Transnational Catholicism in Tudor England: Mobility, Exile and Counter-Reformation, 1530–1580, by Frederick E. Smith

Frederick E. Smith’s book focuses on Catholic exiles during the reign of Henry VIII and Edward VI, a topic which he rightly acknowledges has been seriously under-investigated. Compared to the headline-grabbing executions of Thomas More, John Fisher and the Carthusians, and the burgeoning field of research on the exile movement after Elizabeth I’s accession, these figures have been sorely neglected. Moreover, as Smith notes, whereas scholars now contextualise the later Catholic exiles through a transnational lens, their predecessors remain rooted in an Anglocentric world, simply reacting to the early stages of Continental Catholic reform rather than actively engaging with it. As such, the book’s argument that English Catholicism and the European Catholic Reformation were not just connected but interdependent is wholly welcome, with Smith arguing for a reciprocal relationship between the centre and the peripheries.

These are strong and convincing wider points. To make them, Smith has identified 191 émigrés for the period under Henry and Edward, though it soon becomes apparent that there is only surviving evidence about a much smaller number, with Reginald Pole a focus of significant chunks of the book. Moreover, there is a slight issue with the book’s conceptual framework that becomes apparent as it progresses. Smith uses the current popular framework of mobility to understand these émigrés, though he admits they considered themselves as exiles, the motivations for which are the topic of his first chapter. His argument for rejecting their own definition is because the term ‘mobility’ shows their agency, but has anyone before actually argued that exile meant these individuals lacked agency? Smith presents evidence of émigrés on occasion glossing their motivations for departure from England: sometimes they erased periods of conformity, on other occasions they delayed their departure to avoid financial or familial repercussions, but more often for reasons of loyalty to king and country. Thus, it is strongly suggested the émigrés were not always such firm Catholics as they later self-presented.

Smith briefly mentions that confessional positions hardened under Edward, not just in terms of Protestant reform, but in the attitudes of Catholics as well, an observation that would be worthy of more discussion, particularly due to the fluidity of positions at the time. It is an important point for the third chapter, which focuses on how the émigrés viewed the ‘lukewarm’ who did not follow them to Continental Europe. Henry’s approach to religion was followed by the much more hardline Protestant one under Edward, so it is not surprising that exile Catholics became more critical of those who hedged their bets in the face of this radicalisation. Indeed, Smith provides a number of examples of individuals who prevaricated under Henry, but became firmer when faced with the religious radicalism of Edward’s reign.

Smith’s fourth and fifth chapters move to the years after exile and the return of the émigrés during Mary I’s restoration of Catholicism. Smith convincingly argues they helped shape the Marian vision of Catholicism, with a number of them in influential church positions. The chapter perhaps overplays the role of the émigrés in comparison to the Spanish influence on the Marian church, but Smith’s central argument is well made that some of the initiatives taken during the period prefigure later Catholic Reformation efforts.

The final chapter stretches these arguments into the Elizabethan period, to argue that Henrician and Edwardine Catholic émigrés laid a number of the foundation stones for the later exiles. Smith makes the point that the continuities of English Catholicism are frequently underplayed, a legacy of John Bossy’s seminal work, The English Catholic Community (1975), which painted a new dawn beginning with the arrival of the seminary-trained clergy in the 1570s from the English College at Douai. Interestingly, despite his reaction against this argument, Smith ends his study in 1580, the year the Jesuit mission to England launched. This suggests he might actually take Bossy’s argument even further in terms of a break from the past, though one suspects Robert Persons, SJ, may have railed against his description here as Pole’s heir. Paradoxically, this chapter is the most Anglocentric, with arguments made that sometimes neglect developments in Continental Catholic reform. For example, evidence is presented that English Catholic engagement with Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises stems from the earlier émigrés yet, in reality, these spiritual trends were shaping the whole of Catholic Europe. Similarly, as Smith notes, the seminary visions of William Allen and Pole were indeed alike, but this neglects the influence on Allen of Jean Vendeville, regius professor of canon law at Douai and future bishop of Tournai. Nevertheless, Smith’s contention that Pole’s reform programme was part of wider Catholic Reformation discussions is an important one.

Ultimately, though there are a number of debatable points, the book’s central argument is a vital one: that the Catholic Reformation continues to need further de-centring and that England’s relationship with it was not a one-way affair. As Smith writes, it is impossible to understand ‘either early modern English Catholicism or the wider European Counter-Reformation without appreciating the contacts, interactions, and exchanges between them’ (p. 236).