TOOTELL, HUGH (CHARLES DODD)

Historian of the Church in England, critic of the Jesuits; b. Lancashire, 1671; d. Harvington Hall, Worcestershire, 1743. He studied at Douai and in Paris, and was ordained in 1697. He worked in Lancashire and for a time served as an army chaplain overseas. From 1722 he was in England in the household of Sir Robert Throckmorton. He was a prolific writer and more than 60 of his MSS are listed in Joseph Gillow's Bibliographical Dictionary of English Catholics. His History of the English College at Doway (1713) and The Secret Policy of the English Society of Jesus (1715) involved him in fierce controversy with the Jesuits and have been characterized as "partisan and poisonous." His monumental three-volume Church History of England from 1500 to 1688, however, was a valuable, well-documented pioneer study. Mark Aloysius Tierney (1795–1862), who undertook to edit it, took to heart the words of Tootell's preface that his history was meant to be "an inducement to better performers …to be improved and built upon by posterity."

Bibliography: j. gillow, A Literary and Biographical History or Bibliographical Dictionary of the English Catholics from 1534 to the Present time, 5 v. (London-New York 1885–1902; repr. New York 1961) 5:549. t. cooper, The Dictionary of National Biography from the Earliest Times to 1900, 63 v. (London 1885–1900; repr. with corrections, 21 v., 1908–09, 1921–22, 1938; suppl. 1901–) 5: 1052–55. p. guilday, The English Catholic Refugees on the Continent, 1558–1795 (New York 1914). j. b. code, Queen Elizabeth and the English Catholic Historians (Louvain 1935).

[p. mcgrath]