In much of the modern-day ‘mainstream’ scholarly literature there is a kind of received wisdom about aspects of the post-Reformation Catholic community in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In particular this is the case with the English members of the Society of Jesus, whose presence in their native country was certainly regarded by many, and not just Protestants, as highly controversial. But a good deal of that modern account is a sometimes-uncritical replication of contemporary opinion. There was another narrative of their place in the English Church and polity, one that has, by and large, been missed – one that was given a new edge by the accession of James VI of Scotland as king of England and Great Britain in 1603. It is, I argue, central to some of the major current debates about the post-Reformation Church and state.