One hundred years ago this week, John Maynard Keynes published the extraordinarily prescient and morally compelling The Economic Consequences of the Peace. A historian traces the great economist’s surprising roots in Catholic recusancy

While John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) was a scholar at Eton, he presented a paper to the literary society (which he had helped revive) on Bernard of Cluny, a twelfth-century monk. Keynes also made detailed charts of his own pedigree, which revealed not only that he came from an old Norman family, but one with a remarkable history of Catholic resistance and Royalist support.

The Keynes family of Compton Pauncefoot, Somerset, one of several branches spread across the south and west of England, became a leading recusant family in the reign of Elizabeth, and remained so throughout the seventeenth century. Edward Keynes, together with his wife, Catherine, and his brother Humfrey, were present at Lyford Grange, outside Oxford, on Sunday 16 July 1581 for the momentous weekend when the Jesuit missionary and martyr, Edmund Campion SJ, preached his last sermon.

The dinner that followed, for some 35 priests, nuns and laypeople, was interrupted by the arrival of 50 armed men, led by the Catholic “traitor”, George Eliot, a paranoid spy, who searched the house like a madman for 20 hours, before finally exposing the priest-hole where three priests were hiding; the Keyneses were arrested with Campion.