The chronology of God’s Secret Agents is not always as clear as it might be, but if there is one criticism to be made it is that the book parades its colours a bit too obviously. It does not fudge the multiplicity of motives that fired the returning priests, or the streak of fanaticism with which some sought out martyrdom. Nor does it dissemble the bitterness of the struggle between the Jesuits and seculars that ripped the Catholic mission apart, but there is never much doubt where loyalties lie. The ambiguities of a lay Catholic’s position, with the intolerable burden of divided loyalties, are dealt with a good deal more sympathetically than the corresponding dilemma of a government faced with the threat of invasion and a dissident population. The savage Marian persecution of Protestant heretics surely demands more than the two or three lines it gets.aThe remark that ‘Latimer’s “candle” of martyrdom found a marked lack of oxygen in Oxford’ seems something less than generous. These, though, are details. And if Alice Hogge can sometimes seem unjust to Elizabethan England, she would have every right to point to the intervening centuries of Protestant triumphalism still commemorated by Bonfire Night, and echo E. M. Forster’s response when a reader of A Passage to India accused him of being ‘unfair’ to the British Raj. ‘Ah, but you see,’ he replied, ‘I didn’t want to be fair.’
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