England (Since the Reformation)

The Protestant Reformation is the great dividing line in the history of England, as

of Europe generally. This momentous Revolution, the outcome of many causes,

assumed varying shapes in different countries. The Anglican Reformation did not

spring from any religious motive. Lord Macaulay is well warranted in saying in his

essay on Hallam's "Constitutional History", that "of those who had any important

share in bringing it about, Ridley was, perhaps, the only person who did not

consider it a mere political job", and that "Ridley did not play a very prominent

part". We shall now proceed, first, to trace the history of the so-called

Reformation in England, and then to indicate some of its results.

I. HISTORY

Henry VIII (1509-1547)

It was not until the twenty-sixth year of the reign of Henry the Eighth -- the year

1535 -- that the English Schism was consummated. The instrument by which

that consummation was effected was the "Act concerning the King's Highness to

be the Supreme Head of the Church of England, and to have authority to reform

and redress all errors, heresies and abuses in the same". This statute severed

England from the unity of Christendom and transferred the jurisdiction of the

supreme pontiff to "the Imperial Crown" of that realm. That is the unique

peculiarity of the Anglican Reformation -- the bold usurpation of all papal authority

by the sovereign. "The clavis potentiæ and the clavis scientiæ, the universal

power of Government in Christ's Church, the power to rule; to distribute, suspend

or restore jurisdiction, and the power to define Verities of the Faith and to

interpret Holy Scripture has descended on the shoulders of the Kings and

Queens of England. The actual bond of the Church of England, her characteristic

as a religious communion, that which makes her a whole, is the right of the civil

power to be the supreme judge of her doctrine." (Allies, "See of S. Peter", 3rd

ed., p. 54.) The Act of Supremacy was the outcome of a struggle between Henry

VIII and the pope, extending over six years. Assuredly no such measure was

originally contemplated by the king, who, in the early part of his reign, manifested

a devotion to the Holy See which Sir Thomas More thought excessive (Roper's

Life of More, p. 66).

The sole cause of his quarrel with the See of Rome was supplied by the affair of

the so-called Divorce. On 22 April, 1509, he ascended the English throne, being

then eighteen years old; and on 3 June following he was wedded, by

dispensation of Pope Julius, to the Spanish princess, Catherine, who had

previously gone through the form of marriage with his elder brother Arthur. That

prince had died in 1502, at the age of sixteen, five months after this marriage,

which was held not to have been consummated; and so Catherine, at her

nuptials with Henry, was arrayed not as a widow, but as a virgin, in a white robe,

with her hair falling over her shoulders. Henry cohabited with her for sixteen

years, and had issue three sons, who died at their birth or shortly afterwards, as

well as one daughter, Mary, who survived. At the end of that time the king, never

a model of conjugal fidelity, conceived a personal repulsion for his wife, who was

six years older than himself, whose physical charms had faded, and whose

health was impaired; he also began to entertain scruples as to his union with her.

Whether, as an old Catholic tradition avers, these scruples were suggested to

him by Cardinal Wolsey, or whether his personal repulsion prepared the way for

them, or merely seconded them, is uncertain. But certain it is that about this

time, to use Shakespeare's phrase, "the King's conscience crept too near

another lady", that lady being Anne Boleyn. Here, again, exact chronology is

impossible. We know that in 1522 Cardinal Wolsey repelled Lord Percy from a

project of marriage with Anne on the ground that "the King intended to prefer her

to another". But there is no evidence that Henry then desired her for himself.

However that may have been, several years elapsed before his passion for her,

whatever the date of its origin, gathered that overmastering force which led him to

resolve with fixed determination to put away Catherine in order to possess her.

For marriage was the price on which, warned by experience, she insisted.

Henry's relations with her family had been scandalous. There is evidence, strong

if not absolutely conclusive -- it is summed up in the Introduction to Lewis'

translation of Sander's work, "De Schismate Anglicano" (London, 1877) -- that he

had had an intrigue with her mother, whence the report, at one time widely

credited, that she was his own daughter. It is certain that her sister Mary had

been his mistress, and had been very poorly provided for by him when the liaison

came to an end, a fact which doubtless put Anne upon her guard. That the king

had contracted precisely the same affinity with her, by reason of this intrigue, as

that which he alleged to be the cause of his conscientious scruples with regard

to Catherine, did not in the least weigh with her, or with him.

The first formal step towards the putting away of Catherine appears to have been

taken in 1527, when Henry caused himself to be cited before Cardinal Wolsey

and Archbishop Warham on the charge of living incestuously with his brother's

widow. The proceedings were secret, and the Court held three sessions, then

adjourning sine die for the purpose of consulting the most learned bishops of the

kingdom on the question whether marriage with a deceased brother's wife was

lawful. The majority of the replies were in the affirmative, with the proviso that a

papal dispensation had been obtained. Henry, thus baffled, then determined to

proceed in common form of law, and Sir Francis Geary in his learned work,

"Marriage and Family Relations", has summed up the proceedings as follows:

"By a process well known to Ecclesiastical Law, the King wished to institute his

suit in the Appeal Court for this purpose given original jurisdiction. With this

object, instead of, as originally intended, suing in an English Consistory or

Arches Court, from which appeal lay to Rome, then menaced or actually

occupied by the armies of Charles V, a commission from Pope Clement, dated

June 9, and confirmed by a pollicitatio dated July 13, 1528, was obtained

constituting the two cardinals a Legatine Papal Court of both original supreme

and ultimate jurisdiction and to proceed judicially. The Court opened May 21,

1529; there followed citation, articles, examination, and publication, and on

Friday, July 23, 1529, the cause was ripe for judgment. At that day Campejus

[Campeggio] adjourned till October, on the ground that the Roman Vacation,

which he was bound to observe, had already begun. But in September the

advocation of the cause to Rome, and inhibition of the Legatine Court, given by

Clement contrary to his written promise on the word of a Pope, had arrived in

England, and the Court never sat again. Henry waited for more than three years,

negotiating to have the suit brought to judgment, till at last, in November, 1532,

he married Anne Boleyn, and in the following year, May, 1533, Cranmer,

Archbishop of Canterbury, gave sentence of nullity. At Rome the cause dragged

on, -- there is a gap at this epoch in the reports of the Rota, and it does not

appear if there was any argument either by the advocates of the 'orator' or

'oratrix', or by the defensor, -- till at last, on March 25, 1534, the Pope, in a

Consistory of Cardinals, of whom a minority voted against the marriage,

pronounced the marriage with Katherine valid, and ordered restitution of conjugal

rights."

The Statute of 1535 (26 Hen. VIII, c. 1) above quoted -- it is commonly called the

Act of Supremacy which transferred to the king the authority over the Church in

England hitherto exercised by the pope, may be regarded as Henry's answer to

the papal sentence of 1534. But, as Professor Brewer remarks, "to this result the

King was brought by slow and silent steps". The Act of Supremacy was in truth

simply the last of a series of enactments whereby, during the whole progress of

the matrimonial cause, the king sought to intimidate the pontiff and to obtain a

decision favourable to himself. Seven statutes in particular may be noted as

preparing the way for, and leading up to, the Act of Supremacy. The 21 Hen. VIII,

c. 13, prohibited, under pecuniary penalties, the obtaining from the Holy See of

licences for pluralities or non-residence. The 23 Hen. VIII, c. 9, forbade the

citation of a person out of the diocese wherein he or she dwelt, except in certain

specified cases. The 23 Hen. VIII, c. 6, which is entitled "Concerning the restraint

of payment of annates to the See of Rome", was not only an attempt to

intimidate, but also to bribe the pope. It forbade, under penalties, the payment of

firstfruits to Rome, provided that, if the Bulls for a bishop's consecration were in

consequence denied, he might be consecrated without them, and authorized the

king to disregard any consequent ecclesiastical censure of "our Holy Father the

Pope" and to cause Divine service to be continued in spite of the same; and

further empowered the King by letters patent to give or withhold his assent to the

Act, and at his pleasure to suspend, modify, annul and enforce it. The Act was in

fact what Dr. Lingard has called it, "a political experiment to try the resolution of

the Pontiff". The experiment failed, and in the next year the royal assent was

given to the Act by letters patent. In this year also was passed the Statute, 24

Hen. VIII, c. 12, prohibiting appeals to Rome in testamentary, matrimonial, and

certain other causes, and requiring the clergy to continue their ministrations in

spite of ecclesiastical censures from Rome. The next year witnessed the

passing of the Act (25 Hen. VIII, c. 19) "for the submission of the clergy to the

King's Majesty", which prohibited all appeals to Rome. The Act following this in

the Statute Book abolished annates, forbade, under the penalties of pn munire,

the presentation of bishops and archbishops to "the Bishop of Rome, otherwise

called the Pope", and the procuring from him of Bulls for their consecration, and

established the method still existing in the Anglican Church (of which more will

be said later on) of electing, confirming, and consecrating bishops. It was

immediately followed by an Act forbidding, under the same penalties, the king's

subjects to sue to the pope, or the Roman See, for "licenses, dispensations,

compensations, faculties, grants, rescripts, delegacies or other instruments or

writings", to go abroad for any visitations, congregations, or assembly for religion,

or to maintain, allow, admit, or obey any process from Rome. The net effect of

these enactments was to take away from the pope the headship of the Church of

England. That headship the Act of Supremacy conferred on the king.

This sudden falling away of a whole nation from Catholic unity, is an event so

strange and so terrible as to require some further explanation than Macaulay's,

who refers it to the "brutal passion" and "selfish policy" of Henry VIII; In fact the

struggle between that monarch and the pope was the last phase of a contest

between the papal and the regal power which had been waged, with longer or

briefer truces, from the days of the Norman Conquest. The Second Henry was no

less desirous than the Eighth to emancipate himself from the jurisdiction of the

supreme pontiff, and the destruction and pillage of the shrine of St. Thomas à

Becket was not merely a manifestation of uncontrollable fury and unscrupulous

greed; it was also Henry VIII's way of redressing a quarrel of nearly four hundred

years' standing. The reason why Henry VIII succeeded where Henry II, a greater

man, had failed must be sought in the political and religious conditions of the

times. Von Ranke has pointed out that the state of the world in the sixteenth

century was "directly hostile to the Papal domination . . . The civil power would

no longer acknowledge any higher authority" (Die römischen Päpste, I, 39). In

England the monarch was virtually a tyrant. The Wars of the Roses had

destroyed the old nobility, formerly an effective check upon regal despotism. "The

prerogative", Brewer writes, "was absolute both in theory and practice.

