The following review is by James Carley, Distinguished Professor University of Toronto and Member of the Committee for the British Academy John Foxe Project.

Greg Walker, WRITING UNDER TYRANNY, Oxford University Press, 2005

Two major studies of the reign of Henry VIII have appeared in the past year. Focusing on the 1530s, they argue (in contrast to prevailing scholarly orthodoxies) that the king was firmly in control of his policies, that he shaped rather than was shaped by events. Although they employ different methodologies both conclude that Henry, who began his reign as the model of a Renaissance prince -learned, beneficent, open to counsel--ended as a tyrant of the worst sort. George W. Bernard's THE KING'S REFORMATION: HENRY VIII AND THE REMAKING OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH (New Haven & London, 2005), approaches the question from a historical perspective, making comprehensive use of archival evidence, and Greg Walker's WRITING UNDER TYRANNY gives a close reading of a number of literary texts, showing how their authors moved from the speculum principis model to a literature of despair. Walker's are, as he states, 'case studies', and his conclusion is a sweeping one: he believes that in their attempt to combat the 'illness'of Henry's drift towards tyranny, these writers 'changed the face of English literature forever'. Like many recent scholars he thus locates the first flowering of the English Renaissance in Henry's rather than Elizabeth's reign.

Walker divides his book into three sections organized chronologically: read together these provide a collective biography on how to live and write 'under tyranny'. His basic premise is that telling stories 'or editing past writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer'provides a means for commenting on and attempting to alleviate contemporary problems. In this case literary works must be interpreted within their historical context and the job of the critic is to tease out the deeper meanings; he is the exegete in the medieval sense. This approach, when it works, can be very illuminating, which Walker usually is (and the texts he chooses are for the most part political by nature), but sometimes one does suspect that there are situations in which 'a rose is a rose is a rose' rather than a hidden code for something else.



The first part of WRITING UNDER TYRANNY concerns three household servants, William Thynne, Brian Tuke and John Heywood, who used the speculum principis tradition to combat their growing concerns over the inevitable repercussions of the King's Great Matter. Through their literary output these men tried to steer Henry and his counsellors in the direction of moderation, of social and religious accommodation, rather than high-handed and self-serving policies. Unlike most scholars from the time of John Foxe onwards, Walker does not believe that the 1532 edition of Chaucer was a reformist endeavour. Rather, he is convinced that the 'Works' was a response to the Lollardizing of Chaucer, and this is how the introductory poems inter alia should be read. Likewise Henry was meant to identify with 'imperial'Theseus and like Theseus show himself firm but tolerant, able to bring stability out of struggle and disorder. Although WilliamThynne may have been the acknowledged editor, Brian Tuke was also actively involved. Because of 'sensitive nature of his employment in the divorce negotiations'he wished, however, to keep a low profile, and he therefore acknowledged his authorship of the preface only in a handwritten note in his private copy rather than proclaiming it in the printed edition.

The interludes of John Heywood - who audaciously praised Mary in 1534 after her bastardization in 'Give Place Ye Ladies' - also argued for accommodation, 'The Play of the Weather'(1533) implicitly requesting that the church be left to reform itself. In his treatment of Jupiter Heywood took licence through 'merry criticism' to touch upon issues close to the king, confident that Henry would listen and not be offended. It was, in Walker's opinion, the last moment at which a writer could get away with 'risking Jove's thunderbolts in order to offer him the good advice that all princes needed'.


The long middle section of WRITING UNDER TYRANNY is devoted to Sir Thomas Elyot, who reacted to lack of promotion and dissatisfaction with the evolving religious policies of the regime through extensive writings: in these he attempted to counsel the king 'on his personal conduct and the public policy of the realm'. Walker shows how one work inevitably led to the next as the situation (at least from the perspective of moderate conservatives like Elyot) deteriorated. The Book Named the Governor (1531), written as 'Henry's Great Matter' was beginning to take on ramifications well beyond the dissolution of his first marriage, examines the role of the good counsellor in the education of the prince. By Elyot's interpretation the problem with Henry's determination to marry Anne Boleyn was that it placed private desires above the public good. Pasquil the Plain (1533), on the other hand, was directed against Thomas Cranmer and other time serving evangelicals. By the time Elyot came to write the Image of Governance (1541 [1540]) his irony had become more bitter and his solutions more drastic: he now believed that Henry could not be reformed through eloquence and he argued for a omnicompetent council with coercive force.


