Mary I by John Edwards

Author:John Edwards
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241184110
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2016-09-15T04:00:00+00:00

4

Bride of Christ

One of the aspects of history in which hindsight can be most misleading, and even harmful, is that of religion. Study of the past, in this case the sixteenth century, is full of what translators from one language to another call ‘false friends’, that is, words which look similar in the two languages but in fact mean quite different things. The vocabulary of religion is full of such traps, not the least of which being the word ‘religion’ itself. In Mary’s day it generally had quite a specific meaning in the Catholic Church of the West. Someone who adopted ‘religion’, and hence became a ‘religious’, took vows and joined a religious order, whether they were male or female, ordained or not. Thus ‘religion’ meant something quite different from what it does now, whether to academic scholars or to the general public, who commonly talk of belief in theological propositions, often lumped together with ritual, dietary rules and public worship as ‘faith’. Even more crucial among the false friends for students of the sixteenth century are the terms ‘Catholic’ and ‘Protestant’. When Mary was born in February 1516, just before Martin Luther placed his famous ninety-five theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, the words ‘Catholic’ and ‘Christian’ were virtually synonymous, in the West at least. By the time she died in November 1558, ‘Catholic’ was becoming effectively a denominational label, contrasted with the various terms used for those who had broken away from the Church centred on Rome and who might be known as ‘Evangelicals’, ‘Lutherans’ or ‘Anabaptists’ and, increasingly, ‘Protestants’. In her Richmond proclamation of 1553 Mary had already recognized this. Mary’s personal religion (using the term in the wide, modern sense) developed in these complex and ever-changing circumstances, and thus needs to be approached with more subtlety than is usually employed to deal with it. Terms like ‘Catholic’ need further definition, and pejoratives such as ‘Bloody Mary’ simply do not cover the case.

Until Mary reached her twenties, little is said in the sources about her personal faith and beliefs. It seems likely that this is because she was conventional in her views and observance. Even so it is clear that, while her mother had a devotion to traditional practices such as pilgrimages to shrines, her daughter was taught by prominent, spiritually minded, Christian Humanists who were strongly influenced by developments in Renaissance scholarship and disliked such ‘popular’ manifestations.1 Although the lives of both mother and daughter would be thrown into turmoil by King Henry’s liaison and marriage with Anne Boleyn, and historians talk, with hindsight, of the supposedly inexorable progress of England to Protestantism from then onwards up to 1549, the Mass continued to be the main act of public worship in the kingdom’s churches. In Edward’s short reign, on the other hand, the English Reformation, which had begun under Henry with the closure of monasteries and the removal of most religious images from churches, showed signs of becoming much more radical.2 At this point, whether keeping faith with Catholicism or just with her father, Mary drew the line.

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