So wrote Richard Watson—Church of England clergyman and royalist writer—in May 1650 from the Dutch city of Breda. Almost ten years later, a jubilant Charles II would issue from this same location a declaration of religious freedom and invite a tactical lapse in memory for those Civil War combatants who recognized the Stuart succession. In 1650, however, Watson had good reason to despair. At the time of his writing, Watson had been warily observing the negotiations taking place in the town between Charles II and representatives of the Scottish Covenanters. The Scottish alliance was, as Ronald Hutton has observed, one born of grudging pragmatism and opportunism: renewed hopes for a Stuart restoration were purchased at the cost of Charles's recognition of the Scottish kirk and parliament. These anticipated later concessions that would see Charles reluctantly sign the covenants and adjoin his cause to that of the Church of Scotland in opposition to both his conscience and counsel.Footnote ² Watson, sidelined by his staunch dislike of the Scottish Presbyterians and opposed to the negotiations on principle, lamented that the treaty “hath been carried on with strange privacie,” leaving news of Scottish terms to the mercy of unflattering rumor and hearsay. Watson's own predictions for the outcome of the negotiations were bleak. In the course of recent days, he had witnessed the Scottish party debating amongst themselves “what way best to take to remove the Kings Chaplaines,” noting to fellow royalist and exile William Edgeman that, once this had been accomplished, “ye fine new pageant will be seen . . . in their preachments.”Footnote ³ While some among the royalist party welcomed the renewal of military efforts within the Three Kingdoms, even at such a dear cost, a sense of sacrifice and compromise was unavoidable in the production of “a gigantic lie which neither party had intended to produce.”Footnote ⁴ To onlookers like Watson and Edgeman, however, such grim pageants only served to herald the demise of their church and the onset of further dislocations as the realities of exile settled in. Such concessions in the name of the Stuart cause were enough, Watson posited, to make “every honest subjects heart ake.”Footnote ⁵

For other royalist exiles, however, both the Established Church and its liturgy remained decidedly alive, if maimed and disoriented. Gathering in the private chapel of Sir Richard Browne, the royalist diplomat in Paris, and under the chaplaincy of John Cosin, dean of Peterborough, many Protestant royalists recast their newfound hardship in familiar religious terms. Whether forced into exile by parliamentary ordinance or voluntarily following the Stuarts in hopes of restoration, those who attended services at Browne's chapel turned to Scripture and divine example in order to comprehend defeat.Footnote ⁶ In addition to Cosin, clergymen such as Richard Steward, dean of St. Paul's, and John Earle, translator of Eikon Basilike into Latin and former chancellor of Salisbury cathedral, steered the imagination of their audience to the temptation of Christ, the doubts of Saint Thomas, the trials of the Israelites, and, inevitably, original sin, in hopes of lending insight and providing guidance to those in attendance.Footnote ⁷ Records of these sermons kept by those in attendance suggest that the relevance of these themes in creating new continuities were not lost on the disillusioned royalists. For instance, in June 1650—shortly before Charles II grudgingly signed the covenants in Scotland and de facto endorsed Presbyterianism—John Evelyn reflected on a sermon of Cosin's, noting that

Such reflections helped to not only suggest the church's continuity amid apparent disruption, but to reinforce the place of these Protestants as God's chosen, even when Satan's “cursed Instruments” had temporarily severed them from the churches and chapels of normal observance. To these ends, Browne's position as ambassador to the French court helped to provide for signs of outward continuity within the chapel, including fine damask for Cosin's Easter Communion services. The latter, though grateful for these coverings, nevertheless could not help but note with a tone of regret “what condition wee are [in] for ye performance of our divine service & ye reception of those yt have a mind to attend it.”Footnote ⁹ The desire for continuity, as would so often be the case, clashed with the harsh realities of material need and disruption.

What had become painfully apparent to the likes of Watson, Cosin, and Browne was the threat that exile—forced or otherwise—posed to the resilience of their devotional world and those of their royalist companions. Negotiating between the principles of their common creed and the necessities of acquiring aid, many royalists were now being forced to reorient themselves, not only geographically, but in ideological terms. The challenges of exile required that these royalists retrace their beliefs relative to the new confessional latitudes of their dispossessed king, the fate of their dispersed church, and the turbulent confessional waters of Continental Europe in which they were now immersed. Under such circumstances, locating the contours of royalist religious life demands analysis of not only the methods of survival but also those practices to which they clung, those they refashioned, and those they jettisoned for the sake of king, community, or conscience.

This article, therefore, seeks to assess the devotional landscape of these exiled royalists through these lenses of mobility and allegiance. As I show, exile posed a significant challenge to the foundations of locality and nationhood that, as Alexandra Walsham and Raymond Gillespie have vividly illustrated, defined much of the devotional world of early modern communities.Footnote ¹⁰ Read as an exercise in boundary definition and the maintenance of clear devotional “spaces” amid this enforced dislocation, the problems posed to royalist identity became all the more pronounced.Footnote ¹¹ Once forced beyond familiar boundaries and made to relocate these identities in foreign, often hostile environments, the immediate need to forge alliances and facilitate survival left the ties between royalism and modes of devotion all the more ambiguous, straining languages of inclusion and exclusion while demanding a clear sense of identity at the center. As I argue, charting the processes by which royalists responded to these crises provides insights into not only the nature of royalism as a creed but also the broader devotional and cultural frameworks in which it was set.

Royalists had, of course, been challenged from the outset of the civil wars by the various foundations of their own creed. As a growing body of research has shown, royalist languages of allegiance during the course of the civil wars of the 1640s (the “Wars of the Three Kingdoms”) were remarkable in their heterodoxy, affixing the cause of Charles I and monarchy (not necessarily indivisibly) atop a much broader collection of political, religious, and cultural concerns. Thus, to long-standing discussions regarding the particular constitutional frameworks of royalist allegiance—most notably articulated by David L. Smith's distinctions between “constitutionalist” and “absolutist” royalisms—have been added analyses of royalism's diverse manifestations within wider English and “British” contexts, including Cornwall, Wales, and Ireland.Footnote ¹² Such diversity has also met with, and in no small part driven, further exploration of the confessional limits of royalism, charting not only the mobilization of Protestant adherents of the established church—largely thought to be the “prototypical” royalists—but also Catholics and Nonconformists.Footnote ¹³ This appreciation of royalism as a “variegated, complex, heterogeneous and interesting creed” capable of spanning seemingly incompatible cultural concerns has made the articulation of a single “royalism” nearly impossible. Though loosely joined by a common belief in their desire to see monarchy survive, royalists could easily be fractured by internecine struggles over the precise meaning of allegiance and regularly voiced suspicions over who constituted a trustworthy ally. Indeed, as Andrew Hopper has recently shown, such allegiances were fluid and contingent well beyond the outbreak of total conflict (that is, across the Three Kingdoms) in 1642. Changes in military fortunes, political shifts, crises of conscience, or simple opportunism brought about new delineations and subsequent refashionings.Footnote ¹⁴ Out of these shifts and reinforcements came languages through which to condemn treachery and uphold the virtues of loyalty; yet, characteristically, these often proved incompatible with one another when forced to describe and accommodate multiconfessional and multiethnic variations.Footnote ¹⁵ As David Scott has recently observed, whatever the foundations of royalist identity within England, “inviting Irish Catholics and Scottish Covenanters to restore the English monarchy challenged royalist thinking” on all fronts, straining notions of unity under God and king and suggesting instead a fractured and dissonant pluralism.Footnote ¹⁶ Necessarily a broad church in its search for allies across the Three Kingdoms, royalism, in effect, often struggled throughout the 1640s to preach what it was practicing for fear of alienating such a varied congregation.

