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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

In the first volume of his History of Monmouthshire, Sir Joseph Bradney admitted that ‘in Monmouthshire the principles of the old Catholic faith have never been lost to a large number of people. Many families of position in this district continued to adhere to the old doctrines.’ Thomas Richards, the most scrupulous of the historians of Welsh non-conformity, not only identified the Catholics of Wales as ‘the sons and grandsons of men who had never accepted the Protestant Reformation' but from his unrivalled knowledge of the sources for seventeenth-century religious history in the principality advanced two quite startling hypotheses. The first was that there is ‘positive proof of the silent growth of Popery during Propagation and Protectorate times’ (he pointed out that in 1676 the number of Catholics recorded in Monmouthshire was ‘within sixty-six of being equal to all other dissenters in [the county] gathered into one total’); the second, a result of his searching analysis of the so-called Compton Census, was that even the figure of 541 Roman Catholics in Monmouthshire—416 in the rural deanery of Abergavenny alone—was ‘too low’.