Catholic beauty

In 1992 the Roman Catholic historian Eamon Duffy of Magdalene College, Cambridge published a large book called The Stripping of the Altars. Deploying a wealth of evidence, Duffy argued that the English men and women of the 16th century, especially in the provinces, did not really want to be ‘reformed’. They liked their old Catholic ways. The feasts and festival days fitted with the rhythms of the rural year. The architecture, furnishings and images of late medieval churches had given stability and comfort to parish communities. The common people only ever became reluctant Protestants.

It is often said that history is written by the winners. Duffy and his fellow ‘revisionists’ were seeking to overturn a Protestant, Whiggish narrative that had been engrained — and perhaps forced — upon the English psyche for generations, from John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (1563) to Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall’s Our Island Story (1905):

Now began the most terrible time of Mary’s reign, for it required more than a few words from King, Queen, and Pope to make England again truly Roman Catholic. The Protestants would not give up their religion. Mary was determined that they should. Those who refused were imprisoned and put to death in the most cruel way. They were burned alive.

Or, in the immortal words of Sellar and Yeatman’s parody of Miss Marshall: ‘Broody Mary’s reign was, however, a Bad Thing, since England is bound to be C. of E., so all the executions were wasted.’

Duffy is an excellent historian and he would be the first to admit — indeed, he says as much in the concise introduction to this new collection of his essays — that the truth, as is nearly always the case with grand historical narratives, lies somewhere in the middle ground.