The Intercessor

This chapter explores questions about assimilation and integration of Catholics in a universal Church through the lens of expatriates’ devotional lives. Their English identity was not a merely abstract idea but was, like all early modern belonging, constituted through bonds and reciprocal relations. The formative role of charity in fostering and maintaining communal bonds explains some of the driving motivations behind expatriate English Catholics’ preserving their own English community distinct from that of their hosts. They needed to perpetuate the commemoration of their ancestors to ensure their salvation, and intended to return England to the Catholic fold for the salvation of their compatriots. Yet this chapter also questions the assumption that migrants belonged either to their home society or their host society, and that there is a linear way to map their steady integration into the new host culture. Identification with and participation in one community did not preclude membership of other communities.

The Record Keeper

This chapter reflects on the ways in which past conceptions of mobility have shaped our knowledge and understanding of expatriate Catholics. Through a study of the multiple English Catholic record-collecting projects which converged in the decades around 1700, this chapter explores the roles of scholarship, archives, and written memory for a dispersed community. Understanding the collections not as neutral repositories, but as processes and practices indicates their role in sustaining their scattered community. Through commemoration, they consciously tried to maintain the continuity of their community, despite their dispersal across England and Europe. Behind that preoccupation with their uninterrupted line of English Catholics and English Catholic practices lay a commitment to returning England to the Catholic fold.

The Exile

This chapter analyses the broad conceptualization of mobility by Catholics. It explores the different understandings of migration for Protestants and Catholics, and highlights the specifically Catholic interpretations of mobility. A narrative of ‘exile’ is not dominant in Catholics’ writing on mobility; instead, the centrality of ‘mission’ in Catholic thinking becomes manifest. This changes the dynamic of how we should interpret mobile Catholics: not as isolated sufferers, but as militant defenders of their Church. Rather than victims escaping hardship, English Catholics went abroad with a mission and purpose. Moreover, the preference for ‘missionary’ over ‘exile’ indicates that Catholics did not understand physically leaving their country as breaking all ties with it in order to embrace the life of an isolated wanderer. On the contrary, expatriate Catholics were seen as active participants in an English Catholic community that did not have clearly defined geographical borders.

Introduction

The introduction sets out the methodological framework, and expounds the conceptual shift from exile to confessional mobility. Without summarily dismissing ‘exile’, it argues that adopting a wider term changes perspective, reshapes what we see in the sources, and opens up new questions. Rather than labelling people and reducing their entire identity to that label as their key characteristic, ‘confessional mobility’ focuses on the activity in which complex and conflicted people engage. In the process, it does justice to the broad spectrum of English Catholics who crossed the Channel, challenging scholarship that searches for a single ‘pure’ motivation for travel. Moreover, scrutinizing mobility forgoes an assumed separation and isolation, highlighting the constant cross-Channel communication. Links with the Counter-Reformation on the Continent were not important solely for those who travelled abroad, nor solely for their time abroad: they influenced the entire Catholic community.

The Educational Traveller

This chapter foregrounds the diversity and dynamics of the expatriate community and writes the history of expatriate English Catholics into a much older tradition of educational travel. Recognizing that continuity alerts us to read the expatriate houses neither as a purely new phenomenon, nor as exclusively defined by flight from repression. Rather, without prioritization, it integrates retreat from persecution and preparation for the future, but still recognizing the two-way interaction. Children and youngsters were sent to colleges on the Continent to ensure that they were safe from Protestant influence and to prepare them for an active apostolate. Highlighting these dynamics helps to move beyond a static understanding of expatriates which limits the understanding of movement to the moment of migration, and instead discloses an expatriate life that was much more dynamic and in flux than these images suggest. Going abroad was a transformative experience.

The Fugitive

This chapter argues for the importance of practical loyalty in English Catholics’ political situation. It shows that the assumption that leaving the country compromised political relations is based on an anachronistic coupling of territory and nationality. Instead, this chapter highlights the significance of bonds of loyalty and legal frameworks, and of practical expressions of loyalty over abstract theories. Seemingly unpromising documents such as travel passes and passports provide access to careful negotiations and practical transactions. Expatriate Catholics did not cut themselves off from their king but fostered bonds regardless of their location. These cross-Channel connections were both the corridors which enabled Catholics to uphold their allegiance to the Crown and the lifelines which ensured the continued survival of the English Catholic community in defiance of government measures.

Conclusion

The conclusion draws together the book’s arguments, highlighting the importance of recognizing the variety of confessional mobility. Through this approach, the discussion of expatriate English Catholics is no longer a self-contained narrative: its greater significance lies in reconfiguring how we think about both confessional mobility and the Counter-Reformation. English Catholics’ scattered community shows the role of bonds of belonging over physical proximity and territoriality. Moreover, their various identifications—among English Catholics, within the broader Catholic Church, and with English subjecthood—strongly support moving beyond a narrative of simple, linear integration in a host society. Confessional Mobility also challenges the ongoing practice of reducing English Catholics, especially migrants, to the footnotes to scholarship on the Catholic Reformation, since they did not conform to a monolithic image of the triumphant Church. However, this book shows that the Counter-Reformation took many shapes, and that English particularities were part of this diverse spectrum.

The Pilgrim

This chapter focuses on the transformation which expatriates deliberately sought. Building on the rich work on sacred space, it adds a temporal dimension. The static, the durable, and the territorial have long dominated the study of early modern Catholicism, even of pilgrimage. However, the journey, as well as the destination, was a constitutive part of spiritual travel. Mobility becomes particularly visible when we scrutinize the element of time. Short-term visits by individuals; the long-lasting impact on their lives of the distribution of relics and shrines; the carefully phased process of spiritual exercises; and the sense of a temporal retreat in preparation for the future alert us to a dynamic understanding of English Catholics’ mobility. Their deliberate decision to journey in order to change shows the formative role of the expatriate experience, in these cases characterized by vibrancy rather than victimhood.