The Construction of Martyrdom in the English Catholic Community, 1535-1603 (review)

Reviews 191 Parergon 21.2 (2004) Dillon,Anne,TheConstructionofMartyrdomintheEnglishCatholicCommunity, 1535-1603 (StAndrews Studies in Reformation History),Aldershot,Ashgate, 2003; pp. xxvii, 474; 69 b/w plates; RRP £59.50; ISBN 0754603059. This is a stimulating and thought-provoking book on a currently fashionable topic. Subversion of the accepted images of justice is one of the more difficult but effective ways of altering the perceptions of generally accepted authority. The representation of individuals executed with the full panoply of the law for the highest crime against the state was contested between the English Protestant rulers and those who adhered to the Catholic and Roman faith. Within the small group of self-confessed Recusants who constituted those still in communion with Rome there was an urgent need for a focus for a new identity. The success of the Jesuits in presenting the priests hanged, drawn and quartered as martyrs served this purpose for over four hundred years. From the popular hymn ‘Faith of our fathers, living still in spite of dungeon, fire and sword’ to Robert Hugh Benson’s novel Come rack, Come rope which was virtually mandatory reading in my convent youth, Edmund Campion and his peers were the heroes of Catholic England. Victory in the struggle over the iconography seems to have gone to the Jesuits, a fact that James, the man about to be king, implicitly acknowledged when he criticised the English government in 1602 saying ‘I greatly wonder from whence it can proceed that not only so great flocks of Jesuits and priests dare both resort and remain in England but so proudly do use their functions through all the parts of England without any controlment or punishment these divers years past’(Akrigg, Letters, p. 201). For many years the way in which the idea that these men were martyred, not lawfully executed for treason, was achieved remained unexamined. There has, however, been considerable research in the last decade on the way in which governments used public execution to legitimise their authority that is the matrix from which Dillon’s examination springs. Ideally the delinquent confessed to the crime committed and repented on the scaffold. The whole ritual took on its own purificatory flavour as part of a macabre theatre of horror. Dillon has carefully worked through the struggle to revamp the image of the execution of those who did not accept the religion of the state in which they lived. Protestant and Catholic both sought to present the death of their co-religionists as martydom while relegating the deaths of their opponents to invincible ignorance of the true way. Dillon examines the pamphlet warfare in which both sides 192 Reviews Parergon 21.2 (2004) sought the moral high ground of a direct link to the primitive church and the arguments employed. She then seeks to deconstruct the images printed in the propaganda works produced for the edification of Catholic continental audiences, and the murals painted in the chapel of the English College in Rome to inspire the postulants to aspire to martyrdom. This painstaking analysis of images, and the subtle changes introduced into them, that are by no means self-evident to modern eyes enables her to show the sophisticated use of iconography to relate the sufferings of the priests executed on the scaffold at one level to the sufferings of the long-established primitive martyrs of England, and at another to Christ’s atonement for mankind on the cross. Symbolically they are representing Christ in his eternal sacrifice. Dillon’s examination of the story of Margaret Clitherowe leads her to conclude that the Catholic writers needed a layperson and a woman whose sufferings could offset the use that Protestant hagiography made of the death of Anne Askew. The presentation of her virtues is designed to emphasis the qualities that a lay and probably illiterate person needed if they were to be successfully promoted as martyr material in a context in which education, scholarship and reason were paramount requirements for a true martyr. Dillon concludes with a chapter in which she discusses the recreation of history to provide a Protestant line of dissent and the Catholic response to it. The debate, she shows...