Thomas Penswick, titular Bishop of Europum, and Vicar Apostolic of the Northern District, died at his brother’s house, The Manor House, Ashton-in-Makerfield, Lancashire on 28th January 1836. He was aged sixty-three. His funeral in Liverpool was followed by his burial in the Catholic cemetery at Windleshaw, near St. Helens. He was succeeded by his coadjutor bishop, John Briggs. He inherited a district which stretched from the Scottish Border in the north to a line from the Humber to the Dee in the south. It encompassed the counties of Northumberland, Durham, Cumberland, Westmorland, Yorkshire, Lancashire, Cheshire and the Isle of Man, and although perhaps less in size geographically than the Western District, which took in the whole of Wales, it was nevertheless the largest in the number of missions, clergy and people. When Bishop Thomas Smith made his return to Propaganda in 1830, he reported 172 missions served by 115 secular priests, 31 Benedictines, 23 Jesuits or ‘Stonyhurst Priests’, 2 Franciscans and 1 Dominican, and an estimated Catholic population of 185,000. In addition there were three colleges, Ushaw, Ampleforth and Stonyhurst and four convents of nuns.

William Turner in 1851 became the first Bishop of Salford, one of the original dioceses created when the English and Welsh Hierarchy was restored.

The clearest account of the foundation of the Oblates of St. Charles can be gleaned from Henry Edward Manning’s submission of 1860 to Pope Pius IX in response to complaints raised against the Oblates in that year by Archbishop George Errington, Wiseman’s coadjutor, and the Westminster diocesan chapter. He writes as follows:

With the consecration in Southwark Cathedral of James Brown as first Bishop of Shrewsbury, the restoration of the hierarchy in England and Wales was completed. Originally intending to leave several sees vacant for a time, Rome unexpectedly hurried him into office in the face of the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill, an attempt to prevent the new Roman Catholic bishops from assuming territorial titles. At 39, he was one of the youngest of the bishops. Brown came to his diocese from the world of education. In 1845 he had joined the staff of his old school at Sedgley Park, assuming the presidency of the college in 1848. These were years of reform: he supervised improvements to the buildings, reorganised the course of studies, and introduced an annual school retreat. Before returning to Sedgley Park, Brown had been on the staff at Oscott, staying on after his ordination to the priesthood there in 1837. He was thus a member of staff when the newly-consecrated Wiseman arrived to assume the presidency of Oscott in September 1840. One might surmise that, like others at Oscott, Brown was a little unsettled by Wiseman’s flamboyance and rather bemused by the stream of visitors the new president’s presence attracted. Brown was by this time prefect of studies, an office he accepted in 1839 and which he surrendered in 1844 to George Errington, Wiseman’s former vice-president in Rome, and who, at Wiseman’s request, had come to Oscott the previous year. Brown’s time as prefect of studies had witnessed the grant of a royal warrant allowing students from Oscott to enter for external examinations in the University of London.

William Hogarth was born on 25 March 1786 of a small landowning family in Dodding Green, near Kendal, in Westmorland. He and his older brother Robert were among the earliest students, in 1796, to enter the new northern seminary of Crook Hall, established in 1794 on its removal from Douai in northern France, in the bloody aftermath of the French Revolution. He and his contemporaries such as George Brown, the first Bishop of Liverpool, felt themselves to be foundationers, the very inaugurators of the next stage of the tradition. The Ushaw discipline was a strong one: rising at six, meditation in chapel until 7am, then Mass to 7.30, then study until breakfast at a quarter to nine, school from 9.30, dinner at 1.00, study at 3.00, prayer at 7.00 till supper, second prayers at 9.15, and then bed. There were two play days a week. The simple austerity of this life, pursued over thirteen impressionable years from the age of ten, left its mark. On the other hand, Hogarth or his fellow future bishop George Brown recorded his enormous educational debt to his brilliant young preceptor, the historian John Lingard: ‘I learned more in one month’, the writer recalled, ‘than I had done in six, under my former pedagogue; and I also remember that, while he [Lingard] was listening to me translating Latin into English, he was turning over the leaves of a large folio, and making notes for his history, and yet nothing escaped him of what I was reading.’

