To be an early modern Catholic was to give voice to an international vision, to accept that certain commands towards affinity, solidarity and authority swept through the boundaries of the sovereign state or kingdom. To be an English recusant was to face especially urgent reminders of this condition: to find stigma in their own realm and protection beyond its borders as a consequence of the allegiances, obligations and institutions of the universal Roman Catholic communion. At the highest diplomatic level, the stances struck in France, Spain, Rome and the Empire would carry serious ramifications for the life of the English Catholic community. Hitherto, this discussion has concentrated on the relationship between English recusants and the demands of their native political and national community. Yet the horizons drawn after 1688 were decked by the challenges of a European arena, when the old recusant leadership had been scattered into diaspora, and the early Noncompounders of the exiled Jacobite court intoned the lesson that ‘all Catholick good consists in unity’, to induct their continental hosts into the experience of the fallen king. Accordingly, current scholarship has underplayed the extent to which eighteenth-century recusants experienced the tensions, anxieties and intellectual tremors of a European terrain that had as much of a tendency to fragment, as to unite. This chapter will contend that existing interpretations of the relationship between Jacobitism and English Catholicism after 1688 neglect the fact that the most decisive shifts in attitude came as responses to events in Europe.