Catholic Culture in Early Modern England

9. The English Colleges and the English Nation: Allen, Persons, Verstegan, and Diasporic Nationalism

 The English Colleges and the English Nation Allen, Persons, Verstegan, and Diasporic Nationalism Mark Netzloff Discussing English Catholic culture in the context of English nationhood would seem to bring together diametrically opposed categories, a perception that has only been reinforced by recent critical work on the early modern English nation. Richard Helgerson’s Forms of Nationhood, for instance, analyzes English Catholic culture solely in terms of the Elizabethan period’s memory of Marian Catholicism, thereby relegating this community to the English nation’s past.1 In a corollary argument, Linda Colley’s Britons emphasizes Catholic culture’s foreign provenance, situating it primarily as an external threat that roused nationalist sentiment in the eighteenth century.2 As these groundbreaking studies so valuably reveal, anti-Catholicism played a crucial role in the formation of English national identity. Nonetheless, by focusing solely on anti-Catholic texts, as well as omitting any reference to recusant or expatriate writers, both Helgerson and Colley reiterate the exclusion of English Catholic culture from representations of the national community. As Alison Shell has noted, “[A]bsent from these discussions has been a consideration , or even a consciousness, of the other side: how English Catholics’ experience of diaspora, combined with the necessity to re-evangelize a nation from  overseas, shaped their ideas of nationhood.”3 Qualifying Shell’s insightful point, however, my own argument is concerned less with recuperating an alternative or oppositional English Catholic “side” than with emphasizing the multiple and competing narratives of English nationhood that vied for authority in the early modern period. Catholics, too, participated in this struggle to define the nation, demonstrating how early modern English nationhood can be more productively conceptualized as a locus of identification (“Englishness”), one that was open to contestation and reimagining, rather than as a stable or monolithic entity (“the English nation”) that could be dominated by any particular community.4 As Helgerson argues, one of the distinctive features of early modern English nationhood was a sense of the nation’s territorial integrity, an emphasis upon the land itself as a consummate embodiment of Englishness.5 Taken in these terms, the bond between the English nation and many early modern Catholics would seem to have been irrevocably severed. Their experience , instead, was one of diaspora, of continental migration and exile, a position marked by distance from an English homeland as well as opposition to the nation’s dominant Protestant culture. Following the Elizabethan settlement, English Catholics, unable to complete degrees at Oxford and Cambridge, often chose to study at the seminaries formed by English Catholic exiles on the Continent.6 The first English College, begun by William Allen at Douai (), was quickly joined by others: Owen Lewis, a Welsh canon lawyer, founded the English College in Rome (), while Robert Persons established several institutions, including seminaries at Valladolid () and Seville (), as well as a preseminary school at St. Omer ().7 The colleges were initially constituted on the basis of an academic program rather than an activist one; however, in the wake of Pius V’s papal bull Regnans in Excelsis ()—which excommunicated Elizabeth I and implicitly called on English Catholics to depose their monarch—one of their primary tasks became the training of missionary priests for their return to England, efforts that accelerated under Allen and Persons’s leadership of the English mission (beginning in ). Rather than severing ties to the English nation, diasporic English Catholics appropriated—and at other times contested—paradigms of English nationhood, and the seminaries occupied a unique position as extranational institutions attempting to intervene in English political life and the public sphere.8 English authorities , however, interpreted this diasporic activism as a violation of national The English Colleges and the English Nation  integrity, a threat to the nation’s cultural boundaries as well as to the state’s sovereignty. Despite their political significance, the English Colleges have received only marginal attention in critical discussions of early modern English Catholic culture. In his introduction to The English Catholic Community, ‒, John Bossy justifies his exclusion of Catholic expatriates from his study, arguing that exile placed this group in a separate tradition, as part of “Catholicisms of the continent,” rather than in any relation to English history; he therefore mentions the English Catholic diaspora only as “it contributed directly to the history of the community in England.”9 Bossy rightly underscores the distinctiveness of early modern Catholic communities—whether those residing in...