Difficult though the 1640s may have been, the exile of the 1650s would prove all the more challenging for royalist allegiances, not only by plunging many Protestant royalists in a sea of Catholicism, but also forcing further redefinitions of tolerable alliance across confessions and cultures spanning early modern Europe. While the civil wars did much to dislocate many royalists from the “spaces and places” that shaped their confessional sense of identity, exile necessarily severed these connections. Particularly for those forced into exile by parliamentary ordinance, this dislocation represented an intentional breach with the localities and communities that had often driven their sense of identity and lent devotional meaning through material connections and tradition. This, in turn, threatened to deny these royalists confessional and political unity by imposing penury and impermanence. Exile, as such, became an exercise in not only retaining a sense of continuity amid the unfamiliar, but also one of reconstitution and reimagination within these new spaces.Footnote ¹⁷

Precisely where exile was to unfold hinged not only on the location of the Stuarts to whom these royalists adhered, but also the capacity of the latter to sustain themselves amid financial and political strain. Three courts in exile were maintained by the Stuarts in this period: from 1644, Queen Henrietta Maria largely resided in Paris at the hospitality of the Louvre; James, duke of York, maintained his own retinue from 1648 onwards, initially in Paris and later in the services of the Spanish armies; and, especially from 1651 following his defeat and escape from Worcester, the king's own court. The last of these was, itself, itinerant, moving from Paris to Cologne in 1654 in anticipation of the Anglo-French Treaty of Westminster and then to Brussels in 1656 under the protection of the Spanish crown. Here, numbers can be seen to have fluctuated as locations and fortunes changed, variously dispersing and reassembling in accordance with royal funds and the hospitality of the European courts.Footnote ¹⁸ Beyond court payrolls and correspondence, however, there remained a much broader network of royalists embedded in the armies, courts, and colleges of Europe who served the king's cause but were not permanently resident within it. For instance, contemporary estimates of Irish Catholic soldiers in the service of Charles II place the number at more than thirty thousand, while records of the Commonwealth and Protectorate list dozens of Irish soldiers and statesmen exiled from the Three Kingdoms but virtually absent from royalist correspondence networks. One contemporary estimate of Irish Catholic soldiers driven into Continental military service though still nominally in the service of Charles II places the number at more than thirty-thousand displaced.Footnote ¹⁹ The realities of mobility have even prevented the enumeration and tracking of those most often (though often mistakenly) assumed to have been the most stalwart of royalists: the clergy of the formerly established church. Though many remained unwaveringly devoted to the continuation of their church, both the demands of their flock and the realities of survival worked against the establishment of any clearly delineated or fixed community.Footnote ²⁰

What such numbers and movements suggest, however, is the contingent and discontinuous nature of the royalist community at large during this period. In particular, they emphasize the dominant role played by mobility and disruption in the establishment of a common royalist cause. The wider phenomenon of exile in the early modern period has been studied largely for its capacity to create common cause out of such dislocations. For the mid-sixteenth-century Marian exiles, the experience helped to connect animosities over Tudor dynastic politics to the cause of European Protestantism, with Geneva offering a rallying point for the alienated. Likewise, for Catholic exiles of the Dutch Revolt, it forced the creation of a common identity clustered around confessional militancy. Even when the Stuarts once again went into exile in the 1690s, dislocation provided supporters of the then-openly Catholic dynasty with a more immediate connection to the papacy and Catholic Europe, further legitimizing its cause.Footnote ²¹ However, as I argue, the mobility forced upon the royalist exiles of the 1650s seriously undermined any such attempts at creating a unified sense of purpose and identity. In particular, the confessional continuities that were provided in other exile communities by a like-minded host (for instance, the Marian exiles in Geneva) were negated by the cooperation of Protestant states with the Commonwealth regime (most notably the Dutch Republic before the 1652–54 Anglo-Dutch War) and the more immediate desire to engage with the affluent Catholic states of Europe. Where both predecessors and subsequent exiles could entrench themselves in the certainties of their co-religionists, the royalist exiles found themselves simultaneously in need of cross-confessional aid and beset by questions posed by what had previously been the religious “other,” now transformed into the prospective ally.

With these factors in mind, I approach the question of mobility and the royalist devotional landscape in three sections. Each of these will address different—though overlapping—dimensions of boundary maintenance. First, by looking at both personal correspondence and printed propaganda, I will reconstruct the responses of the “Anglican” royalists among the exiles and the terms used to reframe their allegiances.Footnote ²² By contrasting personal doubts expressed among these royalists with the printed propaganda of the exiled court (specifically Bishop John Bramhall's 1653 Answer to M. de la Millitière), I will set out the tensions between the confessional priorities of the court and devotional concerns among the royalists more generally. This will then allow me to assess the terms by which royalists were willing to extend the boundaries of allegiance to incorporate Catholic interests, once again articulating the terms by which alternate confessions—Catholicism, in particular, within the context of exile—could be trusted within the rubric of loyalty to the Stuarts and monarchy more generally. As I will show, the utility of Irish Catholic intermediaries in these contexts—as interlocutors and representatives with Catholic Europe—helped to broaden and legitimize Stuart restoration efforts while also pushing at the limits of royalist conceptions of religious and cultural identity. Finally, through the example of two prominent Catholic converts—Murrough O'Brien, Lord Inchiquin, and George Digby, Lord Bristol—I will gauge royalist reaction to conversion and, in the process, seek to delineate the boundaries of trust in which the exiles operated.

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Few of the adherents of the formerly Established Church who left the Three Kingdoms at the close of the civil wars seized upon their newfound latitude (both geographically and in spiritual terms) with the optimism and industry of the Huguenot turned Church of England clergyman Isaac Basire. Traveling throughout Europe during the course of the 1650s with the commendation of Queen Henrietta Maria, Basire attempted to forge a union between the Church of England and the Greek Orthodox Church, translating the Book of Common Prayer into Greek along the way.Footnote ²³ In spite of, or due to, such travels, Basire remained resolute in his belief in the power of the Church of England liturgy. Basire praised the Prayer Book in a letter to Richard Browne, saying that, having “travelled many Countryes, and studied sundry Churches . . . I speake it in Gods hearing, Next ye holy Bible, I thinke I may safely say of the Common Prayer Booke of the Church of England . . . [that] I find none like yt.”Footnote ²⁴ Basire's target audience in his own preaching—the Catholics of the Isle of Zante (or Zakynthos, in western Greece)—fell short of agreeing with him, driving him off the island.Footnote ²⁵ Nevertheless, Basire's convictions as to the purity of the church's rite and the imminent opportunity to preach its merits remained, driving further travels through the Balkans and Ottoman Empire.

