The reign of Mary Tudor (a.k.a. Bloody Mary) has for long been an easy target for historians. They have enjoyed coasting the waves of popular hostility and derision that have greeted, over the centuries, this gold-plated, ocean-going instance of female political failure. This was a failure which was characterised by an experiment in repression, which, even in the sixteenth century, offended against a justly proud spirit of Englishness, allied with Protestantism and freedom. Coalitions of liberals and evangelicals could also confidently proclaim that Mary Tudor was so stupid that she had failed to discover the Counter Reformation, though presumably this would not have saved her miserable regime either. The stupidity of this, in any case, half-Spanish bigot could be indexed directly by reference to her cruelty toward those of her subjects who had correctly discerned the course of the future.

This might seem like a caricature, of course, but anyone who is burdened with the teaching of early modern British history of the sixteenth century in universities (and, I dare say, in schools as well) knows that this is what passes for historical “truth” in the larger field of the so-called “mid-Tudor crisis.”

Eamon Duffy is, therefore, not aiming at an entirely straw man in his partial rehabilitation of the regime of 1553–1558 and in his questioning of the received wisdom of much of the period, wisdom which has in large part been culled from the pages of John Foxe's Acts and Monuments and has been distilled into a Whiggish narrative of the mid-sixteenth century that saw its apotheosis in A. G. Dickens's The English Reformation (New York: Schocken, 1964).

The question is, if one is going to perform an exercise in rehabilitation, how should one go about it? The first option is the counterfactual one. What if the elder daughter of Henry VIII had lived into the 1560s or 1570s or for as long as Gloriana eventually did? We can only speculate how the future might have been different, but different it would undoubtedly have been, and we might as a result have been in possession of an entirely different received wisdom about the period (the innate ideological superiority of Catholicism, its compatibility with monarchical polities, its popularity, and so on).

The second approach is to say, as Duffy makes the case with considerable aplomb, that the Marian Counter Reformation was practical and viable. The evidence for this has, in fact, been in plain view for some time. As Duffy gracefully acknowledges, it is implicit in some of the work of Thomas Mayer on Mary's archbishop of Canterbury, Cardinal Reginald Pole. The third way, the joker in the pack as it were, is the claim that, like prison, repression works. On some measure, the Marian persecution of heretical dissent was large scale, but, by European standards, it was not entirely novel. At the end of the 1550s, the Inquisition in Spain was certainly doing something similar. Nor was the Marian crackdown on heresy in fact very geographically widespread. It is clear that it was restricted to certain regions. It was not something that was outside the imagination of supposedly much more via media regimes. (Elizabeth Tudor and James Stuart both burned their heretics, though, of course, far fewer of them.) Also, burning as a mode of execution was not limited. One has not noticed historians of early modern Europe weeping and wailing with evangelical zeal about the readiness of contemporary regimes to burn witches, for example, in Scotland, a country supposedly dominated after ca. 1560 by the good sense of the Protestant Reformation.

However, down this route of comparative cruelty, madness lies, certainly if one starts to discuss whether burning is worse than, for instance, hanging, drawing, and quartering. To his credit, Duffy avoids this. In this volume he follows the lines of thought laid out in his own co-edited collection of essays on the Marian Church that appeared a few years ago (Duffy and David M. Loades, eds., The Church of Mary Tudor [Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006]), one which, from a variety of different perspectives, set out an alternative structure for thinking about the period.

The point about Mary's accession in 1553 was that she came to the crown on a legitimist ticket, in other words, on the basis of her descent in blood from Henry VIII. This was the case made in her battle in summer 1553 with the duke of Northumberland and Lady Jane Grey. In some sense, the ultimate achievement of the Marian regime was to sustain this legitimist claim of the house of Tudor to the throne (in spite of the religious policy that it decided to implement) through to the next reign.

Under both Elizabeth and Mary, really hard-line dissenters tended to go into exile. What was different in Mary's reign was that the almost immediate challenge to the regime after Mary was on the throne, resulting in Wyatt's rising in 1554, was provoked in large part by the queen's own preferred dynastic policy, namely the Anglo-Spanish marriage. (This kind of dynastic step was one which Elizabeth never actually could bring herself to take.) As much as anything, this seems to have been what impelled the authorities of Marian England to use the language of religious orthodoxy to protect itself in the face of violent political dissent. The myths and nonsense associated with “Bloody Mary” were really the result of what happened after Mary went to meet her maker.

This leads us to two more points. First, we perhaps need some sense of what it was in evangelical Protestant religion in the 1550s that was regarded by the Marian authorities as so dangerous. Duffy notes the instances when Marian Protestants openly challenged those authorities. But, in many of these cases, these people, whose stories are recounted by Foxe, resemble lunatics, more appropriate candidates for counselling than for incineration. Also, Duffy refers to the extensive anti-Nicodemite campaigns launched from the Continent (163). There is an interesting comparison to be made here with Nicodemite/occasional conformist Catholic thought and practice under Elizabeth—the basis in fact for the much lauded via media Elizabethan settlement. Ralph Houlbrooke's offering in Duffy's co-edited essay collection showed how structurally similar were the methods adopted by the Marian and Elizabethan authorities to secure conformity. If the Marian Church and state were capable of securing this measure of conformity, in the way that Duffy describes, this is perhaps the most appropriate context in which the violence and undoubtedly horrifying and sickening cruelty of the persecution should be located and described.