ABSTRACT
The cinema and the newspapers and novels of today provide us with a staple diet of men on the run, spies, informers, bogus plots and forced confessions. The history of the Catholic recus-ants of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries will never be popular in that sense; it lacks the glamour of the ‘heroic age’ and will always remain more or less a closed covert for the antiquarian and the professional historian. Individual patronage of country stations by the few surviving Catholic land-owners was no longer an effective answer to the missionary problem, and the growth of Catholic congregations in the new urban centres had not yet really begun. That Milner’s standpoint was to be justified by the future course of events was not due to guesswork or to prophecy. Milner and the latter-day recusants play out their roles in the last act of tragedy on which the curtain went up with the accession of Elizabeth.
