Eamon Duffy is a 62-year-old Irish "cradle Catholic" who, as professor of the history of Christianity at Cambridge, has made it his business to force the English to think again about the central event in their history, the Protestant Reformation. Did the Reformation take place, as Protestants claimed, because the Catholic Church was rotten within, and overwhelmed from without by the brave new doctrine? Or was it simply, as Catholics argued, that Henry VIII fell in lust with Anne Boleyn and, because he couldn't have her any other way, broke with Rome?
Because Protestantism won and because history is written by the winners, the Protestant account of the Reformation triumphed. Indeed, in dilute form, it held sway until very recently as academic orthodoxy in AG Dickens's classic The English Reformation (1964). In the 1980s and 1990s, this came under heavy sniper fire from historians such as Christopher Haigh. But it was Duffy himself who blew up the citadel in two remarkable books.
The Stripping of the Altars (1992) described, with the love and passion of a believer, the vibrant world of late-medieval English Catholic piety: its rich colours, textures and smells, its miracle-working images and holy wells, its rituals and ecstasies, which made sense of life and, still more, of an omnipresent and terrible death. And it mourned, as again only a believer could, their destruction at the hands of Henry VIII's brutal, greedy, self-serving apparatchiks.
The Voices of Morebath (2001) was an even more effective piece of writing, pitting a little, isolated rural community, led by its garrulous, conservative yet oddly sympathetic priest, against the heavy-handed impersonal forces of the Tudor state. This is David versus Goliath as we understand it. The villagers of Morebath and their headman-priest tugged on our heartstrings like a threatened tribe in the Amazon rainforest, and we cursed the servile Tudor busybodies who trampled over their world like the nasty loggers, miners and profiteers of our own time.
Both The Stripping of the Altars and The Voices of Morebath are outstanding pieces of scholarship. But they are something more - or less. They also frankly (and cleverly) deploy emotion by defending the institution and practices of medieval Catholicism with some very modern sentiments: our sympathy with the underdog and our tendency, whatever the rights and wrongs of the issue, to side with the little man facing the big battalions. And it is, it seems to me, to this ingenious blow beneath the scholarly belt that Duffy owes his success.
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The same balance of emotional advantage will not, however, apply to his new book, The Fires of Faith. For with the accession of Mary Tudor, daughter of Catherine of Aragon, the Catholics were, briefly, the winners. It was the Catholics who now wielded all the powers of church and state and the Protestants who were the persecuted minority. Not that Duffy - despite tuts about the "sanctified savageries" of the 16th century - shows much sympathy for them. Instead, he comes down wholly and uncompromisingly on the side of the persecutors.
Indeed, he intensifies rather than extenuates. Protestant historians, led by Dickens, have characterised the Marian persecutions as old-fashioned, backward-looking and rather amateur because her regime had "failed to discover the Counter-Reformation". Duffy dismisses this judgment as "famous, fatuous, but fatally quotable" and proceeds to show, on the contrary, that the Marian persecutors were efficient, bang up to date and could - and indeed did - teach their continental Catholic brethren a thing or two about the judicious use of fire and sword.
This is especially the case with Duffy's hero: Mary's cousin, papal legate and confidant, Reginald Pole, Cardinal and Archbishop of Canterbury. Ever since his own time, Pole has been seen as too fastidious to have got involved in the messy, bloody business of persecution. Duffy will have none of this. Drawing heavily on the work of Professor Tom Mayer, he presents Pole as a pioneer: formulating, applying and leading a programme of Catholic restoration in England that would later serve as a model for Catholic revival throughout Europe.
And in this programme, the burning of recalcitrant heretics played a regrettable but indispensable role. Moreover, and this is the nub of the book, the burnings - all 284 of them - worked. There is no evidence, Duffy claims, that public sympathy was on the side of the heretics. If the burnings tailed off towards the end of Mary's reign, it was not because of any failure of nerve but because the supply of victims was getting exhausted. Above all, it was not revulsion at the burnings that ended Catholic England, but simply the accident - unforeseen and, Duffy suggests, unforeseeable - of Mary's death on November 17, 1558.
There is a certain shocking candour about all this. It is also, bearing in mind Duffy's rhetorical skills, intended to be the shock of the new. But it isn't. For exactly the same case was made 150 years ago, and with much greater economy and force, in John Stuart Mill's essay On Liberty. "Indeed," Mill observes, "the dictum that truth always triumphs over persecution is one of those pleasant falsehoods… To speak only of religious opinions…in Spain, Italy, Flanders, the Austrian empire, Protestantism was rooted out; and mostly likely would have been so in England, had Queen Mary lived, or Queen Elizabeth died."
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But to agree, however reluctantly on the part of some of us at least, that persecution works is one thing. To claim that Marian England was therefore fully on course to a secure Catholic restoration is another. For there is the little matter of politics or "mundane things", which Duffy seems to discount almost as thoroughly as Pole did himself.
Because the succession did not catch men unawares in 1558. Instead, the political elite was obsessed with it from the beginning of the reign. So long as it looked as though Mary would have a child by Philip, she got pretty much what she wanted. The moment in August 1555 it was clear she was sterile, her power ebbed. In particular, parliament would not agree to confiscate the estates of the Protestant exiles who had fled abroad at the beginning of the reign. That entrenched a Protestant reversionary interest that would have been a source of long-term instability at best and religious war at worst. Nor was it possible even to think of repealing Henry VIII's will and act of succession that made the Protestant Elizabeth Mary's heir.
The result was a paradox. As Duffy shows, Pole's energy and vision created an English church that had escaped from Henry VIII's shadow to become authentically Roman and Counter-Reformed. But the English state remained in thrall to the old king. And, as usual in post-Reformation England, the state won.
Fires of faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor by Eamon Duffy
Yale £19.99 pp264