The Marian Catholic Revival: A Review Essay

Transcription

1 344 EMWJ 2008, vol. 3 Book Reviews The Marian Catholic Revival: A Review Essay The Church of Mary Tudor. Ed. Eamon Duffy and David Loades. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, xxxi pp. $ ISBN The Theology and Spirituality of Mary Tudor s Church. William Wizeman, S.J. Aldershot, England: Ashgate, x pp. ISBN In his classic but problematic work, The English Reformation, 2nd ed. (University Park, PA, 1989), A.G. Dickens in essence ends his account with the Elizabethan Settlement of In this schema, the Reformation began to be established officially in England, even if tentatively and piecemeal, under Henry VIII. Following the death of the awe- and fearinspiring king, a more thoroughgoing Protestantism was laid out by the Edwardian regime, and, with the accession of Elizabeth, a moderate Protestant settlement, the so-called via media, became the basis of the Anglican Church of England. There was, of course, a brief and ostensibly aberrational interlude the Marian years between the otherwise progressive ascendancy of Protestantism under Edward and then Elizabeth. In this version of the English Reformation, the growing power and popularity of Protestant Christianity was only briefly interrupted by the lastditch attempt of Mary and her supporters to re-impose Catholicism on the country. Yet, despite the repressive measures of Bloody Mary, her regime failed to prevent the ultimate triumph of Protestantism under Elizabeth, the Protestant Deborah. Revisionist and even postrevisionist writings of recent years have overturned a great deal of this idea of the Protestant Church of England s supposedly inexorable and inevitable triumph over a moribund late medieval Catholicism revived only briefly by the Marian church and state through force and fear. The two works under review here are but a part of the extensive and creative reinterpretations of many aspects of the religious, social, and cultural history of Tudor England. Perhaps no period has needed and received as much recent attention as the mid-tudor era,

2 Book Reviews 345 especially the Marian years. In The Church of Mary Tudor, Eamon Duffy (a leading proponent of the considerable vitality of Catholicism well into the Elizabethan era) and David Loades (an expert on the life and reign of Mary) have gathered together the essays of about a dozen scholars on various aspects of the Marian Catholic revival. These essays are of a generally high quality and, while they are by no means uniform in their approaches or interpretations, they tend to support a much more innovative and, in varying degrees, successful view of what Queen Mary and her church tried to and in some measure did accomplish. In the introductory essay, David Loades discusses The Personal Religion of Mary I. This discussion is in a number of ways a nuanced one based on a significant amount of data, but the reader is still left with the question as to whether or not we have reached the heart of Mary s personal life and religion. To some extent this is an understandable problem because a similar assessment could be made concerning much of the writing about Elizabeth s inner life and beliefs. Whereas Henry VIII wore his heart on his sleeve, so to speak, his daughters, for a whole host of reasons, not least of which was surviving in the midst of the dangerous Henrician court and its machinations, had to learn to hide or dissemble some of their personal views concerning religion and other matters. Even so, Loades argues that, in spite of her enthusiasm for the Mass, [Mary] was not ostensibly a Catholic at all, but what her father had made her a conservative humanist with an extremely insular point of view (18). While Mary was in some ways her father s daughter, she was even more so her mother s, at least in her fundamental devotion to the old faith, despite the public conformity that Henry all but forced on her. According to Loades, in Mary s religious hierarchy, devotion to the Eucharist was paramount, compared, for example, to papal prerogatives, but that did not make Mary in any way unorthodox or out-of-sync with other monarchs, including her husband, Philip of Spain, the Most Catholic King. As with the Queen, Loades sees a similar religious ambiguity surrounding many of The Marian Episcopate. It is true that most bishops had conformed to the Henrician religious changes, but a number of them were far less willing to go along with what they considered to be a dangerous religious revolution during the Edwardian years. This was certainly

