Bloody Bonner: history is not a morality tale

A condemnation on social media of Edmund Bonner, bishop of London in the 1550s, for burning 300 Protestants was fact without context: that is not history

As I made, I hope, clear in an essay in October 2022, I am not a religious sort, not a “person of faith”. Religion fascinates me, it drives so much of what we do, whether we subscribe to it or not, some of my best friends are profound believers (and some are nailed-on atheists), and my academic interests have been wrapped round the history of the church for more than 30 years. Unlike some atheists—I venerated Christopher Hitchens but could never join him completely in this—I do not hate religion or the religious, though I hate some of its manifestations and outcomes. I have said often that I am as relaxed about England’s having an established church as Peter Mandelson was about people becoming filthy rich, and I’ve written in a kind of defence of the presence of the lords spiritual in the House of Lords as well as tried to explain the much smaller but formal place the Church of England has in the House of Commons.

Now, look. I am aware that these attitudes are in part informed by the different kinds of “privilege” which I have or am deemed to have. I went to notionally—well, actually but mildly—Anglican schools, or at least schools which involved a degree of Anglican worship, I was married in a Church of Scotland ceremony on 31 July 2004 (yes, 20th anniversary coming up, I was ribbing my ex-wife about it earlier), I have happily attended Christian services of many kinds, and all of this has been made easier by my starting point of rather mushy, culturally Jew-ish agnosticism, which has only morphed into determined atheism in recent years. I am well aware that this benevolent tolerance would look very different if I had grown up in a Catholic family on the Falls Road or even in Anderston in Glasgow. My parents were from the west of Scotland, and I tried to explain when I wrote about Ma that, while they were not remotely religious, faith and its implications ran through their childhoods and early lives ineradicably.

I have, however, learned a lot. That is partly just a reflection of being a good citizen: we are in the main becoming a secular society very quickly, but it’s easy to overlook the fact that the last census in 2021 showed those in England and Wales who declared “no religion” amounted “only” to 37.2 per cent; yes, that’s 22 million godless Britons, but the flipside is that if you gathered 10 people in a room, then statistically six of them would have some kind of religious faith or at least a sense of the supernatural and the spiritual. If you don’t have a faith, it’s dangerously easy to think of spirituality as a weird, fringe activity, or else a kind of performative habit. But the evidence we have is that more of us still accept some notion of the divine than don’t.

I have learned in an academic sense, but I’ve also learned by doing and watching. Since I was surprisingly young, I’ve had an inexplicable but powerful interest in, and to an extent an affinity with, Northern Ireland, and especially its tangled history and politics; for six years I had a partner for Northern Ireland, so I visited frequently and I adore the place not uncritically but absolutely sincerely; and for a few years when I worked in the House of Commons one of my additional jobs—the House service was a pioneer in the gig economy—was as a committee clerk for the British-Irish Parliamentary Assembly (BIPA), a wonderful, mad kaleidoscope of a body bringing together legislators not just from Westminster and Dublin but from Edinburgh, Stormont, Cardiff Bay and the smaller jurisdictions of Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man. (BIPA has an especially lovely tie, green and red striped with gold portcullises and harps embroidered on it. I wear mine often and am on, I think, my second. Wear and tear, you know.)

Another bee in my sometimes-capacious bonnet is the abuse of history. I vented my spleen recently about the way that historians, pseudo-historians and civilians are especially prone to twisting and distorting the story of Anne Boleyn to make political or cultural points, or to create some kind of morality tale, usually of a proto-feminist bravely wielding “girl power” in a male-dominated environment. (Please read the essay if you’re interest, but TL;DR if you manage to make Boleyn fit your idea of a feminist, you must have distorted the definition beyond recognition and utility.)

This stems from my very firm belief that judging the past and its inhabitants by our own standards, especially in moral and ethical terms, is at best a waste of time, but much more often a source of misinformation, misunderstanding and idiocy. And this is where I take up what I wanted to say.

I was scrolling through Twitter (yeah, I know, X) and I came across a post by an account with a hefty following (nearly 40,000), and, worse, one which seems to position itself as an account dealing with history. Look, before you start, I know. I know. I could have walked on by, as Burt Bacharach suggested. But that wouldn’t be very on brand, would it? I wouldn’t be reflecting my whole self. So I didn’t.

