The received version of the English Reformation ? Protestants good, Catholics bad ? has been destroyed by the revisionists. But in that case, why did the Reformation happen at all? The Reformation has been rescued from the Protestants; does it now have to be rescued from the Catholics? A historian launches a two-part discussion.

THE English Reformation has been rescued from the Protestants. For 400 years ? from John Foxe?s ?Book of Martyrs? in 1563 to A.G. Dickens in 1964 ? the dominant interpretation of the Reformation was an unambiguously Protestant one. And if there were Catholic protests against this version, from Robert Parsons to Philip Hughes, they were attempts to recalculate the suffering rather than present a truly different vision. So we had a Protestant history. After all, the Protestants had the numbers, in the universities and in the reading public. Above all, the Protestants had the national myth of the escapes from popery: freed from Rome by Henry VIII, saved from Spain in 1588, from papist traitors in 1605, from Spain again in 1623, and from a Catholic king (and France) in 1688.

But now it is different, and the key elements of the Protestant story have been challenged, perhaps destroyed. The Protestant claim that the pre-Reformation Catholic Church was corrupt and unpopular has been disproved. The Protestant assertion that the new religion was enthusiastically welcomed and rapidly received has been undermined. And the Protestant assumption that the victory of the Reformation was inevitable (because Protestantism was better, and because it was English) has been demolished: the English Reformation was contingent, depending on the chances of politics and the births, marriages and deaths of kings and queens.

The Catholics have been put back into Reformation history, in two ways. First, we now know very much more about the realities of pre-Reformation faith and devotions. In place of the old Protestant mockery of Catholic ?superstition? ? mechanical images, miracle stories, pilgrimages to faked shrines, and the rest ? we now have a sensitive understanding of what it was like to be a Catholic. We now know what conventional Catholicism offered its devotees, and we now know that most English people liked it. There were few real grievances against the Church, and any conflicts between clergy and lay people were local and personal rather than institutional and endemic. The significant indicators ? recruitment to the priesthood, giving to religious causes, paying for votive masses ? all suggest ungrudging commitment to Catholicism. So the realities of traditional religion now look like reasons for opposing the Reformation, rather than reasons for wanting the Reformation.

Secondly, Catholics are now recognised as part of the Reformation process, as energetic participants in its history and not just its hapless victims. The Protestant version told us about those who made the Reformation ? Henry VIII, Thomas Cromwell, Thomas Cranmer, Hugh Latimer, the ?progressives? who were bringing in the future. Since the Protestants won in the end, we were taught how they got their victory. But we now see the Reformation as a contested process, a continuing struggle, which was as it was because Catholics didn?t want it, as well as because Protestants did. We have to know about compromised and compromising political bishops like Cuthbert Tunstall, Stephen Gardiner and Edmund Bonner ? as well as the saints like John Fisher and Thomas More.

And we have to understand what it was like for traditionalists to experience the Reformation. We were told how Protestant converts read their Bibles and flocked to evangelical sermons (and we were told how Catholic martyrs struggled to reconcile political and religious loyalty, and finally stood up for the faith). But we have only recently been told about the many, many more for whom the Reformation was neither a liberation nor a death sentence ? those for whom it was a long, inglorious, painful process of loss and adjustment. A.G. Dickens revealed the Yorkshire curate Robert Parkyn, who recorded what to him were dreadful changes to churches and services ? but to Dickens Parkyn was a quaint figure, ?the last medieval Englishman?. We have only recently rediscovered Christopher Trychay, vicar of Morebath in Devon, and Roger Martyn, a layman from Long Melford in Suffolk, who saw the religion they had loved gradually stripped away, and stood impotently, fearfully, resentfully, by.

The new approach to Reformation history has been called ?revisionism? ? and much of it is owed to Catholic historians. Jack Scarisbrick?s The Reformation and the English People (1984) illuminated the neglected world of Catholic confraternities, and suggested that the Reformation cost England dear. Eamon Duffy?s The Stripping of the Altars (1992) gave an affecting evocation of traditionalist piety, read with sympathy and skill from carvings, primers, the ?Lay Folk?s Mass Book? and ?The Fifteen Oes?. Some reviewers thought Duffy had created an idealised version of how popular spirituality ought to have been, but it was widely recognised that he had shown pre-Reformation lay devotion to be authentic, vibrant, rich in meaning, and widely shared. And recently Duffy?s The Voices of Morebath (2001) detailed the religious practice of a Devon parish, how it was reshaped by the experience of Reformation ? and how Christopher Trychay lost his vestments, his favourite saints, and the sheep whose wool had funded parish devotions. There are other Catholic historians, other important works, but these three books made vital contributions to the revising of the Reformation. They alone would have made the Protestant version untenable.

So the English Reformation was rescued from the Protestants. But now ? if I may put it so ? it needs to be rescued from the Catholics. ?Revisionism? was not invented by Catholics, and revisionism is not a mode of Catholic revanchism ? though both Catholics and Protestants have assumed or asserted that it was. It suited Catholic triumphalists to welcome revisionism as Catholic history, and it suited Protestant and Whig historians to dismiss it as such. When I published The English Reformation Revised (1987), A.G. Dickens declared it was just what you?d expect from a Catholic ? and when told that I wasn?t, he expostulated: ?Then why does he write such things?? In his review of Duffy?s The Stripping of the Altars, the late Lawrence Stone claimed that the revisionist challenge was ?mostly by Catholic or Catholic-sympathising historians? ? which is not true, unless everyone who tries to understand the appeal of Catholicism is branded ?Catholic-sympathising? (and in that case all Reformation historians should be ?Catholic-sympathising?, as well as Protestant-sympathising).