3 346 EMWJ 2008, vol. 3 Book Reviews true of Edmund Bonner and Stephen Gardiner. Yet, in addition to considering their religious stance, Mary also chose a number of candidates for their learning; Reginald Pole clearly fit both of those bills. If reforming bishops were crucial to a Catholic revival, the centers of learning were also fundamental to any long-term strategy. In an article on The English Universities, Claire Cross points out that all of the Tudor regimes realized that the universities were key to their goal of creating an educated elite who could staff the offices of church and state. Both Oxford and Cambridge under Mary benefited from royal bounty, and, while a Catholic resurgence had commenced at both institutions, it had proceeded at a faster pace at Oxford. But, as in other regards, Cross concludes: More than any other single factor, time frustrated the plans of Mary and Pole for Catholic higher education in England (76). Whereas Henry VIII had dissolved the monasteries, Mary began what turned out to be a brief revival of religious houses. C. S. Knighton writes about the most famous one in Westminster Abbey Restored. It is debatable how much of a role religious houses and orders might have played over the long-term. As it was, Mary refounded seven religious houses, five for men and two for women. Before Mary s reign, the Benedictines had played an important part in English religious history for close to a thousand years and presumably could do so again. The revival of Westminster, however, lasted less than three years. Regrettably, there is neither in this essay nor elsewhere in the book a more extended discussion of the topic of religious life. In particular, there is virtually no examination of the revival of religious life for women under England s first queen regnant. As to the Catholic revival in various locales, Ralph Houlbrooke examines The Clergy, the Church Courts and the Marian Restoration in Norwich. Although Norwich was a relatively early and strong center of Protestantism, the city s Protestant leaders either submitted to the Marian church or went into exile, and it did not exhibit the degree of overt or covert opposition found, for example, in Colchester. Nevertheless, Norwich had its Protestant martyrs, including some women. One of them, Elizabeth Cooper, went to her death over her resolute interpretation of the Lord s Supper. Cardinal Pole was obviously a central figure in the church of Mary Tudor and, appropriately, this collection has three related articles: Thomas

4 Book Reviews 347 Mayer on Pole as legate, Eamon Duffy on Pole as preacher, and John Edwards on the degree of Spanish religious influence. The old canard was that, having been so long an exile, Pole was out of touch with the religious realities and changes that had occurred in England, and that he was more reactive than proactive in his program for a Catholic revival. These essays are part of a rehabilitation of Pole and the Marian church that paints a very different and far more flattering portrait. Collectively, these essays demonstrate that Pole had no illusions about the challenges he faced, nor was he neglectful or insular in dealing with them. Whether in terms of administration, finance, discipline, preaching, publishing, or instruction, Pole and others began to make some very creative reforms and recommendations, not the least of which was the proposal concerning diocesan seminaries. In light of all the efforts of the Marian church, Mayer s dramatic conclusion appears to be well founded: That England did not remain a Catholic country must be accounted much more of an accident than we have been readily prepared to admit (174-5). The classic centerpiece of Catholic spirituality was the Mass, and, as Lucy Wooding stresses in The Marian Restoration and the Mass, its restitution was paramount for Mary and her leading churchmen. That does not mean that there was not ongoing theological reflection on the understanding of the Eucharist and transubstantiation. In other words, in this regard as elsewhere, Marian Catholicism looked both backward and forward. Wooding mentions that some of the bishops, such as Thomas Watson and Edmund Bonner, encouraged more frequent communion, i.e., more frequent than the medieval norm, which, due to an exaggerated sense of awe, often resulted in reception of the Eucharist very infrequently, perhaps only once a year. It would have been helpful, however, to place the bishops position within the context of early modern Catholicism, in which more frequent communion became a growing spiritual practice, as, for example, among Jesuits. In addition, if it is true (as Loades suggests) that Mary herself, while devoted to the Mass, apparently only received communion at Easter, how did the queen react to this call for more frequent reception of the Eucharist? Concerning contemporary accounts, Gary Gibbs provides an insightful reinterpretation of Henry Machyn s Manuscript. Gibbs argues that,

