Peter Marshall's Heretics and Believers: A History of the English Reformation is quite an impressive book. Marshall tells the story (or better, stories) of the English Reformation at a level of detail generally not found in books aimed at a broad audience. His overall thesis is that the English Reformation was not simply a series of “top down” mandates or a peaceful, if complicated, process. It was, rather, an ongoing and contentious negotiation between people at all levels of the English church, from rulers and bishops to local clergy and parishioners, which constituted a decades-long education in theological issues. The Reformation changed religion in England from part of the general culture to an active choice that posited, often violently, believers against heretics.
Marshall's helpful introduction alerts the reader to the overarching points he seeks to make. Along with changing the nature of religion, the Reformation was a pyrrhic victory for the monarchy; it gained control over the church yet lost the unity it greatly desired. While martyrs demonstrated and inspired conviction, a culture of dissembling was normalized. Marshall notes that he has included many individual names to make the point that real people were the ones shaping the religious situation throughout the sixteenth century. For nonspecialist readers, a “who's who” might have been helpfully included for those names that show up repeatedly, such as the various bishops of London. For academic readers, although the footnotes show a great range of primary and secondary sources, a bibliography would have been quite welcome.
The book is organized into four largely chronological parts. Part one, on the late medieval church, is masterful. Marshall demonstrates the integration of religion and life, the significant desires for reform of the clergy, and the ongoing competition over who was responsible for such reform. Finally, his discussion of the Lollards sets up themes that will expand in the English Reformation: a varied religious landscape, permeable yet vigilantly guarded boundaries between orthodoxy and dissent, questioning of official religion, and personal choices of conscience and belief (119).
In part two, Marshall takes the reader through much of the reign of Henry VIII, from humanist inspired reform and new Lutheran ideas through the declaration of royal supremacy and its immediate after effects. The king's marriage and church reform were separate issues that coalesced, gave the public important issues to debate, and unintentionally began a shift of power from the ruler to the ruled. The Pilgrimage of Grace gets more coverage here than in many accounts of the English Reformation, showing that there was very substantial resistance to Henry's reforms. Along with the dissolution of the monasteries and its discouragement of some forms of popular piety, reform at this stage encouraged a “kind of creative obfuscation” about theological matters and official policies (257).
Marshall begins part three in the later 1530's and continues through the death of Mary I. As Henry dissolved the monasteries, he did not provide “coherent or compelling alternatives” to old pieties, thus “increasing numbers of English people were taking responsibility for their own understanding of religious truth, helping to forge the new Christianities that would transform the nation” (302). Marshall sees the ascendancy of evangelical religion under Edward VI as causing massive disruption on the local level and decidedly bringing the late medieval church to an end (319). Under Mary, replacing such previously removed items as roods, altars, and vestments was not so much a restoration of the past as “a statement of faith in an alternative future” (381). During her short but highly influential reign, in which repression and reform went hand in hand, political loyalty and religious conviction were valued as inseparable, while the nation itself settled into deeper Roman Catholic and Protestant divisions.
With part four, Marshall covers much of the reign of Elizabeth I, stressing her firm but quirky version of what should constitute the right form of church. Again and again, Elizabeth called for uniformity but failed to get the backing of temporal and ecclesiastical officials. Indeed, Marshall stresses that people schooled in decades of religious debate were less compliant than ever. Elizabeth herself was Nicodemite in temperament and was willing to tolerate such in others; this had the paradoxical effect of encouraging zealous calls for clarity and reform. Even so, by the third decade of Elizabeth's rule, Marshall finds that the majority of people in most places were conformist Protestants. Marshall concludes the book after the execution of Mary Queen of Scots and the defeat of the Spanish Armada because by this time “crucial questions had been settled, or shown themselves incapable of being settled” (xviii). By this point, the reader does share the sense that England must have been weary of religious controversy.
Although long, the book is highly readable. Marshall has a gift for illustrative examples and anecdotes; in his hands, history is good storytelling. Although readers know the general shape and outcome of sixteenth-century English history, this was far from self-evident to the characters involved in most of the book. Marshall is quite willing to use colloquial language to convey the vitality and dynamism of any given situation, as in “Henry was never one to buy his theological clothes off the peg” (233). Throughout the book, Marshall begins each section with a particular incident illustrating the more general point that is about to be made. Further examples show the range of the claim, providing local and color and highlighting regional and local variations and disagreements. An interpretive strength is Marshall's regular acknowledgment of how things cut both ways; for example, the Carthusians of Syon could raise the public estimation of monasticism or highlight the laxity of other houses.
In his postscript, Marshall acknowledges that he has focused on conflict rather than continuity because he sees the struggle itself as significant. It was, “from first to last, a vocal, vibrant national conversation, about issues of uttermost importance, and one from which few voices were ever entirely excluded” (577–78). Although not all readers will have the tenacity to stick with the messiness of conflict to the end, this is an important book offering a creative synthesis of decades of fruitful scholarship in the field.
