Looking back on the religious strife of Reformation and post-Reformation England is a melancholy process in the eyes of modern people. Persecution for reasons of faith, torture and execution seem wholly abhorrent to the twenty-first century. Historians of Tudor England have very largely freed themselves from the confessional biases that shaped their predecessors’ writings. For that reason, the letter from Brian Conneller in the letter column of today’s The Times newspaper is misconceived and inappropriate. No one denies the personal trauma that the Princess Mary suffered when her father, Henry VIII, and her mother, Catherine of Aragon, separated and were ‘divorced’ or that she felt deeply the changes to the practices of her Catholic faith introduced by her father and, after 1547, by her half-brother, Edward VI. She was persecuted for her faith and, in turn, persecuted Protestants when she came to the throne in 1553. But Thomas Cranmer was not principally responsible for her father’s divorces nor for the trials and executions of More, Fisher, the Carthusians and other adherents of Catholicism. It is absolutely untrue to claim that Mary’s successor, Queen Elizabeth, was a tyrant – she was, in fact, a conservative Protestant much less interested in theological niceties than her Privy Councillors. She was careful not ’to make windows into men’s souls’ and, as a result, saw Catholicism wither and largely die in the first twenty years of her reign. By 1580, England was an overwhelmingly Protestant country. The appearance of Catholic priests trained on the continent had two objectives: one was to shore up the faith of the one to one and a half per cent of the population that still adhered to the old faith; the second was to prepare the ground, in alliance with the Papacy and Philip II of Spain, for circumstances in which Elizabeth could be deposed and Catholicism be restored. Elizabeth’s regime naturally took preventative measures and treated those working for her overthrow either as potential or actual traitors. It was not a pretty process; it did claim martyrs to Catholicism; and it did preserve England’s Protestantism. At this distance in time, we need to recognise why the participants acted as they did, not to make the mistake of painting Catholics as exemplars of virtue and Protestants simply as persecutors or vice versa. Mr Conneller’s defence of Queen Mary is a throwback to a historiography of religious conflict that died generations ago.
