Long celebrated as England’s oldest ally, Portugal also boasted the English clergy’s first continental seminary

Four hundred years ago a Portuguese nobleman obtained authorisation for the foundation of a seminary in Lisbon. In time the students became known as os Inglesinhos, “the Little Englishmen”. And some of them really were little: until the Second World War boys as young as 14 were admitted to the College with the prospect of spending 10 or more years there before returning as ordained priests for the English and Welsh Mission.

Lisbon had harboured a community of exiled English priests from the beginning of the seventeenth century, but thanks to Dom Pedro de Coutinho, an Anglophile Portuguese former military commander and diplomat, the only continental English seminary entirely under the control of the English secular clergy was founded in the city’s Bairro Alto in 1622.