Government was identified with the will of the Sovereign; his word was law for the

conscience as well as the conduct of his subjects. He was the only

representative of the nation. Parliament was little more than an institution for

granting subsidies" (Letters and State Papers, II, Part I, p. cxciii, Introd.). The lax

lives led by too many of the clergy, the abuses of pluralities, the scandals of the

Consistorial Courts, had tended to weaken the influence of the priesthood; "the

papal authority", to quote again Brewer, "had ceased to be more than a mere

form, a decorum to be observed." The influence of the ecclesiastical order as a

check upon arbitrary power was extinct at the death of Wolsey. "Thus it was that

the royal supremacy was now to triumph after years of effort, apparently fruitless

and often purposeless. That which had been present to the English mind was

now to come forth in a distinct consciousness, armed with the power that nothing

could resist. Yet that it should come forth in such a form is marvellous. All events

had prepared the way for the King's temporal supremacy: opposition to Papal

authority was familiar to men; but a spiritual supremacy, an ecclesiastical

headship as it separated Henry VIII from all his predecessors by an

immeasurable interval, so was it without precedent and at variance with all

tradition" (Brewer, Letters and State Paters, I, cvii, Introd.).

Henry VIII made full proof of his ecclesiastical ministry. In 1535 he appointed

Thomas Cromwell his vicegerent, vicar-general, and principal official, with full

power to exercise all and every that authority appertaining to himself as head of

the Church. The vicar-general's function was, however, confined to ecclesiastical

discipline. The settlement of doctrine Henry took under his own care and, as is

related in the preamble to the "Act abolishing diversity of opinions" (31 Hen. VIII,

c. 14), "most graciously vouchsafed, in his own princely person, to descend and

come into his High Court of Parliament" and there expounded his theological

views, which were embodied in that Statute, commonly called "The Statute of the

Six Articles". It was in 1539 that this Act was passed. It asserted

Transubstantiation, the sufficiency of communion under one kind, the obligation

of clerical celibacy, the validity "by the law of God" of vows of chastity, the

excellence of private masses, the necessity of the sacrament of penance. The

penalty for denial of the first article was the stake; of the rest imprisonment and

forfeiture as of felony. But while thus upholding, after his own fashion, Catholic

doctrine, Henry had possessed himself of a vast amount of ecclesiastical

property by the suppression first of the smaller and then of the larger religious

houses, thus laying the foundation of English pauperism.

Edward VI (1547-1553)

After the death of Henry (1547) the direction of ecclesiastical affairs passed

chiefly into the hands of Thomas Cranmer. Lord Macaulay has described him

accurately as "a supple, timid, interested courtier, who rose into favour by serving

Henry in the disgraceful affair of his first divorce", who was "equally false to

political and religious obligations", and who "conformed forwards and backwards

as the King changed his mind". During the minority of Edward VI, no longer

cowed by the "vultus instantis tyranni", he favoured first Lutheranism, then

Zwinglianism, and lastly Calvinism, so that it may seem doubtful what form of

Protestantism, if any, he really held. Certain it is, however, that he had "the

convictions of his own interests", and that these were bound up with the

anti-Catholic party. He had judicially pronounced the invalidity of Henry's

marriage with Catherine and the illegitimacy of Mary, thereby deeply offending

and scandalizing Catholics, who were by no means mollified because, not long

afterwards, he had similarly prostituted his judicial office in dealing with Anne

Boleyn and her daughter Elizabeth. He was married, contrary to the Statute of

the Six Articles, to a daughter of the Protestant divine Osiander, whom,

according to a tradition preserved by Sander and Harpsfield (both first-rate

authorities), he was in the habit of carrying about in a chest until, in the latter

part of Henry VIII's reign, he judged it prudent to send her, for greater security, to

Germany. Shortly after the death of the king, he reclaimed her, showing her

publicly as his wife. To him are chiefly due the legalization of the marriage of the

clergy (23 Ed. VI, c. 21), the desecration and destruction of altars, for which

tables were substituted, and of images and pictures, which gave place to the

royal arms. He had the chief part in the inspiration and compilation of the first

Prayer Book of Edward VI (1548) in supersession of the Breviary and the Missal,

a work which, in the preamble of the Act of Parliament sanctioning and enjoining

it, is said to have "been drawn up by the aid of the Holy Ghost". Notwithstanding

this encomium, it was superseded, within four years, by a second Cranmerian

Prayer Book, not similarly commended in the Act prescribing it, in which the

slight outward similarity to the Mass, preserved in the Communion Service of the

first Prayer Book, was obliterated. The Ordinal underwent similar treatment; the

sacrificing Priest, like the Sacrifice, was abolished. Another of Cranmer's exploits

was the compilation of Forty-two Articles of Religion which, reduced to

Thirty-nine and slightly recast, still form the Confession of Faith of the Anglican

Communion.

Mary I (1553-1558)

In 1556, under Mary, Cranmer met his death at the stake, after vainly

endeavouring by copious recantations -- Sander avers that "he signed them

seventeen times with his own hand" -- to save his life. This severity, though

doubtless impolitic, can hardly be deemed unjust if his career be carefully

considered. But his work lived after him and formed the basis of the

ecclesiastical legislation of Elizabeth, when Mary's brief reign came to an end,

and with it the ineffectual endeavour to destroy the new religion by the fagot.

Mary's fiery zeal for the Catholic Faith failed to undo the work of her two

predecessors, and unquestionably did ill service to the Catholic cause. It would

be foolish to blame her for not practising a toleration utterly alien from the temper

of the times. But there can be no question that Green is well warranted in writing

that to her is due "the bitter remembrance of the blood shed in the cause of

Rome which, however partial and unjust it must seem to an historic observer, still

lies graven deep in the temper of the English people" (Short History, p. 360).

Elizabeth I (1558-1603)

The first act of Elizabeth, when she found herself firmly seated on the throne,

was to annul the religious restorations of her sister. "All Laws and Statutes made

against the See Apostolic of Rome since the twentieth year of King Henry VIII"

had been abolished by the 1 and 2 Philip and Mary, c. 8, which "enacted and

declared the Pope's Holiness and See Apostolic to be restored, and to have and

enjoy such authority, pre-eminence and jurisdiction as His Holiness used and

exercised, or might lawfully have used and exercised, by authority of his

supremacy, before that date". Elizabeth, by the first Act of Parliament of her

reign, repealed this Statute, and revived the last six of the seven Acts against the

Roman pontiff passed between the 21st and 26th year of Henry VIII of which we

have given an account, and also certain other anti-papal Statutes passed

subsequently to the enactment of Henry's Act of Supremacy. That Act was not

revived, doubtless because Elizabeth, as a woman, shrank from assuming the

title of Supreme Head of the Church bestowed by it on the sovereign. But,

although she did not take to herself that title, she took all the authority implied

therein by this first Act of her reign. It vests the plenitude of ecclesiastical

jurisdiction in the Crown and the Queen's Highness, who is described as "the

only Supreme Governor of this realm as well in all spiritual and ecclesiastical

things or causes as temporal", and it prescribes an oath recognizing her to be so

for all holding office in Church and State. The next Act on the Statute Book is the

Act of Uniformity. It orders the use in the churches of the second Prayer Book of

Edward VI, in the place of the Catholic rites, and provides penalties for ministers

disobeying this injunction. It also enforces the attendance of the laity at the

parish church on Sundays and holidays, for the new service. This was the

definite establishment of the new religion in England, the consummation of the

revolution initiated by Henry VIII. The bishops, with the exception of Kitchen of

Llandaff, refused to accept it, as did about half the clergy. The majority of the

laity passively acquiesced in it, just as they had acquiesced in the ecclesiastical

changes of Henry, and Edward, and Mary. Its effect was, virtually, to reduce the

Church of England to a department of the State. The Anglican bishops became,

and are still, nominees of the Crown, election by the dean and chapter, where it

exists -- in some of the newer dioceses there are no chapters, and the bishops

are appointed by Letters Patent -- being a mere farcical form of which Emerson

has given a pungent description: "The King sends the Dean and Canons a cong

d' lire, or leave to elect, but also sends them the name of the person whom they

are to elect. They go into the Cathedral, chant and pray; and after these

invocations invariably find that the dictates of the Holy Ghost agree with the

recommendation of the King." If they arrived at any other conclusion, they would

be involved in the penalties of a pr munire. The Convocations of York and

Canterbury are similarly fettered. They cannot proceed so much as to discuss

any project of ecclesiastical legislation without "Letters of Business" from the

Crown. The sovereign is the ultimate arbiter in causes, whether of faith or morals

within the Anglican Church, and his decisions of them given by the voice of his

Privy Council, are irreformable. But of course in these days the sovereign

practically means the Legislature. "The National Church", Cardinal Newman

writes in his "Anglican Difficulties", "is strictly part of the Nation, just as the Law

or the Parliament is part of the Nation." "It is simply an organ or department of

the State, all ecclesiastical acts really proceeding from the civil government."

"The Nation itself is the sovereign Lord and Master of the Prayer Book, its

composer and interpreter."

Queen Elizabeth's Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity form, in the words of

Hallam, "the basis of that restrictive code of laws which pressed so heavily, for

more than two centuries, upon the adherents of the Roman church". It is not

necessary here to describe in detail that "restrictive code". An account of it will

be found in the first chapter of "A Manual of the Law specially affecting

Catholics", by W. S. Lilly and J. P. Wallis (London, 1893). But we may observe

that the queen who originated it was animated by very different motives from

those which influenced her father in his revolt against Rome. Sander has

correctly said, "he gave up the Catholic faith for no other reason in the world than

that which came from his lust and wickedness"; and, indeed, while severing

himself from Catholic unity, and pillaging the possessions of the Church, he was

as far as possible from sympathizing with the doctrinal innovations of

Protestantism and savagely repressed them. Elizabeth, by the very necessity of

her position, was driven -- we speak ex humano die -- to espouse the Protestant

cause. No doubt, as Lingard writes, "it is pretty evident that she had no settled

notions of religion", and she freely exhibited her contempt for her clergy on many

occasions -- notably on her death-bed, when she drove away from her presence

the Archbishop of Canterbury and certain other Protestant prelates of her own

making, telling them "she knew full well that they were hedge priests, and took it

for an indignity that they should speak to her" (Dodd, "Church History", III, 70).

But, like Cranmer, if she had no religious convictions, she had the conviction of

her interests. Her lot was plainly cast in with the Protestant party. Rome had

declared her mother's marriage null, and her own birth illegitimate. Catholics, in

general, looked upon Mary Queen of Scots as the rightful claimant to the throne

which she occupied. Throughout her reign

Church policy and State policy are conjoint:

But Janus-faces, looking different ways.

The Anglican Church, as established by her, was a mere instrument for political

ends; in her own phrase, she tuned her pulpits. The maxim, Cujus regio ejus

religio, was currently accepted in her time. It seemed according to the natural

order of things that the people should profess the creed of the prince. Elizabeth

is not open to the charges made against her sister of religious fanaticism. But

she was given up to that "self will and self worship" which Bishop Stubbs justly

attributes to her father. And, in the well-weighed words of Hallam, "she was too

deeply imbued with arbitrary principles to endure any deviation from the mode of

worship she should prescribe".

It was on the feast of St. John Baptist, 1559, that the statute took effect which

abolished throughout England the old worship, and set up the new. Thenceforth

Catholic rites could be performed only by stealth, and at the risk of severe

punishment. But during the first decade of the queen's reign Catholics were

treated with comparative lenity, occasional fines, confiscations, and

imprisonments being the severest penalties employed against them. Camden

and others assert that they enjoyed "a pretty free use of their religion". But this is

too strongly put. The truth is that a vast number who were Catholics at heart

temporized, resorting to the new worship more or less regularly, and attending

secretly, when opportunity offered, Catholic rites celebrated by the Marian clergy

commonly called "the old priests". Of these a considerable number remained

scattered up and down the country, being generally found as chaplains in private

families. These occasional conformists were supported by the vague hope of

political change which might give relief to their consciences. Elizabeth and her

counsellors calculated that when the old priests dropped off, through death and

other causes, people generally would be won over to the new religion. But it fell

out otherwise. As the old priests disappeared, the question of a supply of

Catholic clergy began to engage the minds of those to whom they had

ministered. Moreover, stricter conceptions of their duty in respect of heretical

worship were gaining ground among English Catholics, partly on account of the

decision of a congregation appointed by the Council of Trent, that attendance at

it was "grievously sinful", inasmuch as it was "the offspring of schism, the badge

of hatred of the Church". Then a man appeared whom Father Bridgett rightly

describes as "the father, under God, of the Catholic Church in England after the

destruction of the ancient hierarchy", to whom "principally, we owe the

continuation of the priesthood, and the succession of the secular clergy".

That man was William Allen, afterwards cardinal. He conceived the idea of an

apostolate having for its object the perpetuation of the Faith in England, and in

1568 he founded the seminary at Douai, then belonging to Spanish Flanders,

which was for so many generations to minister to the wants of English Catholics.

It is notable as the first college organized according to the rules and constitution

of the Council of Trent. The missionaries, full of zeal, and not counting their lives

dear, who were sent over from this institution, revived the drooping spirits of the

faithful in England and maintained the standard of orthodoxy. Elizabeth viewed

with much displeasure this frustration of her hopes, nor was the Bull "Regnans in

excelsis", by which, in 1570, St. Pius V declared her deposed and her Catholic

subjects released from their allegiance, calculated to mollify her. Increased

severity of the penal laws marks the rest of Elizabeth's reign. By the Act of

Supremacy Catholics offending against that statute had been made liable to

capital punishment as traitors, the queen hoping thereby to escape the odium

attaching to the infliction of death for religion. Few will now dissent from the

words of Green in his "Short History": "There is something even more revolting

than open persecution in the policy which brands every Catholic priest as a

traitor, and all Catholic worship as disloyalty." But, for a time, the policy

succeeded, and the martyrs who suffered for no other cause than their Catholic

faith were commonly believed to have been put to death for treason. In 1581 this

offence of spiritual treason was the subject of a far more comprehensive

enactment (23 Eliz., c. 1). It qualified as traitors all who should absolve or

reconcile others to the See of Rome, or willingly be so absolved or reconciled.

Many English historians (Hume is the most considerable of them) have affirmed

that "sedition, revolt, even assassination were the means by which seminary

priests sought to compass their ends against Elizabeth". But this sweeping

accusation is not true. No doubt Cardinal Allen, the Jesuit Persons, and other

Catholic exiles were cognizant of, and involved in, plots which had for their end

the queen's overthrow, nor would some of the conspirators have shrunk from

taking her life any more than she shrank from taking the life of Mary Queen of

Scots. But, in spite of all their sufferings, the great body of English Catholics

maintained their loyalty. From the political intrigues in which the exiles were so

deeply involved they held aloof, nay, many of them viewed with suspicion not only

the exiles, but the whole Society of which Persons was a foremost

representative, and desired the exclusion of Jesuits from English Colleges and

from the English mission. When the Armada was expected they repaired in every

county to the standard of the Lord Lieutenant, imploring that they might not be

suspected of bartering the national independence for their religious belief. They

received from Elizabeth a characteristic reward. "The Queen," writes Lingard,

"whether she sought to satisfy the religious animosities of her subjects, or to

display her gratitude to the Almighty by punishing the supposed enemies of His

worship, celebrated her triumph with the immolation of human victims" (History of

England, VI, 255). In the four months between 22 July and 27 November, of 1588,

twenty-one seminary priests, eleven laymen, and one woman were put to death

for their Catholic faith. During the rest of Elizabeth's life her Catholic subjects

groaned under incessant persecution, of which one special note was the

systematic use of torture. "The rack seldom stood idle in the Tower during the

latter part of her reign", Hallam remarks. The total number of Catholics who

suffered under her was one hundred and eighty-nine, one hundred and

twenty-eight of them being priests, fifty-eight laymen, and three women. To them

should be added, as Law remarks in his "Calendar of English Martyrs" (London,

1870), thirty-two Franciscans who were starved to death.

Notwithstanding the severities of Elizabeth, the number of Catholic clergy on the

English missions in her time was considerable. It has been estimated that at the

end of the sixteenth century they amounted to three hundred and sixty-six, fifty

being survivors of the old Marian priests, three hundred priests from Douai and

the other foreign seminaries, and sixteen priests of the Society of Jesus.

James I (1603-1625)

On the queen's death the eyes of the persecuted remnant of the old faith turned

hopefully towards James. Their hopes were doomed to disappointment. That

prince took himself seriously as head of the English Church. He chose rather to

be the successor of Elizabeth than the avenger of Mary Stuart, and continued the

savage policy of the late queen. The year after his accession an Act was passed

"for the due execution of the Statutes against Jesuits, Seminary priests and

other priests", which took away from Catholics the power of sending their

children to be educated abroad, and of providing schools for them at home. In the

course of the same year a proclamation was issued banishing all missionary

priests out of the kingdom. The next year is marked by the Gunpowder Plot, "the

contrivance", as Tierney well observes, "of half a dozen persons of desperate

fortunes, who, by that means, brought an odium upon the body of Catholics, who

have ever since laboured under the weight of the calumny, though no way

concerned". Soon afterwards a new oath of allegiance was devised, rather for the

purpose of dividing than of relieving Catholics. It was incorporated in "An Act for

the better discovery and repression of Popish recusants" (a recusant Catholic

was simply one who refused to be present at the new service of the Protestant

religion in the parish church), and was directed against the deposing power. The

Holy See disallowed it, but some Catholics took it, among them being Blackwell

the Archpriest. Twenty-eight Catholics, of whom eight were laymen, suffered

under James I, but that prince was more concerned to exact money from his

Catholic subjects than to slay them. According to his own account he received a

net income of 36,000 a year from the fines of Popish recusants (Hardwick

Papers, I, 446).

Charles I (1625-1649)

With the accession of Charles I (1625) a somewhat brighter time began for

English Catholics. He was unwilling to shed their innocent blood -- indeed only

two underwent capital punishment while he bore rule -- and this reluctance was

one of the causes of rupture between him and the Parliament. His policy, Hallam

writes, "with some fluctuations, was to wink at the domestic exercise of the

Catholic religion, and to admit its professors to pay compensations for clemency,

which were not regularly enforced". The number of Catholic clergy in England

received a considerable augmentation in his reign. Panzani reported to the Holy

See that in 1634 there were on the English mission five hundred secular priests,

some hundred and sixty Jesuits, a hundred Benedictines, twenty Franciscans,

seven Dominicans, two Minims, five Carmelites, and one Carthusian lay brother,

besides the clergy, nine in number, who served the queen's chapel. This large

increase in the number of Jesuits was not regarded by all as an unmixed gain,

unquestionable as was their zeal and devotion. It was considered by some as the

cause of rivalries and dissensions, unpleasant to read of, among the small

remnant who kept the faith. The Jesuits seem to have been, at times, open to the

charge of aggressiveness, and certainly they did not succeed in dissipating the

prejudice so universal against them. One of the burning questions among English

Catholics was concerning the episcopal succession. The secular clergy desired

a bishop, and Allen had proposed to Gregory XIII that one should be sent. Though

Persons' influence at Rome, which was very great, instead of a bishop an

archpriest was appointed (1598) in the person of George Blackwell, who has

been already mentioned, a friend of his own, who was deprived by the Holy See

ten years later for taking the oath of allegiance under James I. Birkhead

succeeded him, and Harrison succeeded Birkhead, until, in 1623, Dr. William

Bishop was appointed Vicar Apostolic of England. He died in 1624, and was

succeeded by Dr. Richard Smith. Shortly afterwards there was an outbreak of

persecution occasioned by the Puritan party in the House of Commons led by Sir

John Elliot, and Bishop Smith withdrew to France at the end of 1628, never to

return to England, which remained without a bishop till 1685.

When war broke out between Charles I and the Parliament, English Catholics, to

a man, espoused the cause of the king. They could not do otherwise. Hatred of

Catholicism was a dominant note of the Parliamentary party, who bitterly

resented the quasi-toleration which the Catholics had for some years enjoyed;

and between the meeting of the Long Parliament and the death of Cromwell

twenty-four adherents of the Faith suffered martyrdom. The Catholics, as Hallam

points out, were "the most strenuous of the King's adherents"; they were also the

greatest sufferers for their loyalty. One hundred and seventy Catholic gentlemen

lost their lives in the royal cause; and Catholics were especially oppressed under

the Commonwealth.

