The English Martyrs

In reading one of the most recent histories of the Tudor period, the impression was gained that the Catholic martyrs, admittedly gallant men, worthy to be compared for courage even (amazing admission!) to Drake and the seamen, were swept to a glorious doom for attempting to stem the tide of inevitable change. The stirrings of the Renaissance and Reformation, the coming-of-age of the spirit of nationality, the mental activity that followed the spread of printed books, and, to crown and clinch it all, the popular, forceful, ruthless, but progressive tyranny of the Tudors—all these forces were sweeping away the mediaeval Church as surely as the rising tide sweeps away a castle of sand.The martyrs, one gathers, were brave men—to be admired for refusing to change with the times out of base motives, but their cause was as hopeless and their protest as useless as that of (say) a modern upholder of the legitimist claims of the Stuarts. And it is as well, the history almost makes us feel, that this was so, because their cause and the modern world, even that adolescent modern world of the sixteenth century, had nothing in common.If after reading such a book, we go straight to some contemporary account of the martyrs, we find a complete absence of any sense on their part of fighting the inevitable, of Being out of date or of championing a lost cause. It never occurred even to the Protestant leaders of those days to attempt to justify their actions on the ground of progress, or of national or social needs.