In June 1629 Thomas, Viscount Wentworth was given control of the Northern Commission for Compounding with Recusants and appointed Receiver-General of northern recusant revenues. He was already Lord President of the Council of the North and Lord Lieutenant of Yorkshire, but this new appointment was to extend his power geographically far outside the Council’s jurisdiction. It gave Wentworth the opportunity to demonstrate further his administrative abilities and brought him personal financial advantages. Wentworth’s biographers have customarily given this aspect of his work only cursory attention, but in 1961 Clare Talbot edited a Catholic Record Society volume (n. 53) containing a selection of texts relating to Wentworth’s management of the commission, prefaced by a very informative introduction by the late J. C. H. Aveling which has added much to our knowledge of this part of Wentworth’s administrative work. The texts include over eighty documents, in whole or in part, from the Strafford Papers held in Sheffield Archives which shed much light on the work of the northern commission. There are, however, a number of other important letters, accounts and texts of speeches, both in the Strafford Papers and elsewhere, which deserve attention as they usefully supplement, and occasionally correct, Aveling’s introductory comments.

The letters of Mary Knatchbull, abbess of the English Benedictine Convent in Ghent between 1650 and her death in 1696, are of considerable interest. They reveal a woman operating with significant influence in two discrete spheres: the enclosed cloister and the royalist court in exile. This article will consider briefly the religious career of Mary Knatchbull and her importance to the Benedictines of Ghent, before examining in detail her part in the restoration of Charles II. It examines the unexpressed dichotomy of seemingly irreconcilable rôles performed by a member of an enclosed Order who on the one hand, in fulfilling her vows, was submissive and obedient, and yet on the other, was able to communicate with senior royalist advisers confidently and involve herself in the strategic planning of the campaign for the return of Charles II to England. As abbess, Mary Knatchbull led her community effectively at a difficult time. Under her leadership the convent survived an expensive building programme, established a successful new house and maintained high standards of practice in the religious life of the convent. From conventual records, it is clear that she was considered one of the outstanding abbesses of the seventeenth century in the English Benedictine community. Her correspondence with the royalists ministers in exile shows her opinions were taken seriously. She was regarded as a competent organiser and she had extensive links covering Flanders, France and England that kept her in touch with developments of interest to the king. Hitherto her life has been little known and published writing has been largely devoted to her rôle as an abbess. Mary Knatchbull’s life challenges categorisation and shows the importance of flexibility of approach to understanding the rôle of women in the early modern period.

A good deal of attention has been paid in recent years to the relationships between Methodists and Catholics in England in the eighteenth century and, in particular, to John Wesley’s own dealings with Catholics and Catholicism. This article examines a link with Catholicism at the very heart of Methodism’s first family: the involvement of Samuel Wesley (1766–1837), the younger of the two musician sons of Charles Wesley, and the nephew of John. As will be seen below, Wesley converted in 1784, marking the occasion by composing an elaborate setting of the Ordinary of the Mass (the Missa de Spiritu Sancto) which he sent to Pope Pius VI. This article discusses the background to the composition of the Mass, its musical content, and the subsequent history of its autograph score. It is prompted by the publication of a performing edition of the work and by a subsequent performance (almost certainly the world première) in St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, on 10 September 1997, which was recorded and later broadcast on both Irish and British radio.

Kenney, Peter James (1779–1841), was born in Dublin, probably at 28 Drogheda Street, on 7 July, 1779. His father, Peter, and his mother, formerly Ellen Molloy, ran a small business. Apart from Peter, the other known children were Anne Mary, who joined the convent of the Sisters of St. Clare, and an older brother, or half-brother, Michael, who set up an apothecary’s shop in Waterford.

Peter was born, therefore, in the decade which saw the American Revolution, the Suppression of the Jesuits and, in Ireland, the birth of Daniel O’Connell—destined to become ‘The Liberator’. The need to keep Ireland quiet during the American conflict, led to concessions to the Catholic population. The first of these was in 1778. Others followed when the French Revolution raised possibilities of unrest. In 1792 the establishment of Catholic colleges was allowed, and entry to the legal profession. These led to the founding of Carlow College and to Daniel O’Connell’s emergence as a lawyer. The following year the Irish parliament was obliged by the government to extend the parliamentary franchise to Catholics. Increased freedom, however, and the government’s connivance at the non-application of the penal laws, led to increased resentment against the laws themselves and, among middle-class Catholics, to a relishing of Edmund Burke’s celebrated reminder to the House of Commons in 1780, that ‘connivance is the relaxation of slavery, not the definition of liberty’.

