Rolling Back the Reformation

Eamon Duffy

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 comparatively recently, almost everyone who wrote about what has been routinely described as the ‘Marian Reaction’ agreed that to a greater or lesser extent the Catholic Church during her reign was backward-looking, unimaginative and reactionary, sharing both the queen’s bitter preoccupation with the past and her tragic sterility. Marian Catholicism was strong on repression, weak on persuasion. Its atrocious campaign of burnings was not only an outrage against human decency but a devastating political blunder, which alienated moderate opinion and inoculated the English nation against Catholicism for ever. Marian apologists and polemicists were dismissed as uncharismatic second-raters, the regime in general as fatally unaware of the crucial importance of argument and debate in the battle for hearts and minds, and thus neglectful of the power both of the pulpit and of the printing press.

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Vol. 30 No. 3 · 7 February 2008 » Eamon Duffy » Rolling Back the Reformation (print version)
Pages 27-29 | 4731 words

Letters

From Edward Pearce

Eamon Duffy has written an eccentric and charmless piece, the point of which seems to be that Mary and her bishops didn’t just burn people to death for being unsound in their religious beliefs (LRB, 7 February). They also preached more spiffing sermons than we thought and won some conversions; no burning alive without a priest at hand preaching sound doctrine. Such consolation!

Against a background of incremental massacre, Duffy has a footling point to make. Putting ‘doctrinal truth’ above human decency, he does not so much study the 16th century as go native. His comments on acts of faith and combustion take the breath away: ‘Yet the case can be made that in 16th-century terms the burnings were inevitable, and that they were efficiently carried out and persuasively defended. The regime had to break the back of Protestant resistance, and pressed the device of painful public execution into service as a powerful tool.’

Those are words to run around the mouth and savour, words luxuriant in contemporary resonance. They recall the lady on an American talk show, coming out against Senator McCain: ‘He’s against torture. Hell, I’m pro-torture.’ The passage about the burnings being ‘efficiently carried out’ speaks a moral squint which no doctrine of any branch of any religion can mend. The recent parallels are too blazingly obvious to cite.

Duffy ends that part of his essay by linking the burnings with subsequent trials and executions of Catholics. The ‘powerful tool’ would be put into service ‘mutatis mutandis’ by Elizabeth against Catholics ‘from the 1570s onwards’. This slides over essential distinctions. One must not follow Duffy into defending what should never have been done. But ‘from the 1570s’ avoids a precise date. The St Bartholomew’s Day massacre of Huguenots in Paris took place in 1572; there were massacres, too, in Rouen, Orléans, Lyon, Meux, Bordeaux and Toulouse. I follow the list given by Jasper Ridley in Elizabeth I (1987), who puts the number of the dead at eight thousand. Pope Gregory XIII responded with a Te Deum and declared a Jubilee. Elizabeth and her ministers went on to persecute Jesuit priests not for a doctrine the back of the resistance to which had to be broken, or for the force of their sermons, but as servants of a papacy that celebrated mass murder.

Edward Pearce
Thormanby, North Yorkshire

Eamon Duffy writes: Edward Pearce thinks that Mary Tudor’s burning of almost three hundred Protestants was loathsome beyond words, while Elizabeth’s strangling, castration and slow disembowelling of roughly the same number of Catholics was justifiable, because Catholics are bloodthirsty and cruel. I think both sets of executions were appalling, but asked the different question, was Mary’s regime inept as well as ruthless?, I suggested the answer might be no. My piece attempted to get a more objective historical hold on the religious battles of the 16th century. Mr Pearce appears to be still fighting them.