The Trail of Martyrdom: Persecution and Resistance in Sixteenth-Century England (review)

This book is an institutional and social history of the judicial processes by which suspected heretics and religious traitors were identified, sought, apprehended, imprisoned, tried, and executed in England from the reign of Henry VIII through that of Elizabeth I. The principal argument is that executions of religious dissidents, insofar as they depended upon sixteenth-century institutions and the often unstable relationships among the crown, local authorities, and the population at large, were less than entirely successful in achieving the crown's goal of ensuring religious uniformity and control. Such executions were also occasions for contestation and resistance. The book's five chapters discuss both Roman Catholics (under Henry VIII and Elizabeth I) and Protestants (under Henry VIII and Mary) who, depending upon the seesaw prescriptions of Tudor religio-political regimes, were prosecuted for religious dissidence. Through numerous examples drawn from martyrological and other published sources, trial records, correspondence, and government documents, Covington patiently describes the suspects' dealings with officials involved in the process, including paid informers, summoners, sheriffs, jail keepers, interrogators, and executioners. Variability and contingency characterized every stage, the result of the complex social interactions and individual qualities of the authorities, suspects, and coreligionists involved.

Covington's basic argument will be unsurprising to those familiar with the judicial and religious realities of Tudor England. The book's strength lies in its structure and scope, viz., the marshaling of examples from the 1520's through the 1590's of Protestants as well as Catholics, organized into a step-by-step description of the prosecutorial process. The study also has some shortcomings. Conceptually, it is unclear why Covington uses the term "persecution" rather than "prosecution" in her subtitle and throughout the work, especially insofar as her epilogue states, "The quest for uniformity on the part of the Tudors, and the desire to extinguish any groups who [sic] posed a challenge to it, was entirely logical in the context of the sixteenth century, and should not be viewed from a post-Enlightenment perspective" (p. 201). She notes the importance of understanding interrogators on their own terms (pp. 110–111), yet "persecution" is used throughout the book as though it were a neutral category of analysis. The treatment of Protestant and Catholic martyrs themselves (mostly in Chapter 5, on executions) is quite superficial, and fails to root their actions deeply in their robust religiosity. Imprecision of expression is sometimes a problem; one cannot "dispens[e]" or "distribute mass" (pp. 54, 95), for example, and "proscribed" is used where "prescribed" is meant (p. 189). Covington relies primarily on the 1583 edition of Foxe's Acts and Monuments, but occasionally and without explanation uses the discredited, nineteenth-century Cattley and Townsend edition, reprinted in 1965. And the book includes a baffling factual error: nearly a full page is devoted to William Tyndale, probably the most notable pre-Marian English Protestant martyr, as "[o]ne of the few successful extraditions in the century," who was "eventually returned to England and burned" (pp. 60, 61). But Tyndale was executed in early October, 1536, at Vilvorde, near Brussels (see David Daniell's biography, which Covington herself cites).