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THE TRAIL OF MARTYRDOM: Persecution and resistance in sixteenth-century England

by
02 November 2006

iStock

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.

To place an order for either book contact CT Bookshop


 

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