England Swings
Fires of Faith: Catholic England Under Mary Tudor
by Eamon Duffy
Yale University Press, 2009
(249 pages, $28.50, hardcover)
reviewed by William J. Tighe
Eamon Duffy is Professor of the History of Christianity at Cambridge University and a Fellow of Magdalene College. He became famous as a media personality in 1992, when his newly published book, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c. 1400 to c. 1580, unexpectedly became something of a bestseller in England.
That book was divided into two parts. The first sought to present and explain major aspects of late-medieval English Catholicism, while defending it from the common criticism—in origin stemming from Reformation Protestants and later liberals—that it was “sub-Christian” and “superstitious” in important ways. The second part sought to demonstrate that English Catholicism died hard, as large numbers of Englishmen, perhaps the great majority of them down to the 1580s, resented and often resisted its suppression and attempted supersession by an iconoclastic Reformed Protestantism during the reigns of Edward VI (1547–1553) and Elizabeth I (1558–1603), and, by contrast, supported and rejoiced in its restoration in the reign of Mary I (1553–1558).
Dismissive Attitude
For decades, the predominant approach to Mary Tudor’s reign has been to dismiss it as, in the words of one historian, “the sterile reign,” even though—as the same historian who produced that phrase himself recognized—it saw a great deal of administrative reorganization and consolidation in various government departments. (The historian got around this by attributing these measures to the surviving “disciples” of Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s “evil genius.”)
This attitude has been particularly persistent concerning the Marian restoration of Catholicism, both among those dwindling number of historians who think that Protestantism had largely triumphed, at least among the elite, by 1553, and among those who believe that while a Catholic restoration could have succeeded had Mary reigned longer than she did, the actual policies pursued by the queen and her archbishop of Canterbury, Reginald, Cardinal Pole (1500–1558), were “unimaginative” and “backward-looking.” The latter see these policies as a sort of last hurrah of medieval Catholicism, which, on the one hand, ignored or deliberately spurned the first signs of what became the Catholic Counter-Reformation—as when Cardinal Pole supposedly refused the offer of St. Ignatius Loyola to send Jesuits to England to assist in the work of restoration—and, on the other, alienated the population at large by the prosecution and execution of heretics.
The Most Trusted Counselor
Duffy contests every one of these criticisms. He devotes a whole chapter to demonstrating Cardinal Pole’s active involvement in all aspects of the Marian restoration. Pole pushed successfully against Mary’s initial impulse to accord qualified praise to her father for upholding aspects of Catholicism. Rather, he insisted that it was Henry VIII who had cast himself into hell and led the realm into schism “for the sake of a whore” (Anne Boleyn).
Pole was said to be a “broken man” by the time he came to England in 1554 because the Council of Trent had rejected his “quasi-Lutheran” views on justification, but Duffy demonstrates that he accepted this rejection with equanimity because of his high views of church authority in determining doctrinal truth. Pole placed a high emphasis on the importance of sermons, and was himself an indefatigable preacher, and, in sharp contrast to the pre-Reformation discouraging of Bible-reading and banning of English Bible translations by the Church in England, Pole held it laudable and to be encouraged, so long as it was understood that its purpose was devotional edification and not individual doctrinal inquiry—for doctrine, he believed, was delivered by Tradition from the Church, and not through individual inquiry using the Scriptures as source material.
As to his refusing the Jesuit offer of assistance, Duffy shows that what St. Ignatius offered was to educate two or three English students at Jesuit institutions in Rome, but that what Pole had in mind and intention was a more ambitious alternative: to transform the disused and decrepit “English hostel” on the Via Monserrato in Rome, originally founded to house English pilgrims, into a seminary for training the “best and brightest” English students there.
William J. Tighe was Professor of History at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, until his retirement in 2024. He is a member of St. Josaphat Ukrainian Catholic Church in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.He is a senior editor for Touchstone.
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