Once considered an oxymoron, the ‘Catholic Enlightenment’ is an idea with much contemporary resonance in historical scholarship. New publications are emerging with ambitions of legitimating, globalizing, and amplifying it. Ulrich L. Lehner's The Catholic Enlightenment: The Forgotten History of a Global Movement (Oxford University Press, 2016) is, perhaps, the loudest of these new publications, but the work under review is rather in line with a more temperate circle of enthusiasts. It ought to be considered as a contribution to a literature being nurtured by scholars such as Gabriel Glickman, Geoffrey Scott, and Mark Goldie. In other words, its roots are English and then British, in that order, and that adds much to its allure.

The subject of this scholarly biography is Sir Thomas Gascoigne (1745–1810), and at first glance his life seems poor material for the author's intellectual energy. His casual and tactical conversion to the Established Church came at a point in life when he had exhausted his circle of friends with a decade and a half of appalling behavior across Europe. Between his first Grand Tour of 1764–1765 at the age of 19, and his last in 1774–1779, he managed to greatly impoverish his estate, murder an unfortunate coachman in Rome, impregnate and scandalize multiple lovers, and generally ate, drank, and indulged himself through the Catholic courts of Europe. He was, in every sense, a Briton behaving badly abroad. Furthermore, his faith in any religion was apparently entirely insincere. He was an untrustworthy friend, an opportunist in politics, an uninterested husband, and (in early adulthood) an absentee landlord. A life worth recording, certainly, but as a conduit of Catholic Enlightenment?

It is to the author's credit that he can connect Gascoigne to wider developments in aristocratic Catholic circles. The bulk of the book is devoted to building the world around Sir Thomas—his tutors, family, estate, friends, and enemies. The book is divided into three major sections, each of which operates to some extent as an entirely different study.

The first section details the education and formation of Sir Thomas. He first received a Benedictine education at Douai until 1762, and thereafter he tried the patience of his talented mentor and tutor, Stephen Tempest, as he repeatedly failed to take his studies seriously. From Douai he went on to the Collége de Quatre Nations in Paris, and from there to the Academy at Turin. It was in Turin, between the age of 18 and 19, that the feckless and morally dubious Gascoigne emerged. With £1400 per annum in his pocket, and nobody to answer to, the pleasures of the world awaited. One of the most interesting aspects of the correspondence to and from Sir Thomas at this phase in life is the extent to which his poor judgment and faulty moral compass are acknowledged openly by his friends and family. Their fears proved to be well-founded when, after a year or so at Turin, Sir Thomas prematurely began his first Grand Tour against the advice of all who either loved or could tolerate him. Eight months later, in 1765, he was back in England, his tour cut short and in considerable disgrace. A coachman was dead in Rome, and Sir Thomas was suspected of the murder, though this did not seem to affect his later life or career adversely. He was also in debt, and stories of his libidinous exploits were legion. The second, grander, tour was taken between 1774 and 1779, and was altogether more successful. Sir Thomas charmed the Catholic courts, basing himself at the Royal Court at Naples for a whole year, and travelled to Versailles to meet Marie Antoinette, armed with a letter of introduction from her sister, the Queen of Naples. Such high points in the Continental career of Sir Thomas lend credence to the author's thesis that English Catholics like Sir Thomas were granted a ‘social presence’ on the continent that was denied them at home. For this reason, he speculates, they could be reluctant to return to England, where they were faced with suspicion, low political capital, and sometimes outright sectarian bias.

The second section is given over to an extended discussion of the political career of Sir Thomas, greatly facilitated by his well-publicized apostasy. This cynical conversion allowed him access to a Parliament still characterized by ‘old corruption,’ and the newly Protestant Sir Thomas was returned for the borough of Thirsk in the Rockingham interest in 1780. Sir Thomas was undistinguished in the House of Commons and in fact spoke only once in more than a decade at Parliament. This cautious and muted political identity was doubtless strategic. After all, Gascoigne's real victory was to be able to appear in Parliament at all.

The last section covers the estate management of Sir Thomas at Parlington. He was a progressive and engaged landlord, entrepreneurial and forward-thinking once he finally knuckled down to the task. His collieries were productive and technologically advanced. He invested in improving his estate, employing John Kennedy to coordinate his agricultural strategy and patronized his experiments with new crops and techniques. Kennedy's Treatise on Gardening (1776) was the result of his time at Parlington, and all of this serves to bolster the idea that Sir Thomas represents a Catholic landlord who was also an ‘improver’—another myth subverted. Among the many interesting aspects of English Catholic life to be revealed in this section is the granular detail we are given on Catholic communities that surrounded estates like Parlington. We learn much about how a crypto-Catholic such as Sir Thomas might continue to employ a majority of Catholic workers on his estate, and prop up a network of Catholic businesses in neighboring towns, from butchers to bakers.

This complex biography reveals many sides to Sir Thomas. The conscientious and dedicated improver that is revealed in section three is entirely at odds with the lazy and libidinous train wreck of a young man we met in the first section. The cautious and measured politician in section two is even more of a mystery. How can we reconcile the three? How can we trust a man who remains ambiguous even to his biographer?

There are frustrations too. This reader wished he could know something more about the personal life of Sir Thomas, especially something of his wife and son, both of whom are more or less silent here. More might have been said on the internal class dynamics of such a minority Catholic culture in England. Nonetheless, Lock's monograph adds much depth to the Catholic gentry world revealed by Geoffrey Scott and Peter Marshall's Catholic Gentry in English Society: The Thockmortons of Coughton from Reformation to Emancipation (Ashgate, 2009) and it is a fine achievement in its own right, providing readers with a valuable insight into both the English Catholic world, and its relationship with the elites of Catholic Europe.

Readers of Church History with a particular interest in the Catholic Grand Tour, Apostasy, Crypto-Catholicism, and Catholic estate management in the second half of the eighteenth century will find much to satiate them here. The author has less to say about the Catholic Enlightenment than the title might indicate, but it is a well-executed study of a man with many faces—though perhaps none of them sincere.