The tweet featured a detail from an 18th century map of Bethnal Green, and pointed out “Bishop Bonner’s Hall”. This was an occasional residence of the bishop of London, variously known as Bishopswood, Bishopshall, Bishops Hall and Bonners Hall, certainly in use by the beginning of the 13th century but demolished in 1845. The owner of the Twitter account was very exercised by this building.

Bishop Bonner was infamous as being a Catholic clergyman who, in the mid 1550’s burnt almost 300 Protestants at the stake (lovely history we have in London, isn’t it?)

Hmmm. Well, no, on my most counts. Even if that were a sentence of unimpeachable accuracy, and it really is not, it would be a strange matter to drive up the blood pressure, especially if your stock in trade is discussing the history of the capital. One of the lessons they should teach at history school, in one of the very first classes, is that not everyone is nice.

Let’s start with some context. Edmund Bonner was born in Hanley, in Worcestershire, around the turn of the 16th century. Like many future Tudor prelates, he was not from a privileged background. His mother was Elizabeth Frodsham (which I discover is the name of current actress and writer), of whom we know virtually nothing except that she was about 20 when she gave birth, and she was married to a sawyer also called Edmund Bonner. A story that Elizabeth married the elder Edmund only after the birth of the younger is probably not true; there was also a tale told at the time that the real father was a clergyman called George Savage, rector of Davenham in Cheshire, son of Sir John Savage who had commanded Henry VII’s left flank at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485 and slain the Duke of Norfolk in hand-to-hand combat. John’s younger brother Thomas joined the church, was a chaplain to Henry VII, bishop of Rochester (1492-96), bishop of London (1496-1501) and archbishop of York (1501-09).

In any event, young Edmund was a bright and ambitious boy and shot up the educational ladder towards the clergy as clever poor boys did in Tudor England. When he was 12 or so, he went up to Broadgates Hall, an academic hall for law students at the University of Oxford which was later transformed into Pembroke College, and then on two successive days, 12 and 13 June, in 1519, when he was around 19, he graduated as a bachelor of canon and civil law. He was also ordained at a similar time. In 1525, he became a doctor of civil law.

This progress was impressive but not unprecedented for the period: Thomas Wolsey, that greatest prelate of the early Tudor church—a butcher’s son from Ipswich—had been an undergraduate at Magdalen College, Oxford, and was awarded his BA at the age of 15, dubbed “the Boy Bachelor”; Reginald Pole, eventually archbishop of Canterbury, was the same age as Bonner and went up to Oxford (in his case to Magdalen) the same year as Bonner, 1512, and graduated as a bachelor of arts at 15; John Fisher, later bishop of Rochester and a cardinal for a month in 1535 before Henry VIII had him executed, was not quite 18 when he was awarded his BA at Michaelhouse, Cambridge, and only 21 when he incepted as a master of arts and became a fellow of his college.

I won’t keep you with a meticulous recitation of Bonner’s career. He became a protégé of Wolsey and then of Thomas Cromwell, and, like many able churchmen, spent a lot of his time on political and diplomatic missions, including acting as ambassador to France, but in 1539 he was nominated bishop of London and came back to the capital to be consecrated on 4 April 1540. It is worth making the point that Bonner was a lawyer—indeed his doctorate was in civil, not canon, law—and he claimed no great theological expertise or insight. This made him a perfect churchman for the Henrician Reformation, which was not essentially a rending doctrinal crisis but a tangled dispute over authority and jurisdiction. There were certainly no problems of conscience as the theological landscape evolved throughout the 1530s and early 1540s, although he never embraced any obvious kind of Protestantism.

When Henry VIII died in January 1547, that landscape changed. The new boy-king, the unappealing nine-year-old Edward VI, was a stiff, priggish Protestant whose character seems to have been exactly what one would expect of a nine-year-old boy who is told by adults he is the new iteration of the biblical king Josiah; moreover, political power lay with the king’s uncle, Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, who established himself as Lord Protector of the Realm and Governor of the King’s Person, and promoted himself to Duke of Somerset for good measure.

(Since we’re here, a word on Henry VIII’s will. The old king, who was, remember, only 55 when he died, had spent the second half of his reign worrying about the succession, lacking a legitimate male heir until 1537, though his only acknowledged bastard, Henry FitzRoy, Duke of Richmond, had lived to 17. The king’s daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, were rising 30 and 13 respectively when he died, but the idea of a female succession was never seriously considered except absolutely in extremis. England had never had a female ruler; Henry I’s daughter Matilda had controlled most of the realm for a few months in 1141, and had been declared heir presumptive after her only brother, William Ætheling, had drowned in 1120, but she was never crowned or considered monarch in her own right. She was significant only insofar as she transmitted her claim to the throne to her son Henry II (1154-89).