In an 1885 article on ‘Roman Catholics and Parliamentary Representation,’ The Times suggested ‘it is a strange thing that although the Catholic Emancipation Bill was passed in 1829, very few members of that faith have succeeded in holding seats for English constituencies.’ During the past few decades a number of historians have published important studies of the electoral influence of Catholics in the nineteenth century, but most of these works have paid little attention to the Catholics who were Members of Pariliament. But any attempt to understand the Catholic contribution to public life in the nineteenth century surely requires an analysis of the Catholic M.P.s.

However strongly some authors may oppose the adjective ‘Catholic’ as limiting their vocation, a recognisable body of British Catholic literature does exist from the mid-nineteenth century. Its boundaries are not always easily definable since its origins are mixed. It was moulded initially by pre- and post-Emancipation renewals, the number and energy of the new converts from the Oxford Movement, the effects of Irish immigration, and the anti-Catholic rhetoric in both Protestant revivals and rising liberal secular thought. As a result British Catholicism formed a distinctive apologetic, which marked its literature from the beginning. Thus, Newman’s Loss and Gain: The Story of a Convert (1848) made the case for Catholicism against Elizabeth Harris’s novel, From Oxford to Rome, and in his Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics (1851) he defended the faith during the ‘Papal Aggression’ fury. Similarly, both Wiseman and Newman responded to anti-Catholic caricatures in Charles Kingsley’s Hypatia (1851) with their own fictional depictions of the early Church, Fabiola (1854) and Callista (1856) respectively.

So ends the register of the convent founded in Hammersmith in 1669, and with the death of Sister Joseph the Institute of Mary became extinct in the south of England. But in distant Belfast the story of its revival was already taking shape. On 1st April 1812 a little girl, Mary Petronilla, was born there to a Protestant Doctor Barratt and his wife. We know nothing of her childhood, but it is thought that as a young woman she taught singing in a Loreto convent. About the year 1835 she was received into the Catholic Church, and so embarked upon a career that was to have far-reaching effects. The presence of a Roman Catholic daughter may have been embarrassing to the doctor’s household, or perhaps it was just the desire to learn German and to see the world that prompted Mary Barratt to follow the advice of the Loreto Sisters and to accept a teaching post advertised in Augsburg. There she not only learned German in return for giving English lessons, but she observed religious life as lived in the oldest house of the Institute. Strict as the régime was (the nuns rose at 4.30 am. all the year round) she fell in love with it and asked to be received into the novitiate. On 10th September 1844 she was clothed in the habit and given the name Sister Petronilla, though this was later changed to Sister Ignatius.

On 13 August 1919 an interview between Charles Dawbarn, a member of the press, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on the relationship between Christianity and Spiritualism appeared in the columns of The Daily Chronicle. Before the article appeared, Dawbarn had also asked the Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson, ,for an interview to give him the opportunity to state the position of Anglicanism in regard to Spiritualism. ‘It will be seen,’ he told the Archbishop, ‘that Sir Arthur blames the Church for cold comfort administered to those who mourn their dead and declares that windy words and dogmatic assertions prevail in the pulpit.’ Archbishop Davidson, however, refused this invitation. The article, ‘The Challenge of Spiritualism. Does It Confirm the Christian Doctrine of Immortality?,’ introduced Sir Arthur as ‘… the immortal literary figure … Sure we are that nothing but sincerity and a desire to serve humanity lies at the bottom of his missionary efforts for Spiritualism.’ Dawbarn noted that in the minds of many people Spiritualism did constitute a ‘challenge to the Churches, which has not been disregarded,’ and he drew attention to the words of Arthur Foley Winnington-Ingram, Bishop of London, at a recent Hyde Park meeting speaking about the influence of Spiritualism: ‘Many have been led astray.’ This statement appears to have been the occasion for the newspaper interview with Conan Doyle.