Broody Mary: A Good Thing?

Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor, by Eamon Duffy; Yale University Press, 2009, $40.95.

As every schoolchild—well, actually nothing like every schoolchild, especially in Australia, but perhaps every reasonably educated person of a certain age—knows, Mary Tudor was a bloodthirsty Catholic hag who managed to weasel her way onto the rightfully Protestant (or at least Anglican) throne of England. She and her pathetic foreign husband then proceeded to kill everyone in sight until Mary herself mercifully died without living issue. England then got back to being decent and reformist and full of constitutional rights and riches for everyone except slaves (reintroduced to England by Elizabeth I) and Catholics.

If you visit any major or minor museum in the UK, you will usually find the above mythology presented, with varying degrees of sophistication, ad nauseam. In fact, if you watched the recent mini-documentary series Tony Robinson’s Crime and Punishment on the ABC, episode three on the Tudors seemed to have taken its historical arguments directly from 1066 and All That. I myself only recently scandalised the editor of this magazine by rhapsodising counterfactually about England’s prosperity under a victorious Armada.

Really, quite the reverse should be the case. This “inevitability” in the presentation of history—which carelessly skates over the obvious fact that history is written by the winners with all the awkward bits left out—should be catnip to the would-be revisionist. The curious and free-thinking always head straight to the archives to see whether this glib mythology is really sustained by empirical evidence. As with his magisterial Stripping of the Altars, Eamon Duffy has been there and done that; hence this new book.

Anyone who has read any of Duffy’s works knows that he is not a polemicist or an apologist. He gratefully acknowledges the work of competent historians of all persuasions who have helped to cast light on this murky era by tackling the source materials, including the lurid Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, with an open mind. He also faces up to the awful subject of the burning of Protestants by Mary’s government—and occasionally at Mary’s personal instigation, as in the case of Cranmer. Duffy does not excuse: he points out that, aside from anything else, the burning of the frequently-recanting Cranmer deprived Mary’s campaign of a star convert.

But he does contextualise. How would you feel about a man who, while holding the highest spiritual office in the land, had openly perjured himself countless times, who had urged the burning of others when the archiepiscopal slipper was on the other foot, and who had facilitated your parents’ very messy divorce? (Ask anyone who’s been through the Family Court about that last one.) Burning was, quite simply, a common form of administering justice at the time, no matter how rough that “justice” may seem now.

Disembowelling live Catholics between 1535 and 1700 was also not nice, but that was the penalty for treason, and Catholics were considered traitors. QED.

The book covers a lot of ground, notably the work of Cardinal Pole in bringing home the revolution—coming straight from Rome, Pole was imbued with the cutting-edge of the Counter-Reformation, and set to work to invigorate priestly training and to ensure that a decent set of bishops was installed. Unlike Henry VIII’s time, when the capitulation of Catholic bishops to the new status quo was almost unanimous (pace John Fisher), Mary’s bishops were of sterner stuff: their refusal to capitulate to Elizabeth made living martyrs of almost all of them.

I was, however, delighted to encounter the prototype Vicar of Bray, Bishop Anthony Kitchin, who had survived Henry VIII by becoming an Anglican, and then a Protestant under Edward VI, and then a Catholic again under Mary. Duffy trenchantly remarks that Kitchin “would doubtless have become a Hindu if required, provided he was allowed to hold on to the See of Llandaff”. Kitchin was also, as one might suspect, the only Marian bishop to yield to Elizabeth.

Duffy does not just tackle the common-man attitude to “Bloody Mary”: he goes for the academic historians also, arguing that too many have not thought—or even looked—outside the Reformation box. By examining the output of Catholic literature in the period—actually counting it, and analysing it—Duffy also puts paid to the academic canard that Mary’s campaign did not use preaching or the press as well as her Protestant rivals.

Duffy ably demonstrates that the reconversion of England was taking place successfully and comprehensively, helped by a more educated clergy and university-trained theologian bishops. For example, when Mary Tudor came to the throne, over two-thirds of the senior clergy (canons, deans, chancellors, archdeacons) conformed and remained in their places to serve her. Upon her death, more than half the senior clergy in England resigned or were removed from their positions for defying Elizabeth. There are ample contemporaneous Protestant sources which bitterly noted the rapidity and extent of the return of the population to Catholicism, among them the infamous priest-hunter Peter Martyr (no relation), who was horrified at the recantation of persons “whom you would have considered the most resolute”.

Duffy, is not, however, uncritical of Pole and of Mary: among other things, he highlights Mary’s failure to return the pillaged church lands to their original owners. Pole knew only too well that a revitalised and stable clergy needed to be provided for financially; the church had been left utterly impoverished by Henry VIII and then Edward VI. In an era when land was wealth, the failure to restore church lands meant that the reconversion of England would be significantly slowed through lack of resources. Without preachers, no preaching; without revenues, no preachers.

This book is a shrewd and well-argued piece of work, which is bound to ruffle a few feathers. A good history always does.