The thread connecting these nine essays is made up of intertwined studies of family, local and national history. They owe their interest and readability to the extensive use of the Throckmorton family archive, correspondence, diaries and estate papers. These interlock with references to the extended family in the National Archive to present a gentry family that maintained its position in the Midland counties for four centuries. But this is local history with a difference. A staunch Catholicism in the senior branch underpinned activities common to their status, such as the building up of social and economic credit and the soliciting of assistance from a judiciously selected patron. The Throckmortons continued to function in spite of anti-Catholic legislation applied with a degree of severity or laxity according to the temper of the times. They consistently supported priests and chapels in their houses or rebuilt and enlarged accommodation for the use of all Catholics in the neighbourhood. No account of English Catholicism can avoid the issue of conflicting loyalties to the crown and to religious conviction. Impatience with the penal restrictions led some Throckmorton family members to manipulate political events to bring down the established order. The Throckmorton plot of 1583 and the Gunpowder plot of 1605 failed in their attempts to overthrow the monarchy by violence, implicating closely related family members. The genealogically complex account of events around the Gunpowder plot requires constant reference to the tables printed in the appendix. Endogamous marriages had the double effect of preserving religious traditions and encouraging practice, and the consolidation of estates by incorporating dowries and inheritances. By these means Harvington and Buckland joined Coughton and Weston Underwood to make the Throckmorton one of the wealthiest of Catholic families. The most interesting studies in this volume deal with the long eighteenth century which saw the family establish firm links to European culture and an informed view of intellectual and political life outside England. The liberal Benedictine education received at Douai College tempered the Gallicanism tinged with Jansenism which was an influence on the three brothers John, George and Charles Courtenay, who inherited the baronetcy in turn. Throckmorton generosity in an earlier generation had helped to finance education for English boys and aspirants to the Benedictine and secular priesthood at Douai and in Paris and supported a projected English translation of the New Testament. The slow progress towards Catholic Relief and at last to emancipation involved entrance into the political sphere as Whigs, thus libertarian and constitutional issues were pursued side by side with ecclesiastical politics. The Cisalpine Club and Catholic Committee owed much to Sir John Courtenay's skill as a pamphleteer, advocating for the laity the leading role in making clerical appointments. The disappointment of this hope foreshadowed the gradual loss of influence of the Catholic gentry in the first years of the nineteenth century, as urban expansion overtook rural hegemony. Nevertheless, the final study of Throckmorton fortunes ends on an upbeat, with the election in 1831 of Sir Robert George as the first Catholic member of parliament to sit for an English constituency and to take the Oath of Allegiance.