English Catholic Research Articles

Shakespeare and the politics of Protestant England

The elm and the vine King John - the Church, the courts and the law Comedy of Errors - the parody of errors and heresies Twelfth Night - the errors of exorcism for Measure - the transition to Stuart rule Cymbeline - the oath of allegiance and the English Catholic Henry VIII - the Protestant-Catholic court in 1613.

"Cauterising the Tumour of Pyrrhonism": Blackloism versus Skepticism

In 1663 English Catholic priest Thomas White (1593-1676) proclaimed a need for some cauterisation to be apply'd to that Tumour of Glanvill's, which has rag'd now full two years.' The tumour, as physically manifested, can be identified as The Vanity of Dogmatizing,2 and underlying malaise as philosophical position expounded in that work-namely, skeptical philosophy of Pyrrhonism, which confirmed (in words of Glanvill's subtitle) the Shortness and Uncertainty of our Knowledge. The growth of that Pyrrhonian attitude to knowledge, characterized by White as a destructive contagion, had, as he goes on to note, long since ... begun to take fresh heart-encouraged no doubt by Thomas Stanley's new English translation of Sextus Empiricus. Standing determinedly against this intellectual fashion, White and his followers continued to propound an essentially anti-skeptical philosophy during latter half of seventeenth century. It is not least as a result of this intellectual unorthodoxy that White himself and Blackloist philosophy associated with him virtually disappeared from history books.4 During his own lifetime he enjoyed close relations with members of Mersenne-circle and with such subsequently canonical figures as Hobbes and Descartes. He also acted effectively as leader of English Catholic clergy during 1650s, heading domi-

Archbishop Manning and the Kulturkampf

It is not surprising that Henry Edward Manning had strong opinions about the Kulturkampf, Otto von Bismarcks effort in the early 1870’s to bring the Roman Catholic Church in Germany under the control of the State. As head of the Catholic Church in England, it appropriately fell to Manning to condemn what most British Catholics would have seen as the persecution of their Church in the new German Empire. Moreover, Manning knew personally the bishops involved in the conflict with Bismarck from their time together at the Vatican Council. Indeed, he was well acquainted with some of them who had played important rôles, either for or against, in the great controversies of the Council that led to the definition of Papal Infallibility. MiecisIaus Ledochowski, Archbishop of Gnesen and Posen, imprisoned and expelled from his see by the German government in 1874, had, together with Manning, been a prominent infallibilist. Paulus Melchers, Archbishop of Cologne, and leader of the German inopportunists, suffered the same penalty. The bishops of Breslau, Trier and Paderborn, all of whom had played significant rôles at the Council, the first two against, the latter for the definition, were either imprisoned, expelled, or both. Manning considered these men to have suffered for the cause of religious liberty, and could not understand the indifference of British politicians, especially of liberals like Gladstone, to their fate.

Roman Catholic Beliefs in England: Customary Catholicism and Transformations of Religious Authority.

This 1991 book makes available an empirical study of the transformations in religious beliefs that have occurred amongst English Catholics. It complements Dr Hornsby-Smith's well received Roman Catholics in England (1987) which provides the social and historical context for this present study. In Roman Catholic beliefs in England, Michael Hornsby-Smith explores Catholic beliefs over a range of concerns from doctrinal matters to questions of personal and social morality and assesses how religious beliefs are differentiated between different types of Catholics. He also examines the legitimacy accorded by English Catholics to both papal authority and religious authority in general.

