Hilary Mantel writes:
In Fires of Faith, Duffy sets out to show how the Marian reconstruction worked. Until now the orthodox view has been, broadly speaking, that Mary and her bishops were not only despicable bigots, but also ineffectual and unimaginative; that they did not know how to fight for their cause; that they faltered in the face of popular resistance; that they were – and should have known it – on the wrong side of history. On the contrary, Duffy tells us, Marian prosecution of Protestants was monstrously successful. It was well organised, perpetrated by able and determined clerics, and backed by enthusiastic preaching and propaganda.

(LRB 24 September 2009)

The traditional view of ‘Bloody Mary’ is of a reactionary monarch seeking to reimpose the rule of Rome on an unwilling population through violent repression. In fact, as Eamon Duffy has persuasively argued in The Stripping of the Altars and The Voices of Morebath, Protestantism was nothing like as deeply embedded in the religious consciousness of the nation as its subsequent, triumphalist partisans have led us to believe. Duffy’s revisionist Mary is, while still comparatively bloody, an outward-looking ruler, learning from the European counter-Reformation, and one whose bid to restore England to its traditional faith was in the end defeated only by the accident of her dying childless on the same day as her influential cousin and chief adviser, Cardinal Reginald Pole.

Yale | hardback 249 pp. |ISBN: 9780300152166