The direction of recent scholarship has started to restore religious controversies to the heart of our understanding of eighteenth-century England, calling into question the older image of a secularising ‘age of stability’. In the light of works by Stephen Taylor, John Walsh and Jonathan Clark among others, it is now far less likely that historians would assent without debate to the notion that ‘by comparison with previous generations, the Englishman of the early eighteenth century displayed little religious fervour’.¹ Yet, in spite of the vigorous exchanges roused by these revisions, the community of English Catholic recusants has evaded attention, and...

The events that started in December 1688 became rapidly ingrained in the public mythology of the English state. The ‘Protestant’ wind that blew William of Orange towards the throne of the three kingdoms, the humiliating exit of James II and the subsequent reassertion of parliamentary right were serenaded as the hallmarks of deliverance from the twin pillars of ‘Popery and Arbitrary Government’. Raised as a landmark moment for the constitution, the Glorious Revolution was perceived to have set the dogma of Rome against the will of freeborn Englishmen to bring the final triumph of Protestant over papist, tarnishing the co-religionists...

By 1691, when James II’s forces withdrew from Ireland back to the continent, the Glorious Revolution had been established as a disruptive and traumatic moment for the Catholic community: a blow struck against the hope of peaceful integration into England. Despite the bursts of patriotic defiance with which they rallied around the Stuart banner, recusant leaders were forced to confront the creation of a new order far harder to negotiate, in which the utility of old political and intellectual resources appeared fatally undermined. Catholic religious and political writings after 1688 were not conceived in abstraction: they articulated the high stakes...

The grip of the diaspora on recusant lives, the instability of their place in England, and an impassioned sense that the laws of God and man preserved the right of the exiled Stuarts had all established Jacobitism as an overwhelming presence in the political imagination of the English Catholic community. By 1716, recusant leaders were proclaiming these convictions at the public scaffold, exhorting their countrymen to work towards ‘Uniting and Reconciling all their Interests … in the only Measure that can render them happy’.¹ However, Jacobite ideology could not be frozen in a state of such exalted self-certainty. Its advocates...

If the ideology of Catholics in exile grew within a relatively free and prosperous political space, recusant discourse in England was framed in an environment far more threatening and claustrophobic. Though the Catholic lay leaders demonstrated notable resilience in the face of social pressure, their prospects for the future still appeared, in contemporary judgements, to be distinctly parlous. Memories of 1688 entrenched a state of estrangement from the body politic: a starkly ironic end to the great loyalist turn in Catholic thought, when older Jesuit theories of resistance had been surmounted by a patriotic commitment to the Stuart throne. Now,...

To be an early modern Catholic was to give voice to an international vision, to accept that certain commands towards affinity, solidarity and authority swept through the boundaries of the sovereign state or kingdom. To be an English recusant was to face especially urgent reminders of this condition: to find stigma in their own realm and protection beyond its borders as a consequence of the allegiances, obligations and institutions of the universal Roman Catholic communion. At the highest diplomatic level, the stances struck in France, Spain, Rome and the Empire would carry serious ramifications for the life of the English...

The taint of a ‘priest-ridden’ reputation bedevilled the Jacobite movement. Whispers of shadowy clerics directing secret counsels filtered into the descriptions of St Germain, circulated by Williamite agents within England to fan the flames of the popular imagination.¹ Accounts of Stuart conspiracies claimed to expose the craft of James II’s ‘fatal scorpions’, who ‘swarm’d over from Doway and St Omers, greedily gaping after preferments’.² Jacobitism gave a new lease of life to old archetypes of Catholic clergymen as exotic figures, inspired by the missionary and martyrological zeal of the Counter-Reformation to hold up a crucifix to Protestant England. This chapter...

In 1737, an obscure novel of ideas emerged from the London printing press. Acclaimed in The Gentleman’s Magazine as ‘a beautiful fiction’, and ‘sublime allegory’, The Adventures of Signor Gaudentio di Lucca presented a new vision of man’s state of nature, centred on the encounters of an explorer with a people ‘such as nations might be supposed to be, who had retained in their Purity … the original ideas of the arts, manners, religion and government of the first men in the infancy of the world’.¹ The inhabitants of Mezzorania had survived their own voyage through exile, cast out of...

Three decades after the last shot was fired in the siege of Preston, the Jacobite challenge was once again pressed upon the consciousness of the nation. During the course of the 1745 rebellion, there were significant signs that elements within the English Catholic community had not abandoned the dream of reversing the Revolution, and reclaiming their perceived birthright within the kingdom on the back of Stuart re-conquest. In the East Anglian recusant enclaves of Norwich, Wymondham and Bungay, Catholic priests were reported to be exhorting their flock to rebellion.¹ In Yorkshire, the duke of Norfolk’s steward, Andrew Blyde, rode out...