:An Encyclopedia of Archetypal Symbolism

Alan Ford and John McCafferty (eds), The Origins of Sectarianism in Early Modern Ireland, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. ix + 249, hb. £50.00, ISBN: 978-0-521-837-552.'Ireland is riven by sectarian hatred.' This sweeping, but regrettably accurate statement sets agenda for a collection of essays that seeks to explore an area of Irish history that has previously been 'under-researched', 'that period when Protestants and Catholics began to live apart and create parallel communities, institutions, cultures and histories' (p. 3).In his eloquent introductory chapter Alan Ford chooses not to summarise succeeding articles but to explore some of themes that dominate in period that Ireland became confessionally aware, late-sixteenth to mid-seventeenth centuries. Thus he looks at issues of periodisation and terminology and provides an interesting if brief analysis of opposing trend to book's stated subject matter: giving a few glimpses of ability of some early modern Irish people to 'live together' in relative peace. Ute-Lotz Heumann's article imports recent German historiographical frameworks of confessionalisation and periodisation and successfully applies them to Irish context. Whilst she and Ford are at variance over which term, 'confessionalisation' or 'sectarianism', is more appropriate, they provide sound arguments for each and improve range and quality of interpretive frameworks available to us.David Edwards and Brian Jackson both look at development, organisation and internal workings of Catholic communities in early-modern Ireland. Edwards's ground-breaking essay on link between Catholicism and plantation offers a corrective view to commonly held assumption that New English meant Protestant. By highlighting influx of Catholic migrants from England and Scotland throughout period and especially during plantations, which after 1580 were assumed to be completely Protestant, Edwards shows overriding power of religion in forming communities between people of differing and often antagonistic ethnic stock. Thus many New English Catholics went, just a couple of generations from English conquerors to Catholic rebels' (p. 101). As he notes, marriage bonds, political and military alliances were made between New English Catholic settlers and native Irish and Anglo-Irish Catholics resulting in groups being almost 'as one ... in fearing worst as the Puritan faction grew in strength after Wentworth's downfall' (p. 123). Jackson's micro-historical account of a well-known dispute in Drogheda in 1618 shows internal rivalries and disputes within Irish Counter-Reformation Catholicism and undermines commonly held view that it was 'vigorous, rigorous and aggressive: a coherent ideology propagated with missionary fervour' (p. 203). Instead he details bitter and damaging disputes between Dominicans, Franciscans and Jesuits over power and influence in town. These two essays in particular remind us not to treat confessions or ethnic blocks as clearly defined and defining parameters in our research. Sectarianism arose not only between two confessions, but as John Morrill notes in his concluding chapter, in 'mutual recrimination amongst Protestants and Catholics' (p. 233).John McCafferty's and Tadhg O'Hannrachain's articles complement each other well, pointing out contrasting experiences and effectiveness of two rival Irish episcopates. So whereas Protestant Lewis Jones was proposed for see of Dromore so that 'in that vast country [there will be] at least some show of a church' (p. 60), during 1640s Irish Catholic hierarchy 'had evolved as a genuinely national body representing ... all four provinces of island' (p. 81). Reading essays together highlights in particular differing emphasis two churches placed on native Irish dimension. Though James I and a handful of clerics encouraged use of Irish language in early years, propagation of faith in native tongue soon lost impetus. …

PARADIGM OR PERIOD PIECE? DAVID LODGE'S HOW FAR CAN YOU GO ? IN PERSPECTIVE

It Is Now over a decade since the publication of How Far Can You Go?, David Lodge's astutely observant, often wickedly amusing, but also deeply serious novel of English Catholic life from the early 1950s to the mid 1970s.1 Although by no means Lodge's first attempt to construct a fictional narrative with post-war English Catholicism as its principal subject, How Far Can You Go? was certainly—and to date remains—Lodge's most ambitious and far-ranging exploration of this theme.2 The scope of How Far Can You Go? is, indeed, ambitious, for it attempts nothing less than a narrative of the various stages in the transition (or rather transitions) of a group of a dozen or so central characters from a rather narrow and essentially obedient, if also somewhat grudging and perplexed, acceptance of Catholic religious authority and tradition in their student days of the early 1950s; through the experience of an extraordinary expansion of their options both secular and religious in the 1960s; down to a point in the mid-1970s at which the relative uniformity and order of their Catholic identity of the early 1950s has given way to a remarkable plurality (or even perhaps chaos) of alternative ways of being Catholic in the mid-70s. Along the way, the various characters discover first the desire, then the possibility, and finally the necessity to 'choose for themselves' in matters of lifestyle, of morality and of religion—even if the final choice for some of them is a return to a more or less traditional version of their Catholic faith.

Making Catholic Spaces: Women, Decor, and Devotion in the English Catholic Church, 1840-1900

Nanda took in her surroundings… At the end of the corridor stood a statue of Our Lord in white robes wearing a red, thorn-circled heart on his breast like an order. The bent head with its pale brown hair and beard was girlish and gentle; the brass halo had been polished till it winked and reflected each flicker of the little glass lamp that burned on the pedestal… At the end of the passage hung a large oil painting of Our Lord, showing his five wounds … Between the lines [of desks] stood a statue of Our Lady, supported on each side by angels with folded wings and flying girdles. Nanda thought it was a privilege to be near so holy company. Her desk was empty but for a small picture of the Sacred Heart gummed inside the lid. … ‘I never thought there were so many holy pictures in the world,’ she thought to herself. Every room she had entered since she had arrived at the Convent of the Five Wounds had had its picture or statue.’

