Popular Politics and the English Reformation

In the reign of Mary Tudor, with Roman Catholicism restored and heretics fleeing for their lives, Catholic writers penned a series of what they assumed were post-mortems on England's brief Protestant experiment. Yet, despite the mercy that God had shown by providing a Catholic queen, the tone of these retrospective accounts was not self-congratulatory but rather betrayed a sense of deep frustration that so many English subjects, especially among the common people, had wandered off the True Path. John Bullingham, for instance, wrote that ‘thousands of men (alas for pity) having their hearts clean void of charity, being corrupt in conscience, and flattering themselves with their counterfeit faith, have not only been turned into jangling and babbling, but at the last have fallen into great and horrible blasphemies’. As a result, he wrote: ‘There is a plague and pestilence throughout England [and] the air is infected. Where corrupt hearts and minds are, there cannot be pure and lively faith. And where pure faith is not found, there is a commodious place for errors and heresies to dwell in.’