Other clerical and lay adherents of the formerly established church—in both its English and Irish variants—were not so wholly confident of either the model to be preserved or how providence now directed them. As Jeffrey Collins has noted, some members of the clergy found the political independence and innovation of these circumstances liberating. Newfound space and freedom allowed many to espouse the sort of high church theology and episcopal authority that had often strained to operate in tandem with the awkwardly articulated Erastianism and perceived innovations of the Caroline and Jacobean Churches.Footnote ²⁶ Others, in contrast, seized the opportunity to produce, as Anthony Milton has shown, the first “systematic justifications of the historical and doctrinal basis of [Charles I's] Personal Rule.”Footnote ²⁷ The confluence of such trends—newfound space for debate and the pressing need to prop up what little remained of the Caroline foundations of church and state—brought about dangerously divisive collisions, both in print and in private correspondence. The Catholic writer John Austin, for instance, writing in 1651 under the pseudonym William Burchley as part of a series entitled The Christian Moderator, provoked one such flurry of activity by suggesting that the present political situation demanded the extension of toleration to both Independents and Roman Catholics. Here, Austin maintained that the settlement of “peace [in] the Commonwealth” necessitated the articulation of common religious bonds through a “summary of belief” common to all Christians—Anglican, Presbyterian, or Catholic.Footnote ²⁸ Anglican clergy and laymen responded to such overtures with rallying cries against perceived innovations, hoping to reinvigorate Protestant virtue amid fears of Catholic “seduction.” Such calls to arms would, it was hoped, strengthen the boundaries between Protestantism and Catholicism that the exigencies of the period appeared to be eroding.Footnote ²⁹ Francis Cheynell, for instance, who had resigned his post as president of St John's College, Oxford, after refusing to take the Oath of Engagement (and thereby swear loyalty to the new Commonwealth), condemned the Christian Moderator’s willingness to sacrifice true religion in exchange for subjects “true to the State.”Footnote ³⁰

For those clergy in exile, however, the defense of true religion was weighed carefully alongside considerations of their duty to their flock and the spiritual model to which they should adhere. The aforementioned Richard Watson, resident in The Hague, made clear that the church had to remain sure of itself and its rites even in the midst of such trials and at the price of the present sufferings.Footnote ³¹ Writing again to William Edgeman, he acknowledged the role that action on the part of the clergy of the church might serve either through their example, gaining purity and clarity of vision through prayer and suffering, or in confronting attacks against king and church (not necessarily in tandem) by engaging directly in controversy against common foes. While Watson made initial forays on these fronts, including an anti-Presbyterian tract published in The Hague, by 1652 he had opted for inwardness and reflection.Footnote ³² Resigning himself to a life of penance and being “in the world as not of it,” Watson hoped to provide some measure of spiritual guidance and inspiration for his fellow exiles while also being “wash[ed] clean” by his “many teares.”Footnote ³³ Here, Watson's engagement with these new devotional latitudes clashes with the air of opportunism shown in Basire's experience. Both were acutely aware of the challenges posed by dislocation and the need to provide a pastoral example, but where Watson fulfilled that role through sedentary controversial efforts, Basire seized upon the evangelical potential of mobility.

These moral quandaries among the exiled clergy, when contrasted with those of the Protestant laity, are relatively well known. Yet, while it seems, as Ken Fincham and Stephen Taylor have argued, that many clergymen weighed carefully their duties to flock and king, there nevertheless remained an enduring tension among the laity between religious observance and the practicalities of survival. Rumor, in particular, amplified disillusionment and preyed upon miscommunication between royalist parties in exile. Christopher, first baron Hatton, for instance, wrote despairingly from Paris in August 1650 of rumors that Charles II no longer upheld the Book of Common Prayer: “[i]tt is, as I am credibly informed,” wrote Hatton,

Hatton's desolation, like Watson's only months earlier, arose in no small part from Charles II's covenanting with the Scots. To Hatton, such actions appeared to present at best religious compromise on the occasion of victory in Scotland or, at worst, Charles's total disowning of the Anglican rite. The space that dislocation permitted for the circulation of such rumors could, in effect, misrepresent the state of the royalist cause as easily as it authenticated it and allow for the persistence of disillusioning news where a more centralized and cohesive royalist community might have dispelled it.

Others, however, proved less anxious, adopting instead a certain resignation towards providence even amid Charles's apparent compromises. The great Irish Protestant magnate and former Lord Lieutenant of Ireland James Butler, marquis of Ormond, wrote reassuringly to fellow councilor Secretary Edward Nicholas, shortly after the Battle of Worcester (when Charles had gone missing) that:

Even upon Charles's miraculous reappearance, Ormond remained convinced that “though it has pleased God to lay us flat upon the ground for our sins, hee hath not forbidden us to looke about how wee may rise.”Footnote ³⁶ Providing more material advice as to how best to cope with exile, Ormond suggested that Nicholas remain in “a proper and advantageous place to lay hold of the opportunity I hope God will offer us with effect to shew our zeal to his Church, and duty to the King, and our affection to our inthralled [sic] Country.”Footnote ³⁷ Dislocation, in this instance, served as a reminder not only of defeat, but also provided a space into which the devout could peer in order to seek out God's divine purpose and to confirm personal belief. Mobility, in effect, forced a turn towards the immateriality of devotion and the search for providence within as well as without.

Disrupting this mixture of passive and active obedience to the will of God, however, was a more immediate need to react to the challenges of exile and, as often, reevaluate and reformulate convictions as the religious landscape changed. The precise relationship between the monarchy and the Established Church was never so completely fortified by practice or force of argument that it could not be subjected to second-guessing or disillusionment. As Anthony Milton has observed in the clergyman Peter Heylyn's criticism of the emergent “cult” of Charles the Martyr for its apparent lauding of impotent kingship, previously accepted tropes of royalist allegiance to king and church as indivisible could be shaken by awkward remembrances and the cold realities of defeat.Footnote ³⁸ In some cases, this precipitated a wholesale revisiting of the relationship between religion and state. In yet another (surprisingly open) exchange between Nicholas and Ormond, both men spoke of duty to the king in religious terms, Ormond remarking (with allusion to 1 Samuel 15:23) that rebellion could “no more than witchcraft be legitimated by hopes or certainty of private or publick preservation.”Footnote ³⁹ While both men conventionally blamed poor counsel for Charles I's demise, they nevertheless thought the “orthodox” view among “orthodox men” to be that “you owe the King and Church a subduing of even just resentments, and a resignation of yourself to the way affairs are in.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Even amid Charles II's negotiations with the Scots, Ormond added that “in lawful commands (and such certainly is the defense or recovery of their just rights) we are to yield active obedience to Papist, nay to Pagan princes, if we be their subjects: and why not as well at least to a Presbyterian king, I know not.”Footnote ⁴¹ Occasioned by unprecedented acts of negotiation and concession by the king, such correspondence and mutual reiteration of their principles could shorten ideological distances among the disparate royalist community. Where successful (it often was not), correspondence between royalist camps across Europe could connect across physical spaces. Articulating common principles and bolstering political and religious orthodoxies within the community helped to reduce the apparent discontinuities brought about by exile. While such correspondence may well have been performative, rather than reflecting genuine doubts or convictions, it nevertheless represents attempts to extend these common sinews of devotion and allegiance within and across the royalist community.Footnote ⁴² Moreover, it suggests a common awareness of the need to reinforce certainty in the face of overwhelming disillusionment.