Like Elyot Sir Thomas Wyatt was ultimately a political writer, but his poetry was much more inwardly directed than Elyot's prose; it is reflective rather than overtly didactic. As in the case of Elyot, many of Wyatt's writings were translations and Walker is particularly adept at examining the subtle modifications of the originals and showing how these reflect the concerns of the translator. 'Mine Owen John Poyntz' is a powerful example of how the satire was directed through the 'rootedness of the narratorial' (I). Although not printed during Wyatt's lifetime the Paraphrase of the Penitential Psalms is both a meditative exercise and an 'anatomization of the royal condition'. Henry can be identified with the 'naughty' King besotted by Bathsheba and the murderer of Uriah whereas Wyatt himself adopts the voice of the prayerful psalmist. We thus have a powerful conjunction: 'The consoling fantasy of imagining the King repenting of his lusts and despotism, and adopting instead a life of repentance and atonement merges in the text with an exploration of Wyatt's own sense of himself as a sinful, fallen human being, giving the Paraphrase its unique potency as both politically and psychologically radical writing'. Doctrinally, Wyatt adopted a middle way closely related to that promulgated in The Institution of A Christian Man (1537); he did not in any sense find himself at odds with the regime over matters of faith but rather of politics and morality.


WRITING UNDER TYRANNY concludes with a discussion of the relationship between Wyatt and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, an examination of Surrey's poetic oeuvre and specifically an analysis of Surrey's paraphrase of the psalms. In this section Walker is, as he acknowledges, much indebted to W. A. Sessions's Henry Howard, THE POET EARL OF SURREY: A LIFE. Surrey no doubt undertook his translation of the psalms during his final imprisonment and through it defied the king to redeem himself. The picture which emerges is of a self-indulgent, drunken and gluttonous tyrant, driven by pride and worldly ambition. (Less than a decade earlier Henry Parker, Lord Morley had written 'who is more temperat in all thinges, in eting, in drinkyng and in other voluptyose plesurs then oure Henry'). Like Wyatt Surrey looks both inwardly to his own soul and outwardly to the sins of Henry and his counsellors. His own experience brings to the text a painful sense of particularity and venom. As Walker observes, 'Quite literally, he was writing for his life', and what he produced was a literature of resistance.


Walker is a close reader and knows his material intimately. He provides new insights into well known works, showing us how they can be read 'politically' in ways which are not immediately apparent and he also reveals unexpected meanings in less familiar passages. Most importantly, he charts an evolution from text to text, establishing how a chronological reading is essential. On the other hand, he is often long-winded and WRITING UNDER TYRANNY would have profited from a firm editorial hand: his arguments would have been even more convincing if he moved more quickly from point to point. Since so much depends on the precise date of publication of key texts, it seems a pity, moreover, that there is no bibliography to provide this and other information: as Writing Under Tyranny now stands we are not even given STC references. There are also inaccuracies in detail, some of which effect Walker's interpretations. For example, as he has observed, Elyot dedicated A Sweet and Devout Sermon of Holy Saint Ciprian 'To my right worshipful sister dame Susan Kingston'and their two 'sisters religious' Dorothy and Elinor Fettiplace, all three of whom were probably (my emphasis) sisters of the Bridgettine House of Syon in Isleworth at this time'. For Walker, this dedication to his sister establishes Elyot's deep 'personal investment'in the text. The situation is slightly more complex than Walker describes it. Susan Kingston was Elyot's stepsister rather than sister; she was the eldest daughter of Richard Fettiplace and Elizabeth Bessels, who later married Elyot's father. Dorothy and Eleanor were also daughters of Richard and Elizabeth and thus full sisters of Susan; Dorothy [Godrington] was a widow when she joined the order. All three were equally related to Elyot (by marriage), but only two were 'sisters religious' of Syon; Susan was a vowess and would thus be the means of 'communicating' the text to the two enclosed sisters.

Through lack of bibliographical sophistication Walker sometimes gets things wrong and this can be crucial in terms of arguments based on dating. Walker maintains, for example, that there must have been an now lost edition issued in 1534 of The Bankette of Sapience and that comments in the narrative can be seen as politically charged in the light of the repressive measures that had been enacted to bring about the Boleyn marriage and the Supremacy. His evidence is based on the title page of the 1542 edition (although the same title page is found in the 1539 edition of which he states mistakenly no exemplars survive), which has the date 1534 in the border. In fact, had he consulted R. B. McKerrow & F. S. Ferguson, TITLE-PAGE BORDERS USED IN ENGLAND AND SCOTLAND 1485-1640 (London, 1932), no. 30, he would have seen that this same block (with 1534 in the sill) was used in books published up to 1569. The date, in other words, provides no evidence for an earlier edition.

