Read an Excerpt

Fires of Faith

Catholic England under Mary Tudor

Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Rolling Back the Revolution

The reign of Mary Tudor has had few friends among historians, and the regime's religious dimension has provided most of the copy for the bad press. Until relatively recently, almost everyone agreed that Mary's church was backward-looking, unimaginative, reactionary, sharing both the Queen's bitter preoccupation with the past and her tragic sterility. Marian catholicism, it was agreed, was strong on repression, weak on persuasion. Its atrocious campaign of burnings was not merely an outrage against human decency but a devastating political blunder, which alienated moderate opinion and helped to inoculate the English nation forever against roman catholicism. Its apologists and polemicists, with the possible single exception of the London artisan Miles Hogarde, were dismissed as unimpressive second-raters, their works tedious and unimaginative, the regime in general fatally unaware of the crucial importance of argument and debate in the battle for hearts and minds, and neglectful of the power of both the pulpit and the printing press in that struggle.

Mary's church was led by Reginald Pole, a man, it was claimed, positively averse to preaching, whose capacity for action had been sapped by disillusionment at the rejection of his theological vision and his understanding of reform at the Council of Trent, an Inglese Italianato who had been an exile in Italy for so long that he utterly failed to grasp how deeply the reformation had penetrated the religious life of England. This damning appraisal was most clearly set out in the late Geoffrey Dickens's textbook The English Reformation, which appeared first in 1965 and which was to dominate the historiography quite remarkably for the next thirty years. Dickens distilled this overwhelmingly negative picture into the claim that the Marian regime, bedevilled by a 'sterile legalism', had 'failed to discover the Counter-Reformation'.

This verdict – famous, fatuous, but fatally quotable – stuck, and has had an influence apparently directly proportionate to its basic implausibility, and over historians who might have been expected to have known better. It underlies I think, John Bossy's claim that Queen Mary and Cardinal Pole are best regarded not as figures in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century reconstruction and re-imagining of European catholicism that we call the counter-reformation, but 'as part of the posthumous history of medieval Christendom'. It coloured Rex Pogson's influential Cambridge doctoral study of Pole's legatine mission, and it informed the treatment of religion in David Loades's standard history of the reign, which conceded that the leaders of Mary's church 'were not slack or inept', but nevertheless insisted that they pursued a long-term policy which 'ignored ... important features of the immediate situation', above all 'the desperate need for spiritual leadership of a high calibre'. Deluded in believing that protestant ideas had established only a superficial hold in England, Loades argued, Cardinal Pole in particular drew back from the strenuous evangelisation that was so urgently needed, and characteristically refused help from the Jesuit order because he 'simply did not want men with the fire of the counter-reformation in their bellies'. He belonged to a nostalgic 'older generation' (Pole was in fact nine years younger than the Jesuit founder, St Ignatius), which, like the Queen herself, 'saw the future in terms of the past', at best clinging to the humanist ideals of the 1520s, and an agenda now hopelessly overtaken by the radicalisation of both the catholic and protestant reformations. Professor Loades has since modified some of these positions, and has encouraged efforts to rethink the religious aspects of the reign. His overall assessment of Marian religion remains muted, however, the sound at most of one hand clapping: Mary and her bishops, he believes, did too little, too late.

Over the last twenty years, this negative consensus has been chipped away piecemeal. In 1986, the late Jennifer Loach published an essay offering a positive re-assessment of the Marian establishment's use of the printing press. Susan Brigden's magisterial study of the reformation in London, published in 1989, offered a nuanced study of the impact of the Marian restoration in the capital, which did justice to its effectiveness, despite the presence there of a strong and vociferous protestant minority. In 1992, in the Stripping of the Altars, I suggested that the Marian restoration of catholicism had, in fact, displayed high levels of determination and resourcefulness, and that far from being, in another of Dickens's memorable phrases, 'the prisoner of a sorrowful past', in many instances the key policies of the regime anticipated or directly inspired later counter-reformation developments. And in 1993, in his English Reformations, Christopher Haigh offered a similarly upbeat survey of the effectiveness of the Marian regime.

Since then, a number of fresh developments have contributed more indirectly to the continued reappraisal of the reign. First, the establishment (on the initiative of Professor Loades) of the British Academy's Foxe Project has made available annotated online texts of all the Elizabethan editions of our single most important source for the religious history of the period, stimulating a wave of valuable new research, led by the project's own resident guru, Dr Tom Freeman. Secondly, Professor Thomas Mayer, in a stream of essays on Cardinal Pole, a new biography and a monumental calendar of Pole's correspondence, has provided the materials for a radical reassessment of the most important figure in the Marian religious establishment, and thereby encouraged the placing of the Marian episode in its proper European context. The changing historiographical climate has been registered in a series of publications and doctoral theses, themselves signalled in two collections of essays on the religion of the reign, published by Ashgate in 2006.

