The English Catholic Community in Early Modern England

The story of Catholicism in post-Reformation England is one of reinvention. Throughout the Elizabethan and Stuart regimes, Catholics had to work around a legal system which excluded them from England’s public sphere. Catholicism evolved into a community, consisting of ‘all right-thinking people who had a conscience in matters of true religion and the courage to express it’ (p. 9). Catholics deliberately portrayed themselves as a ‘gathered’ sort during a time of great social-legal change.

Between 1550 and 1640, Michael Questier focuses on the Catholic aristocracy and their reactions to the changes brought by the later Tudors and Stuarts. Both regimes politicised the community, forcing Catholics to choose whether to conform to the established Church, or not, and to choose whether Catholics should create their own internal Church system, heeding to the demands of Rome.

Catholics were never passive victims to their state’s intolerant religious system, and individuals varied in terms of action. Questier shows how the views of Catholic elites differed within their families. For example, members of the Leedes family ranged from ‘willing conformists’, that is, those who attended Church services against the threat of recusancy laws (i.e. fines for non-attendance), to ‘religious exiles’, like Sir Thomas Leedes who evaded persecution by going to Louvain, north Europe (p. 56). As such, historians would be mistaken, Questier argues, to assume that there was a ‘single social or religious structure which we can label exclusively as Catholicism’ (p. 66). Families differed in terms of the lengths they would go to defend their faith.

There was no unitary ‘Roman Catholic bloc’, Questier says, but there was certainly a ‘Catholic clan mentality’ during this period. The exchange of Catholic ideas and aspirations depended on familial connections and, namely, on what Questier calls the community’s ‘entourage’. Through a nexus of kinship relationships and beyond, Questier proposes an ‘entourage’ model to explain how Catholics communicated the core features of their faith. Through such a model, Catholics maintained a ‘visible presence’ both in their localities and in state politics (p. 60). Catholicism was a body of committed individuals, and no greater is this point found in none other than the Browne family.

The Browne family provides the backbone of Questier’s discussions. Through three generations, the Brownes played a key role in the survival of Catholicism in England. Consider, for instance, their marriage alliances. The Brownes inter-married with ‘clans which had significant Catholic associations’ and these marriage alliances ‘were clearly informed . . . in part by the known Catholic characteristics of those families’ (p. 87). Although the ‘mere fact’ of a family’s Catholic credentials never made these alliances automatic, they nevertheless served to characterise and politicise contemporary Catholicism’ by providing a network to develop ‘the essential stuff of the Catholic community’ (p. 94; p. 107).

The Brownes also held an important political role. Importantly, they were nobles, with Sir Anthony Browne holding the title of the first Viscount Montague during Elizabeth’s reign. The Second Montague continued the political role of his father, who participated in parliamentary debates and served as an ambassador to Rome. The Second Montague convinced himself that the Established Church was temporary. Representative of a view that many Catholics held (that ‘true’ religion was yet to be re-instated), Montague once wrote a letter to his daughter that said that the Church of England ‘[will] make you beleeve that you looke not uprightlie and indifferently to the cause’ and that she should stay strong in the face of adversity (p. 240). Here, Reformed Calvinism was a false system of beliefs. Montague’s ‘instruction’ sought to preserve the Catholic cause in England by signposting theological warnings for future generations.

The Second Montague, Questier argues, tried to reformulate his family’s Catholicism into something with ‘a harder edge’ (p. 242). When Montague attended debates in the House of Lords, he invested his speeches with emotion, saying that ‘out of the reverence of my [heart]’ he speaks to his fellow Lords ‘out of the necessary discharge of my conscience in this most important cause’ (p. 274). Protecting Catholic rights was an imperative of one’s conscience: a religious truth ‘suppressed by persecution, but hath been thereby encreased’ by hardship, according to Montague (p. 275).

Such an attitude drove the Catholic cause in Stuart England. Isaac Oliver, a painter, depicted Montague with his two brothers (pictured). They stand and interlock their hands with one another, signifying a sense of ‘communal loyalty’ (p. 243). Questier says the painting can be taken ‘to represent and celebrate a unity of Catholic religious identity and purpose within the Browne family’ (p. 243). This was a crucial time. Catholicism now saw itself as adherents of an embittered religious cause, determined to survive in an intolerant state.

The Browne brothers on the front cover of
Questier's book.

Questier’s argument, that Catholicism was not in decline over the course of 1550 to 1640, is his study’s most striking feature. By focusing on the Brownes, Questier argues that we should understand ‘Catholicism as a fluid political issue’ (p. 510). Various bodies of opinion and their debates within the entourage re-shaped the face of Catholicism. As an inter-state entity, Catholicism led some like Montague to make the case that England required an episcopal structure to support Catholic discipline and allegiance to Rome. Montague supported Bishop Richard Smith who attempted to bring Church government to England, but was later exiled due to his perceived threat to the Crown’s authority. The role of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) also informed a lot of Catholic thinking, proving to be a contentious issue for many elites. The main issue was that English Catholics feared the Jesuits push for counter-reformation which would potentially jeopardise the Catholic bid for toleration with the Crown. Among Jesuit opponents, a ‘more staid and respectable mode of disputation was called for’. In the process, they clipped Jesuit wings who never left a real mark in England (p. 374).

Questier’s book is a significant examination of the networks which kept Catholicism alive in post-Reformation England. At times, it can be long-winded and includes very little discussion on Catholic practices among ordinary people (e.g. servants in the Montague household). However, this is a minor point to a magisterial study of a crucial time in European history.

Source:

Catholicism and Community in Early Modern England: Politics, Aristocratic Patronage and Religion, c.1550-1640. By Michael C. Questier. (Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History.) Pp xxii + 559 incl. 29 illustrations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. £46.99. 978-0-521-86008-6.