The tragedy that was the Reformation

A People’s Tragedy. Studies in Reformation

Eamon Duffy
Bloomsbury Continuum
Nov, 2020
272 pages
ISBN: 978-1472983855

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In 1992, Eamon Duffy wrote his acclaimed history of the English Reformation, The Stripping of the Altars. It maintained that, contrary to received wisdom, popular Catholicism had considerable strength and vigour in England before the Reformation and that the Reformation was imposed in that country only with considerable difficulty and after a long period of time. As he puts it in this more recent work, there is “a growing awareness of the existence of widespread discontent with and resistance to the Reformation process, which is now understood as a long labour, not a rapid and popular push-over.”

Duffy’s 1992 book highlighted hitherto neglected aspects of late medieval Christianity in England, for example, massive lay investment in the rebuilding and furnishing for Catholic worship of many of the parish churches of pre-Reformation England, in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.

Duffy is originally from Dundalk and is now Emeritus Professor of the History of Christianity at the University of Cambridge. He returns to the Reformation in this absorbing book of historical essays.

Part One presents “Studies in Reformation” and considers hitherto neglected aspects of English religion, such as pilgrimages and monasticism. The opening chapter looks at cathedral pilgrimages in the late Middle Ages and at the shrines contained in such cathedrals, notably, the shrine of St Thomas Becket in Canterbury. Duffy talks of the “embedding of cathedral pilgrimage in a much broader landscape of holiness”. For example, testators at the time often asked in their wills for surrogates to go on their behalf to various pilgrimage sites in England or even further afield.

With the destruction of the medieval Cathedral shrine, Duffy argues, “one of the most vital and persistent institutions of medieval Christianity was snuffed out … and a resonant symbol of hope and healing banished from the great buildings that had sheltered it for half a millennium. Who can doubt that the English imagination was poorer for it?”

Part One also includes chapters on the dissolution of Ely Priory, a Benedictine priory originally founded by St Ethelreda, and on the King James Bible, among other topics. Another fascinating chapter covers the English Catholic seminary at Douai in modern-day France, which was founded in 1568 and moved for a time to Rheims. One of the Douai professors, Gregory Martin, produced an important English translation of the New Testament in 1582. While the focus in most seminaries at the time was on practical pastoral skills, Douai was unusual in its emphasis on Scripture – in recognition of the fact that debate with Protestants would probably be important in the life of future English priests. As time went on, harsh persecution meant that such debate did not, in fact, become a realistic option in the immediate future.

The chapter, “1569: A People’s Tragedy?”, covers resistance to the Reformation, and particularly the rebellion in the North of England in 1569, where the desire to restore Catholicism was the “single most important motive” for the rebels.

Part Two reflects on “Writing the Reformation” and looks at how the Reformation has been studied and understood in the centuries since. It includes chapters on Luther through Catholic eyes, on the historians James Anthony Froude and AG Dickens, and on Walsingham.

Walsingham is a shrine to the Holy House at Nazareth, which was established in the eleventh or early twelfth century and dissolved in 1538. It began to be revived in the nineteenth century and is today a flourishing place of pilgrimage, which I have been privileged to visit, with strong ecumenical links between the Catholic and Anglican pilgrimage sites.

In his final, thought-provoking chapter, “Fiction and Faction”, Duffy reflects on how the Reformation has been portrayed in fiction over the centuries and includes a topical discussion of Hilary Mantel’s remarkably successful novels and TV adaptations.

Duffy maintains that Protestant historical reflections on the Tudor story, which also shaped fictional stories, have tended to dominate in England, even if alternative Catholic accounts began to emerge from the 1860s and 1870s. A feature of relatively recent reflection has been the strong interest of historians such as Geoffrey Elton in Thomas Cromwell, principal adviser to King Henry VIII in the 1530s, and their antipathy to St Thomas More, the chancellor of England who was executed by Henry VIII. Such historical writings provide the backdrop to the prize-winning historical fiction of Hilary Mantel.

Duffy provides a closely argued and nuanced account of Mantel’s work. Her Wolf Hall trilogy of novels, he acknowledges, were the most widely read historical fiction for decades, were a “remarkable imaginative feat” and have been hugely influential. Indeed, in their application interviews, Duffy notes, some recent candidates to read history at Cambridge have seemed to depend on Hilary Mantel for their historical knowledge of the Tudors!

Professor Duffy takes issue with the novelist’s extremely negative portrayal of St Thomas More and excessively positive portrayal of Thomas Cromwell. Her “reversal of the roles of More and Cromwell fails as fiction because it will not stand as history”. Claims given prominence in Mantel’s novels that More was a torturer, Duffy maintains, are false. He also refers to Cromwell’s cruelty to the heroic English Carthusians, who opposed the king’s spiritual supremacy and were hanged and disembowelled at Tyburn in 1535.

Duffy maintains that “the compulsiveness of Mantel’s writing, her insistence on her faithfulness to contemporary Tudor sources and Wolf Hall’s prime-time exposure on TV have combined to ensure that fiction has been taken for fact and the necessary distinctions blurred.”

Whatever her intentions, Duffy concludes, “it is hard to put down Mantel’s learned and darkly witty fiction without regret, and some puzzlement, at her trilogy’s unmitigated construction of a vain, cruel and mean-spirited Thomas More.”

While a work of impressive scholarship, Duffy’s book is elegantly written and fully accessible to the general reader with an interest in history. It does not offer specific reflections on Ireland but its fresh take on the Reformation in England could be linked to efforts in Ireland to re-visit, in a more positive light, and in a spirit of openness to historical truth, various aspects of our Catholic past.