What he found in England was a traumatised Catholic majority, a few formidable Protestant scholars who had not fled to Europe, bishops who had gone along with Henry’s Catholicism-without-the-pope and the hasty religious revolution of Edward’s reign and now went along with the return to papal obedience, and in some areas of the country a number of impassioned Protestants. Pole’s reforming priorities were an emphasis on good, orthodox preaching and strong sacramental theology, seminaries to train priests properly, and exemplary probity in the church.
But heresy had to be dealt with. Duffy does not attempt to exonerate Pole from a presiding role in the burning of 284 irreconcilable Protestants, the indelible scar on Mary’s reign, made the very most of in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, published four years into Elizabeth’s reign under government auspices and one of the most successful propaganda efforts in history. Duffy does his best to explain to a post-Enlightenment reader how the assumptions of the 16th century made it possible for a gentle and exceptionally intelligent man to pursue this now appalling and, as it turned out, counter-productive policy. He shows that it was becoming effective, and that senior clergy, many with chequered theological pasts, tried, sometimes successfully, to coax Protestants to the simplest statements of orthodoxy to save their lives; he also shows how heretics, some no more than crude blasphemers, could crave the glory of a spectacular martyr’s death. He thinks it likely that Pole did try to persuade Mary against the burning of the then reconciled Cranmer, the most resounding public relations disaster of the reign. Elizabeth learnt the lessons; her executions of Catholics were as grisly and often preceded by torture, but she burnt no one: no fires, no smoke.
The Catholic revival in England failed because the end came unpredictably quickly: Mary and Pole died on the same day in 1558, and it took Elizabeth only months to sweep away everything positive they had done. Duffy’s rewarding book shows how, nevertheless, Pole’s ideas and some of his loyal clergy inspired the last session of the Council of Trent. It was largely thanks to Pole that the tradition, forward-looking rather than backward, of Erasmus and Thomas More survived to inspire the English recusancy and counter-reformation Europe. As Erasmus had written only seven years after Luther’s pebbles had precipitated the Reformation avalanche: ‘I would have had religion purified without destroying authority’. This was the keynote of Pole’s whole life.
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