Charles II (1660-1685)

At the Restoration of Charles II, in 1660, English Catholics expected, not

unnaturally, to receive some recompense for their unswerving devotion to the

royal cause, and this more especially as the new king's personal obligations to

them were very great. After his total overthrow at the battle of Worcester, he

owed his life to the Catholics of Staffordshire, the Huddlestones, the Giffards, the

Whitegreaves, the Penderells. But "Let not virtue seek remuneration for the thing

it was" is a lesson written on every page of the history of the Stuarts. Catholics

asked, in a petition presented to the House of Lords by Lord Arundell of Wardour,

that they might receive the benefit of the Declaration of Breda. Charles was

inclined to give them "liberty of conscience", but Lord Chancellor Hyde,

afterwards Earl of Clarendon, we read in Kenneth's "Register and Chronicle",

"was so hot upon the point, that His Majesty was obliged to yield rather to his

importunities than his reasons". The king, who, as he himself expressed it, was

not minded to set out again on his travels, recognized that there was in the

nation a strong anti-Catholic feeling, and bowed to it, though himself intellectually

convinced of the truth of the Catholic religion. The laws against Papists remained

on the statute book, and, from time to time, proclamations -- they were, it is true,

for the most part brutum fulmen -- were issued requiring Jesuits and other priests

to quit the kingdom under the statutory penalties. A singular instance of

overmastering anti-Catholic prejudice prevailing in the nation is supplied by the

monument erected by the Corporation of London to commemorate the Great Fire

of 1666. It bore an inscription in which Catholics were accused of being the

authors of that calamity, a monstrous assertion for which no shred of evidence

was ever adduced. --

Where London's column pointing to the skies,

Like a tall bully lifts its head and lies,

Pope had the courage to write. But not until the nineteenth century was well

advanced was the calumny erased.

It is not possible here to follow, even in briefest outline, the course of Charles II's

reign. We may, however, point out that two things are necessary to a right view

of it: to understand the character and aims of Charles II, and to realize the

dominant temper of the English nation. Idle, voluptuous, and good-humouredly

cynical, Charles certainly was; but he possessed deep knowledge of human

nature, great political tact, and remarkable tenacity of purpose. That he preferred

the Catholic religion to any other, is certain; and he was glad to embrace it on

his death-bed. But he recognized the strong Protestant feeling of the people over

whom he ruled, and was not prepared to imperil his crown by defying it. He was,

however, really desirous to do what he could, without risk to himself, for the relief

of Catholics; and this was the motive of his Declaration of Indulgence in 1672, by

which he ordered "that all manner of penal laws on matters ecclesiastical against

whatever sort of Nonconformist or recusants" should be suspended, and gave

liberty of public worship to all dissentients, except Catholics, who were allowed

to celebrate the rites of religion in private houses only. This declaration was

sovereignly displeasing to all parties in the House of Commons, who answered it

by a resolution "that penal statutes in matters ecclesiastical cannot be

suspended except by consent of Parliament", and refused supplies until the

declaration was recalled. That was a convincing argument to Charles. He recalled

the declaration forthwith. Parliament then proceeded to pass a bill -- it went

through both Houses without opposition, and Charles dared not refuse his royal

assent to it -- which required every one in the civil and military employment of the

Crown to take the oaths of allegiance and supremacy, to subscribe a declaration

against Transubstantiation, and to receive the Eucharist according to the rites of

the Church of England. One effect of this Act (13 Car. II, St. 2, c. 1) was to

deprive James, Duke of York, who had become a Catholic, of his office of Lord

High Admiral.

During the next nine years the struggle between the king and the Parliament

continued. The popular leader was Ashley, Earl of Shaftesbury -- for some time

Chancellor -- whose character has been delineated by Dryden with merciless

severity, but with substantial accuracy, in "Absalom and Achitophel". This

statesman's own Protestantism was of the haziest kind, but he was zealous,

from political motives, for the national religion, and for that reason was bent upon

excluding the Duke of York from the succession to the throne. To accomplish

this end, he fought strenuously, unremittingly, nor was any weapon too vile for

his use. The Second Test Act, passed through his exertions in 1678, rendered

Catholics incapable of sitting in Parliament, and thus deprived twenty-one

Catholic peers of their seats in the House of Lords; but the king contrived to

procure the insertion of a clause exempting the Duke of York from the operation

of the Statute. lt was in this same year that Titus Oates appeared on the scene

with his pretended Popish Plot. There is no evidence that Ashley was the

instigator of the colossal villainy, but he did not scruple to employ it for his own

purposes. "The origin of the Plot", says a recent well-informed writer in

"Blackwood's Magazine" (May, 1908), "is a mystery. We know no more than that

the English people, being mad, interrupted the course of justice, insisted that the

judges should condemn every man brought before them, suspected of papistry,

and easily believed the crazy stories of hired perjurers. It is most probable that

Oates himself contrived the death of Sir Edmund Godfrey." However that may

have been, certain it is that the calumnies of Oates and his confederates and

imitators awakened the Elizabethan Statutes into fresh activity. The king was far

too shrewd to give credence to what Macaulay has well called "a hideous

romance resembling rather the dream of a sick man than any transaction which

ever took place in this world." But he was powerless to save the victims of

popular fanaticism; "I cannot pardon them", he said, "for I dare not." And so, in

1679, the horrors of 1588 were repeated, eight priests of the Society of Jesus,

two Franciscans, five secular priests, and seven laymen being put to death, while

many more died in their foul prisons. The next year witnessed the judicial murder

of Lord Stafford, his peers being unable to withstand the madness of the people.

In 1681 Oliver Plunket, the Archbishop of Armagh, was executed at Tyburn, after

a mock trial. His was the last blood shed for the Catholic religion in England. The

persecution, which had begun with the execution of the three saintly Carthusian

friars in the twenty-sixth year of Henry VIII, had lasted, with little intermission, for

a century and a half. Three hundred and forty-two martyrs had sealed their faith

with their blood, while some fifty confessors, in the reign of Elizabeth and her

successors, ended their lives in prison. The king's long struggle with the popular

party ended in his complete victory. No more consummate master of political

strategy ever perhaps existed; and the violence of the party led by Shaftesbury

played into his hands. Shaftesbury himself was arrested on a charge of

suborning false witnesses to the Plot; although the Grand Jury of Middlesex

ignored the bill of his indictment, he saw that the tide of popular feeling, which

had begun to ebb with the execution of Lord Stafford, was now turned completely

against him, and at the end of 1682 he fled to Holland, where, two months

afterwards, he died.

Charles II was the most popular of kings during the last two years of his reign,

and he was careful not to mar his popularity by illegal acts or by measures

opposed to the feeling of the nation. The statute for the regulation of printing,

passed immediately after the Restoration, had expired in 1679; Charles made no

attempt for its renewal. In the same year the Habeas Corpus Act -- that great

charter of the liberty of the subject -- was passed; Charles acquiesced in it. He

did indeed infringe the Test Act by the Duke of York's readmission to the Council

and restoration to the office of lord high admiral. But, in the recrudescence of

loyalty, this tribute to fraternal affection passed unblamed. In his last illness the

churches were thronged with crowds praying that God would raise him up again

to be a father to his people; and on his death, in February, 1685, all sorts and

conditions of his subjects made great lamentation over him.

James II (1685-1688)

In the first year of the reign of James II Dr. Leyburn was appointed by the Holy

See as vicar Apostolic. In the next year Dr. Giffard received a like appointment,

as did Dr. Ellis and Dr. Smith the year after that, England being divided into four

districts: the London, the Midland, the Western, and the Northern, in each of

which the papal vicar exercised all the authority possessed by an ordinary. The

new king came to the throne with advantages which he could hardly have hoped

for. He inherited, in some sort, the popularity of his brother, and his religion was

forgotten in his blood. He began his reign by a solemn pledge to keep the laws

inviolate and to protect the Church of England, and the nation believed him. "We

have the word of a king", it was said, "and of a king who was never worse than

his word." The saying, whoever was its author, went abroad. It expressed the

general conviction, and his first Parliament made proof of exuberant loyalty,

granting to the monarch, without demur, a revenue of nearly two millions for life.

Argyll's rebellion in the North and Monmouth's in the West but served to bring out

the devotion of the nation at large to the sovereign. But the cruelties of Kirke and

the savageries of Jeffreys in the "Bloody Circuit" caused a change in the general

feeling. The king's popularity began to wane, and the measures to which he now

resorted soon put an end to it. Monmouth's revolt was made the pretext for

raising the army to twenty thousand men, and it soon appeared that James

supposed himself able, with this force at his command, to place himself above

the law. He attempted to nullify the provisions of statutes by the exercise of his

dispensing powers. Judges who refused to fall in with his plans were dismissed;

and it was held by a bench packed with his creatures that his dispensation could

be pleaded in bar of an Act of Parliament. Armed with this decision, the king

proceeded to set aside the disabilities of Catholics and the restraints upon the

exercise of their religion. They were admitted to civil and military offices closed to

them by the law; members of religious orders appeared in the streets of London

in their habits; the Jesuits opened a school which was soon crowded. Further,

the king found himself ex officio supreme head of the Anglican Communion, and

he resolved to use his supremacy as a weapon for its overthrow. Following the

precedent of Elizabeth, he appointed an Ecclesiastical Commission, in defiance

of an Act of Charles I which declared that court illegal; and he placed Jeffreys at

the head of it. He forbade the clergy to preach against popery, and suspended

the Bishop of London for refusing to carry out this order. At Oxford he presented

a Catholic to the deanery of Christ Church and converted Magdalen College into

a Catholic society. Among English Catholics most men of reputation stood

aghast at this reckless violence. Few approved it but converts of broken fortune

and tarnished reputation. Rome gave no countenance to it. Macaulay is

absolutely warranted in writing: "Every letter which went from the Vatican to

Whitehall recommended patience, moderation and respect for the prejudices of

the English people". "The Pope", he observes in another page, with equal justice,

was too wise a man to believe that a nation so bold and stubborn

could be brought back to the Church of Rome by the violent and

unconstitutional exercise of the royal authority. It was not difficult

to see that if James attempted to promote the interests of his

religion by illegal and unpopular measures, his attempt would fail:

the hatred with which the heretical islanders regarded the true faith

would become fiercer and stronger than ever: and an indissoluble

association would be created in men's minds between

Protestantism and civil freedom, between Popery and arbitrary

power.

This is precisely what happened. And indeed it is not too much to say that

British Catholics have, in great measure, to thank the two last Catholic

sovereigns for the strong feeling which so long existed against them throughout

the nation, and which, even now, has not wholly disappeared. The severities of

Mary appeared to give countenance to the popular Protestant opinion that

Catholics rely chiefly on the argument from fire and are always ready, if they can,

to burn dissidents from their religious belief. The conduct of James II seemed an

object lesson confirmatory of the vulgar conviction that Catholics are not bound to

keep faith with heretics, and that any violation of law, any "crooked and indirect

bye-ways" are justifiable means to the end of advancing the Catholic religion.

The reign of James II lasted only three years. It is not too much to say that

before two of them were out he had succeeded in alienating the devotion of the

entire nation. The famous Declaration of Indulgence supplied the supreme proof

of his folly and was the immediate occasion of his downfall. The gist of it was

that by the royal authority all laws against all classes of Nonconformists were

suspended, that all religious tests imposed upon them by statute as a

qualification for office were abrogated. Only an absolute monarch could claim to

exercise such a prerogative. It is true that the Declaration was full of professions

of love of liberty of conscience -- professions which came oddly from a monarch

with James's record. Moreover, as we now know, upon the very eve of publishing

it he had written to congratulate Louis XIV upon his revocation of the Edict of

Nantes, an example which Barillon, a very competent judge, thought he would

have only too gladly followed if he had been able. Those hollow and palpably false

professions deceived no one, and the failure of the Declaration to conciliate the

support of those who would have chiefly benefited by it, might have suggested

caution to a wiser man. But James would brook no opposition; and on 27 April,

1688, he ordered the Anglican clergy to read his Declaration of Indulgence during

divine service on two successive Sundays. Nearly all the clergy refused to obey,

and Sancroft, the Archbishop of Canterbury, with six of his suffragans, addressed

to the king a respectful and temperate protest. The document was treated as a

libel, and the famous trial of the seven bishops was the result. The acquittal of

the prelates was greeted throughout the country with a tumult of acclaim, which

was the signal for the Revolution, whereby the ancient liberties of England were

vindicated, and a Parliamentary title to the crown was substituted for an

hereditary one. (See ENGLISH REVOLUTION OF 1688).

William III & Mary II (1688-1702)

The disfavour with which Catholics were viewed when William and Mary were

placed on the throne vacated by James II, was natural enough. They shared in

the hatred inspired by the perfidy, cruelty, and tyranny of the absconded

sovereign. William, indeed, would have gladly extended to them the same

measure of toleration which, in spite of Tory opposition, he was able to secure for

Protestant Nonconformists. He was under great obligations not only to the

emperor, but also to the pope, whose sympathy and diplomatic support had been

of much help to him in his perilous enterprise. He was, by temperament and by

conviction, averse from religious persecution. Moreover, as Hallam justly

observes, "no measure would have been more politic, for it would have dealt to

the Jacobite cause a more deadly wound than any which double taxation or

penal laws were able to effect." And this, no doubt, was one of the reasons why

the High Tories persistently opposed it. But the Legislature did not content itself

with leaving on the statute book the former statutes against Catholics; it enacted

new disqualifications and penalties. The Bill of Rights provides that no member of

the reigning house who is a Catholic, or has married a Catholic, can succeed to

the throne, and that the sovereign, on becoming a Catholic, or marrying a

Catholic, thereby forfeits the crown. This article of the constitution was confirmed

by the Act of Settlement (12 & 13 Will. III, c. 5, s. 2), which conferred the

succession on the descendants of the Electress Sophia (a daughter of James I),

being Protestants. Another statute, of the first year of William and Mary,

prohibited Catholics from residing within ten miles of London and empowered

justices to tender to reputed Papists "the oath appointed by law", providing that

any who refused it, and yet remained within ten miles of London, was to forfeit

and suffer as a Papist recusant convict. A third Act of the same year (1 W. & M.,

c. 15) provides that no suspected Papist who shall neglect to take the oath

appointed by law, when tendered to him by two justices of the peace, and who

shall not appear before them upon notice from one authorized under their hands

and seals, shall keep any arms, ammunition, or horse above the value of five

pounds in his possession, and in that of any other person to his use (other than

such as shall be allowed him by the sessions for defence of his house and

person); that any two justices may authorize by warrant any person to search for

all such arms, ammunition, and horses in the daytime, with the assistance of the

constable or his deputy or tithing-man, and to seize them for the king's use; and

that if any person shall conceal such arms, ammunition, or horses, he shall be

imprisoned for three months and shall forfeit to the king treble the value of such

arms, ammunition, or horse. The 7 & 8 Will. III, c. 24, closed to Catholics the

professions of counsellor-at-law, barrister, attorney, and solicitor; and the 7 & 8

Will. III, c. 27, declared that any person who refuses to take the oaths of

allegiance and supremacy, when lawfully tendered, should be liable to suffer as a

Popish recusant convict; and that no person who should refuse the said oath

should be admitted to give a vote at the elections of any member of Parliament.

In 1700 an Act was passed which, Sir Erskine May observes, "cannot be read

without astonishment". It incapacitated every Roman Catholic from inheriting or

purchasing land, unless he abjured his religion upon oath; and on his refusal it

vested his property, during his life, in his next of kin being a Protestant. He was

even prohibited from sending his children abroad, to be educated in his own faith.

And while his religion was thus proscribed, his civil rights were further restrained

by the oath of abjuration. It prescribed imprisonment for life for all Catholic

priests, and enacted that an informer, in the event of their being convicted of

saying Mass, was to receive a reward of one hundred pounds.

Concerning this Act of William III Hallam remarks, "So unprovoked, so unjust a

persecution is the disgrace of the Parliament that passed it." But he goes on to

add, "The spirit of Liberty and tolerance was too strong for the tyranny of the law

and this statute was not executed according to its purpose. The Catholic

landholders neither renounced their religion nor abandoned their inheritance. The

judges put such constructions upon the clause of forfeiture as eluded its

efficiency." No doubt this is generally true. But as Charles Butler tells us in his

"Historical Memoirs" (London, 1819-21), "in many instances the laws which

deprived Catholics of their landed property were enforced." He adds that "in other

respects they were subject to great vexation and contumely". They were a very

small and very unpopular minority in an age when a common creed was

regarded, in every European country, as the chief bond of civil polity and

dissidents from it were more or less rigorously repressed. As a matter of fact, it

is to a great English magistrate that we owe the ruling which placed an almost

insuperable difficulty in the way of the tribe of informers. At the trial of the Rev.

James Webb on the 25th of June, 1768, at Westminster, at the suit of a

notorious common informer named Payne, Lord Mansfield told the jury that the

defendant could not be condemned "unless there were sufficient proof of his

ordination". Such proofs, of course, were not forthcoming. Lord Mansfield, as

Charles Butler relates in his above-mentioned "Historical Memoirs",

discountenanced the prosecution of Catholic priests and took care that the

accused should have every advantage that the form of proceedings, or the letter

or spirit of the law, could allow. And at that period the same temper animated

English judges generally.

After William and Mary

As the second half of the eighteenth century wore on, English Catholics ceased

to be regarded by the Government as politically dangerous. A certain number of

them had taken part in the rising of 1715, and in the far more serious rising of

1745, and had in some instances been executed for their pains. But in 1758 the

Old Pretender died, and the Young Pretender, upon whom his claim devolved,

had ceased to excite either dread or enthusiasm. Men no longer took him

seriously, and English Catholics in time -- it was no very long time -- acquiesced

in the Revolution of 1688. Nay, they did something more than acquiesce. In 1778

an address was presented to George III, bearing the signatures of the Duke of

Norfolk and nine other peers, and of one hundred and sixty-three commoners, on

behalf of the Catholic body. It represents to the sovereign their "true attachment

to the civil constitution of the country, which having been perpetuated through all

changes of religious opinions and establishments, has been at length perfected

by that Revolution which has placed your Majesty's illustrious house on the

throne of these Kingdoms, and inseparably united your title to the crown with the

law and liberties of your people". In this year, 1778, the first Catholic Relief Act

was passed. It repealed the worst portions of the Statute of 1699 above

mentioned, and set forth a new oath of allegiance which a Catholic could take

without denying his religion. Though a very modest measure of relief, it was

extremely distasteful to some bigoted Protestants, among whom it is distressing

to find the name of John Wesley. But in truth Wesley -- it is not a rare case --

was no less ignorant and narrow-minded than zealous and devout, as is

sufficiently evident from his "Letter concerning the Principles of Roman

Catholics". In this document, besides other equally foolish assertions, he alleges

that they hold an oath not binding if administered by heretics, and that they

believe in the remission of future sins through the Sacrament of Penance. The

conclusion he draws is that no government "ought to tolerate men of the Roman

Catholic persuasion". There can be no doubt that the diatribes of Wesley and his

followers largely swelled the agitation for the repeal of the Act of 1778, which was

conducted by the Protestant Association, and which issued in the Lord George

Gordon Riots.