Reconciliations and adaptations evident in private correspondence did not necessarily transfer, however, to the practicalities of maintaining both the outward practice of devotion and the appearance of religious unity among Protestant royalists in the face of hardship. Where Richard Browne's chapel provided some measure of continuity for Protestant practice within the foreign environment of Paris, the royalist propaganda effort in The Hague, under the careful management of the printer Samuel Browne, allowed for the dissemination of key royalist imagery and ideas. This not only included such well-known works as Eikon Basilike and Reliquae Sacrae Carolinae, but also the circulation and reinforcement of increasingly scarce remnants of the church's liturgy, including forms of prayer used in the king's chapel.Footnote ⁴³ Such attempts to employ print as a means of prompting Anglican memory to ensure that these rites did not slip into obscurity, and to assuage lingering doubts as to Charles II's devotion to his father's church, may have gone some way to close the spatial and spiritual gaps between king, clergy, and laity. What they obscured, however, were the increasing strains caused by both pragmatism and incoherence among the devout. When more mundane issues such as the burial of Anglican royalists came to the fore, even the staunchest Protestants were forced to acknowledge the challenges posed to such basic expressions of devotion by the limitations of their new spiritual geography. In February 1657, for instance, John Bramhall, exiled bishop of Derry, visited the Catholic bishop of Ypres, Jean-François de Robles, along with “F. Crowther” (likely Joseph Crowther, then a chaplain of the Duke of York), with the aim of negotiating burial space for Protestant royalists. Having apparently visited the bishop on previous occasions about “some Printing, & Civill addresses heretofore about ye permit of Buriall,” Bramhall and Crowther found de Robles accommodating, allowing for the consecration of a small space of land in the Protestant rite. This land (apparently frequented, but largely undamaged by passing carriages) was granted to the exiled royalist community on the condition that ceremonies not be conducted with “too great visibility of pompe,” as de Robles evidently feared this might “trouble our weake ones.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Here, Bramhall and Crowther had proven instrumental in facilitating the perpetuation of yet another sort of sacred space for the exiled community; however, it came at the expense of secrecy and silence. Far from the triumphant Protestantism familiar to many of these royalists in their homeland, this was a form of devotion that—not unlike the Catholicism many had sought to root out at home—was surviving through sheer tenacity and, in some instances, the renegotiation of boundaries.

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Nevertheless, while accommodation for the maintenance of these rites could be reached in some instances with amenable European Catholic representatives such as de Robles and the (occasionally) sympathetic French court, thoughts of compromise and adaptation were far more threatening once they seeped into broader European discussion. Individual doubts could, to an extent, be played out in correspondence and negotiated through relatively closed circuits of communication, and ruptures in the spiritual fabric of the royalist community repaired through mutual assurances and consolation. This apparent bubble of royalist self-regulation and reinforcement was, however, also constantly threatened from the “outside,” with the necessities of diplomacy and the realities of survival leaving the royalists inextricably entangled with the wider European world. It was at these points of contact—both real and imagined—that the need for ideological flexibility among the royalist exiles was at its greatest, and where the possibility of fracture loomed largest.

In such scenarios, responding decisively with the appearance of unity and devotional confidence became paramount. This was poignantly illustrated in 1651 with the publication of Theophile Brachet de La Milletière's Victoire de la vérité pour la paix de l'Eglise (The Victory of Truth for the Peace of the Church), dedicated to “the King of Great Britain, To invite him to embrace the Roman-Catholick faith.”Footnote ⁴⁵ This was, in fact, only a protracted dedicatory epistle to Charles II that framed a much larger discourse on the doctrine of transubstantiation. La Milletière's credentials as a propagandist were, by this time, impeccable. He had received approbation and support for this tract from such high-standing French ecclesiastics as Antoine Godeau, bishop of Grasse, and Pierre de Marca, bishop of Couserans and later archbishop of Toulouse.Footnote ⁴⁶ Moreover, La Milletière, a recently converted Huguenot, was an accomplice of Cardinal Mazarin, who treated him as an engine for converting French Protestants.Footnote ⁴⁷ But he was no mere firebrand: La Milletière was an irenicist, advocating the unity of Europe's Catholic churches in a vein that has been compared to the likes of the ecumenist John Dury.Footnote ⁴⁸ Moreover, he was an open critic of Cromwell and the new Commonwealth, and an advocate of divine monarchy. As such, La Milletière posed a threat to the royalists, not because he was a militant Catholic seeking to prey upon the disillusioned, but because he appeared to offer a sympathetic and temptingly easy solution.

La Milletière's The Victory of Truth, as it was subsequently known in royalist discussions, brought to the fore many of those issues that had caused anxiety among the clergy and laity in exile, but had largely been circulating through private correspondence. Framed as a personal exhortation to Charles II to convert to Catholicism, La Milletière's work called upon the King to discern the will of providence, arguing that “this terrible work of the hand of God . . . is nevertheless a judgment of his mercy for you . . . that you may perceive the sin, whereof it is the offspring.”Footnote ⁴⁹ The present sufferings of Charles and (by implication) his adherents were “the very punishment of the sins your Fathers committed,” now to be remedied only through his return to the Catholic Church.Footnote ⁵⁰ Charles I, for his part, was recast as having been God's agent through which the established church would be brought back into the fold of universal Catholicism. This was, in effect, an inversion and appropriation of the cult of the martyr—a term La Milletière himself openly applied to the deceased king.Footnote ⁵¹ Disunity within the church, La Milletière reminded Charles, and the “Catastrophe of Reformation” had sowed the seeds of rebellion, calling into question the authority of both the monarch and episcopacy to the point that “no bishops, no king” could be called, as La Milletière noted, “a lamentable Prophesie.”Footnote ⁵² The choice before Charles was, therefore, a straightforward one: retain the episcopate through reunion with the communion of the Church of Rome and, in so doing, redeem himself for the transgressions of his predecessors, or remain subject to this divine retribution and risk losing the throne entirely. For Charles, this choice was reduced to his own conversion to the Roman Catholic faith, as his “Conversion and return to the Church may open the hearts and the way for all the rest to follow [his] example.”Footnote ⁵³ La Milletière also hinted at the political allegiances that Charles's conversion would bring, stating that both Louis XIV and the archbishop of Paris, Jean-François de Gondi, cardinal de Retz, would be in attendance for such an event.Footnote ⁵⁴ In doing so, Charles would not only regain his throne, but become, through his example and public engagement with Rome, “an Instrument of the Truth.”Footnote ⁵⁵

The printing and subsequent distribution of The Victory of Truth therefore posed numerous threats to the faith of the exiled royalist community. While seeking to tempt Charles from the ruins of the established church through overtures of Continental aid (a temptation with which Charles would grapple for much of his life), it also simultaneously threatened to cause ruptures among the wider clergy and laity of the church.Footnote ⁵⁶ As the only published appeal to Charles on behalf of Catholic Europe to convert, La Milletière's work would both spark rumor and intensify already-circulating questions of the place of the Stuarts within the scattered church. The response it inevitably invited would, moreover, have to be printed and circulated among those royalists who fell prey to La Milletière's simultaneous appeal to unity and pragmatism.

The response to La Milletière that finally surfaced in 1653 was penned by one of the few clergymen able to reconcile issues of dislocation and disunity with questions regarding the place of the former established church within the wider royalist diaspora. John Bramhall, bishop of Derry, was the direct beneficiary of the patronage of the Marquis of Ormond, with whom he had been closely affiliated in Ireland in the 1630s as an agent of Wentworth's reforms and Laudian orthodoxy. While engaged on Ormond's behalf in the management of privateering efforts in Flanders and France, Bramhall had also functioned as a protector of the marchioness of Ormond, Elizabeth Butler, who trusted Bramhall completely as one whom “loyaltye [,] religion and honnor oblige[d the Marquis] to reveranse.”Footnote ⁵⁷ It was through this connection that The Victory of Truth ultimately passed to Bramhall from Ormond in early 1652, though the latter appears to have initially asked the Huguenot polymath Samuel Bochart to respond on the King's Behalf while resident in Caen on the Normandy coast.Footnote ⁵⁸ Bramhall was put to work by Ormond and appears to have finished a draft by early March when he passed it on to Ormond and the king for reading, adding that he had noted in the margins “sharp” points “that His Majesty and yourself might view particularly and expunge them or change them as you thought fit.” He subsequently informed Ormond that he was working on a second treatise that he would bring with him for perusal, intended as a defense from the charge of schism, “which I think will say more than hath yet been said in that cause in defence of our Kings and Church.”Footnote ⁵⁹ This “second treatise” was almost certainly his 1654 publication A Just Vindication of the Church of England from the Unjust Aspersion of Criminal Schism. In both instances, the relationship between Ormond and Bramhall was decidedly reciprocal. For Bramhall, Ormond's patronage and protection provided a means of mitigating at least some of the penury and dislocation of exile, sustaining him as a central voice among the scattered clergy. In exchange, Ormond and the royalist community at large retained Bramhall as the chief voice in these controversies, employing the bishop's authority to counter the uncertainties already evident in royalist correspondence while repairing cracks in the public discourse over royalist devotion.

In approaching Bramhall for a response, Ormond had effectively commissioned not only a seasoned controversialist, but was also forwarding a political and religious stance better suited to the circumstances of the royalists more generally: namely, a position situated between the orthodoxy the Stuarts had espoused through the reforms of Archbishop Laud (of which Bramhall had been a key proponent), a cautious approach to Catholicism that did not alienate potential allies, and an entrenched hatred of Presbyterianism that distanced the royalists from the awkward covenanting of Charles II only a few years earlier. The response itself was pieced together through a combination of references to books made available to Bramhall in Utrecht (largely in the collection of the avid book collector and royalist Michael Honywood), the Jesuit Library in Brussels, and of course Bramhall's intimate knowledge of the Laudian church.Footnote ⁶⁰ The final work reflected this motley influence of Protestant principle and a learnedness born of mobility. Printed in 1653 and 1654 in English alongside a (surprisingly accurate) translation of La Milletière's original, Bramhall's response began with a familiar refutation of the catholicity of La Milletière's church, questioning transubstantiation and other foundational doctrines.Footnote ⁶¹ What drew the substance of Bramhall's reproach, however, was the apparent willingness of La Milletière and those on whose behalf he spoke to uphold papal supremacy to the point of “absolving subjects from their Oaths of Allegeance [sic], of exempting the Clergy from secular jurisdiction, of the lawfulness of murthering Tyrants and excommunicated Princes . . . to the danger of Civil Government.”Footnote ⁶² Citing in particular the repercussions of the 1641 Rising in Ireland, Bramhall condemned Catholic Europe for circulating “private whispers, and printed insinuations” that the Established Church was near “shak[ing] hands with the Roman in the points controverted.”Footnote ⁶³ Turning back once again to disputes over the origins of the Church and its authenticity in light of the apparent shattering of the institution by providence, Bramhall pointed to this overextension of papal jurisdiction as the source of contamination in what would otherwise be a calm Christian world: “you, principally you,” charged Bramhall, “have divided the Unity of the Church.”Footnote ⁶⁴

But where in this vision of Protestant fortitude was the defeated and potentially apostate monarch? For Bramhall, the answer to this potentially awkward question lay in a notable distancing of the Church from any Erastian tendencies of its Caroline, Jacobean, and Elizabethan forebears and, in its stead, an elevation of the episcopate to a level that anticipated the jure divino formulations of the Restoration period.Footnote ⁶⁵ Qualifying any claim to spiritual or ecclesiastical headship on the part of the monarch, Bramhall noted that “Here is no power ascribed, no punishment inflicted, but merely political”; however, the king remained “the Keeper of both Tables, the preserver of true Piety towards God, as well right Justice towards men; And is obliged to take care of souls.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Charles I had, in Bramhall's iteration, never styled himself head of the church and, conveniently, neither did his son. Rather, the Stuart subject was provided with the liberty to interpret Scripture and follow the law according to their own judgment, but only insofar as the authority of the king and of the church was maintained.Footnote ⁶⁷ Thus, Bramhall quipped, “sometimes nothing is more necessary than Reformation.”Footnote ⁶⁸

Bramhall was quick, however, to avoid the suggestion that Peter Heylyn ultimately would make—namely that Charles I's martyrdom had verged upon inconvenient and selfish—and addressed the role of providence in defeating the royalists and the established church. Echoing Charles's own scaffold speech, Bramhall reiterated that Charles's martyrdom had “rendered him the Glory of his Country, the Honour of that Church whereof he was the chiefest Member . . . and a Pattern for all Princes”—or, borrowing Charles's own words, he had been “deprived of a corruptible Crown, and invested with a Crown of glory.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Laud, too, was owned by Bramhall as “an earnest pursuer, of Order, Unity, and Uniformity in Religion.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Such memories were subsequently applied to Bramhall's present uses, asking both La Milletière and (undoubtedly) his English readership whether Charles I's “constancy encourage[s] you to believe, that [Charles II] is a reed shaken with the wind,” willing to “change his religion for temporal respects.”Footnote ⁷¹ Here, as Cosin had done in his sermons, Bramhall held steadfast to the belief that divine intent remained for both institutions, stating “No, no sir, Our sufferings, for the Faith, for the Church, for the Monarchy, do proclaim us Innocent to all the world, of the ruin either of Faith, or Church, or Monarchy.”Footnote ⁷² In this way, Bramhall attempted to respond at once to the doubts raised in print by La Milletière and the private disillusionments evident (as previously shown) among the wider royalist community, elucidating God's purpose in dislocating devout royalists while reiterating the unity of “faith, church, and monarchy.” Thus, at least in their public iterations, these sorts of issues sowed no real disunity among the royalists in exile. Though Bramhall and others carefully qualified the terms of their allegiance and mapped their devotional world, the appearance of continuity remained.

Bramhall's response played well among what little of his readership can be discerned. Richard Watson professed being “glad the Bishop of Derrie undertakes Militer [sic],” despite his apprehensions that responses to such controversialists might “tie them up too close, out of [fear that] some jealousie may fall on their own reputation otherwise.”Footnote ⁷³ By 1660, French Protestant connections had been employed to facilitate a French translation of the text to once again reinforce the religious convictions of Charles II.Footnote ⁷⁴ The text went through two editions in English, and Bramhall himself was among those kept closest to the court as it attempted to formulate further directions for the church: it was Bramhall who, in 1655, drew up a list for Edward Hyde of the Irish bishoprics “with yeir respective values, as they were upon improvements at the later end of my Lordship of Straffords Government.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Bramhall would later clash with Hyde when suggesting that bishops might be appointed “ye Irish way” (that is, by the monarch rather than by dean and chapter), thereby “elud[ing] all those formalities which seem to perplexe us.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Such circumstances clearly helped, as many scholars of the church during this period have suggested, provide the space in which such ideas could expand and be debated, even if they were subsequently shot down by Hyde and others. They also aided in the articulation, not only of a sort of royalist unity, but also a response to the interrogations of opportunists eager to capitalize on royalist dislocation by suggesting that not only restoration but also salvation lay elsewhere.

