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The waters of the North Sea are shallow, and the weather there can be severe. On and around the Dogger Bank sudden gales cause high and heavy seas. The smacksmen of the fishing fleets in the 80s and 90s of the last century were there throughout the year on voyages which could last eight weeks, and their 50–80 ton yawl-rigged smacks were entirely at the mercy of the weather. Their fishing grounds were too far from land for them to run for shelter. They were compelled to ride out the heaviest gales or founder. In 1881 it was estimated that the North Sea fishing population numbered upwards of 12,000, the ‘Short Blue’ fleet alone consisting of 220 smacks crewed by 1,500 men.

Robin Clifton has explored the ‘nature, extent and causes of the Protestant fear of Catholics’, and Dr Wiener has traced how ‘hatred of Catholics, once the private obsession of religious extremists, developed into a part of the national ideology’. But what was the attitude in Monmouthshire, which in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was culturally and ethnically a part of Wales? Attempts have been made to compare Catholicism in eighteenth-century Monmouthshire with that in other parts of the Western Vicariate, and to suggest a parallel with Lancashire. There may be some valid comparisons but for a variety of reasons Monmouthshire sits uneasily with any close identification with the English scene.

In 1715 the governors of Queen Anne’s Bounty promoted a bill in parliament ‘for making more effectual her late Majesty’s gracious intentions for augmenting the maintenance of the poor clergy’. Section four of this statute declared that the bounty had been ‘intended to extend not only to parsons and vicars who come in by presentation or collation, institution and induction; but likewise to such ministers who come in by donation, or are only stipendiary preachers or curates’.

‘Until 1563 the progress of the reformation in Wales was linked with the use of English as a prescribed language . . . Few decisions had more far-reaching consequences than the decision to abandon this principle so far as religion was concerned in Wales’. Walker believes that this change of policy in the early years of Elizabeth’s reign was brought about by what he calls ‘the deep-seated conservatism of the Welsh Church’, and quotes the letter of bishop Nicolas Robinson of Bangor (1566–86) to Cecil, in which Robinson claims that the slow progress of the reformation in the principality was at least partly due to ‘the dregs of superstition which did grew chefly upon the blindness of the clergie’ and ‘the closing up of God’s worde from them [that is, the Welsh people in an unknown tongue’. Richard Davies, bishop successively of St Asaph (1560–1) and of St Davids (1561–79) believed that if the Welsh church was to be directed along the path required by Elizabeth’s government then the language of the overwhelming majority of the people would have to be employed in both liturgy and pulpit. Only worship in Welsh would make the Anglican church an acceptable institution in Wales, and that necessitated ministers fluent in the vernacular whose teaching was buttressed by the reading of the scriptures and the performance of divine service in the same tongue.

Eighteenth-Century Europe is remarkable for the number of medically qualified men whose fame rests not on medicine, but on their achievements in other fields. The poets Oliver Goldsmith in England and Johann Schiller in Germany come to mind, as do the author Tobias Smollett and the French political activist Jean Marat. Another is the subject of this paper, Thomas Seeker, who in later life was successively bishop of Bristol, Oxford, and archbishop of Canterbury.Seeker’s undoubted pastoral sensitivity was reflected in his sermons and in the visitation charges which Richard Watson said deserved ‘as much attention as the best’ of those published in the eighteenth century. This, coupled with his own reticence, has tended to overshadow, if not totally eclipse, his earlier years of training as a physician, and his contribution to medicine. His biographer, Beilby Porteus, said of him ‘he chose always rather to talk of things than persons; was very sparing in giving his opinion of characters... Of his own good deeds or great attainments he never spoke, nor loved to hear others speak’.

In the first volume of his History of Monmouthshire, Sir Joseph Bradney admitted that ‘in Monmouthshire the principles of the old Catholic faith have never been lost to a large number of people. Many families of position in this district continued to adhere to the old doctrines.’ Thomas Richards, the most scrupulous of the historians of Welsh non-conformity, not only identified the Catholics of Wales as ‘the sons and grandsons of men who had never accepted the Protestant Reformation' but from his unrivalled knowledge of the sources for seventeenth-century religious history in the principality advanced two quite startling hypotheses. The first was that there is ‘positive proof of the silent growth of Popery during Propagation and Protectorate times’ (he pointed out that in 1676 the number of Catholics recorded in Monmouthshire was ‘within sixty-six of being equal to all other dissenters in [the county] gathered into one total’); the second, a result of his searching analysis of the so-called Compton Census, was that even the figure of 541 Roman Catholics in Monmouthshire—416 in the rural deanery of Abergavenny alone—was ‘too low’.