It would be an error to impute the prevalence of a milder spirit towards Catholics

at this period to sympathy with their religion. It arose rather from the relaxation of

dogmatic belief, the latitudinarianism, the indifferentism which is a notable sign of

those times, and which infected Catholics as well as Protestants throughout

Europe. In England it was manifested, among other ways, in the apostasy of nine

Catholic peers, while many other Catholic laymen, of position and influence,

assumed a quite un-Catholic attitude towards the episcopate and towards the

Government. They desired, legitimately enough, further deliverance from the

penal laws; and to compass this end they had recourse to means not at all

legitimate. In May, 1783, five of these constituted themselves "a Committee

appointed to manage the further affairs of Catholics in this kingdom", to use their

own words. "It was in some respects", writes Canon Flanagan (History of the

Church in England, II, 393), "a useful institution, working zealously for the

supposed interests of the Catholic body. Its zeal, unfortunately, was not

according to knowledge. It sought to win emancipation by making to Protestants

every concession that it believed it could in conscience, but it forgot meantime

that minute theological knowledge would be necessary for so delicate a task; or

rather it forgot that it was unintentionally perhaps, but not the less certainly,

usurping the place of the bishops and of the Holy See. It was now in treaty with

the government for fresh measures of relief. It complained that the Catholics were

not allowed their own 'mode of worship'; were punished severely for educating

their children 'in their own religious principles', whether at home or abroad; could

not practise any of the professions of the law, or serve in the Army or Navy, or

vote in the elections, or hold a seat in either House; and it prayed William Pitt,

who was now prime minister, to aid them in their intended application for

redress". Pitt was favourably inclined towards the committee, whose

proceedings, however, were soon marked by great unwisdom. Protestant

Nonconformists were at that time striving to obtain a complete toleration, and

held out the right hand of fellowship to Catholics. The Catholic committees were

well pleased by the proposed alliance, and in a bill which they drafted for the

House of Commons, they inserted a clause providing that the relief to be given by

it was to be available to those only who subscribed their names, in a Court of

Justice, in the following form: "I, A.B., do hereby declare myself to be a

Protesting Catholic Dissenter. The four vicars Apostolic, in an encyclical letter,

condemned this and other vagaries of the Catholic Committee, and declared that

none of the faithful clergy or laity under their care ought to take any oath or

subscribe to any instrument wherein the interests of religion are concerned

without the previous approbation of their respective bishops. The Holy See

approved this letter. In the Relief Act which was passed in 1791 the foolish

phrase "Protesting Catholic Dissenters" was struck out, and the oath proposed

by the Catholic Committee was utterly discarded, the inoffensive Irish oath of

1778, with slight variations, being substituted for it. Catholics taking this oath

were relieved from the penalties of the Statutes of Recusancy and from the

obligation of taking the oath of supremacy prescribed by the Statute of William

and Mary. Various disabilities were removed, and toleration was extended to

Catholic schools and worship. Shortly after this Act was passed the Catholic

Committee turned itself into the Cisalpine Club and continued under that name,

for thirty years, to trouble more or less the vicars Apostolic.

There can be little doubt that the passing of the Relief Act was facilitated by the

outbreak of the Revolution in France. Another result, at first extremely prejudicial

to the Catholic Church in England, of that great upheaval was the closing of the

seminaries on the Continent, which had furnished to that country a supply of

priests. Douai was seized by the French Revolutionary Government in 1793. The

English Benedictine houses in France also disappeared. The closing of the

English Catholic colleges in France was, however, to some extent compensated

by the influx of clergy from that country. No less than eight thousand of these

confessors of the Christian Faith sought the hospitality of Protestant England,

and it was ungrudgingly given. The King's House at Winchester sheltered a

thousand of them, and for several years a considerable sum was voted for their

relief by Parliament and was largely supplemented by voluntary subscriptions. A

certain number of these priests sought and found work on the English Mission.

By far the greater part of them returned home when Napoleon had concluded his

Concordat with the Holy See and re-established Christian worship in France. Of

those who remained a few were irreconcilably dissatisfied with the new

ecclesiastical arrangements in their country. They were known as Blanchardists,

from their leader Blanchard, and were a source of much annoyance to the vicars

Apostolic. The heroic Milner was especially prominent in combating them, and in

asserting the rights of the Holy See. That strenuous champion of orthodoxy had,

at the same time, to contend with Catholics of his own nationality. The spirit

which had animated the Catholic Committee and the Cisalpine Chub was by no

means extinct, and led to the formation in 1808, of what was called a "Select

Board" which professed as its object the organization of an association for "the

general advantage of the Catholic body". That "general advantage" turned out to

be the further removal of Catholic disabilities, and the price which the Select

Board was prepared to pay for such removal was the vesting in the Crown of an

effectual negative upon the appointment of Catholic bishops -- commonly called

the Veto. The Irish episcopate unanimously opposed this arrangement, and

passed a vote of thanks to Dr. Milner for his "apostolic constancy" in

withstanding it. On 30 April, 1813, Grattan brought forward a Catholic relief bill in

the House of Commons, which substantially provided for the Veto. It was thrown

out on the third reading. Eight years later a similar bill passed the House of

Commons, but was rejected by the House of Lords. Of the eventual emancipation

of Catholics Dr. Milner had no doubt. Twelve years before his death, which took

place in 1826, he assured the pope that it was certain to come. But he would not

purchase it by the slightest sacrifice of Catholic principle. In 1826 a declaration

was put forward by all the vicars Apostolic of England explanatory of various

articles of the Catholic Faith greatly misunderstood by many Protestants. It was

widely read and doubtless helped to remove prejudice. In the same year Sidney

Smith published his masterly "Letter on the Catholic Question". Not, however, till

March, 1829, was the long desired boon conceded to Catholics. It was wrung, so

to speak, from statesmen who had always opposed it. The Clare election

convinced Peel and the Duke of Wellington, who were then in power, that the

settlement of the Irish question was a political necessity. The duke reminded the

House of Lords that when the Irish Rebellion of 1798 had been suppressed the

Legislative Union had been proposed in the next year mainly for the purpose of

introducing this very measure of concession, and not obscurely intimated his

opinion that further to refuse it must lead to civil war. This relief bill passed both

Houses by large majorities. The king's consent was reluctantly given, and the

Emancipation Act became law. It should be noted that before the passing of the

Emancipation Act the friction of which we have been obliged to speak, between

certain prominent members of the Catholic laity and the vicars Apostolic, was

virtually at an end. The Cisalpine Club still existed; but, as Monsignor Ward

remarks (Catholic London A Century Ago, p. 38), "there was very little

Cisalpinism in it". This was largely due to the personal influence of Dr. Poynter,

Vicar Apostolic of the London District, whose gentleness and meekness

triumphed where the fiery zeal of Milner failed.

When the nineteenth century opened, the Catholics of Great Britain were, to

quote Cardinal Newman's words, "a gens lucifuga, found in corners and alleys

and cellars and the housetops, or in the recesses of the country". Their chapels

were few and far between, and were purposely placed in quarters where they

were unlikely to attract observation. It was common to locate them in mews, and

in their exterior they were hardly distinguishable from the adjoining stables.

George Eliot has well remarked in Felix Holt, "Till the agitation about the

Catholics in '29, rural Englishmen had hardly known more of Catholics than of the

fossil mammoths." Their political emancipation was the beginning of a great

change in their social condition. "The steps were higher that men took"; their

ostracism began to pass away. Moreover, the reaction which had followed the

French Revolution had told in favour of Catholicism even in England.

Chateaubriand's "Génie du christianisme" had a world-wide influence, and some

of the historical novels of Sir Walter Scott, however deficient in accuracy,

presented a much kinder view of the ancient faith than had been commonly taken

in Protestant countries.

In the history of the Catholic Church in England since 1829 two events require

special notice. One was the rise of what is called "The Oxford Movement".

Cardinal Newman used to date that movement from the year 1833, when Keble

preached at Oxford his famous assize sermon on "National Apostasy". But

indeed it was simply the bodying-forth of tendencies which had been long in the

air. The old notion of the medieval period as "a millennium of darkness" had

passed away; and from the contemplation of its masterpieces in architecture and

painting men proceeded to study its intellectual and spiritual life. They were also

led to investigate, in the light of facts and first principles, the claims of

Anglicanism. No doubt the "Lectures on the History and Structure of the Prayer

Book of the Church of England" delivered by Dr. Lloyd, the Regius Professor of

Divinity at Oxford, set many of his hearers thinking, Newman among them. But

the object of the leaders of the Oxford Movement at its beginning was not to

examine, but to defend, the Anglican Church. This was the intention of the

"Tracts for the Times", begun in 1833. It is not here possible, or indeed

necessary, to follow the course of the movement, which, as it went on, departed

ever more and more widely from the standards -- even the highest -- of

Anglicanism, and approximated ever more and more closely to the Catholic ideal.

It culminated in the famous "Tract XC", the theme of which was that the

Thirty-nine Articles were susceptible of a Catholic interpretation and could be

accepted by one who held all the dogmas of the Council of Trent. Of course the

movement greatly interested Catholics, and by no one was it more closely and

anxiously followed than by Dr. Wiseman, who had made the acquaintance of

Newman and Froude upon the occasion of their visiting Rome in 1833. In

September, 1840, Wiseman arrived at Oscott from Rome -- where almost all his

previous life had been spent -- to take up his residence as president of that

college and Vicar Apostolic of the Midland District. He felt from the day of his

arrival there, as he wrote in a memorandum eight years afterwards, that a new

era had commenced in England. To help forward that era was the end to which

his great gifts and his large heart were utterly devoted. The majority of hereditary

English Catholics were much prejudiced against the Tractarians. Dr. Lingard

warned Bishop Wiseman not to trust them. Dr. Griffiths, the Vicar Apostolic of

the London District, used similar language. But Wiseman did trust them. He held

that Catholic principles, if honestly entertained, must lead to the Catholic

Church, and he fully believed in the honesty of Newman and Newman's followers.

How Newman was influenced by a paper of his on the Donatists, published in the

Dublin Review in 1839, is well known. The Oxford Movement had been directed to

the impossible aim of unprotestantizing the Anglican Church. Newman and many

of his friends came gradually to see that the aim was impossible. The kindly light

which they had so faithfully followed step by step led them on to Rome.

Wiseman testified: "The Church has not received at any time a convert who has

joined her in more docility and simplicity of faith than Newman."

