`Yale University Press first edition - 2009
I have two other books by Eamon Duffy - the splendid and provocative The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580 (Yale U. P., 1992; and Marking the Hours: English People and their Prayers 1240-1570 (Yale U.P., 2006). He is an historian of the first order, burrowing into original sources and using and explaining them with skill. He can be ranked with other catholic apologists - Christopher Haigh, Diarmaid MacCulloch - as responsible for transforming one's approach to the Roman Catholic story under the Tudors. My sixth form and university days were formed by such as A.G. Dickens, Geoffrey Elton and Joel Hurstfield, and even during much of my teaching career which focussed on the Tudor period, this veritable revision of the traditional Protestant/Whig approach mainly passed me by. It was not surprising that he would turn to an appraisal of Mary I's reign; 'Bloody Mary' was summed up in Elton's England Under the Tudors (1955) - my main Sixth Form textbook - Positive achievements there were none; Pollard declared that sterility was its conclusive note, and this is a verdict with which the dispassionate observer must agree...[Mary's] life was one of almost unrelieved tragedy, but the pity which this naturally excites must not obscure the obstinate wrong-headedness of her rule.
Duffy is anything but a dispassionate observer. He states that this book was long in the making, with one origin being the short account of the restoration of catholicism in the reign of Mary he published in The Stripping of the Altars in 1992. He has now expanded and added material to five lectures he delivered in Cambridge in the Michaelmas Term of 2007. He is a clever, most persuasive writer. There are plenty of sweeping statements - Protestantism was a minority faith everywhere in England, except possibly in one or two of the villages of the Stour valley - but such is Duffy's well-honed craft that the reader doesn't really notice he/she is being swept along. A time-consuming project would be to detail the use of adjectives to describe Catholic compared with Protestant figures, beliefs or events. Again, one has to admire Duffy's grammatical technique. This is not to say that reading his book was not enjoyable or compelling. Certainly it was provocative.
What I did agree with was the author's elevation of Cardinal Reginald Pole to the forefront of the decision-making and cohesion of the reign. Whether it was the broadsheets, the sermons or the burnings, it was usually Pole's vision which was triumphant. Mary was not far behind, either. It was somehow apt that both queen and cardinal archbishop died on the same day. Secondly, I could understand Duffy's argument that the Marian church was not a backward-looking and sterile failure, but that it was one of the cogs in the Counter Reformation wheel. It heavily influenced the recusants of Elizabeth I's reign.
Fires of Faith has, of course, a double meaning. Faith was/is not the preserve of Roman Catholics. Many, if not most, of the Protestants they burned had just as a sincere and deep faith as themselves. Duffy is right to say that 21st century sensibilities means a horrified recoil from the burnings (and yet our world dishes up similar, if not worse, behaviour). Where this lapsed Methodist parts company with the author - and would always side with the Protestant cause - is in the role of the Papacy. Cisalpine catholicism? just bearable. Transalpine/ultramontane Roman Catholicism? ugh! Moreover, I didn't subscribe to Duffy's rather strange argument about Sir Thomas More - being God's special grace to England and to London. It was the privilege of martyrdom, granted to no other country afflicted by religious division. These two (Bishop Fisher too) men, the paragons of their age, were special legates from God to England... More's vicious persecution of so-called heretics was downplayed both by the Marian Catholic propagandists and Duffy himself. No similar appraisal of any of the Protestant 'martyrs' such as Latimer, Ridley and Cranmer.
Duffy is persuasive in that his reassessment portrays Mary's regime as neither inept nor backward-looking. But in 1558 death took not only Mary and Pole, but also their cause. Equally skilful propaganda over the next few centuries meant Roman Catholicism and the Papacy were equated with foreign domination and treachery. Not until the early nineteenth century were Catholics officially allowed any semblance of religious freedom again.
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