A great deal of attention has rightly been given to those Catholics who were put to death under Elizabeth I, but imprisonment as distinct from execution has not received the attention it deserves. Catholics sometimes sing about ‘our fathers chained in prisons dark’, but they are not always aware of what imprisonment meant to their ancestors. It is the purpose of this article to consider some aspects of this large and neglected subject, since imprisonment and the threat of imprisonment made a big impact on the Elizabethan Catholic community and must have discouraged a great many people from persevering in their religion when they contemplated what could at best be an irritating deprivation of liberty and at worst a long ordeal which might end in death.

The names of Dr. Thomas Vavasour and of his wife Dorothy are not uncommon in the chronicles of English Catholic recusancy and in related studies. The poignancy of their story—of a husband and wife practising their religion in the face of persecution and ending their lives in different prisons after a long period of enforced separation—and the relative richness of the relevant sources have together assured them at least a passing mention in such diverse works as Aveling’s studies of Yorkshire recusancy, Cliffe’s account of the Yorkshire gentry, and Claire Cross’ biography of Henry Hastings, third earl of Huntingdon. Although Thomas Vavasour has been described as ‘a very shadowy figure’, he and his wife are in fact among the best documented of the early lay recusants. It is all the more surprising, then, that no attempt has previously been made to bring together the disparate sources to give a reasonably full and coherent account of Thomas Vavasour’s career and family. This article aims to fill that gap. Its attempt to do so is greatly facilitated by the availability in print of much of the basic documentation.

It is proposed in this article to discuss the English Catholic seminarists who apostatised between 1582 and 1596—that is, after the date when Catholics in England were required unequivocally to separate themselves totally from the Established Church but before the beginning of the Appellant Controversy. P. McGrath in a recent article has set out the basic biographical details of a number of the Elizabethan apostates. T. H. Clancy has dealt with Jesuit defectors from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries and gives interesting and useful statistics on apostates in general. Neither of them, however, makes any extensive attempt to assess the development or significance of these apostates’ changes of religion. McGrath expressed the hope that his ‘survey… of an important section of the Elizabethan clergy’ would ‘draw attention to the variety of motives influencing these men’ and ‘the need for further examination of their strange careers’. It is the intention of this article to explore further the importance of apostasy among the Elizabethan seminarists (seminary priests and students for the priesthood who never got as far as being ordained). Instead of concentrating, as McGrath and Clancy do, upon establishing who the apostates were, a comparative approach over a shorter period will be employed, using a wider range of source material, including the books of ‘motives’. The aim is to challenge the view that all clerical apostates were basically of similar significance, distinguished mainly by whether they remained with the Established Church or not. It will be argued here that the phenomenon grew more serious between 1580 and 1596. It is not enough to say of these apostates merely that there were bound to be ‘deviationists’ from the Allen-Persons line, or that they had the example of the Marian priests before them.

With the publication of the Register, the name of the English College of SS Peter and Paul, Lisbon, can now be added to the list of those English establishments at Douai, Rome and Valladolid whose registers of students are available to the public in print. It is twenty years since the College ceased to take students and the property has been disposed of, but a full history remains to be written. As a prelude to this it is worth considering how there came to be a college there in the first place. The story is not at all simple since the foundation of the English seminary in Lisbon contrasts markedly with the setting up of similar colleges in neighbouring Spain. Within the five years, 1589 to 1594, Robert Persons S.J. had created colleges at Valladolid and Seville and a residence at Sanlucar, and in 1611 a legacy provided for the beginning of a further college in Madrid. But although there was a residence for English priests in Lisbon before 1594, it was only in 1622 that the Papal Brief for the foundation of an English seminary was issued. The first students did not arrive from Douai until 1628. Although he sent priests to Lisbon in 1596, Fr. Persons did not consider that the time was yet ripe for opening a college. When an English college was eventually founded nearly thirty years later, it was a further six years before any students arrived. Was there something special about conditions of life in Lisbon or was it simply that during the union of the two crowns of Portugal and Castile, Portuguese affairs did not command the immediate attention that was given to English Catholic establishments in Spain?

The English who, in the seventeenth century, went abroad in order to get to know the countries and peoples of Europe looked upon the presence of their countrymen and women in convents in Flanders and Brabant as one of their many subjects of inquiry. Protestant travellers who had little occasion to mix with Catholics at home and who had gone abroad to widen their horizons visited these houses as a matter of course. For them, as for the much smaller number who came to see relatives and acquaintances, the informal conversations must have been a welcome change after the ‘Compulsory’ visits to public buildings and all sorts of collections of curiosities in cities far away from home.

Professor Emmet Larkin of the University of Chicago is undoubtedly the most prolific historian of nineteenth century Irish Catholicism. The author of numerous volumes on the period 1850–91 and of several challenging essays he is perhaps best known for his original, stimulating and provocative article entitled ‘The Devotional Revolution in Ireland, 1850–75’ published in 1972. In that article Professor Larkin put forward the thesis that Archbishop Paul Cullen championed the consolidation of a ‘devotional revolution’ in post-Famine Ireland. Up to the 1840s, he claimed, there was only a small but perceptible change and increase in devotional practices in Ireland. The effects of the Famine were seen by him as the key to this ‘devotional revolution, bringing about a dramatic improvement in the ratio of priests to people through the death or emigration of the disadvantaged who were in any case disinterested in religion and least amenable to clerical control. Indeed ‘what achievement there was before the famine… was largely confined to that “respectable” class of Catholics typified by the Cullens and Mahers in Carlow who were economically better off’. The advent of the reforming Paul Cullen as papal legate to the Synod of Thurles, 1850, and subsequently as archbishop of the most important see, Dublin, from where he organised the church in an ultramontane fashion and introduced many Italian devotional practices to Ireland, coupled with the consequences of the Famine, had a decisive effect in shaping Irish Catholicism and accomplishing a post-Famine ‘devotional revolution’.

Around the main actors in the drama of the Oxford Movement there was a supporting cast of secondary figures which have remained in relative darkness; the increasing glow of attention focused on the central characters, Newman in particular, appears to have relegated them even further into obscurity. Samuel Francis Wood belonged to this group of people, and he is perhaps the most attractive of the personalities among them: loyal, generous, warm, affectionate towards his friends and passionate in the promotion of the causes he espoused. He was destined to be on most intimate terms of friendship with both Newman and Manning, acting as a bridge—together with the Wilberforces—between these two extraordinary personalities.

The advent of State intervention in education in the early Victorian period and the creation in 1839 of the Committee of Council on Education, a Select Committee of the Privy Council, brought with it new duties and responsibilities. One of the first tasks confronting the Committee of Council was to determine the manner in which the new grants of money to schools should be distributed. In June 1839 the Committee issued a Minute announcing that all future building grants to schools would involve the right of inspection: