The title of this book is pretty bold: it invites a comparison with John Bossy's magisterial study, The English Catholic Community, 1570–1850, published in 1975. Anyone who is looking for a sweeping social, demographic, and administrative treatment of English Catholicism from Elizabeth to Victoria should stick with Bossy. Gabriel Glickman, on the other hand, has provided a compelling analysis of English Catholic politics and culture in a period that is poorly served by Bossy's book, from the Glorious Revolution to the mid-1700s. In part because he sought to argue that eighteenth-century English Catholicism was developing into a moderate, tolerant, and distinctly English variety of religious nonconformity, Bossy avoided any prolonged discussion of Jacobitism or loyalty to the exiled Catholic Stuarts. From Bossy's perspective, Jacobite tendencies set English Catholics apart from their compatriots by stimulating an aggressive, backward-looking political commitment. Glickman, by contrast, argues that Jacobitism was central to English Catholic identity in the decades after 1688 for all but a small number of recusants. Far from isolating them from their compatriots, Jacobite loyalties, according to Glickman, made Catholics acutely aware of national issues and strengthened their ties to Anglican Tories as well as to the patriots of the country opposition. The coalescence of what Glickman calls a “Jacobite Church” allowed English Catholics to maintain their separateness from Rome, while paving the way for the emergence of enlightened approaches to religious accommodation after 1730.

This is certainly a daring thesis, although it might not be seen as particularly earthshaking, because it is restricted to the relatively narrow confines of English recusancy. Glickman demonstrates convincingly, however, that the little world of aristocratic and gentry Catholics in England was closely connected, through a multiplicity of educational, professional, and familial bonds, with the much bigger world of European Catholicism. The English part of that Catholic world included thriving colleges in Spain, France, the southern Netherlands, and Rome, as well as émigré military, diplomatic, and mercantile communities throughout Europe. Above all, it included the exiled Stuart court. This amounted to considerable clout within the diverse and often conflicted sphere of international Catholicism. The restoration of a European-wide perspective is perhaps the most significant contribution of Glickman's book. He points out that English Catholics were educated in other parts of Europe, traveled and lived there, fought and served as diplomatic envoys there (he says little, unfortunately, about their business activities). They looked to the Stuart court for direction at least as much as they looked to Rome. After all, the “king over the water” remained their legitimate ruler and the leading national representative of their faith. He had a considerable, and increasing, voice in nominating English vicars apostolic, as well as the abbots of English monasteries abroad. The Stuart court was a center for Catholic politics and the formulation of religious policy, especially after 1693, when the advisors of James II forced him to recognize officially the rights of the Protestant Church of England. The court also harbored religious dissidents, like the Jansenists, and it later encouraged enlightened Catholic writers like Andrew Ramsay, Nathaniel Hooke, and Simon Berington.

In short, the unique identity of English Catholicism, which Bossy celebrated, owed a great deal to its Jacobite affiliations. The degree of English Catholic alienation from Rome depended in large part on how the exiled monarch was being treated by the Vatican. Driven by hostility to France that often spilled over onto dependents of the French king, the papacy was no reliable ally of the Stuarts before the 1720s. A strong backer of the Austrian Habsburgs against the obnoxious French Bourbons, the See of Rome looked with some satisfaction on the Glorious Revolution, and it later moved toward a rapprochement with those staunch allies of Austria, the house of Hanover. As Glickman emphasizes, the efforts by Bishop John Stonor and Dr. Thomas Strickland to negotiate an acceptable oath of recusant submission to the Hanoverian monarch George I have to be seen in the light of international politics. Most English Catholics, however, rejected the attempt, which they saw as a threat not only to their Jacobite sentiments but to their identity as a largely self-governing community, distanced from papal authority. The pope warmed up to the Stuarts after the failure of the oath proposal, a point not given enough attention by Glickman, but the Vatican always seemed ready to abandon them if a better political option arose. It finally ditched them decisively after the death of James III in 1766, in spite of the efforts of Cardinal York, the late monarch's younger son, to retain papal favor for his brother, Charles Edward.

Glickman's treatment of the Jacobite impact on English Catholicism is detailed, well informed, and fast paced. His last chapter, on the roots of an enlightened Catholic approach to religious and political issues in the writings of adherents of the “Jacobite Church” will provide intellectual historians with much to ponder. His book can be faulted for not comparing the English case with that of Scots or Irish Catholics and not paying enough attention to mission activities, the embryonic growth of urban Catholicism, or social networking among the English Catholic gentry, but other historians have already dealt with these subjects, and Glickman's focus is very clearly fixed on English political and cultural issues. While his work will not replace that of Bossy, it adds a vitally important dimension to what is already known about eighteenth-century English Catholicism. In his account, as in Bossy's, recusants remained distinctly English, but they were also members of a universal church and an international community. The tension they experienced in negotiating their religious identity led them into more turmoil and disagreement than historians have usually been willing to acknowledge. It also guided them toward more exciting intellectual pathways, even toward a Catholic Enlightenment.