Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor by Eamon Duffy
Yale University Press, £19.99
Eamon Duffy’s central thesis is that Bloody Mary was not such a bad old stick if judged by the standards of her day and not ours. True, she burned 284 Protestants, but then even the saintly Elizabeth I strangled, disemboweled or dismembered 200 Roman Catholics. And their combined tally of scalps was nothing on their father Henry VIII who executed 57,000 heretics.
Sixteenth century sentencing policy may well seem revoltingly excessive in the 21st century but, in the 1550s, when burnings were all the rage as Catholic Mary struggled to enforce the Counter Reformation, there was not the same squeamishness. Public executions were as much public entertainment then as the cinema is now, and the cherries served to audiences were the popcorn of their day.
This is not to say that going to the stake was the Tudor equivalent of an Asbo. But Duffy’s case for the defence is that Mary preferred recantation to conflagration so those who were roasted could have chosen not to be. It was even possible to be hauled off a lit pyre if you were prepared to undergo a last minute conversion.
That they would rather be burned than renounce their Protestant faith says everything about the grip of religious factions on hearts and minds. Even the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cardinal Reginald Pole, had no qualms about burning bodies. It was the welfare of our souls which troubled him.
So, although a keen persecutor, he bent over backwards to get the persecuted to change their minds and avoid the flames in this world, reasoning that to die a Protestant condemned them to eternal fire in the next.
There were those, though, who clearly enjoyed the chase. Justice Drayner, the heresy-hunting magistrate of Smarden in Kent, was nicknamed Justice Nine Holes because of the spyholes he made in the ceiling of his local church to check that the congregation behaved themselves at Mass.
The difficulty of writing about the Marian repression is that just about the only source for the sharp end of it is John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and Eamon Duffy, Professor of the History of Christianity at Cambridge University, acknowledges this problem. Because Foxe was a Protestant evangelical and propagandist who fled to Europe when Mary became Queen.
It was Foxe who reported the brave and witty words of Bishop Latimer to Bishop Ridley as they were chained to their stakes: “Be of good comfort Master Ridley, and play the man. We shall this day light such a candle by God’s grace in England, as shall never be put out.”
But they were pure invention, added for dramatic effect by Foxe and modelled on those uttered by the early church martyr Polycarp when he was burned by the Romans. This also makes the erudite last words of humbler martyrs, like the cobblers and labourers Foxe also quotes, rather suspect, too. He was not the most accurate of reporters, either, killing off two men who were never burned, and getting the date wrong for the execution of another.
As we cannot trust the contemporary account, we must rely on historians like Duffy to piece together what happened as best they can. It’s a tough job, but someone has to do it.
Nigel Nelson
