Geoff Baker’s new book presents a welcome sign that the recent renewal of scholarly interest in early modern English Catholicism has extended its reach into the middle and later part of the seventeenth century. Close studies of the networks forged through kinship and religiosity have been especially fruitful as a means of rediscovering the materials of Catholic England, and Baker’s study of the Lancashire recusant landowner William Blundell takes its place alongside work on the Throckmorton family (Peter Marshall and Geoffrey Scott, eds., Catholic Gentry in English Society: The Throckmortons of Coughton from Reformation to Emancipation [Farnham, 2009]) as well as an anatomy of the early Viscounts Montagu (Michael C. Questier, Catholicism and Community in Early Modern England: Politics, Aristocratic Patronage and Religion, c. 1550–1640 [Cambridge, 2006]), to offer an especially vivid example of this method. The rich and previously untapped potential of the Blundell archives allows this work to stand not merely as a detailed piece of microhistory but as a teeming picture of the recusant imagination within its national and European context, which aims in turn to overhaul some long-standing perceptions lingering in the historiography of English Catholicism. Baker’s work invites us not merely to cast a skeptical eye over hoary notions of the recusant laity as the “passive victims” of exclusion and persecution but also to question how far their real activities matched their self-presentation as stoically loyal subjects of a Protestant realm.

The swathe of Catholic England opened up for historians by the Blundell manuscripts cuts across Lancashire patrician circles into the politicized taverns and coffeehouses of Restoration London and the exiled clerical institutions of France and the Low Countries. At the center of this world stood William Blundell himself—bustling, sociable, intellectually curious, and, as Baker contends, a rather more complex and conflicted figure than his own carefully choreographed image tended to suggest. On the surface, Blundell embodied a caricature of the type of recusant who had expended blood and treasure in order to extinguish taints of extremism and disloyalty from the English Catholic community. All but crippled by wounds received fighting for Charles I, he wore his credentials on his sleeve, serving as churchwarden of his local Anglican parish and articulating at every opportunity an ideal of the Catholic gentleman tending privately to his estates, gently observing a faith he kept contained within the walls of the family chapel. Yet to take Blundell at his word would, Baker argues, result in too neat and convenient a verdict. Beneath the quietist gauze, the squire of Little Crosby is unveiled here as a vigorous defender of the Catholic community, working to secure its survival and prosperity against the rigors of the English state. Blundell pressed before local Anglican notables the case for greater Catholic freedoms and used the same friendships to reach financial arrangements that shielded his estates from penal taxes and prohibitions. Away from the public gaze, he was an even more trenchant and somewhat less irenic upholder of his religious interest. On his estates, he manipulated leasehold systems to maximize control over the lives of his tenants, enabling him to keep alive his boast that Little Crosby remained free of beggars, alehouses, and Protestants. He concealed no less from Protestant associates the energy put into his role as an agent of European convents and seminaries: the sums of money lent with interest by Blundell to local Tories represented (unbeknownst to the recipients) part of a pattern of investments made on behalf of the Poor Clares at Rouen.

Baker builds his case by moving from Blundell’s public and religious affinities through to the inner life revealed by his reading habits and testified to in lengthy, thorough, and systematically organized commonplace books. Here, Blundell interrogated the political, moral, and spiritual condition of the world in which he lived, sketching out a narrative of recent European history that threw off the self-restraint of public Catholic discourse, to defend people, actions, and episodes from which recusants usually sought to disentangle themselves. In the privacy of his study, Blundell praised the policies of Queen Mary, defended the Irish rebellion of 1641, and even justified the raising of the Catholic League against Henri IV. If he reiterated his distaste for intolerance and persecution, he spelled out nonetheless a trenchant idea of the degenerate future awaiting any nation that had sliced itself apart from the bonds of Catholic unity. Yet, even in the light of these disclosures, Baker argues that it is not enough to see in his subject just a simple dichotomy between the peaceful public patriot and the repressed ideologue. Recurrently, as he ruminated over books and manuscripts collected from England and Europe, Blundell could slide away from his religious certainties to set down unspoken anxieties about certain dogmas retained within his church: doubts that arose in part from his attachment to the intuitions of Baconian science. If he kept from Protestant associates his feelings over the moral character of Charles II’s England, so Blundell shielded from his coreligionists a tense skepticism over the veracity of many miraculous claims, a series of aspersions on the judgment of St. Augustine, and some thoughts on the doctrine of original sin that pushed perilously at the boundaries of orthodox belief.

Early modern identities, so neatly packaged and deconstructed by secondary historians, were rarely fixed or stable. While retaining its primary focus on the culture of English Catholicism, Baker’s work repeatedly points the reader toward this larger conclusion, showing how an individual strove to make sense of a shifting political and intellectual landscape, probed those strands of his own thought that pulled in different directions, and wrestled with the gulf that could grow between an outward image and a set of inner convictions. A study of one man carries its own inescapable restrictions, and there are moments in this book where one feels that a more thorough attempt to contextualize Blundell within wider Catholic and gentry horizons would have assisted Baker’s case. But the work makes nonetheless for a gripping, sensitive, and insightful account of its subject, which manages at once to enhance and to challenge many ideas found within the existing canon of “recusant history.”