Wiseman had earnestly desired "an influx of fresh blood" into the Catholic

Church in England. The accession of the converts due to the Oxford Movement

brought it. And no doubt it accelerated the restoration of the hierarchy which had

been so strongly desired by generations of Catholics. In 1840 Gregory XVI had

increased the number of English vicars Apostolic from four to eight. Ten years

afterwards Pius IX decreed that "the hierarchy of Bishops ordinary, taking their

titles from their sees, should, according to the usual rules of the Church, again

flourish in the Kingdom of England". The whole of the country was formed into

one province consisting of the metropolitan See of Westminster, and the twelve

suffragan sees of Southwark, Plymouth, Clifton, Newport and Menevia,

Shrewsbury, Liverpool, Salford, Hexham and Newcastle, Beverley, Nottingham,

Birmingham, Northampton. This restoration of the hierarchy was certainly not

designed as an act of war; it was indeed "unattended by any suspicion that it

would give offence to others". But it did give dire offence, and the country

resounded with denunciations of what was called "The Papal Aggression". An

"insolent and insidious aggression", Lord John Russell, the premier, pronounced

it to be, and shortly afterwards introduced into the House of Commons a bill by

which the Catholic bishops were prohibited, under penalties, from assuming the

territorial titles conferred upon them by the pope. The bill became law after long

and angry debates, but was, from the first, a dead letter. There can be no

question that Cardinal Wiseman's appeal to the people of England largely

contributed to allay the popular passion which his pastoral letter "From without

the Flaminian Gate" had had no small share in exciting. Though a somewhat

lengthy pamphlet, it was printed in extenso in "The Times" and in four other

London newspapers, and its circulation was immense. The cardinal appealed to

the "manly sense and honest heart" of his countrymen, to "the love of honourable

dealing and fair play, which is the instinct of an Englishman", and he did not

appeal in vain.

Cardinal Wiseman filled the metropolitan See of Westminster from 1850 to 1865,

and it would be hard to overrate the greatness of his services to the Catholic

cause in England. Manning truly said in the sermon preached at his funeral:

"When he closed his eyes he had already seen the work he had begun

expanding everywhere, and the traditions of three hundred years everywhere

dissolving before it." When he began that work, there were less than five hundred

priests in England; when he ceased from. it there were some fifteen hundred. The

number of converts during these fifteen years had increased tenfold, and fifty-five

monasteries had come into being. But mere statistics give no sufficient notion of

the progress made by the Catholic Church under Wiseman's rule, a progress

directly due to him in large measure. Not the least important item of his service

to religion was the way in which he presented the Church to his countrymen. Mr.

Wilfrid Ward is well warranted when he writes: "Wiseman may claim to have

been the first effectively to remind Englishmen in our own day of the historical

significance of the Catholic Church, which so much impressed Macaulay, and

which affected permanently such a man as Comte, which kindled the historical

enthusiasm of a De Maîstre, a Görres and a Frederick Schlegel." The

organization of the Catholic Church, as it now exists in England, may be said to

be due to him. He himself drew up, almost entirely, the decrees regarding it for

the First Provincial Synod, held at Oscott (1852). His work, indeed, was not done

in the tranquillity which he loved. "Without were fightings, within were fears."

Some of the converts did not fuse with the hereditary Catholics, "the little

remnant of Catholic England", whom they judged to be ill-educated and behind

the times, and this prejudice Wiseman regarded as ungenerous, even if, to some

extent, it was not unfounded. He deprecated strongly the spirit of party and

sought in all gentleness, to put it down and to guide his flock into the way of

peace. On the other hand, some of the old clergy, taking their stand upon the

ancient ways, regarded with distrust certain innovations of discipline and devotion

introduced by the more zealous of the converts. They looked upon the Oratorians

as extravagant. They viewed Monsignor Manning with suspicion. It is

unnecessary to enter into the dissensions which embittered Wiseman's declining

years. The last two, indeed, were passed in comparative quiet, but amid much

physical suffering. Not long before he died he said: "I have never cared for

anything but the Church. My sole delight has been in everything connected with

her."

Cardinal Wiseman's successor in the See of Westminster -- the successor he

desired -- was the provost of his chapter, Monsignor Manning, whose episcopate

lasted until 1892. They were twenty-seven years of fruitful activity, through evil

report and through good report. For some time he was certainly unpopular, not

only among his Protestant fellow countrymen but among his own clergy, who did

not like his strict discipline and some of whom by no means sympathized with

what was called his "ultra-papalism". But gradually the prejudice against him

wore off, and his great qualities obtained general recognition. It was the victory of

his faith unfeigned, his deep devotion, his spotless integrity, his indomitable

courage, his singleness of aim, his entire devotion to the cause which, in his

heart of hearts, he believed to be the only cause worth living for. One who knew

him well said of him: "He was an Archbishop who lived among his people", "the

door-steps of his house were worn with the footsteps of the fatherless and the

widow, the poor, the forlorn, the tempted and the disgraced, who came to him in

their hours of trouble and sorrow." No doubt he made mistakes, some of them

grave enough -- as, for example, his persistent opposition to the frequentation of

the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge by Catholic young men -- and his

abortive and costly attempt to supply the loss of academical training by a college

of higher studies at Kensington under the direction of Monsignor Capel. But it is

certainly true that the active part which he played in every department of social

reform revealed him not only as a great philanthropist and a great churchman, but

also as a statesman of no mean order. It was said by an able writer, upon the

occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of his consecration: "To him, more than

to any man, it is due that English Catholics have at last outgrown the narrow

cramped life of their past of persecution, and stand in all things upon a footing of

equality with their fellow countrymen." No doubt this happy result was largely due

to Manning; but perhaps it was more largely due to another. The revelation of his

inner life which John Henry Newman thought himself obliged to put before his

countrymen in order to vindicate himself from the wanton attacks of Charles

Kingsley, in 1864, came like a revelation to multitudes of what Catholicism as a

religion really is. The "Apologia pro Vita Sua" was like a burst of sunlight putting

to flight the densest mists of Protestant prejudice. And the "Letter to the Duke of

Norfolk" (1875), in reply to Gladstone's pamphlet on the Vatican decrees which

appeared in 1874, may be said to have made an end of the old error that a loyal

Catholic cannot be a loyal Englishman. It was enough for Newman to affirm that

there was no incompatibility between the two characters. His countrymen

believed him on his word. Lord Morley of Blackburn, a very competent judge,

writes: "Newman raised his Church to what would, not so long before, have

seemed a strange and incredible rank in the mind of Protestant England"

(Miscellanies, Fourth Series, p. 161).

Herbert Vaughan, who succeeded Cardinal Manning in the See of Westminster,

ruled the diocese as archbishop, and the province as metropolitan for nearly

eleven years. It was reserved for him to take up a work which his predecessor

had put aside -- the erection of a cathedral for Westminster. The first public act

which Manning had to perform after his nomination to the archbishopric -- it was

even before his consecration -- was to preside over a meeting summoned to

promote the building of a cathedral in memory of Cardinal Wiseman. He declared

on that occasion: "It is a work which I will take up and will to the utmost of my

power promote -- when the work of the poor children in London is accomplished,

and not till then." This work for the poor Catholic children of London -- provision

for their education in their religion -- was Cardinal Manning's life-work; and before

he passed away it was accomplished. The building of the cathedral he left, as he

announced in 1874, to his successor. The magnificent fane conceived by the

genius of John Francis Bentley may, in some sort, be considered as Cardinal

Vaughan's monument, as being the outcome of his energy and zeal. It is a

memorial of him, as well as of Cardinal Wiseman.

II. CURRENT POSITION OF THE CHURCH

So much must suffice regarding the history of Catholicism in England from the

so-called Reformation to the present day. We now proceed to give some account

of the actual position of the Church in that country. We have already seen that in

1850 Pope Pius IX reconstituted the hierarchy, making England one

ecclesiastical province under the metropolitan See of Westminster, with the

twelve suffragan Sees of Southwark, Hexham and Newcastle, Beverley, Liverpool,

Salford, Newport and Menevia, Clifton, Plymouth, Nottingham, Birmingham, and

Northampton. In 1878 the Diocese of Beverley was divided into the Dioceses of

Leeds and Middlesborough; in 1882 the Diocese of Southwark was divided into

the Dioceses of Southwark and Portsmouth, and in 1895 Wales, excepting

Glamorganshire, was separated from the Diocese of Newport and Menevia, and

formed into the Vicariate Apostolic of Wales. Three years later this vicariate was

erected into the Diocese of Menevia, so that the Archbishop of Westminster now

has fifteen suffragans. Hitherto, since the Reformation, England had been

regarded as a missionary country and had been immediately subject to the

Congregation of Propaganda. But Pius X, by his Constitution, "Sapienti Consilio",

transferred (1908) England from that state of tutelage to the common law of the

Church.

The number of priests, secular and regular, in England, according to the most

recent list, is three thousand five hundred and twenty-four, and the number of

churches, chapels, and institutes, one thousand seven hundred and thirty-six. Of

the regulars who are over a thousand in number, many are French exiles, and a

considerable number of them are not engaged in parochial or missionary work.

There are three hundred and eleven monasteries and seven hundred and

eighty-three convents, a great increase during the half-century which has passed

away since 1851, when there were only seventeen monasteries and fifty-three

convents. During the same period many churches of imposing proportions,

adorned with more or less magnificence, have been erected. Conspicuous among

them is the cathedral of Westminster of which mention has been already made.

It is in the Byzantine style and is certainly one of the noblest of modern religious

edifices. Nearly two hundred and fifty thousand pounds have already been

expended on it, and, although still unfinished, it has been open for daily use

since Christmas, 1903.

Catholics in England are still subject to various legal disabilities. We have

already seen that by the Bill of Rights (11 Will. and Mary sen. 2, c. 2) no

member of the reigning house who is a Catholic, or has married a Catholic, can

succeed to the throne, that the sovereign, on becoming a Catholic, or marrying a

Catholic, thereby forfeits the crown, and that the Act of Settlement (12 and 13

Will. III, c. 2, s. 2), by which the succession was confined to the descendants of

the Electress Sophia, being Protestants, confirms this article of the Constitution.

This last-mentioned statute further enacts "that whosoever shall hereafter come

to the possession of the Crown of England shall join in communion with the

Church of England as by law established". The Emancipation Act (10 Geo. IV, c.

7), which was largely a disabling Act, provides that nothing contained in it "shall

extend or be construed to enable any person otherwise than he is now by law

entitled, to hold the office of Lord Chancellor of England or Lord Lieutenant of

Ireland", and the common opinion is that Catholics cannot now fill these great

positions, but this view appears questionable. The point is discussed at length in

Lilly and Wallis's "Manual of the Law specially affecting Catholics", pp. 36-43.

