Eamon Duffy - A People’s Tragedy: Studies in Reformation

For tony

with love

Contents

On 5 November every year tens of thousands of visitors descend on the small Sussex town of Lewes for one of the last major manifestations of a tradition that was once a shaping force of British national identity. In the wintry darkness up to 30 torchlight processions, led by brass bands and thundering kettledrums, trail through the narrow streets, the flames illuminating exotically costumed paraders pirates, Tudor townsfolk, skull-faced zombies and even, for some reason, feather-crowned Zulu warriors. The processions climax in a gigantic firework display and a bonfire, on which human effigies (which in 2019 included Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage) are immolated to the sound of jeers and cheers.

The Lewes Guy Fawkes celebrations are now a complex folk event encoding a multitude of meanings, in which elements of local, national and international popular culture and issues of current concern jostle tourist-board promotion and local patriotism. But the event itself originated in deadly religious divisions, because 5 November was the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot, the abortive attempt by a group of disgruntled Roman Catholic conspirators to blow up King James I and his Parliament and place a Catholic ruler on the English throne. In 1606 an annual commemoration was instituted to keep alive the memory of this foiled atrocity, and a special service was added to the Book of Common Prayer for the purpose. Over the next two centuries further deliverances from popery were included in the commemorations, notably the deposing of the Catholic King James II in favour of his son-in-law William of Orange and the replacement in 1714 of the religiously unreliable Stuart dynasty by the staunchly Protestant Hanoverians. Guy Fawkes night became a ferocious and fiery annual celebration of the deliverance of our Church and Nation from Popish tyranny and arbitrary power. Well into the nineteenth century the effigies burned on bonfires up and down the country included not merely the Catholic plotter Guy Fawkes but also, more often than not, the reigning Pope, in an aggressive collective re-affirmation of Protestant national identity. And at Lewes the celebrations were given additional fervour because the bonfires served also to commemorate the brutal execution by burning alive of 17 local Protestants during the reign of the Catholic Queen Mary.

If one strand in English national consciousness has been a carefully fostered folk memory of the nations narrow escapes from tyrannical Catholic domination under Elizabeth I and her Stuart successors, another equally important element has been the myth of Good King Harry, the titanic figure of Henry VIII, who in the 1530s severed Englands 900-year-old links with the papacy, declared his kingdom an empire unto itself and created a national Church subordinated to the monarchy. The new Church was not at first Protestant, and while Henry lived it retained the medieval Mass almost unchanged. But Henrys Reformation involved far more than a switch from papal to royal jurisdiction. Henry put an end to the immemorial and resonantly symbolic practice of pilgrimage, and with it the multitude of major and minor shrines that had criss-crossed England with a network of pilgrim routes that constituted a sacred landscape, literally grounding the peoples sense of the sacred. Henry also suppressed all English and Welsh houses of monks and nuns. Early Tudor monastic communities could be sleepy, over-comfortable institutions, and some were openly corrupt. But monasticism had been central to the health of Christendom for more than a millennium, at its best an inspiring witness to the radical demands of the Gospel and a perennial source of religious zeal and moral and institutional reform. Female religious communities had offered women a dignified form of life in which their identity and value were not constituted by their role as some mans daughter or wife. The outlawing of this venerable and versatile form of religious expression for the next three centuries was an impoverishment at least as profound as any entailed by the revolt against the papacy.

Until a generation or so ago, the historiography of the English Reformation made little of such losses. The break with Rome was widely understood as a necessary liberation into national autonomy the prequel to modernity or imperial greatness and the suppression of monasticism was viewed as an overdue escape from rank superstition. Major late medieval religious institutions pilgrimage, the priesthood, monks and nuns, confraternities and guilds, indulgences were viewed unsympathetically and little studied, and the late medieval Church itself was seen as an ailing institution, whose unpopularity with the men and women of early Tudor England explained their rapid and eager adoption of Protestantism.

In recent years there has been welcome change in this situation. Historians are newly sensitive to the vigour and popularity of many hitherto ignored and unstudied aspects of late medieval Christianity, expressed most obviously in massive lay investment in the rebuilding and lavish furnishing for Catholic worship of many of the parish churches of Plantagenet and early Tudor England. There has also been a growing awareness of the existence of widespread discontent with and resistance to the Reformation process, which is now understood as a long labour, not a rapid and popular push-over. The study of minority religious communities, Protestant and Catholic, who refused conformity to the national Church has moved from a denominational niche interest to the historical mainstream.