Throughout the 1630s, Queen Henrietta Maria’s mission to re-establish the Catholic faith in England looked increasingly successful. The decade saw numerous high-profile conversions, growing crowds around the new centres of legal Catholic worship in London, and a relaxing of penalties against Catholics. But none of this activity went unnoticed by Puritan detractors. By the end

The Royal Academy exhibition of Charles I’s reunited collection is breathing new life into the king’s martyrology. But history has still mostly forgotten that Charles I’s reign witnessed English Catholicism’s near-triumph and a phenomenal mission to reconvert Britain that was led for two decades by the sophisticated, politically alert and supremely devout Queen Henrietta Maria.

Alice Thomas Ellis was a novelist, controversialist and party hostess, but above all else a Catholic

Alice Thomas Ellis found that housework was the best form of writerly procrastination. She would dither at the Aga for a while, do some laundry and prepare the dinner, her mind turning over the thing she needed to write. Then she would lie on the couch with a packet of cigarettes watching an old movie,

Anna Margaret Haycraft (1932-2005), known to her readers as Alice Thomas Ellis, was a journalist, novelist, painter, Catholic polemicist, cookery book writer, fiction editor, mother of seven and a member of the Gloucester Crescent literary milieu. In the 1980s and 90s she was considered one of Britain’s finest novelists; now she is largely remembered only