Man For All Seasons

A Man For All Seasons by Robert Bolt, 163 pages

Sir Thomas More, councillor to King Henry VIII, stubbornly refuses to approve of the conduct of his king.  In return, the ministers of that king force him first into retirement and finally to the scaffold.  Sir Thomas alone, amid a crowd of vain, greedy, and ambitious men, remains true to himself and his principles, and this earns him persecution and death.  The story is a familiar one, but here beautifully and movingly told.

Part of the story's familiarity is due to the classic 1966 movie version of this very play, adapted by Bolt himself.  The play differs from the film primarily in the part of the Common Man, who plays various minor roles and offers sporadic commentary to the audience.  If this is a stagy artifice, there is a certain value in the character precisely as he represents our own practical natures against the very impractical sanctity of Sir Thomas.  Of course, Bolt hollows out that sanctity by presenting St Thomas as a martyr, not for the truth, but rather for what he believes.

Life of Reginald Pole

The Life of Reginald Pole by Martin Haile, 536 pages

George, Duke of Clarence, was the brother of Edward IV and Richard III, the uncle of Edward V.  He was executed for treason by his elder brother, leaving behind two children, Edward and Margaret.  His son, the Plantagenet heir to the English throne, was executed by Henry VII after attempting to escape the Tower of London, his death helping to facilitate the marriage between Catherine of Aragon and the Prince of Wales.  Margaret became a close friend of Catherine, even being named governess to her daughter Mary, and the lives of the princess and Margaret's son Reginald would be inextricably bound together.

Reginald Pole established a reputation for intellectual brilliance early in life, a reputation that only grew with his Italian education and friendships with luminaries including Desiderius Erasmus, Pietro Bembo, Vittoria Colonna, and St Thomas More.  From the safety of the Continent, he responded to Henry VIII's solicitations with a book condemning the King's marriage to Anne Boleyn and his usurpation of the headship of the Church.  His mother and brother, still in England, were put to death for holding the same views, and Pole himself had a bounty placed on his head.  Named a cardinal by Pope Paul III, while dodging Henry's assassins he divided his efforts between fighting for the liberty of the Church in his homeland and fighting for the reform of the Church generally.  These struggles merged after the accession of Mary as Queen of England and the subsequent ordination of Cardinal Pole as Archbishop of Canterbury.  After three years of cooperation, the Cardinal and the Queen died merely 12 hours apart, and the English Counter-Reformation largely died with them.

Martin Haile's biography of Pole is told from a point of view based solidly at Rome.  From this perspective, the ambition and pride of Charles V are seen as an obstacle second only to the tyranny of Henry VIII.  The great advantage of this viewpoint is that it breathes the free air of the Italian Renaissance, contrasted with the "narrow dusty room[s]" of the Reformation.  Haile's writing is as expansive and welcoming as his subject.

Come Rack! Come Rope!

Come Rack!  Come Rope!  by Robert Hugh Benson, 377 pages

The only son of a proudly recusant Catholic family in the reign of Elizabeth, Robin is devastated when he learns that his father intends to recant and join the state church.  Perhaps even more surprisingly, his beloved Marjorie reveals to him her growing conviction, despite her own wishes to the contrary, that it is the will of God he should become a priest.  Robert Hugh Benson's classic novel follows the pair on their separate journeys of love from this initial sacrifice to the ultimate consummation.

Although the primary characters are fictional, a number of historical personages make appearances in Come Rack!  Come Rope!, including St Edmund Campion and Mary Stuart.  Benson evokes the historical period with a casual ease, conveying its peculiarities without belaboring them.  The novel focuses on the characters and lacks a strong central plot - the primary antagonists barely appear - and, unfortunately, those characters are not strong enough or interesting enough to carry the book.

Edmund Campion

Edmund Campion: Memory and Transcription by Gerard Kilroy, 241 pages

In the reign of Queen Elizabeth,

     Relligion thear was treason to the Queene,

     preaching of peanaunce, war agaynst the lande,

     preestes were such dawngerous men as had not beene,

     prayeres and beads weare fyghte and force of hand,

          Cases of conscience bane unto the state,

          Soe blynde ys error, so false a witnes hate.

As was proven by the fate of St Edmund Campion, it was a time when holding the wrong faith or speaking the wrong words could lead to torture - forbidden under Edward and Mary but allowed under Elizabeth - and execution, when even copying a forbidden manuscript could result in having one's ears chopped off or nailed to a pillory.  In such times even the written word becomes subject to equivocation, and, as Gerard Kilroy explains, equivocation can become a language of its own.

     Yee thought perhapps when learned Campion dyes,

     his pen must cease, his sugred townge be still;

     But yow forgot how lowd his death yt cryes,

     how farre beyond the sownd of tounge or quill.

          yow did not know how rare and great a good

          yt was to write hys precious guiftes in bloode.

