The English Catholic Community and Europe during the English Revolution, 1640-1660

This project will assess how the English Revolution impacted the English Catholic community by examining how it shaped its interactions with its cross-channel networks of Catholic families, colleges and religious houses. In so doing, my study will break with existing scholarship (Aveling, 1976; Thompkins, 2010) including a recent study by Eilish Gregory (2021), which has mainly examined how the Civil War and Interregnum affected the English Catholic community in England only. In contrast, this study takes a transnational approach to this question which reflects the centrality of the continent to English Catholic life. The continent was a safe haven to travel and reside for lay exiles, pilgrims, monks and nuns. And recent scholarship (Hufton, 2008; Chambers, 2017) has stressed that the continental English colleges, as an educator of English children and supplier of priests, were key to the survival of Catholic belief and practice in early modern England. This study will consider how the community used its English colleges and other continental institutions to sustain English Catholic life in this period of acute disruption and hardship. This includes asking how the economic hardship of the community in England affected institutional finances, how this shaped their support, such as its ability supply priests to England and house English monks, and the strategies employed to mitigate the effects. I will do this through examining the Colleges' diaries, financial and attendance records, as well as correspondence between Catholic gentry, College rectors, and clergy.

The second part of this study will examine how the community utilised their transnational networks, experience, and travel to participate in the politics of the Civil War and Interregnum. This will build upon the recent historiographical trend of drawing out the political agency of Catholics, particularly Walker's research on the role of exiled nuns in the Royalist cause (2003; 2012). This study will examine how the role of nuns as conduits for intelligence was only one part of a wider cross-channel network of politically useful Catholic individuals, families, colleges, and clergy. It will explore their various activities in support of the Royalist cause, and will consider how the community's distinctive transnational characteristics, such as its continental institutions, contacts and rich experience of travel shaped this. This study will analyse visitation diaries, panegyrics of Catholic Royalists, and the correspondence, both between institutions and individuals, such as Mary Knatchbull, abbess at Ghent and lay exiles such as Marmaduke Langdale, as well as with members of the exiled English Court, such as Sir Edward Hyde. This section aims to fundamentally change the way historians approach the history of confessional mobility. 'Confessional mobility' is an important analytical tool recently pioneered in the research of Liesbeth Corens (2019), which identifies religious migration as varied and dynamic rather than as a static exile. By exploring the interactions between political activities and transnational travel, this study challenges a currently largely apolitical approach, and points the way towards further research into Catholic and other confessional mobilities which reflects the importance of political engagement in shaping religious migration.