That a religious revolution occurred in England in the sixteenth century there can be no doubt, argues the Regius Professor of Modern History Emeritus in the University of Cambridge. We are all post-revisionists now. But what exactly that revolution consisted of remains a matter for discussion.

EPPUR SI MUOVE ? and yet it does move! Galileo didn?t say it. The famous put-down attributed to him was first quoted in 1761. But it can get us started. Something moved: the English Reformation did, after all, happen. In his book English Reformations (1993), Christopher Haigh disputed the idea that there was any huge difference between Catholic and Protestant England. Rather, he suggested, there was no watershed, only a disjointed series of accidentally related reformations, some of them political, some more properly religious, not at all like the Reformation, which happened on the Continent. The book ends: ?That was how it had been in 1530; and that was how it was in 1590.? But another revisionist, Eamon Duffy, who wishes indeed that the English Reformation had never happened, has always known that, in the long haul, it was a ?runaway success?. Two versions of what is vulgarly called revisionism.

Since then, however, Christopher Haigh has changed his tune, rescuing the Reformation. We are all post-revisionists now. But without revisionism you cannot have post-revisionism. So thank you, Christopher Haigh and Eamon Duffy, and Jack Scarisbrick too.

On 30 April in the chapel of King?s College, London, we shall celebrate the life and work of the historian Professor A.G. Dickens. There will be none of the embarrassment which attends so many memorial services, since Dickens was a staunch Anglican of a Protestant bent. We shall hear tributes to his very great merits in both discovering and communicating the past, German as well as English. We shall be told how the young Fellow of Keble with an interest in Italian Renaissance history returned to his native Yorkshire, walked up to York Minster, and discovered that here was one of the richest archives in Europe for the history of religious change in the sixteenth century. Dickens was aware that this change had been contested, since his earliest publications had to do with resistant Catholicism.

At first his work was little known beyond the University of Hull, except to fellow- specialists. But in 1964, not long after his arrival at King?s College, Dickens?s book The English Reformation was immediately hailed as a nearly definitive account of its subject. ?Masterly!?, the Times Literary Supplement pronounced. ?There is not likely to be a comparable study in our lifetime.?

But perhaps on 30 April someone will have the courage to say that in one crucial respect, Dickens was mistaken. Lecturing on the Reformation in Northamptonshire, a county he knew less well than Yorkshire, he claimed to have found there ?a new climate of thought? which had provoked ?an ever broader rejection of the claims of the medieval Church?. There had been, he pronounced, only a lingering addiction to the old ways, mostly among the elderly, while even the clergy ?failed to defend Catholicism with much conviction or success?. This view did not come out of the archives, and Dickens was forced back on the risky argument that much evidence of precocious Protestantism had probably gone unrecorded.

Dickens?s verdict on Mary Tudor was indicative. The longer she had lived, he held, the deeper the hole she would have dug for herself, for there was no prospect of any revival of a religion which was already doomed. No one now believes that. As Christopher Haigh has pointed out, the paradox of Dickens?s career as a historian of the Reformation is that he sent little armies of young researchers into the vineyards of the local record offices to harvest the grapes he was sure were there, but for the most part they returned with what for him were sour grapes, setting their mentor?s teeth on edge.

My own relations with Dickens were those of the kind of friendship which stays the course. He was a generous and supportive colleague when I most needed one. But when push came to shove they were complex. My own work, as early as the Fifties, suggested that the English Reformation in any very meaningful sense happened very late. When I dedicated to Dickens my little book The Birthpangs of Protestant England (1988), which said as much on the first page, I am not sure that he appreciated the compliment.

And then happened Duffy and his book The Stripping of the Altars. There have been critical receptions of this tour de force. Can we really accept the proposition advanced by Duffy that the distinction between religion and superstition is wholly arbitrary, one person?s superstition being another person?s religion? The denunciation of superstition by the Reformers, the exposure of the jiggery-pokery of the Rood of Boxley and the Blood of Hailes, had its resonances. Duffy?s paradigm is the rural parish, almost to the exclusion of the more complex religious scene of the late medieval town. And the organisation of the book as a kind of loosely hinged diptych fails to explain how and why it was that things so lovingly depicted on the first panel were scored and scratched out on the second. Unless it was all down to Henry VIII. But that explanation is not sufficient either, for he was not the first king to take advantage of the politics of religion. Duffy overlooked the political motives of the Lancastrian kings of the early fifteenth century, with their insecure claim to the throne. In clamping down on heretics, they too used religion for a political purpose. Nevertheless, few books are ever published which have had as much capacity as The Stripping of the Altars to change our perceptions of a large and important subject, and for ever.

Post-revisionism (rescuing the Reformation from revisionism) seems to be where we now are. This position rests on a simple syllogism. A change so drastic cannot have happened: people do not change their religious ideas so thoroughly. But it did happen. Ergo, it cannot have been all that drastic. Well, it seems to me that the English Church looked and was a different institution in 1600 from what it was in 1520. But the revisionist logic I have outlined still does not solve in all respects what has been called the riddle of compliance. If people in the 1540s really believed that their dead grandparents and little children were in Purgatory, how could they so easily accept a political decision to close down all institutions for intercessory Masses and confiscate their assets? I have compared this to a modern government suppressing hospices for the terminally ill, and pocketing the proceeds. People would not stand for it. More recently it has been suggested that a more up-to-date analogy might be the discovery that your pension fund is worthless. People would be furious about that, too. Professor Scarisbrick in his book The Reformation and the English People (1984) knew that the last generation of Catholic Englishmen were complicit in the process of Reformation. And as a good Catholic he sat in moral judgement.

