Review

Reviewed Work(s): Tudor Apocalypse: Sixteenth Century Apocalypticism, Millenarianism

and the English Reformation: From John Bale to John Foxe and Thomas Brightman by
Richard Bauckham
Review by: Arthur H. Williamson
Source: The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 53, No. 2 (Jun., 1981), pp. 334-336
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1877841
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334 Book Reviews

Tudor Apocalypse: Sixteenth century apocalypticism, millenarianism and the

English Reformation: From John Bale to John Foxe and Thomas Brightman.
By Richard Bauckham.
Oxford: The Sutton Courtenay Press, 1978. Pp. 392.

The role of the Christian apocalyptic in shaping the public culture of the
English-speaking world has been enormous, and growing interest in this
subject has led to a proliferation of books about it. The most recent contribu-
tion is Richard Bauckham's Tudor Apocalypse, which offers an overview of
sixteenth-century Englishmen's understanding of sacred history.
Although extensive study of both medieval and seventeenth-century
apocalypticism has appeared in the last few years, Bauckham sees nothing
comparable for the century of the English Reformation, and he therefore
intends his book to fill "an obvious historical gap." To this end Bauckham
surveys a range of reformers from John Bale to John Foxe and Thomas
Brightman, and the Tudor Apocalypse provides a relatively detailed discus-
sion of the various prophetic traditions on which the reformers drew as they
undertook to interpret and promote the upheaval which was the Reformation.
Bauckham's general conclusion about the character of English apocalyptic
thought is revisionist-though not altogether new. Following the line of argu-
ment adopted by V. Norskov Olsen and Paul Christianson, Bauckham finds
William Haller's extremely influential study of John Foxe (Foxe's Book of
Martyrs and the Elect Nation) to be "overrated" and misleading. English
apocalypticism "by and large" tempered rather than articulated English pa-
triotism: its message was uniformly pessimistic, its prime concern martyrdom
and its vindication in the world outside the saeculum. Centrally important
theorists like Bale and Foxe did indeed innovate when they merged the
apocalypse with history. But history ultimately bore witness to its own
futility, for the triumph of truth occurred outside its confines. Although the
English reformers were "hard-headed pragmatists" seeking to implement
far-reaching political programs, the goals of Protestantism and the focus of its
apocalyptic were fundamentally otherworldly-a fact too little appreciated by
modem commentators. The Henrician and Marian reactions-rather than the
Henrician and Edwardian reform-bit deeply into the reformers' self-con-
sciousness and made the keynote consolation, not triumph. Moreover, the
fragility of the Elizabethan regime combined with the ferocious Counter-Re-
formation on the continent to ensure this perception remained dominant for
most of the last Tudor's reign. Only after the Armada did a "wave of
self-confident nationalism" begin to transform English apocalypticism into a
patriotic historicism. Only then were sown the "seeds" which would subse-
quently mature as the concept of an English national election which Haller
prematurely proclaimed for Foxe's "Book of Martyrs." Thomas Brightman
emerges as the central figure in this transformation, but his main work, The
Revelation of the Revelation, only saw print (posthumously) well into the
seventeenth century.
Bauckham is therefore urging upon us a severely dichotomous view of the
Tudor and early Stuart periods. Apocalypticism informed English politics
positively in the seventeenth century: if one looked to the past, English
experience appeared peculiarly at the core of the sacred drama; for those bold
enough (or impudent enough) to look to the future, England might easily
appear the theater of the historical redemption in the last days of the world.

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 Book Reviews 335

In utter contrast, the sixteenth century (except for the last decade) confronts
us with the unremitting gloom of the suffering faithful, enduring ever more
horrific perils and earnestly calling upon God to end both time and decay in
cataclysmic and righteous judgement.
Now there can be no doubt but that the early seventeenth century wit-
nessed enormous apocalyptic excitement-and well before the publication of
The Revelation of the Revelation. Many greeted the union of crowns with the
expectation that James, the latter-day heir to the "British" Constantine,
would use the strength of English and Scottish arms

for the delivery of [God's] Church from the barbarous tyranny wherewith she hath been
so long oppressed by Popes. And as Constantine the Great, the protector and restorer
of the auncient Christian Church, was borne in great Brittane, and there beganne his
Empire, obtayning afterwards admirable victories against fowre Romane tyrantes,
persecutors of the Church of God, by means whereof he did abolish Gentilisme and
planted the Christian Religion at Rome and throughout the Empire. In like sort the
same God hath raised your Majestie to the height of greatness, to be successor unto
Constantine in the said realmes, and to chase out of the same Rome the idolatry and
abhominations of the Gentiles, the which Sathan hath brought in under the name of
Christ.

