John Foxe, Anti-Popery and English National Identity

Since it was first proposed in 1992, Linda Colley’s thesis that anti-popery was a particularly important factor in the formation of both Britain and British national consciousness, has been cited, debated and discussed.  Using the reception and influence of John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, the seminal text of early modern anti-popery, as a case study, in this paper I will re-examine Colley’s thesis.

The first point is to examine in detail the accessibility of the Acts and Monuments from 1563, when the first edition was published, through the seventeenth century and the long eighteenth century.  An assumption that Colley and numerous authors have made is that Foxe’s book was widely known and read during these two and a half centuries even though no unabridged edition of the Acts and Monuments was published between 1684 and 1832.  I will look at the numerous ways in which the contents of Foxe’s martyrology and were circulated  in this period: abridged editions, sermons, treatises broadsides, ballads,  pictures (in printed works but also displayed in houses) as well as copies if Foxe on public display, discussing whether these were plentiful enough and sufficiently widely disseminated for Foxe’s work to be able to shape popular opinion for over a century since its last complete printing. 

From there I will discuss the validity of William Haller’s widely known thesis that Foxe provided a history in which England was portrayed as an ‘elect nation’ whose divine mission was to defend and propagate true religion.  I will also examine the ways in which Foxe’s work has been said by scholars, notably Frances Yates, to have glorified the English Protestant monarchy and rallied Protestant opposition to papal claims of sovereignty.  But the most important aspect of Foxe’s work on the development of English national consciousness lay in Foxe’s vivid, detailed and graphic depictions, both visually and in print, of the horrors of the Marian persecution.

Foxe’s book had a significant influence from Elizabeth’s reign to the Restoration, but the Duke of York’s conversion to Catholicism made the Acts and Monuments, with its portrayal of the persecution that ensued the last time a Catholic sat on the throne, sharply relevant, indeed seemingly prophetic.  There is little doubt that one reason for the vehement opposition to the prospect of York’s accession to the crown was the fear that it would lead to a revival of religious persecution.  But what is insufficiently examined is why the memory of a persecution, no matter how severe, was remembered with such fear a century later.  Much of the answer is the Acts and Monuments, not only in its detail but in the moral authority the work held, its unusual diffusion and the different media through which its description of the Marian persecution was conveyed.  A question worth pondering is would there have been an Exclusion Crisis if the Acts and Monuments did not exist?

Foxe ‘s work was pillar of Linda Colley’s argument that religion - specifically the fear of Catholics and the rule of Catholic monarchs unified the British and made Great Britain possible.  In this talk, I will examine the validity of this and consider the varied, indeed ambivalent, impact of anti-popery in general, and Foxe’s martyrology, in particular had on the development of Britain.