A new approach
It was a quiet world until the sixties. The conventional view was that Henry wanted to break from Rome and so, after some time figuring out how, he broke. It was decided, enforced, and finished. Mary tried to change it all but didn't have much chance as England was, by that stage, Protestant. This all changed in 1964 with the publication of The English Reformation by A.G. Dickens. He took this familiar story but broke new ground by using local archives - originally those of York - to highlight both the independent contribution of specific reformers and the power of Protestantism to convert people before and against official government policy. The Reformation was sought after and well-received by an England ready and willing to embrace the new religion.
This view prompted the debate that has yet to be fully resolved: how did a Catholic country become Protestant? Using the same methods as Dickens, the 1970s saw the birth of the "revisionist" case. In 1975 Christopher Haigh, studying Tudor Lancashire, found much support for pre-Reformation Catholicism there, as well as considerable resistance to Protestantism that lasted well into Elizabeth's reign.
'There was not one Reformation, but several.'
More controversially, he developed a national analysis from his regional research. There was not one Reformation, but several. All had short-term political causes, not longer term social and economic ones. Despite some murmurs in the wings, the Catholic Church in England was alive and well and the Reformation was forced onto the country from above, by Henry and Parliament. This fitted with the pioneering work of Sir Geoffrey Elton, who studied Thomas Cromwell and his use of Parliament and statute. He had concluded that, in executing the Reformation in the country, Thomas Cromwell modernised government to a quite revolutionary extent.
Published: 2001-05-01
Bookmark with:
What are these?