Dr. Thomas Watson, bishop of Lincoln from 1557 until his deprivation in 1559, was, as A. F. Pollard describes him, ‘one of the chief catholic controversialists’ of Mary Tudor’s reign. ‘A man of acute parts’, according to Bishop Nicholas Ridley, Watson shaped the eucharistic thinking of English Catholics for a generation. Ten years after Watson’s deprivation, one Robert Crowley still felt the need to publish an answer to Watson’s two eucharistic sermons of 1554, since by them, Crowley believed, Catholics were yet ‘chiefly persuaded and stayed’ in their opinions.

The Augustinian Convent of Our Lady of Syon (ancestor of the present St. Augustine’s Priory Ealing) was founded at Paris in 1634. After some early difficulties it made its home in 1638–39 on a site in the rue des Fossés Saint-Victor (now rue du Cardinal Lemoine) on the eastern outskirts of the city where it was to remain, with its school, for more than two hundred years. Almost alone among English Catholic institutions founded in France and Flanders during the penal times it weathered the storm of the French Revolution and remained throughout much of the nineteenth century on the site it had formerly occupied. During the Revolution it was suppressed as a Religious house, its property was sequestrated, many treasures were stolen and some early records lost. The buildings in the rue des Fossés Saint-Victor were used for a time as a prison in which nuns from various convents, as well as laywomen, were confined. Conditions became easier after the fall of Robespierre in 1794 and some of the nuns’ property was provisionally restored to them, but it was again seized under the Directory and those nuns who had survived the earlier ordeal were evicted. Reluctantly, they made preparations to follow the example of many other English Catholic institutions in France and on French-held territory and seek refuge in England.

Christopher Maire who was thus described by Alban Butler was the son of Christopher of Hartbushes near Hartlepool, County Durham, of a younger branch of the Maires of Hardwick likewise not far from Hartlepool. Christopher senior had married Frances Ingleby of Lawkland in Yorkshire and they had ten children—eight sons and two daughters. The daughters, Mary Euphrasia and Catherine Eugenia entered the convent of English Poor Clares at Dunkirk. Of the eight sons six were to become priests—two, Henry and William seculars, and four, Christopher, James, Peter and Thomas, Jesuits. The other two, George and John remained laymen and George married. Two sons of George and his wife Mary (Hussey) were also to become Jesuits—Edward and George.

Egerton Castle’s 1896 two-volume edition of The Jerningham Letters (1780–1843), Excerpts from the Correspondence and Diaries of the Honourable Lady Jerningham and of her Daughter Lady Bedingfield was based on the sixteen bound volumes of manuscript letters received and kept by Lady Bedingfield. These volumes are now housed at the University of Birmingham. Many of the letters from Lady Jerningham, her family and friends, were cut drastically for publication; a reader of the manuscript volumes will see Egerton Castle’s red and blue editorial marks on the letters themselves. Other letters, dealing with matchmaking, finances, family problems, the upbringing of children, and religious vocations, were omitted altogether. One striking omission is the series of letters from Lady Bedingfield’s youngest daughter Charlotte, ranging from the time in 1815 when she was a pensioner at Hammersmith making her first communion, to her announcement in 1824 that she had just been voted to her profession at Bruges. She called herself the happiest of Lady Bedingfield’s children and was an Augustinian Canoness at Bruges for over fifty years.

Major changes in ecclesiastical government are seldom effected without disagreement or tension. The immediate background to the creation of the Diocese of Brentwood in 1917 bears ample testimony to this truth. Three areas of difficulty were especially evident in the decade before the separation of Essex from the Archdiocese of Westminster: the longstanding dispute between the dioceses of Westminster and Southwark; a clash of personalities between Archbishop Bourne and Bishop Amigo; and a protracted argument over the administration of St. John’s Seminary, Wonersh, the management of Southwark’s trust funds and the availability of funds for any new ecclesiastical territory.