Book Review

Zealots who fanned the flames

Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor

Wishful thinking is a perennial companion of moral outrage. In particular, we wish that those two cardinal virtues, prudence and justice, were indivisible. When fulminating against torture, we readily slide from asserting that it's inherently wrong to claiming that it doesn't work. The same sloppy logic affects debates over vivisection, and a great deal else. We dislike the idea that something can be both morally wrong and practically effective.

Christianity's own-brand version of this wishful thinking centres on martyrdom, a form of spiritual ju-jitsu which takes apparent disaster and turns it into strength. There are, of course, excellent theological reasons for this. Moreover, it can work. The blood of the martyrs can be the seed of the Church - sometimes.

But any seed can be washed away by over-watering. The nasty truth about religious persecution is that it sometimes succeeds, especially if (unlike most of the ancient Roman persecutions) it is thorough and relentless. The extermination of the huge Japanese Church in the early seventeenth century is the most spectacular example. Eamon Duffy's new book turns to a more controversial case: England under Queen Mary I (1553-58).

In 1992, Duffy wrote a brief, path-­breaking reassessment of Mary's reign, attacking the notion that she was little more than a speed-bump on England's inevitable (providential?) road to Protestantism. He argued that her ­attempt to restore Catholicism was well thought out, widely supported, well- ­resourced, forward-looking, and was cut short only by her untimely death. But he ­attracted criticism for passing over the most notorious aspect of her reign in near silence. This was, as Protestants have never let anyone forget, a regime which in less than four years burned nearly 300 men and women alive for heresy. Now Duffy has written a fuller version of the reign, with the burnings front and centre.
His most striking claim is an uncomfortable one, but a very powerful one. While ­morally appalling to modern eyes (he makes no bones about that), the campaign of burnings was working. Indeed, in its own terms, it was necessary. As a sixteenth-century Home Secretary might have said, persecution works.

That said (and despite the title), this is not a book about the burnings, but about the Marian restoration. Its real hero, whom Duffy sees as the regime's religious mastermind, is Reginald Pole, the last Catholic Archbishop of Canter­bury. (Mary herself, by contrast, is oddly absent from the book.) For researchers, it is the work on Pole which is the most exciting. Pole has a reputation for being gentle, high-minded, Italianate, over-subtle and ineffectual. For Duffy, he is a devastatingly effective thinker and reformer. Several hoary myths are exploded here: in particular, the claims that Pole disapproved of preaching and that he short-sightedly excluded the Jesuits from Marian England. No one should now ever be able to make those claims in polite company again.

More broadly, Duffy argues that the regime's religious policy was not merely up to date: it was innovatory, and its experience went on to inform the final sessions of the Council of Trent. His cheeky final line suggests that the regime did not merely discover the Counter-Reformation, it invented it. Now nobody who is familiar with Duffy's work will be in the slightest surprised by these conclusions. And while he makes an excellent case, it is a polemical book. At times, he can become positively dewy-eyed about the regime's efforts; he can also slip into caricature when dealing with Protestantism. I was also disappointed to see him join in the too-easy condemnation of ­Anthony Kitchen, the only Marian bishop to accept Elizabeth I's re-established Royal Supremacy: an octogenarian in a Church which Pole and Mary had stuffed with clear-eyed zealots, but who still defied his new queen to an extraordinary extent and was allowed to run his Welsh diocese as a virtual Catholic enclave until his death in 1563.

Such nuanced compromises are not Duffy's fashion, as is evident when we turn to the burnings. The logic of his argument is strong. Almost everyone in the sixteenth century agreed that it was sometimes right and necessary to execute people for their religious views; so our revulsion at the principle tells us nothing about how contemporaries reacted. There is in fact slender evidence for any widespread revulsion at the burnings (as opposed to outrage from Protestant partisans). And it was working. The regime successfully wiped out the Protestant leadership in 1555-56 and then moved on to rounding up underground congregations, a campaign which peaked in 1557. The decline thereafter, Duffy argues, was not because of any change of policy; rather, it reflected some practical difficulties and the fact that there was not a limitless supply of would-be martyrs. So the campaign was just, in contemporary terms, and was succeeding, by any standard.

Two cheers for that argument. Successful: yes. The argument is all the more powerful for being constructed largely from John Foxe's passionately Protestant martyr stories. But just? Mary and Pole were, to say the least, at the hard-line end of the range of contemporary opinion. Duffy shows how uneasy some were with prosecuting heresy so vigorously. One of this book's surprises is the revelation that ­Bishop Bonner of London, long a comic-book villain of the persecution, was actually ­driven by the Council and his own officers to burn suspects whom he would rather have freed.

The contrast with Edward VI's and Elizabeth I's reigns is instructive. All of the Tudors executed religious offenders. Yet Edward VI executed no Catholics as such, and nor did Eliza­beth for 20 years. The main wave of killings of Catholics in the 1580s was linked to fears (genuine, if also paranoid) of invasion and subversion. Mary executed the Protestant bishops she inherited; Edward and Elizabeth imprisoned the Catholic ones they inherited. Mary's regime demanded a far higher level of inward and outward conformity from her subjects than Elizabeth's (a difference which partly reflects the limits of what Elizabeth could realistically hope to achieve). Mary Tudor's Church was, Duffy's account makes clear, an intensely instrusive Church. Any ­withdrawal from communal participation constituted prima facie grounds for an accusation of heresy.

This book has persuaded me that Mary's (and Pole's) religious policy was creative, ­forward-looking and brutally effective. But I'm still not sure that I like it.

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