And then there is the riddle of our friend the vicar of the Devon parish of Morebath in his last, Elizabethan, years, as expounded by Eamon Duffy in his book The Voices of Morebath. Christopher Trychay, the man who had lost his little world, St Sidwell and her silver shoes, that expensive black cope for funerals, finished up as some kind of Protestant, acquired a second living, and was even one of the few clergy in that part of the world to preach sermons. We do not know what kind of sermons. Probably they were short, punctuated with, ?Now, good neighbours?, thin on theology. But his behaviour remains a puzzle. Asked at a conference held this month at Exeter, a few miles away from Morebath, how Trychay could have brought himself to do it, Duffy could only say: What else was he to do?

Evidently Sir Christopher was not the stuff of which martyrs and recusants were made, and conversion through conformity was perhaps the commonest route to a Protestant grave. The Jesuit John Gerard warned the turncoat master of Peterhouse, Andrew Perne, that the Queen?s religion was a good one to live in but not to die in. ?Die in faith and communion with the Catholic Church, that is, if you want to save your soul.? Did Perne, who collapsed at Lambeth Palace, save his soul? Did William Shakespeare, who was probably another convert through conformist osmosis?

Revisionism at its peak made the mistake of adopting too narrow and exclusive a definition of what constitutes a Protestant. It confused Protestantism ? as I did myself, mea culpa ?with the prodigious form of Protestantism often called Puritanism. I came close to saying that Elizabeth I was not a Protestant, and I have called her (and still will) an ?odd kind of Protestant?. I have written that when most people became ?Protestants?, Protestants became Puritans, implying that they were the only genuine Protestants. And those sorts of Protestants are prone to believe that they, and not too many of them, are the only Christians. My attention was captivated by their religious athleticism, thanks, it may be, to my own rigorous, rapturous, evangelical upbringing. In fact, however, conformity may even have been what the past mostly consisted of.

It was Protestantism of this religiously athletic kind which Haigh had in mind when he wrote, in an essay in a collection he edited on The Reign of Elizabeth I (1984), ?The task was impossible?the English people could not be made Protestants?. As Haigh expounded it, they knew nothing about justification by faith or predestination, matters ?above the capacities of ordinary people?, but hoped to get by, eternally, by doing nothing too dreadful. And that was what Haigh meant when he suggested that towards 1600 England was fast becoming ?a Protestant nation, but not a nation of Protestants?. For ?Protestant nation?, perhaps we should read ?anti-Catholic nation?, a nation which celebrated with bonfire and bells its near-miraculous deliverances from Armada and gunpowder plot, and which turned on its kings when they proved unreliable in withstanding popery.

More recently, Haigh has modified his position (?Success and Failure in the English Reformation?, Past & Present, November 2001). Now he says that by the early seventeenth century, the Church of England had succeeded in teaching its people their catechism. That was success by the minimalist standards set by the government and the bishops. But by the standards of the preaching ministers themselves, the Reformation had failed. Or at least there was a perception of failure. Haigh knows that preachers were predisposed to look on the dark side, but he may still be too inclined to take perceptions of the case, and the case itself, as one and the same thing. Historians have to wade through a great deal of rhetoric and polemic, and they need to be aware that that is the colour of the water.

Post-revisionism, as I see it, has two things to say. First, we must be careful not to impose our own notions and tastes on the past. If people enjoyed and benefited from going to sermons, as many did, we must acknowledge that; nor can we do much about the widespread belief in witchcraft and other pieces of mentality remote from our own. Such things may be for us a weariness to the flesh, but it was not necessarily so for them. Moreover, to concentrate on how far untrained intellects were capable of absorbing the content is too intellectual an approach to the problem. People are formed (and reformed) by behaviour and habits. We need to recreate in our mind?s eye, and ear, the ritual of going to and from the sermon, and what seems to have been the typical reaction to it. ?He preached a good sermon? (but don?t ask me what he said).

In the second place, post-revisionism acknowledges continuities as much as discontinuities of religious thinking and behaviour. Haigh?s reduction of the Reformation watershed is right if he means that the post-Reformation inhabited the same moral universe as the pre-Reformation. Belief in divine providence in early modern England was all-pervasive, and at intellectual levels both high and low. Providence informed the understanding of every event, from an accident in the garden (no accident) to the defeat of the Spanish Armada. That belief was not new, although it was accentuated by the removal of the saints from the big picture.

What this had to do with the coming of the world we now inhabit is another question. To find the answer, you might want to read Kingsley Amis?s The Alteration, with its dystopian vision of a world ruled by sinister cardinals in their electrically propelled cars. But I would say, not much. The Reformation was indeed one of those foreign countries, where they did, and believed, things very differently.

Back to homepage