The story of Catholicism in Britain from the Reformation to the present day, from a master of popular history
- `A first-class storyteller` The Times Throughout the three hundred years that followed the Act of Supremacy
- which, by making Henry VIII head of the Church, confirmed in law the breach with Rome
- English Catholics were prosecuted, persecuted & penalised for the public expression of their faith. Even after the passing of the emancipation acts Catholics were still the victims of institutionalised discrimination. The first book to tell the story of the Catholics in Britain in a single volume, The Catholics
Includes:: much previously unpublished information. It focuses on the lives, & sometimes deaths, of individual Catholics
- martyrs & apostates, priests & laymen, converts & recusants. It tells the story of the men & women who faced the dangers & difficulties of being what their enemies still call ` Papists`. It describes the laws which circumscribed their lives, the political tensions which influenced their position within an essentially Anglican nation & the changes in dogma & liturgy by which Rome increasingly alienated their Protestant neighbours
- & sometime even tested the loyalty of faithful Catholics. The survival of Catholicism in Britain is the triumph of more than simple faith. It is the victory of moral & spiritual unbending certainty. Catholicism survives because it does not compromise. It is a characteristic that excites admiration in even a hardened atheist.