In 1800, a Scottish priest published a pamphlet meditating upon the history of Catholic recusancy in Britain, and offering – with uncharacteristic diffidence – a Modest Apology for his co-religionists. Over three centuries, Alexander Geddes opined, a ‘kind of secret reformation’ had swept through the Catholic communities of England and Scotland, with clergy and laity quietly taking it upon themselves to cleanse and regenerate the Church from within. In Britain, the ‘cloud of superstition’ that had once smothered Catholic belief had been ‘quietly dissipating’, so that the ‘still small voice of reason begins at length to be heard’, and recusant society now glimmered with the ‘gentle sunshine of a rational philosophy’. Geddes, a poet, polemicist and biblical scholar drawn from the recusant enclaves in north-eastern Scotland, delivered one of the most consequential but divisive contributions to the campaign for Catholic emancipation. In a succession of treatises that made him briefly the darling of recusant society, he pinpointed British Catholicism as a spearhead of Enlightenment. Having beaten back obscurantist forces within their own Church, he believed, his co-religionists had not merely accommodated themselves to the spirit of the age, but had helped to advance it – and he challenged British Protestants to respond, by stripping the nation of penal laws founded upon ‘zealotism’ and intolerance. Yet, as Mark Goldie has shown, Geddes's vision of continual ‘revolution’ ramified as explosively within his own Church as among his Protestant compatriots. Excoriating clerical celibacy and Latin liturgies, admonishing the papacy and anathematising the religious orders, the ‘disedifying’, ‘libertine’ ‘infidel’ (in some of the more temperate Catholic judgements) took his provocation one step too far by acclaiming the French Revolution as the climax of an age of soaring human potential.

Goldie's scholarly recovery of Alexander Geddes cautions against the more recent tendency of liberal Catholic commentators to turn a ‘wayward’ and vituperative spirit into an irenic herald of the Second Vatican Council. Nonetheless, Goldie has positioned Geddes not simply as a mercurial individualist, but as one voice within the greater panoply of a Scottish Catholic Enlightenment. Through the later eighteenth century, pressures for political and religious reform surged through the ranks of the Scottish secular clergy, connecting Geddes to more orthodox thinkers, including the vicars apostolic George Hay and his own cousin John Geddes.

In 1735, a purported Persian fable entered the London printing press. The ‘Tale of the Troglodytes’ claimed to capture the descent of a community into moral and political corruption, offering the sobering example of how a people might become ‘wickeder and more miserable in a State of Government, than they were left in a State of Nature’. Its narrative rested on a country delivered from conflict by a warrior prince, whose leaders proceeded, in a fatal slide into ‘innocence’, to raise him to their throne ‘without prescribing any bounds to his authority’. They had left themselves unshielded against the corruptible tendencies inherent in human politics, deluded that ‘when Virtue was on the Throne, the most absolute Government was the best’, and therefore disarmed when ambition and insecurity propelled their new sovereign into arbitrary rule. ‘From this single root sprung up a thousand Mischiefs; Pride, Envy, Avarice, Discontent, Deceit and Violence’, as the king exploited the legislative machinery to create divisions between his subjects, with fratricidal conflicts eroding the civic spirit, and a tangled matrix of debts, bad laws and social ills displacing ‘ancient Customs’, overthrowing the ‘dictates of natural justice’ and destroying ‘the natural Obligations to Virtue … by the foreign Influence of human Authority’. Such was the condition of any people ‘when they had quitted their own Nature, and so bewildered were they in the Labyrinth of their own laying out’.

In 1737, an obscure novel of ideas emerged from the London printing press. Acclaimed in The Gentleman's Magazine as ‘a beautiful fiction’, and ‘sublime allegory’, The Adventures of Signor Gaudentio di Lucca presented a new vision of man's state of nature, centred on the encounters of an explorer with a people ‘such as nations might be supposed to be, who had retained in their Purity … the original ideas of the arts, manners, religion and government of the first men in the infancy of the world’. The inhabitants of Mezzorania had survived their own voyage through exile, cast out of their native land by religious persecution. Resettled ‘in the midst of the Deserts of Africa’, they had constructed a society that was ‘the most humane and civilized I ever saw’, anchored in agrarian economics, a public meritocracy shaped by intellectual achievement, and the protection of benign, paternalist monarchy. Above all, they propounded toleration in affairs of the soul, being ‘not so inhuman as to put people to death, because they were of a different opinion from their own’. These ‘gentle and innocent children of nature’, had been set free to follow ‘the dictates of pure reason’ and ‘natural justice’, and their kingdom had ascended to a state of unity, bound not by coercion, but the love that made each man and woman view each other as part of the same family.

By 1691, when James II's forces withdrew from Ireland back to the continent, the Glorious Revolution had been established as a disruptive and traumatic moment for the Catholic community: a blow struck against the hope of peaceful integration into England. Despite the bursts of patriotic defiance with which they rallied around the Stuart banner, recusant leaders were forced to confront the creation of a new order far harder to negotiate, in which the utility of old political and intellectual resources appeared fatally undermined. Catholic religious and political writings after 1688 were not conceived in abstraction: they articulated the high stakes faced wherever the recusant world was strong enough to exert an identity, in a time when national allegiances had been overturned and the welfare of the flock cast into doubt. This chapter will look at how the social institutions of recusant England responded to the challenge, concentrating on the laymen who had assumed public leadership within the Catholic community, but had now become vulnerable to exile or imprisonment, after their reluctance to acknowledge the transference of the English crown. Outside the ranks of the clergy, the dominant voice in eighteenth-century Catholic writing remained that of the gentleman lay leader. Tracing the social fortunes of the recusant elites therefore lays a foundation to explore the way in which Catholics mediated between the contested national, political and religious identities that impinged upon their place in England after 1688.

