conclusion that the real problems lay elsewhere. In the same year, the Irish Bishops admitted openly that the granting or withholding of state recognition would not ultimately determine the success or failure of the University. In any event, they could easily have overcome the difficulties posed by the lack of a charter by affiliating their College to London University, merely for the purpose of taking London examinations and degrees. This they admitted in a letter to the Home Secretary, Sir George Grey. In 1857, the Roman Catholic College of St John the Evangelist, Sydney, Australia, did affiliate, for the purpose of obtaining degrees, to one of the new non-denominational state-erected universities of that colony. But Newman was too suspicious of London's alleged liberalism and Cullen too jealous of undiluted episcopal control over the Dublin establishment to tolerate such a notion. It is, therefore, towards the attitudes and roles of these two that one is led in considering why the Catholic University failed.