The imaginative life of Robert Southwell in Rome as a student and in England as a mission priest was energized by the figure of Mary Magdalen. From the translation of a Franciscan sermon to an extended meditative prose work, in poems and illustrative reference, he explored the complexity of her life, finding in it a depth of emotional experience in which he himself was immersed. Her torment of sorrow was seen reflected in the life of Catholics in England, in their suffering and in the strain of endless endurance. It is an irony that through his writing on Mary Magdalen’s witness to the Resurrection in the garden, Southwell’s message of comfort and hope introduced England to the ‘literature of tears’.

Whereas Graham Greene, in his well-known Introduction to Fr John Gerard’s Autobiography of a Hunted Priest (1952), expresses surprise that “the martyrs are quite silent” in Shakespeare’s plays, it is precisely the opposite that transpires from a careful reading of them, if only “between the lines”—according to the literal meaning of “intelligence”. The case of Lavinia in Titus Andronicus would have been immediately recognized by an Elizabethan audience with reference to the “lopping” of limbs of those who similarly suffered on what the dramatist elsewhere calls “Love’s Tyburn that hangs up simplicity”. Not a few scenes in such famous plays as Hamlet, Macbeth and The Merchant of Venice that clamour to be cut by an impatient producer have distinctly recusant implications, not least Hamlet’s famous but misunderstood soliloquy, “To be, or not to be,” which evidently refers not to modern existentialists but to Elizabethan recusants, for whom existence had been made intolerable by their cruel persecutors.

The College of St Omers was founded in the Spanish Netherlands by Robert Persons S.J. in 1593 to provide an education for English Catholics. Those who wished to study for the priesthood would then proceed to one of the Jesuit-managed seminaries on the continent, among which was the College of St Gregory in Seville founded by Persons in 1592; many of its alumni joined the Society after ordination, as was the case with both William Appleby (hereafter WAp) and William Atkins (hereafter WAt); a full account of this institution can be found in CRS 73 (1992); cf. also WAt pp. 206–8. Intending students normally travelled by sea, as was the case with the twelve who set off in 1622 and were captured by Moorish pirates en route. The twelve ranged in age from adolescents to mature adults like WAp (aged 31) who had presumably been at St Omers for a period of probation rather than for the normal course of studies.

This article examines the growing involvement of English Catholicism in the antislave trade and anti-slavery campaigns of the nineteenth century. Early in the century, Catholics in England were conspicuously absent from the Wilberforce-inspired crusade to eradicate the slave trade. By the end of the century, Catholics in England played a leading role in that continuing crusade. The article examines several events that led to growing Catholic participation as the century progressed, including the restoration of the hierarchy, the American Civil War, Herbert Vaughan’s missionary endeavours, the death of Charles Gordon in Khartoum, and the celebrated efforts of French Cardinal Charles Lavigerie to end the slave trade in northern Africa. This argument is placed within the greater context of papal encyclicals on the subject of slavery from the nineteenth century and earlier. The article surveys the work and words of Cardinals Wiseman, Manning and Vaughan, as well as the Catholic press, including the Tablet, the Dublin Review, and the Month.