The direction of recent scholarship has started to restore religious controversies to the heart of our understanding of eighteenth-century England, calling into question the older image of a secularising ‘age of stability’. In the light of works by Stephen Taylor, John Walsh and Jonathan Clark among others, it is now far less likely that historians would assent without debate to the notion that ‘by comparison with previous generations, the Englishman of the early eighteenth century displayed little religious fervour’. Yet, in spite of the vigorous exchanges roused by these revisions, the community of English Catholic recusants has evaded attention, and the lack of study has perpetuated an older view that dismissed them as silent spectators in the nation's rise to imperial grandeur. In the verdict of J.R. Jones, recusants remained an ‘inert, defensively-minded and intellectually negligible’ minority, shut out from the discourse that dominated the English public sphere. To John Owen, they were an ‘impoverished’ group, who ‘played no part in national politics’. To Linda Colley, Protestant self-assertion was part of the genetic make-up of the Hanoverian kingdom, and those who fell outside the pale risked being cast to the margins. Indeed, the study of recusants over the larger early modern period has been reduced, all too often, in one recent judgement, to ‘an historiographical sub-field or occasionally a ghetto’. At best, the examination of English Catholicism has been deemed less significant than the study of anti-Catholicism. Such an emphasis cannot, however, be dismissed as the product of an incorrigible Protestant Whiggery.