Reginald Pole: Prince & Prophet and Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c. 1560-1660. (Reviews).

Thomas F. Mayer, Reginald Pole: Prince & Prophet

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. xv+ 468 pp. $74.95. ISBN: 0-521-37188-0.

Peter Lake and Michael Questier, eds., Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c. 1560-1660

(Studies in Modern British Religious History, Vol. 2.) Woodbridge, UK: The Boydell Press, 2000. xx + 296 pp. $85. [pounds sterling]50. ISBN: 0-85115-797-1.

I want to begin with Lake and Questier's book even though Pole's life (he died in 1558) preceded the period studied in its essays because it is such a rare pleasure to find a collection of essays that so well accomplishes the clearly articulated thematic and methodological goals of its contributing editors' introduction as does this one. In addition, its methodological precision can serve to put some of my criticisms of Mayer's rich biography in perspective.

In their "Introduction," the editors identify the volume's aim "to problematise the notions of both orthodoxy and conformity" (ix), while they note that "the intersection between conformity. . . and orthodoxy. . . was a crucial aspect of ecclesiastical politics after the Reformation" (vii). The essays that follow carefully and from multiple perspectives, fulfill the editors' stated purpose that "orthodoxy and conformity are seen here not as stable quantities but rather as the sites of conflict and contest. This volume has, therefore, some claim to methodological novelty; as a move away from hypostatised labels and categories to a more self-consciously fluid and processual notion of identity formation constructed through manipulation of a variety of notions of both conformity and orthodoxy, none of which were set in stone in the minds of contemporaries" (xx). In incorporating these interpretive positions, the essays that follow indicate that Tudor and Stuart men and women were often agents actively involved in constructive (and sometimes destructive) negotiations about who they were, in relation to Church and State, and about what that meant. We see history as a process, and characteristically as recursive process, as Anthony Giddens theorizes it. The resulting book, then, is methodologically sophisticated; it identifies as best as possible that objective truths are available to us even as we recognize that they are constructed contingently and must be contextually situated, even as we highlight that they are always unstable and always under interpretation.

The book is divided into three sections. I'll focus in more detail on the first but each section and every essay is useful. "Orthodoxy as Process" includes four essays that deal with the ways in which orthodox positions were construed and constructed by a number of very different contemporaries" (3).

In "Lancelot Andrewes and the Myth of Anglicanism," Nicholas Tyacke establishes the shifts in Andrewes' positions from those identifiable with the reformism of the Elizabethan Settlement to ones influential in the Laudian refashioning of the English Church in the early seventeenth century. In so doing, he argues that such reflexivity on the parts of such as Andrewes influenced how the Church's doctrines changed over the years. As he concludes: "conformity and orthodoxy are nor necessarily religious constants, even in ostensibly the same institution; instead they remain malleable, tending to vary according to the outlook of the people in power" (33).

Thomas Freeman complicates this process. His study of "John Darrell and the Politics of Exorcism in late Elizabethan England," I would argue, shows that institutional reflexivity operates, in practice, as a recursive process. Darrell's exorcisms highlight the process of the creation "of orthodoxy in the Church of England through the struggles between conformists and dissidents" (35). Indeed, Darrell's exorcist practices may be viewed as puritan anti-authoritarian discourses and are opposed by the Church, especially Bancroft, not for what they were but, as Freeman puts it, because they "sanctioned, even sanctified, crucial puritan practices and dogmas" (35). Thus Canon 72, approved by Convocation in 1604, ended puritan popular exorcisms and the fasting that was their main instrument. But such coercion resulted not in the intended religious unity of England. Rather, in responding to such practices by articulating and coercing orthodoxy, the English Church helped those that they were marginalizing form a more cl ear-cut identity and thus "fostered and widened . . . religious divisions" (63).

In "Puritans, Predestination and the Construction of Orthodoxy in Early Seventeenth-Century England," David Como demonstrates the malleability of orthodoxy by situating the process of puritan questioning of predestinarian orthodoxy in broader historical and theological contexts. Como examines the case of William Twisse's 1646 publication of a treatise against John Cotton for compromising Calvinist orthodoxy on predestination -- Twisse's treatise had been written about twelve years prior, Cotton's around 1625. Como places Cotton's work within a wider English Calvinist community conversation that he reads as part of a process in practical self-articulation, spurred by the Arminian threat. Feeling compelled to define and defend themselves, this "display of intense anti-Arminian solidarity" (77) instead exposed divisiveness and produced a fragmentary process that intimated the severe divisions that manifested themselves during the civil war. The stark realities of the 1640s turned this conversation into interneci ne conflict: thus Twisse's 1646 publication. Thus, political and ideological contexts mitigated against established orthodoxy. Even the notion of absolute predestination -- the godly's Calvinism, as Como claims -- became a casualty of "this centrifugal process" (87).

Finally in this section, Judith Maltby examines Christopher Harvey's poems that "extol the qualities of the pre-civil war Church of England" (90). She does so, not just to indicate popular support for the Laudian church, but to begin an historical investigation into how those who felt an affinity with the politics and liturgy of this Church negotiated their abolition and suppression during the 1640s and 1650s. Her goal is to elucidate the pluralistic quality of mid-seventeenth century English Christianity.

Section II, "Conformity as Process" explores how conformity was "enforced and indeed defined and redefined through the process of enforcement" (123). This is, again, manifestly a recursive process, or as the editors put it, a dialogue between enforcers and enforced, "a series of negotiations" contingently and contextually mediated.