Let us remember where this revisionism originated. Its roots lie in the Sixties, when Margaret Bowker and Peter Heath were working on the parish clergy at the eve of Reformation, when Keith Thomas was working on popular beliefs, and when eager young graduate students were beginning research on diocesan administration and the local history of the Reformation. Paradoxically, it was Dickens who had pointed the way to county archives, and he probably thought we would find lots and lots of Protestant heretics, lots and lots of evidence of the failure of Catholicism. But we didn?t. Bowker and Heath found that, by and large, the clergy were hard-working, clean-living, and got on reasonably well with their people. Ralph Houlbrooke and Stephen Lander (now head of the security service MI5) found that the church courts were, by and large, cheap, efficient, and responsive to the needs of their customers. And those who wrote county or diocesan studies of the Reformation, by and large, found much less evidence of Protestant enthusiasm and much more evidence of Catholic devotion than had been expected.

There were two other influences on the making of revisionism ? and the remaking of the Reformation. One was the late G.R. Elton, whose Policy and Police (1972) was the first serious, archive-based attempt to treat the Reformation as a problem of enforcement, and the conservatives as a force to be reckoned with. Elton recognised that the early stages of the Reformation ? the break with Rome, the suppression of monasteries, the first attacks on images and pilgrimages ? were deeply unpopular, and that opposition had to be contained and broken. The other influence came from the work of Eric Ives and David Starkey (yes, that David Starkey), who revealed the instability and unpredictability of Henrician politics, and so the contingency of Reformation policy. For revisionism was not just a matter of finding that Catholicism was popular and Protestantism (to begin with) wasn?t ? it was also a reconceptualising of the Reformation, seeing change as contested and other outcomes as possible. The Catholics did not know they were going to lose ? and in 1539 and 1553 they thought they had won.

So the ingredients of revisionism were all there by 1979, when Eamon Duffy was still writing (very well) about eighteenth- century Catholics. A 1979 survey of the historiography sketched out a revisionist approach to the Reformation, and it was soon explicitly identified as ?revisionist?, comparing the strategy employed to the ?revisionism? of Conrad Russell and other historians of pre-Civil War England. So Scarisbrick and Duffy were Johnny-come-lately revisionists, and I remember the former being rather shocked by what some of us were saying. But The Reformation and the English People, The Stripping of the Altars, and The Voices of Morebath came from the same sources as the earlier steps towards revisionism ? not, I am sure, from Catholic prejudice, or from adoption of a new methodological fad, but from the archives, from hundreds of wills and parish accounts. And Stripping worked so well, mattered so much, not because it was new, but because we were ready for it.

When Dickens reviewed Scarisbrick?s book, he pointed out that there were no Protestants in it ? and much the same point could be made about Duffy?s. All are books about why the Reformation shouldn?t have happened ? why it wasn?t necessary, and how it was opposed. But, in a manner of speaking, the Reformation did happen ? not quite the Reformation we were once told about, and certainly not in the way we were told it happened, but, slowly, somehow, it did. Only a few wanted it, but it came nonetheless. How can we understand that? We are, perhaps, all post-revisionists now, struggling to find how the impossible came to be, how the strong, successful, and effective Catholicism of late-medieval England came to be broken ? and by whom.

The nice thing about the old Protestant history was that it was simple: Catholicism bad, Protestantism good, the English made their choice, end of (short) story. But if Catholicism wasn?t bad, and if Protestantism wasn?t (seen as) particularly good, why all the trouble? That is a long, complicated, and rather messy story, in which the saints and heroes have only bit parts. It operates at two levels. At the Court, politicians weighed their chances, jockeyed for position, offered competing policies and plans ? break with the Pope, or do a deal with the Emperor? Suppress some more monasteries, or persecute the heretics? Ally with Cranmer, or with Gardiner? Support Jane Grey, or Mary Tudor? In the parishes, priests, churchwardens and parishioners had to deal with the flow of orders from the centre: take down altars, then put them back, then take them down again; forget about the saints, then celebrate them again, then forget them once more. Caught between the Crown and the parish community, between statute law and old custom, clergy and wardens had to negotiate ways through ? or risk the penalties for outright disobedience. They did (most of) what they were told: usually they hid some of the church kit in case it was needed again, but they pulled down the images and put down the Mass.

So there is a third way in which the Catholics have been put back into Reformation history. Much of the Reformation was not made by Protestants at all; it was made by men who thought they were Catholics ? and Catholics can?t blame the Protestants for the Reformation. In Parliament, ?Catholics? voted against the Pope, against the monasteries, against chantries, because they thought they better had. In the parishes, ?Catholic? priests and people conformed to new rules, because they thought they better had. Whether they really were Catholics, whether they were good Catholics, what Catholics ought to have done, are not historians? problems ? and there?s not much point in applying anachronistic definitions or unrealistic expectations. Our job is to try to understand what it was like to be there, why more-or-less decent people did what they did, why the English had a Reformation hardly anyone wanted. And Eamon Duffy has made one thing abundantly clear: it was not because they did not care.

Christopher Haigh is at Christ Church in the University of Oxford. He is the author of English Reformations: religion, politics and society under the Tudors (1993). Next week Patrick Collinson, Regius Professor of Modern History Emeritus at Trinity College, Cambridge, will respond to this article.

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