Recent studies of Catholic families in early modern England has drawn attention to the ways in which they navigated the political problems associated with their religion by drawing on the social and familial capital they had accrued among their non-Catholic neighbors and from the support of their co-religionists. This reflects two important shifts in the relevant historiography. First, there has been a move away from a recusant history, which emphasized the Catholic character of their lives at the expense of discussing relations with non-Catholic neighbors and kin, as revealed in the influential and important work of John Aveling, a close reading of which shows the Yorkshire families he studied to be deeply involved with their Protestant neighbors, though he tended to downplay this, focusing instead on the conflicts between them in matters of local politics. Second, the growth of women's history has accorded Catholic women a proper place in the history of these families and opened up a wider understanding of the networks and strategies of Catholic households, shown for example in the work of Michael Questier on the Montagues and in Peter Marshall and Geoffrey Scott, eds., Catholic Gentry in English Society: The Throckmortons of Coughton Hall from Reformation to Emancipation (2009). Each of these works informs Susan Cogan's Catholic Social Networks in Early Modern England: Kinship, Gender, and Coexistence. Cogan also focuses on the greater landowners, cutting through the usual county parameters and tracing connections of several households across the midlands, chiefly between 1570 and 1640. Her study opens up a much wider context as families like the Catesby's owned extensive estates throughout Warwickshire and Northamptonshire with an extensive kinship group in both counties, which in 1605 lay at the heart of the Gunpowder conspiracy, though it may be too strong on Cogan's part to say that it was from this that the plot was born (94).

Elsewhere the wide regional links of Catholic families also reflected wide devotional links, as in the case of the Throckmorton family, which included several Protestant members, one of whom, Sir Arthur, was charged with returning confiscated recusant property in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot, receiving “the outcries of my unkind kindred” for his pains (212). What these examples reveal is the persistent way that politics intruded on social and kinship networks in this period and disrupted their long-standing stability. The antiquity of these networks, often formed in the fifteenth or early sixteenth century, is central to Cogan's argument, and she draws attention to an important point in stressing the social and emotional depth of these links. Antiquity was important to all landowners, and she shows how, in their emphasis on heraldry in their buildings, Catholic gentry shared a common cultural trope with their Protestant neighbors. However, as Peter Lake has shown, antiquity was a contested claim at this time and, during the difficulties of the regime in the closing decades of Elizabeth's reign, Catholic noblemen and gentry blamed the bad counsel of the queen's chief advisers and her refusal to heed the advice of the traditional (and Catholic) leaders of local and national government for the problems the Crown was facing at home and abroad. When Thomas Tresham placed heraldic shields on his buildings, he was implicitly demonstrating the superiority of his lineage to those of his (relatively) newer neighbors like the Montagues of Boughton or the Knightleys of Fawsley who had displaced his family in county government. Far from providing “opportunities for concord” (156), one might characterize Tresham's building scheme as a form of cultural aggression in the face of political decline: a point driven home, perhaps, by the avowedly Catholic devotional emblems that also adorned those same houses and lodges.

For all his networks and kinship links, Tresham lived among broadly hostile neighbors, and his story is littered with legal and physical disputes between him, or his tenants, and their neighbors, occasionally reaching Star Chamber. It was this history, despite his genuine protestations of loyalty, that made the government wary of Tresham's intentions when, in the mid-1590s, his leases still required tenants to provide men “fytte for service” (195) if he or his son were called to serve the Crown overseas. In such difficult political circumstances, women acquired agency, not only in managing the households in the absence of imprisoned husbands and keeping the networks alive, but also in political terms. This was mainly carried out through petitioning, either through Protestant friends or intermediaries or directly to the Privy Council. To return to the Treshams. In 1583 Sir Thomas's wife Muriel (née Throckmorton) secured his removal from prison to house arrest at his home at Hoxton, east of the city, following letters to friends and family at Court and an appeal to the Privy Council. In 1590 she was again petitioning the Privy Council and the archbishop of Canterbury, this time as an agent for his imprisoned husband, appearing before them in person on several occasions. In contrast, Elizabeth Throckmorton petitioned the archbishop of Canterbury in 1612 for help in securing lands against the claims of a predatory uncle, and a later Lady Tresham petitioned Charles I for the return of her marriage portion as her husband, serving in the king's army of Flanders, had abandoned her. Cogan rightly draws attention to the importance of this “citizenship” activity of elite women and their interactions with the state, and to the fact that Catholic women were heavily represented (185–93). Undoubtedly the networks of these Midland Catholic families protected them from the worst ravages of the penalties of the law, but they also proved fragile at times of crisis, as in the 1580s and the years after 1605.

These networks stretched widely geographically and ran deep chronologically, and they incorporated women as important agents in sustaining and extending them. Whether by the early seventeenth century “England was moving toward acceptance of religious plurality and that many English people prized familial, social and community harmony over an atmosphere of dispute” is less clear (252). In noting the open female networks of the late sixteenth century, Cogan remarks that these became more closed, even insular, in later decades, citing the Vaux and Throckmorton families as examples.