PUBLICATIONS

A review by Peter Marshall, University of Warwick follows:-

Eamon Duffy and David Loades, eds., The Church of Mary Tudor. Aldershot: Ashgate Press. 2005. Pp. xxxii + 335. ISBN 0 7546 3070 6.

With the possible exceptions of Richard III and John, Mary Tudor has had probably the worst press of any English sovereign. Her governance has traditionally seemed politically inept (unpopular Spanish marriage, disastrous war with France), and, in religious terms, at best misguided and ineffective, at worst murderously cruel. The historical roots of this interpretation lie, of course, in the sixteenth century itself, particularly in John Foxe's spectacularly successful arraignment of the Marian persecution in his Acts and Monuments/Book of Martyrs. The view of Mary's reign, and of her attempted restoration of Catholicism as an aberration, an unfortunate 'interlude', persisted well into the twentieth century - a case study in the 'Whig view of history' which associated nation, liberalism and modernity with the inevitable triumph of Protestantism in the sixteenth century. Nowadays, of course, to be called 'whiggish'is almost the worst insult one historian can throw at another, and Mary's reign and religious policy have long looked ripe for reassessment. Yet despite the revisionist wave in English Reformation studies which has been sweeping almost all before it since the later 1970s, close focus on the full range of religious expression under Mary has remained surprisingly elusive. In 1992, Eamon Duffy, co-editor of this collection and author of the acclaimed Stripping of the Altars, complained that 'a convincing account of the religious history of Mary's reign has yet to be written'. He and his fellow editor David Loades make no claim that their volume entirely supplies the lack, yet there is no doubt that it represents a very significant step towards a more rounded historical understanding.

Mary failed in almost all her objectives, representing, in historical terms, the ultimate 'loser'. Yet as the editors in their introduction astutely note, there is a tendency among historians to judge the Queen's policies as if she and her servants should have known that they only had five years in which to implement them. There is an alternative temptation: to construct counter-factual fantasies of long-term success and achievement - what if Mary had not died so relatively young, what if she and Philip had produced a Catholic heir? Wisely, the contributors to this volume resist the temptation to go too far down this road, instead concentrating on the processes by which policies were formulated, implemented and received. Unsurprisingly, the overall assessment of religious policy-making is a much more positive one that the traditional interpretation of the topic has sustained. But the result is no tightly marshalled revisionist manifesto, the historiographical equivalent of a New Labour conference. There is room for nuance, and some disagreement on substantial issues. This should not occasion surprise, as the editorial pairing imaginatively brings together, in Duffy, the leading revisionist historian of the English Reformation, and in Loades, the leading political historian of Mary's reign, who has generally been cautious about ascribing undue praise to the achievements or potential of the Catholic Restoration. Although the volume appears in a series devoted to 'Catholic Christendom', the unhappy experiences of Marian Protestants are not entirely neglected. In a characteristically incisive concluding essay, Patrick Collinson re-examines the persecution in Kent (where 61 martyrs were burned), and finds that John Foxe went to considerable lengths to try to conceal that some of them may have held unorthodox anti-Trinitarian views.

The rest of the volume, however, concerns itself firmly with Marian Catholics, prefixed by a thought-provoking introductory essay by Loades on the religious outlook of the Queen herself. This finds the key to apparently contradictory impulses and behaviour in the intensity of her devotion to the theology and practice of the Latin mass. The subsequent essays are divided into three sections, focusing on 'The Process'(i.e. the instruments and institutions of re-Catholicisation); on Cardinal Pole and his circle; and on Marian religious culture more broadly. In a second contribution, Loades provides a survey of the Marian episcopate, which, while less effusive than some other recent assessments, nonetheless identifies the real progress that had been made in restructuring the body by the second half of the reign. Claire Cross's examination of policy towards the universities finds a similar pattern of successful institutional reform, which can be measured in the extent of deprivations required after 1558, and a flight to the continent of Catholic scholars which outweighed the equivalent Protestant migration after 1553. Another flagship institution of Marian Catholicism - the restored Benedictine community at Westminster - is reconstructed with skill and patience (and with a useful biographical appendix) in Charles Knighton's essay. Ralph Houlbrooke provides a provincial case-study of Catholic restoration, and has a fascinating story to tell to counter-balance the conventional emphasis on heroic Protestant martyrdom. In Norwich, the Edwardian clerical leadership effectively collapsed, and the leading evangelical preacher John Barret became an active collaborator with the new regime. Interestingly, Houlbrooke speculates that the relative absence of persecutions in Norwich might reflect a Protestant laity demoralised by these capitulations.

The 'Pole' essays are similarly close-focused and forensic. Thomas Mayer analyses Pole's legatine register to document the impressive number of appeals coming forward from clergy and laity alike, and comes to the 'heretical' conclusion that Pole's final legation must be considered a success. Eamon Duffy re-opens the question of Pole's attitude to preaching, and finds much of the traditional case for the Cardinal's supposed mistrust of it to rest on a mistranslation of a letter to the Spanish Dominican Carranza. Through a close examination of Pole's sermon preached in London on St Andrew's Day 1557, Duffy finds a figure far removed from the stereotype of the remote and unworldly Cardinal Legate, but rather a man with his finger firmly on the pulse of local and civic concerns, and rhetorically skilful in his appeal to his audience. If Duffy succeeds in setting the record straight, John Edwards effectively rewrites it. In a ground-breaking essay, Edwards demonstrates that far from being marginal to religious developments in England, the Spanish churchmen who accompanied Philip (Bartolomé Carranza foremost among them) played significant roles in the universities, in the restoration of liturgy and ceremonial, and in the prosecution of heresy.

The suggestion that the Marian Church was part of the mainstream of sixteenth-century Catholic reform is taken up in the final section of the book, in William Wizeman's thorough analysis of themes in the sermons of Bishop Thomas Watson. Wizeman finds Watson citing decrees of Trent in advance of their official promulgation, and advocating practices (such as the need for frequent communion) which were entirely characteristic of Counter-Reformation spirituality. Yet, paradoxically or not, Watson was also a traditionally-minded Catholic humanist, who took many of this theological bearings from Bishop John Fisher. This sense of a dynamic Catholic tradition is still more evident in Lucy Wooding's elegant consideration of the meanings of the mass in the Marian restoration. Wooding finds the mass to be a distinctly multivalent property: increasingly demarcator of a self-consciously confessional Roman Catholic identity, but at the same time a symbol of continuity with the policies of Henry VIII, and a focus of popular devotion independent of any necessary concern about the papacy. 'The people' are a rather attenuated presence through much of this volume, but one representative is placed centre-stage in Gary Gibbs's lively re-reading of the manuscript of the London citizen Henry Machyn. Mislabelled a 'diary' by its Victorian editor, Gibbs persuasively places the text in the civic chronicle tradition, and suggests that its concern with the recording of religious processions provides evidence for the success of the Marian regime's use of ritual and spectacle.

Taken together, these essays represent a welcome and much-needed rephrasing of the questions historians should be asking about the English Church and religion in the 1550s, ones less concerned with tautological identification of 'problems' to account for Marian 'failure', but which, in the editors' own words, attempt 'to locate the events of 1553-58 in the cultural context to which they belong'.Amen to that. Future researchers will be encouraged rather than deterred by the sign posts pegged out here.

Peter Marshall

University of Warwick

Xxiii - Foxe and his critics both right - 'A Church which had a broadly popular programme of worship and practice, and which was committed to education and evangelization, nevertheless carried out one of the most sustained persecutions seen anywhere in Europe'.

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