In this expansion of his masterly biography, Edmund Campion: A Scholarly Life, Kilroy transcribes and elucidates a series of texts - the saint's own "Virgilian epic" retelling the story of the apostolic age, Henry Walpole's hagiographic eulogy "Why doe I use my paper, ynke and pen", and a selection of Sir John Harington's "All my ydle Epigrams".  He also discusses a different sort of text in the form of the symbolic architecture of Thomas Tresham.  Throughout, Kilroy is not only interested in the meaning of the texts themselves, but in what their history and manner of transmission can tell us about the time in which they were written down.  While this may not be the most exciting subject, it is a fascinating glimpse into life and faith in a time of persecution and martyrdom.

Edmund Campion

Edmund Campion: A Scholarly Life by Gerard Kilroy, 396 pages

St Edmund Campion grew to adulthood during the successive reigns, and successive religious revolutions, of the children of Henry VIII.  After a brilliant academic career at Oxford, he was faced with the necessity of committing himself to one of these visions of the truth.  Taking St Patrick as his patron, he chose to leave behind a promising career in the Church of England to serve Christ in the Society of Jesus.  After a decade on the Continent - studying in Douai, being ordained in Rome, teaching and writing in Prague - he was ordered to return to England to minister to the Catholics living under persecution there.  After a year he was betrayed and arrested, taken to the Tower of London for torture and trial.  A series of semi-public disputations were held between Campion and Protestant scholars, and despite his being fresh from the rack and bereft of books it was generally conceded that he more than held his own.  At his trial he further embarrassed Her Majesty's government by revealing that he had been offered a bishopric if he would join the established church, demonstrating that he was being persecuted for his religion and not for any alleged treason.  As he was being drawn and quartered, a drop of his blood landed on the coat of the young lawyer Henry Walpole, who subsequently eulogized Campion in his poem "Why doe I use my paper, ynk and pen", immortalized in music by William Byrd:

     Saynt Marie churche can tell, and all the scholes do know,

     the walles may yet resound his praise, where he excelled soo

     how scharpe yn science sound, how rype yn skyll was he?

     how sweate for toung, how grave for trowthe, how deape for memoree? 

     how skyll yn antique writers, how rare yn everie arte, excelled.

     And that wich most appearde, yet rarest for to fynde,

     the more of learnyng he possest, more humble was hys mynde.

Kilroy's biography is thorough and impeccably researched, a scholarly biography of a scholarly man.  Unfortunately, this also necessarily means that the book is a less than thrilling read, as the author carefully makes his way through the sources.  Kilroy places Campion's mission to England in the context of the Sander expedition which sought to drive the English from Ireland with papal support, climaxing in Campion's arrest by troops mustered to defend England from Sander and his allies.  Indeed, Kilroy uses Dr Sander as St Edmund's foil, as determined to restore Catholicism in Britain by military force as Campion was by the power of persuasion and the sacraments.  Kilroy also briefly touches upon the immediate explosion of literature celebrating Campion and condemning the English government, published at underground presses in Britain and openly abroad, which establishes Campion's execution as a landmark in the increasing isolation of post-Reformation England from the culture of the Continent.  Throughout, however, Kilroy keeps the focus on the person and personality of Edmund Campion, along the way proving the truth of Walpole's tribute, "the more of learnyng he possest, more humble was hys mynde."

Divorce of Henry VIII

The Divorce of Henry VIII: The Untold Story from Inside the Vatican by Catherine Fletcher, 214 pages

Although he is mentioned in neither the title nor the subtitle, Catherine Fletcher's inside story on the most momentous divorce in history is really the story of Gregorio Casali.  As "our man in Rome" for the English monarch, Casali spearheaded efforts to secure a favorable judgement from Pope Clement VII.  Simultaneously, Gregorio worked to advance the far-flung interests of his family, and used his family to advance the interests of his client.  The manner in which these interests interacted, combined and conflicted, forms much of the drama of the story.

Fletcher writes well, smoothly guiding the reader through the intricacies of Renaissance diplomacy, although the book might have benefited from a collective introduction of all the members of the Casali family rather than a piecemeal approach.  The Divorce of Henry VIII is an intriguing, informative tale of Renaissance diplomacy, even if it sheds little light on the "great matter" at its heart.

