It is now not far short of thirty years since, in the pages of the present journal, Antony Allison made his survey of ‘Franciscan Books in English 1559–1640’. In the course of his article he describes the work entitled The Life and Death of Edmund Geninges priest which appeared at St. Omers in 1614. He cited the prime authority of Luke Wadding, the great Franciscan historian, whose Scriptores Ordinis Minorum was published in 1650, that this anonymous account was by the martyr’s brother, John Gennings, who became a Franciscan about 1616, restored the Second Province of the English Friars, and was in fact still alive when Wadding wrote. Further analysing the book, Allison identifies ‘I. G. P’, to whom it is dedicated, as John Gennings Priest, and ‘I. W. P.’ who writes the dedication, as John Wilson Priest, who in 1614 had already for several years been manager of the press operating in the English Jesuit College at St. Omers.

When, in 1905, G. W. E. Russell commented on converts to Catholicism in the period preceding the zenith of the Oxford Movement, he mentioned six names: three of these were the ‘Cambridge Converts’ Ambrose Phillipps [de Lisle], George Spencer and Kenelm Henry Digby. These permutations,’ he said, ‘were regarded as mere eccentricities, and no one dreamed that they were likely to have any effect upon the Church.’ Did they have any effect on Anglicanism via their point of contact, the Oxford Movement? What were their motives in respect of the Tractarians, and how did they relate to each other as a group? These converts—Spencer and Digby in particular have largely been ignored—illustrate the range of Catholic attitudes to Anglicanism, while Digby represents the main body of Catholic opinion, which was suspicious of Anglo-Catholicism.

Despite the importance attributed to Southwell in Louis Martz’s The Poetry of Meditation, his Latin poetry—overlooked in Leicester Bradner’s Musae Anglicanae and the subject of a solitary unsatisfactory discussion in Pierre Janelle’s Robert Southwell the Writer—has received little attention. Such neglect is not unusual. Barbara Lewalski’s Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric—a spacious enough volume—disposes of Herbert’s important Latin collection Passio Discerpta in an endnote. This is despite a number of recent studies emphasising the position of Neo-Latin as a modern language alongside and correspondent with the vernacular, acting ‘as a sort of John the Baptist to the vernacular’, or ‘drinking from the same streams’. It is, I think, indisputable that Martz and Lewalski would have needed to modify their arguments had they taken the Neo-Latin poetry of Southwell and Herbert into account in their respective studies. Martz would have found some part of ‘meditative structure’ attributable to the conventions of Latin elegiac writing rather than to Ignatian meditation. Similarly, Lewalski would have had to qualify her description of so much poetry as ‘lyric’ had she considered its relation to Latin elegiac and epigrammatic writing.

Several nineteenth-century Catholic bishops have found biographers, not only, as might be expected, the three archbishops of Westminster but also Ullathorne of Birmingham and Grant of South-wark. Yet Robert Cornthwaite, who was bishop in Yorkshire for almost twenty-nine years, laying the foundations for the three modern dioceses of Middlesbrough, Leeds and Hallam; who was Manning’s chief supporter at the Vatican Council and the most Ultramontane of the English bishops; and who was that allegedly rare creature, both an able administrator and a man of great spirituality, has been neglected. It is surely time to remedy matters.

A familiar theme in Parliamentary agitation from the 1580s onwards was the demand that, in the interests of national security, those Catholics owning weapons and armour should be dispossessed of all but a few of them until they conformed in religion. They were to be left only with sufficient swords, daggers, brown bills and pike-staves to defend their homes and families. Confiscated arms not already sold to an approved buyer had still to be shown at musters; but one of the marks of gentility was no longer assured to recusants accustomed, in Sir Thomas Tresham’s words, ‘daily [to] go armed with weapons as a badge of… vocation.’

Nearly fifty years ago, Joseph Lefèvre, the distinguished editor of the correspondence of the Spanish court with the Low Countries, pointed out the unusual career of Henry Taylor. As an accredited diplomat at Whitehall for six years during the regime of the sovereign Archdukes, Taylor’s letters were sampled by Lefèvre for his perspective on the court of Charles I and for illustrations of the differences in policy between the Archduchess Isabella and her nephew Philip IV. While foreign princes occasionally employed Englishmen to represent their interests in London, it was striking that an English Catholic born in Douai would be selected during the period of the penal laws. Lefèvre’s study was hardly the full story, for Taylor’s diplomatic service to the Spanish crown was longer, more varied and more significant than has hitherto been recognized. Furthermore, his career as a chaplain at the court of the governor at Brussels, which ended in his promotion to be the dean of Antwerp cathedral, deserves attention. Because of his unusual background, it will not cause surprise that during more than thirty years in Spanish service he encountered at different times, and for particular political motives, suspicions and hostility that limited his achievement.

