(1685 - 1700)

Charles II was succeeded by his Catholic brother the Duke of York, who became King James II in 1685. Not long after his coronation the rule of the Vicars Apostolic was reinstated. England had not had a Vicar Apostolic since Bishop Smith fled to France more than half a century earlier.

Any idea of regaining the original pre-Reformation bishoprics was abandoned. Instead England was divided into four districts, each with its own Vicar Apostolic. Each district was to be funded by the King with £1,000 a year (= £52,000 today). Berkshire was in the London District, which included the Home Counties, Isle of Wight, Channel Islands and the American colonies; Oxfordshire was in the Midland District, the Thames forming the border between the two. This division has continued to the present day, the Thames forming the boundary between the diocese of Portsmouth and the archdiocese of Birmingham.

The new King, James II, began a programme of positive discrimination in favour of Catholics. Thirteen were appointed to the Privy Council and four were made judges. Others were given commissions in the army or senior appointments in the universities.

James set up a Catholic royal chapel in London and this led to the opening of many other Catholic chapels across the country. At Oxford Mass was celebrated in the chapel of Magdalen College and in the oratory of Christ Church Cathedral. In 1686 Obadiah Walker, master of University College, Oxford, had a private Mass said at the college, thus provoking a minor riot.

In Easter Week 1687 George Eyston of East Hendred began repairing the ancient thirteenth century chapel of St Amand attached to Hendred House. Before the Reformation the chapel had its own chaplain and parsonage, and had been financed by tithe income and a dozen acres of land. Now the interior was derelict and only the base of the altar remained.

Chapel of St Amand
The ancient chapel at Hendred House (Photo: J L Hadland)

Five days after the refurbishment began the King issued a Declaration of Indulgence suspending anti-Catholic legislation. Thus the Catholic Thomas Kimber was able to join Oxford City Council. That summer the Papal Nuncio, the Pope's ambassador, was formally received by the King at Windsor.

The refitting of the Eyston's chapel was completed a week before Christmas 1687. On Christmas Eve three Franciscans, including the Eystons' chaplain Fr Pacificus and one of the Youngs of Whatcombe, blessed the altar stone and celebrated vespers. On Christmas Day seven priests said Mass. One of the celebrants was the Jesuit Fr Francis Hildesley, whose brothers William, the heir of Littlestoke, and Martin, purchaser of the manor of Blount's Court, were also present. Others attending included Sir Henry Moore of Fawley, John Massey the Catholic Dean of Christ Church, Oxford, and members of the Hyde, Perkins and Winchcombe families.

The following April James II issued a second Declaration of Indulgence giving rights of public worship to Catholics and Protestant Nonconformists. The King stated:'We cannot but heartily wish ... that all the people of our dominions were members of the Catholic Church; yet ... conscience ought not to be constrained nor people forced in matters of mere religion ...'

Seven Anglican bishops, including Tilehurst born William Lloyd, were imprisoned for signing a petition against the Declaration.

It was becoming clear that the King's attempts to improve the lot of his fellow Catholics were moving too fast. The situation was not helped by Catholics such as the landlord of the Mitre at Oxford, whose inflammatory anti-Protestant comments led to the mob breaking the windows of every known Catholic house in the city.

The backlash was not confined to the Oxford rabble. Fifty miles downstream Protestant gentry and nobility were plotting at Ladye Place, a Tudor riverside mansion on part of the site of Hurley Priory. Ladye Place was the home of Lord Lovelace, a friend of Titus Oates.

Earlier in the year Lord Lovelace had been brought before the King and Privy Council for telling constables to ignore the instructions of a Catholic Justice of the Peace. He was released for lack of evidence and promptly joined a plot to depose James II and replace him with his Dutch Protestant son-in-law, William, Prince of Orange. Lord Lovelace allowed the old Benedictine cellars of Ladye Place to be used for midnight meetings of the conspirators. These included Lady Mary Stonor's stepbrother, the Earl of Shrewsbury, who had left the Catholic Church after the Titus Oates affair.

Although the original Ladye Place was long ago demolished, the cellars still exist to the east of Hurley parish church. They are not normally open to the public. (The present Ladye Place stands to the west of the church and is the modernised sixteenth century farmhouse of the Tudor mansion.)

In September 1688 Lord Lovelace visited Holland and in November William of Orange landed at Torbay with 15,000 troops. On Friday 7 December he reached Hungerford and stayed at the Bear Inn, which stands on the old London to Bath road. There he was visited by James's Commissioners, who wanted to negotiate. William wished to be seen as the protector of parliamentary independence rather than the rightful King's usurper. He therefore withdrew three miles up the Kennet Valley to Littlecote House while the negotiations took place at Hungerford.