Still, when Henry VIII’s body finally gave up in 1547, he had a legitimate son, Edward. True, the new sovereign was only nine years old, but he was an intelligent and well-educated boy, raised in a Protestant milieu directed by the archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer. To deal with his minority, Henry’s will had been repeatedly updated and amended. The last revision the king made was on 30 December 1546, four weeks before his death and authorised with the “dry stamp”, essentially a licensed forgery of the sovereign’s signature controlled by brothers-in-law Sir Anthony Denny, Groom of the Stool, and Sir John Gates, gentleman of the Privy Chamber. This final revision set out the line of succession, which, strangely, consisted of six women and only one man (or boy), who were, in order: Edward, Prince of Wales (9); Princess Mary (29); Princess Elizabeth (13); Lady Jane Grey (9 or 10); Lady Katherine Grey (6); Lady Mary Grey (1); Lady Margaret Clifford (6). That list shows the savage effect that the Wars of the Roses and a stiff dose of sectarian strife had on the monarchy and the nobility.

The will also appointed a list of 16 (adult male) executors, including Archbishop Cranmer, Cuthbert Tunstall, the septuagenarian bishop of Durham, Seymour and John Dudley, Viscount Lisle but later Earl of Warwick and Duke of Northumberland, until recently Lord Admiral. These executors were to act as the Privy Council until Edward reached the age of 18, which would be on 12 October 1555.

But was the will valid? The Act Fixing the Succession 1544 provided that, beyond the king’s direct heirs (Edward, Mary and Elizabeth), and any heirs produced by Edward or future children Henry might have with his sixth wife, Kateryn Parr, or any future wife, Henry:

should and might give, will, limit, assign, appoint or dispose the said imperial crown and other the premises to what person or persons, and give the same person or persons such estate in the same, as it should please His Majesty by his gracious letters patents under the great seal, or by his last will in writing signed with his most gracious hand.

So effectively the king could determine the succession in his will, a relatively radical constitutional doctrine. But there was a problem: the will had been authorised with the dry stamp, not in “letters patent under the great seal” 'or “signed with his most gracious hand”. Strictly speaking, then, the will of 30 December 1546 was invalid with regard to the succession beyond the king’s children. That was not an immediate problem, but, in strict legal terms, it would be difficult when Edward VI died in 1553.

There seemed to be arrangements in place for the governance of England during Edward’s minority, then. Except that within days of Henry’s death, there was essentially a very low-key, unobtrusive but effective coup d’état. The plan was that the council of 16 was to rule by majority vote, each member having “like and equal charge”, with no provision made for a powerful executive chairman, let alone kind of governor. When the council met on 31 January, however, three days after Henry’s death, Sir William Paget, one of the secretaries of state, proposed a protector be appointed.

Lord Wriothesley, the lord chancellor and an opponent of Seymour, spoke fiercely against the idea and reeled off cautionary precedents: the Duke of Gloucester, protector for Henry VI from 1422 to 1429, quarrelled with his brother and fell out with the Duke of Burgundy, a key ally against the French; while Richard III, when Duke of Gloucester in 1483, was widely believed to have had his nephews Edward V and the Duke of York murdered so that he could seize the throne for himself. But Wriothesley carried little weight. On 1 February, the 13 executors present at the Tower of London proposed to Edward:

the naming and placing of the saide Earle of Hertforde, his uncle, to be Protectour of his realmes and dominions and Gouvernor of his persone, and to require his consent to the same; and that doone that we shuld declare the same furste to the Counsail nat being executours, and after to all the Lordes on the presence of the Kings Majeste, which was doon in every poincte as was determyned. And furste the Kinges Majeste by thadvise and consent of all the saide executours being present with him gave his royal assent that the said Earle of Hertforde shuld be Protectour of his realmes and domynions and Governor of his persone, next it was declared to the Counsail, and thirdly to all the Lordes, being the same declared unto them by the saide Lorde Chauncellor, who with oone voyce gave their consentes to the same.

It was no coincidence that most of the executors involved shortly afterwards received titles, office or property, and the decision was not prima facie an unreasonable one. But it defied the late king’s will, or at least used the powers of that will very creatively to install Hertford—who was soon created Duke of Somerset—as a kind of dictator: the duke obtained letters patent from the king in March which allowed him to appoint members of the council and to consult the body only when he chose. Thereafter he would rule largely by proclamation.)

