Аннотация:Worcestershire in the early seventeenth century was not a county, by comparison with some others, with a large percentage of Roman Catholics. Many of the leading families in the county, however, were Catholic, for example the Talbots of Grafton (from 1618 Earls of Shrewsbury), the Sheldons of Beoley, the Habingtons of Hindlip, the Middlemores of King’s Norton (and Edgbaston in Warwickshire) and the Wintours of Huddington. All these families had suffered for the Catholic faith by way of recusancy fines and, in some cases, by imprisonment, loss of property and even by loss of life. In this last connection one might instance the deaths of the Carthusian monk Humphrey Middlemore in 1535, of Edward Habington in 1586, and of Robert and Thomas Wintour, the Gunpowder Plot conspirators. The Catholics of Worcestershire were powerful enough and organised enough to act as a group in connection with the 1601 and 1604 elections for the Knights of the Shire, though in neither case were they successful.
