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.
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