Catholics during the English Revolution 1642–1660 charts how Catholics responded to adaptations made by Parliament to Elizabethan, sequestration codes to finance its revolutionary war via compounding fines levied on recusants, delinquents (Royalists), and recusant delinquents. Gregory focuses on how Catholics specifically navigated regular changes to sequestration legislation and its enforcement as the needs of Parliament, and later the Protectorate, changed. Catholics did so, Gregory argues, to secure their political and economic standing at least, but at times some Catholics, like the Blackloists, attempted to exploit the instability of the political regimes during the revolutionary period in order to secure religious toleration. Catholics during the English Revolution therefore contributes to the field of scholarship on religion and political loyalty in early modern England shaped by the likes of Michael Questier, Peter Lake, Gabriel Glickman, and Stefania Tutino.Footnote 1
The first three chapters explain the Elizabethan sequestration process, and how it changed during the Civil Wars (1642–1648) and the English Republic (1649–1660), including the transformative nature of Parliament's decision to print and widely circulate sequestration acts and ordinances. This published information improved Catholics’ ability to legally ground their petitions to contest their sequestration and/or an argument in favor of being permitted to compound for their estates. The first three chapters thus lay the groundwork for the final three chapters which are more concerned with how Catholics experienced sequestration, and how their resistance to it was aided by influential social networks connected to Parliament, many of which included Protestants bound by kinship or social deference. Gregory's work is detailed and careful, and undergirded by an impressive amount of archival research. In the first three chapters, the constant revision of sequestration legislation and the inconsistency of its implementation is consolidated into a concise, but precise history. The first half of Catholics during the English Revolution is therefore useful to all historians working even tangentially with sequestration records because it is the first book to explore those records in depth, and in their own right, for the revolutionary period. Scholars analyzing these records, even for different answers to those sought by Gregory, will benefit from her synthesis.
In the final three chapters, Gregory interprets Catholic responses to sequestration and makes some important discoveries. First, despite anti-Catholic prejudice having been a consistent problem for Catholics since the Reformation, between 1642 and 1660, Catholics were not scapegoated as the cause of the revolution nor sequestered more regularly than other religious groups, especially after the Toleration Act (1650). In fact, Gregory argues convincingly that before the Restoration, suspected royalism was a more likely cause for an estate to be sequestered, though Catholic royalists typically struggled to compound for their estates more so than Protestant royalists. Second, Gregory reveals how adeptly Catholics exploited the boom in printed news to alter their methods to compound for their estates according to changes in sequestration which loosely corresponded to shifts in the balance of power between Presbyterians and Independents, and finally the installation of the Protectorate. This was important, because Catholics framed their petitions to compound based upon the terms of legislation, and gathered the evidence required of them, based upon details circulated in printed news (chapter 4). Finally, Gregory makes clear the importance of local noble and political networks which connected Catholic gentry to sympathetic members of Parliament. Catholics appealed to these networks to intercede on their behalf to have the sequestration revoked altogether, or to verify the loyalty of Catholics who sought permission to compound for their estate. For those who, based upon details circulated in news, were confident that they would not successfully compound, these networks were vital to protecting estates from division and sale. Typically, Catholics exploited networks of lawyers to place their estate in the trust of relatives or their heirs, or in the hands of an agent like John Rushworth and Gilbert Crouch (pp. 157–158). Networks that relied on Protestant relatives or kin is perhaps expected, but Gregory reveals that even tenants or petty officials in the provinces paid attention to the standing of Catholics in the local area and often proved reluctant to carry out sequestration raids. For peers of the realm who were not in open opposition to Parliament, like Elizabeth Savage, Countess Rivers, her Catholicism was not sufficient to outweigh her nobility and so, somewhat unexpectedly, Parliament agreed to support an investigation into the theft of her property looted from her Colchester estate by an anti-Catholic mob (pp. 138–140, 152–155). Thus, when they played the game of loyalty well, families like the Constables, the Gages of Hengrave Hall, the Carylls, and the Arundells of Lanherne weathered the storm of the revolutionary period and even gained reward for their loyalty to the Stuarts after the Restoration despite some having eventually disavowed the Crown in order to compound for their estate.
Catholics during the Revolution is important reading, however because of the nature of Gregory's sources, and because sequestration legislation and enforcement was often in flux, the first three chapters of the book especially are dense with detail. Related to this, some of the arguments made in the second half of the book relies on the reader retaining in memory of some of the detail of the first half in order to make sense of Gregory's analysis. This is challenging even for scholars with much experience working in this period of history, and might be a considerable barrier to undergraduates especially. It would have been useful to have included in the front matter even a brief timeline of events in the revolutionary period, such as the dates when the Long Parliament and Rump Parliament governed, as well as the dates of various ordinances passed. Likewise, a table of members of the Committee for Compounding and the dates they held office would have been an aide-mémoir that guided a reader through references to those officers in later chapters. That being said, scholars could easily compile these supplementary materials for use in undergraduate teaching. Their absence is only a minor detraction from scholarship which otherwise deepens our understanding of Catholic navigation of political and religious change in a tumultuous period of history in seventeenth-century England.
