As Machiavelli knew well, nothing succeeds like success. ‘Good King Harry’; ‘Good Queen Bess’; ‘Bloody Mary’: until very recently the smoke from the burning of Protestants in Mary Tudor’s brief reign has coloured not only common tags but the vision of most Tudor historians, who have regarded her five years on the throne as a cruel, incompetent and futile attempt to halt the progress of England towards Elizabeth I’s Protestant nation-state.
Eamon Duffy, particularly in The Stripping of the Altars (1992), has done more than anyone to dispel the conventional view of traditional Catholic life — better lost than saved — in England before the Reformation. Now, in a short, evidence-packed book, exceptionally well provided with illustrations and maps, he has shone a just and equal light on the English church in Mary’s reign. His thesis is that the management of the return to Catholicism from the muddled, opportunistic and destructive Protestantism of Edward VI’s reign was not, as historians have mostly supposed, an ineptly handled throwback to the discredited past. He shows that, in fact, a great deal of new work was done in a very short time; that the appointments made and arrangements decreed to establish a better disciplined, better financed and more theologically grounded episcopate and priesthood were sensible, practical and far from merely nostalgic; and that in all this Cardinal Pole, the last Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury, was the driving force.
Pole is one of the most unfairly ignored major figures in English history. Duffy says, rightly, that ‘The established narratives of [Mary’s] reign would not look very different if Pole were to be edited out of them altogether’, and the case for appropriate recognition of Pole’s qualities and achievements is here powerfully made. He and his Yorkist family had suffered much for his loyalty to papal authority, the loyalty which had cost Thomas More, Bishop Fisher and a number of others their lives. An Italian exile with a (huge) price on his head, he became an incorruptible cardinal at the cutting edge of the Catholic Church’s response to the theological and ethical challenges of the Reformation, delivered a galvanising, disinterested address to an early session of the Council of Trent, and later missed being elected pope by a single vote.
What he found in England was a traumatised Catholic majority, a few formidable Protestant scholars who had not fled to Europe, bishops who had gone along with Henry’s Catholicism-without-the-pope and the hasty religious revolution of Edward’s reign and now went along with the return to papal obedience, and in some areas of the country a number of impassioned Protestants. Pole’s reforming priorities were an emphasis on good, orthodox preaching and strong sacramental theology, seminaries to train priests properly, and exemplary probity in the church.
But heresy had to be dealt with. Duffy does not attempt to exonerate Pole from a presiding role in the burning of 284 irreconcilable Protestants, the indelible scar on Mary’s reign, made the very most of in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, published four years into Elizabeth’s reign under government auspices and one of the most successful propaganda efforts in history. Duffy does his best to explain to a post-Enlightenment reader how the assumptions of the 16th century made it possible for a gentle and exceptionally intelligent man to pursue this now appalling and, as it turned out, counter-productive policy. He shows that it was becoming effective, and that senior clergy, many with chequered theological pasts, tried, sometimes successfully, to coax Protestants to the simplest statements of orthodoxy to save their lives; he also shows how heretics, some no more than crude blasphemers, could crave the glory of a spectacular martyr’s death. He thinks it likely that Pole did try to persuade Mary against the burning of the then reconciled Cranmer, the most resounding public relations disaster of the reign. Elizabeth learnt the lessons; her executions of Catholics were as grisly and often preceded by torture, but she burnt no one: no fires, no smoke.
The Catholic revival in England failed because the end came unpredictably quickly: Mary and Pole died on the same day in 1558, and it took Elizabeth only months to sweep away everything positive they had done. Duffy’s rewarding book shows how, nevertheless, Pole’s ideas and some of his loyal clergy inspired the last session of the Council of Trent. It was largely thanks to Pole that the tradition, forward-looking rather than backward, of Erasmus and Thomas More survived to inspire the English recusancy and counter-reformation Europe. As Erasmus had written only seven years after Luther’s pebbles had precipitated the Reformation avalanche: ‘I would have had religion purified without destroying authority’. This was the keynote of Pole’s whole life.
Comments