Melissa Franklin Harkrider's book Women, Reform, and Community examines the changing religious beliefs of Katherine Willoughby, duchess of Suffolk during the Reformation. A member of the aristocracy, and connected to the royal court, Willoughby was raised in a devout Catholic family. Her mother, Maria de Salinas, was Spanish and came to England as a lady-in-waiting for Catherine of Aragon. Yet, as Katherine Willoughby grew up, married, was widowed, and married again, her religious beliefs changed. Eventually she became a staunch Protestant, espousing some of the most radical ideas about the liturgy, the role of scripture, and the Eucharist. She went into exile during Queen Mary's reign, and returned upon the accession of Elizabeth, only to be bitterly disappointed at the Elizabethan Settlement. Not content to just live her life in quiet, Willoughby used her wealth and position to actively advance the cause of the evangelicals.
Harkrider's book is not written as a biography of Willoughby. She is interested instead in the relationship between Willoughby's various family and patronage networks on her changing religious identity. Harkrider's study demonstrates that religious conversion was not merely a matter of political expedience, as many historians have assumed of the aristocracy, nor were her changing religious ideas simply a matter of family dynamics. Rather, Willoughby's evolving religious ideas were the response to a complex web of politics, family, opportunity, and interest. Moreover, Willoughby's ideas do not remain static but continue to develop and change over the course of her life. Harkrider's study moves beyond one woman to larger questions of how aristocratic women influenced the world around them. Willoughby and her circle were by no means passive observers of the fraught religious politics of the sixteenth century. Their wealth and connections combined with their religious interests and encouraged them to promote religious change.
Willoughby's life is particularly well documented, and so it is possible to trace her changing religious ideas and how they shaped her life and actions. Not only does much of her correspondence survive, but so do household accounts, the sermons and lectures she commissioned, the court records from her disputed inheritance, and John Foxe's account of her life. With such a rich source base, Harkrider has traced her evolving networks of friends and associates and shown how they changed as her religious ideas changed. Harkrider argues that one of the most profound events to influence Willoughby's religious beliefs was her disputed inheritance. At the death of her father, William, lord Willoughby de Eresby, Katherine was her father's only living heir, but her uncle challenged her inheritance, creating a protracted dispute. The dispute erupted at the same time that Henry VIII began to try to divorce Catherine of Aragon. These marital politics forced Katherine Willoughby and her mother to seek court allies beyond their usual conservative religious circle. One of the key men in this new network was Charles Brandon, the duke of Suffolk, who first served as Katherine Willoughby's guardian and then married her at the death of his wife. The duke was religiously conservative but had a number of evangelicals in his household, who introduced their ideas to Willoughby.
Katherine Willoughby not only surrounded herself with like-minded men and women, she actively sought to advance the cause of the evangelicals. As one of the major landowners in Lincolnshire, through her father, Katherine Willoughby was in a strong position to act on her religious beliefs. She held sixteen benefices in Lincolnshire and was able to appoint a number of like-minded clerics to these positions. Between 1540 and 1555, she appointed a number of former monks. After her first husband's death, her commitment to reform deepened and in the decades before her death in 1580, she was able to appoint a number of “hot gospelers” to these positions. She was also able to transform the family's chantry lands in Spilsby into an endowment for a grammar school for young men. In Willoughby's hands, lay patronage was a powerful tool for advancing the Gospel.
Harkrider's study is important for a number of reasons. It raises interesting questions about the ways in which women were able to shape their own immediate religious surroundings and about the role of gender and status in this process. As many previous studies of women and religion have shown, household duties are an important starting point for women's influence, but in the case of Willoughby, the wealth of documentation on her and her network allows us to see how Willoughby moved beyond her household and how she combined household and political influence. Harkrider is also able to show how religious ideas evolved and changed over the course of a life. Her study is greatly enhanced by its constant acknowledgment of the rich historiography of the period, which contextualizes Willoughby's life and career. Yet religion was not the sole determination of Willoughby's actions. Despite her commitment to evangelical thinking, she had friends and colleagues among the Lincolnshire gentry who were Catholics, and that county politics united them when religion divided them. My one reservation about this study is its pace. Harkrider moves very rapidly through a great deal of material, and at points I wish she had slowed down and further developed the implications of her extensive research.