Holiness in Beauty? Roman Catholics, Arminians, and the Aesthetics of Religion in Early Caroline England

This paper is more concerned with posing questions than attempting to provide answers. I am principally interested in trying to establish whether there was a connection between the English Arminians’ emphasis on ritual and the beautification of churches in the 1620S and 1630S and the perception at the time that Roman Catholicism was gaining ground, especially in London and at the court. It has long been known that Charles I’s court was considered by contemporaries to have been rife with Catholic activity. Likewise, the embassy chapels in London provided a focus for Protestant discontent as a result of their attracting considerable congregations of English Catholics. The 1620s also saw the Arminian faction within the Church of England grow in influence, acquiring the patronage of the Duke of Buckingham and of King Charles himself. As has been demonstrated by Nicholas Tyacke, for example, this faction was very much orientated towards the court, and gained power by working within this milieu under the leadership of Laud and Neile. However, I am not concerned here with the politics of the Arminian rise to control of the Church of England hierarchy, but rather with their interest in ceremonial worship, their endeavour to place liturgy rather than the sermon at the centre of services. Was a leading Arminian such as John Cosin, for instance, reacting to what amounted to a Roman initiative? Furthermore, one needs to ask what part aesthetics played in attracting and retaining the allegiance of Catholics to what was, after all, an illegal form of worship. Even if the no longer faced the likelihood of physical martyrdom, financial penalties were severe, and the threat of imprisonment remained for priests and laity alike. Yet some twenty per cent of the titular nobility and many ordinary folk remained loyal to Rome. May not the very nature of Catholic worship provide a clue to explain this phenomenon? Clearly this is an extremely wide subject, which the time and space available does not permit me to explore in depth on this occasion. Therefore, I propose to focus on two specific areas: what attracted crowds of Londoners to the Catholic worship offered by the embassy chapels; and on one aspect of the Arminian response, namely, the field of devotional literature. I shall examine John Cosin’s A Collection of Private Devotions… Called the Hours of Prayer (1627) in the context of its being a reply to popular Catholic devotional books of the period, such as the Officium Beatae Mariae Virginis, commonly known as the Primer. Thus I shall address issues connected with both public and private devotions.

Piety and Politics: Recent Work on German Catholicism

Previous articleNext article No AccessReview ArticlePiety and Politics: Recent Work on German CatholicismMargaret Lavinia AndersonMargaret Lavinia Anderson Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 63, Number 4Dec., 1991 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/244385 Views: 8Total views on this site Citations: 13Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1991 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article: Quellen- und Literaturverzeichnis, (Jul 2022): 550–609.https://doi.org/10.13109/9783666371011.550Jeffrey von Arx Engaging the liberal state: Cardinal Manning and Irish home rule, British Catholic History 35, no.11 (Apr 2020): 25–54.https://doi.org/10.1017/bch.2020.2Michael E. O'Sullivan Religion, Modernity, and Democracy in Central Europe: Toward a Gendered History of Twentieth-Century Catholicism, Central European History 52, no.44 (Jan 2020): 713–730.https://doi.org/10.1017/S000893891900102XBrendan Karch Nation and Loyalty in a German-Polish Borderland, 3 (Sep 2018).https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108560955Jasper M. Heinzen Nursing the Fatherland? Hohenzollern State Building and the Hidden Transcript of Political Resistance in Hanoverian Female Charity during the Second German Empire, Central European History 44, no.44 (Dec 2011): 595–623.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008938911000653 By Oliver Zimmer Beneath the “Culture War”: Corpus Christi Processions and Mutual Accommodation in the Second German Empire Zimmer, The Journal of Modern History 82, no.22 (Jul 2015): 288–334.https://doi.org/10.1086/651612Michael E. O'Sullivan From Catholic Milieu to Lived Religion: The Social and Cultural History of Modern German Catholicism 1, History Compass 7, no.33 (May 2009): 837–861.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1478-0542.2009.00589.xGeorge S. Williamson A Religious Sonderweg? Reflections on the Sacred and the Secular in the Historiography of Modern Germany, Church History 75, no.11 (Jul 2009): 139–156.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0009640700088375Hans-Ulrich Wehler A Guide to Future Research on the Kaiserreich?, Central European History 29, no.44 (Dec 2008): 541–572.https://doi.org/10.1017/S000893890001428XStathis N. Kalyvas, Alessandro Chiaramonte LA FORMAZIONE DEI PARTITI CONFESSIONALI IN EUROPA, Italian Political Science Review/Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica 26, no.22 (Jul 2018): 317–363.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0048840200024254Oded Heilbronner In Search of the (Rural) Catholic Bourgeoisie: The Bürgertum of South Germany, Central European History 29, no.22 (Dec 2008): 175–200.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008938900013005Helmut Walser Smith The Learned and the Popular Discourse of Anti-Semitism in the Catholic Milieu of the Kaiserreich, Central European History 27, no.33 (Dec 2008): 315–328.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0008938900010244James F. Harris Rethinking the Categories of the German Revolution of 1848: The Emergence of Popular Conservatism in Bavaria, Central European History 25, no.22 (Dec 2008): 123–148.https://doi.org/10.1017/S000893890002029X

Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans: Seventeenth Century Essays (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 671 new. Doubtless much in his construction is speculative, difficult to demonstrate conclusively ; but he has amassed sufficient evidence to establish some degree of plausibility for much of his account, enough so that those who would attempt to refute his theory will surely have to come up with some new evidence, or at least a significant reworking of the existing evidence. Whether or not Bos' conclusions are true, they are sure to incite a new direction in Aristotelian studies. The title of the book is mildly misleading. Most of the book is concerned with "cosmic" theology in the lost dialogues, and "meta-cosmic" theology is mentioned chiefly by contrast. Despite Bos' theory of the meaning ofexoterikoi logoi,one might well wonder just how much discussion of the Unmoved Mover one might have found in the dialogues, by comparison with Metaphysics Lambda, Physics8, and related passages in the corpus. Given the evidence Bos presents, one might imagine that the dialogues differ at least in emphasis from the corpus in that they must have presented a far more vivid picture of celestial divinity. ANTHONY PREUS State Universityof New York, Binghamton Hugh Trevor-Roper. Catholics, Anglicans and Puritans: Seventeenth Century Essays. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1988. Pp. xiii + 317 . NP. This fine collection of five previously unpublished essays begins with an attempt to find out who Nicholas Hill was, and why he wrote Philosophia Epicurea, Democritiana, Theophrastica (16ol), one of the earliest modern atomist works. Through some ingenious detective work, Trevor-Roper builds up a case that Hill, an English Catholic, was influenced by Bruno's visit to England, and by his theories, and tried in a minor way to set up a utopia right after Tommaso Campanella's attempt in 16ol. The last essay seeks to interpret John Milton's political views, from preRevolutionary times to his writing of Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes, by showing his changes as expressions of Milton's egotism, rather than a continuous or coherent political theory, even in his writings during the Puritan Revolution and the Cromwell Protectorate. The three middle essays, "Laudianism and Political Power," "James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh" and "The Great Tew Circle," have a common core, and present some important perspectives for understanding seventeenth-century intellectual developments . Trevor-Roper insists that one has to see and understand intellectual developments in seventeenth-century England both in their political, social, and religious context, and as part of what was happening in Europe during the period of the Thirty Years' War, the rise of Calvinist orthodoxy in the Netherlands, and the interaction of continental ideas with English ones. The central essays portray and analyze the interplay of historical and prophetic Millenarianism as the account of what was going on, against the counterview that theology was beyond human knowledge, and that a kind of sceptical understanding of religion as a way of life, as a practice, could provide a basis for a social and political 672 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 29:4 OCTOBER 1991 world. The Reformation had caused a fundamental reconsideration of man in history. One Protestant version, presented in various forms in England, the Netherlands, Germany, Bohemia, Sweden and elsewhere, was that mankind was emerging from a drastic theological blight--the Reign of Antichrist, the Church of Rome and the Papacy . True Christianity, which had existed in early times, and was suppressed by Rome, reappeared sporadically in the movements of the Waldensians, the Hussites, the followers of Wyclif, and now was blossoming as the result of Luther and Calvin. The significance of this was described in prophecy, especially in the scriptural books of Daniel and Revelation, which indicated that the final chapter of human history, with the return of Jesus, would soon occur. Humans could prepare for this by perfecting themselves, their societies and their religious institutions. In the early seventeenth century this combined with Francis Bacon's advancement of learning, with different nationalisms proving that certain countries or societies would be the Millenial Kingdom , the New Israel. "I'revor-Roper shows that Archbishop Ussher, now regarded as a crank for telling us that the world was created in 4004 B.c., was a most eminent polemical Millenarian scholar...

