ONE of the must-see TV events this year has been the BBC2 programme Lucy Worsley Investigates (available on BBC iPlayer), in which this expert presenter promises to re-examine some “brutal chapters” of British history, using scientific advances and a “modern perspective”.
When it comes to that “modern perspective”, two episodes in the series should be of special interest to Christians: those on Queen Mary I, and on the 1605 Gunpowder Plot. Both reassess the evidence and long-established narratives, offering a more balanced view of what motivated the competing religious factions.
Although Mary Tudor, England’s first female monarch, should be viewed as a “trailblazer”, Dr Worsley tells us, she is remembered, instead, as an “evil tyrant”, thanks to propagandist portrayals in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, and a subsequent “smear campaign”.
Does “Bloody” Mary deserve her reputation? While at least 280 people were killed “in the name of religion” during her five-year reign, many more were killed under Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Elizabeth I. “Misunderstood, overlooked, and vilified”, Dr Worsley argues: Mary’s case reminds us that there is always “more than one side to a story”.
As for the Gunpowder Plot, this would, if unstopped, have “changed the history of Britain entirely”. But how did a small network of men reach the extreme conclusion that the answer to their problems lay in “wiping out the seat of power”?
Dr Worsley demonstrates how Guy Fawkes, Robert Catesby, and others were radicalised by James I’s false promises of toleration, and by the executions and dispossessions that followed — in a tragic, brutal chain of events which sealed the fate of Britain’s surviving Roman Catholics for the next three centuries.
BOTH episodes testify to a continuing fascination with the Tudor period, which marked England’s emergence as a nation state, with a developed economy and government and new notions of representation and personal freedom.
They also reflect the interesting historical revisionism at play over the past three decades, as the retreat from confessional loyalties and mind-sets has enabled historians to begin cutting through generations of disinformation.
In 1992, Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars reassessed the Whig interpretation associated with A. G. Dickens and other historians: that breaking with Rome had been essential in overthrowing the corrupt, decaying power of a late-medieval Church, and in allowing modernisation to be ushered in with new Protestant ideas.
Duffy and others have offered a Catholic counter-perspective, arguing that theological justifications for Henry VIII’s changes were largely added ex post facto, at huge cost in public suffering, disorientation, and division.
Such claims have been challenged in turn by the likes of Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch, with monumental lives of the two Thomases (Cranmer and Cromwell), as well as by “new political historians” such as John Guy, and by Hilary Mantel’s fictional Wolf Hall triptych.
THE past, in short, is being contested — and the result has been a much-needed breath of fresh air, enabling researchers with fewer ideological axes to grind to unravel the conflicting values, allegiances, and agendas which accompanied Reformation-era changes, along with the complex overlap of religious convictions, political aims, economic interests, and personal ambitions. The tolerant atmosphere is being felt locally — as in Oxford, where Catholic and Protestant martyrs are now at last gaining equal acknowledgement.
It is also being expressed in arts and media, such as the BBC1 2017 drama mini-series Gunpowder, which portrayed vividly the fateful events of 1605 from a recusant viewpoint; or by the British Library’s pioneering “Elizabeth and Mary: Royal Cousins, Rival Queens” exhibition in 2021-22 (Arts, 5 November 2021), which placed Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots, for the first time on an equal moral footing.
“Being much more ecumenical now, we’re better able to avoid confessional partisanships,” the exhibition’s catalogue compiler, Professor Susan Doran, explains. “Both figures, with their Protestant and Catholic identities, still stir interest and imagination, and it’s important to approach them objectively, bringing out the political dynamic underlying their relationship, but without the emotional one-sidedness of the past.”
History was argued over in Tudor times, too, of course, with much use of biblical metaphors and ancient myths; so, while these are steps in a good direction, there is still some way to go.
In October 2021, The Tablet ran an article on the Gunpowder Plot, “The plot that never was”, showing how evidence extracted under torture to prove the story would never have been accepted by a modern court of law.
Dr Worsley does not go that far. While Fawkes, Catesby, and others were prepared to die for their beliefs, she argues, they were also ready to kill “hundreds, if not thousands” in the process, at a time when religion was treated as a matter of life and death. Today, they would be branded “terrorists” and “foreign fighters”.
Yet time provides perspective, a chance to unlock secrets and deconstruct mysteries — to build the understanding and mutual respect on which an increasingly complex modern society depends. We should be more careful now, Dr Worsley concludes, about “what and who we choose to celebrate”.
Jonathan Luxmoore’s two-volume study of martyrdom, The God of the Gulag, is published by Gracewing.