Yet major barriers to a genuine reassessment ofMary's church remain. The remarkable achievement of the Marian parishes in reconstructing the physical setting for catholic worship is concealed from us by generations of subsequent iconoclasm, first religiously and then aesthetically driven, which destroyed most of the evidence. The material situation that Mary's church inherited was dire. In five years, Edward's regime had bulldozed away centuries of devotional elaboration, and had stripped bare the cathedrals and parish churches of England. The most devastating impact had probably been in music, since the heavy emphasis of reformed protestantism on the intelligibility of the written or spoken word in worship left no place for Latin word-setting and elaborate polyphony. The entire repertoire of sacred music from late antiquity to the recent past, therefore, had been swept aside as redundant in a matter of months. But, after music, it was architecture and its attendant arts – paintings, statuary, stained glass – that suffered most. Virtually all the altars had been pulled down, their consecrated table-slabs or mensae often deliberately broken up, or profaned by use as paving, bridge components, walling or hearthstones. With the removal of the altars, the spaces round them – chancels and cathedral choirs – were drastically reordered.

As we shall see, Ridley's radical rearrangements at St Paul's would become almost legendary, but the hammers had been out everywhere – at Worcester, a representative case, Dean Barlow razed the high altar to the ground in August 1552, at the same time removing the medieval choir screens. By the end of that month the organ had gone too. The great crucifixes that had dominated every church in the land had been ritually burned by the Edwardine visitors; every accessible niche had been emptied of its saint; wall and panel paintings were scraped or whitewashed over. Acres of stained glass had been smashed or sold off and, when left in place, as perhaps they mostly were, the faces of sacred persons and the more overtly catholic iconography might be daubed out with paint or whitewash. In the most zealously policed dioceses, such as London, even the brass memorials of the dead, 'superstitious' because of their requests for prayers for the repose of the souls of the departed, had been prised out of the floors and sold for scrap. The vestments, vessels, books and music needed for catholic worship were outlawed, dispersed and (mostly) destroyed. In 1552,Edward's government, desperate for war funds, had turned this religiously inspired repudiation of catholic externals into a fiscal resource, and had carried through the largest government confiscation of local property in English history. County-based royal commissioners had stripped the parish churches of all their remaining valuables, leaving most with little more than a quantity of linen or silk cloth to cover the communion table, a single chalice for communion, a surplice for the priest, and the English books needed for the new services.

I have discussed elsewhere the massive sustained effort required throughout Mary's reign to reverse all this and re-equip the parishes for catholic worship, and I will not repeat myself here. It was a gargantuan task, and inevitably a slow one, hindered by lack of resources, by the scarcity of available craftsmen and specialist workshops, occasionally by the reluctance of communities or individuals to invest in the restoration of a religious system that they inwardly rejected. Perhaps the greatest hindrance was the massive blow that the Edwardine years had delivered to lay confidence in an age-old system of devotional provision and donation, which depended for its momentum on its immemorial and unchallenged character. Yet in churchwardens' accounts, visitation returns, will and probate records, and in the fabric rolls of the great churches, we find abundant evidence that the re-equipping went ahead, gathered momentum and that, by the end of the reign, it was well on the way to reshaping the physical appearance of English worship.

There was of course a great deal of make-do and mend. Impoverished parishes, even when we know them to have been devoutly catholic, might take years to gather the full complement of books, vessels and vestments needed, and even then might have to make do with pewter instead of silver vessels for the Sacrament. Churchwardens' accounts survive for fewer than 140 parishes from Mary's reign, a tiny proportion of the 10,000 or so in the country as a whole. Yet, even in parishes with surviving accounts, a great deal of the work of reconstruction is invisible because it was paid for by individual donations rather than by the parish at large, and so was not recorded in the wardens' accounts.

Cambridge University Library holds a splendid Sarum missal printed in Paris in 1555.20 Folio-sized, handsomely rubricated and illustrated throughout with high-quality woodcuts, this editon was the most sumptuous liturgical book produced for Marian England. Inscriptions on the title page and before the Canon of the Mass in the Cambridge copy ask for prayers for Richard Perkyn the elder, who presented the book to the Bedfordshire parish of St Peter, Tempsford, on 28 November 1557, just in time for the annual St Andrew's day celebration, commemorating England's return to papal obedience. By that point in the process of restoration, of course, the parish must already have used a mass-book daily for at least three years. Perkyn's gift is therefore an example of devotional elaboration, the provision of an expensive higher-quality item to dignify the parish's worship, designed to elicit the gratitude and prayers of the community for the donor (Plates 12 and 13). There must have been thousands of such gifts of books, vestments and fittings all over England, as local elites or the specially devout contributed to the re-establishment of catholic normalcy. Most such donations, however, like the Tempsford missal, will have been recorded, if at all, only on the object itself. And the overwhelming majority were to perish without trace in the early years of the Elizabethan Settlement. With them disappeared most of the material vestiges of a huge and concerted counter-revolution.

