If we survey the Jesuit writers on the deposing power during the period 1603-1640, we find that for the first seven years Persons is the only English Jesuit to treat of the subject and he touches on it in all his last four books. The fullest treatment is in A Treatise tending to Mitigation but neither there, nor in the other books is there anything more than an explanation of the points of contention, treated according to the system of Bellarmine. For a few years after Persons's death in 1610 the steady flow continued of Latin works by the Jesuit controversialists on the continent: Becanus, Gretser, Bellarmine, Lessius and others. Some of these works were translated into English, together with some of the works of the French Jesuits referred to in the previous article. After 1613 the decree of the Jesuit General Aquaviva, forbidding Jesuit writers to treat of the subject, took effect, and with the exception of the works of Thomas Fitzherbert against the defenders of the Oath of Allegiance the voice of the Jesuits, at least on the deposing power, was heard no more.

Some years ago the Rev. Gordon Huelin published an article on Catholicism in the diocese of London, based on the returns of papists (1706) then in St. Paul's Cathedral Library and now in the library of Guildhall and it may perhaps be of interest to examine the returns for another part of the country, namely Wiltshire, and see what light these documents, reinforced by data from other sources, can shed upon Catholicism in that county during the first decade of the eighteenth century.

After the death of the Archpriest George Birkhead the secular priest John Colleton and his fellow assistants wrote to the Pope on 28 July 1614, to submit a list of suitable condidates from whom a bishop for England might be chosen. The names put forward included those of William Bishop and Richard Smith, who were each later to receive the appointment, and William Harrison, who in fact was made Archpriest in 1615. The list of suggestions ended thus: “Lastly we should like to add ... the name of Mr. Thomas More, our Agent, a most acceptable man, both because of his own merits and because of the most glorious memory of his great-grandfather, the famous More, who with the Cardinal elect of Rochester, first suffered an illustrious martyrdom for refusing the oath of supremacy: were it not that he is the only man we have or can hope to have who can afford from his own resources to act for us out there.” It was a name to be proud of and a relationship he did not hesitate to proclaim. When, with his brother Henry, he arrived at the English College in Rheims in 1583, aged 18 years, they were registered as “Thomas and Henry More, brothers, great grand-children of the most holy martyr Thomas More.” He went on to Rome in 1587, but the registers of the English College there and those of Valladolid, where he arrived in 1591, contain no reference to his ancestry. After some sixteen years of activity on the English Mission he accompanied Richard Smith out to Rome in 1609 intending to put the case for the appointment of a bishop to rule once more the church in England in place of an archpriest. He swore he would not return until they had succeeded, and he kept his oath. He spent the next seven years in Rome as Clergy Agent, and a further five years in Spain, trying to get help for the seminaries and eventually helping to establish the new seminary in Lisbon. When in 1623 William Bishop was appointed bishop for England, Thomas More was made by him Archdeacon of Hertfordshire and Northamptonshire, and he may have then returned home to England, but in May 1624, after the death of William Bishop he was made special agent to go to Rome for the purpose of securing the appointment of another bishop, and was back in Rome in August. He died there in the following year. The story of his last illness and death is considered worth telling now for the first time because it is so extraordinarily well documented by manuscripts in the Westminster Archives, the Archbishop of Birmingham's Archives and the Archives of the Old Brotherhood.

In the Folger Library in Washington is a large folio manuscript which Dr. James McManaway has recently established as compiled “by some one deeply interested in the affairs of Essex, perhaps by one of his clerks.” The identification of the clerk has yet to be made; a note in the top left corner of the manuscript's front cover “Die Veneris Julii 1, 1601 per me Ricardum Greeneum” is a promising lead, but a Richard Green has not as yet been discovered among the extant records concerning the Earl of Essex. Dr. Mc Manaway writes of this manuscript's contents as follows :

According to the Dictionary of National Biography, John Taylor, that “factious papist” and diplomatist, was born about 1600, and was the eldest son of John Taylor of Kingsnorth, Kent, by Anne daughter of William Austen of Goudhurst. It is true that Berry's Kentish Genealogies, pp. 162-3, to which DNB refers, gives John Taylor and Anne Austen a son John, but it gives the younger John's wife's name as Elizabeth whereas DNB calls her Jane, as indeed she calls herself (Cal. S. P. Dom., 1649-50, p. 208). Also, Berry mentions no brothers, while DNB states that he had a brother who was chaplain to the same Emperor to whom he was accredited as agent.

It is known that Mrs. Mary Hanne (or Hanna) was landlady to Bishop Richard Challoner, Vicar Apostolic of the London District in the eighteenth Century. In the parish ratebooks (now at Holborn Town Hall) for the years 1767, 1768, 1772, 1776, 1778 and 1780 her name always appears in the same position among those living on the west side of Gloucester Street, now Old Gloucester Street, near the church of St. George, Queen Square. Her name is also to be found in the Watch ratebook for 1777, but not in that for the year 1780, where its place is taken by the new entry “Wm. Burgis Middx 81.”