This is the remarkable and harrowing story of one of the worst people in the world. Admittedly, there’s a long list of people who’ve chosen the Void rather than the Light, but Titus Oates stands out ...

Far from London, where the Popish Plot was still in the full fury of investigation, accusation, trials, and execution, two Catholic priests, John Wall and John Kemble, suffered and died in Wales.

The convulsions of 17th-century England are familiar: a civil war, a regicide and, eventually, a restoration of the monarchy. Not long after came another episode of agitation and unrest, less familiar ...

Simon Edwards (Letters, 1 January) refers to the original inscription at the foot of the London Monument to the Great Fire, alerting readers to “the continuing threat of the Roman Catholic church in ...

For five impossibly happy years, I lived in Wiltshire in a converted Catholic chapel that Italian masons built in 1695 to house temporarily the relics of two early Christian martyrs, the curiously ...