English Catholicism under Mary Tudor

The reign of Mary Tudor remains the Cinderella subject of early modern English history; England's last Catholic Queen regnant, the "Bloody Mary" of popular opprobrium, has been neglected as much as she has been traduced. There has been but one comprehensive scholarly treatment of her reign in modern times, and but one thorough academic biography (both of them by David Loades). Mary's Church has suffered as much as any other aspect of her reign from this neglect. The appearance of two scholarly symposia dealing with various aspects of Marian Catholicism is therefore much to be welcomed. These two volumes complement each other, and at times overlap; indeed, they share a number of contributors—Professor David Loades, Professor Thomas F. Mayer, Dr. John Edwards, Dr. Lucy Wooding, and Father William Wizeman appear in both.

With the other contributors including Father José Ignacio Tellechea Idígoras, Father Dermot Fenlon, Dr. Ronald Truman, Dr. C. S. Knighton, Professor Ralph Houlbrooke, and Professor Eamon Duffy, these volumes gather for the most part a formidable force of scholarship. There can be little doubt that Reforming Catholicism in the Reign of Mary Tudor and The Church of Mary Tudor are considerable works both individually and together, and are the best accounts we possess of Catholicism in Queen Mary's reign. It should be stressed that in general they offer a positive view of their subject. Their broad approach takes to a further stage the 'Revisionist' school of Reformation history which has endeavored to draw attention to the social and intellectual vigor of English Catholicism in the first half of the sixteenth century.

Professor Mayer, the leading modern biographer of Cardinal Reginald Pole, Mary's Archbishop of Canterbury, is unambiguous in the title of his essay in The Church of Mary Tudor: "The success of Cardinal Pole's final legation." He calls his proposition that Pole succeeded "counterintuitive" (p. 149). It may be doubted whether he proves that Pole succeeded, but he certainly demonstrates that Pole received a high number of appeals as Legate. He has found that 315 were submitted (as against a previously calculated total of 45), and concludes (p. 174) that by the end of the Queen's reign—Pole and Mary died almost simultaneously—"a good deal had been done and an administrative and legal framework put in place that would have allowed a good deal more. . . ." Professor Duffy in his "Cardinal Pole preaching: St Andrew's Day 1557" (again in The Church of Mary Tudor) acquits Pole of the faults sometimes imputed to him: inattention to preaching and a lack of realism. Concerning the challenges facing the Marian Church (p. 200), Associate Professor Gary G. Gibbs (once again in the collection edited by Professors Duffy and Loades) notes how the chronicler Henry Machyn composed "frequently positive and celebratory representations of the reign" (p. 296).

Not all of the contributions to the two volumes are of equal merit and some contain considerable deficiencies; others are thoroughly vitiated by the approach taken by their authors. The faults to be found in some essays must be dealt with before the stronger articles are considered. Professor Patrick Collinson's essay in The Church of Mary Tudor, "The persecution in Kent," is characteristically opaque and mannered. It is of some interest that Professor Collinson notes that even though Kent saw more executions of Protestant martyrs than any other region outside London (p. 310), Protestantism was not the dominant religious force in the county in Mary's reign (p. 316). It is unfortunate that Professor Collinson twice refers to the executions in Kent, which numbered at most sixty-seven (pp. 310-311), as a "holocaust;" the use of a term properly applied to the extermination of six million European Jews in this context is inappropriate if not indeed insensitive.

Other contributors...