by Sarah Covington
University of Notre Dame Press £45.50 (0-268-04225-X); £23.50 pbk
(0-268-04226-8); Church Times Bookshop £40.95 and £20.15 respectively
Reviewed with
LEST WE BE DAMNED: Practical innovation and lived experience among
Catholics in Protestant England
by Lisa McClain
Routledge £60 (0-415-96790-2); Church Times Bookshop £54
THE STORY of the English Reformation is not what it was once was. There used
to be a clear narrative of the triumph of English Protestants over English
Roman Catholics.
In this story, the Reformation did away with a corrupt and unpopular
late-medieval Catholic Church. Change was backed by the state, and it was
popular; people fed up with priests and the financial exactions of the Church
embraced the break from Rome and, eventually, the English Prayer Book.
Mary’s reign was an aberration — the burnings at Smithfield and the cries of
relief at the accession of Elizabeth were proofs of that.
This now looks very thin. Some historians even wonder whether we should not
instead think of a number of Reformations, political as well as popular, that
happened at different times and at varying speeds during the 16th century.
From a certain point of view, the Elizabethan church settlement looks like
an unhappy compromise that truly satisfied no one. There were Elizabethan Roman
Catholics who refused to give in to the government; Catholicism lived on in
England.
And even the power of the state, apparently at its most terrifying in
religious persecution, perhaps looks less complete when we see how much the
Tudor kings and queens depended on ordinary people to keep an eye on those who
did not conform in matters of faith and belief.
All of this should help to explain why Sarah Covington and Lisa McClain have
written the books they have. Covington’s study is about what it was to be a
martyr, either Roman Catholic or Protestant, in Tudor England. McClain’s
explores what it was to be a Roman Catholic in England between the accession of
Elizabeth I and the start of the Civil War.
In both of these books, faith is something that had to be contested and
fought for. There were no easy victories for Protestants over Catholics:
instead there were competing claims of truth for the sake of which some people
died painful deaths.
Covington’s purpose is to examine the trail of martyrdom as well as its
trial. Her book is structured round the legal process, from informing and
arrest to prison, interrogation and trial. She tries to get into the minds of
the accused and the accusers. Dialogue between prisoners and interrogators is
used to very good effect. The book shows that the authorities had to rely on
local officials, such as constables and churchwardens, to enforce conformity of
belief.
But persecution appears as something uneven, and something that often
depended on local circumstances. Though persecutors often later became the
persecuted, and though men such as Thomas More and Thomas Cranmer had very
similar views on the need to punish heresy, there is a sense, in this book, of
how fluid and changing faith could be. A century that, perhaps, appears to us
rigidly fixed in absolute standards of religious truth looks, through
Covington’s eyes, more uncertain.
For McClain, the most important question of all is “What is the Church?” She
takes us from the Catholic Church in England before the Reformation, with
its parish churches, priests and sacraments, to the experience of Elizabethan
and Stuart Roman Catholics who worshipped in secret.
McClain explains how Catholics adapted their worship, instead, to the home.
She finds different Roman Catholic experiences and communities in London, the
North, and in Cornwall. She explains how, in the quest for salvation, and for
the want of priests, objects such as prayer beads came to represent
alternatives to the sacraments.
English Roman Catholics were a Church without a church: this is one of the
most striking features of the world that is described by both Sarah Covington
and Lisa McClain.
Stephen Alford is a lecturer in History in the University of Cambridge,
and a Fellow of King’s College.
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