Diarmaid MacCulloch writes:

Female caretakers did not take initiatives, but they could react to situations that they inherited, playing their role as mother of the realm in seeking to reconcile or solve problems. Both Mary and Elizabeth came to the throne after a period of creativity in government and immense upheaval in the Church. The two women had diametrically opposed reactions to what Henry and Edward had done. If anything, Marian Catholicism was more creative than Elizabethan Protestantism, in both religion and other policies. Loades remains firmly fixed on biography, giving only a few side-glances at much recent fascinating reassessment of Mary’s religious policies: where A.G. Dickens half a century ago described a Marian ‘reaction’, a posse of historians led by Eamon Duffy, Christopher Haigh, John Edwards and Loades himself have found a reformation as full of potential as anything that Protestants did, indeed the largest-scale attempt to restore Catholicism up till then in all Europe.

(LRB 18 October 2007)

National Archives | hardback 240 pp. |ISBN: 9781903365984