This clever book is a response to John Bossy's dismissive description of early modern English Catholicism as “inertia to inertia in three generations,” based on a close study of the “entourages” (relatives, in-laws, tenants, clients, and servants) of the first and second viscounts Montague (The English Catholic Community, 1570–1850 [London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1975]). While the author's indebtedness to and indeed admiration of Bossy is evident, his research nonetheless overturns the received version. The English Catholic community was not, after all, inert, inept, or leaderless—or else why the fear it inspired? Nor was it marginalized. Questier moves beyond Bossy in exploring the Catholic community not just from within, but as it engaged the rest of English society. He finds that recusants were not divorced from their larger social and political context, as nearly all earlier studies have portrayed them (though John Aveling and Alan Davidson are notable exceptions). Seigneurial Catholicism was instead actively engaged with the political order at all levels; the laity did not let missionary clergy go it alone.

This is a much closer look at Catholic clerics and their relationships with their noble patrons than has previously been attempted. The “ageing revisionism” that portrays activist seminarist clergy as atypical is quite laid to rest in this volume (288). One need not limit the scope to Jesuits in seeking the clerical struggle for hearts and minds: Questier opens the hitherto ignored activities of noble chaplains and shows us an intellectual and pastoral activism, with an impact all out of proportion to the numbers of men involved, well into the seventeenth century. For seminarists and Jesuits alike, though, patronal support and political engagement were key.

Variation in how early modern governors perceived a Catholic threat made its contribution to lay Catholic activism. Elizabeth had no apparent difficulty with the first viscount entertaining her and serving her diplomatic ends—he even traveled to Spain in 1560 to “take the religious heat out of the Scottish question” (131) and participated actively (sometimes volubly) in Parliament: here was no cowering, marginalized recusant, but neither was there so terrified a queen as we sometimes think. Montague acted with some care, of course. Questier does an excellent job of decoding the messages in ritual display, as in the queen's visit to Cowdray during her 1591 progress—a study in determined Catholic construction of loyalist cues for the queen in the midst of wartime anxiety about internal divisions and Jesuit-inspired treason.

The author's focus on Sussex Catholics displays in microcosm the divisions that plagued the larger Catholic population. Clerics quarreled and laymen puzzled about issues like nonconformity, the succession, and allegiance, the nature of ecclesiastical hierarchy and discipline, and sacerdotalism. When the Sussex Deputy Lieutenants reported “a great variety of papists within the said shire,” they were actually more perceptive than generations of historians have been; a combination of good neighborhood and practical limits on the power of the early modern “state” allowed for a “large and intractable grey area between full nonconformity and full compliance” for Elizabethan and early Stuart lay Catholics (46). The first and second viscounts themselves exemplify the varieties that lay Catholicism could assume, reflecting the constant and often bitter disputes that raged among the clergy who tried to guide them. The second viscount (also Anthony Browne) was emphatically not inclined to his grandfather's compromise and conformism, yet even after the Powder Plot and his refusal to take the Oath of Allegiance in 1611, he remained active in local and occasionally higher-level politics (though he prudently absented himself from the House of Lords until 1621), and his entourage provided “a forum for debates about the future of the Catholic community in England” (287).

These quarrels, from the Appellant Controversy of the end of Elizabeth's reign to the Approbation Controversy of the 1620s, centered on polity, and especially the question of re-establishing episcopal oversight of English Catholics—a notion anathema to the Jesuits, who had their own agenda and wanted no secular priest looking over their shoulders. But this was not just a clerical quarrel: the “pro-episcopalian lobby” (380) found lay patrons, including preeminently the second viscount Montagu, though he also had Franciscans, Benedictines, and even a few Jesuits among his beneficiaries. Questier makes the very important point that conflicts within the Catholic community were not between clergy and their lay patrons, but were among patron-client alliances. Patronage was complicated. In Montagu's case, it was also active: he did not just distribute largesse and protection to his clients, he also participated avidly in their debates, even writing to Pope Paul V in 1605 urging episcopacy for English Catholics, and eventually penning a 700-page defense of Richard Smith (Lady Montagu's chaplain and later titular bishop for English Catholics).

The pro-episcopalians saw their proposed reform of English Catholic polity as a coming into line with King Charles's love of bishops, and so likely to bring them some political advantage. There was an “empathetic link between Laudianism and a certain strand of contemporary Catholicism” (495) that would in the end do Charles's reputation among zealous Protestants no good at all. Questier may overstate the case when he puts the repercussions of the Approbation Controversy at the center of the Caroline regime's collapse; however, he does succeed in showing the Catholic community very much on the national stage in the 1630s—fully justifying puritan alarm. When Catholics joined the king in arms in the 1640s, demonstrating the cohesiveness that transcended their internecine strife, they clinched the puritan argument.

The book is overlong and contains much extraneous detail, unnecessary quotes, and some redundancy. Cambridge editors used to be made of sterner stuff. Still, the book does repay the effort required to slog through it. “Bossyworld,” as Questier so disparagingly labels it (479), is finally left in the dust.