As Simon Johnson recognises at the start of this book, the English College at Lisbon is probably the least known of the colleges founded by exile Catholics, despite its 350-year existence. It was the only exile English college never to have Jesuit influence on its administration, as well as the only one not to number any martyrs amongst its alumni. Whether these two facts are behind its relatively low profile is a question for another study, as Johnson provides a narrative of the college's existence in this handsomely produced volume.

Relying predominantly on the surviving archive of the college, he traces the college's origins from an English residence for exile Catholic clergy in the city at the end of the sixteenth century, to its foundation in 1622 as part of a broader anti-Jesuit push. A key backer at this time was Dom Pedro Coutinho, a local aristocrat with an interest in English matters who helped the college navigate the patronage structures of the Habsburg world. The first students arrived in 1628 and the college's second president was the notorious Thomas White, alias Blacklo, to whom Johnson appears sympathetic even though questions surrounding his, and thus the college's, orthodoxy dogged the institution even decades after his death.

Financial issues loomed large in those early years, a problem Johnson identifies continued throughout the college's existence. Nevertheless, for Johnson the college's glory years were linked to the Anglo-Portuguese alliance following Catherine of Braganza's marriage to Charles ii. The period witnessed the college's influence grow in both Portugal and at home, with its former students populating the chapter that oversaw the English mission. Despite the influential devotional writer John Gother being an alumnus of the college, the eighteenth century saw it beset by a series of disputes that Johnson puts down to poor provision, both financial and in quality of training. As the century progressed, the number of Lisbonians on the English mission dwindled and, despite Johnson mounting a case for the defence, there is a feeling that the college was entering a terminal decline. Still, it managed to survive the Napoleonic wars, eighteenth-century Portuguese anti-clericalism and the country's move to a republic in the twentieth century, mainly thanks to its status as a British institution.

What it could not survive, in Johnson's opinion, was the changed world of post-emancipation English Catholicism and the return of the hierarchy in 1850. With no say in the college's running, the bishops had little interest in sending clergy to help staff it, or even men to be trained there as priests. In Johnson's telling, the college basically spent a century on the brink of collapse and finally, with the changes of Vatican II, the decline in priestly vocations and rapid deterioration of the buildings, the college closed in 1972.

Johnson is clearly comfortable wading through labyrinthine ecclesiastical bureaucracy and in this work succeeds in outlining the chronology of the college's existence, offering a springboard for future research into its place in global Catholicism.