The college had a close affiliation with the Catholic Church, through the British Province of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) whose scholarly tradition went back to a 1614 exiled foundation in Leuven, Belgium, and whose extensive library collections it housed.

[4] It was the first significant UK higher education institution to completely close permanently (not including mergers and name changes) since the dissolution of the original University of Northampton in 1265.

It sold its Oxfordshire estate to the National Westminster Bank Group which turned the house and its precincts into a training and conference centre.

Due to continuing anti-Catholic persecution during the reign of James I, a network of English religious schools was established in Western Europe.

Likewise the Society of Jesus preferred to establish its school for boys and its faculties of theology and philosophy for training English Jesuit candidates abroad.

The Liège college was protected in the Austrian Netherlands and continued relatively undisturbed for 178 years, through the suppression of the Society of Jesus in 1773 under the personal authority of Bishop François-Charles de Velbrück, until French troops surrounded the city in 1794.

They resolved therefore to accept the authority of the only remaining valid Jesuit province which was in the Russian Empire under superiors, Gabriel Gruber and Tadeusz Brzozowski.

[14] In 1964, the college was raised to the status of a Pontifical Athenaeum, named as the Heythrop Faculties of Theology and Philosophy, open to lay men and women and clerics from outside the Society of Jesus.

[19] In 1993 the college moved to its final location, in the Maria Assumpta Centre at 23 Kensington Square, initially sharing the site with several other organisations, most notably the Westminster Pastoral Foundation (WPF), a reputable and long-established counselling training institute.

[21] Eight years later, WPF were finally persuaded to uproot and vacate their extensive purpose-built premises, about a quarter of the Maria Assumpta site.

[22] In January 2014, the college received decrees from the Congregation for Catholic Education of the Holy See officially reactivating its ecclesiastical faculties under the patronage of saint Robert Bellarmine.

While the college still retained the English Jesuits' original function of training future priests of the Catholic Church, its contemporary teaching staff and student body had become much wider, more international and diverse.

Undergraduate student recruitment declined after the cap on tuition fees was raised to £9,000 per annum in 2012, resulting in the Society of Jesus subsidising the college with millions of pounds: Claire Ozanne, the college's final principal, also highlighted the impact of the administrative burden of quality assurance assessments such as the Teaching and Research Excellence Frameworks on small institutions like Heythrop.

[24] The Sisters originally ran a convent school and later a teacher training college on the mainly residential Victorian site, known for decades as The Maria Assumpta Centre.

All lecture rooms, the students' union, the dining hall, previously shared with WPF and other tenant organisations, in the Victorian buildings in Kensington Square, came under its exclusive management.

[32] The college had a distinctive history and range of teaching in pastoral theology and allied disciplines, with a profile in the United Kingdom and internationally.

They were reactivated on 17 September 2013 by a decree of the Congregation for Catholic Education of the Holy See, expanding the opportunities and teaching the college could offer to seminarians, priestly candidates and others.

[39] The college hosted a number of free public lectures, research seminars and study days throughout the year on a variety of philosophical and theological topics.

The series was named after William Loschert, chairman of the trustees of the London Centre of Fordham University, who donated the funding for the lectures.

Published on a bimonthly basis, The Heythrop Journal was founded in 1960 by Bruno Brinkman as a format for research on the relational dialogue between philosophy and theology.

[45] Heythrop ultimately closed at the end of the 2017/18 academic year, with the final graduations taking place at Senate House on 12 December 2018.