Our appetite for neglected parts of our national history has been fed in recent times by any number of biographies, novels and BBC4 documentaries by camera-friendly academics. Few, though, pause for long on the recusants, that small number of Catholics who, amid the post-Reformation religious havoc wreaked by Tudor and Stuart monarchs, refused to be coerced into abandoning their allegiance to the pope.

Roy Hattersley, politician turned historian, sets out to correct that sin of omission in his elegantly written, sweeping account of Catholics in these islands from the Reformation to the present day. It’s a tale of high drama and high stakes, by turns horrifying, romantic and ultimately hopeful.

In just a handful of places – Hattersley mentions in particular the ancient healing shrine of St Winefride’s in north Wales – the Catholic mass has been said continuously despite Henry VIII’s break with Rome. Successive Protestant kings, queens and ministers may have deployed every weapon at their disposal – spies, penal taxation, exclusion from public life and gory, staged executions – to force Catholics on pain of destitution and death to conform to the new national religion, but they failed to impose their will.

Survival and continuity, however, came at a cost. Hattersley chronicles the long list of those hung, drawn and quartered for their faith, now regarded by the church as martyrs, and highlights one case “as an example of barbarism, corruption and sheer evil”. Father Nicholas Postgate had been trained like many others as a Catholic priest on the continent and then smuggled back into England to lead a secret life, perpetually on the run between priest-holes and hidden chapels in the recusant homes of the Catholic gentry.

Unlike most, he had survived into his 80s but found himself caught up in 1678 in the latest of many waves of anti-Catholic hysteria, this one caused by the “Popish Plot” to depose Charles II and replace him with a papist. No matter that the plot existed only in the imagination of its unreliable narrator, Titus Oates, Postgate was arrested, found guilty of treason, and executed. “I do not die for the plot, but for my Catholic religion,” the old man told the crowds at the gallows in York before he met his maker.

Such attachment even unto death fascinates Hattersley. Why didn’t the recusants just go with the religious flow, outwardly at least? It was, he concludes, something to do with the certainty that Catholicism represented, and how it was impervious to persecution and prejudice. Indeed, they have the opposite effect, a lesson just as relevant today in handling minority faiths mistakenly regarded as subversive by an often overexcited majority. What finally healed the recusant breach was compromise and acceptance of Catholics’ right to be different – in the Relief Acts of the late 18th century and the granting of emancipation in 1829.

For Hattersley, the story he tells has a personal side. The book is dedicated to his father, who was a Catholic priest in 1932 when he fell in love with a young woman who had come to him with her fiance for marriage preparation. The wedding went ahead, but two weeks later Father Hattersley eloped with the bride. The couple never told their son about their past. He only discovered it by accident after his father’s death in 1972.

He touches on this private wound at the start, but all too briefly, which is a shame. Elsewhere he could have done with rationing his words in the same manner, especially in the sections on the already too familiar story of the buildup to the post-Reformation persecutions. But the core of The Catholics is worth waiting for. The story of the recusants is neglected no longer.

Peter Stanford’s Martin Luther: Catholic Dissident is published by Hodder on 16 March.

• The Catholics: The Church and Its People in Britain and Ireland, from the Reformation to the Present Day by Roy Hattersley is published by Chatto & Windus (£25). To order a copy for £21.25 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99