When the hunt was in full cry

Howard and Southwell, Fortes- cue, Paine, Percy, Mayne, Milner, Owen, Houghton, Cam- pion — even the names of our prep school dormitories were a declaration of dissent. Of this list perhaps only Edmund Campion is now at all widely known, but after three years of interminable prayers for the reconversion of England and the canonisation of the 40 martyrs that quixotic collection of saints, poets, fanatics, scholars, Jesuits, Carthus- ians, plotters, aristocrats and carpenters can still conjure up an alternative sense of Englishness and English history that is difficult to shake off.