This was a frequently repeated statement, but the following verses declared
British destiny more succinctly:

If that the time be blest when God began

To make the mass of this faire globy frame:
Or if the time be blest, he moulded Man
First of the earth, for to rule in the same:
Then blest the time wherein great James began
T'unite the Crowns of this great Ile of Man.

For if the time be blest God did descend

From Heav'n to Earth, a man for to be made,
In Manies wombe for us that did offend,
To th'end man's sin on Jesus might be laid:
Then blest the time when Maries James came down
From North to South to beare Great Britain's Crown.

On Bauckham's telling, these remarks depart fundamentally from the world

of the sixteenth century. But the authors themselves did not think so, and
they are probably right. Optimism and pessimism, after all, are very slippery
categories: the Judaeo-Christian apocalyptic inherently involved both. Events
could therefore easily alter emphases, time-strategies, and tactics. In the case
of Bale's great commentary, a massive reorientation occurred within the
covers of a single volume. No less elusive is the distinction between human
and divine agencies. The providential everywhere operated the programmatic
of history. The reformers were indeed "hard-headed" in that they sought to
realize extensive programs irrespective of however imminent the end of time
might be. For the most part theoreticians rather than original or systematic
theologians, these thinkers become impoverished by any purely theological
analysis. In the same way the ambiguity between formal prophecy (which
involves free will) and eschatology (which precludes free will) appears prom-
inently in the sixteenth century, for the two were regularly interleaved to-
gether. As a result, the difference between the sixteenth century and the early

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 336 Book Reviews

seventeenth century is likely to be a good deal subtler than Bauckham's

resolutely bifurcated projection.
And so it emerges. As early as the 1540s the proposed marriage of Edward
and Mary had appeared to some reformers as the providential means for
achieving drastic transformation: the union of England and Scotland, the
triumph of the true faith, sweeping social and legal reform, the restoration of
the age of Constantine. At that moment England began to become, in An-
thony Gilby's words, a sanctuary for saints everywhere in the world. Such
was clearly his goal in 1558, and in the decades that followed, the Elizabethan
realm was indeed regarded both at home and abroad as the promoter and
protector of the reformation in Flanders, France, Ireland, and Scotland. Only
in this context does Dee's imperialism make sense. Only in this context can
we appreciate the paramount importance of John Foxe's parallelism between
Constantine's age and his own. Only in this context can we understand the
patriotic detestation of the Roman Antichrist in thinkers as different as John
Knox and John Aylmer. Only in this context can we properly assess the
struggle for the church polity in the 1570s and 1580s and appreciate its
outcome. The loss of context is decisive, for to ignore all this is to miss the
very texture of the English Reformation.
At the heart of Protestantism is the multidimensional discovery of time:
with its emphatic insistence upon the sufficiency of Christ's sacrifice and its
concomitant rejection of a sacramental nunc stans, with its humanistic preoc-
cupation with the word, text, and context, with its historicist apocalyptic.
This massive validation of time, especially with the Christian apocalyptic, is
what turns a highly religious perception into a profoundly secularizing one.
There is a great deal going on both with English apocalyptic thinking and
with Protestantism generally which Bauckham's study ignores-and under-
standably so as they are precluded by its assumptions. The Tudor Apocalypse
does provide us with a useful discussion of the prophetic traditions, medieval
and contemporaneous, continental and indigenous, on which the English
reformers drew to shape their vision of the world. But it examines too narrow
a group from too narrowly traditional a perspective, and it therefore certainly
does not fill "the obvious historiographical gap."

ARTHUR H. WILLIAMSON
New York University

The Apocalyptic Tradition in Reformation Britain, 1530-1645. By Katherine R.

Firth.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1979. Pp. viii+281. $26.00.

Scottish National Consciousness in the Age of James VI: The Apocalypse, the
Union and the Shaping of Scotland's Public Culture. By Arthur H. William-
son.
Edinburgh: John Donald Publisher, Ltd.; Atlantic Highlands, N.J.:
Humanities Press, 1979. Pp. x+215. $25.00.

The modern reader emerges from the reading of apocalyptic history as from a
madhouse of metaphor, but for contemporaries it became a unique key to
universal historical understanding. Firth shows that it is not all of a piece and
charts the stages of its development.

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