The events that started in December 1688 became rapidly ingrained in the public mythology of the English state. The ‘Protestant’ wind that blew William of Orange towards the throne of the three kingdoms, the humiliating exit of James II and the subsequent reassertion of parliamentary right were serenaded as the hallmarks of deliverance from the twin pillars of ‘Popery and Arbitrary Government’. Raised as a landmark moment for the constitution, the Glorious Revolution was perceived to have set the dogma of Rome against the will of freeborn Englishmen to bring the final triumph of Protestant over papist, tarnishing the co-religionists of James II with obscurantism and defeat. In recent years, the stress on religious conflict within the Revolution has yielded before an alternative historical emphasis. Some of the strongest works have explored the ‘conservative’ and ‘reluctant’ qualities of the event, considered the countervailing role of temporal patriotism against eschatological piety, or reasserted the primacy of high politics over clashes of ideas. Scholars of the continental scene have stressed the new king's record as a defender of Catholics in his native territories, to suggest that William's enthronement dampened, more than it inflamed, the confessional passions of the realm. Yet contemporary witnesses were somewhat less sanguine. The Prince of Orange's banners proclaimed ‘the Protestant religion’ as a spur to action, his preachers hailed a godly triumph, and his coronation formally endorsed the conviction that Catholic governance was ‘inconsistent with the Safety and Welfare of this Protestant Kingdom’.

The direction of recent scholarship has started to restore religious controversies to the heart of our understanding of eighteenth-century England, calling into question the older image of a secularising ‘age of stability’. In the light of works by Stephen Taylor, John Walsh and Jonathan Clark among others, it is now far less likely that historians would assent without debate to the notion that ‘by comparison with previous generations, the Englishman of the early eighteenth century displayed little religious fervour’. Yet, in spite of the vigorous exchanges roused by these revisions, the community of English Catholic recusants has evaded attention, and the lack of study has perpetuated an older view that dismissed them as silent spectators in the nation's rise to imperial grandeur. In the verdict of J.R. Jones, recusants remained an ‘inert, defensively-minded and intellectually negligible’ minority, shut out from the discourse that dominated the English public sphere. To John Owen, they were an ‘impoverished’ group, who ‘played no part in national politics’. To Linda Colley, Protestant self-assertion was part of the genetic make-up of the Hanoverian kingdom, and those who fell outside the pale risked being cast to the margins. Indeed, the study of recusants over the larger early modern period has been reduced, all too often, in one recent judgement, to ‘an historiographical sub-field or occasionally a ghetto’. At best, the examination of English Catholicism has been deemed less significant than the study of anti-Catholicism. Such an emphasis cannot, however, be dismissed as the product of an incorrigible Protestant Whiggery.

Three decades after the last shot was fired in the siege of Preston, the Jacobite challenge was once again pressed upon the consciousness of the nation. During the course of the 1745 rebellion, there were significant signs that elements within the English Catholic community had not abandoned the dream of reversing the Revolution, and reclaiming their perceived birthright within the kingdom on the back of Stuart re-conquest. In the East Anglian recusant enclaves of Norwich, Wymondham and Bungay, Catholic priests were reported to be exhorting their flock to rebellion. In Yorkshire, the duke of Norfolk's steward, Andrew Blyde, rode out to rally under the standard of Prince Charles Edward. Further north, military exertions by members of the Strickland, Charlton, Collingwood and Clavering families showed that old traditions of Stuart royalist action would take more than one generation to wither away. These scattered bursts of insurrection represented a slight threat compared to the rising of 1715, or the organised system of weapon-holding and conspiracy that linked together recusant manors during the reign of William III. However, they served to hint that, just because the Catholic community had been demilitarised by the recriminations after 1715, it was not necessarily drained of fervour.

While Jacobite conspiracy slowly diminished, Jacobite convictions would still linger into later decades in the English recusant consciousness. In Lancashire, Anne Hawarden and Mary Standish exchanged political poetry during the '45, and ran to salute the rebel troops on their southward march.

The grip of the diaspora on recusant lives, the instability of their place in England, and an impassioned sense that the laws of God and man preserved the right of the exiled Stuarts had all established Jacobitism as an overwhelming presence in the political imagination of the English Catholic community. By 1716, recusant leaders were proclaiming these convictions at the public scaffold, exhorting their countrymen to work towards ‘Uniting and Reconciling all their Interests … in the only Measure that can render them happy’. However, Jacobite ideology could not be frozen in a state of such exalted self-certainty. Its advocates were soon forced to convert private zeal into a voice that could speak outside the sanctuary of the loyal household, enter into the less comforting arena of national controversy and confront the taunt that ‘You labour more than ever to estrange them from King James with such authentique wrighting … to declare he will not reign but to signify his publique zeal for the Catholique religion.’ The political thought of Catholic Jacobitism was fashioned out of successive exchanges between the court, the diaspora and its following in England: fixed on the terms of a restoration settlement, but ranging across wider horizons, to contemplate the moral image of a Catholic king, the place for Stuart piety in a Protestant realm, and the status of recusants beyond the point of an imagined second Restoration.