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For a time, then, Bramhall's work narrowed the spaces that might have opened up between Protestant royalists, providing a measure of ideological coherence and helping to maintain Charles II—with some qualification—at the center of royalist identity despite his devotional wavering. At the heart of the exile experience, however, there remained a genuine dissonance between the overtures of unity made by the likes of Bramhall in “official” royalist print and the strains of survival felt by the wider royalist community. Where the works of controversialists such as Bramhall might have been aimed at reassuring Protestant royalists of the proximity of their cause and denying the widening gap between the Stuarts and their kingdoms, necessity threatened even the most adamantine conscience. Watson's approval of Bramhall's response was cautiously framed with an acknowledgment that, should Catholics succeed in converting Charles, “their triumph will not be so glorious if they should get a conquest upon his conscience by the extremitie of his missefortunes, & lay more weight upon him the human infirmitie [he] is likelie to undergoe.”Footnote ⁷⁷ While royalist propaganda efforts could be arrayed against such spiritual conquerors in defense of the king, they nevertheless brought into stark relief two other features of the devotional landscape in this period: first, the need to engage with and adapt to Catholic intermediaries to acquire aid in the restoration effort; and second, the very real prospect of exile as a prompt to conversion and the pursuance of providential will amid these trials in the desert. Both represented attempts among the exiles to reconcile themselves to dislocation within a foreign landscape and to adjust to this uprooting from familiar devotional spaces.

Among the first tasks pursued by the royalists in exile, even amid the closing stages of the civil wars, was an expansion of diplomatic networks in order to open channels of communication and play upon the sympathies of Catholic Europe. Queen Henrietta Maria's connections proved initially useful here, particularly in France and Rome.Footnote ⁷⁸ More useful in the longer term was an extensive Catholic community that—ironically by virtue of a more protracted experience of dislocation, mobility, and exile—had preceded many Protestant royalists in the form of the English and Irish Catholic collegiate network.Footnote ⁷⁹ A complex system of allegiances held by these scattered Catholic communities in Rome, Paris, Madrid, Brussels, Leuven, and elsewhere provided the royalist effort with intermediaries through whom Stuart claims to relative toleration and peace in the face of Republican persecution could be legitimized and invested with authority. To this end, individuals such as the Irish Dominican Father Dominic O'Daly were commissioned by Henrietta Maria to treat with the Vatican in June 1650 to “solicit his Holiness conditionally” on the subject of Ireland; the Irish Carmelite Father Rowe was employed to counteract Parliamentary efforts in Rome by none other than Edward Hyde; the Franciscan George Dillon and his nephew, Theobald, Lord Taaffe, were employed to speak on behalf of the benighted Catholic Irish to the mercenary Duke of Lorraine in Brussels; and the Irish Jesuit Father Peter Talbot, a theologian in Antwerp and beneficiary of Spanish and Roman education, functioned as an invaluable (though much questioned) diplomat throughout the framing of Charles II's 1656 treaty with Spain.Footnote ⁸⁰

Such intermediaries functioned not only as a means of closing the confessional gap between the royalists and their would-be European supporters, but also provided an essential means of articulating a sense of common royalist cause to the scattered adherents within the Continental armies. Talbot, for instance, was capable of casting the royalists as “all men of moderate, and honest principles, etc., noe way tending to prosecute religion” in the eyes of the papal internuncio in Cologne in 1654. During the 1656 treaty negotiations with Spain, Talbot was active in convincing skeptical Spanish ambassadors in Brussels of the authenticity of royalist interests in implementing tolerationist policies upon Charles's restoration.Footnote ⁸¹ Other Catholic clergy, for example the exiled Irish bishop of Dromore, Oliver Darcy, could be called upon by the likes of Ormond (himself an invaluable, if qualified employer of Irish Catholic networks) to speak to Irish Catholic soldiers of their duty to their king. When, in the summer of 1656, Cardinal Mazarin accused Charles II of ingratitude for attempting to draw his Irish soldiers away from the French army and into that of his new Spanish allies, Darcy read aloud to the Irish soldiery campaigning in St. Ghislain a defense written by Ormond. With Darcy as his interlocutor, Ormond reminded the Irish soldiery that it could not “be consistent with honour or advantage for any of our kings subjects especially of the Irish nation to be flattered or bribed by ye Cardinal from ye duty they owe to their naturall king and their desolate Country.” Reminding the Irish that Mazarin himself was now allied with “ye professed persecutors of Roman Catholiques . . . the destroyers of your nation” and the enforcers of their exile, Ormond was able, through Darcy, to call past atrocities and present interests to the minds of the Irish while avoiding the potential awkwardness of his own Protestantism.Footnote ⁸² Such networks proved vital to navigating through the challenges posed by Catholic Europe, suggesting common political cause while appearing to tactfully avoid issues of confessional difference. They expanded the confessional boundaries of the royalist cause while lending authority to their endorsements of a tolerationist policy upon the king's restoration.

As Bramhall's endeavors suggest, however, there were actively enforced religious limits to which most royalists were willing to venture in order to ensure survival and acquire aid. Maintaining the appearance of confessional unity behind a staunchly Protestant Charles II and Stuart family more generally dominated many projections of the royalist cause and the worthiness of the restoration effort. The problem lay in the question of audience. While Charles II remained acutely aware of the need to maintain an avowed adherence to Protestantism to maintain the loyalty of his subjects at home and Protestant adherents abroad, his more immediate surroundings demanded the appearance of flexibility on confessional issues and the possibility of concessions to skeptical Catholic parties. For Charles II's followers, these boundaries were even more ambiguous. Encounters with (and often dependency upon) Catholic Europe, when combined with the jarring impact of dislocation, posed fundamental questions about their faith and shook many of the confessional walls that had, with the support of fiery polemic, previously helped to enforce identities. In an environment of increasing distrust where moral rigor was thought to be under threat—what Ormond pessimistically called “sordid basenes [sic] disguised under the notion of reason of state”—these realities gave way to a unique combination of rumor, intrigue, and misinformation across the various royalist communities.Footnote ⁸³