The fickleness of historical reputations is well illustrated by the case of Thomas White, 1593–1676. A Catholic secular priest, a prolific writer, and a widely-known figure in his own life-time, White sank after his death into an oblivion, from which he has only recently been rescued. Admittedly, his scientific theories soon became unfashionable, and no doubt his 'extravagant' and 'heretical novelties' in theology contributed towards his disfavour amongst seventeenth-century fellow- Catholics. But it will be argued here that the main cause of White's historical eclipse was his short political treatise, The Grounds of Obedience and Government, published in 1655.

In his Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England, published in 1851, John Henry Newman examined the evidence against Catholicism of two witnesses: Joseph Blanco White and Maria Monk. Of Blanco he could speak from his own experience. He was, he said, ‘a man of great talent, various erudition and many most attractive points of character… I admired him for the simplicity and openness of his character, the warmth of his affections, the range of his information, his power of conversation, and an intellect refined, elegant and accomplished. I loved him from witnessing the constant sufferings bodily and mental, of which he was the prey, and for his expatriation on account of his religion… He was certainly most bitter-minded and prejudiced against everything in and connected with the Catholic Church; it was nearly the only subject on which he could not brook opposition; but this did not interfere with the confidence I placed in his honour and truth’. Newman went on to contrast Blanco’s character with that of Maria Monk. ‘Whatever the one said was true, as often as he spoke to facts he had witnessed, and was not putting out opinions or generalising on evidence; whatever the other said was, or was likely to be, false… Yet the truth spoken against us by the man of character is forgotten, and the falsehood spoken against us by the unworthy woman lives’.

‘Ultramontanism’, a term which can be used simply to describe a particular attitude towards the Papacy, is frequently used to describe certain kinds of devotional practice, and is sometimes used in connection with other aspects of Catholicism, such as attitudes towards poverty, charity and Protestants, and the growth of authoritarianism in the Church. The second half of the nineteenth century is portrayed as the period during which the Ultramontane clergy took control of the Catholic Church from the hands of the old English clergy and laity, symbolised in the appointment of the Ultramontane Manning to Westminster in 1865 rather than the old English Bishop Clifford: ‘the victory of Ultramontanism and Romanisation’. If this was true of England as a whole, then it must surely be true of Yorkshire, where in 1861 the ‘thoroughly Roman’ Robert Cornthwaite became Bishop of Beverley? Ultramontanism, in all its guises, certainly had an important influence on the Catholic Church in Yorkshire during this period, but there is also evidence of a continued attachment to old English attitudes and practices, even as late as the 1890s. What took place in Yorkshire was not the triumph of Ultramontanism but a gradual acceptance and assimilation of two different kinds of Catholicism, as the gentry who had formerly dominated the Yorkshire Church, and the old English clergy who served them, came to terms with the most Ultramontane of the English bishops and the younger priests who followed his example.

Aelred Calyle (1874–1955) devoted his entire life as an Anglican to the establishment of Benedictine monasticism in the Church of England. Monastic life had attracted him early: as a medical student in London he joined a brotherhood in 1893; he often visited Buckfast Abbey, where he almost converted to Roman Catholicism; and in 1898 he took private vows of poverty, chastity and obedience according to the Rule of Saint Benedict. In the same year, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Frederick Temple, sanctioned his solemn profession as an Anglican Benedictine monk. Four years later, Temple also signed a charter which commissioned Carlyle to found an Anglican monastery and appointed him as its abbot. With the approbation of William Maclagan, the Archbishop of York, Bishop Charles Grafton ordained him a priest on 15 November 1904, in his American diocese of Fond- du-Lac. Along with archiepiscopal sanction and orders, Carlyle also enjoyed the patronage of Lord Halifax, the prominent Anglo-Catholic. In 1902, Carlyle accepted Halifax’s invitation to settle at his estate at Painsthorpe in Yorkshire.