ABSTRACT
Recent years have seen a growth of interest in post-Reformation Catholicism, and in studying groups of Catholics, in England and elsewhere, who were living in areas where Catholicism was a minority faith. This research has highlighted two areas with rich possibilities for future study: looking inwardly, the extent to which Catholics could interact with and take part in public life, formally and informally, in a Protestant state; and looking outwards, the extent to which they engaged with their Catholic peers in other parts of Europe.1 On the first of these issues, Sheils has demonstrated ways in which to access ‘the dilemma of the laity below gentry status’, a group which has been neglected in historical scholarship. He explores the question of ‘how early modern Catholics looked to ‘get on’ – that is to say, to improve one’s social, political and cultural standing in society’, but to achieve this whilst also ‘getting along – that is to say maintaining good relations – with the dominant group’. Sheils suggests the language of ‘getting on’ and ‘getting along’ is particularly useful for nonelite groups. Those at the top of society tend to be approached through a language of ‘differentiation that implies relationships between recognised and recognisable religious communities’, which is not particularly useful when discussing their social inferiors.2 This essay in fact is an attempt to see how far the language of ‘getting on’ and ‘getting along’ might apply to the study of elite Catholics in England. Admittedly, those highborn English men and women who were recognised as Catholics by the Protestant state
and by their neighbours and peers have been much studied in English Catholic historiography. On some levels, the emphasis on themes of difference and separation in relation to these groups is valid: scholars have been interested in how they differed from their Protestant peers, and how they became a separate, or separatist, group in a Protestant state. It might be seen as particularly apt for those clergy and laity who went overseas: their action of removal abroad is usually viewed as an act of deliberate separation from their homeland, and from the Protestant regime that they left behind. Exiles are often assumed to be a kind of special case, and in the case of laity overseas, perhaps an exception to the kinds of Catholic behaviour that were ongoing inside England.