William of Orange's visit to Hungerford entered the town's folklore. The traditional Hocktide festivities, which take place in the second week after Easter, were modified to include the distribution of oranges and orange flowers. And the Town Clerk's staff bears a silver ferrule engraved with the date 1688.

On Sunday 9 December, two days after William arrived at Hungerford, hundreds of Irish troops loyal to James II moved into Reading to defend the town against the Dutch. But the people of Reading supported William and appealed to him for help. The Prince responded by sending a relief force of some 300 Dutch troops.

Irish cavalry were stationed at the bottom of Castle Street where the road from the west enters the old town centre. Other Irish troops were in Broad Street and St Mary's churchyard, but most were in the Market Place. The townspeople sent details of the Irish strategy to William. The Dutch soldiers therefore approached Reading not down Castle Street as expected, but from the Pangbourne direction, thus catching the Irish off guard.

The fighting that followed resulted in the Irish being forced out of town towards Twyford. About fifty were killed, whereas the Dutch suffered a mere half dozen fatalities. Some of the dead were buried in St Giles's churchyard, a few hundred yards south of where much of the fighting took place.

The event was remembered by the people of Reading who added their own verses to the then popular anti-Irish song Lillibulero. These told of how 'Five hundred Papishes (sic) came there' to destroy the town 'in time of prayer, But God did them defend.'

On Tuesday 11 December 1688, two days after the Reading skirmish, the Dutch army reached Abingdon. William of Orange stayed at the recently built Milton Manor, four miles south of the town. There he heard that James II had fled from London, throwing the Great Seal of office into the Thames to prevent Parliament being called in his name.

This news soon reached a party of Dutch troops quartered at East Hendred, two miles south of Milton. They celebrated by desecrating the Eyston's newly reopened chapel of St Amand. They smashed the fittings, celebrated a travesty of the Mass and stole a set of vestments. These they took to Oxford which Lord Lovelace now held on William's behalf. There they dressed a dummy to represent a Catholic priest and burned it on a bonfire.

Chapel of St Amand
Another view of the chapel at Hendred House (Photo: J L Hadland)

This was one of many anti-Catholic incidents that occurred that 'wild Popish night' as it became known. George Eyston's aunt Jane, a daughter of William Eyston of Catmore, died that Christmas 'of a fright she took at the mob when they plundered the Spanish Ambassador's chapel and house' in London. Her husband was Robert Smeaton, an attorney from Henwick near Thatcham where a Catholic branch of the Winchcombes had lived before the Civil War.

A few days after the 'wild Popish night' William of Orange reached London. James II, having been captured, was allowed to escape on 23 December 1688 and went into exile in France. There he joined his second wife Mary of Modena, the last Catholic Queen of England.

James's Court was re-established at the great fortress of Saint-Germain-en-Laye near Paris. Several hundred Catholic gentry joined the King, including the Comptroller of the Royal Household, Francis Plowden, a great great grandson of the Elizabethan lawyer.

Francis Plowden's young nephew, Lieutenant William Plowden of Shiplake, quit the Thames Valley for Saint-Germain-en-Laye. He left his mother to supervise the disposal of Shiplake Court which was sold to Robert Jennings, a former head of Reading School, for £5,800 (= £313,000 today) and a life income of £60 a year (= £3,250 today) for William's grandmother. She was probably the Mrs Plowden who lived on at Shiplake until 1694 in a house called Grovelands, later known as Ship House.

Two hundred years later, in 1894, a secret cupboard was found in a farmhouse near the site of Shiplake Court. It has been suggested that this may have been used to conceal Mass materials after the Plowdens sold the Court.

Nothing now remains of Shiplake Court except a silted-up fish pond. The site is divided between Shiplake College and the former kitchen garden of Shiplake House. Three hundred years after they left the village the Plowdens are commemorated in the name of an inn on the Reading to Henley road, the Plowden Arms.

In 1689 William of Orange and his wife Mary, daughter of James II and his Catholic convert wife Anne Hyde, were recognised by Parliament as joint monarchs. The penal laws against Catholics were harshly re-enforced and Catholic landowners were again badly hit.

The same year George, second son of George Eyston of East Hendred, joined the Jesuits at Watten in Flanders. He seems to have spent the rest of his life there or at Ghent.

James II tried in 1690 to regain the Crown by invading Ireland and raising an army there. In July his troops were defeated by William's at the Battle of the Boyne. Commanding James's Second Regiment of Foot was twenty-two year old William Plowden, late of Shiplake, who after the battle returned to exile in France.

In 1692 William Plowden's mother obtained a pass for him to visit England. Four years later he married his second wife Mary Stonor, daughter of John Stonor and Lady Mary Stonor of Watlington Park. The following year he was officially pardoned and allowed to return to England where he lived a quiet life.