Last Divine Office

The Last Divine Office: Henry VIII and the Dissolution of the Monasteries by Geoffrey Moorhouse, 256 pages

The Last Divine Office is a portrait of the English Reformation as viewed from the choir stalls at Durham Cathedral.  The book begins with an extended history of the cathedral, the attached Benedictine monastery which supplied its clergy, and the shrine of St Cuthbert which provided its focus.  Events in the outside world are kept largely in the background as the monks cycle through the birth, life, death, and resurrection of their Lord in the liturgical year, year after year, with the archbishop and monastery steadily growing in wealth and influence.  Even after Henry VIII's break with Rome, life for the monks continues more or less as normal, even as the process of accretion reverses, with the monastery's holdings methodically stripped away layer by layer to feed the royal treasury.  By the end of Elizabeth's reign, the monastery was a shadow of its former self, but, as Moorhouse reveals, an oddly substantial shadow.

Moorhouse covers the subject with skill, sweeping through centuries of history without becoming either boring or superficial.  Most importantly for the story he has chosen to tell, he ably conveys a sense of place - the reader is able to smell the accumulated reside of centuries of incense, hear the echoes of the Latin chants, feel the impress of the personalities of the patron saints as they shaped the history of the community.  Less convincingly, Moorhouse portrays Cuthbert Tunstall, who served as Prince-Archbishop of Durham from 1530 to 1559, under Henry VIII and all of his children, as the model of an Anglican bishop - able to bend with the passions of the day in order to preserve what is most worth preserving.  Unfortunately, this seems to neglect the lessons of Tunstall's own experience, which led the man who took the Oath of Supremacy under Henry to refuse to do so under Elizabeth.

Reformation of Images

The Reformation of Images: Destruction of Art in England 1535-1660 by John Phillips, 210 pages

Over the course of little more than a century, beginning in the reign of Henry VIII and cresting under the Protectorate, religious art in England, ubiquitous in the Middle Ages, was sought out and destroyed in churches, marketplaces, and even in private homes.  As John Phillips relates, this destruction was driven by a complex set of religious and secular motives, chiefly the fear of idolatry, the rejection of matter in favor of spirit, growing suspicion of the human imagination, concern for public order, and simple greed.  He demonstrates how doctrines concerning the use and abuse of images were inextricably tied to other doctrines involving the sacraments, the ministerial priesthood, the cult of saints, the veneration of relics, monasticism, pilgrimages, and the entire social dimension of the Church.  The rejection of sacred images, or their acceptance, was thus emblematic of an entire worldview.

The first half of the book, covering the period up to the Elizabethan settlement, is solid, but has largely been superseded by Eamon Duffy's masterpiece The Stripping of the Altars.  The second half, discussing iconoclasm and the definition of Anglicanism as against Puritanism under the Stuarts and Cromwell, is equally good, and has not, to my knowledge, yet been surpassed.

Humanism, Reform, and the Reformation

Humanism, Reform, and the Reformation: The Career of Bishop John Fisher, edited by Brendan Bradshaw and Eamon Duffy, 225 pages

St John Fisher was the Bishop of Rochester from 1504 until his death in 1535, and Chancellor of the University of Cambridge during the same period.  Renowned as a humanist and patron of scholars, friends with Erasmus of Rotterdam, Johann Maier von Eck, and St Thomas More, Fisher stubbornly refused to recognize Henry VIII as Supreme Head of the Church of England, and was executed on the same day as More.

This book, a compilation of papers presented at a Cambridge symposium in 1985, examines the various facets of Fisher's multifaceted life, including his impact on the University, his pastoral style as bishop, his apologetical work against Luther, and his resistance to royal absolutism.  The figure revealed escapes easy categorization - neither a progressive nor a reactionary, with one foot in the humanist world of letters and the other in the scholastic world of ideas.  Above all, it reveals Fisher to have been thoroughly human, as all saints are.

Wolf Hall

 Wolf Hall  by Hillary Mantel, 604 pp.   

I really enjoyed this long, detailed, historical novel about a Henry VIII and his first two wives (remember "divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived…", but  weren't there a couple of K(C)atherines and which was which?).  I'm not a big historical novel fan and wasn't especially interested anymore in Henry VIII, a subject perhaps overdramatized on PBS. But you can often trust in the readability of the Man Booker prize winners and I had heard so many other good things about Wolf Hall that I decided to take the plunge on a snow day  and was caught up on the first page by the introduction of the main character,  Thomas Cromwell. Thomas's story, from his childhood as the son of a brutal blacksmith through his world travels and his rise to become one of the most powerful political fixers in Europe is fascinating. Each chapter, while blessedly short, is dense with character revelations. The fact that Thomas is the heart of almost every scene, beautifully describing people and places, interpreting conversation, reflecting the really dangerous religious and political and human realities of the times, carries the reader through the book and makes the history come to life.  I plan to tackle the sequels--Bring Up the Bodies and The Mirror and the Light, just to find out what Thomas, and Mantels, think and how they feel about it all.