Foremost among such rumors and intrigues were claims that the Stuarts would sacrifice their Protestant allegiances to facilitate their restoration. All three of the Stuart brothers were challenged during the course of the exile by the temptations of conversion and the apparent comforts that it might offer within Catholic Europe. Some of these controversies were clearly born of Stuart initiatives: in 1658, for example, James, duke of York, extended an offer (via Father Peter Talbot) to the Spanish to convert to Catholicism in exchange for a greater pension and a cavalry regiment. Only the acumen of Philip IV, who felt such a conversion would be detrimental to Charles II's restoration campaign, prevented it.Footnote ⁸⁴ In other instances, it was the royalists themselves who weighed the benefits and drawbacks of a Stuart conversion. In October 1654, following the relocation of Charles's court to Cologne, word reached the king that Henrietta Maria, in defiance of the former's instructions, had undertaken the conversion of Henry, duke of Gloucester, via the Jesuit college at Clermont. Reports from Lord Hatton in Paris struck a historical note, saying “the Papists are allready busey with their old prophecy that Hen[ry] the 9th must repaire what Hen[ry] 8 ruined.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Only the direct intervention of Ormond and the withdrawal of Gloucester to the Low Countries prevented serious rupture. Ormond himself drew upon the examples of both Henri III and Henri IV of France to convince Henrietta Maria of the dangers of such politique.Footnote ⁸⁶ Ormond's intercession was once again required in later negotiations with the Spanish in order to retract offers of Charles's conversion being made by Father Peter Talbot as oil for the diplomatic gears. Talbot, writing directly to Charles, made thinly veiled references to the king's grandfather, Henri IV of France, suggesting that “three kingdoms is worth a journey” to negotiate such a conversion.Footnote ⁸⁷ Ormond was also subject to these sorts of overtures, often as a consequence of his own entrenchment in Irish Catholic diplomatic networks. For instance, in May 1651 a Catholic agent of Ormond's frankly suggested that the latter engage “that honorable resolution of Henry the Borboun in choosing to hear one Masse rather than to hazard his kingdome.”Footnote ⁸⁸

Location, it seems, could prompt remembrances of these politique conversions, calling to mind the security that might be gained in exchange for setting aside more rigid religious principles. Recurrent imagery drawn from the French Wars of Religion—resolved nearly half a century earlier, though recently recalled in English editions of Enrico Davila's History of the Civill Wars in France—reminded the exiles of the potential consequences of rigidity and the peace that might come from concession.Footnote ⁸⁹ Such remembrances were clearly employed with the leverage of historical authority, and the temptation of ending dislocation at the expense of conversion, in mind. Nevertheless, they also struck a clearly ominous chord, with civil war as the potential consequence of ill-considered conversion. In each instance, extending these devotional boundaries—whether those of an individual Stuart or those who would adhere to him following conversion—demanded a careful weighing of principles and, in this case, drawing from historical example to augur the consequences.

Succumbing to the temptation to convert was often the result of these factors of distance, providence, and the allure of comfort. Two of the most prominent conversions of the 1650s—that of Murrough O'Brien, earl of Inchiquin, in the first half of 1657 and George Digby, earl of Bristol, in September 1658—help to illustrate the relationship between these factors vividly. In the first instance, O'Brien, who had been born into the Catholicism of his O'Brien ancestors in Munster and subsequently converted as a ward of the crown, had been a loyal—if controversial—member of the king's court in the first half of the 1650s. He had been granted the earldom in May 1654 and, despite allegations levelled by fellow royalists of having been disloyal during the civil wars, he had been actively defended as a “constant and vigorous” supporter of the king's cause in Ireland.Footnote ⁹⁰ In spite of these reiterations of support, however, the confessional landscape of exile actively undermined Inchiquin's role within the court. Among the Irish Catholics who populated the courts of Paris and Madrid, Inchiquin was remembered for his merciless siege of the Confederate stronghold of Cashel in 1647, whereby he had “dyed his hands in the blood of Priests and innocent souls.”Footnote ⁹¹ Others, including the brother of Peter Talbot, the Augustinian Thomas Talbot, accused Inchiquin of fabricating his earldom for selfadvancement.Footnote ⁹² Edward Hyde wrote to the Irish Catholic lawyers and exile Richard Bellings in June 1654 that the resident Irish Catholics in Paris, “upon the counte of [Inchiquin's] heresy will not be willinge to see him prosper,” adding with a characteristic touch of xenophobia that this was “a madnesse no other nation under heaven but the Irish could be capable of, under so greate calumnityes.”Footnote ⁹³ Driven from involvement in Charles II's court, Inchiquin took refuge in the French armies in Catalonia rather than subject both himself and the restoration effort to the damages of these sectarian memories, amplified as they were by a combination of a receptive European audience and a mobile Irish Catholic interest better able to spread and authenticate these accounts.

Yet, by the summer of 1657 rumor reached Charles II's court that Inchiquin had converted back to the Catholicism of his O'Brien forebears, probably due to a bout of consumption in Paris (Hyde cynically doubted in July that this was the case, as he had last seen Inchiquin “fat and corpulent,” and thereby not inclined towards the disease).Footnote ⁹⁴ Some evidently held to the belief that rumors of Inchiquin “going to mass [were] spread purposely” as a political ruse against the Protectorate.Footnote ⁹⁵ Inchiquin himself would dispel such rumors when, in July, his wife Elizabeth and their young son were given a pass out of Paris by none other than the Protectorate's ambassador, William Lockhart, after being pursued first by Inchiquin and then by the Catholics of Paris for having not obliged Inchiquin's wishes that they convert. Yet another royalist scandal materialized as Henrietta Maria attempted to intercede with Mazarin and Anne of Austria to have the son left in Paris in obedience to Inchiquin's will, while Lockhart warned of the “insolence of the [Paris] Papists” if such demands were met.Footnote ⁹⁶ The impact upon Inchiquin was palpable, as an even greater chasm opened between himself and the royalist effort more generally. Both his conversion and the torrent of rumor, memory, and infamy that seemed to envelop him left him alienated from friends and compatriots alike as the wider exiled community closed ranks in order to dissociate itself from Inchiquin's apparent inconstancy. Here, just as Bramhall and others had sought to project devotional unity and steadfastness in spite of dislocation, the appearance of infidelity and spiritual corruption brought into being by exile and expediency gave the royalists a common ideology against which they could define themselves—even at the expense of former allies.

The conversion of George Digby, earl of Bristol, precipitated an even greater fall from grace that left him ostracized from Charles's court. A brilliant and charismatic figure, Bristol had been a vital intermediary with the Spanish following the 1656 treaty, adding much needed aristocratic leverage to Charles's court (despite having personally offended Mazarin years earlier). However, in September 1658 Bristol too converted to Catholicism after a serious bout of illness, confirming longstanding suspicions on the part of the Vatican that he was inclining more and more towards Rome.Footnote ⁹⁷ The papal nuncio in Brussels subsequently reported with glee to Rome that Bristol had publically professed his faith in the Jesuit church in Ghent.Footnote ⁹⁸ Bristol himself wrote to both the Vatican secretary of state and Pope Alexander VII that it had, in fact, been a disease of the spirit—“l'infection d'heresie”—that had enfeebled him. Having been purged of this “infection” through conversion, Bristol offered his faculties and powers to the pope and church that had brought about his salvation.Footnote ⁹⁹ The repercussions of this again underscore the complexity of royalist circumstances. Ormond and Hyde refused to come to his sickbed following news of his conversion, and Bristol was stripped of all offices within the court in order to distance Charles from association with Catholic converts.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Charles proved characteristically forgiving of a close friend, including allowing his “Ivory Poet” accompany him on an ill-fated journey to the Franco-Spanish negotiations for the Treaty of the Pyrenees in 1659. Nevertheless, Bristol's favor and trust never fully recovered. At the advice of the aforementioned Daniel O'Neill, Bristol was left in Spain under the supervision of Father Peter Talbot and the royalist ambassador in Madrid, Henry Bennet, under the pretense of aiding in negotiations with Spain. Nevertheless, the poor funding under which he was kept there and ongoing reports that he had happily taken up “the sacraments of confession and communion” alongside Talbot condemned Bristol, like Inchiquin, to the periphery of the royalist effort.Footnote ¹⁰¹