William Plowden's marriage and pardon were arranged with the assistance of Lady Mary Stonor's stepbrother, the Earl of Shrewsbury. He had been well rewarded by William of Orange for his part in the plot to usurp James II and was the only person ever to be made simultaneously Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Lord Chancellor and Lord High Treasurer. But despite having abandoned Catholicism, he used his influence to help his Catholic relatives.

In 1690, the year of the Battle of the Boyne, Sir John Yate of Buckland died in Paris. He was succeeded by his sister Mary who soon afterwards married Sir Robert Throckmorton. The Throckmortons were an old Catholic family with estates in Warwickshire and north Buckinghamshire, and Sir Robert spent little time at Buckland.

1692 saw the imposition of double land tax on Catholics. That same year Maryland, established as a North American refuge for English Catholics, was transformed into an Anglican colony with anti-Catholic legislation.

Two years later William, son of the John Eyston imprisoned in the aftermath of the Popish Plot, was jailed for going into exile with James II. He spent four years in prison and was then banished. He returned to spend his last years in England and was buried in the Eyston aisle of East Hendred parish church. A Latin inscription refers to his loyalty to the Catholic Church and to the King. We are left to guess whether the king in question was James II or William III.

William Eyston's three younger brothers all went into exile and served in the Duke of Orléans' regiment. All three had died unmarried by 1705.

For Catholic gentry the choice of marriage partners was now reducing. A significant minority had become nuns or priests, who were therefore ineligible for marriage and produced no children for the next generation. Others had followed James II into exile on the Continent. In 1693 the widowed Francis Perkins III of Ufton Court married his distant cousin Anne Perkins, daughter of Richard Perkins of Beenham. (Francis Perkins III was the grandson of Francis Perkins II.) Anne gave birth to a daughter whose birth was, for legal reasons, recorded in the registers of Beenham parish church, despite not being baptised there. Out of habit the parson started to write 'baptised' but crossed it out and wrote 'born' instead.

About this time the Perkins of Beenham had a Jesuit chaplain, whereas their Ufton cousins' chaplain was a secular priest, that is, one who was not a member of a religious order.

In 1696 Fr Francis Hildesley was forty-one and Superior of the Jesuits' Residence of St Mary, which included Oxfordshire. Two years later his aunt Catherine died. She was the last survivor of four daughters of William Hildesley of Littlestoke who had become nuns at Liége. More than twenty years earlier William Hildesley, together with a Mr Dolman, had made a donation to the convent at Liége and paid for a stained glass window in its chapel. Another Hildesley nun, Frances, died in 1693 aged thirty-one. She was probably Fr Francis Hildesley's youngest sister.

In the same year that Frances Hildesley died so too did Elizabeth, wife of Joseph Gage of Shirburn Castle near Watlington. She was buried in Shirburn parish church, next to the castle. Joseph Gage was the nephew of Lady Abergavenny and in 1698 was indicted with some of his servants for recusancy, just as his aunt had been in the past. Similar indictments were made the two following years.

In 1700 an investigation was carried out into an alleged boast of Lady Abergavenny and Joseph Gage. It was claimed that they had said that, when the Catholic Stuart monarchy was re-established, Catholics would reclaim £100,000 (= £4.8m today) from Protestant estates. This seems to have referred to the costs of maintaining English seminaries and religious houses abroad.

Allegations and rumours of this sort were rife at this time. The villagers of Great Milton (7 miles ESE of Oxford) claimed that the Simeons' estate at nearby Chilworth and Coombe was held secretly for the Dominicans. John Stonor was said to have made over part of his estate to the Jesuits of Douai. Sir John Curson of Waterperry was accused of mortgaging his estates for £450 a year (= £21,600 today) to provide £6,000 (= £288,000 today) for the same Jesuits. Ten years earlier an informer had reported that a small estate at Garford near Lyford had been granted, presumably by the Yates, as a site for a nunnery 'when Popish times should come'. Even earlier, in the 1670s, an informer had claimed that a farm at East Garston in the Lambourn Valley (presumably Maidencourt) was being held in trust, also as a site for a convent.

And so the century ended. Having set out to establish a religious freedom in which Catholicism enjoyed favoured status, James II had lost the Crown and left a legacy of anti-Catholicism that took centuries to dispel. His Dutch son-in-law had given a solemn assurance that Catholics would be 'put out of fear of being persecuted on account of their religion'. Yet by the end of the seventeenth century their lot was, in many ways, worse than ever.

The days of martyrdom and glory were over and the expectation of the re-establishment of Catholicism as the national religion had gone. From now on all that Catholics could expect was financial ruin, exclusion from public life and deprivation of civil rights; a subtle form of internal exile.