ABSTRACT
Most historians now accept that Catholicism is a major topic in the historiography of post-Reformation England and Britain. While not everyone agrees how to define exactly what a Catholic was during that period, there is a broad consensus that there were quite a lot of Catholics and that the Reformation in the British Isles was not necessarily the smooth consensual process that some historians of the topic used to assume. That topic, English Catholicism, has very often been dumped in the box marked 'local studies' and has been taken to be largely free of real ideological and political baggage, despite a number of contemporary Catholics' vehement opposition to the imposition of a Protestant settlement in Church and State. It seems clear enough that Rome, as it responded to the calls of an influential section of the English Catholic community to provide it with direct Episcopal government, through a dynastic marriage alliance, to one of the major European Catholic royal houses.