Among the bishops of the restored hierarchy of 1850, the name of Joseph William Hendren holds a special place for three reasons. On his appointment as Vicar Apostolic of the Western District in 1848, he was the last of the Vicars Apostolic in England and Wales to be nominated prior to the restoration; he was the only member of the restored hierarchy to be the first bishop of two new sees—Clifton, in 1850, and Nottingham in 1851; and the duration of his episcopal career was the shortest of any of his confrères around the time of the restoration.

On 3 October 1875 the Diocese of Northampton, by direction of Francis Kerril Amherst, its bishop for the past seventeen years, marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Apostolic Constitution Universalis Ecclesiae. The clergy of the diocese, in addition to special liturgical celebrations on that day, were exhorted ‘to give some instruction … on the graces and blessings bestowed upon this country by the restoration of the Hierarchy’. Bishop Amherst presided at Northampton Cathedral, and shortly after at the third diocesan synod.

George Hilary Brown (1786–1856), Vicar Apostolic of the Lancashire District since its establishment in 1840, became the first bishop of the new diocese of Liverpool in 1850. He had been extremely reluctant to accept the vicariate, partly because of chronic ill-health and partly because of diffidence about his ability. From 1841 on Propaganda received a number of complaints about his absence from and neglect of his District, and when he was present he caused ill-feeling among his clergy: they thought he was a martinet and complained frequently to Rome about his decisions. For his part, Brown seemed to think he was fighting for episcopal rights against a recalcitrant clergy: in a later letter to Wiseman he claimed that all the bishops should be grateful to him because of his long battle against ‘Josephism and Pistoia’. This article examines two inter-connected quarrels he was involved in after 1850, one with his chapter, the other with his coadjutor. They illustrate some of the issues that arose from the restoration of the Hierarchy in 1850 as well as throwing light on the personality of the Bishop.

Thomas Grant was born at Ligny-Les-Aires near Arras in France on November 25th 1816. His father was a sergeant in the British army and had just fought at Waterloo. He was at the time serving in the army of occupation following Napoleon’s defeat. For the first twelve years of his life Thomas followed his family to many assignments with the army. He grew accustomed to army life and this would serve him well when later he became a bishop. In 1829 he entered Ushaw seminary and from there was sent to the English College in Rome in 1836. He was ordained in 1841 and was created Doctor of Divinity immediately after his ordination. Already acclaimed for his great learning, he was named as secretary to Cardinal Acton. In his service he became proficient in canon law and the workings of the Roman curia. He became Rector of the English College in 1844 and was nominated to the see of Southwark in 1851. At that time he had not been in England since he left for Rome in 1836. Indeed he had only lived ten years in England altogether.

In November, 1850, in his first Pastoral Letter as Bishop of Newport and Menevia, Thomas Joseph Brown OSB described the unfavourable reactions to the recent restoration of the Catholic Hierarchy as ‘… wild passions that are agitating the land,’ but confidently prophesied that ‘a reaction will succeed, favourable to the progress of Catholic truth, as followed the healing of diseases from the stirring up of the pool of Bethsaida’. ‘Stirring up the pool’ was a well chosen image not only for the Restoration of the Hierarchy, but also for the ensuing controversy it unleashed between the new hierarchy and the regular clergy and specifically the English Benedictine Congregation, to which Brown belonged.

‘Whilst sailing on board a French ship on the Pacific Ocean in the year 1839, I drew up the first sketch of a plan for establishing the Catholic hierarchy in Australia. The sketch was afterwards completed by the guide of my monastic life and studies, the Archbishop of Sydney, then Vicar-Apostolic of Australia; and by authority of Pope Gregory XVI, in the following year the Australian hierarchy came into existence. The fertile results which quickly followed from the establishment of the normal state of the Church in that distant land inspired me with the earnest desire of seeing the same blessing conferred on the Catholics of England. And on the day of my episcopal consecration, being the very day of the coronation of the present reigning pontiff, as the three Bishops were placing the mitre on my head, there arose up in my mind a sense that was indescribably keen of the need in which we stood for recovering our Hierarchy; and with that sense came a desire as keen to labour for its recovery.’