THOMAS Bullaker is one of the eighty-five martyrs who were beatified by Pope John Paul II on 22 November 1987. His biography necessarily involves an exercise in textual criticism. The most important sources for his life are two, more or less contemporary, accounts: theCertamen Seraphicum,written by his fellow Fransciscan Richard Mason, and published in 1649; and theHistoire de la Persecution presente des Catholiques en Angleterreof Le Sieur de Marsys, published in 1646. When Richard Mason wrote his account he had access to some writings of the martyr himself, which were kept in the archives of St. Bonaventure's at Douai, and were lost at the time of the French Revolution. His description of Bullaker's trials is largely based on the martyr's first hand testimony. De Marsys, a servant of the French Ambassador, who collected papers concerning sixteen of the martyrs, claimed to have been present at Bullaker's final trial and execution. A copy of a pamphlet entitledAn Exact Relation of the Apprehension, Examination, Execution and Confession of Thomas Bullaker,1642, which was sold in London on the day of Bullaker's execution, has survived among the Thomason Tracts in the British Library.

The 2nd. Viscount Montague, like his grandfather before him, was the recipient of several literary dedications. His material circumstances as a wealthy Sussex landowner, and his spiritual significance as one of the foremost Catholic peers, made him an appropriate patron for a number of writers at the beginning of the seventeenth century. At the same time, Montague was a well-known distributor of Catholic books, and a benefactor of ‘three score and six costly great volumes in folio all bought of set purpose and fayrly bound with his Armes’ to that ‘bulwark of extreme Protestantism’ the Bodleian Library.

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Henry Manning first settled in Sussex when he became John Sargent’s curate at the tiny village of Upwaltham in 1832. A year later Sargent made him his curate at Graffham and Lavington. When John Sargent died in May 1833, his widow presented Manning to the two livings. On December 24 1840, he was appointed Archdeacon of Chichester. He was to remain in Sussex for eighteen years until his resignation from all these preferments in December 1850, and shortly afterwards, in his own words, Manning became a Catholic ‘off his own bat’.

Two recent articles inRecusant Historyhave drawn attention to the Protestation Returns, and used them as evidence for the size and strength of the Catholic community in the seventeenth century, as well as for evidence for the existence or non-existence of ‘Church Papists’. The purpose of this article is to move the discussion on towards an examination of the reliability of the Protestation Returns themselves as giving an accurate picture of the size of the Catholic community, and, in particular, to examine the evidence in the case of the parish of Midhurst in West Sussex, a well-known centre of recusancy.