Welsh Journals

THE REIGN OF MARY TUDOR: POLITICS, GOVERNMENT AND RELIGION IN ENGLAND, 1553-58, Second Edition. By David Loades. Longman, London and New York, 1991. Pp. xii, 444. Paperback £ 12.99. This revised edition of a work first published in 1979 and out of print for some years is very much to be welcomed. David Loades's book is the only recent full-scale study of Mary's reign, and is as rich in detail for the specialist as it is readable for the student. Much research published in the past decade has been integrated in this edition, and throughout the book the primary research of others on areas such as Parliament, the Privy Council, the Church, and the wider policies of Mary's Habsburg kin is neatly dovetailed with the author's investigation of his own spheres of special interest, including conspiracy, propaganda, and the Court. The major excision from the earlier version is of background material on the legacy of the 1530s and 1540s, but useful comparisons with the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI and Elizabeth still appear at many points. They are conspicuously missed only on foreign policy, where the forlorn attempts at English and papal mediation in the Habsburg- Valois struggle bear intriguing resemblances to those of Wolsey and Henry VIII, and on the problems of female rule and the cultivation of the royal image. The most extensively rewritten section is that concerning Mary's life before her accession. where Professor Loades has drawn on his biography of Mary, published in 1989, in which he treats her early life and the events of 1553 much more fully than space in this book allows. Professor Loades disarmingly describes his work as an 'interim report' and freely confesses its concentration on politics, religion, finance and government at the centre. What he covers, he covers very well, but his focus makes it hard for him to answer two of the overriding wider questions of recent early modern historiography: how far could central government really affect what happened at the local level, and how far did underlying movements in population and food supply outweigh political change in determining the lives of individuals and the fate of governmental initiatives? There has been little enough research done on the local effectiveness of the Marian regime. but more might have been made of that which has been published on the restoration of the Church and the remodelling of local government in areas of political and religious polarization such as East Anglia. Wales, even more neglected than Ireland or most English counties, appears in the book only when one president of the Council in the Marches succeeds another, though the earl of Pembroke's military and political career and Edward Carne's diplomatic activities do bring them considerable coverage Professor Loades is aware of the issue-the Privy Council registers' litany of security measures, the rush of proclamations against sedition and the use of martial law are invoked to show that the regime knew it had problems in controlling the localities-but the nuanced investigation of those problems is left to others. Similarly, the interlocked economic and demographic crises of 1555-59, the most acute of the whole century. figure in their contribution to the government's difficulties in raising troops and taxes and as material for subversive pamphleteers, but they are never really brought into