In recent years scholars have started talking about the Catholic ‘other’ in early English modern politics and culture. Here Christopher Highley identifies Catholic ideas about the nation and national identity, and asks how his approach might square with the current consensus that nationalism in this period is exclusively Protestant. This counterfactual approach seems to me to be absolutely right. As the author points out, there were serious divisions within the Catholic community, located at home and abroad, and concepts of nationhood were fundamental to their justifications of their stance on various topics, and also in their relationship with the regime and state.

The author's principal focus is on the Catholic literary tradition, and on the texts which were produced by Catholics, mainly in Elizabeth's reign, texts which reflected on nationhood. Since a good deal of Tudor and Stuart policy towards Catholic separatism and semi-separatism was governed by their, from time to time, both cordial and hostile relationships with European Catholic powers, this is clearly a topic of some importance.

Almost all the current literature about Catholicism in England tends to be about alienation. But the whole point is that the Catholic movement, if such it was, was driven by expectations that the status quo was far from static or assured. Even if there were no sudden reversal of fortune as some of the exiles under Elizabeth hoped, the fact remained that the queen's reign was one long succession crisis, the outcome of which could not easily be predicted until the late 1590s. This was the significance of the Catholic polemic which contested contemporary Protestant characterisations of Roman Catholicism as foreign and disloyal, and which argued that Catholic assumptions about everything from theological truth to political theory were in harmony not just with Catholic western Christendom in general but also with the Christian tradition in England until the disruptions caused by the Reformation.

As the author points out, the Catholic exiles abroad were always at odds and nowhere more so than on the basis of rival nationalities. English, Scots (and also the Welsh) were perpetually at loggerheads, particularly in the continental seminaries. At times this seems to have been the product of no more than petty and personal rivalries. But those rivalries were also commentaries on the issue of how and when the Stuart dynasty might or would replace the Tudor one. When this happened, there would have to be a resolution of the centuries of Anglo-Scots enmity. The question of whether and in what form a union might take place and how far regal union would require toleration of Catholics in order to be effective was central to debates on this topic before and after the accession of James vi. (During Elizabeth's reign there were differently structured tensions between England and Irish Catholics which are dealt with in chapter v.)

As Highley shows, it was not unpredictable that the most insistent of the assertions of Catholic Englishness during the period were those of the so-called appellant clergy and their friends who took up and deployed European Hispanophobe stereotypes in order to exploit the reverses of Spanish power in northern France in the face of a resurgent French monarchy, and to align themselves with the politique discourses of sovereign authority which were used by the French enemies of the Jesuits. (The Jesuits were frequently identified as the agents of Spain.) These discourses were clearly intended for the attention of the Scottish king. Their stress on the question of nationality was an essential component of the pitch which these Catholics were publicly making as they anticipated the accession of James Stuart. Highley's chapter on the ‘Hispaniolized English Catholic’ nicely rounds off this account of polemicised assertions of nationality and patriotism.