ABSTRACT
Broughton viewed his Jesuit contemporaries at Stonyhurst, the successors of the Gentlemen of Lige, as judiciously planted agents'. These men, he believed, were surely engaged in a design now in progress of execution, for re-establishing the Roman Catholic religion' in Britain. Belonging as they did to a Society restored and once again planted in England', Broughton was convinced that they directed all its energies to recover for the Roman Catholic Faith its lost dominion over the people'. Clearly, much of Broughton's anxiety was based on fears harboured in certain quarters in the 1830s concerning the possible effects that the 1829 Catholic Emancipation bill might then already be having on religious belief and practice in Protestant Britain. Indeed had Broughton known that a clause in the 1829 bill specifically forbade the existence of the Society of Jesus within the kingdom a prohibition never subsequently tested in the courts his agitation might have been all the greater.
