Catholicism and Community in Early Modern England: Politics, Aristocratic Patronage and Religion, c. 1550-1640 (review)

The title of Michael Questier's important and ambitious study is an undisguised tribute to John Bossy's seminal book on The English Catholic Community (1975). Bossy's account of the first generations of post-Reformation Catholic history told a story of "seigneurialization," and of increasing political quietism, as the generally conformist attitudes of the gentry triumphed over the grander ambitions of their seminarist chaplains. It was also a largely "internalist" narrative, with English Catholicism treated sociologically as a species of religious nonconformity. Questier's interpretation differs on both scores: he questions the notion of a retreat from political engagements on the part of Catholic elites, and at the same time presents a model of a Catholic "community" fundamentally structured and determined by its interactions with the rest of English society.

The point of entry for these explorations is a single aristocratic family: the Brownes of Cowdray and Battle in Sussex (raised to the peerage in 1554 as Viscounts Montague). The main protagonists are the first Viscount (d. 1592), a broadly moderate and conformist figure (though not, Questier argues, as moderate or conformist as he has been painted), and his grandson the second Viscount, a much more overt nonconformist, convinced that his infant son had died because he allowed him to be christened in the Church of England. However, this is no conventional family history. The main focus is an analysis of what Questier usefully terms the Brownes' "entourage"—a variegated cluster of kin, client, and ideological connections—and particularly the activities of the family's chaplains. One of the central, provocative insights of the book is that English Catholicism in this period is best understood, not as a uniform entity, a gathered Church of right-minded individuals, but as "a conglomeration of social attitudes, political allegiances, parish frictions, marital links and patronage/clientage conections" (p. 66), and that it may have been viewed that way by contemporaries. There is thus a move away from a historiographical concern with popular Catholicism/conservatism and its alleged post-Elizabethan decline, and our attention is directed instead toward the political discourses and engagements of the seminarist clergy and their lay patrons.

It has to be admitted that parts of this story make for hard reading. The client and kinship networks being described are of their nature dense and complex, and the intra-Catholic clerical controversies in which the Brownes' chaplains and many others engaged were both lengthy and labyrinthine. Readers hoping to learn about the devotional texture of post-Reformation Catholicism will be disappointed. Questier is not much concerned with the inwardness of Catholic belief and practice (characterized from time to time as "the clacking of rosary beads"), concentrating instead on political and ideological positioning. But it is worth persevering. For the real achievement of the book is to sharpen our understanding of why "Catholicism" remained into the seventeenth century a source of intense political discussion and anxiety. The right to speak on behalf of the Catholic community (which is what the interminable debates between Jesuits and "hierarchicalist" Catholics largely amounted to) was a significant political asset, holding out promises of tangible support to the early Stuart monarchy. Catholic hierarchicalists of the sort patronized by the Brownes engaged in a "high-stakes game," assimilating their own anti-Jesuit rhetoric to the growing swell of anti-Puritanism in Church and State. Puritans were not simply being paranoid in identifying the homologous character of Laudianism and popery. Similarly, high levels of active royalism among Catholic gentry in the Civil War were no anomaly, but "the logical culmination of the Catholic struggle for respectability and acceptance ever since the mid-Elizabethan period" (p. 507). In persuasively asserting a place for "Catholic history'' in the central narrative of post-Reformation politics, Questier has done scholarship a major service.