Chapter 1 examines recruitment, looking at questions surrounding a postulant’s choice of convent and how they managed to travel there. The very foundation of each exile convent was based on national identity: these were, after all, English convents. Yet this insistence on Englishness did not only emanate from the women religious themselves but was fundamental to their gaining permission to establish convents in the first place. Nevertheless, it is argued that particular religious identities affected the process of joining a convent. It takes as its case study convent recruitment from the county of Essex to argue that women chose particular convents based on an interplay between home and abroad, as well as clerical and familial patronage. It highlights the effect of one clerical movement – the Jesuits – on convent recruitment patterns, yet these issues of competing spiritualities were not, despite first appearances, solely products of particular national contexts but part of wider developments in Catholic Europe. They show the formation of the English convents as part of the European – and even global – Catholic Reformation rather than presenting them as isolated national enclaves.