Michael Questier's encyclopedic study of the prominent recusant Browne family, viscounts Montague, and their circle is noteworthy in several ways. Despite the dearth of surviving Montague family papers, Questier has unearthed a remarkable amount of information on this Sussex family and their religious and political networks. His reinterpretations of the Lords Montague are provocative and will provide much food for thought for historians of early modern English Catholicism. Furthermore, Questier's study brings recusant family history firmly into the twenty-first century, moving beyond antiquarianism, hagiography, and a clerically dominated narrative, and placing laymen, laywomen, and clerics—with their sometimes competing religious and political aspirations—together at the center of his study. Most importantly, he demonstrates the significance of ostensibly internecine Catholic disputes over clerical, particularly episcopal, authority to the broader narrative of early modern English history, arguing that such controversies bear a “family likeness” to similar wrangling over appropriate ecclesiastical power structures among early modern English Protestants (340).

Questier's findings belie the contention that English Catholicism was isolated and in a state of terminal decline in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Rather, Questier depicts a dynamic constellation of individual Catholic “entourages” that variously cooperated with and conspired against each other for influence within the Catholic world (domestic and international) and with the English government. Elites constructed such groups through blood, marriage, and patronage of clerics. Far from being static entities, these webs of association were flexible and sometimes fraught with fissures. Questier is careful to emphasize the fluidity of Catholic opinion and to avoid oversimplifying the clerical factions that were so much a part of early modern English Catholicism. The well-known, often vitriolic, disputes between English Catholic secular clergy and regular clergy, such as the Jesuits, “would probably not have made it into the public sphere” (107–8) without the influence of laypeople's familial networks that “actually underwrote and amplified such quarrels” (107).

The Montague entourage provides an excellent case study through which to observe how such networks both functioned and malfunctioned. Sir Anthony Browne, first viscount Montague, is remembered largely because of his famous speech in the 1559 parliament against the final supremacy bill; he was the sole temporal peer to oppose its passage. Questier argues persuasively that this speech has been widely misinterpreted as a moderate response to religious change and Montague himself simplistically characterized as a “loyalist.” Instead, he asserts that the speech was “as thorough an indictment of the regime's policy as it is possible to imagine” (123), which bordered on a justification for civil disobedience (138). No uncompromising recusant, Montague was a conformist, but associated with individuals with a variety of positions on the recusant question. Although he was not a partisan of the “new clergy” (seminarists, such as the Jesuits), his broader entourage showed some influence from them.

Questier traces changes in the religious tenor of the Montague circle after the first viscount's death in 1592, when his widow, Lady Magdalen, rose to prominence. Under her influence, the Montague network's brand of Catholicism was “radicalised, or at least refined and concentrated” (213). Questier demonstrates that a Catholic household such as the dowager viscountess's did not function within a politically irrelevant, gentrified bubble, obsessed with nostalgic attempts to recreate pre-Reformation religiosity, but rather was both devoted to traditional religious activities and actively engaged in the significant issues of the day. Questier's account of Lady Magdalen provides important evidence of the centrality of women who were neither nuns nor saints to early modern Catholicism.

When the first viscount's grandson, Anthony Maria Browne, the second viscount, took sole control of the entourage after Lady Magdalen's death in 1608, he moved the family in a more religiously aggressive direction than had his grandfather, going so far as to refuse to take the oath of allegiance in 1611. Questier argues for the Montague family's centrality to struggles to chart the future of England's Catholics, asserting that “the second viscount's kin and patronage network was the groundwork for the construction of ” the clerical faction that was essentially “the heirs of the appellants” (329). By the 1620s and 1630s, Questier asserts, the Montague entourage was of paramount importance to the quest of some “hierarchalist” English Catholics to render their religion more palatable to the Stuart regime.

Questier's discussion of the appellant dispute, and later approbation controversy, over different elements of episcopal jurisdiction within English Catholicism is especially significant, since he removes analysis of these conflicts from a vacuum. The players in these disputes sought to appeal to the English government by arguing that, were their side to emerge victorious, they would be the more successful at ensuring that Catholics acted as good English subjects. Questier demonstrates the many parallels that such dissension within the Catholic ranks shared with the presbyterian agitation within the Church of England. In fact, Catholic and Protestant opponents of the Jesuits often overtly equated them with puritans and separatists, as enemies of ecclesiastical discipline. In turn, English Catholic opponents of an English Catholic bishop couched their own critiques of episcopacy and its alleged worldiness in “quasi-puritan” terms (418). Questier also points out the resemblance between Bishop Richard Smith's eventual demand for approbation (the power to license Catholic clerics to hear confessions) and the controversial subscription campaigns within the Church of England and notes how Laudian rhetoric found a receptive audience in those Catholics with pro-episcopal leanings.

Additionally, Questier's book contains a persuasive critique of the seigneurialisation thesis and valuable discussions of: the rise and fall of Bishop Smith, the range of Catholic thinking on the sacrament of confirmation, and Catholics’ involvement in the negotiations over the Spanish and French matches. The book's appendices are useful; the genealogical one is vital for successful navigation through a text so thick with names. Although the second viscount exits the narrative almost imperceptibly when his death garners only brief mention (470), that is a minor annoyance. Questier's prodigiously researched, often witty, book is an example of politically engaged family history at its best, providing a detailed and thought-provoking analysis of how the Montague entourage served as an important locus for debate over crucial elements of early modern English Catholics’ religious and political identities.