English Clerical Converts to Protestantism, 1580–1596

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.

‘Briefly, and in Confidence’: Private Views of Her Majesty’s Inspectors on English Catholic Elementary Schools, 1875

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:The right of inspection will be required by the Committee in all cases; inspectors, authorised by Her Majesty in Council, will be appointed from time to time to visit schools to be henceforth aided by public money: the inspectors will not interfere with the religious instruction, or discipline, or management of the school, it being their object to collect facts and information, and to report the result of their inspections to the Committee of Council.

‘The Willing Captive of Home?’: The English Catholic Women's League, 1906–1920

Henry Cardinal Manning wrote in 1863 that he wanted English Catholics to be “downright, masculine, and decided Catholics—more Roman than Rome, and more ultramontane than the Pope himself.” Given this uncompromising call for militant, masculine Roman Catholicism in Protestant Victorian England, frequently cited by scholars, it may seem surprising that a laywomen's movement would have emerged in Great Britain. In 1906, however, a national Catholic Women's League (CWL), linked closely to Rome, to the English clergy, and to lay social action, emerged in step with the aggressive Catholicism outlined by Manning 40 years earlier. The Catholic Women's League was led by a coterie of noblewomen, middle-class professionals, and clergy, many of them former Anglicans. The founder, Margaret Fletcher (1862–1943), and the league's foremost members were converts; the spiritual advisor, Rev. Bernard Vaughan, was the son of a convert. A short list of the clergy affiliated with the CWL reveals an impressiveWho's Whoin the Catholic hierarchy and in social work in the early twentieth century: Francis Cardinal Bourne (Archbishop of Westminster from 1903 to 1935), Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson (a convert and well-known author), and influential Jesuits Bernard Vaughan, Charles Plater, Cyril Martindale, Joseph Keating, Leo O'Hea and Joseph Rickaby. The CWL was born from a joining of convert zeal and episcopal-clerical support to a tradition of lay initiative among English Catholics.

Kenelm Henry Digby and English Catholicism

Though Kenelm Henry Digby, a romantic convert, is a minor figure within the story of the development of nineteenth-century English Catholicism, his name is recalled in passing in many of the text books; and so, perhaps, some seventy years after Bernard Holland’s sketchy biography of him, there is room for a reassessment of his place within Victorian Catholicism, in which milieu his name was well-known, his books widely read, and his person much-loved. In W. G. Roe’s estimate, his writings ‘made a considerable contribution, if not to the thought, at least to the atmosphere of the Catholic revival.’ He was interesting as the first man to use the widespread fascination with the Middle Ages for the purpose of Catholic apologetic. When so distinguished a figure as Lord Acton noted his influence, and a contributor to theDublin Reviewsuggested in 1843 that Digby’s writings had helped to reduce anti-Catholic prejudice, it is of interest to reconstruct his views on, and his contribution to, English Catholicism. The task is difficult, for he was and remains an elusive figure, somewhat isolated, uncontroversial, obsessively restless and given to writing numerous volumes of poor prose and terrible meditative poetry, which, despite their autobiographical nature, are frustratingly unrevealing.

Lulworth Castle from 1700

The owners of Lulworth Castle were Roman Catholic. That distinction from the mainstream of English culture gave Lulworth Castle a special character in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Welds were, and remain, English landowners with their roots firmly in this country, but they were also part of a network which stretched across Europe. Rome had a double significance for cultivated English Catholics. On the one hand was the Augustan idyll perceived through patrician English eyes, which inspired the elegant refurbishment of so many English country houses in the eighteenth century, Lulworth included. On the other, Rome was the head and heart of a religion so alien to the eighteenth-century English establishment that its devotees paid for their loyalty financially, socially and politically.