Walker is entirely convincing in his description of the intentionality of his writers and in his view that each of them was at least implicitly addressing the king. He also maintains that the king in turn read the texts, and he provides a lively evocation of New Year's Day 1534 when Elyot, as he describes it, may have presented the king with an unattested manuscript copy of his translation from Isocrates, The Doctrinal of Princes (London, n.d.): 'the text's opening remarks concerning those presents sent to kings in the hope of reciprocal rewards...could be recycled as a witty commentary on the foodstuffs, plate and jewellry that poured into the royal household during the traditional Tudor gift giving ceremony. Indeed, a remark of the sort was very likely to catch the jaded eye of the King as he doled out the annual largesse to the courtiers, gentlemen, and other hangers-on who queued to present themselves in the royal presence each New Year's Day. The reality was alas more mundane - gifts were received by the king, indeed, but they were immediately handed over to the appropriate secretary who entered them in a list. Rarely did Henry himself see them again and on those occasions it was usually because an intermediary brought them back to his attention. There is therefore no evidence that a manuscript copy of The Doctrinal of Princes was given to the king in January 1534, let alone read by him (and in any case it would have appeared in the full New Year's Gift Roll that survives for that year.) Nor is it likely that the king would have worked his way through 'The Knight's Tale'and identified himself with Theseus. Two surviving books by Elyot - the Dictionary and the Image of Governance - were stored in the royal library at Westminster, but the former was sequestered from Cromwell, and the latter- even if lavishly bound by the Greenwich binder- has no annotations by Henry or other indications that he examined it. Ultimately, Walker's arguments about why the books were written and what they were meant to achieve do not depend on whether or not the king consulted them, but somehow one does wish that Walker had managed to find at least some concrete evidence that the king actually engaged with these texts and the ideas they put forth, that Henry's self was at least slightly fashioned by them.

Peter Marshall reviews

Eamon Duffy and David Loades, eds., The Church of Mary Tudor. Aldershot: Ashgate Press. 2006. Pp. xxxii + 335. ISBN 0 7546 3070 6.

With the possible exceptions of Richard III and John, Mary Tudor has had probably the worst press of any English sovereign. Her governance has traditionally seemed politically inept (unpopular Spanish marriage, disastrous war with France), and, in religious terms, at best misguided and ineffective, at worst murderously cruel. The historical roots of this interpretation lie, of course, in the sixteenth century itself, particularly in John Foxe's spectacularly successful arraignment of the Marian persecution in his Acts and Monuments/Book of Martyrs. The view of Mary's reign, and of her attempted restoration of Catholicism as an aberration, an unfortunate 'interlude', persisted well into the twentieth century - a case study in the 'Whig view of history', which associated nation, liberalism and modernity with the inevitable triumph of Protestantism in the sixteenth century. Nowadays, of course, to be called 'whiggish'is almost the worst insult one historian can throw at another, and Mary's reign and religious policy have long looked ripe for reassessment. Yet despite the revisionist wave in English Reformation studies which has been sweeping almost all before it since the later 1970s, close focus on the full range of religious expression under Mary has remained surprisingly elusive. In 1992, Eamon Duffy, co-editor of this collection and author of the acclaimed Stripping of the Altars, complained that 'a convincing account of the religious history of Mary's reign has yet to be written'. He and his fellow editor David Loades make no claim that their volume entirely supplies the lack, yet there is no doubt that it represents a very significant step towards a more rounded historical understanding.


Mary failed in almost all her objectives, representing, in historical terms, the ultimate 'loser'. Yet as the editors in their introduction astutely note, there is a tendency among historians to judge the Queen's policies as if she and her servants should have known that they only had five years in which to implement them. There is an alternative temptation: to construct counter-factual fantasies of long-term success and achievement - what if Mary had not died so relatively young, what if she and Philip had produced a Catholic heir? Wisely, the contributors to this volume resist the temptation to go too far down this road, instead concentrating on the processes by which policies were formulated, implemented and received. Unsurprisingly, the overall assessment of religious policy-making is a much more positive one that the traditional interpretation of the topic has sustained. But the result is no tightly marshalled revisionist manifesto, the historiographical equivalent of a New Labour conference. There is room for nuance, and some disagreement on substantial issues. This should not occasion surprise, as the editorial pairing imaginatively brings together, in Duffy, the leading revisionist historian of the English Reformation, and in Loades, the leading political historian of Mary's reign, who has generally been cautious about ascribing undue praise to the achievements or potential of the Catholic Restoration. Although the volume appears in a series devoted to 'Catholic Christendom', the unhappy experiences of Marian Protestants are not entirely neglected. In a characteristically incisive concluding essay, Patrick Collinson re-examines the persecution in Kent (where 61 martyrs were burned), and finds that John Foxe went to considerable lengths to try to conceal that some of them may have held unorthodox anti-Trinitarian views.


