Jnl of Ecclesiastical History, Vol. , No. , July . # Cambridge University Press DOI: .\S Printed in the United Kingdom Catholicism, Kinship and the Public Memory of Sir Thomas More by MICHAEL QUESTIER Historians are now particularly aware that kinship had political and social resonances in the early modern period. Historians of English Catholicism in this same period have always stressed that a web of family networks helped to sustain the English Catholic community within its harsh post- Reformation environment. But how exactly did this happen, particularly when Catholicism in England was so diverse, and when Catholics were often deeply divided over key political and religious issues? In this essay I examine how these relationships worked for one significant kinship group, a set of people descended from or related to the Henrician Lord Chancellor, Sir Thomas More, and thus how they affected Catholicism’s political and ecclesial expressions of itself. I argue that in doing this, we can begin not only to reveal how far religious continuity depended on or was influenced by kinship, but also to describe some of the ways in which post-Reformation Catholicism was defined and perceived. here has long been a consensus that post-Reformation Catholicism in England was something which was nurtured and sustained by Tand within Catholic families. The flame of the faith, we are told, was kept alive, during the harsh times of persecution, by those Romish families which point blank refused to conform to the religion of the Church of England. In several of them we find a continuous tradition of resistance to the introduction of Protestant ideas into the English Church from the time of the first reform measures during the reign of Henry . What became an increasingly tightly-knit and intermarrying group of gentry families was the last redoubt of the Catholicism which came to be served by the new seminary-trained clergy who appeared in England " from the s onwards. Historiographically, this has been an issue of some importance. For it AAW l Archives of the archdiocese of Westminster; CRS l Catholic Record Society; HMC l Historical Manuscripts Commission I wish to express my thanks to Dr Peter Marshall, Professor Peter Lake and Professor Conrad Russell for commenting on a previous version of this essay, and particularly to Dr Thomas Freeman for many invaluable references and discussions on this topic. " J. C. H. Aveling, ‘Catholic households in Yorkshire –’, Northern History xvi (), –; A. Fletcher, A county community in peace and war: Sussex –, London , –. has served as a crucial explanatory mechanism to describe how Catholicism retreated, towards the end of the sixteenth century, into a minority gentrified household religion of the kind depicted by, for # example, the famous Jesuits William Weston and John Gerard. This has, indeed, become one of the central topics in our narrative of the course of the Reformation in England, as historians have tried to describe how the Catholicism which emerged in opposition to the settlement, at one time the religion of ‘the people’, became the preserve of a distinct, small, gentrified and interrelated Catholic community; and how the continuity of English Catholicism was preserved by the passing of the faith from one generation to the next within this same small number of families. Family and kinship, then, were clearly central to Catholicism’s fortunes in this period. But Alan Davidson, for one, has questioned Lawrence Stone’s dictum that the Catholic gentry simply pursued a policy of religious ‘apartheid’. Davidson observes how, the moment that the family trees of the Catholic gentry are extended beyond the immediate family, $ patterns of religious allegiance can become very complex indeed. As William Sheils has demonstrated through a longue dureTe study of Catholic families in North Yorkshire, once one has detected Catholicism within early modern family networks, there are quite a lot of questions to answer about how it was received and transmitted. His painstaking reconstruction of the Catholicism of the Egton area shows that kinship was not necessarily just a bastion behind which Catholicism could shelter. There was certainly no guarantee that all the members of the kin would share the same religion. In fact, kinship ‘was just as effective in breaking down confessional barriers within generations as it was in sustaining them % between generations’. The work of scholars such as Davidson and Sheils suggests that the ‘continuity’ of Catholic religious allegiances within ‘Catholic’ families may not have been as straightforward as historians have sometimes assumed. Yet if kinship was, as scholars such as David # William Weston, ed. P. Caraman, London ; John Gerard, ed. P. Caraman, London . $ A. Davidson, ‘Roman Catholicism in Oxfordshire from the late Elizabethan period to the Civil War c. –’, unpubl. PhD diss. Bristol , –; L. Stone, The crisis of the aristocracy –, Oxford , . It should be noted, however, that Stone’s remarks applied primarily to the ‘great’, i.e. ennobled, Catholic families. % W. Sheils, ‘Catholics and their neighbours in a rural