the English people in the martyrs’ blood.
John Fisher was the only cardinal ever to die a martyr’s death, but Pole would have made the second if he had waited around in England for Henry VIII to get hold of him. He had thought it prudent in 1531 to return to his studies in Italy, where he drew up a treatise on papal primacy, De Unitate, which he sent off to Henry in 1536. During its composition, he had become convinced that the primacy of Peter’s successor belonged to divine, not human, law. The king, now counting Pole among the traitors, had to be content with chopping off the head of his aged mother, the Countess of Salisbury, in 1541. 

The irony was to be that Pole fell out with a real live pope, Paul IV, who portrayed him as a heretic. Pole had earlier been convinced that faith justified, and was devastated by the rejection of this doctrine by the Council of Trent, over which he had presided in its opening sessions. Nevertheless, he reconciled himself to the council’s definitions, and in the conclave of November 1549 to February 1550 narrowly avoided being elected pope himself. In a game of counterfactual history, Trent defining justification by faith (along with sanctification by works, perhaps), followed by the election of Pope Reginald, would make a splendid hypothetical combination.

Professor Duffy wrote a couple of years ago about Pole’s part in Mary’s restoration of Catholic England in Fires of Faith, and here he is content to explode the myth that Mary’s reign perpetuated Henry’s antipathy to papalism. As for John Fisher, Duffy devotes two chapters on this “neglected giant” to demonstrate the falsehood of the suggestion that opposition to the Reformation was the work of “devoted mediocrities” (in the phrase of Geoffrey Dickens). I confess to having underestimated the standing of this “the most distinguished Catholic theologian in the Europe of his day”, despite the recent efforts of the Archbishop of Westminster to restore his status in his book Saint John Fisher, which Duffy cites. Duffy, while recognising Fisher’s sometimes over-emotional medieval piety, establishes, against C.S. Lewis’ interpretation, his notably humanistic outlook. He makes me want to look again at Fisher’s sermons on the Penitential Psalms and on the crucifix, for Good Friday. He also makes me want to visit the tremendous Perpendicular church at Salle, in Norfolk, the life of which he sketches in one chapter, as in 2000 he had reconstructed in a vivid book the life of the parish of Morebath.

Now in a series of self-contained chapters, written in his usual easy style, he takes the story of Tudor religion from its Catholic expression, through lay-sponsored painted chancel screens, to its late nostalgic regret in Shakespeare’s day for the “bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang”. In different ways, he shows that the Protestantisation of England really began where Geoffrey Dickens had ended his English Reformation (1964) – soon after the accession of Queen Elizabeth.