Mary, quite contrary

Eamon Duffy's new reassessment of the reign of "Bloody" Mary Tudor, Fires of Faith, has prompted a pair of intriguing reviews. The first, a rave, comes from Ryan Sayre Patrico, an assistant editor for First Things, and it appears in National Review Online. Mr. Patrico highlights Professor Duffy's rehabilitation of Cardinal Reginald Pole, a personal hero of mine (Lucy Becket's chapter-length biography of him in the uneven English Catholic Heroes is superb.):

Pole is central to Duffy’s narrative for good reason. The traditional criticisms of the restoration — that it lacked the power to persuade and relied instead on force, that it was fixated on the medieval past, that it was cruel and reactionary — have almost all taken Cardinal Pole as their principal target. Thus, if Duffy can show that the charges leveled against Pole are ahistorical, he can, by extension, argue that traditional portrayals of Mary’s reign are equally flawed.

As Duffy explains, “it has become an orthodoxy that the Cardinal was ‘unenthusiastic about preaching,’ ‘seldom preached himself,’ distrusted ‘preaching campaigns’ and thought that preaching in general was best left on the back burner, until the more important matter of discipline had been properly established.” One can understand why these charges were readily believed: Mary and her supporters were supposed to be cruel; the last thing such a regime would do is reason with opponents.

As it turns out, Pole did place great emphasis on the importance of preaching. When he decided in 1558 to make a book of his sermons, he explained that the work was designed to “feed and instruct” those who “for ignorance of the truth have fallen in diverse diseases of the mind” and for whom, “not being able to speak with so many by mouth, I have put in writing that I would speak if I were present for their instruction.” On the importance of preaching the doctrine of Christ, Pole explained, “herein is no controversy at all, in this both the Catholic and heretic will agree.” Moreover, because preaching could be used as a tool against the church as well as for it, Pole was convinced that “the antidote” to heresy “was not the suppression of preaching, but the provision of Catholic preaching.”

The second review, a pan, is posted on Amazon.com. It is a tendentious, vacuous screed that gives no indication the reviewer read the book, a point I make in the comment box. (You'll note the reviewer doesn't deny the charge.) See for yourself:

Its difficult to put into words the evil of this book. That evil starts with a title that is a thiny veiled allusion to burning human beings alive based on dissenting from the Roman Catholic Church. Eamon Duffy in the book wants desperatly for the reader to understand the greatness of England under Mary I which has been hidden by the evil protestant conspiracy. The message here is that rather than seeing Mary's repressions and burnings as a step backward, they should be seen as a step forward in restoring the natural Catholic order of things to England.

Duffy's argument is in essence that Mary's tyranny and religious persecution was well-organized, highly effective and only held back from success by the untimely death of Queen Mary. Its a rather novel view. I cannot remember many other examples where the effectiveness of a tyranny was used as an argument for its morality. In some ways, its an argument by distraction. This is history written by the killers where the victims are reduced to ciphers. They just don't count.

The book is at its most reprehensible in terms of trying to rehabilitate burning men and women at the stake. The poor judges were doing everything they could to help and everyone felt very sorry that the filthy protestants chose to die for their beliefs. Duffy is sorry for everyone except those who actually suffered as the victims of the policy. He somehow really believes that the machinary of the state is where people's real sympathy should lie.