Catholics used cultural work and cultural networks as means to emphasize their status as gentry or nobility and to emphasize their wealth and position rather than their religion. By building new houses, renovating existing ones, and designing and planting elaborate gardens, gentry and nobility asserted their claims to elite status and their right to pride. During the period of great rebuilding in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, English gentry and nobility displayed their wealth, status, and power over both people and the environment through renovations to their houses, construction of new buildings such as garden lodges and banqueting houses, and the installation of elaborate landscape gardens. Domestic buildings and landscape architecture were ways in which the wealthy fashioned their religious and political identities and demonstrated that they possessed aristocratic virtues and honor. For rising families such as the Cecils, Fitzwilliams, Hattons, and Spencers, such displays helped to accentuate their legitimacy, both in terms of their social standing and their political authority. For established families like the Treshams and Throckmortons, cultural displays underscored their long-term status at the top of the county social and political hierarchy. Catholic gentlemen who faced exclusion from the political office to which they were entitled by their high birth found building projects an ideal means to showcase their virtue, honor, and their membership in the local body of the upper sort. Religion was not a critical variable in cultural activities like architecture and gardening.