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In his History of the variations of the Protestant Churches, his major work of confessional controversy, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627-1704) made a genuine effort to use various primary sources. In the case of England, however, he chose to rely on a single authority, Gilbert Burnet’s (1643-1715) History of the Reformation of the Church of England, which was available to him in a recent French translation. This reflected Bossuet’s tactical determination to employ only authors whom his Protestant adversaries could not object to, but also his paradoxical affinities with Burnet, whose very political reading of the English Reformation fitted well with his own interpretation. Burnet, however, had included in his History a rich collection of records, which Bossuet studied and occasionally used to challenge Burnet’s main text. Although Bossuet’s interests remained those of a polemical divine, he spoke the language of historical erudition to assert his trustworthiness.

Although he had not yet been canonized, Thomas More’s sanctity was recognised throughout the English Catholic community and beyond from the late sixteenth century. It was also acknowledged by many significant Protestant writers and, in the decades leading up to the passing of the Catholic Emancipation Act in 1829, his life and the history of the English Reformation became a source of controversy not only between Catholics and Protestants but within Protestant historical writing itself. This chapter examines the ways in which More’s life and character were treated by two contrasting controversialists, the by now conservative Robert Southey and the radical William Cobbett. Each referred to More as a saint, but they drew diametrically opposed lessons from his life. Southey used him to bolster the Church-State compact in his dialogues on the condition of England, Thomas More, while for Cobbett the chief lesson to be drawn from the martyrdom of More and Fisher, ‘two of the best men of their generation’, was the need to grant freedom of worship to their latter-day co-religionists. This chapter reveals how More’s exemplary life transcended denominational boundaries, but how it was also politicised in order to address contemporary debates over emancipation and constitutional reform.

This chapter engages with responses to the beatification in 1886 of a number of English Catholics executed during the Reformation era, as a means of exploring their significance to Catholic culture and to Protestant-Catholic relations. It examines the reporting of the beatifications in the Press, as well as pamphlet publications and architecture, especially the imposing Our Lady and the English Martyrs’ Church in Cambridge. All were used to express, and to create, pride in the martyr ‘heritage’ of the English Catholic Church. This was so important because although the individuals promoting the martyrs’ cause were mainly clerical, scholarly, and often convert Catholics, they sought to embed devotion among a Catholic population that was mostly lay, socially comprehensive, and in large part ethnically Irish. Controversy surrounding the English Catholic martyrs also draws attention to tensions within Catholicism, between Ultramontanism and a self-consciously ‘English’ Catholicism: the martyrs were canonised as exemplars of loyalty to papal authority, yet they enabled English Catholics to celebrate saints of their own ‘native soil’. More broadly speaking, as we shall see, the martyrs were magnets for those concerned with the theological and ecclesiological questions of the late nineteenth century. They enabled Catholics, at least, to reclaim England’s past from dominant Protestant narratives.