This is a polemical work and does not pretend to be anything else. Eamon Duffy sets out to praise an institution that he claims has been denigrated and misunderstood for far too long. In so doing he is, historiographically speaking, taking a step backward, because his principal target is the late A. G. Dickens’s English Reformation, which included the famous and too often quoted observation that Mary “never discovered the Counter Reformation.” More recent and more nuanced work is quoted selectively to make it appear that the authors endorsed Dickens’s opinion. The English Reformation was in many ways a fine book, but recent scholarship has demonstrated that the author was seriously mistaken about the Marian church. The work of Tom Mayer on Cardinal Pole and of John Edwards on Spanish influence has already shown that the Counter Reformation (or parts of it) were alive and well in England between 1554 and 1558. It may have been that the cardinal’s approach to the theology of Trent was more selective than it is made to appear, but that was on account of his judgment of the English situation, not from any general lack of sympathy. He rejected Ignatius Loyola’s offer of assistance because of his own rather different plans, not from any lack of enthusiasm for the Jesuits. This portrait of Pole, committed in principal to the persecution but reluctant to get his hands dirty, is entirely convincing. He was a man of learning, cautiously committed to preaching and wholly committed to the suppression of heresy. Duffy believes that he was the real driving force behind the burnings, and in that he is rather less persuasive, because Mary needed no urging in that direction, and it was she rather than Pole who drove the council and the lay magistracy.

Nor did the church under Pole’s guidance lack any commitment either to polemic or to its pastoral duties. Polemic is a matter of taste, but it is clear that official and semiofficial propagandists traded insults with their Protestant opponents with far more equality than has been appreciated. Particularly interesting in this connection is the effect that Pole’s hostility to Henry VIII had on the face of official writings and sermons, because after his arrival there was no longer any attempt to pretend that Henry’s church settlement had been in any acceptable sense Catholic. How this affected Mary’s own attitude to her father’s memory is not entirely clear because, as the author admits, she went on using remnants of the Royal Supremacy long after it had been flamboyantly abandoned. It has been recognized for some time that the Marian church produced distinguished Catholic theology and manuals of instruction for the laity, but it is good to see this aspect of its work so thoroughly explored. Analysts of this aspect of the church have been misled, Duffy argues, by counting titles rather than editions. Each work was reprinted many times, arguing a wider market and more influence for these books than has been hitherto believed.

In presenting the persecution itself, however, Duffy is in certain difficulties, not least because so much of the evidence has to be taken from John Foxe. He points out (quite rightly) that the death penalty was considered appropriate for ideological enemies of any regime, whether Catholic or Protestant, but is on less safe ground in comparing Mary to Edward or Elizabeth. It was the sheer quantity of the Marian burnings that impressed contemporaries, and it really will not do to argue that the heretics left the authorities with no alternative. Both Edward and Elizabeth found other ways of dealing with dissenters. What we see in Mary’s reign is two sets of determined fanatics going for each other, and of the two it was the bishops, but not the lay magistrates, who were the most squeamish. The timetable of the persecution is interesting in this connection. There was no slackening in its intensity as 1557 moved into 1558, which does not seem entirely compatible with the view that the authorities were winning the battle. As a struggle for the hearts and minds of the majority of the population, again it looks like a drawn battle. Duffy is quite right to point out that many of the “spontaneous” demonstrations of sympathy with the victims were carefully orchestrated by their fellow believers, but it was not only Simon Renard who believed that the burnings were “odious to many people.” Venetian observers thought the same. They were, of course, describing reactions in London, but that was where the majority of the burnings took place. There were demonstrations hostile to the victims also, and a lot seems to have depended upon the personal standing of those being burned. However, to describe the government as having won this battle seems to stretch the evidence further than it will go.

Duffy is concerned to celebrate the achievements of Mary’s church, and up to a point he does this very successfully. Its infrastructure was carefully restored, and it took its responsibilities with great seriousness. It was probably more successful with the intellectual elite than with any other section of the population, and that was to leave a vibrant recusancy and a severe headache for the Elizabethan authorities. However, there is another side to the story. Thanks to the eccentric behavior of Pope Paul IV, the English church was deprived of its legatine leadership and was largely frozen out of the curia during the last eighteen months of the reign. Pole carried on, but he felt this repudiation keenly, and it took much of the steam out of his enthusiasm for Rome. Left to its own devices, the momentum of the restoration did not slacken, but it lacked context. When Elizabeth succeeded, Mary’s senior clergy stuck to their guns commendably, but they were brushed aside by the laity in parliament who blithely undid her whole achievement. Those magistrates who had been foremost in the persecution either turned their coats or retired into private life. If there is a message to be derived from the church history of this period, it is less the excellent quality of the Catholic restoration than the importance of obedience to the crown.

This study is learned and eloquent, and does much to establish the credentials of a church that has suffered from centuries of adverse publicity. Even more, however, it demonstrates the perils of ideological conflict. The Protestants won by historical accident, but it is pure gain to see the other side of the story so ably presented.