Voices of the Past

Do you have a British coin in your purse or pocket?  If so take it out and have a look at the abbreviations around the Queen’s head.  Just before the date you will see the letters FD.  It’s a Latin abbreviation for Fidei defensor in the male and Fidei defensatrix in the female form.  It means Defender of the Faith, a title originally accorded to Henry VIII by Pope Leo X in 1521 after the publication of Assertio Septem Sacramentorum – Defence of the Seven Sacraments -, a treatise rejecting the reformist teachings of Martin Luther. 

Eamon Duffy, professor of the History of Christianity at Cambridge, mentions it in the opening paragraph of a polemic published by the Telegraph at the weekend (The Story of the Reformation needs reforming).  Since 1558, he writes, it has meant defender of the Protestant faith. 

What he neglects to mention is that the original title was revoked by Pope Paul III in 1530 after Henry’s break with Rome.  It made no practical difference, as the style continued to be used in official documents, and was formally ratified by Act of Parliament in 1544.  Rather ironically, though she never used the title, even Bloody Mary was FD by parliamentary grant! 

That seems to me to be the whole point of the English Reformation – it was about empowerment and national sovereignty, a contention I advanced in previous articles touching on the subject.  Above all it was about breaking free from the authority of Rome, as much a temporal as a spiritual power at the time.  It really is worth stressing that Henry never abandoned Catholic orthodoxy as a personal standard of faith.  His Reformation was based wholly on the rejection of papal tutelage.

Duffy proceeds, as polemicists are wont to do, with a one-sided and historically unbalanced argument.  He is quite right to point out some of the tragic consequences of the English Reformation, a lengthy process rather than a single event.  He is right to lament the cultural vandalism that accompanied the religious and social upheaval, in the course of which so much of England’s Catholic and medieval heritage was lost. 

But he is wrong to see a process which shaped a new and greater nation as a wholly negative event.  In my own polemical style I have no hesitation at all in saying that the Reformation was a great and necessary metamorphosis.  In the place of medieval mystery plays came the dramas of Shakespeare.  In the place of Latin bibles, read and interpreted by priests, came the vernacular translations of William Tyndale followed by the King James Version, great well-springs of our language and literature.  In the place of controlled thought came free thought, the greatest legacy of all.  As the sun set on Galileo and the Catholic south it was to rise on Newton and the Protestant north. 

There was nothing inevitable about the Reformation, Duffy contends.  True; for nothing in history is truly inevitable.  That does not mean to say that there was nothing necessary about a process that swept virtually the whole of northern Europe, a process that freed the imagination from the straightjacket of traditional dogmas, a process that transformed England from an outpost of the Roman-focused medieval world to a great outward looking imperial and seafaring power. 

The professor touches on past injustices.  He touches on the anti-Catholic narratives of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, which turned the faith into the malevolent doctrine of an obscurantist and foreign power, a view entrenched in popular consciousness after the Glorious Revolution of 1688.  Gilbert Burnet, the seventeenth centaury divine, earns his animus as the ‘chief propagandist’ of this event, the author of the History of the Reformation, in which he describe Catholicism as tyranny.  “They hate us”, Burnet wrote, “because we dare to be freemen and Protestants.”

‘They’, in a general sense, is certainly a bit sweeping.  There were many English Catholics who may have taken spiritual solace from Rome but whose secular loyalty was to the land of their birth.  But always, always, we have to consider the context of the times.  Louis XIV certainly hated freemen and Protestants, as the Huguenot refugees who flooded into London prior to the Glorious Revolution would have testified.  His imperial ambitions, moreover, were a serious threat to the integrity of Protestant Europe.  This was no imagined danger. 

The professor concludes his piece by saying that the slaughtered Popish martyrs look less like an alien fifth column than “the voices of a history that England was not allowed to have.”  Would the ‘slaughtered Popish martyrs’, I wonder, include the conspirators behind the Gunpowder Plot?   I think it best to let that pass.  What I cannot let pass, though, is an earlier suggestion that John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, detailing the horrors of Mary Tudor’s Catholic reaction, simply served as propaganda against Catholicism at home and abroad.  So far as Duffy is concerned it would appear that some martyrs are more equal than other martyrs, some voices more essential, some narratives more valid and some histories more complete.   

In the name of the books

I hugely enjoyed Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, a medieval mystery set around a hidden monastic library, a treasure house of knowledge; but it was not knowledge accessible to everyone, not even to Brother William of Baskerville (no need to guess the inspiration for that particular name!), the novel’s oh so rational Franciscan sleuth. It was him I thought of in reading recently about John Leland, a real-life bibliophile who saved so much that might otherwise have been lost.

We are used to libraries as public institutions. This is a relatively modern development, though. For hundreds of years books – aside from a few in private hands – were kept in religious institutions, not always readily accessible to other clerics let alone members of the wider community.

John Leland, who was born in London in the early years of the sixteenth century, came at just the right time, a crucial turning point in England’s history just before the Dissolution of the Monasteries by Henry VIII, when so many libraries were destroyed, their contents lost. Originally a protégé of Cardinal Wolsey, he was given the task by Thomas Cromwell of touring England’s monastic libraries, with the aim of obtaining documentary evidence that would support the king in his desire to have his marriage to Catherine of Aragon annulled.

So, off he went, this book hunter, on a journey that took him to places as far away as Tynemouth Priory in the north-east to Glastonbury Abbey in the south-west. Some of the monks were welcoming, others less so, though none were in a position to deny the king’s commission, or to object when Leland ‘borrowed’ some of their collection.

Just as Brother William was gripped by a childlike sense of wonder when he finally penetrated the maze-library of the Italian monastery so, too, was Leland at Glastonbury;

I immediately went to the library, which is not open to all, in order to examine most diligently the relics of sacred antiquity, of which there is so great a number that is not easily paralleled anywhere else in Britain. Scarcely had I crossed the threshold when the mere sight of the ancient books struck my mind with an awe or amazement of some kind, and for that reason I stopped in my tracks for a while. Then, having saluted the genius loci, I spent some days searching through the bookshelves with the greatest curiosity.

His recording and borrowing, which allowed some priceless manuscripts to pass into posterity, came not a moment too soon. Henry’s quarrel with Rome descended ever deeper into acrimony and bitterness. In 1536 an act was passed allowing for the dissolution of many of the country’s religious houses. The business was handed to men like Richard Layton, who carried out the task with all the subtlety of the Vandals descending on Rome. Even a radical Protestant like John Bale, a friend of Leland’s, was moved to condemn the actions of men who used the leaves of irreplaceable manuscripts as lavatory paper or to clean their boots.

With the disappearance of the monasteries ancient libraries disappeared also. In the end there was nothing left, an act of greed, short-sightedness and stupidity than comes close to breaking the heart of all those who love books and revere the past. As I type I feel –what do I feel? – a sense of sorrow and anger, as if the great library of Alexandria had been wilfully destroyed for a second time, on this occasion in my own land. The fact that this happened over half a millennium ago seems to make no difference.

Thanks to Leland something emerged phoenix-like from the ashes – De Viris Illustribus, an invaluable bibliography, a record of what was and what remained. A huge enterprise, he set out to describe every writer and every book he had come across in his travels. James P Carley, editing a new edition of this work, quite rightly says that it is a unique witness to pre-Dissolution England. Or loss was great but without Leland our loss would have been greater still.