That is a diversion. Back to Edmund Bonner. There was a significant turn towards advanced Protestantism under the new régime, and Cranmer ordered a thorough visitation of the provinces in August, one requirement of which was the possession in each parish of a copy of the archbishop’s Certayne Sermons, or Homelies appoynted by the kynges Maiestie. Among other doctrinal aspects, this focused heavily on justification by faith alone, and was too much for Bonner and his ally Stephen Gardiner, bishop of Winchester. Bonner was briefly imprisoned in the Fleet, released in time to oppose the new religious settlement in Parliament on November 1547 and again in November 1548 to March 1549. He spoke against the Act of Uniformity 1549 and the Book of Common Prayer, and refused to enforce them when they became law, and in October he was deprived of his see and committed to the Marshalsea, a notorious prison in Southwark.

When Mary I acceded to the throne in the summer of 1553, Bonner was freed, his deprivation annulled and he was once again bishop of London. If he had rejected papal authority in the 1530s, he had no difficulty accepting its return now, but that was not unusual in the early to mid-Reformation. The process was deeply unpredictable and no-one knew what was an end state and what merely a pause in flux. There is no reason to think, however, that Bonner was dismayed at the restoration of Catholicism and the rejection of the instruments and doctrines for opposition to which he had, after all, spent four years in prison.

The remaking of the Catholic Church had many aspects, and it is unfortunate, because it is not wholly representative, that the element which has caught the public and historical imagination is the suppression of heresy by force, up to and including burning at the stake. The First Statute of Repeal, given Royal Assent on 5 December 1553, simply erased the reforms of Edward VI and restored the status quo ante of the end of Henry VIII’s reign:

All such divine service and administration of Sacraments as were most commonly used in the realm of England in the last year of the reign of our late Sovereign Lord King Henry VIII shall be, from and after the twentieth day of December in the present year of our Lord God 1553, used and frequented throughout the whole realm of England and all other the Queen’s majesty dominions; and that no other kind nor order of divine service nor administration of the sacraments be, after the said twentieth day of December, used or ministered in any other manner, form or degree, within the said realm of England, or other the Queen’s dominions, that was most commonly used, ministered and frequented in the said last year of the reign of the said late King Henry VIII.

It did not go as far as the queen wanted, since she found many of her father’s later reforms deeply noxious, but it was all the new lord chancellor, Stephen Gardiner, could get through Parliament at the first time of asking.

It was enough to get started. In 1554, Bonner drew up a set of 37 Articles to be enquired of in the generall visitation which would allow him to investigate and regularise doctrine and usage in London. In November that year, Parliament passed the Revival of the Heresy Acts, which brought back on to the statute book letters patent of Richard II from 1382, the Suppression of Heresy Act 1401, pithily referred to as De haeretico comburendo, and the Suppression of Heresy Act 1414. The articles gave Bonner a framework to ensure that the church was ministering religion well: they set standards for clergy, made sure they were diligent, dutiful and unmarried, and holding theological beliefs which were in alignment with the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church; they ensured that the Eucharist was offered only to those ready to receive it; and more broadly they expected priests to enforce a kind of calming effect on society, bringing order and obedience to their congregations.

This is where the modern mind has to adjust. What follows might seem obvious to historians of the period, but I really want to try to get the sense of what I’m saying across to non-historians or at least non-specialists too. So everyone bear with me.

Probably the biggest single obstacle for the modern reader in trying to understand the early-modern mind is the value we in the 21st century place on personal freedom and individuality. How many ways do we have of packaging up essentially the same idea? “Be yourself.” “Be authentic.” “Do your own thing.” “You do you.” There are grand and trite ways of expressing it but it comes down to the the core idea that the freedom of the individual, the freedom from especially intellectual and emotional constrains, is central to our identity.

The 16th-century mind not only didn’t share that spirit, it would have found it dangerous and unfamiliar. It might have found some faint resonance among Protestants, as they believed primarily in an individual, untrammelled, unmediated relationship with God, access for everyone to the Holy Scripture so that people could make their own judgements about the word of God, and the stripping away of any intermediaries and unnecessary obstructions. For Martin Luther, for example, the lynchpin of Christianity was faith, the sheer belief in God’s grace anf its redemptive power. “This one and firm rock, which we call the doctrine of justification, is the chief article of the whole Christian doctrine, which comprehends the understanding of all godliness,” he wrote in his 1538 commentary on Galatians.

