THE HISTORY OF THE TUDOR ELIZABETH

Press, Volume XCI, Issue 27576, 5 February 1955, Page 3

THE HISTORY OF THE TUDOR ELIZABETH

The l^ ef “^ ,at, °” *?. Wland. Volume „ ue „ Religion Now Established. By Philip Hughes. Hollis and Carter. 486 pp. [Reviewed by A.R.] *

e.,S ln 5 e ‘ he beginning of the new Elizabethan age, there has been a natural tendency to concentrate anew on the history of the Tudor Elizabeth and her reign. The importance of that reign in various directions is undoubted, but probably it was the Elizabethan religious settlement which £ ad 2 h £.. gre^Je ? lastin & importance. Elizabeth s Reformation Settlement provided the basis on which the Church of England has developed as a national church, and set an end to the startling fluctuations in church administration and doctrine which had begun in the reign of Henry VDI and continued through the eras of Edward VI and Mary Henry had transferred the Papal authority over an orthodox church to the Crown; Edward had protestanised the church, and Mary had brought it back into submission to Rome. The history of these changes has been fully covered from a Catholic viewpoint in Father Hughes’s earlier volumes on “The Reformation in England • Now he has completed his detailed s.udy with a volume on “The Second Conversion of England” in the reign of Elizabeth. Again, as in his two earlier volumes, he has been re. sponsible for much patient and thorough research, and he has produced a work which will long stand as the most authoritative Catholic statement on this subject.

This book should be read by both Catholics and Protestants: it is a work of great scholarship and it presents much that is new in an absorbingly interesting manner. Probably more than in his earlier volumes, the author appears as the Catholic theologian and historian anxious to be as impartial as possible but recognising the impossiJu taking an y other line than the one he has adopted when writing about the trials and tribulations of the English Catholics under Elizabeth. Thus, he has insisted that the opinions of such men as Cardinal Allen and Father Robert Persons (often given as Parsons) should “be heard, at least in this generation that is not so passionately interested in the question whether it is the Catholic or the Reformed view of the Christian religion that is true. He finds it difficult to set limits on his admiration for Campion and Persons, the two Jesuits who carried through a Counter-Reformation mission in England. He recognises the problem of attempting to be impartial and wisely states where he himself stands. “Any discussions will reveal . . how close to us these events of three to four hundred years ago remain. The tradition of a great injustice that triumphed through fraud and force is still very much alive among the descendants of one part of the England of Elizabeth; and the tradition of a great liberation, won in defiance of all the world leagued against us, survives among the descendants of the other Elizabethans.” In discussing the question of the guilt or innocence of the English Catholics, he begins by declaring that “it can be lawful to rise against a tyrant.” And in denouncing the moral character of the persecution of the Catholics under the Elizabethan laws, he is very critical of the “apologists for the Elizabethan tyranny” and he goes on to indicate his own attitude to her leading advisers. “The most obvious explanation is that the men responsible for these laws were men who would stick at nothing that would serve their purpose, provided they could, as we say, ‘get away with it.’ And, to confess my interest, I will say plainly that.l believe Burghley to have been such. Leicester of course and, in what relates to Catholics, Walsingham also.” Elsewhere there are no such pointed declarations of attitude but the underlying faith and convictions of the writer are always clear. Father Hughes begins his book with a chapter entitled “Granddaughter of Henry VH,” apparently*so named in order to indicate how capable, as a ruler, Elizabeth was to be. But the reader’s introduction to Elizabeth is scarcely flattering to the last of the Tudors. “We may think ... of her birth, the child of a union which no one, not even her parents, really believed to be a marriage; of her father’s judicial murder of her mother .'. . and of her father’s public defaming of her mother—and of her own birth—by an Act of Parliament at her

’ a J c ession, the law of the realm; . . . tbe dangerous years when Mary ruled, the half-sister who did nbt believe Elizabeth to be Henry’s daughter Rni? ’ bu J the offs P ri ng of Anne -teyn and one of those put to death with her by Henry as her adulterous accomplices.” Elizabeth is declared to be still something of an enigma and is therefore not discussed at length. The gontical and economic importance of er reign is ably summarised. Indeed, rather Hughes is realist, if not unintentionally Marxist, in his assessment ot the values of economic and social reconstruction carried through by the Queen s government. “For the moneyed classes, for the landowners and the new capitalists and the new merchant -^ be classes from which came the administrators, the politicians, the members of the House of Commons) this competent and successful, practical, social policy was all that was needed to rivet to the cause of the Queen and of her policies what had, so far, been but attached; and to attach whatever was wavering. The national prestige of a government that had successfully drawn the nation from the brink of a bottomless slough was perhaps, of all things, its greatest asset in the business of persuading ‘the nation* not to reject the settlement which it proposed in matters of religion.” Tie treatment of the actual settlement, of the Acts of Supremacy and of Uniformity and the rest, is sound and authoritative. It differs from earlier studies both in its detail and m its explanation of resulting differences between the new order and the old, which had lasted for a thousand years. By skilful handling of such Tudor writings as Jewel’s “Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae” and the Catholic replies to it, Father Hughes makes clear what the Reformation meant to English Catholics of the day, and how justified they were in opposing the changes. He insists that, contrary to the general view that the Elizabethan setlement was a middle-of-the-road compromise, that it was no compromise made between contending parties but the triumph of the laymen over the clerics and of a revolutionary minority, as in so many modern revolutions, over a more or less apathetic majority. “It was a thing devised by laymen—the queen and her ministers —behind closed doors; put through parliament in the face of much opposivlon; sanc ll° ne< l finally by parliament the whole body of bishops, and convocation, too, voting contra to the end —and then introduced to the country through the agency of a very small handful of clerics, who saw that the thing was as much as they were likely to get of what they had dreamed.’’ He also insists that the protesting Catholics were not traitors and were, for the most part, loyal to the Queen. His description of the work of the Jesuits and others in Elizabethan England may lack the dramatic qualities of Evelyn Waugh’s “Edmund Campion” or John Gerard’s “Autobiography,” but only a determined critic will not be moved to admiration for the Catholics of 1570 onwards. “ . . . a people reevangelised, toughened by new ’processes and instruments, a multitude whose religion is active, whose understanding has been enlightened, whose faith is instructed, and for whose leaders and guides Catholicism means combat and endurance until death.” Yes, it was literally ,to the death, since the government of Elizabeth put to death “solely because of their religion, between the years 1577 and 1603, 183 of her Catholic subjects.” Father Hughes avoids making dogmatic assertions as to the total outcome but he follows his usual practice, in such circumstances, of asking questions in a form which suggests the answer he would like to give. “Was England, at any time, ever more Church of England,” or “Protestant,” than it was Catholic in 1529? or was it —ever —even as much so? Was not more destroyed, after 1529—in the way of genera!, popular understanding and attachment to a system of Christian thruth as a thing that really matters in practice—than was ever rebuilt? Was the Englishman of 1603 more—or was he less—influenced by religion in his conduct than the Englishman of 1529?” Father Hughes denies that there was any great national movement of religious revival in England and contrasts the situation in this respect unfavourably with that in Spain and Italy, “where the great cities, and the countrysides, too, were alive with the activities of a really national, religious revival.”

Well illustrated and provided with useful appendices and bibliography, this book is perhaps too detailed a study to be read as widely as it should be. Nevertheless, it goes a long way to substantiate the claim that history is a living subject and to demonstrate the tremendous interest which Tudor Elizabethan studies can have for us in the mid-twentieth century.