The Scottish Catholic Enlightenment

In the eighteenth century, most Scottish Protestants took it for granted that Roman Catholicism was antithetical to the spirit of “this enlightened age.” Amid the several polarities that framed their social theory—barbarism and politeness, superstition and rational enquiry, feudal and commercial, Highland and Lowland—popery in every case stood with the first term and Protestantism with the second. Sir Walter Scott'sRedgauntlet, set in the 1760s, is redolent of these contrarieties. He draws a stark contrast between the world of Darsie Latimer, the cosmopolitan, bourgeois, and Presbyterian world of an Edinburgh attorney, and the world of Hugh Redgauntlet, rugged and rude, clannish and popish. When the Stuart Pretender appears on the scene he is disguised as a prelate, his odor more of sinister hegemony than of pious sanctimony. Scott's tableau captured the Enlightenment commonplace that the purblind faith of popery was a spiritual halter by which the credulous were led into political despotism. Catholicism, by its treasonable Jacobitism and its mendacious superstition, seemed self-exiled from the royal road of Scottish civil and intellectual improvement.It is not too harsh to suggest that modern scholarship on the Scottish Enlightenment has implicitly endorsed this view, for next to nothing has been written about the intellectual history of Scottish Catholicism, let alone anything comparable with the two full-scale studies now available on the English Catholic Enlightenment. One historian has suggested an alternative view, by suggesting that, in the emergence of the Scottish Enlightenment, it was Catholics and Episcopalians who, as alienated outsiders, helped loosen the straitjacket of Calvinist orthodoxy.

Attempts to revive the Order of Malta in Stuart England

Just defeated at the Boyne, James II was now demoralized, and took no further effective action to replace William III in Whitehall. Yet his rhetoric remained martial as he requested the knights of Malta to pray that God might grant him success against the protestant usurper.' Of course there was no likelihood of military assistance from Malta, and James did not expect such. Rather he was unburdening himself to his own kind: catholic knights whose own Hospitaller Order of St John of Jerusalem had weathered many catastrophes similar to James's present ruin, whether it had been their expulsion first from Jerusalem and then from Cyprus and Rhodes or their near-loss of Malta to the Turks in the Great Siege of I565. James's letter, however, also set the seal on the half a century of frustrated negotiations between the Order and a variety of English catholics.

St Alban’s College, Valladolid and the Events of 1767

This article is based on documents in the National Historical Archive in Madrid and concerns the expulsion of the Jesuits from St. Alban’S College Valladolid. The connection with English Catholicism may appear at first to be remote since, although nominally an English college, there were only two English students resident at this time and the Jesuit staff who administered the college together with the servants were all Spaniards. But the English Vicars Apostolic, however critical they may have been towards the Jesuits, continued to regard the three colleges at Valladolid, Madrid and Seville as English, their purpose being to prepare priests to serve on the home mission in England and Wales. The response to the events of 1767 was swift and the colleges, although lost to the Jesuits, were retained for England since the three were merged into the one college at Valladolid and placed under the direction of the English secular clergy. There had been a precedent in the French government’s seizure of the English College at St. Omer in 1762, but the way in which His Catholic Majesty Charles III engineered the expulsion of the Jesuits from his kingdoms was remarkable for its thoroughness.

Newman, Faber and the Oratorian Separation: A Reappraisal

John Henry Newman’s establishment of Oratorian houses in London and Birmingham in 1849 seemed like an auspicious event for English Catholics. The houses were filled with Oxford converts who were eager to minister to the laity and furnish intellectual support for the Faith. Unfortunately, only six years after the houses were founded the Oratorians became enmeshed in bitter feud. The Oratories had been developing along different lines. Father Frederick Faber was a zealous ultramontane; he and his London associates embraced all things Roman. Newman and his Birmingham confreres experimented with Roman devotions but were never comfortable with them. Newman sympathized with the ‘old Catholics’ and retained cordial relations with many Anglicans. As the Oratories were drifting apart so too were Newman and Faber. While they had been close friends when the Oratories were established, Newman became increasingly critical and suspicious of Faber.

Michael E. Williams, "St Alban's College Valladolid. Four Centuries of English Catholic Presence in Spain" (Book Review)

Michael E. Williams, "St Alban's College Valladolid. Four Centuries of English Catholic Presence in Spain" (Book Review)