The raid of Bishop Grindal’s commissioners on the study of John Stow, the eminent antiquary, which occasioned this catalogue of forty proscribed works, was indication of the growing hostility towards Catholics after the Northern Rebellion and a foreshadowing of their open persecution in the years to come. Similar searches became commonplace in the 1570s and 1580s but the Stow catalogue, reflecting his historical and antiquarian interests, is one of the most comprehensive which survive. Although it includes manuscripts of chronicles, suggesting that Stow’s historical interests were not immune from the imputation of religious bias, the large group of Catholic and Recusant works indicates one direction in which these interests might have developed further had he not become the subject of official investigation.

John Crosse of Liverpool has been hailed by several historians (see below, p. 37) as an example of a ‘Roman Catholic actively opposing Ship Money’ in part because Catholics typically were financially stretched by the demands of compositions. Few individuals have been identified in that role, thus assuring Crosse a permanent place in history. But how justified is this assessment of a man whom recent research reveals as a more complex character than is allowed by the convenient stereotype allotted to him? Who exactly was he?

‘I acknowledge this Doctrine is not commonly received by Protestants, who (I humbly conceive) might reject it chiefly in opposition to the See of Rome, wherein such a multitude of monsters do swim…’ This is how the Congregationalist divine, Robert Dingley (1619-1660) summarized the characteristic Protestant attitude to the Roman Catholic belief in guardian angels in the preface to The Deputation of Angels, or The Angel-Guardian (1654, Wing D 1496).

To examine Jacobitism only as a post-1688 phenomenon leads to an inevitable neglect of formative influences which help explain why antipathy to the Revolution was so strident in the first generation of Jacobites. Henry Joseph Johnston’s career demonstrates the strength of these influences. He was the seventh son of a Yorkshire Anglican clergyman, and the brother of the antiquary and Non-Juror Dr. Nathaniel Johnston, ‘the prince of Yorkshire collectors’. Henry Johnston had been converted from Anglicanism to Catholicism sometime between 1671 and 1674, and, taking the name Joseph in religion, was to be professed as a monk in 1675 at the English Benedictine priory at Dieulouard in Lorraine. Benedictine monasticism not only had an immediate attraction for a convert antiquarian but it was also to provide Johnston entrance into court circles.

Samuel Peploe was vicar of Preston from 1700 to 1726 and bishop of Chester from 1726 to 1752. Today he is best remembered for a story—perhaps apocryphal—concerning his behaviour during the Jacobite rising of 1715. It is said that, when he was conducting a service, a group of rebels entered the church at Preston and threatened to kill him unless he ceased to pray for the ‘Hanoverian usurper’. Peploe supposedly replied ‘Soldier, I am doing my duty; do you do yours’; and continued his prayers. When this was reported to George I, he apparently remarked: ‘Peep-low, Peep-low is he called? But he shall peep high; I will make him a bishop’.

In the early development of their spiritual and theological roots, the Sisters of Mercy are indebted to many Irish diocesan priests and to many religious orders active in Dublin and the surrounding area during the early nineteenth century, especially to those most supportive of Catherine McAuley and the first Sisters of Mercy prior to and following the founding of the Institute of Mercy in Baggot Street in 1831. Among the religious orders, the Carmelite Fathers on Clarendon Street, the Presentation Sisters on George’s Hill, the Dominican Fathers at Carlow College, the Irish Sisters of Charity (in the person of their founder, Mary Aikenhead), the Poor Clares, and the Irish Christian Brothers come immediately to mind. The theological debt of Catherine McAuley (1778–1841) and the Sisters of Mercy to the Society of Jesus, however, is fundamental and quite specific. The subsequent historical affiliations of the Sisters of Mercy with members of the Society of Jesus and the frequent consultations which many congregations of Sisters of Mercy have had, and continue to have, with various Jesuit advisers and spiritual directors have their earliest exemplar in the remarkably close association of Catherine McAuley with the classical religious writings of the well-known sixteenth-century Spanish Jesuit theologian, Alonso Rodriguez (1526–1616). This intellectual relationship is suggested by much in Catherine’s thought and writing, but, for the purpose of this article, most notably in the remarkable parallels that exist between Catherine’s only long essay and Rodriguez’s early seventeenth-century essay on the same general theme.

John Henry Newman’s establishment of Oratorian houses in London and Birmingham in 1849 seemed like an auspicious event for English Catholics. The houses were filled with Oxford converts who were eager to minister to the laity and furnish intellectual support for the Faith. Unfortunately, only six years after the houses were founded the Oratorians became enmeshed in bitter feud. The Oratories had been developing along different lines. Father Frederick Faber was a zealous ultramontane; he and his London associates embraced all things Roman. Newman and his Birmingham confreres experimented with Roman devotions but were never comfortable with them. Newman sympathized with the ‘old Catholics’ and retained cordial relations with many Anglicans. As the Oratories were drifting apart so too were Newman and Faber. While they had been close friends when the Oratories were established, Newman became increasingly critical and suspicious of Faber.

Searching for a phrase to describe the Spirit of the Age, the mid-Victorian writer might choose the ‘Age of Education’, or perhaps the ‘Age of Transition’; but Wilkie Collins preferred ‘The Age of the Periodical’. The high–status periodical, and education itself, could be seen as motive forces, determining, shaping, announcing and ushering in the ‘Age of Transition’. For the Liberal Catholics ofThe Rambler, the ‘Age of Transition’ could be an ‘Age of Opportunity’, witnessing the start of the reconversion of England; or it could be an ‘Age of Danger’, witnessing the slide of England into overt infidelity. Of the two motive forces, even the most complacent and self-satisfied review writer would admit the greater to be Education.