The Catholic Church took a wholly different approach, albeit with points of agreement. We are all born sinners, tainted by the original sin of Adam in the Garden of Eden: as St Paul expressed it in his Epistle to the Romans, “just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned”. But there was a way out! Through faith, yes, but also through the sacraments of the church, from baptism to extreme unction, sinners could access the merit of Christ, and, by co-operating with God, earn justification. And as one sinned in life, as man was bound to do, so there was redemption through the sacrament of confession. All of this, of course, relied on the priesthood as mediators, and the authority of the church. Essentially, follow the rules, do as you’re told, and you’ll be helped to as strong a position as you can be in at the Final Judgement.

Manifestly, this Catholic view of the moral universe was not amenable to initiative. Christianity for the Roman Catholic Church was a group endeavour, a matter of obedience and conformity. Those attitudes were also the glue which held society together in a more humdrum way. You were expected to attend church, though the bar was low: the expectation of the Church, reiterated at the Council of Trent, was that people should receive the Eucharist at least once a year, at Easter. The overriding priority was conformity and obedience. Some theologians and clerics understood very well that their power to control people’s thoughts and beliefs was limited, but the Church could and did require the outward signs of faithful obedience in the Christian life.

If you can understand how important conformity was, you can by contrast see the terrible threat of heterodoxy. The Church’s role as an intermediary encompassed explanation and interpretation, naturally. It accepted that too many clergymen were ignorant and poorly trained, and one of the requirements to come from the Council of Trent was that every diocese should have a seminary to train its priests. If clergymen did not know their Scripture and exegesis, and were not sure and sound on doctrine, however were they to guide the laity through life? But again, this required conformity: the Church’s doctrine could not then be picked apart as an intellectual exercise, nor could worshippers take some parts but not others. If the guidance of the clergy was to be successful it had to be followed absolutely.

Our modern cynicism sees this kind of insistence on orthodoxy and obedience as somehow sinister and controlling, a tool to wield power. There is certainly no doubt that the Church by 1500 had come to enjoy substantial power, temporal and political as well as theological, but there was also the profound business of saving souls. As I tried to convey in an essay last April, 16th-century Europe did not really have a concept of atheism in the way we take for granted. There might be bitter, indeed fatal, doctrinal disputes, as we shall see, but the existence of God, Jesus and Heaven was almost universally accepted as natural and automatic. The question facing man was not, was there a God, but how best to engage in worship of Him and how most effectively and in sincerity to be good and moral and worthy of salvation.

What that meant was that salvation was of the utmost importance. It was the highes stake (forgive the pun) for which one could play. When the Church sought to correct doctrinal error and enforce conformity, it did so because it believed it was acting to save not the lives of its congregations—after all, the earthly span of three score and ten years allotted in the Psalms was a relatively minor matter—but their eternal souls. So, yes, conformity and obedience were important for a peaceful and cohesive society, but those were by-products of lives lived according to the doctrine of the Church.

When Bonner carried out his visitation in 1554-55, he found much that needed to be changed. London was, after all, the capital and England’s trading hub, easily accessible to heterodox thinkers and ideas from overseas. Religious dissent had long been a problem: not a serious one overall, but more marked in London than most other parts of the country. Lollardy, the old heresy of John Wyclif, had survived into the 16th century, with more than 300 individuals being investigated and either prosecuted or forced to abjure between 1510 and 1532. Sir Thomas More, during his tenure as lord chancellor between 1529 and 1532, had been an eager and meticulous prosecutor of heretics, especially Lutherans, in the capital. James Wood is slightly waspish when he calls More a “zealous legalist [with] his itchy finesse of cruelty”, but he has a point. Richard Marius, in his hefty biography, described the chancellor as “the last important advocate in the government for the eradication of heresy by fire”, a man bent on “using all the power at his disposal” to prosecute heretics.

When an heretical priest called Thomas Bilney was executed in Norwich in August 1531, More summed up the view of both church and state of the eradication of heresy. The fire in which he had burned to death had been Bilney’s own purgatory, and Christ, More concluded:

hath forthwith from the fire taken his blessed soul to heaven where he now prayeth incessantly for the repentance and the amendment of all such as have been by his means while he lived, into such errors induced or confirmed.