The Emancipation Act also contains sections imposing fresh disabilities upon

"Jesuits and members of other religious orders, communities or Societies of the

Church of Rome, bound by monastic or religious vows". These sections have

never been put in force; still, as they remain on the statute book, they have the

serious effect of disabling religious orders of men from holding property. An Act of

1860 (23 and 24 Vict., c. 134) has, however, somewhat mitigated this hardship,

as also a like hardship regarding bequests for what are deemed superstitious

uses, such as Masses for the dead. Such bequests are held by English law to

be void, but the Irish courts do not follow the English on this point. It should be

noted that up to the passing of the Emancipation Act, trusts for the promotion of

Catholic charities were held to be illegal. Nor did that enactment expressly refer

to them, so that three years later, in order to remove all doubts concerning them,

the Roman Catholic Charities Act was passed, by which such charities were

made subject to the same laws as Protestant Dissenting charities. The English

law as to trusts for Catholic purposes, which are neither charitable nor void as

being for "superstitious uses" or for support of forbidden orders, is the same as

that which applies to other bequests which are lawful but not charitable.

The only other Catholic disability which need be noticed here is that no person in

Holy orders of the Church of Rome is capable of being elected to serve in

Parliament as a Member of the House of Commons. This disability is shared by

the clergymen of the Church of England, who, however, can escape from it by the

legal process vulgarly, though incorrectly, called renouncing their orders, but not

by Protestant Dissenting ministers.

It should be noticed that in England provision is made for securing religious

liberty for pauper and criminal Catholics. In every workhouse a creed register is

kept in which the religion of every inmate is entered by the master, upon

admission, and the Guardians of the Poor are empowered to appoint Catholic

clergymen, at suitable salaries, to minister to the Catholic paupers. Similarly,

Catholic chaplains may be appointed in public lunatic asylums. Catholic pauper

children may be transferred from the workhouse schools to schools of their own

religion, and, if boarded out, provision is made for their attending the Catholic

church. Catholic ministers to prisons are appointed by the Home Secretary, and

are duly remunerated. There are sixteen commissioned army chaplains paid by

the State. In the Navy there are twenty-three Catholic chaplains, and a hundred

and thirty priests receive capitation allowances.

We go on to say some words en Catholic education in England since the

Reformation. Of course it hardly existed when the penal law's were enforced in

their full rigour. The clergy, as we have seen, were trained abroad at Rome, at

Douai, at Lisbon, at Valladolid. The young laity benefited in intermittent and

uncertain fashion by the teaching of the priests. Shakespeare, whom there is

strong reason for accounting a Catholic (see Lilly's "Studies in Religion and

Literature"), was "reared up", according to an old tradition, by an old Benedictine

monk, Dom Thomas Combe, or Coombes. In Pope's time a few Catholic schools

were found here and there, and he was sent to one of them, a "Roman Catholic

seminary", it is called, at Twyford, kept by Thomas Deane, an ex-fellow of

Magdalen College, Oxford. But these "seminaries" were carried on with difficulty,

being illegal, and it was not until the outbreak of the French Revolution that much

was effected for the cause of Catholic education in England. The professors and

pupils of the University of Douni, after enduring many hardships, returned to

England in 1795, some going to Herefordshire, in the South, and some to

Tudhoe, in the North. The Herefordshire establishment developed in time into St.

Edmund's College. The school founded at Tudhoe, and removed first to Crook

Hill, has expanded into the great college of Ushaw, which now also serves as a

seminary for the five northern Dioceses of Hexham and Newcastle, Leeds,

Middlesborough, Salford, and Shrewsbury. Thus these two noble institutions may

claim as their far-off founder Cardinal Allen. The magnificent Jesuit college of

Stonyhurst may in like manner derive its origin from Father Persons, for it was

founded by the religious who fled from the house established by him at St. Omer.

The not less magnificent college of Downside is the descendant of St. Gregory's,

Douai, i.e. of the Benedictine monastery and college founded there in 1606. The

monks fleeing from the fury of the French Revolution were received at Acton

Burnell in Shropshire by Sir Edward Smith who had been one of their pupils. It

was in 1814 that they settled at Downside. The great college of Oscott is now a

seminary in which priests are trained for the southern dioceses and is under the

joint direction of the Archbishop of Westminster and the Bishops of Birmingham,

Clifton, Menevia, Newport, Northampton, and Portsmouth.

St. Joseph's Missionary College was founded by Cardinal Vaughan, who ever

took the deepest interest in it, and who is buried in the grounds. Of Catholic

higher schools two deserve special mention; that at Edgbaston, founded by

Cardinal Newman, and that at Beaumont, established by the Jesuits. Until 1895

Catholic young men were discouraged -- nay were inhibited, without special

permission of the ecclesiastical authorities -- from frequenting the Universities of

Oxford and Cambridge, but in that year a letter from the Congregation of

Propaganda to Cardinal Vaughan announced that the Holy See had removed this

restriction, the bishops, however, being enjoined to make proper provision for

Catholic worship and instruction for Catholic young men resorting to these

ancient seats of learning. Elementary education has also been largely provided

for by Catholics in England. Before the Protestant Reformation all the great

monasteries had, attached to them, primary schools for poor children. These of

course disappeared with the monasteries. In the eighteenth century a number of

Protestant charity schools were founded, but it was not until the end of the first

quarter of the nineteenth century that provision for elementary public instruction

began to be recognized as a public duty. In 1833 a Parliamentary grant was first

made "for the purpose" of education. It was divided between two Protestant

societies, the British and Foreign School, which ignored dogmatic religious

teaching, and the National, which represented the Church of England. In 1847

Catholic elementary schools, which had much increased in numbers, were

admitted to share in the government grant, and the Catholic Poor School

Committee was founded to supervise and direct them, a duty which this body,

now called the Catholic Education Council, still fulfils.

Catholic journalism in England is zealously represented by "The Tablet"

newspaper, which was founded so long ago as 1840. It is published weekly.

Other Catholic journals are the "Catholic Times", "Catholic Meekly", "Catholic

Herald", "Catholic News", and "Universe". The chief Catholic review is the "Dublin

Review", founded by Cardinal Wiseman, long edited by W. G. Ward, and now by

his son Mr. Wilfrid Ward. It is published quarterly. "The Month", a magazine of

general literature edited by Fathers of the Society of Jesus, is issued monthly,

as its name denotes. An extremely important publication is the "Catholic

Directory", which in its present form dates from the year 1838. But for nearly a

century previously there had been a Directory which, however, in its earliest

issues was merely an Ordo, or Calendar, for the use of priests reciting Office.

It remains now to speak of certain Catholic societies existing in England. In the

first place mention must be made of the Catholic Union of Great Britain, founded

in 1871. The earliest meeting recorded in the minute book was held at Norfolk

House, on the 10th of February of that year, when it was unanimously agreed,

"that a Society of Catholics be founded, under the title of the Catholic Union of

Great Britain, to promote all Catholic interests, especially the restoration of the

Holy Father to his lawful Sovereign rights". The establishment of the society was

sanctioned by the archbishops and bishops of England and by the vicars

Apostolic of Scotland (the hierarchy in that country was not restored until 1878),

and was emphatically approved by Pius IX. In the rules of the Catholic Union the

following means of effecting its objects are specified:

1.By meetings of the Union and of the Council;

2.By public meetings;

3.By petitions or memorials, or deputations to the Authorities;

4.By local branches;

5.By correspondence with similar societies in other countries;

6.By procuring and publishing information on subjects of interest to

Catholics;

7.By co-operation with approved Confraternities, Institutions, and Charitable

Associations, for the furtherance of their respective objects; which

co-operation shall, in each case, be sanctioned by the Bishop of the

Diocese;

8.By any other mode approved of by the Council and the Bishops.

For thirty-seven years the Catholic Union has worked steadily and successfully

on the lines thus indicated. It has also been of great utility in affording advice and

assistance to Catholics, especially the clergy, in matters of doubt and difficulty,

legal and administrative. It is governed by a president and council elected by the

general body of members. From the first the office of president has been held by

the Duke of Norfolk, and for many years the Marquis of Ripon has been the

vice-president. On its list of members will be found most British Catholics of

position and influence.

The Catholic Truth Society was founded in 1884 by the late Cardinal Vaughan,

then rector of the Foreign Missionary College at Mill Hill, and has since had a

career of much usefulness. Its main objects are to disseminate among Catholics

small and cheap devotional works; to assist the uneducated poor to a better

knowledge of their religion; to spread among Protestants information about

Catholic truth; to promote the circulation of good, cheap, and popular Catholic

books. It holds every year a Conference for the elucidation and discussion of

questions affecting the work of the Catholic Church in England. During the twenty

years of its existence it has issued publications, great and small, at the rate of

about a million a year. It has formed a lending library of books for the blind; and it

has a collection of about forty sets of lantern views, with accompanying readings

on subjects connected with Catholic faith and history. It has been copied by

societies bearing the same names in Scotland and Ireland, in the United States,

Canada, Bombay, and Australia.

The Catholic Association was originally founded in 1891. Its objects are stated in

its Rules as being;

To promote unity and good fellowship among Catholics by organizing

lectures, concerts, dances, whist tournaments, excursions, and other

gatherings of a social character, and

to assist, whenever possible, in the work of Catholic organization, and in

the protection and advancement of Catholic interests.

It has been particularly successful in the organization of pilgrimages to Rome

and other places of Catholic interest.

We cannot better bring to an end this brief survey of the career of Catholicism in

England since the Protestant Reformation than in some eloquent and touching

words with which Abbot Gasquet concludes his "Short History of the Catholic

Church in England": -- "When we recall the state to which the long years of

persecution had reduced the Catholic body at the dawn of the nineteenth

century, we may well wonder at what has been accomplished since then. Who

shall say how it has come about? Where out of our poverty, for example, have

been found the sums of money for all our innumerable needs? Churches and

colleges and schools, monastic buildings and convents, have all had to be built

and supported; how, the Providence of God can alone explain. . . . From the first

years of the nineteenth century, when the principle 'suffer it to be' was applied to

the English Catholic Church, there have been signs of the dawn of the brighter,

happier days for the old religion. Slight indeed were the signs at first, slight but

significant, and precious memories to us now, of the workings of the Spirit, of the

rising of the sap again in the old trunk, and of the bursting of bud and bloom in

manifestation of that life which, during the long winter of persecution, had been

but dormant. Succisa virescit. Cut down almost to the ground, the tree planted

by Augustine has manifested again the divine life within it; it has put forth once

more new branches and leaves, and gives promise of abundant fruit."

W.S. LILLY

Transcribed by Douglas J. Potter

Dedicated to the Immaculate Heart of the Blessed Virgin Mary