The rest of the volume, however, concerns itself firmly with Marian Catholics, prefixed by a thought-provoking introductory essay by Loades on the religious outlook of the Queen herself. This finds the key to apparently contradictory impulses and behaviour in the intensity of her devotion to the theology and practice of the Latin mass. The subsequent essays are divided into three sections, focusing on 'The Process;'(i.e. the instruments and institutions of re-Catholicisation); on Cardinal Pole and his circle; and on Marian religious culture more broadly. In a second contribution, Loades provides a survey of the Marian episcopate, which, while less effusive than some other recent assessments, nonetheless identifies the real progress that had been made in restructuring the body by the second half of the reign. Claire Cross's examination of policy towards the universities finds a similar pattern of successful institutional reform, which can be measured in the extent of deprivations required after 1558, and a flight to the continent of Catholic scholars which outweighed the equivalent Protestant migration after 1553. Another flagship institution of Marian Catholicism - the restored Benedictine community at Westminster - is reconstructed with skill and patience (and with a useful biographical appendix) in Charles Knighton's essay. Ralph Houlbrooke provides a provincial case-study of Catholic restoration, and has a fascinating story to tell to counter-balance the conventional emphasis on heroic Protestant martyrdom. In Norwich, the Edwardian clerical leadership effectively collapsed, and the leading evangelical preacher John Barret became an active collaborator with the new regime. Interestingly, Houlbrooke speculates that the relative absence of persecutions in Norwich might reflect a Protestant laity demoralised by these capitulations.

The 'Pole' essays are similarly close-focused and forensic. Thomas Mayer analyses Pole's legatine register to document the impressive number of appeals coming forward from clergy and laity alike, and comes to the 'heretical' conclusion that Pole's final legation must be considered a success. Eamon Duffy re-opens the question of Pole's attitude to preaching, and finds much of the traditional case for the Cardinal's supposed mistrust of it to rest on a mistranslation of a letter to the Spanish Dominican Carranza. Through a close examination of Pole's sermon preached in London on St Andrew's Day 1557, Duffy finds a figure far removed from the stereotype of the remote and unworldly Cardinal Legate, but rather a man with his finger firmly on the pulse of local and civic concerns, and rhetorically skilful in his appeal to his audience. If Duffy succeeds in setting the record straight, John Edwards effectively rewrites it. In a ground-breaking essay, Edwards demonstrates that far from being marginal to religious developments in England, the Spanish churchmen who accompanied Philip (Bartolomé Carranza foremost among them) played significant roles in the universities, in the restoration of liturgy and ceremonial, and in the prosecution of heresy.


The suggestion that the Marian Church was part of the mainstream of sixteenth-century Catholic reform is taken up in the final section of the book, in William Wizeman's thorough analysis of themes in the sermons of Bishop Thomas Watson. Wizeman finds Watson citing decrees of Trent in advance of their official promulgation, and advocating practices (such as the need for frequent communion) which were entirely characteristic of Counter-Reformation spirituality. Yet, paradoxically or not, Watson was also a traditionally-minded Catholic humanist, who took many of this theological bearings from Bishop John Fisher. This sense of a dynamic Catholic tradition is still more evident in Lucy Wooding's elegant consideration of the meanings of the mass in the Marian restoration. Wooding finds the mass to be a distinctly multivalent property: increasingly demarcator of a self-consciously confessional Roman Catholic identity, but at the same time a symbol of continuity with the policies of Henry VIII, and a focus of popular devotion independent of any necessary concern about the papacy. 'The people' are a rather attenuated presence through much of this volume, but one representative is placed centre-stage in Gary Gibbs's lively re-reading of the manuscript of the London citizen Henry Machyn. Mislabelled a 'diary' by its Victorian editor, Gibbs persuasively places the text in the civic chronicle tradition, and suggests that its concern with the recording of religious processions provides evidence for the success of the Marian regime's use of ritual and spectacle.


Taken together, these essays represent a welcome and much-needed rephrasing of the questions historians should be asking about the English Church and religion in the 1550s, ones less concerned with tautological identification of 'problems' to account for Marian 'failure', but which, in the editors' own words, attempt 'to locate the events of 1553-58 in the cultural context to which they belong'.Amen to that. Future researchers will be encouraged rather than deterred by the sign posts pegged out here.


Peter Marshall
University of Warwick

Xxiii - Foxe and his critics both right- 'A Church which had a broadly popular programme of worship and practice, and which was committed to education and evangelization, nevertheless carried out one of the most sustained persecutions seen anywhere in Europe'.