This was the weight of history which accompanied Bonner, though it was true that the number of executions had dropped sharply after More’s resignation more than 20 years before.

What Bonner found does not seem very shocking to us now: 190 were charged with failing to attend religious services, others had not joined processions and some were accused of looking away during the consecration of the Host at Mass. In the end, 450 people were formally charged with offences, most of them to be heard by Bonner’s consistory court, of whom, to give a flavour, 57 were accused of failing to make confession or take communion at Easter that year.

How did the issue go from that to people being burned alive? In spiritual terms, these were not footling matters: the Eucharist, the bread and wine which were literally the body and blood of Christ and an eternal perpetuation of His sacrifice, was the fulcrum of Catholic worship. It held everything together, outwardly and inwardly. Those who could not even pretend to participate were rejecting not just a complex set of theological propositions, but the shared basis on which society hung together. So grave a challenge to authority was it that a man like John Warne, an upholsterer from Walbrook in the City of London, could be burned to death on 30 May 1555 for denying the efficacy of the Mass and refusing to confess his sins. He was 29.

We need to establish a sense of scale. Something like 287 people—56 of them were women—died for their beliefs in Mary I’s reign, between February 1555 and November 1558. That was a relatively intense episode of persecution, but more than 60 Protestants had been executed by Henry VIII’s government. This was in a country with a population of around three million. It is also worth noting that following the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536/37, the rising in protest at the break with Rome and the suppression of monastic houses which began in Yorkshire but ended as probably Tudor England’s most severe challenge, 216 people were executed in a matter of months.

Each death is a tragedy, as even Stalin pretended to understand. But another comparison which might give us pause is the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in France in 1572. It began as a series of targeted assassinations by Catholics against Protestant Huguenots, including Gaspard de Coligny, the admiral of France, but burst into intercommunal violence across the country. The death toll is hard to establish but was somewhere between 5,000 and 30,000, and may have included instances of cannibalism. But then, the French Wars of Religion claimed between two and four million lives over 36 years.

Why am I exercised by all this? The item which caused it all said, casually but certainly, that Bonner “burnt almost 300 Protestants at the stake”. Even taking that 300 as accurate for the whole of England, maybe 120 were executed in Bonner’s diocese of London. And they were not executed by Bonner. The Church had no powers of execution. Certainly, bishops could try people for heresy, and Bonner did. But those found guilty had to be handed over to the government, which, under the heresy laws restored in 1553, had the power to execute them. So the 120 who were executed in London died at the hands of the state, under the queen’s justice. And they died guilty of what was regarded by contemporaries as a very serious offence, one which was a fundamental challenge to the established order.

Was there opposition to the persecution? Certainly. There were people at Mary’s court who advised caution, even leniency, not on the grounds that the crimes were not grave, but because harsh persecution might alienate the public. There are reports of onlookers moved by sympathy for the victims, and many faced death with extraordinary courage and calmness. But we must also note that the only real challenge to Mary’s authority, the conspiracy led by Sir Thomas Wyatt in early 1554, took place before the persecution of heretics began. It was in part motivated by Protestant opposition to Mary’s re-Catholicisation, but it also drew on a dislike of her plan to marry Philip of Spain, and derived some strength from difficult economic conditions.

If we (mis)characterise Bonner as an evil man doing an evil thing for evil reasons, we might as well not read history. The campaign against heresy which Mary I oversaw was certainly sharp and intense, and at best provoked ambivalence in a population exhausted after two decades of religious upheaval, but it was not outwith the intellectual or moral parameters of statehood and government; it was not unprecedented in kind or, really, in scale; in was not unique in Europe; and it was not motivated by inexplicable barbarity dislocated from its context. Anyone is entitled to find it repugnant, to judge those involved, to regard it as immoral and to celebrate contemporary mores which cherish individuality and freedom of conscience, but none of that represents an exercise in history or historiography. It is to create a frame of reference which would have baffled the brightest minds of both sides of the confessional divide.

In a way, this touches on Tucker Carlson’s recent “interview” with Vladimir Putin and the Russian president’s repeated references to history as justification for contemporary foreign policy. To view the Marian persecution through a modern human rights lens makes as much sense as Putin drawing on the reign of Rurik, prince of Novgorod, to underpin his invasion of Ukraine. It is to strip the bare facts of context and then clothe them in one’s own beliefs and perspective. It may serve a purpose, but it tells you nothing about what happened and why, and what the past was really like.