Inchiquin and Bristol were certainly not the only royalists to have converted, nor the most surprising. John Cosin, for instance, witnessed not only a string of conversions amongst his colleagues at Peterhouse, Cambridge, but also the conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1651 of his son, John. While this certainly sparked disillusionment for the resilient chaplain, it also gave way to a prolific effort on Cosin's part to defend the Church of England from its embattled position.Footnote ¹⁰² Other clergy proved more malleable, finding themselves enamored with the Catholicism they now encountered firsthand. Stephen Goffe (or Gough), who had served as a personal chaplain to Charles I and functioned as a royalist agent throughout the 1640s, converted to Catholicism in 1651, entering the Oratorian order in Paris after supposedly being inspired by lectures on the early church. Yet this conversion did not necessarily bar Goffe from all royalist activity. Goffe can be found throughout royalist correspondence in Paris in the 1650s, functioning as an intermediary with the French court and as a connection for royalist post coming from England.Footnote ¹⁰³ By the late 1650s, Goffe was functioning as a private tutor for Charles II's illegitimate son, James Scott, future duke of Monmouth.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ For others, conversion to Catholicism offered both access and the possibility of survival under more sympathetic co-confessionalists: the recent convert to Catholicism Charles Howard, viscount Andover, benefitted in the late 1650s from the patronage of Queen Henrietta Maria, who wrote directly to Alexander VII on his behalf while speaking of his sufferings for his faith “depuis sa conversion.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Others had the benefits of conversion dangled before them. Ormond, for instance, was told in no uncertain terms that if he were to “c[o]me over [to Ireland] Catholick, and continue soe but one year, he w[ould] bring his designes to passe and settle all his frends [sic].”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Within Charles II's court, more overt wishes for conversion were put forward: only months before the Restoration unfolded before them, Father Peter Talbot asked Ormond to assure Daniel O'Neill, with whom the Jesuit had had barely cool relations in the past, that his conversion was being prayed for, if only so that the two might live peaceably with one another.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Conversion, then, at once offered a means by which to accommodate one's devotional world to the realities of dislocation, thereby establishing a new sort of continuity between faith and space, as well as a source of further displacement and alienation from fellow royalists. In the first instance, conversion could be driven—as it clearly had been with Inchiquin and Bristol—by an interpretation of providence that made sense of the sufferings of exile and the spiritual meanings of dislocation. Here, the language of early modern religiosity provided a well-stocked storehouse from which to draw supporting imagery, as such converts could speak of the need for purgation, being subjected to divine trial, and of the restorative properties of newfound faith. Location proved equally vital, as royalist immersion in Catholic Europe provided both political incentive to convert for the sake of survival and (as had clearly been the case with Goffe, Inchiquin, Bristol, and others) surroundings that could suggest alternate interpretations of providence not so readily available at home. Immersion in Catholic Europe mattered greatly in these instances, often exposing the fallacy of previously held prejudices or offering a new and seemingly timely lens through which to interpret the unfamiliar. As Bristol's profession of faith in the Jesuit church in Ghent suggests, it is also tempting to suppose that, surrounded by the architecture and opulence of post-Tridentine Catholicism, some royalists were simply overawed amid moments of profound doubt. All of this offered reorientation to the fundamentally disoriented.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

At the same time, while the itinerancy and poverty of Charles II's court demanded some openness to the aid and allegiance of Catholics, converts remained highly suspect intruders within royal (and royalist) space. The examples of Inchiquin and Bristol, when added to the Stuarts's own flirtations with conversion, suggest a boundary that was actively maintained in order to reinforce the Protestant image of the restoration campaign. While adherence to Catholicism did not, by any means, preclude an individual from supporting the royalist cause, the stigma of inconstancy applied to converts suggested a wider contagion of disloyalty that could not be seen to have infected Charles's (ostensibly) Protestant court. Adamantine loyalty to the Stuarts could be claimed and acknowledged by both Protestants and Catholics alike, but the identification of heretical “infection” among these exiles very often resulted in a purgation of that royalist from the wider restoration cause in order to maintain the appearance of religious robustness and hide its often-flagging health. Space again became integral to the devotional world of the royalist exiles in such instances, as the threat of contamination demanded that such converts be removed from Charles's court, placing them at both a geographical and a spiritual distance from the heart of royalist activity. Such realities strike at the root of royalist contradictions in the 1650s: any effort to maintain a coherent royalist “space” demanded a near-impossible balancing of ideology and pragmatism, embracing practical solutions to harsh realities with open arms while shunning anything that might suggest compromise and dissolution.

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In conclusion, it seems appropriate to revisit once again the question of precisely what “royalist religion” might have entailed, and how it might be located within the wider rubrics of allegiance and identity in the turmoils of the mid-seventeenth century. Following on Anthony Milton's recent examinations of royalist religion in the 1640s, this article has shown that long-held assumptions about the natural preference among royalists for “staid, restrained, socially deferential and understated ‘Anglicanism’ is both outdated and far too simplistic in capturing the range of royalist responses to crises of devotion and allegiance.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ While these and other analyses of side-changing and crises of conscience in the 1640s have begun to suggest the contingency and adaptability of royalist religious views, this article has shown that the exile of the 1650s provides an even richer body of examples from which to analyze the boundaries in which royalists set their understanding of God and king once the more familiar borders of the pew, parish, and nation were far-off memories. The exile period demanded a degree of flexibility in the defining of boundaries unparalleled in both the historiography of royalism and the study of early modern British and Irish allegiance as a whole. Setting down these boundaries required not only the employment of print in the propagation of a sense of common cause (as recent historiography has highlighted in the context of the 1640s), but also the careful management of rumor and the articulation of common beliefs through correspondence and interpersonal interactions. Where conversion and apparent inconstancy were thought to reveal cracks in the broader royalist effort – as had been the case with Inchiquin and Bristol—those managing the devotional image of Charles II's court proved remarkably sensitive to the usefulness of distance and the control of rumor within these European contexts.

Awareness of these contexts came at a price. As the examples of Peter Talbot, Oliver Darcy, and other prominent Catholics within the royalist network have revealed, service in the cause of the Stuart restoration could accommodate confessional divisions, but often at the expense of alienating those with more fixed notions of royalist allegiance. As in the 1640s, royalist languages of loyalty and betrayal were frequently employed in defining and controlling these boundaries. In the context of exile, however, these languages were often restrained or re-shaped by a clear awareness of European onlookers. Faced with such questions, many royalists were left with the choice of reevaluating and expanding the foundations of their creed to accommodate new scenarios or, instead, to be pushed to the margins of royalist activity.

Within the wider framework of early modern allegiance and of royalism more specifically, the experience of exile and the influence it had upon the devotional lives of many royalists suggests that restricting understandings of these themes to the narrow, and in many respects more certain theaters of the 1640s imposes an ahistorical discontinuity. Supposedly natural breaks in the narrative of these attitudes—the execution of Charles I, the Battle of Worcester, or (less commonly) the Siege of Limerick—assign easy bookends that royalists themselves did not perceive. Exile simply set the successions of hope and disillusionment within different contexts, expanding and retracting as failure and compromise set their limits. In the mental worlds of the exiled royalists, these were the revolutions that mattered most.