The reign of Mary Tudor has had few friends among historians, and the regime's religious dimension has provided most of the copy for the bad press. Until comparatively recently, almost everyone who wrote about what has been routinely described as the 'Marian Reaction' agreed that to a greater or lesser extent the Catholic Church during her reign was backward-looking, unimaginative and reactionary, sharing both the queen's bitter preoccupation with the past and her tragic sterility. Marian Catholicism was strong on repression, weak on persuasion. Its atrocious campaign of burnings was not only an outrage against human decency but a devastating political blunder, which alienated moderate opinion and inoculated the English nation against Catholicism for ever. Marian apologists and polemicists were dismissed as uncharismatic second-raters, the regime in general as fatally unaware of the crucial importance of argument and debate in the battle for hearts and minds, and thus neglectful of the power both of the pulpit and of the printing press.

LRB 7 February 2008 | PDF Download