A HISTORY OF CUMBERLAND 



and in the same year Percival Kirkbride was ejected from Asby probably 

 for the same cause. There were two or three other cases of deprivation 

 in 1575, but the record gives no clue of the influences that brought them 

 about. 1 No attempts seem to have been made at this period to organize 

 congregations or to carry on surreptitious ministrations from place to 

 place either in the puritan or papal interest. The two priests who 

 refused the oath of supremacy in 1561 and those others who were unable 

 to accept the Articles of Religion dropped altogether out of view after 

 deprivation. But taking the diocese as a whole, we do not find evidence 

 of external nonconformity, or recusancy as it was then called, till the 

 foreign-bred emissaries from Douay and other seminaries started their 

 secret mission in the northern diocese. None of the old priests had any- 

 thing to do with the movement. It was a new and alien institution, half 

 religious and half political, glowing with enthusiasm and tainted with 

 treason, bringing disastrous consequences to those who came under its 

 spell. The conspicuous figure in the new crusade was John Bost, son of 

 a Westmorland landowner, a man of undoubted ability and undaunted 

 courage, a dexterous controversialist and a devoted papist. Born of an 

 old family for many centuries settled at Penrith and Dufton, younger son 

 of Nicholas Bost of Wellyng in the latter parish, educated at Queen's 

 College, Oxford, of which society he was elected a Fellow in 1 572, he 

 passed over to Douay in August 1580," and was ordained according to 

 the Roman ritual and sent on the English mission in the following year. 

 It was this remarkable man who first laid the foundation of noncon- 

 formity in the diocese of Carlisle, and who may in truth be regarded 

 as the father or originator of the Roman Catholic body in Cumberland 

 and Westmorland. If it were possible to stir up a desire for the Roman 

 obedience in the breasts of the people of the two counties or to fan into 

 flame the dying embers of their papal sympathies, no more brilliant 

 agent could have been selected, for his intellectual gifts and family con- 

 nexions and knowledge of the district invested him with a prestige 

 which the whole hierarchy of Carlisle was powerless to rival or put 

 down. 



In 1581, the year in which the chief penal act against papism was 

 passed, the real troubles of those who had papal sympathies may be said 

 to have begun. By this statute (23 Elizabeth, c. i) it was made high 

 treason to be reconciled to the Roman church, and seminarists saying, 



1 Carl. Epis. Reg. Barnes, MS. ff. 41-3. 



2 Douay Diaries, ed. T. F. Knox, i. 10, 28, 168, 173. Nicholas Boste, gentleman, of Wellyng in 

 Dufton, made his will on 3 December, 1569, which was proved at Brougham [Browholme] on 13 February 

 1560-70. He bequeathed his ' sowle to God Almyghte, trystyng in the mercye of Chryste and throwgh 

 his Passyone yt yt shall be partyner wt. the holye company of Hevyne ' and his body to be buried in 

 the parish church of Dufton. Bequests were made to Janet Boste his wife, Lancelot his son and heir, 

 Elizabeth his daughter, Thomas Warcoppe his godson, Edward, Hugh, and Michael Boste his cousins, 

 Oliver Middleton his right worshipful kinsman, and others of the Hutton and Threlkeld families. 

 To the future seminarist, at that time an undergraduate at Oxford ; ' I wyll that my sone, John Boste, 

 shall have fower merks of mony in the yere for thre yeres nyxt to come and yt to be payd by my executors 

 owt of my guds and lands and he to clame no more of my guds for his barne part or other waye.' The 

 testator was possessed of lands and houses, goods and chattels, both at Penrith and Dufton. The will 

 is now lodged in the Probate Registry of Carlisle. 



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