Catholics Writing the Nation in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (review)

After the break with Rome, the English Protestant reformers were faced with a problem of history: the need to supply a genealogy for their church and in particular one that eliminated any connection with the papacy. The historical revisions undertaken by John Bale, John Foxe, Matthew Parker, and others posited that to be Protestant was to be a member of the earliest, pure Church established by the apostles through the mission of Joseph of Arimathea to the earliest British people. To be Catholic was to be a descendant of the later Saxon race converted by St. Augustine, who had established a church corrupted by the antichrist. Thus religious belief became inextricably tied to nationhood, and at the accession of Elizabeth I the English Catholics found themselves dispossessed, strangers in their own country. In his careful scholarly analysis of a wide range of polemical and antiquarian tracts, letters, histories, and martyrologies produced between 1554 and 1625, Christopher Highley examines some of the Catholic responses to this revision; this subject has attracted much attention and debate in recent years.

Highley's starting point is the writings of those Catholic academics who left their ancestral home after the Elizabethan Settlement to live in the Low Countries. From here they wrote at first in the vernacular for an English audience protesting loyalty to the queen as true Englishmen. But after the watershed of Regnans in excelsis, undermined by the new legislation against them and the effects of the further political consolidation of Protestant identity and nationhood, they changed their strategy, writing in Latin for influential continental Catholics who shared their confessional beliefs and affiliation with Rome and could offer support.

They attacked Protestant claims, arguing that heresy had blighted their Englishness. Highley shows particularly well in chapter 3 how they deployed the tropes of the Turk and Scythian to characterize the Protestant heretic, and manipulated geographical and ethnographical factors to explain the spread of heresy in Britain and Ireland.

Highley examines Catholic responses to the Protestant vision of a united British kingdom. They were hampered, as he shows in chapters 4 and 5, by the mutual antipathy of the exiles and their insistence on maintaining ethnic and cultural differences. Here Highley provides an astute analysis of the tense relationships that had always existed between the English and Irish, added to which were deep-rooted suspicions and uncertainties of the English Catholics about the value of Celtic Christianity. The Catholics turned instead to ideas of a reunited Christendom, building on the already powerful affiliations that existed with fellow members of the Catholic commonwealth, the Continental Catholic powers, while still professing themselves resolutely English.

The final chapter addresses the question of Spain and the English Catholics. The Protestants demonized Spain, charging the exiles with having lost their English identity and of collaborating with the Hapsburgs and the papal antichrist. They singled out the Jesuits, a point exploited by the Appellants, who portrayed themselves as Englishmen loyal to their monarch and to the ancient traditions of their country in contrast to the Jesuits tainted by their Spanish affiliations.

Some of the wider context of the reformation revisionism is lost in Highley's account, and the readings would have benefited on occasion from deeper analytical engagement with the texts. Also, there are some minor errors: the medieval shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham was in Norfolk, not Lincolnshire, and the Rosary devotion is precisely that; it is not a sacrament.

Nonetheless, Highley provides important insights into the consequences of the Protestant appropriation of history and national identity. To survive, English Catholicism had to transcend geographical borders and connect with the wider continental Catholic community while assimilating the demands and effects of the Catholic Reformation. It was from within these imperatives that they "wrote the nation," creating and consolidating their origins, their history, and their English identity.