A few disjecta membra remain as clues to the likely appearance of English churches, great and small, at the height of the Marian reconstruction. Perhaps the most remarkable of all is to be found in the least expected of places. This is the handsome arcaded wooden canopy that crowns the shrine of St Edward in Westminster Abbey (Plate 10). Dismantled and removed under Edward VI, the shrine was reconstructed by Abbot Feckenham and his monks in 1557, and the royal saint's bones replaced 'with goodly syngyng and senssyng as has been sene, and masse song'. The elegant classical lines of the new covering for the relics themselves say a great deal about the spirit of the great Marian rebuilding as a whole: there is nothing the least backward looking or 'gothicising' about this confident renaissance woodwork. The same is true of the fragments of surviving screenwork from the Marian reconstruction of the choir of Worcester Cathedral, now in Holy Trinity Church, Sutton Coldfield (Plate 11). The east end of the cathedral had been devastated by Dean Barlow in August 1551, as we have seen. In 1556, the cathedral sanctuary was rebuilt and re-equipped for the restored Mass and Offices 'with closure of carved boards round about the choir, double stalls, and high stalls for the canons and petty canons, the lower for the children, and a goodly loft wherein the gospel is read': the Queen herself financed the work. Once again, there was nothing backward-looking about the style of the new sacred enclosure. Nikolaus Pevsner and his team, who knew nothing of its Marian provenance, but only that this woodwork had migrated from Worcester to Holy Trinity in the wake of the Victorian regothicising of the cathedral, were unable to date the panelling stylistically, and speculated that it might be of the mid-seventeenth century.

A somewhat more emphatic renaissance elegance characterises the tomb of Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke of Norfolk, buried in Framlingham parish church in 1554. The magnificent stone tomb chest, with its carved figures of the Apostles standing under scallop-shell canopies, was probably begun at Thetford in the late 1530s, but, with other Howard tombs, was moved to Framlingham in Mary's reign and completed. The completion of this emphatically catholic monument in Mary's reign, in the town where the predominantly catholic gentry of East Anglia had rallied to Mary, is an appropriate symbol of the strength of the regime's appeal to contemporary religious feeling. A more severe renaissance austerity characterises the chantry chapel of Bishop Stephen Gardiner in Winchester Cathedral (Plates 7 and 8), totally devoid of religious iconography apart from the bishop's own cadaver image and the figures of Ecclesia and Synagoga flanking the reredos behind the altar.

The greatest barrier to a positive assessment of the Marian restoration, however, remains the fact of the burning of more than 280 protestant men and women in just under four years, from February 1555 to November 1558. This was the most intense religious persecution of its kind anywhere in sixteenth-century Europe, and it not only constitutes a horrifying moral blot on any regime purporting to be Christian, but has seemed to most historians conclusive evidence of that regime's negativity, short-sightedness and instinct for self-destruction. I do not, of course, contest the horror involved in roasting men and women alive for their religious convictions. But, with some diffidence and discomfort, I do want to argue that the received perception of the campaign of burnings, as manifestly unsuccessful and self-defeating, is quite mistaken.

In sixteenth-century terms, the burnings were inevitable, and, gruesome as it is to speak of the efficiency of mass execution, in practice they were efficiently carried out and tellingly defended. For very good reasons, the regime identified protestantism with sedition. In the interests of political stability, it was convinced that it had to break the back of protestant resistance, and it pressed the device of shameful and painful public execution into service as a powerful tool in that task. Elizabeth, mutatis mutandis, would do the same from the 1570s onwards, though her campaign against catholicism was justified in largely political terms. But Mary's regime was also well aware of the potential of such executions to alienate public opinion, and Cardinal Pole and his colleagues took considered and, on the whole, effective steps to justify the campaign to contemporaries. Though it is very unlikely that the protestant minority could ever have been eliminated by force alone, the signs are that the campaign of repression was having the desired effect. By the summer of 1558, the numbers being executed for heresy were tailing off, a trend that has usually been interpreted as a sign of the regime's growing sense of failure and futility. I shall argue that, on the contrary, it reflects the fact that there were fewer defiant activists to execute: the protestant hydra was being decapitated.

In this short book, I do not attempt a narrative survey of religion under Mary Tudor. There are important and still under-explored aspects of the restoration of catholicism that I have time to do little more than mention, such as the restoration of monasticism, or the highly successful reconstruction of the universities (especially of Oxford) as powerhouses of catholicism, a development that, as we shall see in the final chapter, was to have momentous consequences for Elizabethan recusancy and the wider counter-reformation. What I want to tackle here is the overarching issue of the general competence, drive and direction of the regime. What was it attempting to do, how well did it set about doing it, and who was in charge? In the process, I hope to dispose once and for all of some of the misapprehensions that have dogged and distorted the historiography of mid-Tudor catholicism – that it was ineffective, half-hearted, complacent, unimaginative, insular, lacking in leadership, trapped in the preoccupations of the 1520s or 1530s rather than addressing those of the 1550s; in short, that it had failed to discover the counter-reformation. I shall suggest that, on the contrary, as the first protestant nation to return to papal obedience, Marian England was the closest thing in Europe to a laboratory for counter-reformation experimentation.
(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from Fires of Faith by Eamon Duffy. Copyright © 2009 by Eamon Duffy. Excerpted by permission of Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---