THE BASIS OF THE REFORMATION
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
[Correspondents are requested to keep their letters as brief as is reasonably possible. The most suitable length is that of one of our " News of the Week " paragraphs. Signed letters are given a preference over those bearing a pseudonym, and the latter must be accompanied by the name and address of the author, which will be treated as confidential.—Ed. THE SPECTATOR] [To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR]
SIR,—What is the point of continuing to discuss the Reformation as Mr. Wood asks me ? Nothing that I can say would convince him. He has his position ; he is committed to his point of view. And I am disillusioned enough to know that very few people are really open to rational persuasion. Nor will he expect me to answer, in less than a long essay or a book, the huddle-muddle of his questions. Perhaps I can show, however, that one or two of them answer each other. And that may throw some light on the inadequacy of the position from which he asks them.
" But is it suggested," he asks, " that greed originated the change of religious conviction which it exploited ? " Anybody who knows anything about the Reformation knows that that was often the case ; indeed, in his very next sentence Mr. Wood provides us with an outstanding example. " Did gangsters like Northumberland," he asks, " engineer the change in religious outlook for their own advantage ? " The answer is pretty well agreed by historians that he did ; indeed, Northum- berland himself confessed as much. He hadn't much belief either one way or the other himself.
Mr. Wood refers in his last, rhetorical rather than argu- mentative, paragraph to the fact that " three hundred persons, mostly inconspicuous persons, lost their lives at the stake in the time of Mary " ; and then asks, " Did these men and women die not for their religious convictions but to secure power for Northumberland and his like ? " It would seem that Mr. Wood does not know that Northumberland was already dead before the famous (or boring, which you will) three hundred Were sent to the stake ; so that they can hardly have died to secure power for him, poor man. No doubt they died with all sorts of ideas in their heads, as a similar number of Catholics did under Elizabeth; some of them, with what Mr. Wood calls " religious convictions," no doubt, with ideas of resting in Abraham's bosom for ever after the sacrifice they had made ; others of them seem to have died out of what can only be described as sheer obstinacy—as if they were qualified to judge of the complicated intellectual and political questions at issue. Others of them again, it is only common sense to suppose, died with no very clear ideas in their heads at all. It seems such a pity that they should have insisted on dying, like the Catholics after them. But then human beings, as we well know, are so apt to be deluded.
So much for those of my friend Mr. Wood's questions which answer each other. .I am sure he will forgive me if I say that it does not appear that he is very well qualified to pronounce on these issues of the sixteenth-century Reformation ; nor will he expect me to set much store by his view that our historians have degenerated since the days of Ranke and Acton. Of course, he would think that with his parti-pris ; but then he doesn't know. In fact, the issues have become much more clearly defined and understood, and a great deal of knowledge has accumulated by which to answer such questions as Mr. Wood's, since the time of Ranke and Acton.—Yours, &c.,
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