When the hunt was in full cry

Howard and Southwell, Fortes- cue, Paine, Percy, Mayne, Milner, Owen, Houghton, Cam- pion — even the names of our prep school dormitories were a declaration of dissent. Of this list perhaps only Edmund Campion is now at all widely known, but after three years of interminable prayers for the reconversion of England and the canonisation of the 40 martyrs that quixotic collection of saints, poets, fanatics, scholars, Jesuits, Carthus- ians, plotters, aristocrats and carpenters can still conjure up an alternative sense of Englishness and English history that is difficult to shake off.

It is more than a decade now since Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars brought recusant history out of its Catholic closet but in many ways Alice Hogge’s vivid and moving portrait of the Counter-reformation in the Elizabethan age remains true to this older and more beleaguered tradition. In a brief author’s note at the end of the book she plausibly argues for the contemporary relevance of her story, but for anyone brought up on a literature of Tyburn executions, safe-houses, priest-holes, agents provocateurs, informers and heroic resistance, her Elizabethan England will have more in common with Nazi-occupied Europe than it does with Muslim Bradford.