John Adamson's review of Eilish Gregory, Catholics During the English Revolution, 1642-1660
John Adamson on Eilish Gregory’s
book, Catholics During the English Revolution, 1642-1660: Politics,
Sequestration and Loyalty (Boydell Press, 2021)
Given the number
of historians in this country and elsewhere working on the events of the 1640s
and 1650s in the British Isles and the ever-growing body of their publications,
it is not surprising that it has become increasingly difficult to keep up with
the flow of articles, books and reviews coming from their word-processors. Even
with the aid of Google’s alerts and daily checks on social media like Twitter,
some items of interest are inevitably missed. That was certainly the case for
John Adamson’s review in the Catholic Herald in August of Eilish
Gregory’s recent book on the sequestration of Catholics’ estates in the English
Civil War and the immediately succeeding period.[1]
John Adamson’s
review began with a brief account of long-standing fears about Catholic
attempts to subvert England’s liberties and Protestantism stretching back to
the early years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. Later developments like the Spanish
Armada of 1588 and the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 only fuelled such fears and were
reinforced by King Charles I’s marriage to a French Catholic princess (and by
the Irish Rebellion of 1641).
He welcomed
Eilish Gregory’s study of the workings of the penal laws against Catholics in
the Civil Wars and their aftermath. For some hardline Catholics like the Earl
of Worcester, the consequences were disastrous with their estates being
confiscated and sold. But most Catholic gentry did better linked as they were
to their Protestant counterparts by ties of friendship, kinship, neighbourhood
and status. Whatever punishments were devised by the Long Parliament and the
regimes of the 1650s, in practice, local officials often connived at
artificially low assessments of the values of Catholics’ properties, reduced
fines and purchases by Protestant sympathisers willing to surrender their
acquisitions once normal conditions returned. Political revolution was not
enough to overcome pre-war kinship and social ties. Catholics, moreover, were
often willing to pledge their loyalty to the new post-monarchical regimes and
to repudiate Papal claims to a power to depose secular rulers. Eilish Gregory
wins his approval for her analysis of these changes in attitude and practice in
the English public sphere. The rhetoric of anti-Popery admittedly never quite
vanished and the idea of an alliance with Catholic Spain was even entertained
in the Council of State in the 1650s. It may have come to nothing but a degree
of collusion across the confessional divide was a feature of revolutionary
England as the Catholic laity largely went their own way whatever Rome said.
My precis does
not do full justice to the clarity of John Adamson’s review or to its succinct
exposition of Eilish Gregory’s analysis. This is an under-appreciated
literary skill. But he does illustrate the contribution she has made to this
important subject in a rewarding way.
21st September, 2021
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