DAVID WOMERSLEY, Divinity and State.

Abstract

WHAT today we think of as the English Reformation was anything but a straightforward cleansing of the English Church. In some ways it was a by-product of Henry VIII’s political and dynastic desire, his personal conflict with Rome amplified into a national conflict. But as David Womersley notes, Henry himself was no Protestant, and it is not surprising that his ‘theological conservatism’ (22) troubled and made ambiguous the entire Reformation movement in England. The identification of monarchical legitimacy with religious orthodoxy was not easily achieved, and in his excellent book Divinity and State Womersley traces the contradictions and revisions of English history (and ‘history’) that it entailed through the implications of early Tudor historiography, and through history plays, particularly those by Shakespeare. His stated aim is to show why authority feared the power of theatre to stage images that fused heresy and sedition. Womersley begins by considering how historiography developed through the rewriting and reediting of English chronicles in relation to quite topical polemical needs. He begins with an examination of Robert Fabyan’s Chronicle, which appeared in four editions over a period of about forty-five years after Fabyan’s death. Each reediting can be seen as a response to specific contemporary issues; thus the 1516 version stressed Fabyan’s attacks on the covetousness and worldliness of clerics, at a time when Wolsey was powerful. The 1533 edition stressed the Chronicle’s warnings against schism, at a time when relations with Rome were particularly strained. The 1542 edition shifted the emphasis of the account of the relations between Henry II and Thomas Becket, preferring the monarch to the churchman, who was presented as a traitor rather than a martyr. The 1559 edition, responding to the Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity, while ‘unmistakably Protestant’ (35) nevertheless suppresses some of the more radical attitudes of earlier versions. These different iterations of Fabyan’s text demonstrate, Womersley persuasively argues, ‘how a single historical work might be repeatedly adjusted to meet different religious emergencies at the hands of men of very different religious persuasions’ (40).