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F. X. MARTIN, 0.S.A. A THWARTED PROJECT THE CAPUCHIN MISSION TO ENGLAND AND SCOTLAND IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY, 1608-1660 The story of the Capuchin Mission to England and Scotland in the seventeenth century reveals a tragedy, an heroic ideal unfulfilled, brilliant English and Scottish talent denied a place on native soil. It is paradoxical that the very forces of the French monarchy which helped so powerfully to promote the development of the Capuchin Mission to Ireland, and which patronized the Irish friaries at Charle– ville and Sedan, were largely responsible for stifling the Capuchin Mission to England and Scotland. The tragedy is deepened on discov– ering that it was the intense but misguided interest of that enigmatic genius, Friar Joseph of Paris, in the revival of Catholicism in Great Britain which crossed the foundation of independent English and Scottish Capuchin Missions. Even the iron will of a Francis Nugent had to bow to the grandiose schemes of His Grey Eminence. 1. - The first Capuchins from Great Britain The winds of rumour which blew the Channel in the last quarter of the sixteenth century brought English Protestants news of emiss– aries from Rome lately arrived at Antwerp in the Low Countries. A broadsheet issued in London about 1587 announced 1 : « A Newe Secte of Friars called Capichini. » An engraving showed two bearded friars, not caricatured in appear– ance as one would expect, while underneath ran the forbidding verse: These newe freshecome friars being sprong up of late · doe nowe within Andwarpe keepe their abidinge: 1 See British Museum, Cat.Ruth bequest MSS and books, London 1912, 104. Hildebrand [van Hoogledel, O.F.M.Cap., in Coll.Franc. 2(1932) 482, corrects the dating of the broadsheet as proposed by Cuthbert (The Capuchins II, London 1928, 338), and reprints the broadsheet, •483.