The English Catholic Community 1688–1745: Politics, Culture and Ideology (review)

Mr. Glickman has mined archives to expose the paradoxes and complexities of English Catholic self-definition, demonstrating how it was shaped by both domestic and foreign influences following the Revolution of 1688. The result is a fresh look at a portion of English Catholicism from the inside out: he demonstrates how Jacobite English Catholics, steeped in Gallican ideas, tried to align their religious and political allegiances. The dispersal of Catholics after the Revolution of 1688 was both physical and ideological. Where earlier anti-Catholic flashpoints affected clergy, the Revolution affected the Catholic laity. Divisions within the Catholic community resulted from both dismay at the militancy of James’s Catholic advisors and wariness of Louis XIV’s increasing absolutism. When James was ousted, the same loyalism that for a century led Catholics to defend their monarch at great personal and financial cost now led some of them to work against the post-Revolution settlement. And yet “an idea of irenic patriotism became the dominant position within English Catholic thought over the course of the century.” Because most of the evidence comes from correspondence of the gentry and clergy, we do not get a vertical study of Catholicism in all its complexity and variety, but Mr. Glickman’s meticulous scholarship reveals many of the contradictions experienced by English Catholics.

Far from withdrawing into an enfeebled opposition culture, the English recusant gentry rebuilt itself as a prosperous and well-connected society engaged with its culture, even as it cultivated an outlawed inner piety shadowed by Jacobitism. Catholics drew on friendships with Anglicans to protect their estates, forge strategic family alliances, and engage in both shrewd estate management and commercial activity to sustain a patrician sociability and hospitality. Spirituality focused on the cult of the family and was informed by a Salesian merging of the worldly and the otherworldly. The existence of the Jacobite Court lent recusant society a cosmopolitan culture supported by convents, monasteries, and colleges. One of this study’s strengths is its demonstration of how “tutors and soldiers, merchants and musicians, and wives” enlarged English Catholic social networks. The imagined communities that resulted from these cosmopolitan networks provided English Catholics with “an alternative conception of the English nation.”

Yet the exiled Court remained divided by those who held revanchist views of kingship as absolute and those who insisted on conciliation. Within England, Catholic politics split over competing efforts to articulate an oath of allegiance that Catholics could sign. Members of the Catholic Jacobite diaspora viewed Rome as a spiritual authority, but their correspondence reveals “hostility toward the Catholic world order” that had turned its back on England. By the middle of the century, “the institutions of the diaspora continued to protect ‘rebellious’ forms of the faith, even as they intoned ideals of Catholic unity.” Torn “between the universalist outlook of the Catholic Church and the traditions of a community conscious of their unusual minority status in their native kingdom,” they experienced a contradictory identity. Their clergy were similarly divided between those who worked to relieve fears that Catholics had potentially treasonous plans and those who worked to keep Jacobite hopes alive.

That we wish for more information and a broader canvas testifies to Mr. Glickman’s success at demonstrating the perplexity and richness of post-Revolution English Catholicism. Appendices include a list of English Catholics at the Court of St. Germain, Commissions to English Catholics given by the exiled court, a list of Vicars Apostolic, and genealogies of the Howards of Norfolk and the Carylls of West Harting.