community: Egton chapelry –’, Northern History xxxiv (), – at p. and passim. See also his ‘Household, age and gender among Jacobean Yorkshire recusants’, in M. Rowlands (ed.), Catholics of parish and town –, London . See also Ralph Houlbrooke’s overview of the workings of kinship and cousinage which stresses that simply because people were related did not guarantee that they would agree about everything or anything: ‘political alliances between kinsmen were as fragile and volatile as any other sort, and often flawed by additional suspicions and resentments’: The English family –, London , . There were quite as many forces within the family likely to break up family unity as to cement it. Cressy have argued, a dynamic early modern social institution, and if ‘affinal and consanguinal ties alike provided a basis for sympathy, linkage & and collaboration’, it may be worth asking again – how far did ‘clan solidarity’ affect Catholics’ religious opinions, and did their religious opinions contribute to their attachment to family and kin? As is well known, Margaret Spufford and other students of Dissent have tried to trace, over a long time-scale, ‘family and linear linkages’ among Protestants, even to the extent of trying to make connections between Lollardy and post-Restoration Dissent. Spufford cites the work of, among others, R. J. Acheson to argue that ‘the family played a crucial role in the perpetuating of dissenting attitudes over a number of generations, although there is clearly much research [required] before this can be ' established reasonably firmly’. It is easy to think of families which were Catholic across several generations. But simply to trace continuity of religious tradition is not the same as saying what it means. In fact, several scholars have expressed grave doubts about the methodology of the Spufford school. In particular, Patrick Collinson has opined that ‘whether family tradition, dissent in the blood, provides’ a good answer to the continuity of this form of religion ‘is a large question posed rather than fully and satisfactorily answered’ by ( Spufford and her team in the World of rural dissenters. Collinson asks, even more critically, ‘what does it actually mean to speak … of the ‘‘continued strength of the dissenting tradition’’? Was there such a ‘‘tradition’’? If blood-lines can be established … connecting Lollard surnames with Quaker surnames, known ancestors with known descendants, what does that signify?’ And, he says, in the Spuffordians’ work this is often far from clear anyway. For the Spuffordians have not always thought to trace what filled the gap between Lollardy and later Dissent and how these ) ideas were passed down within the same families. & D. Cressy, ‘Kinship and kin interaction in early modern England’, Past and Present cxiii (Nov. ), – at pp. , , . ' M. Spufford, ‘The importance of religion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’, in M. Spufford (ed.), The world of rural dissenters – , Cambridge , . The Spuffordians’ enquiries and methodology have, however, never been extended to the study of early modern Catholicism; see Sheils, ‘Catholics and their neighbours’, –; P. Collinson, ‘Critical conclusion’, in Spufford, World of the rural dissenters, . Perhaps this is simply because the Spuffordians’ principal concern is dissent in specific regions and among certain social status groups which were not, primarily, the gentry. But Collinson rightly points out that the Spuffordians’ dissenters ‘display a cross-sectional profile not much out of line with society as a whole’, and ‘almost anyone could be a dissenter’: Collinson, ‘Critical conclusion’, –. The Spuffordian themes of family tradition and dissent in the blood are of concern for more than just the history of a socially exclusive and excluded rural Protestant dissent; cf., however, Houlbrooke, The English family –, ( . Collinson, ‘Critical conclusion’, . ) Ibid. , . William Sheils notes that, even when a genealogy can be reliably constructed linking a Lollard ancestor with a dissenting descendant, there is often so much Obviously, this is in part because the Spuffordians simply do not have adequate source material to pursue the study of familial continuity from heresy to Dissent. (Spufford herself admits that it is one thing to trace, within a single family, progression from Lollardy ‘through four or five generations’ to early Baptists or Quakers, and another to explain how this * happened. ) But Collinson makes another point. If we try to track dissent genealogically over several generations, there is always a danger that we will forget that the tradition is not static. If, for example, we want to follow a line of Dissent from Lollardy to the civil war sects, at some point that line has to go through the thing we call Puritanism, and, as Collinson has stressed, that was something which could at times be regarded as "! virtually coterminous with English Protestantism. Now all of these problems are ones which are encountered when we trace post-Reformation English Catholicism across the generations during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.