5 348 EMWJ 2008, vol. 3 Book Reviews although it has traditionally been labeled as a diary, it would be much more accurate to view it as a chronicle, that is, not as something personal and anachronistic, but rather as a historical account with subtle political, social, and religious commentary. In this context, Machyn lauds the Marian regime s use of ceremony and spectacle to garner and shore up support. Such a chronicle is a helpful counterbalance to the traditional historiographical emphasis on the Marian martyrs and exiles. Still, martyrs there tragically were. Patrick Collinson focuses his discussion of this issue on The Persecution in Kent. With regard to exiles, he points out that, in addition to those who fled to various Swiss and German cities, there were also a number of internal exiles. As for the martyrs, Kent produced more of them than anywhere except London, and this included many women as well as men. Particularly interesting is Collinson s treatment of John Foxe who, in his so-called Book of Martyrs, not only preserved but also transformed the memories of many of the Protestant martyrs. While Foxe s work is invaluable, we must take his hagiographical agenda into account. There is one further essay in The Church of Mary Tudor, William Wizeman s The Theology and Spirituality of a Marian Bishop: The Pastoral and Polemical Sermons of Thomas Watson. This essay dovetails with Wizeman s important monograph, The Theology and Spirituality of Mary Tudor s Church, in which he examines a wide range of Marian Catholic texts, through which he discerns a fairly consistent theology and spirituality designed to win over heretics and reform and strengthen the Catholic faithful. In successive chapters, Wizeman investigates Marian Catholic texts concerning Revelation, Christology, Soteriology, Ecclesiology, Sacraments, Spirituality, Piety, and Eschatology. Various Marian Catholic writers, a number of whom were bishops, addressed almost all of the major theological controversies of the day, including the role of Scripture and its interpretation, Patristics and church councils, the faith/good works debate, and the related issue of predestination. Marian theologians wrote relatively little about the controversial issue of the royal supremacy. Wizeman argues that many writers were likely embarrassed by their previous acquiescence, but, between the extremes of completely independent national churches and thoroughgoing ultramontanism, the question remains as to what the fundamental ecclesiology of

6 Book Reviews 349 certain bishops was Stephen Gardiner, for example. With regard to the burnings, there were ongoing debates, with writers on both sides of the religious divide arguing that a heretic could not be a true martyr. While very few relished persecution, some believed that, in combination with a program of reform and re-education, some degree of persecution, especially of more radical opponents, would bring about a long-term Catholic revival. In any event, was not much more lost than gained in this trial by fire? In a number of ways, and with strong counterarguments to the alleged insularity of the Marian church, its writers supported practices that were becoming more common in early modern Catholic Europe, including more frequent confession and communion, the examination of conscience, and engaging in various methods of prayer through Spiritual Exercises, whether those of Ignatius Loyola or the Englishman William Peryn, the latter being in no small part a translation and adaptation of those of Loyola and Nicholas Van Ess. Wizeman argues persuasively that Marian spirituality was christocentric, sacramental, ecclesial, and penitential all of which linked it to the international Catholic Reformation. The Marian church also contributed to contemporary and future Catholic spirituality and reform by replacing the traditional hanging pyx for the Eucharist in churches with a tabernacle on the main altar, and by promoting seminaries for the clergy as well as religious instruction for the laity. Yet, as creative as it was, it is probably going too far to argue that the Marian church invented what is often called the Counter-Reformation (251). The scholars examined in this review essay argue convincingly that the church of Mary Tudor was much more creative, forward-looking, and international in its theology and spirituality than its many critics have acknowledged. At the same time, the Marian church was but a part of a multifaceted and widespread movement of reform and renewal in early modern Catholicism, to which many individuals, groups, institutions, and countries contributed, the latter including Italy and Spain, as well as England. Robert Scully LeMoyne College