Briefly, Kenneth Fincham's long opening essay follows "Clerical Conformity from Whitgift to Laud" and sets the historical and methodological parameters for the essays that follow. His very clear conclusion outlines generally the changing patterns of clerical conformity over the long period he covers.

Peter Lake's excellent essay explores various contexts in which to situate the practices of modified subscription as a means of constructing conformity. No matter how carefully authority defined and redefined conformity its character remained always under interpretation.

The final section pursues ways of including Catholics in the history of post-Reformation England other than categorically as recusants. These last essays situate Catholics in relation to political, ideological, diplomatic and financial contingencies. As well, they present English Catholic men and women as agents, actively negotiating their identities as Christians and English, not merely as reactive instruments of larger theological and political conflicts. Each of the three essays, Alexandra Walsham's on the "Post-Reformation Catholic Community," Michael Questier's on "Conformity, Catholicism and the Law," and Pauline Croft's on "The Catholic Gentry" deserves and rewards a careful reading.

Mayer's biography of Reginald Pole exemplifies scrupulous scholarship at its best and is a rewarding study for scholars interested in and informed about Reformation history and politics. Mayer's methodological pretensions about exploring the relationship between Pole's written and lived lives notwithstanding, the book succeeds when and because it offers a rich account of Pole's part in the intricate political world of mid-sixteenth century Europe. Of particular value are the excellent discussion of Pole's relationship to Machiavellian principles in the context of the Henrician Reformation and the detailed and carefully interpreted examination of Pole's part in reconstructing the English Church under Mary.

The discussion about Machiavelli features "prudence and the morality of politics" (78), where prudence is recognized as a negotiating strategy for many confronting a world so rapidly changing. Mayer collapses the traditional view of Pole and Machiavelli as opposites. What emerges is a Pole as instrumentally strategic as Machiavelli only that the transcendental authority that Pole offers to justify his practices is for Machiavelli the obstacle to overcome. This translates well to larger Reformation politics and serves to remind us that Catholic Reformation policies were characterized as much by rational processes as were those of say, Henry and Cromwell.

Pole formally reconciled England to Rome late in 1553. By the time he and Mary died in the same epidemic five years later, much opportunity had been lost. Mayer thoughtfully explains Pole's "failure" to discover or enact the counter reformation not as a result of personal or doctrinal issues, but rather in relation to imperial and papal contingencies.

The larger issue of Pole as an important failure is elaborated in the book's conclusion where Mayer attempts to revisit and extend the methodological goals outlined in his introduction. The problem, however, is that the themes of the introduction and conclusion are nor well integrated into the book. Indeed, together, they read almost like a separate essay. This is disappointing because the book could have been much more than the sum of its many useful parts if it had incorporated into its ongoing discussions these larger thematic and methodological aspirations.

At the outset, Mayer asserts that Pole's life was constructed through texts and rhetoric. Pole wrote his various identities into being, even though much of his writing was composed by numbers of people. "Thus Pole always existed in two phases, the life as lived and the life as written. Almost without exception, the second has been taken as equivalent to the first. This will no longer do. The container (the texts) is not the contained (the life)" (3). But Mayer provides no clear theoretical sense of how or why to separate the two. A post-Renaissance concept of an autonomous, individual self seems projected onto Pole and insufficient attention is paid in the book to how to understand Pole's actions in relation to rhetorical gestures.

Mayer states that his method is to uncover "intentions in texts through close readings, the motives behind them, and after establishing a dialectic between these two [intentions and motives?] placing both in tension with their contexts" (3).

Again, the problem is a lack of theoretical clarity. Which are texts, which contexts? Are personal motives not contexts? Is not Pole himself -- as Mayer's entire enterprise suggests -- a text? And I'm not advocating a radical postmodern reading. Rather, I'm suggesting that the good book that follows the introduction is not quite the one the introduction promises. While Mayer recognizes that the life is much composed rhetorically, he still treats it as wholly anterior to the texts through which it is often presented.

Thus when he returns in the conclusion to this focus, it is surprising. Pole was an important failure, we are told, not because of a stubborn personality, but because of a "faulty sense of rhetorical occasion" (439). Pole's rhetorical style, his skill in playing with language "was his downfall" (441). But this is not all. A second reason is given -- his private life. This sense of privacy Mayer mentions throughout the book as a way to describe what appears to be an aversion to conflict. But at the end of the chapter that precedes the conclusion, Mayer alters the focus. In an interpretive discussion of a number of portraits of Pole, Mayer introduces issues of gender and homosexuality, suggesting another context for Poles' privacy and another way to gloss his passivity. So finally, then, we are told to re-view our subject after 440 pages. Now not only his political failings and his privacy but his writings are recast. It seems that the public figure was a gesture, thus its failings attributable to a desire for privacy "where he and a small group of friends could love one another without intrusions from politics or other public domains ... He would much rather have spent time with Pniuli [about whom Mayer says a few pages earlier: "It is not too much to say that he [Pole] and Priuli were married" (445)] and their small circle of friends than served Henry VIII or the papacy. Not by coincidence, this coterie put much of its energy into Pole's sometimes private, affective, and playful writing" (451). So how to separate the "container" from the "contained"? Which indeed is which? Or, after all, aren't the life and the writing inextricably related? Isn't finally Pole a wonderful example of an early-modern self, his identity, like those explored in Lake and Questier's book, a negotiable process, always under interpretation?