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  • Catholic Gentry in English Society: The Throckmortons of Coughton from Reformation to Emancipation ed. by Peter Marshall, Geoffrey Scott
  • Caroline Hibbard
Catholic Gentry in English Society: The Throckmortons of Coughton from Reformation to Emancipation. Edited by Peter Marshall and Geoffrey Scott. [Catholic Christendom, 1300–1700.] (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing. 2009. Pp. xvii, 282. $134.95. ISBN 978-0-7546-6432-1.)

This work is an extended case study of a Catholic family that remained politically active and socially influential throughout this period—lay Catholic elites in a changing world. A solid but not aristocratic family based in Worcestershire and Warwickshire, the Throckmortons are distinguished especially by the fine archives that have permitted eight authors to range widely and deeply through four centuries of family life and place the family in its wider social, religious, and political context. The editors’ introduction is an accomplished survey of recent work on Catholicism in the “political classes,” alluding to the long importance of “occasional conformity” (aka church popery, p. 2) and the phenomenon of ideologically divided families, both illustrated by the Throckmortons.

John Bossy, in his magisterial work The English Catholic Community (London, 1975), launched the modern study of post-Reformation Catholicism, although his chosen chronology had the community beginning with the Jesuit mission and the abandonment, as he saw it, of pre-Reformation forms so as to enable the emergence of Catholicism as one of the “varieties of nonconformity.” There are only two references in Bossy’s index to the Throckmorton family. Bossy was largely uninterested in “church popery” and pays no attention to the “Cisalpine” views of Joseph Berington. Nor does he devote much place in that work to the international dimension of English Catholicism.

The emphases of this book are very different. John Courtenay Throckmorton, 5th baronet, would assert in 1806 “we are not sectaries” (p. 24), and the family’s sustained contacts with the Continent (especially Paris) shaped its political as well as religious outlook. A devout family before the Reformation, the family maintained throughout its history a close relationship with Benedictines as chaplains [End Page 348] and tutors, reminding readers of the sometimes neglected influence of monks as “missionary priests” in post-Reformation England. A number of women in the family became Benedictine nuns on the Continent; indeed, one theme this book shares with Bossy’s is its emphasis on the role of women in sustaining the faith.

All the scrupulously researched essays cannot be examined in this space, but particular mention may be made of Geoffrey Scott’s essay on the eighteenth century. The family’s position was secured through tenacious marriage strategies that preserved Catholicism, enlarged the family wealth, and extended its social capital within the English elite. At the same time, the Throckmortons’ very Catholicism pulled them into the wider European world, where they viewed sympathetically the modernizing movements of the Enlightenment era.

Thus, by the eighteenth century, the Throckmortons were patrons of Berington and members of a Cisalpine family marked more by political loyalism than by separatism. A sort of Catholic Whiggery emerged that assisted the family in its work for Catholic political emancipation; and Robert George Throckmorton, 8th baronet, would become in 1831 the first English Catholic MP after Emancipation. Ironically the next decades would see the restoration of the hierarchy, which ended the long lay hegemony over the English Catholic Church. This triumph of clericalism, part of what John O’Malley has called the “long nineteenth century” of Catholicism, was epitomized on its most negative side by Bishop William Bernard Ullathorne of Birmingham’s famous retort to Blessed John Henry Newman, “Who are the laity?”

As the Church moves toward reconsidering some of the issues of clericalism, the lay role in the Church, and the relation of center to periphery, the story of the Throckmortons acquires a relevance that would not have been visible when Bossy wrote in 1975. That this is happening under the aegis of the first Jesuit pope reminds us that the path to renewal sometimes “works in mysterious ways,” to borrow the words of the Throckmortons’ friend, poet William Cowper.

Caroline Hibbard
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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